The Bigfoot phenomenon is already quite strange enough as it is, and has long been ground zero for all manner of sightings of people seeing something large, ape-like, and decidedly not human prowling the forests of North America. The main theory behind these encounters is that we are possibly dealing with some undiscovered bipedal primate, perhaps even an ancestral species of human, either way a flesh and blood creature. However, there has been much speculation over the years that this may not be the case at all, and that these beings could be something far weirder than that. Among these are reports of Bigfoot that have seemingly phased out of reality, gone invisible, or otherwise vanishing right before witnesses’ eyes. Although perhaps not quite as common as more traditional sightings reports, they nevertheless come in, and suggest that possibly something more is going on here than a mere undiscovered animal.

One very interesting account of an apparently vanishing Bigfoot was related on the radio show Coast to Coast AM on a July 15, 2016 episode hosted by George Noory. The witness, who called himself “Gene,” from Albuquerque, New Mexico, claimed that he had been hunting for elk at around 7 AM out near a border-town on the Arizona-Mexico border called Gallup. The land was located on a Navajo reservation, and described as being very remote, rugged, and mountainous. As Gene prowled through the rough landscape looking for his quarry, he claims that he got the distinct feeling that something large was following him, perhaps even stalking him. He would explain what happened next thus (transcript from the original show):

I’m an ex-Navy corpsman. I know when something’s following me. I’m about an hour and a half back in and I’m way out in the middle of nowhere. So I go around and I end up on a box canyon on top of this mesa that overlooks the boonies. It’s like a thousand foot drop off. Okay. Real quick, I head back towards the box canyon. I was trying to get away from whatever is following me. All of a sudden I hear these thundering footsteps and I lean up against the wall and here comes about 7 horses out from the middle of nowhere into this box canyon. Wild horses. I get around the box canyon and there it is. It jumps off the top of a twenty foot dead end box canyon. I was at the bottom. I’m looking up and now I’m looking at it. And it jumped, one foot down, one foot up on the side. It was exactly what everybody says that you guys talk about (Noory says Bigfoot) Yeah… and I’m in the middle of the Indian reservation on the top of a little mesa. It blew my mind. It looked right at me. I was less than fifty yards from it. I took off running. I didn’t freeze. I took off running. Then something threw a rock at me. It was a huge rock. I’d say it weighed about 8 pounds. It would have killed me. I looked and I tripped out… at a 120 to 200 yards there it was… and it looked at me. I’m sorry George but… that far. I’m telling you. It blew my mind. It threw an 8 pound rock at least 120 yards. And this thing was not small. This thing was huge.

The terrified witness then decided to take a shot at the thing with his rifle and claims that he actually directly hit it, but after taking a few steps the massive beast simply disappeared into thin air as if it had never been there at all. When he went to investigate there were found to be enormous footprints imprinted in the ground, but no blood or other physical evidence left behind, and there was no sign at all of where the beast could have possibly gone. He was absolutely baffled, and would explain:

I don’t know where it’s from but wherever it came from, when I hit it, it had the ability to just disappear into thin air. You know, I looked… I followed the footprints. I walked the 120 yards. It wasn’t that far from the top of a Mesa it had nowhere to go. Never ever have I seen it again and never ever have I gone back, not by myself.

There have been several similarly bizarre and inexplicable cases of Sasquatch simply vanishing in full view listed in a paper called Vanishing Bigfoot and Anecdotal Accounts: Implications and Challenges for Researchers, by Sharon Cornet. One of the cases covered comes from the summer of 2000, by a witness named John Bohannon. He claims that had been driving along a dirt road during the daylight hours just west of the Three Rivers Campground, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, when he saw a massive bipedal, ape-like creature, which was estimated to have been around 8 feet tall and walking along in the same direction as his vehicle. The driver slowed down to gape at it, and the massive beast was described as having short, reddish brown hair all over its body, with longer hair underneath its forearms and a face that looked like a “Neanderthal.” It allegedly kept up its brisk stride while staring directly at John for about 100 feet, after which it suddenly just abruptly faded away into thin air, as if it had just been somehow erased. The witness explained that there were no trees or anything that it could have hidden behind and that it seemed as if it had walked through “an invisible wall.”

Also covered is a curious account that allegedly happened to witness Larry Kelm, in August of 1980 near Eugene, Oregon, and it is hard to really classify, seeming to point at vanishing Sasquatch being the result of some sort of inter-dimensional portal. On this day, Larry had decided to take a hike along the Mollala Indian trail, which connects the ridges of Saddle Blanket Mountain and nearby Oakridge. At some point during his hike, the witness claims that his surroundings became blurry, overcast, and tinged with an odd grey color, despite the sunny weather, and even though there were no clouds in the sky it seemed as if a shadow had been cast over the land. Larry would say of this:

The only way I can describe it was as if suddenly I was looking through someone else’s prescription sunglasses. I finished the step and started another. Every inch I moved forward the darkness increased and the gray blurring turned into a jumble of shapes that made no sense.

