Dr. Lynne Kitei snapped this photo of three glowing orbs above Phoenix in 2001, which she believes are UFOs.

Searching for the Mogollon Monster
Mitchell Waite and his wife, Susan Farnsworth, have long been fascinated by reports of a humanoid creature covered in fur – usually described as brown or orange-brown in hue – and standing at least 8-and-a-half feet tall, prowling the wilds of the Mogollon Rim about 100 miles northeast of Phoenix. That creature, of course, is the Mogollon Monster, and Waite and Farnsworth not only believe in it, they believe there are several of these beasts lurking around the Valley’s edges waiting to be discovered.

Farnsworth has written a book about the creature, titled simply The Mogollon Monster, and both she and Waite run the Website
mogollonmonster.com as part of their Southwest Publications publishing company.

Early last year, Waite and Farnsworth decided it was time to not only write about the beasts but to actively search for them, too. So the pair traveled to the Rose Creek Campground near the Mogollon Rim Mountains on Memorial Day weekend and set up camp.

The day started out pretty boring, Waite says. The pair explored but found little evidence of anything unusual. They cooked, set up their campground and cleaned their pots and pans. All remained quiet until it was time to sleep that first night. Close to 2:30 in the morning, Farnsworth awoke to the nearly overpowering stench of decomposing fish. When she opened her eyes, she says the side of her tent was hovering over her face, just two inches from her nose.

According to Farnsworth, and her report on mogollonmonster.com, something was pushing her side of the tent down on top of her from the outside.

Farnsworth, lying as still as she could, stretched to reach her pistol. As she wrapped her fingers around it, the tent suddenly flipped back into its dome position. Farnsworth screamed.

This awoke Waite, who leapt into action, grabbing his own pistol and hitting the sides of the tent with his pillow to scare off whatever lurked outside the couple’s sleeping area. After things quieted down, Waite ran outside with his pistol and a lantern. He found nothing.

The biggest disappointment to Farnsworth? She had decided against setting up her motion detectors, game cameras and voice-activated tape recorder before she retired for the evening. When Waite and Farnsworth returned the next morning, after fleeing the spot and staying overnight in nearby Roosevelt, they eventually found what they say was a 19-inch footprint about 30 feet from where their tent stood. They made a plaster cast of the footprint, which can be seen online at the couple’s Website.

That experience was enough to convince both Farnsworth and Waite to continue their search for the creature.

Waite said his perseverance has been rewarded. He’s certain he’s seen the Mogollon Monster two times since he began actively searching for the beast in the late spring of 2008. Once, he says, he was driving down the road close to his campsite near Young – Waite won’t divulge the exact location – when he glimpsed a reddish-brown creature looking back at him from behind some rocks.

“The expression on its face was, ‘Oh, crap. I’ve been seen,’” Waite says. “I slammed on the brakes, but it was already gone. It had traveled about 30 yards in the thicket before it disappeared. It was quick and agile.”

The second time Waite encountered the creature, he was back at his camp. This time, it was late in the evening when he heard noises in the darkness. He flipped on his night-vision goggles and peered into the dark. There, he says, another of the creatures stared back at him. Waite remembers the creature’s quizzical expression just before it slipped back into the night: “It was like it was wondering, ‘How can you see me?’”

Like other local residents searching for the monster, Waite says he has no plans to harm or capture it. He just wants to prove that it’s out there.

“I’m sure that this creature is not aggressive. If it was, I probably wouldn’t be here now talking to you,” Waite says. “I was close enough to it that I could smell it, could hear it moving in the bushes. It was pitch black at night. It probably has much better nocturnal vision than we do. If it was aggressive or a meat eater, I would have been in trouble at the time.”

Looking to the Skies
Thousands of people in the Phoenix area saw something in the night sky on March 13, 1997. Witnesses reported seeing a triangular series of lights in a “V” formation traveling across the city.

The incident, now known as the Phoenix Lights, is still a point of contention among skeptics and believers. The believers, of course, say the Phoenix Lights are evidence of extraterrestrial life, visitors from some unknown spot in the universe racing over our planet. The skeptics say the lights were probably airplanes or flares.

