Is Bigfoot More Than Flesh and Blood? Exploring the Bigfoot Phenomenon
The Bigfoot phenomenon is once again at the center of controversy thanks to a new documentary that may challenge what people believe about the famous Patterson-Gimlin film.
The film, Capturing Bigfoot, reportedly contains previously unseen footage connected to the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. According to people who have seen advance screenings, the documentary may include material that appears to show a rehearsal for the iconic footage that has fueled debates for nearly sixty years.
If those claims are accurate, many people believe it could dramatically impact the long-standing argument over whether the Patterson-Gimlin film shows a real unknown creature or a man in a costume.
But what if that isn’t the most important question?
For decades, the Bigfoot conversation has been dominated by a single debate: Is it flesh and blood?
The problem is that many investigators who spend significant time in the field eventually find themselves confronting experiences that don’t fit neatly into that framework. Strange lights, synchronicities, seemingly psychic experiences, unexplained sounds, unusual dreams, and encounters that feel more like paranormal events than wildlife observations begin appearing alongside traditional Bigfoot reports.
At some point, the question stops being “Is Bigfoot real?” and becomes “What exactly are people experiencing?”
That shift has led some researchers toward a very different model of investigation.
Rather than treating Bigfoot as an undiscovered primate, researchers such as Ron Meyer and others involved in the growing CE6 movement approach the phenomenon in much the same way UFO researchers investigate contact experiences. The focus is no longer on tracking footprints through the woods. Instead, it becomes an exploration of consciousness, perception, and human experience.
Whether Bigfoot is biological, paranormal, interdimensional, symbolic, or something else entirely becomes secondary to the fact that people continue having encounters.
And those encounters often look remarkably similar across different paranormal categories.
The deeper many investigators go into high strangeness, the harder it becomes to separate Bigfoot from UFOs, ghosts, shadow figures, synchronicities, precognitive dreams, and other anomalous experiences. The boundaries that seem obvious at first begin to blur.
A person looking for UFOs may eventually encounter something that feels more like folklore. Someone investigating haunted locations may find themselves studying geomagnetic anomalies, ancient ritual sites, or reports of strange creatures in the woods. A Bigfoot researcher may begin documenting experiences that sound surprisingly similar to contact reports.
Instead of separate phenomena, some researchers have begun wondering whether these experiences represent different expressions of the same underlying mystery.
That idea raises another fascinating question.
Why do people experience the phenomenon so differently?
Two people can have an encounter in the same location and come away with completely different interpretations. One person may perceive a UFO. Another may perceive a spiritual being. A third may describe Bigfoot. Yet when they compare notes, the emotional impact, the synchronicities, and the transformative effects of the experience are often remarkably similar.
It is almost as though the phenomenon adapts itself to the observer.
This is where things become particularly strange.
Many investigators eventually reach a point where collecting evidence is no longer their primary goal. The question shifts from proving something exists to understanding why these experiences occur in the first place.
Why do certain people seem drawn into these encounters repeatedly?
Why do some locations produce reports of ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, and spiritual experiences all at once?
Why do so many paranormal hotspots share similar characteristics?
Again and again, researchers find recurring patterns.
Water.
Caves.
Mines.
Geological fault lines.
Quartz deposits.
Areas with significant historical trauma.
Locations where ritual activity has occurred for generations.
Places associated with power generation, dams, electrical systems, or unusual geological formations.
These patterns appear so frequently that many investigators have begun examining the landscape itself as a possible factor in paranormal activity.
Perhaps location matters more than we realize.
Perhaps the environment acts as a kind of amplifier.
Or perhaps these places create conditions that make unusual experiences more likely.
No one knows for sure.
What becomes increasingly difficult to ignore, however, is that the same types of locations continue appearing across reports involving ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, and other unexplained phenomena.
The mystery only deepens when consciousness enters the equation.
Many experiencers report receiving information through dreams, intuition, symbolic encounters, or meaningful coincidences. Others describe experiences that feel less like communication and more like participation in an ongoing process.
The more attention they give the phenomenon, the more it seems to respond.
That idea can be unsettling because it challenges the traditional investigator’s role.
What if we are not passive observers?
What if we are part of the equation?
Instead of standing outside the phenomenon and studying it, perhaps our perceptions, expectations, emotions, and consciousness are somehow woven into the experience itself.
That possibility creates more questions than answers.
Maybe that is the point.
