An excursion into the California wilderness in 1971 brought Ron Morehead into contact with an enigma that has haunted him for nearly five decades since, enough that he’s continued to speak about it to this day, including a Saturday afternoon at the Olympic Trading Post in Chimacum March 2.

Debi Goetz, owner of the Olympic Trading Post, agreed to host Morehead for a talk, in which he could promote his books on Bigfoot and his audio recordings of his alleged encounters with the creature.

Zach Royer, who owns “Zach of All Trades” in Port Hadlock and a certified field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network, introduced Goetz and Morehead.

“We all kind of travel in the same circles,” Royer said with a laugh.

Such circles were outside of Morehead’s sphere before a family friend returned from a trip to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in 1971, with claims that his band of hunters had encountered an animal very different from the prey they’d had in mind.

Morehead went into the high Sierra with his friend, not just once, but enough times to record sounds and spot huge tracks, and their excursions generated enough curiosity for some university scientists to tag along.

“They determined many of the sounds these creatures made outside of the human range,” Morehead said. “Recent analysis of those recording has shown they’re capable, in one tone, of five octaves, which no human can do. We’re only capable of three octaves in one tone.”

Morehead also cited a crypto-linguist who concluded that the supposed Sasquatch sounds recorded in the Sierras constituted a language, with words being combined to form “sapient sentences.”

“No other animal has that ability,” Morehead said. “It’s exciting, because you don’t know what they are. One guy who went with us never went back, because he couldn’t put what he’d encountered into the structure of his religion.”

The mystery of “how these beings do what they do” inspired Morehead to explore further, not just through scientific methods favored by fellow Bigfoot hunter and California journalist Alan Berry, but also by opening himself to spiritual possibilities.

“Alan would always say, ‘Stay with science,’” Morehead said.  “But these creatures are not just stealthy. Sighting are often accompanied by lights or loud humming sounds.”

Morehead’s increasingly esoteric theories on what this could mean led him to follow up his 2012 book, “Voices in the Wilderness,” with “The Quantum Bigfoot” in 2017.

“When people told me before that they saw these creatures disappear, I used to write it off as misinterpretation,” Morehead said. “But now, I believe those are examples of how they’ve gone into other dimensions, outside our perceptions.”

Morehead theorizes that Sasquatch could be capable of changing its vibrational frequency, and his travels around the world, to sites as far removed as Russia and South America, have led him to consider that Sasquatch might be the source of not only Native American legends, but other cultures’ myths as well.

“Even in the Bible, you see mentions of the Nephilim, giants who were created by fallen angels, or aliens,” Morehead said. “You can’t actively seek them out. Your best bet is to go where they’ve been seen, and if they want to interact with you, it’ll be on their terms and their time.”

Morehead suspects that Native American cultures had more successful contacts with Sasquatch because they were more in tune with nature, whereas he admitted that Western European cultures can be prone to “analyzing things too much,” even as he described his approach as “quantum science,” as opposed to “classical science.”

“This can get a bit out there for some people,” Morehead said with a laugh. “Don’t walk out on me.”

Jim Wurden, like Morehead, now lives in Sequim, but when Wurden still lived in Port Angeles, he heard something he couldn’t explain on Old Mill Road.

“Everything got real quiet, and all of a sudden, I heard something running and crashing through the brush,” Wurden said. “It sounded like it was bigger than a car.”

Morehead confirmed that Bigfoot can be “very strong and very fast.”

Morehead’s partner for the past five years, Keri Campbell, had a sighting of her own when visiting friends, as she was looking out onto their landscape.

“I saw something strange,” Campbell said. “It was this shimmery, pixelated image. We tend to try and talk ourselves out of believing what we’ve seen, when it’s not what expect, so I told myself, ‘I need to see it move in order to believe it.’ And with that, it turned, side to side, and I felt this overwhelming sense of gratitude.”

When Campbell spoke to her friends about what she’d seen, “They went white, because they’d seen it twice at that same spot.”

Morehead’s belief that encountering Bigfoot requires adjusting one’s attitude has inspired him to increase the positivity with which he meets the world.

Morehead can be found online at ronmorehead.com.