Researcher and author Dr. Lynne Kitei, who has written a book on the event called The Phoenix Lights, has long believed that Earth is visited by beings from outer space. She has believed this since 1995 when she and her husband, on the eve of Kitei’s birthday, saw three orbs floating in the sky from their bedroom window. The orbs, which floated about 50 to 75 feet above the ground, measured from 3 to 6 feet across. They each had what Kitei says was a solid amber color.

Once the top orb began fading, Kitei says, she ran for her camera. By the time she had made it back to the balcony outside her bedroom, only two orbs remained. Kitei snapped her photos. She then began her search, which continues today, for what the orbs were and why they had come to Earth.

“I wondered for two years what this was,” Kitei says. “I didn’t know who to show it to. No one
was interested in the topic. This was still two years before the mass sighting.”

Kitei says she strove to find any explanation other than alien visitors for what she saw. That became harder as time went on, she says. And after the Phoenix Lights sighting, when thousands of witnesses claimed to have seen the same type of lights, it became impossible for Kitei to believe anything but the alien theory.

“I have always been a healthy skeptic about these things,” she says. “I called around the next morning, after my original sighting, and tried to find out what these things were. I always figured there must have been a logical explanation. But now I understand that we do have to study this. We need to get this topic out there.”

Kitei’s beliefs were boosted when former Arizona governor Fife Symington III admitted two years ago that he, too, had witnessed something in the skies that evening. He hadn’t before gone public with the information.

In fact, Symington initially disappointed believers such as Kitei. Shortly after the mass sighting, he held a press conference, saying that the government had discovered who was responsible for the lights. During the conference, he introduced an aide dressed in an alien costume. Believers of the Phoenix Lights were not amused. (To see video of the 1997 press conference, visit phoenixmag.com.)

Today, Kitei has joined forces with Terri Mansfield and Dr. Rebecca Hardcastle to form the Phoenix Lights 3. Hardcastle, a hypnotherapist, says that March night more than a decade ago turned a lot of Phoenix-area residents into believers.

To Hardcastle, this is healthy. There is much in the world that can’t be explained by science, she says. The sooner people accept this, she adds, the more open they can be to strange and wondrous events.

“It’s fine when you’re a child to have all these beliefs and experiences. But when you get to 12 or 13 or so, everyone tells you that these beliefs no longer fit in with the world,” Hardcastle says. “Then you start backing off. I think it’s important to see the paranormal as a garden of experiences that we are all able to go through.”

Hardcastle routinely works with patients who have the uncanny feeling that they are missing time, she says. Perhaps these people have had some contact with extraterrestrial beings, she says.

“A lot of people have missing time. I’ll try to help them figure out what happened to them,” Hardcastle says. “I’ll try to help them remember what messages they may have received during this missing time.”

Kitei says that it’s important for humans to keep searching for unexplained life. The alien beings that flew over Arizona in 1997 were not hostile, she says, citing the fact that no one reported an abduction in connection with the event.

Kitei believes instead that aliens can help humans advance.

“We have to study this. We have to move forward in our evolution,” she says. “There is so much information out there if we look for it. The evidence may be pointing to visitors from beyond.”

Hearn may not be looking at the skies, but he certainly agrees that there are things in this world that have yet to be discovered. To Hearn, the Mogollon Monster is incorrectly named; it’s not a “monster.” It’s just undiscovered, a new species waiting to be acknowledged, he says.

Hearn hopes that the search expeditions he helps organize – 10 or 12 people usually, who travel regularly to central Arizona’s Sierra Ancha Mountain Wilderness – will one day prove the existence of the Mogollon Monster, or Bigfoot, or Sasquatch.

“I remember another time I saw one of these,” Hearn says. “It was so startled when it saw me out in the woods. It was so surreal. I saw the back of its head – it had orange-brown hair – and its arms pumping and pumping as it ran away from me. The trees just opened up as it went through the woods. Then it just disappeared. I stood there for 10 or 15 seconds and it all just went quiet. I remember standing there dumbfounded. It was amazing.”