When I was a teen, my family was on a nature walk in a Florida swamp near the Everglades.  As we slowly moved through miles of cypress swamps and oak hammocks, we started to hear a strange loud howl.  It would call out ever few minutes.  We seemed to be the only people out in the swamp that day. I don’t remember the weather or time of year, but it was most likely summer. After a few calls from one side, another one started calling from the other side of us.  Gradually the screaming howls got closer from both sides.  We assumed it was panthers, what else could it be?  But as they got closer we become utterly terrified and ran for the exit as fast as possible.  We never saw the creatures making the eerie calls.

I spent my whole childhood roaming the swamps alone, played with a half grown panther in captivity and even learned to call alligators.  I have never heard that sound before or since.  I have listened to recordings of panthers, bears, wolves and coyotes.  None of them sound like what we heard that day.  It was not until I heard recording of calls attributed to Sasquatch that I realized that could be what we had heard.  Logically, it could have been mating panthers, which I understand make an awful noise.  But the sound had no cat like tones.  It was more of a yell than a howl.  I have owned cats for many years and heard lots of their talk, hurt, mad, sad, etc. but that core cat sound was not there.  If it were panthers, would they have been so close to people during the day? I understand that panthers need about 26 square miles of territory each and rarely cross paths with each other. Either way, what we heard was a truly rare and terrifying experience.

I heard the hosts debate a Bigfoot sighting on Mysterious Universe Plus, I think it was on Episode 10.12.  The couple reporting the Bigfoot reported feeling fear, discomfort and metal banging before a sighting.  That reminded me of the research of Vic Tandy I had been reading about recently.  It occurred to me that if Bigfoot uses infrasound to communicate as some animals do, then humans would have that kind of seemingly paranormal experience if they were around.  This could also explain the complete terror our family experienced in the swamp that day.  Also the metal banging could be caused by a standing wave of infrasound.  See wikipedia for more info on his work with infrasound and the paranormal.

So I did a bit of checking and found this nice write up of that same idea by ‘flesh and blood’ Bigfoot researcher, Cliff Barackman.  This would help explain some, but definitely not all of the high strangeness around them.  My own experience with receiving others thoughts and tends to suggest that some of the ‘paranormal’ traits often attributed to Bigfoot could be true, but they could also have physical abilities that far exceed our own.