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Speaker 1: Nor where you stand with on X Okay, we're here
Speaker 1: with Laura Krantz. Can I call you a bigfoot expert?
Speaker 1: You don't like that? I'm not, You're not, But I
Speaker 1: mean I just wanted to say it. Yeah, you can
Speaker 1: say it, because it's a teaser. We're gonna do something else.
Speaker 1: We're gonna do something else before we talk about that.
Speaker 1: So I thought if I could say there's a bigfoot expert, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think would you like to go by it? Because
Speaker 1: you're not I know you don't like I'm a journalist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but right, but you've developed a little bit of expertise
Speaker 1: on what bigfoot means. I guess compared to the general population,
Speaker 1: I've developed some expertise compared to the bigfoot experts. I
Speaker 1: have a long way to go. Yeah, who was it? It
Speaker 1: It was Jack Hit, you know, the writer Jack Hit.
Speaker 1: The name is familiar, but keep going. Um, he wrote
Speaker 1: a piece one time talking about how the study of dinosaurs,
Speaker 1: like dinosaur things, how he's like incredulous of dinosaur research
Speaker 1: in general because he's like, how seriously can you take
Speaker 1: a discipline where the people that know the most about
Speaker 1: it tend to be twelve tend to be twelve years old? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say that about He's a humorist, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: Jack Hit like makes points. You know, he also has
Speaker 1: a very spirited argument about, um, what an irresponsible mother
Speaker 1: saka Joiah was, But he just like he argues, he's
Speaker 1: kind of like insane points. You could also say that
Speaker 1: Moses his mother was a response and I'm sure Jack
Speaker 1: Jackie would probably like that opinion, so he's a humoroust.
Speaker 1: But in one of his pieces he was like, deconstructing
Speaker 1: I don't know why I'm talking about dinosaur study. Oh
Speaker 1: because from my perspective, as someone who's like decidedly not
Speaker 1: just a disbeliever, I'm like, I'm anti bigfoot, So you're
Speaker 1: a monster. So from my perspective, I would say that
Speaker 1: someone with your perspective has more who's taken like a
Speaker 1: sort of trying to take an impartial look. To me,
Speaker 1: that would be more like being a bigfoot expert than
Speaker 1: someone who is is die hard like I believe this
Speaker 1: is true. You're all idiots for not realizing. So you're
Speaker 1: my kind of bigfoot expert, even though you don't want
Speaker 1: to be one. Reluctant you can call me a reluctant
Speaker 1: big foot. Reluctant bigfoot expert. I'm gonna talk about a
Speaker 1: handful of things before we start talking to you, Laura,
Speaker 1: But chime in, chime in, um, like some feedback. We
Speaker 1: got to cover some. I like to cover some feedback,
Speaker 1: especially corrections places where you making mistakes and past episodes
Speaker 1: and seven straight. But here's not a correction. But just
Speaker 1: something interesting. So we like, if you listen to the show,
Speaker 1: you hear that we often will talk about m If
Speaker 1: you listen to show, you'll here we often talk about
Speaker 1: Folsome hunters and Clovis hunters. You know, yeah, that these
Speaker 1: are old theater price age ice age hunters. Uh people
Speaker 1: used the thing like like for a long time, the
Speaker 1: oldest stuff we knew about was Clovis. So Clovis would
Speaker 1: be thirteen thousand, five hundred uh years ago. Yeah, that's nothing. Um,
Speaker 1: And when we talk about the Clovis culture is just
Speaker 1: kind of like that that there's this, there's a projectile point.
Speaker 1: They made a spear point. This is the bone arrow
Speaker 1: hadn't been invented yet. They made a very peculiar particular
Speaker 1: spear point. And the spear points are so particular that
Speaker 1: the guarded as being diagnostic. So if you were to
Speaker 1: dig down and find a Clovis point, they were so
Speaker 1: particular about how they made them that when you find
Speaker 1: one itself is diagnostic of its age. So it's like
Speaker 1: carbon dating. Yeah, well it's different than that. I mean,
Speaker 1: like a carbon date sort of like if you find
Speaker 1: it in a certain layer of archaeology or like oh
Speaker 1: I know exactly where we are, right exactly, Like those
Speaker 1: dudes made their points in a way that no one
Speaker 1: else made them before, and no one else made them after.
