Boy Lost in Woods for 2 Days Tells Mom He Hung Out With a Bear
A boy who went missing in the woods for two days told his family he “hung out with a bear” before he was discovered by rescuers. The boy’s aunt made the claim in a Facebook group, describing his experience as miraculous, and the bear a divine gift.
Three-year-old Casey Hathaway went missing last week when he wandered off while playing in his grandmother’s backyard. Rescuers found him a few days later tangled up in a patch of thorns. He was found crying out for his mother less than a mile from where he went missing.
Questions about whether the bear was imaginary or real are being debated, but Hathaway’s mother believed her son enough to include it in the police report. According to sources, the county Sheriff thought the claim was cute, but probably not real — that didn’t stop his office from posting a picture of the boy next to a picture of a bear on its Facebook page.
“He made a comment about having a friend while he was in the woods — his friend was a bear,” Maj. David McFadyen of the Craven County Sheriff’s Office told CNN.
According to reports, the boy survived two nights in 20 degree weather with heavy winds and pouring rain, making it more believable he received protection of some sort. Psychologists plan to conduct further interviews with Hathaway, but are giving him time to recover from the traumatic experience.
Though the boy’s story may be hard to believe, it’s almost impossible to disprove. And there are certainly plenty of stories of animals coming to the rescue of humans in dire situations.
Online, people in the more conspiracy-minded forums proposed the possibility that Hathaway’s mysterious savior may have been Bigfoot or the strange Missing 411 phenomenon researched and written about by David Paulides.
Paulides has devoted his career to researching hundreds of strange disappearances throughout the U.S. after a park ranger told him thousands of odd and unexplained disappearances have occurred in the National Park Service’s history. Could this have been one such case that fortunately turned out to have a happy ending?
There are others who have speculated that the bear Hathaway referred to may have been a benevolent spirit that helped him find shelter and keep him safe during his harrowing time alone.
Until the boy is a little older, we may never know whether he was saved by his guardian angel or a real life Baloo. In either case, the story is pretty miraculous.
For more on David Paulides’ Missing 411 documentation of strange National Park disappearances check out this episode of Beyond Belief:
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Countless Bigfoot Sightings in Colorado Tracked at Sasquatch Outpost
If you perform a Google search for the term “Bigfoot” or “Sasquatch,” on any given day it’s likely you’ll find at least a few articles published within the past week. Sasquatch has become so ingrained in our culture, arguably more than any other cryptid, to the point that if it somehow isn’t real, we’ve practically willed it into existence.
Beyond its cultural acceptance, there’s actually overwhelming evidence of the reality of such a creature that spans centuries of sightings and lore throughout myriad cultures. Jim Meyers, a professional Sasquatch seeker and owner of the Sasquatch Outpost in Bailey, CO, cites the fact that nearly every Native American tribe has its own epithet for Sasquatch.
The Navajo call it “Ye’ Iitsoh,” meaning “Big God”; the Cherokee call it “Ketleh-Kudleh,” meaning “Hairy Savage”; and the Lakota-Sioux call it “Chiye-Tanka” meaning “Big Elder Brotha.”
Often, Native Americans refer to Sasquatch as another tribe or another people, rather than a species of ape or animal, Meyers says. And this near-universal acceptance of such a creature by indigenous peoples who have inhabited remote areas of the US, centuries before its modern development, is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the existence of Sasquatch in his opinion.
Though Sasquatch has assimilated into our modern mythological zeitgeist, it can be found in a number of cultural traditions across the world—on nearly every continent, in fact.
Known as the Yeti, Yeren, Yowie, or the pejorative Abominable Snowman, tales of a large, hairy bipedal creature can be found in Australia, Asia, Europe, and both Americas. Interestingly though, Meyers says he’s not familiar with any instances of Sasquatch sightings in Africa, which is also where he lived much of his life.
Meyers grew up in Africa, as his parents were missionaries—a career path he would follow in his adulthood. Having moved to Kenya at age 11, he went to boarding school before attending college in the US. Feeling a desire to continue his parents’ work, Myers would spend another 20 years working as a missionary in Senegal, followed by a decade spent in France. Eventually, he returned to the states and settled in Bailey.
While he was always fascinated with Bigfoot, ever since he saw “The Legend of Boggy Creek” as a kid, Meyers said it wasn’t until a local businesswoman in Bailey recounted a very credible sighting she experienced in the area. Shortly thereafter, Animal Planet recorded an episode of Finding Bigfoot in Bailey, adding to Meyers’ interest, and the rest was history…
Searching for a new avenue of business to pursue, and hearing multitudes of stories and eyewitness sightings in the area, Meyers decided to open a Sasquatch museum in his small Colorado township in 2014. It’s now become a tourist hotspot with over 36,000 visits.
At the Sasquatch Outpost, Meyers has curated his ongoing research into the Sasquatch Encounter Museum where one finds recordings of the creature’s vocalizations, examples of the ways in which it bends, and snaps tree branches, and plaster casts of its footprints.
One of those casts happens to be from the most famous and credible Bigfoot sighting of all time: the Patterson-Gimlin film from 1967. While some skeptics claim the clip has been debunked and a deathbed confession of a hoax was made, Meyers is quick to correct that as a fallacy, pointing out that he’s talked with Patterson’s wife who said he maintained the veracity of the film up until his death.
And if that weren’t enough, Meyers has also kept a map of various levels of Sasquatch sightings and interactions people have reported experiencing throughout Colorado at the Outpost. On the map are various colored pins based on the type of encounter experienced: red denotes a visual sighting; yellow indicates tree breaks and bends; green indicates a vocalization or tree knocking; blue identifies a rock or item thrown at someone.
If you’ve had a Bigfoot encounter in Colorado, you may be able to contribute to this growing map of over 300 encounters. In the meantime, check out Meyers in the latest episode of Beyond Belief.