The deeper people venture into high strangeness, the more they discover that certainty becomes harder to find. Evidence remains elusive. Definitions become blurry. Categories collapse.
Bigfoot starts looking a little like UFOs.
UFOs start looking a little like hauntings.
Hauntings start looking a little like consciousness.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, investigators find themselves asking a question far bigger than whether a creature exists in the woods.
They begin asking what reality actually is.
Maybe the Patterson-Gimlin debate will finally be settled.
Maybe it won’t.
Either way, the larger mystery remains.
Because if Bigfoot isn’t just flesh and blood, then we aren’t dealing with a creature anymore.
We’re dealing with a phenomenon.
If this conversation resonates with you, you’re not alone. Many of the themes explored here, including high strangeness, consciousness, synchronicity, paranormal hotspots, and the overlap between seemingly unrelated phenomena, appear throughout this blog. Feel free to explore some of my other articles as we continue pulling on the threads of a mystery that may be far larger than any single explanation.
Elmer McCurdy should have been a footnote in Oklahoma history. Instead, he became one of the strangest posthumous celebrities in America. After the failed outlaw was killed in 1911, his embalmed body spent decades touring carnivals, sideshows, wax museums, movie sets, and amusement parks before anyone realized the attraction hanging in plain sight was an actual human corpse.
Elmer McCurdy. Bank robber. Train robber. Terrible with nitroglycerin. Better known now as the mummified corpse that spent sixty-five years touring carnivals, wax museums, movie sets, and finally a California funhouse before someone realized,that’s a real dead guy.
It starts like a history lesson. It turns into a meditation on death, exploitation, karma, and whether a soul can ever rest if the body is passed around like a prop.
Michael introduces himself. Museum director. Oklahoma Territorial Museum. Historic Carnegie Library. Guthrie, Oklahoma. Part of the Oklahoma Historical Society. His job is to tell the story of how Indian Territory opened to non-Native settlement, how the territory became a state.
Guthrie is not just some random little town outside Oklahoma City.
It was one of the land offices for the Land Run of 1889. It was the territorial capital at statehood. It was the state capital until 1910. It had a federal jail. The deputy U.S. Marshals who went out to chase down train robbers and bandits were coming out of Guthrie’s courthouse.
The Carnegie Library building, where Michael works. That is where Charles Haskell, Oklahoma’s first governor, was inaugurated on the steps.
Downtown Guthrie, Oklahoma
So yeah. Guthrie is not just “cute antiques and brick streets.” It is one of the historic nerve centers of the state. The funny part is how many people have no idea it exists.
There are basements with giant windows that open at what looks like street level. Half sunken storefronts. Michael explains that at the time, it was normal to build with basements and rent that space out. Main business on the first floor. Offices or living upstairs. Workshops or shops below.
To me, as a California kid, it looks wrong. We don’t do basements because of earthquakes. Oklahoma doesn’t really do them anymore, either, because of water table issues. Early 1900s, Guthrie, though. Different story.
And then there are the fraternal buildings.
You see Masonic symbols on a façade. Or IOOF. Odd Fellows. Those groups would build the building, keep their “temple” upstairs, and rent the main floor to businesses. If you see those marks now, odds are the lodge met above someone’s general store.
That leads us to the real eye catcher in Guthrie.
The huge Scottish Rite Masonic Temple on the hill. And across the street from the museum, the Grand Lodge of Oklahoma.
Why, Guthrie, this is not a huge town?
Masonic Temple. Guthrie, Oklahoma
Michael explains it like this. The city had set aside that Scottish Rite spot originally for the state capitol. When the capital moved to Oklahoma City in 1910, Guthrie was left with a damaged building on prime land that did not get used.
They basically sold the property to the Masons for a dollar.
At the time, Guthrie was not a casual thirty-minute drive from Oklahoma City. There were no interstates. Dirt roads. Horseback. Interurban train. People didn’t live in Guthrie and commute to the city. It was its own world.
You open a door and your hand touches the same hardware marshals and outlaws used.
Michael says he can point to buildings and tell you who walked in and out of them. Bill Tilgman. Tom Mix. Names you read in history books. They grabbed the same handles. Walked the same planks.
Bill Tilgman
Now those buildings are smoothie shops.
If you are even remotely sensitive, you can feel the overlap. Present layered over past. The city is a time capsule.
I met Michael at my sister’s wedding at the Stone Lion Inn in Guthrie. We did the tourist thing. Walked around town. Went to the cemetery.
