Even though sightings of both Bigfoot and UFOs occurring at the same times and places are not uncommonly reported by eyewitnesses, the concurrence of such events is generally dismissed as coincidental, and any possible substantial connection between the two phenomena is not considered a matter of serious inquiry. Both camps of researchers—understandably so—do not want their respective studies to be reduced to speculations based on mere belief. Advocates of both mysteries seem to think the evidence for the reality of the other's subject matter is flimsy to non-existent, thus the reluctance to entertain a connection to each other. Maybe the problem in making the connection between Bigfoot and UFOs lies in the sets of assumptions made about each phenomenon.

In our book, Bigfoot: Exploring the Myth and Discovering the Truth, we do not claim we have solved the Bigfoot mystery. We only state we have evidence that strongly suggests the widespread occurrence of an officially undiscovered large, hairy primate in the southern United States. Beyond that, we point to an array of other strange phenomena associated with many Bigfoot sightings, including mystery light-forms. In fact, what sets our work apart from other researchers is largely that we take into account the paranormal activity that seems to surround the creatures and the areas we have studied where they are sighted. Most other researchers are reluctant to do this.

If the most we can say about the Bigfoot phenomenon without risking making invalid assumptions is that there is evidence it is an undiscovered primate, our research indicates likewise that the most we personally can say about UFOs might be that they are an unknown aerial luminous phenomenon (quite literally unknown flying objects), which usually involve balls of light of various shapes, sizes, and descriptions. This being the case, we maintain there is a definite connection between Bigfoot and UFOs, especially if we allow for their respective mysterious origins and nature. This general observation was independently made as early as thirty years ago by such writers/researchers as John Keel and Dr. Michael Persinger.

Keel, who is well-known for having written The Mothman Prophecies and for popularizing the term "Men in Black" (or "MIB"), described what he called "window areas" where he consistently observed a range of unusual phenomena that occur in specific locations in a particular sequence. These include star-like lights seen in the sky moving at speeds and angles impossible for conventional aircraft; full moon-sized fireballs streaking low across the horizon; smaller lights seen near ground level, followed by the appearance of the classic saucer-shaped spacecraft. At some point in this bizarre phantasmagoria, within the same areas, large mystery primates would also show up, what Keel called "Big Hairy Monsters" or "BHM," sometimes followed by the MIB.

Keel clearly thought all these phenomena were stages—"transmogrifications," he called them—in the manifestation of a single energy source, the origin of which is unknown. The only things witnesses saw that were real were the light-forms. The BHM, spacecraft and their occupants, and MIB were hallucinations (thus their apparent non-materiality), caused either by reactions within the perceivers' minds or actually projected on the observers by an intelligent, perhaps malevolent, outside force directing the energy.

Dr. Persinger, of Laurentian University—who is well-known for his "God helmet" experiments that produce dream-like sensations in laboratory test subjects, which they experience as religious revelations—leaned toward considering the saucers and BHM to be purely hallucinatory. He called them "transient phenomena" and took them to be the brain's reactions to the same kinds of geomagnetic energy that occur naturally in some places where the phenomena tend to "cluster" cyclically over long periods of time. Significantly, he observed that these "cluster areas" where unusual lights and hairy monsters are reported frequently center around some thirty-odd specific locations in North America where the "ghost light" phenomenon is known to have recurred periodically for indeterminately long periods of time. He deduced that the energy source for these lights is likely the base phenomenon in paranormal cluster areas to which witnesses of UFOs and hairy monsters are responding.

A full discussion of this odd, basketball-sized light-form is included in Rob's first book, In the Big Thicket: On the Trail of the Wild Man. To a large extent, Rob intended that book to be a confirmation of much of Keel's and Persinger's observations. The Big Thicket in Southeast Texas has a long history of the full range of window or cluster area phenomena Persinger and Keel delineated. In the Texas case, the epicenter for these weird events seems to be the Bragg Road ghost light that has been observed there for at least a hundred years now. It is seen to this day with regularity on a largely uninhabited eight-mile stretch of arrow-straight dirt road that runs from near Saratoga to what was once the site of the railroad town of Bragg.

With the exception of an actual landed saucer-shaped craft, Rob has personally experienced the entire panoply of strange lights Keel observed. When he was in high school working as a night watchman at the local country club golf course, he was amazed to see star-like objects tracing right angles and diagonals and likewise making triangles and squares in the sky over the surrounding deep woods at speeds no human craft could possibly duplicate.

