Don't look back!

Paul: Recently I interviewed a young man who was hunting in upstate NY within the Lake Ontario snow-belt who had a hair-raising experience.

‘John’ had been hunting a large area of private property by himself. The land was a mixture of thick hardwood forest with a lot of undergrowth, intermittent swamp, and overgrown fields as a result of an abandoned orchard whose trees still bore fruit.

Sounds like a shy monster’s dream. You know what they say in the real estate business – “location, location, location”.

He was headed back to his truck when he suddenly – and for no apparent reason – began to experience what for Sasquatch researchers is the all-too-familiar description of a “strong feeling that I was being watched”.

It was not until AFTER these feelings had manifested that he began to hear the footfalls behind him. He described them as “loud, heavy crunches” that he felt were too heavy and intentional to be a deer, or anything (or anyone) smaller.

He stopped to confirm that what he heard was indeed footsteps.

I often apologize in advance to potential witnesses that – as they relay their story – I may gently interrupt with questions. I hate to do that. My mum would have a fit, God rest her soul. We don’t want to put words into anyone’s mouth, but it’s important that we put every piece of the puzzle in its proper context and clarify the details to get the entire picture.

In this particular case, I knew what was coming. Wanting him to know that I related to his experience, an important step in putting him at ease, I gently interrupted.

“Let me guess – when you stopped walking, the footsteps quickly stopped. When you resumed – THEY resumed”?

His reply was predictable - “EXACTLY”.

John’s experience was quite common in alleged Sasquatch encounters. I’ve experienced this myself, as outlined in The Rabbit Hole Experience, and it can be unnerving, to say the least.

John’s primal instinct kicked in, and he began to walk faster, yet at the same time, he told me that a voice inside his head kept insisting he not turn around.

“Don’t look back – just get out of here – don’t look back!”

I found this particularly interesting – you would think that there would be a deep need to assess the danger by IDENTIFYING it, and then choosing the correct response. Turn around and see a deer, and I guess you’ve experienced an easy day’s hunting. Turn around to face a person, you can then gauge their motivation for following you to choose your response. Turn around and see a 9- foot tall, hairy, yet-to-be-discovered creature, and either take aim or take off.

But here is a strange combination - the primal instinct manifesting itself in the physical act of…. well… getting the fuck out of there, combined with the mind’s quest for self-preservation, considering that if he DOES turn around, he may witness something beyond his comprehension. He may experience something that – after running through his own personal database and failing to identify – results in the violent collision of the known vs. the unknown.

Cognitive dissonance personified. When the unreal becomes the undeniable.

Welcome to The Rabbit Hole Experience.

After he was convinced that whatever or whoever was following him intentionally stopped walking when he stopped, and resumed when he did, John did what most anyone would do.

John ran back to his truck, and never returned.

After relating his story, he shared with me WHY he was hunting alone that day. John explained that his long-time hunting partner, who accompanied him the majority of the time, had suddenly declined invitations to hunt this particular property months before, without offering much explanation. They had been partners for years, and this spot had long been a favorite. Now he would either suggest another area, or opt out entirely.

John didn’t suspect anything, but after his experience, he shared his story with that same friend, who then confided in John that the last time he had hunted there, after seeing footprints of “barefoot children” he witnessed a “baby monkey-like creature” climb up a tree, where it simply stared at him from its perch. Since the incident, a mutual friend has also come forward, describing an experience he had with what he described as an adult and juvenile creature that fit the same description.

A grown man who has hunted all of his life, armed with a loaded gun, shaken to the core, experiencing a tug of war between the primal instinct of running from danger and the quest for psychological self-preservation by sheltering himself from seeing something that he may regret.

For once we peer over the wall of madness – there is no turning back. Once we see, we cannot “unsee”

Michael: The heavy footsteps that John heard while he was walking out are familiar to us. In our book, we describe hearing the same kinds of heavy footsteps during a night investigation in the North Country of New York. The audio from the incident can be heard here.

The monkey-like creature that his friend describes climbing a tree seems to turn up frequently in cases in the Northeast, particularly in NY. The well-known New York Baby footage depicts such a creature, and was reportedly filmed near the Catskill Mountains of NY in 1997. There are many reports of skinny, almost sloth-like creatures watching from trees, in contrast to the more commonly known giant apes most people associate with Bigfoot.