Speaker 1: They would have had like a trademark now, yes, and
Speaker 1: in fact yeah, and they would because it's like it's
Speaker 1: the most one of the most beautiful projectile points. So
Speaker 1: that's like eleven thousand, five hundred BC or BC whatever
Speaker 1: your pickings on that. A little bit of lingo um,
Speaker 1: but they just did a they just did a big
Speaker 1: excavation near Austin, Texas and found what is it now,
Speaker 1: the oldest stone tools that they've that have yet been
Speaker 1: recovered here in what is now the United States of America.
Speaker 1: They found a bunch of stone tools that are fifteen thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred years old, so sets back the clock. What's
Speaker 1: interesting about this is that people used to think that
Speaker 1: people used to argue about did the Clovis Hunters arrive
Speaker 1: here as Clovis hunters, because all of a sudden, around
Speaker 1: thirteen thousand, five hundred years ago, you see this, like
Speaker 1: these projectile points are all over the country and there's
Speaker 1: not it's hard to find stuff that's much older than that.
Speaker 1: So people used to think that There used to be
Speaker 1: this argument that it was Clovis first, meaning that the
Speaker 1: Clovis hunters must have arrived here, that their ancestors, having
Speaker 1: crossed the Bearing land Bridge, they must have very rapidly
Speaker 1: colonized the mid continent and arrived here as a sort
Speaker 1: of fully formed culture. But you're assuming they came across
Speaker 1: the land bridge, which they might not have. No, listen, listen,
Speaker 1: there's no more assumptions any other. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: fun little ideas to get floated around. There's this fun
Speaker 1: little idea called the Salutryan connection, that it was in
Speaker 1: fact Western Europeans had somehow come over because they were
Speaker 1: making projectile points thirty forty thousand years ago that looked
Speaker 1: similar to Clovis points. This idea that Western Europeans came
Speaker 1: over taught the Native Americans how to make cool looking
Speaker 1: arrowheads died out. Yeah, just like they came over and
Speaker 1: showed the Meso Americans how to build pyramids. That that
Speaker 1: it couldn't have been formed here. Um, And there are
Speaker 1: ideas that pop that Polynesians may have that a Polynesian
Speaker 1: type people are an early progenitor of Polynesians might have
Speaker 1: somehow landed in South America. But if you look linguistically
Speaker 1: janetteally technology like technology. The scholarly consensus remains that the
Speaker 1: first Americans came by way of Eurasia and arrived here
Speaker 1: by coming across. Bring you well, there's one of the Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say. They may have followed the coastlines.
Speaker 1: They may not have walks, but it may not have
Speaker 1: been the full land bridge at that point. And they
Speaker 1: may have gone up the northern coasts in the eastern
Speaker 1: coast of Russia and then come across and trying to
Speaker 1: keep land in sight, which is what you would do
Speaker 1: if you were Okay, I'm comfortable with that. I thought
Speaker 1: you were gonna you're an argument of the aliens. Aliens
Speaker 1: drop that. I'm sure there are you know what, there
Speaker 1: are some people who think that there was an alien influence.
