Bigfoot sigtings in Fresno County

My friend Tom (whom I'm hoping will be doing an upcoming podcast with me) showed me a website, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, that had a listing of sightings by State, and then a sub listing by County. Under Fresno County there were several sightings up at Florence Lake, which is above Hunnington. What's interesting about the sightings is they occur only in the late summer and early fall. Tom has a theory that perhaps Bigfoot is a migratory animal and that is why sighting of them are rare. They are always on the move. We've been talking about taking an expedition up to Florence at the start of summer and set up some cameras that are set off by an IR sensor (these are the type that hunters use to photograph game on trails) and come back in six weeks to see if we captured anything. When we do I'll definitely post what we find, if anything, on here.

Here's the link to BFRO's lisings for Fresno County.

El Duende in Fresno??

I recieved a text message from my sister earlier asking me about the El Duende. For those who don't know what this is, it's the South American (and most likely Spanish) version of a gnome. Back in 2007 there was a wave of sightings in Argentina. She asked me where she could find the links on YouTube, which I'm posting here.




The Salta, Argentia sighting


I'll be honest, the side stepping thing scares the hell out of me.



This was another one, this time you can see the, well thing, move against the wall.


What does these vidoes have to do with the Fresno area? El Duende is from Spanish folklore, I'm curious if Hispanic folklore has something similar and maybe there has been sighting around the Fresno area?

Unidentified falling object turns out to be weather monitor

From the Fresno Bee

A woman who lives a few miles north of Los Banos called fire officials around 10 a.m. today to report that a box had fallen from the sky.

The woman thought it had fallen from a plane, but fire officials found that it was instead a weather device that measured humidity, temperature and weather changes at different altitudes — from Missouri.

Officials responded to the call and found the weather surveyor, said Jeremi Roesler, a captain with the Merced County Fire Department, which works in conjunction with Cal Fire. The device had a parachute and a balloon that had popped.

The shoebox-sized instrument had “National Weather Service” written on it and, if found, included directions on how to mail it back, Roesler said.

The Walnut Girl

This is an old story I came across years ago. I had posted it on another blog and had completely forgot about it until today. So I thought I'd repost it here for anyone who hasn't read it yet. More than likely it's another urban legend. But it's one of those strange stories that refuses to go away. Perhaps there is some truth to the legend after all.

In the small California town of Armona, there is a legend of a nine year old girl that met a tragic end and her restless ghost haunts the area to this day. Sometime in the nineteenth century the girl and a few of her friends were skinny dipping at a local waterhole outside of town. A group of boys showed up and threatened to come into the water after them. Most of the girls ran away before the boys could get them into a nearby walnut orchard. One little girl was too scared to follow the other girls. Instead she dove underwater to try and trick the boys into thinking she too had followed the other girls. Unfortunately the poor girl drowned.

Legend has it the restless spirit roamed the area for years. The townsfolk named her the Walnut Girl because she was always seen where walnuts were grown. No male has ever seen the ghost, but stories say that girls around the same age as she was have seen glimpses of her.

Why does her restless spirit only haunt walnut orchards? Perhaps she thinks she will be safe if she can get to an orchard she will be safe from the boys she thinks are still chasing her. This is obvious as she will only appear to girls near her age. It appears even in the afterlife she is still looking for safety.

Photo of Thanksgiving UFO

As luck would have it, my sister was able to get a shot of what she and I saw on the night of Nov. 27, 2008. Granted it's not the smoking gun that everyone wants, but it's still interesting. Any camera can't take a decent night shot without a good source of light and unfortunately this photo isn't the exception. But what is interesting is even before I tweaked the contrast and brightness is that you can see an orange light in the sky. So whatever it was, it was bright enough to show up on camera.

This is the unaltered original photo. You can barely see the orange object in the top third of the picture.









This is after I enhanced the photo. The object is much easier to see.






I know these aren't the best photos, but it's still something. There is one more photo that my sister took, though it's extremely dark but I'm going to see what I can do with it. I'm hoping someone else saw the same thing and can help elaborate what it was we saw.

Clovis Thanksgiving UFO sighting

I was inside a family member’s house when my sister came to get me, saying there was a strange light in the sky. We went back outside and noticed a strange red/orange light drifting in the sky in an upward motion traveling east to southwest. The object looked like it was on fire, and my first thought was maybe someone had their fireplace going and it was flaming debris, but the motion of the object was floating upward and there was no wind to carry anything. That and given the distance of the object to us (at arm's length it was about 1/4" diameter), the object was too large to be debris. I ruled out a flare as it wasn’t falling. It almost looked like it was something suspended from a balloon, but it was traveling to fast and it was traveling too fast to be a balloon. If it was a balloon, then it would have been visible or at least a reflection of the light would have been on the balloon.

I rushed to my car to grab my digital camera and my sister took hers out of her purse. I snapped a picture, but it was too dark so I deleted it. I then decided to change the settings on my camera in hope of maybe getting better luck. As soon as I looked back up, the object was gone. Total time of occurrence was five minutes.

Fresno thief stabs himself with screwdriver

From the Fresno Bee



A man who robbed an Alberto's restaurant armed with a screwdriver early this morning died when his get-away bike crashed and he accidentally stabbed himself with the hold-up weapon, Fresno police reported.

The screwdriver severed an artery in his thigh, and he was found in his own blood.

He was taken to Community Regional Medical Center at 3:45 a.m., and pronounced dead there. His name and identity were still unknown this afternoon.

Police spokesman Jeff Cardinale said the man held up the restaurant on the east side of Cedar Avenue, near Dakota Avenue, and demanded money.