John’s response is a common reaction, and related to a phenomenon we talk about in the book. Witnesses often deal with the cognitive dissonance created in a paranormal encounter by avoiding any information that might make it more real. In John’s case, this process started while the incident was still occurring. His mind knew that once he got out of the woods, he might be able to convince himself that what he heard was some common animal, and he could go on with his life as before. But if he looked back, he might see something that made that impossible. And that might spell the end of his current belief structure.

It’s the same mechanism that makes children hide under the covers from the monster in their room. It’s not so much that they think the monster can’t find them, but it keeps them from finding the monster.

Bears, Elephants, and Loops in Time

Michael Robartes

A few nights ago, I had a dream that the bears were our guardians and would come at night and protect the humans from other predators. For the most part humans were not aware of this going on, but we owed our survival to the bears. I texted my esteemed colleague, Paul, the next day relating this to him. In typical fashion, he commented only that people were not ready to hear the truth.

 This morning, Paul posted to the RHE Facebook page a story about a boy who had been missing in North Carolina for two days, and had been found safe. The boy claimed that he had been hanging out with a bear. Paul did not make a connection with this to my dream until I reminded him of it. It turns out the night I had the dream was the night the boy was found, Thursday night, but I didn’t know about the story until this morning.

 We could have a very interesting discussion speculating about what actually happened to this boy. Certainly, we here at the RHE are happy he is safe and well. But for the moment, I only want to draw upon this as an example of a precognitive dream and use it to stimulate a discussion about time.

 J.W. Dunne used these kinds of dreams as an Experiment with Time in order to demonstrate that the subconscious mind possesses bits of information from both the past and the future and uses both to construct dreams. Thus, we can use the information obtained in dream to demonstrate retrocausality, the idea that events in the future can cause events in the past. From this basis he developed a complex theory of time called Serialism. (If there is anyone else out there who has wrestled through all of his work, please let me know. I need someone to discuss it with. Drinks are on me.)

 Humans have probably known that we have precognitive dreams since humans have been dreaming, but one important aspect that Dunne brought out in his work was that what we are precognizing is not the event itself, but our learning of the event in the future and our reaction to it.

  Assuming it was not random coincidence, Dunne’s interpretation would be that my dream of the bears was not caused by the ordeal of the boy in NC, but by my seeing the news article about it. This is supported by the fact that, in all likelihood there were no bears involved in this story and yet that was what I dreamed about. What this suggests is that we are not connecting with the future of the external world, but rather sharing knowledge through time with past and future versions of ourselves.

 Dunne provides many examples to show that this interpretation is a better fit to the data. This is also consistent with the findings of remote viewing experiments that the success rate is much greater when the participants get feedback later on their target after the fact. In other words, you cannot predict something unless you will know of it later.

 Recently, Eric Wargo has added an interesting element to this literature in his book Time Loops by highlighting the looping causation of (at least some of) these events. These loops occur when we have precognitive knowledge, often in dream, of a future event that then occurs as a result of the precognition of it. For example, you have a dream about seeing a street with a certain name and turning down it to find a friend of yours. The next day, you happen to drive by a street of that name, and because of the dream, you turn down it and see your friend. The dream was precognitive to be sure, but the interesting part that Wargo adds is that you would not have turned down the street if you had not had the dream. So, the event the next day “caused” the dream, but at the same time, the dream “caused” the event to occur.

 Wargo gives many examples of this throughout the book, and his case is strong. In my own experience, I have personally had many experiences that fit this model, and heard many stories from others that also support it. Wargo’s book has made me rethink many experiences I have had, and I don’t need precognition to foresee many more nights staring into a campfire reviewing experiences within this framework.

 In the case of my dream about the bears, this kind of looping quality would be present if Paul had posted the article because he remembered my previous dream and found it an odd coincidence. Then, my dream would be caused by Paul’s post, which was only made because of my dream. Savvy? However, in this case, Paul did not consciously recall my dream when he made the post. It could always be argued that he subconsciously remembered it and that is what led to his finding the story interesting and posting it, but such hypotheses are untestable. It is true that my emotional response to the article was influenced by the dream however.

 The most troubling aspect of the time loop theory is that if we were to believe that all experience is looping in this way, it seems to point directly to a deterministic universe and eliminate free will. Wargo is OK with that. I am not ready to accept this. And I don’t think it is due to a desperate clinging to the illusion that we have freedom, although maybe it is and I am just in cognitive dissonance over it. I am willing to consider this, but in my own experience, it seems like a big stretch to fit determinism to much of the data.

