The Long and Winding Road..

hey everyone, I apologize for such a long delay in updating, but I've been trying to get work done for my classes and so I've been a little behind in other areas that I've wanted to work on. In the next few days I plan on both writing a decent blog entry detailing ghost hunting expeditions on Long Island in the 19th century and also to get back to people who wrote me through email, so I ask you to please bear with me. For now though, here are two pieces I wrote a while ago, they are more op-ed pieces than the ones I usually write, but for now they will have to do:

"The Native Americans have many names and legends about the creature that the white man has come to know as Bigfoot or Sasquatch, but probably the most prominent one is that the creature only shows itself when there is big change on the horizon. "The Big Man", as is one name for the animal, is held to be a spirtual being, only showing itself to those who respect nature, and so the recent surge in reports has many of the tribes convinced that big change is coming soon, though they hold that change to be neither good or bad, but simply being what it is.
With the surge in recent years of reports of not only Bigfoot, but other anomalous happenings, it seems that change is indeed coming soon that may very well impact us all. UFO sightings continue to come in from across the globe, leaving no region of the Earth immune from their mysterious purpose and design. Crop Circles increase in complexity and design, culminating in the first ever 3D design recently found in an Oxfordshire field. Sightings of strange animals, encounters with bizarre entities, falls of fish from the sky, ghostly happenings, mystical occurrences...all of these reports are building up to something huge, something that has never been seen before in this planet's history and probably never will be seen again. 2012 is inching closer and closer with every new day, is this what is being built up towards? It is very possible, but not absoulte.
Big change is coming soon, now it is up to us to pay attention and keep our eyes and minds open for the new and possibly grand changes that are on their way."

and

" In 1955 a farmhouse in Kentucky was beseiged for an entire night by small, goblin-like creatures that proved resistant to bullets and would float away into the darkness come the morning.
In 1966 a headless, black winged humanoid flies around a town in West Virginia for an entire year, scaring the locals senseless and coincending with a wave of other strange activity, including UFO activity, poltergeist occurrences, and Men in Black visitations.
In 2003 a report is submitted telling of a bonfire gathering in the Illinois woods that is interrupted by the arrival of about thirty "stick people", who stand completely motionless but still manage to completely terrify the witnesses.
Now all three of these reports sound like something out of a science fiction or horror novel, but, with the possible exception of the last report, they are all true, and they all happened. They are not the only cases however, for plenty of other reports exist of encounters with winged humanoids, lake monsters, hairy bipeds, fairies, otherwordly beings, and strange creatures and entities that by all logical sense should not exist and certainly should not be generating reports in this manner. Yet, assuming the witnesses are telling the truth, and there is no reason to think that most of them aren't, then what could the appearance of these beings possibly mean? One reader at the Fortean Times forums submitted his theory that the purpose of these entities may be "to break us out of the box of our own thinking. And with that achieved, there really is no need to provide proof of their existence, or even very frequent exposure. The task is accomplished - our minds are freed to relate to the universe again with a re-opened sense of wonder and healthy curiosity." I find myself in agreement with this statement, though I wish to add that this doesn't mean I would say to give up searching for evidence of their existence, because this would be a faulty way of thinking, as evidence and proof must always be sought, not just for cryptozoology and its more paranormal branches, but for all fields of Fortean inquiry. Rather, I would say that it is the hunt itself that brings the most enrichment for the hunter, for it forces him/her, as said above, to open ones mind and expand the intectual horizons, adopting a new view of the universe that may have been impossible to formulate before the hunt began. These types of things will never be taken seriously by the mainstream public at large, due to the admitted bizarre nature of the reports, forver remaining on the fringe, but that is inconsequential at best, for there will always be those who walk to the beat of a different drummer, and who strive to bring light to the darkest and most bizarre corners of the world that all else have neglected. Even if there prove, for example, to be no such thing as stick people running around in Illinois, one will still be richer for the experience of looking, and will benefit tremendously, intectually and even spirtually from daring to pursue the parts of reality that have been deemed "impossible", and yet, still are."