A Window into UFOs, Bigfoot and High Strangeness

By Brent Raynes

August 10, 1975. It was a busy summer. I was burning up the roads from Maine to Florida in my green, four-door AMC Hornet. Once again, I rolled into the small town of Brooksville, Florida, where my friend Ramona Clark Hibner and her new husband, Duane Hibner, had taken up residence because the place was a hotbed of anomalous activity—UFOs, Bigfoots, ghosts and poltergeists—a perfect example of what John Keel had come to call a “window”: an area that seemed rife with high-strangeness encounters.

Ramona and Duane had been particularly drawn to this region because of the ongoing reports of Bigfoot, although they were well aware of the other anomalous activity that had been associated with the area going back to March 2, 1965, when a gentleman named John Reeves really put this place on the map. He claimed to have encountered a humanoid figure who approached him and, while facing him, briefly held a small square object up to its chin, followed by a bright flash of light [Reeves would wonder if his picture had been taken]. The being would soon climb aboard a dull, silvery-gray, saucer-shaped craft approximately 30 feet in diameter, which was sitting on the ground nearby, and hastily retreat skyward for parts unknown.

So, while this couple had set themselves up in this area to investigate reported Bigfoot encounters, they were well aware [and may I emphasize, very, very well aware] of the other anomalies. During my visit, I was brought up to speed on a number of peculiar episodes that they had experienced. Duane had recently seen, on two occasions, the apparition of a tall, thin man who appeared to be in his 40s and had dark brown hair. Several times, often in daylight, he had recently seen a woman in a white gown, like a wedding dress, with a white veil. Often, he would first catch her out of his peripheral vision, at which time he could see that she was looking directly at him. But when he turned to look back at her, she would turn and move away, soon vanishing into thin air.

This reminded Ramona of an experience she had had years earlier. It happened while she was pregnant. She was lying on her back in bed one day while praying. Her mother was in a nearby room. Suddenly, Ramona felt as though someone had brushed her hair back from her forehead. Her eyes had been closed.

“Mother, is that you?” she asked.

Her mother, still in another room, hollered back, “No, what’s the matter?”

At that point, Ramona opened her eyes and said she saw a woman with long black hair, dressed in a long white gown [no veil], standing by her bed with a “warm and gentle expression” on her face.

Back in October 2019, while attending Nashville’s first Strange Realities conference, I was listening to a speaker named Timothy Renner, a folklorist, author and artist from York County, Pennsylvania, whose talk on Bigfoot and various other forms of high strangeness soon had me racking my brain to remember any similar details that I may have come upon in the past. It felt strangely familiar, but after half a century in the field, I needed to prime my memory a bit. One of the things that stood out prominently was the presence of these “women in white” cases.

A few months later, I interviewed Tim in a follow-up about his Bigfoot investigations. He recalled the time he spoke to a man who claimed he had seen two Bigfoots on the other side of a pond on his property. After getting a good description, Tim asked him what else odd might have been going on.

“Oh, well, my house is haunted,” the man replied.

He asked if Tim wanted to see some pictures.

“Absolutely,” Tim replied.

“The interesting thing about them is he kept saying, ‘I think I’m being haunted by bikers. Look at these guys. They’re big, hairy guys.’ And when he showed me the pictures of them, they didn’t look like bikers. They looked like Sasquatches! They were very big. Big eyes. He said, ‘Look, he’s wearing sunglasses.’ They looked like big, hazy, ghostly pictures of Sasquatches.

“He said, ‘I have another one. A spirit manifested in my mirror. I took a picture.’ He showed me a picture of what looked like a woman in a wedding dress. A woman in white, and without knowing anything about it, he sort of presented this woman-in-white spirit.

“I was on another investigation in Maryland and again waited until they told me all the Bigfoot stories. At the end of the day, I said, ‘Okay, what else is weird?’ They started telling me stories of UFOs and said their house was haunted. This woman said, again without knowing anything about this, ‘One night my husband said he saw a woman in a white dress walk up our driveway and disappear.’”

One Bigfoot site Tim investigated was less than half a mile from a pond where legend told of a ghostly woman in white who had drowned her baby. In his research of folkloric accounts, Tim has found a good many descriptions of women in white in various parts of the world, such as the European legend of the Frau Perchta witch, also called the Christmas “belly slitter.”

According to the legend, after cutting her human victims open, she would sew rusty nails and dirt inside them. Tim added that she had “a horde of wildmen that followed her” and was also associated with will-o’-the-wisp orbs connected with the souls of children.

Tim further stated, “Many, many folkloric wildmen across the world have wives or female counterparts that were either white in color or were ghostly white apparitions.”

Linda Sigman claims that when she was 16, she observed a very large, winged, black figure [estimated at 10 feet in length] flying through the air close to a UFO that she and a boyfriend were watching at close range on the evening of April 18, 1967, on a hilltop in Mason, West Virginia [only 13 miles by road from Point Pleasant].

