Bigfoot And UFOs

I get a lot of email every day, and a lot of those emails are from people who have questions about the RV lifestyle. What kind of RV should I buy? Is gas or diesel better in a motorhome? How do I get mail? What state should I choose for my legal domicile? I get asked one of those at least once a week, along with many other RV-related questions.

But I also get questions about blogging, writing books, self-publishing, and all kinds of other things. In the last couple of weeks I’ve received two interesting questions, one from a reader asking if we have ever seen a UFO in our travels, and another one asking if we have ever seen a Bigfoot in all the time we spent in the Pacific Northwest.

No, I’ve never seen a UFO that I know of during our years as fulltime RVers. But prior to that, I did once see the mysterious Phoenix lights, which some people claim are proof of extraterrestrials visiting Earth, while others explain them away by saying they were weather balloons or something like that. What were they really? I have no idea.

On the night my mother died, back in 1991, my son and I and my second wife were driving down U.S. Highway 60 in my pickup from our home in Show Low, Arizona, headed to Tucson. Something with bright blue lights on it went over the top of our vehicle at treetop level, and though it made no sound, it seemed very large. I stopped the truck and we all looked out the window, but it was gone just as quickly as it appeared.

Was it a UFO? Again I don’t know. What I do know is that I have spent a little bit of time around airports and airplanes in my life, both military and civilian, and it wasn’t anything I had ever seen before. So, based upon the fact that it was an object and it was flying, and I couldn’t identify it, I guess you could call it a UFO.

I do think that we human beings are a pretty arrogant lot to believe that out of the whole universe, our one little speck of a planet is the only place where life exists. I also believe that if extraterrestrials have ever visited Earth, they probably quickly decided that there’s no intelligent life down here and went back where they came from.

Now, what about Bigfoot? Nope, never saw one of those either. Not while we were fulltime RVers, nor in my years living on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state, where I got my start in the newspaper business. That area has always been a hotbed of Sasquatch sightings. Back then, I spent a lot of time wandering around in the forest hunting and doing wildlife photography. And I never saw a Bigfoot or any footprints from one.

But I did cover several stories in my newspapers about people who claimed to have seen one, usually crossing a road in the middle of the night. One of those people was a fellow I knew who happened to be a deputy sheriff. He said he saw a Bigfoot standing in the middle of a country road late one night near Copalis, in Grays Harbor County. He grew up hunting, and his dad lived nearby and had three or four bear hunting dogs. He said he went and got his dad and the dogs and came back, and both of them said as soon as they put the dogs on the scent they all started whimpering and crawled under the truck.

When the story came out, the sheriff demanded he say it was a bear, because he didn’t want any of his deputies’ credibility challenged in court down the road. He refused and said he knew what he saw and it was no bear. As I recall, he was eventually forced out of the job. Here is a newspaper article from the Seattle Times about it, with a lot of inaccurate info, but it does cover the basics of the incident.

So is Bigfoot really out there? Again, I don’t know. What I do know is that the Olympic Peninsula is some of the most thickly forested country on this planet. I’ve been in that forest and been almost on top of deer and bear before I ever saw them. One time a man I knew took off from the airport in Hoquiam and crashed within a few moments. Although search and rescue teams combed through the dense forest, and aerial searches were made, they couldn’t find him or his airplane. A couple of years later hunters stumbled upon it. The plane had crashed nose first and the thick tree cover had hid it from aircraft searching overhead. If I was a Bigfoot, I don’t think I could find a better place to hide out from those crazy human beings.

Either way, whether UFOs and Bigfoot are real or just figments of overactive imaginations, I wouldn’t worry too much about going camping in the Pacific Northwest, or anywhere else. In all of my years in the newspaper business and publishing the Gypsy Journal, I have never heard of an RVer being molested by visitors from outer space or by big hairy bush apes.

On another note, if you like historical romance novels and are looking for a good read, download a free copy of No Such Thing, the second book in my friend Mona Ingram’s popular Gold Rush Romances series. Mona has a lot of fans who love everything she writes, and I think you’ll count yourself among them after reading one of her books.

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Today is your last chance to enter our Free Drawing for an audiobook of Point Taken, the tenth book in my friend Ben Rehder’s excellent Blanco County mystery series. I’ve read just about all of Ben’s books, and I don’t think he could write a bad story if he tried. To enter, all you have to do is click on this Free Drawing link or the tab at the top of this page and enter your name in the comments section at the bottom of that page (not this one). Only one entry per person per drawing please, and you must enter with your real name. To prevent spam or multiple entries, the names of cartoon or movie characters are not allowed. The winner will be drawn this evening.

Thought For The Day – I childproofed my house but the kids still get in.