 Philippe Guillemant proposes a different idea in The Road of Time. While he also believes in retrocausality, or more specifically, dual causality from both the past and the future, it does not lead him to forsake free will. He gets around it by adopting the view that although the future already exists, all possible futures already exist. What free will allows us to choose is which one of the possible futures we will experience. Guillemant interprets synchronicities, the term Jung created for meaningful coincidence, as marking junctures that connect our present with the future that we are being drawn to experience.

 Like Dunne, Guillemant proposes an experiment in his book, one in which we generate our own synchronicities. In this experiment, we plant the intention in the future of experiencing some bizarre coincidence that we will recognize as a signal that our experiment worked. As a scientist himself, he sets a protocol and criteria for evidence of success (the kind of thing we would determine by “statistical significance” in data work).

 While reading his book, I decided to try the experiment just as Guillemant laid it out. Many of his synchronicities described in the book have to do with the reoccurrence of strings of numbers, so this is what I was targeting as my signal. The very next day after planting my intention to create a synchronicity, I broke the axel on my lawn tractor –  a departure from my daily routine, which is one of the elements Guillemant proposes as necessary for synchronicities to occur. I went to a Tractor Supply store looking for parts. While they did not have specific parts for my model, the guy at the counter found a part in the supply room that looked like it would work. I proceeded to the check out, where I was behind one woman in line. When I got to the register, the cashier rang my part up to $15.11. Then he said “that’s weird.” I asked him why and he said that the bill of the woman ahead of me had also come out to $15.11.

 OK, so here is a very unlikely coincidence of numbers happening about 12 hours after I had intentionally attempted to create this very thing. Strong support for Guillement’s hypothesis in my book. Can we explain this in the time loop framework? Certainly it is true that the coincidence of numbers was only given meaning because of the intention I had set the day before. But to put a retrocausal element on it, we would have to assert that my sitting down the previous day and sending this intention into the future was caused by the incident the following day. And since it was Guillemant’s book that led me to perform the experiment, my reading of the book was also caused by the coincidence of prices at that register. This seems like a big stretch to me. It is one thing for the future to plant information in a dream. This does not require intention. But to believe that the only reason I suddenly decide to do something very odd like sit down and try to create a future coincidence is because that coincidence is going to occur seems like it requires too much of a stretch.

 In our own book, I write about my experience of a “time loop” in the most literal sense. I was running a loop trail in the woods and found myself running over the same area twice without completing the loop to come back to where I was. Could the time loop hypothesis explain this experience? Possibly. One could say that my experience of running that section of the trail stretched backward in a retrocausal way and planted the memories of the trail in my mind in an earlier part of the run. Most of the time, these precognitive visions come in dreams, but maybe the meditative state created by running opened the door to the subconscious enough that I “premembered” (a Wargo term) the part of the trail I would run later.

 I can’t rule this out, at least not in retrospect. But normally when we have a precognitive dream, we remember it as being such – a dream. In this case, the way I experienced it was as two separate physical runnings of the trail. If I had checked my watch at the time and seen that time passed in a linear way as I did both runs of the section, I might be able to distinguish the truth. But unfortunately, I was not aware that I was involved in an experiment at that point. There are, however, many reports of people who do check their watches during such events. Some find that there is a gap of missing time. Others find that they have traveled a great distance with no time passing. Something else is going on in these cases. And there are many other paranormal events that just don’t play nicely with time.

 My studies of time continue. I feel that if we can get a better handle on what time is, or even what it isn’t, we may be able to make much better sense of many phenomena. My current position on time would be “all of the above and more.” Dunne is correct – dreams do hold traces of the future. Wargo is correct – synchronicity and precognitive events do often seem to have a looping, self-causal quality. Guillemant is correct – we can intentionally create synchronicities, and by implication modify the future. But all of these theories still seem to me like the blind men feeling different parts of the time elephant. All of them are correct about the part they are feeling, but none of them captures the essence of the elephant in the rabbit hole.

Note: no bears, elephants or rabbits were harmed in the writing of this blog post.

Why is there No Body?

Paul: The age old question – and a damn good one at that – regarding the Sasquatch phenomenon is…

“Why has a body never been found”?

Here we discuss some potential reasons…

Mother Nature

First, of course – Mother Nature…. Not only in regard to the decomposition process, but all of the other animals that expedite it. Coyotes, vultures, and possums are all happy to join in and lend a helping hand/paw/beak. Living out in the elements is a tough gig, and taking advantage of an easy (dead) meal is a great opportunity to conserve energy, which is paramount when living in the wild. First other mammals, followed by insects, along with soil, aided by rain, decomposition out in the elements can be a rapid process. Mother Nature runs a well-oiled machine. To avoid the potential spread of disease, and to replenish the Earth, she breaks down tissue and bone with the help of her loyal subjects for the good of the forest and its inhabitants.