Speaker 1: Do you want to talk about them? But I spent
Speaker 1: a lot, Yeah, I spent a fair bit of time,
Speaker 1: uh in this world and read about all of the
Speaker 1: crazy theories, and I think, like I said, the scholarly
Speaker 1: consensus still the American the first America Arikans arrived by
Speaker 1: way that they were Siberians and arrived here um and
Speaker 1: so there used to be this idea that the Clovis
Speaker 1: showed up like a fully formed culture. But then we
Speaker 1: have these these older dates to keep popping up, and
Speaker 1: so now there's an idea that there were there were
Speaker 1: pre Clovis people's here. So now we have a date
Speaker 1: like a like a date that has scholarly consensus, like
Speaker 1: all the experts agree this is legitimate date of fifteen thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred years old. And what are the chances that
Speaker 1: you found the first place that anyone ever camped in
Speaker 1: North America and it happens to be down in Austin, Texas,
Speaker 1: Meaning there's a lot of stuff we're missing. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff from there's many many miles between Austin,
Speaker 1: Texas in Barringia that have campsites that no one's found,
Speaker 1: these fifteen thousand, five hundred year old projectile points. We're
Speaker 1: not Clovis. So now the the fashionable idea is the
Speaker 1: cloth the Clovis culture, which were spreading all around the country,
Speaker 1: and they hunted, they were they were big game hunters
Speaker 1: and hunting megaphon and certainly ate all kinds of seeds
Speaker 1: and vegetable matter and seafood that doesn't store well in
Speaker 1: the archaeological record, but the Clovis was a distinct North
Speaker 1: American creation. People showed up here and developed into the
Speaker 1: Clovis culture, and the Clovis culture was sort of this
Speaker 1: like unified culture that was widespread. Um, and this puts
Speaker 1: another nail into the coffin of the Clovis first idea.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna hit a cup more of these, you okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I should have boned up a little bit more, though
Speaker 1: I didn't realize we were going here. We had a conversation.
Speaker 1: We had a conversation about squirrel tales, and we were
Speaker 1: talking about when this was like two episodes ago, right now,
Speaker 1: when one hunting squirrels that a squirrels tail often betrays
Speaker 1: the squirrel up in the tree. Like you know, there's
Speaker 1: a squirrel in the tree somewhere, and you're looking for him,
Speaker 1: looking for him, looking for him, and when you can't
Speaker 1: find him, and you got your binoculars and you find him,
Speaker 1: usually quite often you can't fool with that. It's the
Speaker 1: tail flicking now, just catching the sunlight. Just like he'll
Speaker 1: plast his body, he'll like plaster his body against the
Speaker 1: trunk or a limb, but his tail gives him away
Speaker 1: because it's blowing in the breeze, or it just catches
Speaker 1: the light and it gives like a halo effect. And
Speaker 1: so we're talking about what a liability of squirrel's tail is.
Speaker 1: And a couple of people took offense to this, and
Speaker 1: one guy wrote in about how you need to watch
Speaker 1: how it how squirrel works his tail when he's around
Speaker 1: a predator. What he's doing is creating he's creating a
Speaker 1: false target. He says, watch a squirrel run out on
Speaker 1: the road in front of your car when he's real
Speaker 1: nervous the car is coming. He's got his tail up
Speaker 1: and he's working. And when a squirrel gets nervous about
Speaker 1: it a predator being nearby, he'll have his tail up working.
Speaker 1: And when he's running, he's got his tail up, and
Speaker 1: he thinks that predators that he's luring the predator to
Speaker 1: something that's non vital, like those extra eyes that are
Speaker 1: on the back of butterflies, or and he says, when
Speaker 1: you're up bow hunting watching squirrels, notice how many squirrels
Speaker 1: are missing a chunk of their tail. And he thinks
Speaker 1: that when something's on it, it's drawing the attention to it.
Speaker 1: And it will take the blow from a hawk or
Speaker 1: a fox grabs the tail and misses the main body.
Speaker 1: You think the hawk or the fox would have figured
Speaker 1: this one out by now. I mean there's been several
Speaker 1: thousand years of being able to like, but it probably
Speaker 1: works with like neophytes, like the ones that haven't done
Speaker 1: it yet. And Ermine does that too, right with the
Speaker 1: black tip on his tail in the winter, could be
Speaker 1: seems like a nose, but it's not. Yeah, the trouble
Speaker 1: of physiology, you never know the real answer. If there is,
Speaker 1: there's there's no real answer. Could just be pretty, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be pretty. Could be sexual, like a sexual
Speaker 1: selection thing. Like there's all kinds of things that animals
Speaker 1: have that we're look like, why does he have that?