Then, as suddenly as this had all happened, Larry reports that he seemed to pass “a barrier,” and that everything returned to focus but that it was now night time and the wind had completely ceased. Upon looking about himself, Larry found that the scenery had changed in other bizarre ways as well. Instead of the fir trees that had been around him before, there was now thick, unrecognizable and wild vegetation similar to a jungle, and the air seemed thick and oppressively humid. Even though it was now night and there was no discernible moon in the sky, he found that he could still see everything to some degree, as if there was some mysterious light source casting a faint frosting of light upon the landscape. At this point, Larry claims that the air was pierced by a “continuous high pitched keening sound,” which immediately filled him with an unbearable sense of dread. The witness explained the bizarre events that followed thus:

It was at this point, I heard a whispered “Gotcha” over my right shoulder. I couldn’t tell if I heard it with my ears or inside my head. The word wasn’t directed at me but something said the word quietly to itself. I was so terrified I actually felt my heart stop for a moment. That whispered word is what saved me. I opened my mouth and gasped in a huge gush of thick air and recoiled backward in the same footsteps I had entered wherever I was. As I threw myself backward, I looked over my right shoulder. A dark colored hairy right hand and arm was reaching for my throat over my shoulder. The hand had pale ivory spade-shaped fingernails. The nails looked clean and almost had a manicured look to them. The thumb was placed lower (towards the wrist) on the hand than a human’s is. Both hand and arm were thin and powerful looking and both were covered with thick coarse black hair. I got a good look at it because the thumbnail grazed my neck (it did not break the skin) as I moved backwards. As I continued backwards, the hand clutched where my neck had been a split second before and it seemed to fade off into the distance as I returned through the Portal.

As soon as he had scampered a few more steps backwards, Larry found himself back in the cool mountain air he had left behind and back in his familiar surroundings, and the portal before him seemed to be an oval shaped patch of shimmering air that slowly faded away until it was gone. Larry then ran off towards his truck as fast as he could without looking back. The terrified witness later would reflect on what had happened to him, and came to the conclusion that it had been some sort of inter-dimensional trap, saying:

On my way home I was absolutely horrified at the thought of what would happen if I were to drive my truck into something like that. It had been a trap pure and simple. Whatever it was that tried to kill me somehow kept the Portal hidden from me on the way in, and I didn’t actually see it until I was back out again. I had terrible nightmares for years, and still haven’t come to grips with what happened. My fingers are trembling and the hair is standing up on the nape of my neck as I write this.

In yet another report, a witness called Ms. Montanez was driving along a desert highway east of El Paso, Texas, when she spotted a Bigfoot reportedly hunched over a dead coyote. She slowed her vehicle to get a better look at the bizarre sight, and claims that as she looked on the massive beast started to sort of sink, as if being absorbed into the ground, until it was completely gone. The witness was convinced that there had to have been a cave there, and that the thing had simply retreated to its dark confines, but when the spot was investigated there was found to be no cave or other opening in the ground. Curiously, the coyote was gone and there were no footprints of anything that could have matched the description of what she had seen. Where in the world did it go? No one knows.

In the book The Psychic Sasquatch and Their UFO Connection, by Kewaunee Lapseritis, M.S., there is an odd account concerning an encounter with a Bigfoot by a group of hikers. According to one of the witnesses, a Mrs. Jeffrey, the group was returning from a hike when a large Sasquatch around 9 feet tall stepped out in front of them to stare for a moment before vanishing right before their eyes. The group insists that it simply “dematerialized,” blinking out of existence. The witness was reportedly so upset by what she had seen that she did not leave her house for a week and refuses to go back to the area.

There is also a report from the Texas Bigfoot Research Center from a witness near Manchester, Texas. The witness claims that in around 1990 he was deer hunting in Red River County, Texas, and was sitting upon a stool waiting for deer to pass by when he saw a large, 8 or 9 foot high dark shape around 120 yards away from his position. Thinking it might just be a large tree stump, the witness took a look through his telescopic rifle scope and was startled to see that it was a hulking, ape-like creature that was staring right back at him. The witness observed it for some time before being momentarily distracted by the snap of a twig or stick nearby. He alleges that he looked away for a split second and when he went back to the scope to continue watching the strange creature it was gone. Considering that it had been standing in a grassy meadow and had been out of sight for not even a second, it was as if it had just vanished into thin air. He would later speculate that the snap he had heard had perhaps been a diversion by another one of the creatures. As to why he had not tried to take a shot at it with his rifle, the witness said:

At this time, I got up and left everything but my rifle and backed out of the area. I had this thing dead to rights in my scope but couldn’t shoot because I did not feel threatened.

There has been much speculation and reams of theories written on the more inexplicable and paranormal aspects of some Bigfoot sightings reports, of which the phenomenon of Bigfoot spontaneously vanishing into thin air certainly ranks amongst. In this case there have been theories such as the idea that Bigfoot are inter-dimensional travelers utilizing portals or vortices, that they are ghosts or spirits of some sort, that they are aliens, that they have some sort of cloaking ability, or that they are using psychic powers to merely befuddle our minds to make it only seem as if they are vanished or invisible. Of course there are also the more skeptical views that this is all just tall tales, that it was all in the witnesses’ heads and that there was no Bigfoot in the first place. I don’t intend to get into the specifics of each of these theories here, as many of them are intricate enough to be worthy of separate articles unto themselves, but if there is anything to these cases at all, and if they are to be given consideration equivalent to other sightings more in line with a flesh-and-blood creature, then it suggests that there is perhaps more weirdness to the Bigfoot phenomenon than we can imagine, and that it is even stranger than previously thought.