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:
UFOs and Bigfoot; Evidence of an Inter-Dimensional Connection

John Keel, the prominent ufologist and paranormal researcher, famous for the Mothman Prophecies, once proposed the idea that there are “window areas” throughout the world, connecting our reality with parallel dimensions. These areas, Keel imagined, may help elucidate some unexplained reports of entities that are too fleeting or confusing to later detail or prove. With the increasing plausibility of the multiverse theory and infinite neighboring universes, maybe we should be asking ourselves; are UFOs and Bigfoot interdimensional travelers, and could there be a connection between the two?
Interdimensional Bigfoot Theories
For hundreds of years, people worldwide have reported encounters with monsters, fairies, demons, and cryptids. To this day those experiences persist, while many of these same entities have also been encountered through the use of psychedelics.
Now, it would be easy to say these are simply archetypal figures; beings our collective consciousness conjures in our minds with anthropomorphic features based on fears or subliminal functions of our psyche. Or we could entertain the ostensibly bizarre possibility that these are entities from another dimension operating on higher realms of existence.
Keel referred to these entities as ultra-terrestrials; beings capable of crossing dimensions at will, often acting as “cosmic pranksters.” Daniel Pinchbeck says he experienced prankster entities from a psychedelic realm cross into the real world after encountering them during and in the subsequent weeks following a psychedelic trip.
When it comes to Bigfoot, Sasquatch, the Yeti, or whatever you want to call them, there is often a playfulness and/or spookiness described in their actions. Tree knocking or eerie screams alert us to their presence until we get close enough where they might offer a glimpse, before vanishing seemingly into thin air.
Their appearance could be considered another form of prank, embodying a primitive, ape-like creature that exudes a noxious odor. Yet, they’re able to evade contact with us despite thousands of reported sightings over hundreds of years. Is Sasquatch cosmically trolling us?
An intriguing account tying UFO’s and Bigfoot together comes from an 1888 meeting between cattle ranchers and a group of Native Americans in Northern California. The natives described three “crazy bears” that descended from the sky in a small moon, leaving them in the woods before taking off.
In another instance, in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1973, a woman named Reafa Heitfield and her daughter were awakened in the middle of the night to a beam of light extending down from a bulbous umbrella shape in the sky. Tracking the light to where it landed in the nearby woods, the two noticed a grayish, simian creature wandering toward the beam. Before they knew it, both the ape and the craft disappeared.
Though these stories may be apocryphal in nature, it’s reported that at least 20 percent of Bigfoot sightings coincide with UFO events.
Jack Cary, a cryptozoologist who has studied Bigfoot for decades, says he believes it’s alternatively plausible that Bigfoot is being abducted by UFOs in much the same way humans are, to study its DNA and physical attributes.