He talked about a dead man being propped up for everyone to see. I thought I knew the story. I asked him something like.
“Is it the corpse they had set up in the window?”
He said no. Not that one. Different corpse.
And I had this moment of.
How many random dead people are being propped up in store windows?
Quite a few, apparently.
At Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, you can visit two big names. Bill Doolin and Elmer McCurdy. Side by side.
Bill Doolan Death Photo
If you have ever watched The Outlaw Josey Wales with Clint Eastwood, there is a scene where he walks into a general store. They show a picture on the wall. An outlaw with his chest full of shotgun holes. That picture is an actual photo of Bill Doolin.
Doolin rode with the Dalton Gang. When most of the Daltons were gunned down trying to rob two different banks in Coffeyville, Kansas, he missed it. The horse came up lame. Bad luck that saved his life.
He later teamed up with another Dalton brother. They became Doolin and Dalton. Also known as The Wild Bunch. They robbed banks and trains all over Oklahoma Territory.
Judge Frank Dale in Guthrie got tired of it. He basically told U.S. Marshal Ed Nix.Just bring them in dead. Forget the trials.
Deputy US Marshals William Banks (left) and Isaac S. Prater (right) killed William “Tulsa Jack” Blake (center) near Dover, Oklahoma Territory, 1895
Doolin was first captured in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, by Bill Tilghman. Hauled back to Guthrie by train. People lined up to file past the marshal’s office just to stare at him like a sideshow. Then he escaped from the federal jail. Of course he did.
He was tracked again by Deputy Marshal Heck Thomas near a little place called Lawson, at his father-in-law’s house. They set up an ambush on the road.
Thomas supposedly yelled.
“Hey, Bill.”
Doolin turned, pulled a gun. Thomas shot him with a shotgun.
They brought the body back to Guthrie. Cleaned him up. Put him on a slab. They stuck him in the bank building downtown. First National Bank back then. Bank First now.
People walked through to look at him. That was the entertainment. Look what we did. We got the outlaw.
They embalmed him. Sat him up. Let people file past. Almost like a very grim meet and greet.
The thing that still gets me is how casual everyone was about it.
Michael is very practical about it.
You do not have TV. No radio. You have books and newspapers. You hear there is a dead outlaw on display. You go look. That was true crime then. Exactly the same fascination. Just more hands-on.
The bodies were usually embalmed. So yes. They did at least have that part handled. Then they propped them up in chairs or in front windows.
Congrats. You have earned the right to be a town attraction.
It sounds grotesque to us. To them, it was normal. A warning. A thrill. A morality play you could poke with your finger.
Part of what makes this so strange for us now is how far we have separated ourselves from death.
People used to kill their own chickens for Sunday dinner. Kids would be sent out to wring a neck. That was just Tuesday.
Now you see a cartoon chicken on a package and a boneless skinless chicken breast in plastic. The middle part never crosses your mind.
We extend life farther now. We warehouse sickness in hospitals and care facilities. Death shows up wrapped in paperwork and medical equipment. It is still brutal. It is just sanitized.
They had a completely different relationship with death. Daily. Physical. Intimate. Their tolerance level was higher because it had to be.
There is a whole Victorian industry around death. Hair art.
They would collect hair from the dead. Braid it. Weave it. Build these elaborate wreaths and framed designs from it. Family memorials made of literal human hair.
Sometimes they would collect hair while the person was still alive. Cleaning the hairbrushes in jars. Saving it for later.
There are photos of caskets in parlors. Dead bodies in living rooms.Because that is where wakes happened.
You did not ship the body off to a funeral home. You bought the casket from the furniture store. The same guy might also be the mortician. They embalmed the body. Brought it back. The casket sat in the parlor. People came to pay their respects.
Then the body went to the church for the funeral and burial.
Deceased Boy Victorian Death Photo
Michael tells a story from his own childhood.
He was maybe six or seven. A friend’s grandmother died. Italian family. Hartshorne, Oklahoma, near McAlester.
He remembers the house as dark, lit by candles. Heavy smell of wax. The casket in the dining room. A Catholic priest doing mass in Latin. He could not understand the words. Just the sound.
That was his first direct encounter with those older funeral practices. It stuck. That lived memory colors how he sees all this now.
We look at those Victorian mourning photos and call them creepy. But they were ritual. They were a way to face what happened and integrate it. There is a strange kind of grounding in it.