In my interview with her, she also recalled how, when she was three years old, she was playing outside alone when she noticed a black-haired woman in a white dress standing beside her. The mysterious woman instructed her to follow her to the backyard. There, she told the little girl to look down at the ground. She did and was puzzled when she saw tunnels underneath the ground, as though she had X-ray vision or something. The beautiful woman then told her that one day, when she was older, she would understand.

Years later, when she was about 14, there was a bad rainstorm. Part of the riverbank in front of the house had collapsed, and there was severe flooding, taking out part of a railroad track and some trees. Soon afterward, authorities arrived and informed the family that the damage had happened because so much rainwater had filled old coal-mine tunnels beneath their backyard!

In their book Where the Footprints End, Vol. 1, Tim Renner and co-author Joshua Cutchin point out how Bigfoot has often been associated with subterranean sites, caves and mines. But it doesn’t end there.

“Moreover, mines are regarded as the domain of faeries throughout the world, from Cornish Knockers and German Kobolds to the Mondong, diminutive Aboriginal spirits believed to haunt Australian ochre mines,” Cutchin wrote. [3]

In Anthony Peake’s The Hidden Universe: An Investigation into Non-Human Intelligences [2019], he touches upon the archetypal Marian apparitions that have long figured so prominently in Catholic tradition and beyond. Here, if you take a moment and blur the lines a little, you will begin to notice parallels, crossover events and similar manifestations.

“Many encounters with religious figures such as the Blessed Virgin Mary also take place in caves or grottoes,” Peake wrote. “We also know from historical reports that elementals such as the Irish Tuatha Dé Danann were banished to live in the ‘hollow hills,’ another underground, chthonic place of darkness. This underground of elemental entities is yet another cultural universal, found across most cultures across the globe. Like shamanism itself, the belief seems to be hardwired into human belief systems.”

Meanwhile, back in early 1974, Ramona and Duane began some serious investigative work on a ranch in Brooksville. They took me there during one visit in October and shared with me what they had learned.

For example, on February 15, 1974, around 10 p.m., Ramona was walking through a wooded area near a small pond when she saw a seven- to eight-foot-tall, dark-brown-haired, muscular figure with long arms and legs walking nearby. She said she got a side view, from which she could see that the “back of the skull was flat” and its head was pointed. A 19-inch-long, five-toed footprint would later be found.

A month afterward, on March 11, at about 9:45 p.m., Ramona and Duane both observed several of these creatures, with short, light and dark hair on their bodies, kneeling on their hands and knees at a garbage pile. Making “smacking, sucking sounds” and “chatter and clicks,” these creatures were described as having pointed heads and ears, leathery-looking faces with fangs, sunken eye sockets and what looked like frail, long arms.

At this same ranch, around 11 p.m. one night in August, Duane was out in the driveway when he said that a silent, roughly 100-foot-diameter craft, with what looked like large, 20-foot-wide, square, illuminated windows, flew slowly overhead at an estimated height of 60 feet above the ground.

In addition, Ramona drove me along nearby Route 491, a two-lane paved road in an isolated area, where one night a “big ball of light” seemed to touch down on the road about 200 feet ahead of her vehicle and then immediately shot straight back up into the sky.

Ramona and Duane even stumbled upon cryptid cases that Keel himself might have noticed with a gasp of surprise. In the nearby community of Nobleton, about a 12-mile drive from Brooksville, the couple received reports in May 1977 of flying “silver disks,” as well as a seven-foot-tall, red-eyed, lizard-like creature with a long tail crossing a road; bird-like creatures with wingspans of up to 15 to 20 feet and “skin like leather,” flying as if in slow motion; and—oh yes—Bigfoot was reported too!

During my 1975 visit with them, Duane also shared how, during the third week of May, around 3 a.m., he responded to a commotion outside. He left the house with his flashlight shining down on the ground so that he wouldn’t trip over anything when, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, he noticed a light-colored thing descending from the air.

It came within about 20 feet of the ground and had an estimated 20-foot wingspan! Apparently becoming aware of his presence, the creature soared off in another direction. About a week earlier, something had been killing two or three of their ducks every night. After that night, no more ducks were killed.

Ramona’s 3 a.m. Bedroom Invader

I first met Ramona a couple of years earlier, in 1973. I was in the Navy then, and my ship, a destroyer escort [USS Paul, DE-1080], was homeported in Mayport, Florida.

I remembered that the year before, I had briefly corresponded with Ramona [her last name was Clark then]. She described having had a close encounter with a classic, domed, disc-shaped UFO near the Mayport Naval Base, along with her 13-year-old son and her husband, on July 29, 1967. Within three or four days, their home erupted with poltergeist activity and, beginning on August 11, entity activity, with balls of light and humanoid, apparitional figures appearing in their bedrooms. The bedroom episodes always seemed to happen around 3 a.m.

As Ramona had initially written to me from a P.O. box in Jacksonville Beach, I tried to locate her there, several miles away, but soon discovered that she lived in residential base housing just a short walk from my ship. Her husband was also in the Navy.