“Abrupt Death” Vs. “Delayed Death”

In his research regarding the Sasquatch and potential reasons that a body has never been found, the late Dr. Grover Krantz divided death among wildlife into two basic categories, abrupt vs. delayed.

Abrupt death is just that – it is swift and sudden, and usually takes place among animals who serve as prey. Deer, rodents, turkey etc. are hunted and killed by larger animals, and whatever may be left will generally remain where they were left by the predator. Behind my cabin, heaps of feathers were often all that remained at the scene of the crime after a turkey fell victim to a coyote or bobcat. The prey suffers an “abrupt” death, and the remains lay where they fall.

However, when we get to the apex predators, the abrupt death rarely takes place. As we go up the chain, prolonged death is more common. Among those towards the top, it is usually old age and disease that usher in the end of life. Even rare instances when the animal dies as a result of a battle with another predator when fighting over territory or a mate etc, usually the animal dies as a result of sustained injuries, and usually has time to seek cover.

Animals know that when they are ill or wounded, they are vulnerable to attack. Instinct dictates that they seek tight cover while they are in this vulnerable state to heal (or to die peacefully?). This is an opportunity rarely afforded the smaller animals who are hunted, but for the larger animals like bears, mountain lions, etc., the abrupt death rarely takes place. Whether it is old age, disease, starvation, or injuries sustained in battle, they have fair warning, the instinctual switch is activated, and they seek out the most concealed place to give them ample opportunity to heal while they are most vulnerable.

The Burying Of Their Dead?

There is also the possibility that Sasquatch may bury their dead.

Homo Naledi is a newly discovered species of extinct hominin within the last five years in what is known as the “Rising Star Cave System” in South Africa. I’ll leave the intricacies to the scientific community, but what seems particularly interesting about Homo Naledi is its unique characteristics of both human and ape traits. Relevant to the Sasquatch discussion is that Homo Naledi seems to further the already blurry line between ape and man.

In two different chambers of the cave system that were both particularly hard to reach, fossils were found that lead some researchers to conclude that the bones were brought to that particular section of the cave deliberately. Considering that they had to crawl on hands and knees to get there, the team on-site felt that animals like hyenas etc would not have expended so much energy to bring the bones to such a hard-to-reach place. Therefore they concluded that Homo Naledi did something previously thought unique only to modern humans - buried their dead. 

Sasquatch and Homo Naledi do not seem to share specific physical traits. Interesting, however, that both Homo Naledi and Sasquatch may reside in a gray area between ape and man, both may have (and regarding the Sasquatch – continue to) exist alongside more modern humans, and both may have (or continue to) bury their dead.

How Often Do People Have An Opportunity To Find Them?

While the human population increases, I can’t help but wonder if the number of people who venture into the wild has actually DECREASED. In this day and age, something tells me that many are more than willing to explore the wilderness through Youtube than getting off of the couch and actually venturing out into the wild. How many people prefer cyber-hiking from the comfort of their own home rather than actually venturing out into our wild places.

Of those who do – even in the more remote places of North America, most of us stick to the trails for safety and convenience.

While I know that there are some of us out there who do, I can’t help but wonder what percentage of us – even in the thickest of forest – venture off of the well-traveled paths to experience the areas not often vulnerable to human footprints.

 Combined with the decomposition process, the rarity of finding the bodies of large predators, and the possibility that Sasquatch bury their dead, I do feel that a strong argument can be made regarding why a body has not yet been found.

Michael: I think I probably spend far more time in the woods than your average 21st century human. But I have never come across the carcass of a bear or a moose or a bobcat. These are animals that we know are out there. If we believe that sasquatch exist in far fewer numbers than these animals, why should we assume that we would come across a body?

That would make it rare, but still, you may say, at some point SOMEONE would come across one. One possible response to this is: how do we know someone hasn’t? So far the people who have come out and claimed to have a body have been revealed as hoaxers, but that doesn’t mean that some people along the way may not have found genuine remains. Just because it has not been on Fox News doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.

It is often said that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Of course, it’s certainly not evidence of presence either, and all of these possible explanations are pure speculation when it comes to a creature that has yet to be proven to exist. But we should maybe not read too much into the fact that no one has come forth with a viable body as yet.