He left with an undisclosed amount, but was found bleeding heavily by his crashed bicycle near Cedar and Farrin avenues. Officers concluded that his screwdriver had apparently stabbed him in a thigh during his fall.

The Fresno County Coroner's Office had not been given the case by this afternoon, and had no identity.

At the restaurant, workers said today that they knew no particulars about the robbery or how much was stolen because it happened hours before they arrived.

This is karma at it's finest. But the question remains. Was it a flathead or philips screwdriver?

Fresno's own UFO encounter

With the recent news that Great Britain's National Archives is releasing over 1500 documents regarding UFO sightings over Britain, I thought I would see if I could find anything of interest in regards to Fresno. First I went to the National UFO reporting center, but there were just vague accounts of people seeing bright lights in the sky, etc. Then a bit more digging I found this story, originally found here. The account is as follows:

Location of Sighting: Near Fresno Airport, Fresno, CA.
Number of witnesses: 2
Number of objects: 1
Shape of objects: Round or Diamond Shaped.

Full Description of event/sighting: Hi Brian, my husband and I sent you our sighting report of 12 white orbs that we saw and photographed over Los Banos, CA on August 28, 2005, which you posted. You have asked for older reports so I am attaching a sighting my girlfriend and I had in 1969 which involved two jets chasing after a UFO spotted near the Fresno, CA Airport.

Clovis CA, June, 1969 It was about 10:00 P.M. on a warm clear evening mid - June of 1969. I had just graduated from High School and my best friend and I were sitting outside my home enjoying the clear dark sky and brilliantly shining stars. On a whim, we decided that we wanted to go to a late-night market in Fresno, about five miles away and buy some magazines to read. We got into my car and began to drive south to a shopping center near the Fresno Airport.

Along the way we decided to take a short cut on a small road adjacent to the airport which was flanked by an open field. We turned right onto the small two-lane road and were now driving along side the field and which was several hundred feet away from the fenced area near the end of the airport runway, which we could see clearly, including buildings and planes of the local Air National Guard. There were no street lights and the road was dark with no traffic, except for us. As we drove by we could see that most of the airport activities had stopped for the evening, which was normal, as no aircraft landed or took off from there at that time of night. 'We continued down the road talking, when I noticed my friend leaning forward in the passenger seat staring up at something in the sky. She motioned to me to look out my driver's side window saying "what is that?"

I looked out the window and saw an intense white strobing light hovering above apparently keeping pace with my car. I slowed down and it continued to follow at the same pace. As our windows were down, we most certainly would have heard an engine, was it a plane, but it made no noise at all. Not knowing what we were seeing, I pulled over, stopped the car and we both got out to take a better look. We were mesmerized by the intense white light of the object which now appeared diamond shaped and strobing quickly as it hovered above us. It was hard to estimate its altitude and size, but we guessed at arms length it would have been the size of a basketball. By now two other cars had come up behind us and had pulled off the road to look as well. Within moments the object started to move away from us, and began to pick up speed. All of a sudden we heard the roar of jet engines and looked up to see two military jets lifting off the runway in hot pursuit of this object.

The jets passed directly over us - so close that we could see the landing gear retract. We watched as the jets tried to close on the object. We were in a flat area of land and we could clearly see the object and jets streaking away from us heading due west. As the jets began to close on the object the object slowed and appeared to hover over the jets as if teasing them, and then it made an incredible 90 degree turn with several jerking, zigzag movements and shot off at tremendous speed to the South directly over downtown Fresno. The jets were left in its wake. We immediately jumped back into the car and decided to head home to tell our families what we had just witnessed.

It was about 10:45 PM when we reached the main intersection of town where we were stopped waiting the signal light to change. Suddenly all of the signal lights, and street lights started flashing on and off, including the caution lights at the train tracks which were directly in front of us beyond the intersection. A large bolt of electricity shot down a power line near the road, arcing and snapping till it got to the end and dissipated. We sat there watching these lights flashing on and off around us for about 3 - 4 minutes and then they all stopped and the signal turned green. We looked at each other and I floored it through the intersection and didn't let off the gas till we got to my friends home only a few blocks away.

When we pulled up to her house, some of the neighbors were all outside talking excitedly about what had just happened with the lights in the neighborhood. Of course they asked us if we saw it and we told them that we had witnessed that - and more. Wanting to confirm what we had seen earlier, we ran inside the house to phone the airport. Incredibly, the call was answered by a man in the control tower. I told him we had observed something in the sky close to the airport less than an hour ago and asked him if two National Guard jets had taken off to check it out. I was told point-blank that no planes had taken off at all that night. I asked him again, if he was sure, and he told me once again that no planes had taken off.

We knew we weren't going to get any further with him and we also knew he had to be lying as we saw the jets with our own eyes and had close enough to read the numbers on the planes. We told our families about what we had seen and received polite, yet insincere statements like "wow that must have been something". But we knew they didn't believe us. There was nothing in the local news the next day about a strange object in the sky or equally strange power surge and nothing was ever said about it again - except between my friend and me. We've recounted that night many times over the years, even up to this day. We know what we saw; we know what happened.

Calling the airport was fruitless, this event happened almost forty years ago. And if the National Guard denied anything then, why would the admit to anything now? Still it's an interesting story and makes me wonder how many times the National Guard jets have been scrambled. I had a friend who lived in the flight path of FYI and would sometimes see F-16's taking off at night. It could have been a training mission most likely. But being the only Air Guard base between SF and LA, they could have been scrambled for something else. Hopefully one day our government will divulge what these mysterious lights truely are.