Only a few months later, driving toward Beaumont one night on a movie outing, Rob, his date, and another couple all saw a large, orange fireball they at first mistook for the moon. It was headed southwest and hung low, barely above the treetops, until it slowly descended beyond the horizon.

Again, after only a few more months, Rob and three of his buddies were driving north from Sour Lake toward Kountze late one night, when one of the guys asked to make an emergency pit stop. They all piled out of the car, and Rob immediately noticed something unusual high up in the sky. A continuous stream of light was passing between what appeared to be two stars. One of them was slightly larger than the other, probably due its being closer to the observers. The larger star would pulse, increasing in size a bit, and then light would stream from it to the other star in a straight line, for a period of about minute or so.

The boys watched this process repeat four or five times, wondering in disbelief what could produce such an amazing effect. Just when they began to think it might be some kind of experimental aircraft, the "stars" streaked off in opposite directions at seemingly impossible speed and quickly disappeared, leaving the boys with little doubt that what they had witnessed was not of human origin.

What originally intrigued Rob about Tom's research was Tom's observation of mystery light-forms in the same areas of his Bigfoot sightings in North Carolina. Because Tom's investigations centered on a specific location no more than a few miles from where the Brown Mountain ghost lights occur, Rob suspected the same range of paranormal phenomena Keel and Persinger recorded in their window and cluster areas would also occur in that region of the Smoky Mountains, just as they do in the Big Thicket.

Tom describes the behavior of the Bigfoot he has encountered as being very much like that of a monkey on steroids. The creatures create an ungodly ruckus, making loud sounds by howling, banging on trees, and mimicking equally loud sounds they apparently have memorized, such as that of a bulldozer Tom had working on his property a few years before.

As strange as these phenomena are, even more so are the mysterious lights he sees in the forests on his land and the occasional classic spacecraft-type UFOs he sees hovering over the mountain peaks near his home. Although he suspects there is a connection with the creatures, Tom acknowledges there is no easy answer to what that might be.

And the high strangeness does not stop there. Tom has witnessed even more bizarre things, which would fit in well with Keel's energy transmogrifications theory. He had a group of self-proclaimed Bigfoot experts from California visit his place. They all witnessed an owl fly into their camp, and it mock-attacked everyone who brought guns, threatening them with close swoops over their heads with its talons threateningly exposed. Then it turned into a ball of light and flew out of the area. That night, the Bigfoot threw trees and rocks in the woods, and the next day the "experts" went home scared.

To top off Tom's own experience of what could have been the full range of "window area" phenomena: it is very likely that he was paid a visit by a MIB or the equivalent. He was approached by a man who identified himself as an intelligence officer from the U.S. Air Force, who somewhat mysteriously knew where Tom worked at the time. The man volunteered information that at least some of the Bigfoot are used by a superior alien race as slaves for the purpose of mining the earth for Bismuth, a radioactive chemical element that, through decay, becomes Uranium 235, and is supposedly used by the aliens as a fuel source.

Tom was also unexpectedly contacted by a different man who claimed to have been an MP on an Air Force base, who said the Bigfoot were frequently seen observing U.S. missile silo installations all over the country.

As outlandish as these claims seem, they are consistent with Keel's observations of the MIB that they frequently convey what turns out to be nonsense or deliberate misinformation and also identify themselves as officers of the Air Force or other U.S. military or government agencies, even though their identities are not confirmed.

Tom added that, despite these sightings and the fact he has also seen several other unidentified objects—which he says have scared the wits out of him—he does not recall being abducted or probed. He does admit, however, that at the start of his Bigfoot work he had several vivid dreams concerning alien-type beings taking genetic material from his body. Whether they were real or imagined he couldn't say, but they were creepy to say the least, and on one occasion the dream included beings showing him on a star map the part of the universe they were from. As to how much of this is connected to Bigfoot and UFOs, Tom admits he is at a loss.

Nick Redfern is a full-time author and journalist specializing in a wide range of unsolved mysteries, including Bigfoot, UFO sightings, government conspiracies, and alien abductions. His many published books include Three Men Seeking Monsters, Strange Secrets, and Cosmic Crashes. Rob met—and quickly became friends with—him shortly after Nick moved to Texas from his native England in 2001. Rob introduced Nick to the Bragg Road Ghost Light and Big Thicket Wild Man mysteries, which were similar to phenomena Nick had already investigated in remote places around the world. In his writings Nick had also made the case for the association of wild man or Bigfoot type creatures with unusual magnetic conditions and mystery luminosities or light-forms.

