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Bigfoot makes guest appearance at Juneau’s first-ever UFO town hall
Extraterrestrial encounters share space with Sasquatch sightings on themed cruise that exchanges experiences with alien-watching allies in Alaska’s capital
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
Tamara Roberts told the audience at Juneau’s first-ever UFO Town Hall that "I first knew that I believed in aliens when I watched ‘E.T.’ when I was 8 years old." But she "never had that slap-your-mama kind of thing" until seeing strange lights above Thunder Mountain while driving home in the wee morning hours in September of 2021.
"I had lived at the base of this mountain for a very long time and this light was just totally out of place," said Roberts, a Juneau resident for 15 years. She said she stopped at Melvin Park to film it and then again at home for more than an hour before going to bed — and after seeing the light reappear two nights later, she’s been watching the skies ever since.
"Needless to say I'm a believer, and I think that if people were to put their phones down and stop looking down and look up once in a while you would see that they're here all the time," she said. "Thunder Mountain is my hot spot and if you ever get out there on a clear night I would definitely look up for change."
Narratives about close encounters of more than just the third kind, inexplicable sightings and a healthy dose of skepticism about media reporting of truths out there were shared among more than 100 people attending Sunday’s gathering at Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall. Most were among an estimated 400 cruise passengers taking part in a voyage that, for the first time, added a UFO itinerary to a third annual Alaska Bigfoot Cruise.
"There was such huge crossover of the people that love both of them, so it worked out really well," said Marty Pippin, a partner with Gather Up Events, a Tennessee company that organizes such events in Alaska and elsewhere.
Roberts got a same-day invite to share her stories and images after Pippin learned about her “encounter” from a person at the Marie Drake Planetarium. She told the audience that in addition to the strange encounters at Thunder Mountain, she experienced something else at the Mendenhall Glacier in October 2024 during an unusually busy night of auroral activity.
"This was something I could not explain, and the color coming off of it had so much color that the light would refract on top of the snow and just bounce off," she said.
The surrealism increased when she departed the glacier visitor center parking lot in her two-year-old car.
"It starts to stall, and I'm like, ‘Uh-uh, not today,’ you know," she said. "And I just gassed it and then my car started going again — and my headlights go out completely. They flickered a couple of times and they just went out. And I got goosebumps now just telling you about it."
Her listeners were mostly visitors making a port stop during the inaugural "Missing 411 Alaska Cruise" aboard Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Seas (which has a maximum capacity of 4,000 passengers, so most aboard weren’t part of the Missing 411 cruise or the Bigfoot cruise group). The seven-day roundtrip departing Seattle on Sept. 11 is also making port stops in Sitka, Skagway and Victoria, British Columbia, but the only other event on shore is a Bigfoot town hall scheduled Thursday in Victoria.
Among the visitors were Eva and Kevin Kusnier, a couple from Boise, Idaho, taking their first cruise after hearing about the joint-themed journey while at the PhenomeCon Conference in Utah last year.
"We always wanted to go to Alaska, so it was kind of a two-birds-with-one-stone kind of a thing," Kevin Kusnier said.
The first part of the town hall featured presentations and a question-and-answer session with three prominent paranormal personas taking part in themed events throughout the cruise. The final hour of the three-hour event focused on personal tales from audience members, which the Kusniers stayed later for than some of their fellow passengers.
"That's what we came for was to hear the stories and all that stuff," Kevin Kusnier said.
"It’s very interesting always to hear stories of other people, what they experienced, what they saw," Eva Kusnier agreed.
The couple, when the town hall was over, also shared their home security camera video of a mysterious light intrusion in their backyard with Pippin and a couple of others lingering behind.
The featured presenters were Joe Hauser (described in a town hall promotion as "a prominent investigator specializing in high-strangeness and Alaskan anomalies"), Chris Bledsoe ("a historic UFO experiencer and subject of the best-selling book ‘UFO of God’"), and David Paulides ("the former law enforcement officer and investigative journalist behind the famous ‘Missing 411’ series").
Paulides’ presentation was of timely interest to many attendees both because of the location and same-day release of his "Missing 411 Alaska," the latest book in his series that examines real-life cases of mysterious disappearances across North America. He noted Alaska has a high frequency of planes mysteriously disappearing without wreckage or mayday calls, and many missing person cases contain only a small portion of known circumstances.
"In there, there's a story about, if you don't know, a Japan Airlines flight from Reykjavik to Alaska with a huge UFO that followed it," he said, adding, "there's also a story in there about a plane that disappeared with a UFO flying around it. There is a connection here, folks."
Bledsoe recounted what he calls a life-altering 2007 encounter in North Carolina when, broke and suffering from Crohn's disease, he was fishing at a river with his son and "three other guys" when he uttered a cry to God for help.
"These balls of fire came out of the sky — three of them, glowing red, fire going around them, 40-50 feet across, big as two-story houses," he said. "And four hours later they brought me back; my Crohn's disease was gone permanently."
Bledsoe said shortly after he reported the incident to authorities that officials with NASA and the CIA showed up at his house. And in the years since his interactions with the government and those strange visitors have continued.
"Until this very day I have been able to take as many as 1,000 people to 1,300 people — that was the biggest crowd this year — outside and call on them and here they come," he said of the mysterious visitors.
Questions from the audience, while often focusing on either UFOs or the existence of Bigfoot, did at times include both.
"Many of the orbs that have been videoed and photographed, inside the orbs we see faces — angel faces, cat faces, human faces, non-human faces — that is not in dispute in question," one woman asked. "My question is, what do each of you feel is the connection between an orb appearing and then a Sasquatch being sighted?"
Hauser replied, "I think in some cases there may be no connection because there's lots of orbs around," but years ago there was a notable encounter during an experiment when "we wanted to raise the energy of the vortex, create a tipping point or an event horizon" to open a portal.
"We suspected there were three portals on the property based on what we've seen and experienced, and so we brought this machine in," he said. "We raised the energy of the field from about 800, 900 milligauss up to 49,650 milligauss. An MRI is like 52,000 to 54,000 milligauss. The whole place was buzzing. We ran it for about 40 minutes."
Very shortly thereafter, "we asked the Bigfoot to show themselves to us if they came through the portal and they did," Hauser added. "The first thing that came through was an orb, and that orb took off and flew over to this side of the building. A few seconds later a Bigfoot came across and he morphed up into a light beam (that) started floating around the house."
"Then another Bigfoot came over from this side — you could see the sagittal crest; he has no neck, shoulders are wide. He turned back, looked right at the camera and then he morphed up in a light beam too. We don't have them turning back into orbs, but we have suspected for years that they travel in the form of an orb."
Praise for the courage of the three featured presenters was expressed by Joel Rutkowski, a Chapel Hill, North Carolina resident, who said "the mainstream media and legacy media doesn't report any of this stuff."
"The government, who works for the people, doesn't report any of this stuff," he said. "However, you guys have access to intel and people that we don't, right? And if you think about all these billionaires and millionaires, they're building bunkers, right? So what do they know and what do you all know that we don't know that we should be prepared for, or start thinking about, or should we run for the hills?"
Bledsoe said, among other things, he wouldn’t pay much attention to what the billionaires are doing. Also, he said, don’t get distracted by what the government is doing such as sending the military to fight in wars and talking about armageddon.
"If we don't buy into it, we don't listen to them, and we don't give them power, and we don't watch the news and tell them to all take a hike," he said. "How many believe in the news anymore? Nobody. So I'd say let's live our life, be happy, go out every day and do your thing, and hunt Bigfoot and have fun, and don't worry about all that stuff."
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
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