His family, the Braziers, were restaurant owners who were vacationing in a small Indiana town, far from their Silverton, Oregon home. They became separated. The family had to return home, leaving Bobbie in Indiana.
So, Bobbie traveled, alone, westward to reunite with his family. At first, he was trying to find his bearings, wandering in circles, as people do when they are lost, traveling miles, but only about a couple of hundred of them in the right direction. In late fall, he began to find the journey toward home.
He trekked through Illinois and Iowa. Sometimes, he caught his own dinner. Other times, people fed him and gave him shelter for a night or longer.
Hoboes shared their food with him. During Thanksgiving, a family took him in for several weeks. Then, it was time for him to move on.
He lost a lot of weight during his journey. He swam across rivers, including the Missouri, filled with ice. He crossed the Rocky Mountains.
Finally, in February, he reached home and entered the family restaurant. He went to the second floor living quarters where Frank Brazier was sleeping, jumped on the bed and licked Frank's face. This ended the 3,000 mile six month long journey.
The president of the Oregon Humane Society authenticated this amazing feat. The route was reconstructed and people who saw or took care of Bobbie were interviewed.
Bobbie did not follow Frank's east/west route and appeared to have traveled thousands of miles over land he had never been in, land he had not seen, smelled or, in any way was familiar, yet, he found his way home.
Joseph Banks Rhine, one of the fathers of modern parapsychology, and his daughter, Sara Feather, have studied many similar cases. Rhine called this phenomena psi-trailing. Psi is the abbreviation for psychic phenomena.
In 1952, he investigated a case of psi-trailing that happened in 1952. This was one of the longest journeys of a cat.
Stacy Woods was an Anderson, California school principal. Sugar was the family cat.
The family moved to a farm in Gage, Oklahoma and left the cat with neighbors because the cat was terrified of riding in cars.
About fourteen months later, Stacy and his wife were milking cows in the barn when a cat jumped through an open window and landed on Mrs. Woods' shoulder. The cat looked and acted so much like Sugar that they joked their cat had found them. Then, they realized that the cat really was Sugar. The cat had an unusual bone deformity at his left hip joint.
