Journey into Mystery: Ronny Le Blanc of 'Expedition Bigfoot' seeks Bay State's monsters

“Anyone not want to sleep tonight?” Ronny Le Blanc, best-selling author and star of the hit cable TV series "Expedition Bigfoot," asked an audience at a local library recently.

He was referring to how we might react to hearing a recording known as the Sierra sounds, purported to be a group of Bigfoot creatures — the elusive, large, hairy, humanlike bipeds also known as sasquatch — communicating with each other.

“It's pretty fascinating,” he said. “You hear communication happening between two individuals, and it sounds like language that is sped up, almost like an alien language.” The recording has been studied by various experts, including a retired Navy cryptologic linguist, who vouch for its authenticity as … well, they don’t exactly know what, beyond that it isn’t human or any known animal.

The recording was made in the Pacific Northwest, where there are vast forests known for stories of Bigfoot sightings. So, after hearing the Sierra sounds you’ll sleep just fine, you think, perfectly safe here in Central Massachusetts — until Le Blanc tells you that Bigfoot is also alive and well and living in Leominster State Forest.

Le Blanc, who grew up in Leominster and still lives there, says he has seen many strange things in that forest over the years, some of which he recounts in his book “Monsterland: Encounters with UFOs, Bigfoot, and Orange Orbs.” The book is named after an especially spooky parcel in Leominster that lies near the state forest. Growing up, the neighborhood kids had all heard the stories of the strange things that were said to happen there, and they mostly avoided the area. (Its aura of mystery was severely crimped later, however, after a Walmart was built on the site.)

Le Blanc frequently presents talks about Monsterland and his experiences and research into Bigfoot and other Massachusetts monsters — of which there are apparently many — at area venues, often libraries. Not only is Bigfoot apparently regularly tramping through a patch of woods near you, but also it seems we best be wary of other fantastical Bay State entities ,include the Dover Demon, a small, not-quite-human creature that sent a wave of terror through the town of Dover after a sighting was reported in 1977. There there’s the unnatural denizens of the Bridgewater Triangle in Southeastern Massachusetts, where sightings of everything from poltergeists to UFOs have been reported.

'Beyond the beaten path'

We caught up with Le Blanc for a summertime talk at Whitinsville Social Library, the public library in Northbridge. Librarian Heather Wade said she booked Le Blanc because of a widespread interest in the paranormal, especially cryptids, the catchall term for the many creatures some believe to be out there somewhere in the wild but whose existence remains unvalidated — or downright disputed by the more pragmatic among us, usually with an eye roll and a dismissive wave of the hand.

But the Whitinsville Social Library’s patrons, from the convinced to the merely curious, increasingly have been seeking information about Bigfoot and other mysterious phenomena, especially after the library’s summer reading topic last year, which fittingly was "read beyond the beaten path."

“We’ve seen an uptick in people checking out books related to the topic,” Ward said. “They are asking for books on the Dover Demon and Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster or they’re asking, ‘What kind of cryptids can I learn about and what is their history?’ People have been so interested in exploring those subjects and they seem to feel that there’s something more to our world even if we can’t understand it.”

During his Whitinsville talk, Le Blanc projected a map of North America on a screen showing the locations of reported Bigfoot sightings over the past 90 years. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of dots. “Bigfoot is not a single entity like the Loch Ness monster,” he said. “There are a multitude of them. No one really knows how many there are, but if there have been this many sightings across the country, there's a good amount.”

Le Blanc stressed that the map represents only reported sightings. Most people, either fearing ridicule or assuming their eyes and ears surely must be playing tricks on them, keep any Bigfoot sightings to themselves. They won’t tell you or me — but they readily tell their stories to Le Blanc, relieved to finally have someone with whom they feel they can safely share their spooky secrets. From his role in over three seasons of "Expedition Bigfoot" and appearances on related paranormal-themed cable shows, they know they’ll have a sympathetic ear.

“I can't tell you how many people have told me about their Bigfoot encounters,” Le Blanc said. “None of those are recorded in any database. People keep a lot of these things close to their chest. They don't even tell their loved ones, but a lot of people are having experiences with things that just don't seem to make sense, that defy the laws of physics.”

Suspending disbelief

Le Blanc doesn’t ask you to believe a Bigfoot may have been watching you on your woodland hikes or anything like that. He just asks just that you momentarily suspend your disbelief and remain open to the plethora of information he presents in his talks.

In movie terms, suspension of disbelief is the process in which you nudge your rational mind off to the side for a while and just kind of go through the experience. “If you are looking through the usual rational type of lens when you're talking about Bigfoot, you're going to dismiss certain things that are clues that there's something else going on,” he said.