We are the weird ones, in a way. We push death completely out of the frame, then act shocked when it ambushes us.
My sister’s wedding theme was actually based on Elmer McCurdy.
We had the wedding at the Stone Lion Inn in Guthrie. We visited Summit View Cemetery. We went to Elmer’s grave. Put flowers on it. Did a murder mystery dinner where people had to give eulogies for him. Some folks had no idea he was a real person. They thought it was just part of the game.
The wedding favors included a book about him. I had already noticed it at the inn and wanted a copy. Then I opened the little goodie bag and there it was. Very on brand.
Elmer McCurdy was a small-time outlaw.
Bank robber. Train robber. Burglar. Not especially good at any of it.
He robbed a train, got drunk, and passed out in the loft of a barn. The posse tracked him there. There was a gunfight the next morning. He was killed.
They took his body to Pawhuska. Embalmed him. Identified him as Elmer McCurdy. He was wanted for multiple train robberies.
Then the county refused to pay the undertaker for the embalming or a burial. So Elmer sat in a back room for about four or five years.
Over that time, his body naturally mummified. Word got out that the undertaker “had a mummy.” Kids talked. People started dropping by asking to see it.
At first it was just. Sure. Come look. Then the undertaker propped Elmer up in the corner and started charging a nickel.
The carnivals showed up next.
Two men from the Patterson Carnival came in and claimed to be Elmer’s brothers. They said their mother’s dying wish was that her boy be brought home to California and buried next to her.
The undertaker finally handed the body over. After years of being stuck with this unclaimed corpse, he believed the story. Or wanted to.
Within a week, Elmer was a sideshow attraction. And that was his life. Or rather, his afterlife. For the next sixty-five years.
He toured with carnivals. Stood in wax museums. Got rented out as a prop. Was used in exploitation films.
One of the most infamous movies he appears in is Narcotic, made by the same people who did Reefer Madness. It is a wild little film about opium addiction. Elmer appears twice. Once dressed in a stereotyped silk outfit and cap, posed in an “opium den” with a pipe cradled in his arm. Later, they flop “him” onto a table when a character overdoses. If you watch closely, the way that body hits and folds is not how a living person moves. It is him.
At one point, the promoter who owned him would haul Elmer around to screenings. People would put tickets or coins in his mouth for luck or as a dare.
Again. Completely different ethical system. People did whatever made money. If someone wanted a mummy, they got a mummy. No one asked the mummy what he thought.
Fast forward to 1976.
They are filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man called “Carnival of Spies.” The set is the New Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California. There is a ride called “Laugh in the Dark,” a classic funhouse ride where you sit in a little car and get dragged through blacklight scenes while things jump out at you.
Elmer is hanging from a noose inside that ride. Painted fluorescent red with phosphorescent paint that glows in blacklight.
During filming, a crew member bumps into him. His arm breaks off.
The guy goes to put the arm back. He picks it up and thinks. This feels wrong.
He looks closer. There is bone sticking out. They gather around. Look at the body. Look between the legs. Realize very fast that this is not a papier mâché dummy.
They call the coroner.
The coroner’s office assumes they are dealing with a recent death. Someone who maybe hung themselves or was murdered and hidden on the ride. They take the body in. Put it on the table. Start the autopsy.
They open him up and realize he has already been autopsied once before. So this is not a recent suicide. This is older. A lot older. They remove the jaw for dental records. Find old coins and ticket stubs shoved up inside.
They start tracing the body’s history. They find the son of one of the early owners, a man named Louie Sonney. The son, Dan, says.
Yeah. That’s Elmer McCurdy.
His dad had gotten the body as collateral on a loan that was never paid back. They kept him for years. Even brought him out at kids’ birthday parties.
“Everyone would play with Elmer.”
Just a casual sentence you never expect to hear. This is where Oklahoma comes back into the story.
The coroner’s office puts out a press release. It hits all the major wire services. Reuters. AP. UPI.
That release crosses the desk of Bill Lehman, editor of the Guthrie Daily Leader. He is part of a group called the Westerners. They are obsessed with Western history. Writers, cops, museum folks, that type.
Two of his friends are key here.
One is a writer and police officer named Glen Shirley, who wrote a lot about Oklahoma outlaws and lawmen. The other is a guy named Fred Olds, the first director of Michael’s museum.
Lehman shows them the wire story.
“What do you think of this?”
