by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
Chehalis, the county seat of Lewis County in Washington State, is a city that celebrates both UFOs and Bigfoot. For the 75th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s sighting over Mt. Rainier (120 miles east) on June 24, 1947, Arnold’s granddaughter, Shanelle Shanz, was among a group of speakers at the Chehalis City Farm during the annual “Flying Saucer Party,” which includes exhibits at and benefits the Lewis County Historical Museum. An event centered around Bigfoot, “Bigfoot: Real or Hoax?” was held on April 15, 2023, at Mcfiler’s Chehalis Theatre with presentations sponsored by the Historical Museum. Even before people started calling large, cryptic, woods-dwelling, hairy humanoids “Bigfoot,” there was an early report of “Sasquatch” terrorizing residents of the Chehalis Reservation (22 miles northwest of the city) in the March 2, 1934, edition of The Province from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. With such deep roots in UFOs and Bigfoot, it’s fitting that there should be a case in the area involving both.
There is an article (page 6 of the pdf) in the December 16, 1970, Centrailia-Chehalis, Washington, Chronicle by Frances Bingaman headlined “UFO, Huge Footprints Puzzle Vader Family.” Vader is in Lewis County around 20 miles south of Chehalis. According to Bingaman, on Monday, December 7, Mrs. Wallace Bower’s son called out to her saying “Mommy, come look!” and she ran to a window expecting (and dreading) to see “the legendary ‘Bigfoot’ striding across the yard,” but instead, saw a disk-shaped object over some nearby power lines. Bingaman explains that Bowers expected to see Bigfoot because of “huge footprints” (one set described as 15 inches long and 6 inches wide) she’d found in her yard the previous Friday. According to Bowers, the footprints were made in an inch of snow, and the gravel beneath was pushed down an inch and a half.
Bingman reports that Bowers called the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office, and Sheriff William Weister, along with a deputy, “came out and took pictures of the prints.” Weister is said to have told Bowers that the prints were made by no known animal and to have advised her to call if anything unusual occurred. According to Bingaman, a check was made with the sheriff’s office and the incident was confirmed, but deputies suspected the prints were hoaxed.
Bowers is said to have called the sheriff’s office to report the UFO and to have also called a neighbor, Mrs. Clarence Hoven, to ask if she could see it as well. Mrs. Hoven said she could and described seeing what, in her words, “looked like a bright star” as it travelled across the sky.
The object, said to have been seen for about ten minutes starting at 7:15 p.m. by Bowers and her four children, three boys and a girl ages 5-10, is described as having a circumference, in Bower’s words, “about the length of a car,” with a dome in the center, around which, the outer part seemed to revolve. Its color is described as being “deeper orange in the center, with the light diffusing toward the outer edge, but with a definite bright rim.” According to Bowers, it was tipped like an airplane banking, hovered over the power lines, and then moved off until it was out of sight. Its color as it went away from the power lines is described as changing from orange to “a bright clear light” and then changing back to orange as it made a sweep closer before moving off. Bowers is quoted saying, “I thought, ‘Oh, no! It’s going to come back.” According Bingaman, Bowers said her children saw “a gray shape” fall from the object before it went out of sight.
Bowers reported other incidents including a “sharp sound” on the home intercom on the night of the sighting and the night before, the dog acting strangely the night before the footprints showed up, and seeing the curtains move in the boys’ bedroom, which prompted her to take the children out of the house. She said she “definitely saw a shape in the bedroom” as they drove away.” They returned after her husband was home from work and saw that the bedrooms seemed to have been gone through and that nothing was taken. Mrs. Bowers said she felt sure it was a prowler as they’d “had trouble” in the neighborhood and although she didn’t think it was related to the other incidents, she wasn’t sure.
Bowers is quoted at the end of the article saying “Since this happened, I keep running into people who have seen similar things – only they didn’t report them because they thought they’d just be laughed at.”
It seems that this account is the original source for this case, which is among three found under 1970 in the UFOs and Related Entities Catalogue (URECAT) compiled by Patrick Gross. According to Gross, the case was included in The Unidentified (1975) by Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman, Mysterious America (1983) by Loren Coleman, and 1970 Humanoid Reports compiled by Albert Rosales circa 2002. Gross didn’t think much of the case and comments, “Overall, the account gives the impression of imaginations running wild on a series of unrelated events of really low strangeness.”
Closer to the event, a description of the case based on the Chronicle article appears in the May 1972 issue (page 5 of the pdf) of Flying Saucer News. On page 8 of the magazine in the “Recent Incidents of Interest” section written by Mike Lindner, under the title, “Sirrah, Sir, I Say They Be Spaceships, and Spaceships They Be,” the case is described in chronological order with each incident following the day and date. Lindner repeats the details found in the original article and adds his opinion at the end regarding the final quote from Bowers in the Chronicle: “Sometimes I think the last sentence might be a fitting epitaph for the stillborn science of ufology.”
Flying Saucer News comes with its own bit of history in that it was published by James S. Rigberg who ran the Flying Saucer News Bookstore on West 46th Street in Manhattan, which, alas, is now long gone. Some insight into Mr. Rigberg’s civic-mindedness can be gleaned from an editorial by him on page 13 of the magazine (page 7 of the pdf) where he suggests a solution to the crime wave brought on by the “heroin scourge” at the time would be to “use cryonics to place psychotic prisoners (Rigberg includes heroin addicts among them) in suspended animation until we have developed medical and psychological treatments to a point at which they could effectively deal with these unfortunate men.” In one of the more unusual pleas from a flying saucer organization for financial assistance on the back of the front cover, Rigberg promises, “Your contributions will be used toward spreading cryonics information through this magazine, newspaper and magazine ads, and pamphlets.”
The area around Chehalis continues to be a source of both Bigfoot and UFO reports and is a destination for those with an interest in either or both.