With that, he launches into a bit of Leominster lore about a man who back in the 1950s bravely (foolishly?) entered Monsterland and sees a terrifying monster on the side of the road. He freaks out and rushes to a local bar, now known as Miranda’s Pub, tells the bartender what he just experienced and asks him to call the Leominster Police Department.

“So, after some convincing, the bartender calls the police,” Le Blanc said, “then the guy says, ‘I’m going back. Tell them where it is, and I’ll meet them there.’ The police show up at this location and they find the guy's vehicle running, the lights are on, the door is open, but he's nowhere to be found. They just assume that he's going to emerge from the woods but at first minutes, then hours, go by and this guy never materializes out of the forest.”

Le Blanc says he continues an as-yet unfruitful search for evidence that might corroborate this oft-told local story.

“But I just find it interesting that there are certain locations that seem to have a lot of this activity,” he said.

As happened in this case, police are sometimes called in when there’s a sighting, and Le Blanc says they also find their experiences hard to process. “I've talked to police officers that have said, ‘Nobody needs to know that I had this experience,’ because they don't want the ridicule. They don't want any of that. So things like that led me to write the book, which in turn led to more people coming forward with their experiences and their stories, and what I found interesting in listening to all this is that Monsterland is like so many other places where people are seeing a lot of weird stuff going on.”

Among other places he mentioned was the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, for decades a reputed hotbed of UFO activity that has piqued the interest of paranormal researchers from all over the world.

The ranch’s name is derived from the so-called "skinwalkers" of Navajo legend who are evil shamans able to appear as animals to deceive their would-be victims. Those who claim Bigfoot encounters usually don’t report that kind of menacing aspect — in fact, the creatures are said to be quite shy, preferring to avoid human contact. But Bigfoot’s ‘footprint,’ if you will, is as large in Native American lore as it is when it allegedly shows up in the mud of a remote forest. Indigenous people have reported seeing Bigfoot-type creatures in almost all parts of North America, Le Blanc said.

“Depending on the tribe, they have different names with some of them kind of menacing like ‘wild men,’ ‘hairy devils,’ ‘evil creature’ or ‘hairy savage,’” he said, as he showed a slide with a long list of the names used by many different tribes. “And then you have other tribes that talk about them as being the forest people and something that's not going to cause harm, but the big question is this: Why would all these tribes have a name for something that doesn't exist?”

Know your sasquatch

So, then, what exactly is Bigfoot anyway? A challenge for researchers is that no one has ever found a body of one that could be studied to answer that question. But, then again, bodies of space aliens are scarce, too, although there is a small but adamant contingent of UFO fans who insist that the U.S. government has found alien casualties from past spaceship crashes and withheld the evidence from us. That seems a stretch, but who is to say that Bigfoot or aliens, if they do exist, are even physical in the same way we are?

“I’ve worked with a few psychic mediums and they all talk about them being interdimensional,” Le Blanc said. “The Native American tribes talk about them having one foot in the physical realm and one foot in the spiritual realm. They believe that these creatures are guardians of the forest or there’s some kind of role that they play when it comes to nature, and people that are more spiritually attuned seemed to encounter more of this activity.”

Glen LeBlanc (no relation to Ronny Le Blanc), who attended the Whitinsville library lecture, has never had any actual strange encounters but likes to keep an open mind. “I’ve always been interested in this type of thing — ghosts, cryptids, Bigfoots,” he said. “I’ve always thought that there’s more out there than what we know. Everything is so vast and there’s so much undiscovered in space and even the ocean that it makes me think we can’t be the only intelligent life in the entire universe.”

Audience member Kent Snow of Millbury also attended because he finds the topic intriguing. The persistent issue of "you couldn’t possibly have seen what you think you saw" reminds him of when his uncle, a state wildlife worker, saw a mountain lion in the wilderness around the Quabbin Reservoir many years ago.

“He saw a mountain lion there back in the 1950s,” Snow said. “They still say there are no mountain lions there, but they could roam down from Canada or upstate New York. We’re not supposed to see them here but they exist, so could Bigfoot exist? That’s a good question. The big thing seems to be they haven’t found a body yet, but they don’t find mountain lion bodies around here either.”

The fourth season of "Expedition Bigfoot" will premiere at 10 p.m. Aug. 30 on the Discovery Channel, and will appear afterward on the new Max platform, a combined streamer that resulted from the recent WarnerBros./Discovery merger.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: 'Expedition Bigfoot' star discusses mysterious monsters nearby