In 2008, Nick published There's Something in the Woods, in which he wrote of what he called one of the strangest cases he had recently investigated concerning the alleged recovery in February 1964 of a crashed UFO in the Big Thicket of Texas. "That the Big Thicket was also said to be the domain of Bigfoot, mysterious black cats, and ghostly lights that zip around the lanes of the woods in the dead of night, made the story, and my subsequent investigation, even weirder," Redfern wrote. The following is a summary of his account of the incident:

Nick's source was Will, who lived in Orange, Texas. Will had been a young soldier back in 1964 and at the time was stationed at Fort Polk, Louisiana, which is about 180 miles east of Houston. One night in February of 1964, Will and a number of colleagues were ordered to immediately deploy in the back of a military truck to the Big Thicket, which was about a two hour drive away. They were met by what looked like classic CIA operatives and two high-ranking military officers and were told to patrol the area and remain alert in the event anyone not cleared should stumble upon the military operation.

Shortly afterwards, a team of four—all dressed in some kind of hazmat protection suits—headed into the woods, "looking for something." They came back in less than two hours, carrying between them a boxlike, sealed metal container that measured about five feet on a side. It was loaded on another truck that was manned with additional personnel who were from Fort Hood, Texas. Will and his team were strictly ordered not to speak of the event to anyone and were sent back to Fort Polk.

According to a friend of Will's at Fort Polk, who had served with him on a reconnaissance mission in Vietnam in 1963, the team from Fort Hood had responded to a report from a military pilot in the area who had seen a small bright light descend slowly into the woods the previous evening at around 11:15 pm. His friend got the details from his brother-in-law, who was based at Fort Hood; the object was a circular, white-colored object that was basketball-sized and looked solid, but had a "fluid" outer coating that seemed to shimmer and move when touched.

Will's contact further stated that the object was sent to the government's biological and chemical research installation at Fort Detrick, MD, and placed in a sealed room. Two other similar devices had been retrieved, one in 1958 in Arizona and another in 1961 near Taos, NM. Members of the retrieval teams for these objects were overcome with nausea and dizziness, and at least two members died of a "flesh-eating virus," similar to Ebola. This was why the Fort Hood team had been garbed in biohazard protection suits.

Will was told personnel at Fort Detrick were highly fearful of unleashing a virus of unknown origins and danger, and apparently had come to the unsettling conclusion that these devices were being "deliberately crash-landed" by alien intelligences as part of an on-going plot to poison the earth with unstoppable viruses of extraterrestrial origin.

Will wondered if the fact that the device was uncovered in an area where ghost lights recurred was evidence of UFO intelligences using certain areas as "worm-hole windows" to enter our reality from another dimensional plane. When Nick visited the alleged crash site, a small clearing in the woods, with Will, he confirmed it was no more than a quarter mile or so from Bragg Road itself.

The circumstances of this case are strange indeed. They include some of the markers of what Keel would consider typically misleading window area phenomena, including what on the surface looks like typical MIB activity. The details provided by Will seem genuine, however, and Rob's experiences give credibility to Will's statements. All of the Rob's weird luminosity sightings previously mentioned (two of which were multiple witness events) in the immediate area of the crash site occurred during the same time frame of that incident—in 1964.

In subsequent research and after questioning more witnesses, some of whom were personal friends of Rob, he found out there were a number of other UFO sightings within only a few miles of the alleged crash site all occurring in or around 1964. If the crash was a case of a worm hole being open or activated at the time, it looks like there could have been quite a bit of traffic going on during that year.

This suggests the window area hypothesis that energy spikes of an unknown origin cause hallucinations has a viable alternative. Did all the various UFOs and strange lights seen in the sky during that specific time period in that specific place all make use of a dimensional portal provided by a naturally occurring worm hole or space-time vortex? Is alien technology able to predict when these conditions will occur and use them to access other realities? Is the connection between Bigfoot and UFOs simply that Bigfoot knows how to access the same energetic conditions with its brain and without the use of technology? Is this why both mystery primates and spacecraft are seen in the same areas and why both are able to suddenly vanish?

In order to answer these questions, it would seem the next step would be to find the precise focal points of these energy vortices so they can be observed, but that involves a possible encounter with the Great Unknown. If we attempt to find the exact locations where these worm holes occur, do we risk falling into another place and time from which we might not be able to return? Who is willing to take that risk?