Bigfoot and UFO Witnesses Describe Nearly Identical Experiences

If you've ever sat with a story for years wondering if anyone would ever believe you, this one's going to hit different. I just came across a talk from Ananomicon 2026 featuring Bennett Tanton, the host of the Broadcasting Seeds podcast, and what he shared is the kind of thing that makes you want to pull out a notebook and start connecting dots you didn't even know were related. Bennett has spent the last 12 years doing something most people in this field don't have the patience for. He's listened. Over 600 interviews with researchers, veterans, scientists, skeptics, true believers, and everyday folks who had something extraordinary happen to them and never got to talk about it. Some of these people had been carrying their stories for 30 or 40 years before anyone ever asked them a single question. That alone tells you something about how lonely these experiences can be. But here's where it gets really interesting. Somewhere around interview 400, Bennett started noticing something he wasn't expecting. It wasn't a new case or a new piece of evidence. It was a pattern. The same pattern showing up again and again, no matter who he was talking to or what they claimed had happened to them. He laid out seven of these patterns in his talk, and three of them really stood out to me, especially for anyone who's spent time in the woods or had a brush with something they couldn't explain. Pattern one is what he calls "the witness changes." Almost nobody walks away from one of these experiences as the same person they were before. The effects vary, but they cluster around the same themes every single time. Deep physical fear that lingers in the muscles for days. Missing time that bothers people for years. Electronics acting up right as the event happens, engines stalling, phones dying, street lights flickering. A lingering sense of being watched long after whatever it was should have been gone. Vivid dreams that start right around the time of the event and stick with people for decades. And a spiritual or existential shift, where people start asking bigger questions about reality and whether the world is stranger than they've been told. Here's the part that really got me. Bennett said he's heard this exact cluster of effects from a Sasquatch witness in Appalachia and a UFO witness in the UK using almost identical language. Two people who have never spoken, never read each other's stories, don't even know the other one exists. Nobody coaching them into using the same words. They just arrived at the same description independently. If you've ever spent time in the old growth forests of Appalachia, you know exactly what that silence feels like. The kind Bennett described at the very beginning of his talk, where a man is walking his dog at dusk and the woods just go completely dead. No birds, no wind, just silence, and the feeling that something very large is standing about 30 feet away, just watching. That feeling of being watched is something researchers like Dr. Jeff Meldrum have written about extensively, and it keeps showing up in witness after witness, not just with Sasquatch but across the board. Pattern two is "the category breaks down." In the research world, people tend to specialize. There are UFO researchers, Sasquatch researchers, ghost investigators, folks who study spiritual warfare or demonic encounters. These communities mostly stay in their own lanes, their own conferences, their own books, their own language for describing very similar things. But the witnesses themselves don't respect these boundaries at all. Bennett has talked to people who had a UFO sighting as a kid and a Sasquatch encounter as an adult, decades apart, who never once thought to connect the two until he asked the right questions. He's talked to ghost investigators who admitted off the record that some of their cases feel a lot more like something out of UFO literature than classic haunting research. And he's talked to people whose religious or angelic experiences, if you just swap out the vocabulary, would sound almost identical to an alien contact story. That idea, that we might be studying one thing from five different doors instead of five completely separate things, is something that researchers like John Green and Grover Krantz started hinting at decades ago. The old-timers in the Sasquatch community have always said that whatever is out there doesn't fit neatly into the boxes we've built for it. Bennett's work seems to be backing that up with hundreds of conversations worth of data. Pattern three is "the liminal place." Liminal just means a threshold, something in between, not fully one thing or the other. And it turns out these experiences cluster overwhelmingly in liminal locations, almost as if location matters as much as timing does. Forests, especially dense old growth ones. Crossroads. Bodies of water, lake shores, river banks, bridges. Ruins and abandoned buildings. Caves. Old battlefields. Isolated stretches of road, especially at night. Cemeteries. Places that already feel like they're holding their breath. You know what almost never comes up? The middle of a busy, well-lit city block at rush hour. These things happen at the edges. The edge of daylight, the edge of town, the edge of the forest, the edge of sleep. Sunset, sunrise. It's like the phenomena, whatever it is, prefers the seams between one thing and another. For anyone who's spent time tracking or researching Sasquatch, this tracks with what we already know. The Pacific Northwest, the Appalachian Mountains, the swamps of the Florida Panhandle, the remote stretches of the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. These are all liminal spaces, places where the boundary between civilization and wilderness gets thin. The old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, places like the Hoh Rainforest or the areas around Mount St. Helens, have been hotspots for sightings for as long as anyone has been keeping records. Even older cultures knew about this. A lot of traditions specifically warn people about crossroads and threshold places, and for good reason. Bennett was careful to say he's not here to tell anyone what's real. He's not a scientist and he's not a debunker. If anything, his role has been closer to an archivist. But after 600 plus conversations, the pattern is too consistent for him to keep ignoring, and honestly, it's too consistent for me to ignore too. If you want to hear the full talk, including the other four patterns he covers, I'd really encourage you to check out the video over on the Somewhere in the Skies channel with Ryan Sprague. It's one of those talks that stays with you long after it's over, and it might just change the way you think about every story you've ever heard.