[Spook]Housekeeping, April 2023

Plans, Promotions, and a Little Bigfoot Tale

Although I will undoubtedly return to the topic, we are approaching the temporary end of the Gulf Breeze Six series that has been an integral part of this newsletter since January. That’s not to say it’s going away quietly into the night: The two concluding chapters will be released on April 23^rd and 30^th respectively and feature some beautiful, fresh artwork from the incredible artist Robert Voyvodic and a trippy, exciting trailer from the amazing documentarian Weird Reads with Emily Louise. Thank you for following this series from chapter to chapter and for your incredible support throughout. I truly hope that you enjoy the ending!

Some other housekeeping:

• As some readers may have noticed, posts older than five months are going into the archives and will only be available to paid subscribers. I will try to let people know when the first installments of important series will be archived but otherwise, subscriptions are only $5 a month or $30 for a year. While I do have a day job, I am attempting to keep the schedule of an article a week—a fairly decent bang for your buck once the archives start filling up!

• I have a promotion running where the 50^th paid Getting Spooked subscriber (at any tier) will be mailed a copy of my book The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction. If you like what you’ve read here, consider supporting the continuation of this research and getting a chance to receive a book that tackles similar themes and subjects.

• I have set up a new email address dedicated to anything and everything you want to throw at it: gettingspooked@protonmail.com. As I said in the previous article, treat this as an open lines episode of Coast to Coast AM. I’m looking for questions, comments, paranormal experiences, vague threats, pranks, leads, you name it.

In other news, I recently attended a talk by Pennsylvania’s best-known UFO/Bigfoot researcher, Stan Gordon, at the beautiful Carnegie Library of Homestead. With over six decades of paranormal investigations under his belt, Gordon is a treasure trove of intriguing stories. He collected important information during the 1965 Kecksburg UFO incident as a teenager and was also the main witness interviewer for the strange assortment of phenomena that popped up throughout the Laurel Highlands during the Chestnut Ridge UFO & sasquatch flap in the early 1970s. His talk was filled with numerous bizarre accounts of the weird collected over the course of his long career.

During the Q&A session after the talk, I decided to ask the most on-brand Getting Spooked question I could muster: Throughout Gordon’s time as a paranormal investigator, had he ever—like Arnold, Keel, and others before him—found himself coming into contact with military or intelligence agencies while on the case? He certainly did not disappoint, recalling a very peculiar situation the befell a dual UFO/Bigfoot witness. In the rural outskirts of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, 22-year-old George Kowalcyzck saw a bright glowing object that left a bright illuminated ring in the place where it landed as well as several “hairy hominids” that soon after stalked the farmland where he lived. It’s a complex tale among many others in the area at the time, but to return to Gordon’s answer my question: He recalled how after the bizarre experience, Kowalcyzck received a visit from ostensible authority figures. From Cutchin and Renner’s Where the Footprint End, Vol. 1: Folklore:

Kowalcyzck related that, about two weeks following his 1973 UFO/bigfoot encounter, two men arrived at his house to question him: one man was dressed in a suit, the other wearing what appeared to be Air Force “blues”.  At the time, Kowalcyzck was under the impression these men worked with Gordon. The two men asked hi, to relate all the details he could remember (and) assured Kowalczyck he was not insane. The “Air Force officer” then opened a briefcase, producing a series of photographs—first UFOs, then of bigfoot creatures—asking Kowalczyck if any looked like what he had seen. Kowalczyck was particularly impressed by a photo, allegedly taken in Georgia, showing a bigfoot climbing a fence with a pig under one arm.¹

Stan Gordon with plaster cast of a PA Bigfoot track. (MUFON’s Skylook: The UFO Monthly, no. 75, February 1974.)

Perhaps most bizarrely, the two men hypnotized Kowalczyck to establish a clearer picture of what the witness encountered. This incident recalls several I have covered in previous Getting Spooked articles such as the visits by purported NASA personnel to both Antonio Villas-Boas and Woodrow Derenberger. In some of these cases, one gets the impression that these NASA or Air Force personnel (or whoever they are) want to reinforce paranormal belief in witnesses.

The odd appearance of official-looking investigators in the case of Kowalczyck recalls an instance in Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men: Brazilian UFO investigator Dr. Olavo Fontes is visited by Brazilian Naval Ministry intelligence officers who tell him “not to poke his nose into matters that ‘did not concern him’” while simultaneously “proceed(ing) to tell him everything they knew about the secret UFO cover-up.” As Pilkington asks, “was it because somebody wanted” UFO investigators and witnesses “to believe these tales, and to share them?”² One gets a similar impression from the case Gordon brought up in this talk. If these two individuals that visited Kowalczyck were legitimate, what was the end game in corroborating his belief in what had occurred to him? Was it to obscure the facts and details of what had actually been going on along the Chestnut Ridge in 1973? Was the duo part of a rival paranormal investigation group, hoping to latch onto a scoop under Stan Gordon’s nose? But if this were the case, where did they get such convincing photographs? And why the hypnosis session? As in other cases, putting witnesses into such a susceptible state makes the possibility of hypnotic suggestion loom large—especially when it seems there are forces at work that seemingly want people to believe in the phenomena.

Thank you for reading Getting Spooked. I hope that this small story can tide you over until the conclusion of the Gulf Breeze Six saga begins next week. Big thanks to The Anomalist for the incredibly kind coverage of this publication over the past week. Until next time, stay spooked.

1. Cutchin, Joshua and Timothy Renner. Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon, Volume 1: Folklore. Dark Holler Arts, 2020. Page vii.

2. Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: A Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs. London: Constable, 2010. Page 106-107.