The year 1973 turned out to be a big one for UFOs. The newspapers, radio and television were full of stories. I got to investigate some of the stories firsthand with Ramona, and I even flew out to New Orleans to meet a researcher she put me in touch with, who kindly drove me over to Pascagoula, Mississippi.

There, I met Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson only 10 days after their internationally headline-making account of being taken aboard a small, hovering, oval-shaped craft by very strange-looking, pale, wrinkled, roughly humanoid beings with lobster-like claws.

I learned a great deal from Ramona. To this day, I still mull over the various things she shared with me.

“During my numerous investigations of varied phenomena, it was apparent that there were members in each family situation who had psychic abilities other than the person who was involved in an encounter,” she once shared. “My eldest brother, his middle daughter and I appear to be the only ones in my family who are psychic [my brother is very psychic]. We all three look exactly alike! It is very hard to find a difference between my niece and me. We look and act just as twins would. We all three have had the same health problems, etc.

“In some of the cases we studied, usually a sister, mother or grandmother had psychic abilities. Usually, only one male member of the family had it. Sometimes, it was a child.

“Odd as it may seem, it was usually someone with dark hair coloring and an olive complexion. As is true within my own family, the female members were more dominant personalities! The male members aren’t passive or meek, but allow the women to take the lead. Both of my grandmothers were very dominant figures within the family as a whole.

“This strong-willed determination to survive against all odds has been passed on to the younger women in our family, as I am sure it has been for hundreds of years among mountain-bred women, though most I have met are very passive, shy and backward.”

I shared Ramona’s statement on family psychic dynamics and genetics with Barbara A. Fisher of Athens, Ohio, the host of 6 Degrees of John Keel and both a researcher and experiencer herself.

“I do believe that some of this is genetic,” Barbara stated. “There is some predilection or affinity for contact with the Other that runs in family lines.”

In her own family, she noted how “the psychic stuff runs on both sides of my family. In my experience, there isn’t a ‘look’ that goes with the psychic genes. That’s what I’ll call them. There’s no consistent physical ‘type.’”

She described to me the different physical traits in her family, including the various skin complexions and hair and eye colors.

In the meantime, Athens sounds like one of those “window” areas John Keel wrote so much about—and why not? Athens, Ohio, is only about 38 miles by road from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, which played center stage in Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies. Remember, too, that reporter Mary Hyre worked for The Athens Messenger. Barbara and others in Athens have many bewildering tales of high strangeness.

“One night, a friend and I were sitting on this hill overlooking my house. She was smoking a cigarette, and I was watching three female-looking entities dancing around the three apple trees that stood about 20 feet from the little house. I didn’t say anything to her about them. I seldom do when I’m with people because I don’t want to influence what they see, if they see anything.

“They looked like they were spinning around and dancing in flowing dresses. The light they were made of was sparkly, kind of gold-white. They seemed to have long hair or veils that flew as they leaped and danced.

“Finally, she speaks up. ‘So, uh, do you see anything down there?’

“I said, ‘Like what?’

“She said, ‘Oh, three ladies dancing around those trees—kinda spinning?’

“And I said, ‘Yeah.’

“And she said, ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

“And I said, ‘Because I didn’t know if you could see them.’

“And she said, ‘Oh. Damn. Well, I can. So, this shit happens out here a lot?’

“I said, ‘Yeah.’

“She was like, ‘Damn. You need to move.’”

On another occasion, Barbara described how she and a friend named Dave, whom she said was very psychic, were watching a group of small balls of light approaching them up a hill one night. These lights had been flashing on and off.

One of them came within an estimated two and a half feet of them, and when it flashed back on at that distance, something incredible happened.

“It turned on, and it looked like a naked little lady with moth wings, and it looked right at us,” Barbara told me. “All but posed. Just looked at us to make sure we got this great look, and then turned off and became a ball of orange light again and zipped off toward the woods.”

So many times, and for so many years, researchers and students from many different fields and disciplines have broken these various inexplicable accounts down into separate branches of study and “understanding,” when it could be that these things we have long treated individually, in separate categories, are somehow interconnected across a vast spectrum of interrelated phenomena.

Typically, over the years, the psychical researcher and the parapsychologist have ignored things such as UFOs and cryptids. The cryptozoologist typically ignores UFOs and psychic phenomena. The “nuts-and-bolts” ufologist ignores the psychic, apparitional and cryptid data.

Such researchers are guilty of misjudging these phenomena based simply upon their surface appearances and their failure to conform to preconceived beliefs and expectations. But, as the old saying goes, looks can be deceiving. These phenomena cry out for a far more penetrating and extensive examination.

Gradually, I feel as though a shift is occurring, and there is a growing realization that we need to apply an expanded, multidisciplinary perspective and approach to our continuing study of these perplexing anomalies.

Increased openness, cooperation and objectivity are the order of the day.

Brent Raynes may be reached at: brentraynes@yahoo.com