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By Hal McKenzie
Part I
The Alternate Realities Conference held June 27-29 at scenic Roan Mountain State Park near Elizabethton, TN, featured an array of fascinating speakers on paranormal subjects ranging from "ghosts, hauntings, UFOs, abductions and ancient earth mysteries," in the words of conference founder and director Stacey Allen McGee. The highlight of the conference was keynote speaker Travis Walton, whose alien abduction experience was made famous in the movie Fire in the Sky.
Participants received an unexpected thrill from the report of a paranormal encounter a few miles away only days before the conference. A local woman called the phone number of the conference, which she had read about in her local Sunday paper, to report that she had seen a Bigfoot staring at her through the window of her trailer. Coincidentally, Sherry Lee Malin, a Bigfoot investigator, was speaking at the conference on her research in the mountains of Tennessee.
McGee, who lives in nearby Unicoi, immediately took time off from conference preparations to investigate the sighting. On June 24, he found what appeared to be a print of the creature in the soft ground, a cast of which was displayed at the conference. It shows two indentations 16-17 inches apart, which could be toes and a heel, or could be knuckles and a knee as the creature kneeled, according to Malin.
While McGee's expertise lies in UFOs, he owned up to his own experience with Bigfoot five years earlier. During solitary hikes through the woods that he loved, he often had the eerie feeling that someone was watching him. One winter, with snow on the ground, he followed a line of huge footprints that led to a still-steaming hole in the snow where a bipedal creature had just urinated.
His most dramatic sighting convinces him that there might be something to the theory that Bigfoot may be extra-dimensional in nature. McGee said he was startled to see a huge, reddish-gray hairy hominid only 15 feet away striding through dry leaves and twigs -- but without making a sound. Thinking at first it was a friend playing a trick, he blurted out, "What are you doing?"
The creature did not react or acknowledge his presence in any way as it disappeared into the trees, behaving as if he wasn't there. He said the encounter was so uncanny and unnerving that he did not go public with it until the woman's report inspired him to disclose it at the conference.
Abductions, negative and positive
Walton admitted to having similar reluctance in facing his encounter with the unknown, despite the world-wide publicity it generated. He still refuses to undergo hypnotic regression to recover his full memory of what happened or compare notes with other abductees.
"It was so hard for me to face my own experience, I'm not about to face the experiences of others," he said. If he was ever abducted again, "I wouldn't tell anybody about it."
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