Shirley says.“I know who that is. That’s Elmer McCurdy.”
He knows Elmer’s story. He knows about the mummy that vanished into the carnival circuit. It clicks.
Fred asks the important question.“What do you think is going to happen to him?”
Someone says. It is California. They will probably cremate him.
Fred is not okay with that.“That’s one of our people.”
This is funny when you step back. Elmer was from Maine. His only connection to Oklahoma is that he died there after a botched robbery. But in the emotional logic of the West, if you die on our soil, you are ours.
So Fred basically gets dared into doing something about it. He picks up the phone and calls the Los Angeles County Coroner. Long distance. Back when long distance cost money and you had to go through an operator.
He says they think they can identify the body.The coroner asks him to prove it. This is where it gets extremely forensic nerdy.
Shirley had found Elmer’s Bertillon records. These were pre-fingerprint criminal ID files. They measured finger bones, arm bones, and head circumference. Logged scars, healed breaks, tattoos. Took front and profile photos. All to track repeat offenders before fingerprinting was standard.
Snow had already done work for the FAA on how to identify victims of plane crashes from burned skeletal remains. He developed a technique called superimposition. You take a known photograph of a person and project it onto a skull to see if the features line up.
Different skulls create different facial structures. You learn how lips, noses, brows sit on that underlying bone. Snow projects the old Bertillon mugshot of Elmer onto the skull. Checks the scar records against the actual bones. It all matches.
No doubt. It is him.
At the same time, Michael is geeking out on his own side of the story. The museum has a collection from the man who killed Elmer. A lawman named Stringer Fenton.
Among the artifacts are two automatic pistols.
A Colt 1911 in .45. And what looks like a German Luger.
The old autopsy drawings show a bullet path through Elmer’s body and a recovered bullet jacket. Caliber. .32.
Michael picks up the “Luger.” It feels smaller than the usual nine-millimeter version. He looks at the barrel. It says 7.65 millimeter. That is .32 caliber.
He finds an old quote from Fenton in the paper. Fenton says that a bullet from his “Luger automatic pistol” entered Elmer’s chest and traveled almost all the way through, coming to rest in his hip.
Same path as the autopsy sketch.
Michael calls the LA coroner’s office to see if they still have that bullet jacket so he can test fire the gun at a ballistics lab and compare. They don’t. It was destroyed in the 1980s. So there is no test.
But given the match in caliber, the statement from Fenton, and the autopsy path, Michael is pretty certain they are displaying the actual gun that killed McCurdy.
Back on the body side. Once Snow and Shirley and Lehman make their case, LA agrees to release Elmer.
He gets a full funeral. Horse-drawn hearse. People on horseback. Folks dressed as cowboys. Guns. The whole Western funeral fantasy.
They lowered him into the grave. Then, reportedly, they back a cement truck up and fill the grave with concrete before covering it with dirt.
You would think that would be the end.
Of course it is not.
Years later, another TV show calls Michael. Mysteries at the Museum. Travel Channel. They are asking if he has any McCurdy artifacts. He explains that they have Fenton’s gun and gear. Realizes in that process that the 7.65 pistol is the likely murder weapon. They shoot a segment around it. You can still hunt it down and watch it. It’s Season 5, Episode 4: Funhouse Mummy, Playboy’s Gold, and Lawn Chair in the Sky.
Then an email shows up that changes everything.
Somebody is pitching a documentary and a Broadway musical based on Elmer’s story. Michael is used to getting emails from random people who have written scripts about McCurdy. He rolls his eyes. Then he starts looking up the names in the email.
They are not random people. They are Tony, Grammy, and Emmy-winning writers and composers.
This is legit.
They come down. Interview him for twenty hours. They take the story we have just walked through and write a full musical around it.
In 2024, Michael goes to New York for the off-Broadway opening of Dead Outlaw. In April 2025, he goes back for the Broadway opening.
At some point, there will be a Dead Outlaw documentary that weaves together those interviews, the making of the musical, and the underlying history. All because a film crew knocked a painted “dummy” in a funhouse, and his arm fell off.
And because a few Western history nerds in Guthrie said. “No. He is one of ours. Send him home.”
If they had not fought to bring him back. If Guthrie had not claimed a man who never lived there as their own. None of this happens. No musical. No documentary. No gun on display. No strange wedding theme at a haunted inn.
That is the kind of hinge moment that fascinates me. Tiny choices. Huge ripple.