Speaker 1: It's like only because it's a only because it's a
Speaker 1: gesture or symbol to other creatures. But it's useful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but look how vulnerable. Look at a gobbler gobbling that
Speaker 1: does not make him a wild turkey out gobbling in
Speaker 1: the woods, does not make him bigger, faster. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a real vulnerability that gets you killed. But sexually
Speaker 1: it's so important, so you can't be like, um, what
Speaker 1: is the advantage of gobbling in terms of fitness. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just it like it's a necessary evil. He has
Speaker 1: to do it to breed. But it actually doesn't like
Speaker 1: benefit the individual. It only benefits the individual's ability to
Speaker 1: spread his lineage. I was starting the sign these researchers
Speaker 1: one time, and they had a bunch of bed a
Speaker 1: bunch of gobblers that they had trackers on, and the
Speaker 1: gobblers a great all winner spring came. They started goblin
Speaker 1: all five or dead bobcats, bobcats. And when you're calling turkeys,
Speaker 1: you're calling all kinds of stuff. Another guy wrote in
Speaker 1: about the squirrel thing, and this is his thing on it.
Speaker 1: He says, he was recently sitting up in his tree
Speaker 1: stand and it was forty degrees twenty five gusts from
Speaker 1: the southeast. I observed a squirrel sitting on a branch
Speaker 1: facing down wind on the leeward side of a tree,
Speaker 1: so he's using the tree for a wind buffer and
Speaker 1: facing away from the wind. He was sitting upright and
Speaker 1: had its tail up and over itself like a hood.
Speaker 1: Then he said he's had the squirrel sat there for
Speaker 1: twenty minutes unmoving. The sun broke from the clouds and
Speaker 1: started hitting the side of the tree. He then went
Speaker 1: around to the sunny side of the tree and pasted
Speaker 1: himself flat out in the sun on the sunny side
Speaker 1: of the tree. He sat there for ten minutes and
Speaker 1: then went about his day eating. So his feeling is
Speaker 1: that they also are using their tail for that. A
Speaker 1: guy was listening to a real old podcast. This is
Speaker 1: moving on from squirrels. Well, I'd like to just put
Speaker 1: a concluding thought on the squirrel It's like, those are
Speaker 1: both great points, but it doesn't change the fact that
Speaker 1: it's a real dutchment. It's real liability. It's a liability, yes,
Speaker 1: but they were saying that, I guess their perspective on
Speaker 1: it is Yes, it's a liability with dudes looking for
Speaker 1: you with twenty two and binoculars. However, people haven't been
Speaker 1: looking for him with twenty two and binoculars long enough
Speaker 1: to drive any particular evolutionary trait. Okay, Well, and how
Speaker 1: much squirrel hunting is there? I mean, in the percentage
Speaker 1: of the population looking at squirrels, how many people are
Speaker 1: actually going after them. I would love to know what
Speaker 1: percent of the nation's squirrels, Even if you remove urban squirrels.
Speaker 1: So what percent of the nation's squirrels that are unhuntable
Speaker 1: land are subjected to some amount of hunting? My huntable
Speaker 1: land subjected to some amountain So you're not college considering
Speaker 1: my backyard and the sling shot. I'm saying, even if, like,
Speaker 1: even if you were going to run out, even if
Speaker 1: you're gonna like exclude so just like, what percentage of
Speaker 1: like huntable squirrels are hunted? I'd be shocked to hear
Speaker 1: that it's I'd be shocked to hear that it's more
Speaker 1: than just a lot of work for not a lot
Speaker 1: of payoff in terms of there's a thriving squirrel hunting
Speaker 1: culture and you can cover a lot of ground hunting squirrels,
Speaker 1: so exposed to some degree of hunting, Like, what percent
Speaker 1: of squirrels u huntable land had a squirrel hunter passed
Speaker 1: within one yards of them? I don't know. Are we
Speaker 1: cool to move on with it now? Guy was listening
Speaker 1: to a military Guy was listening to an old podcast,
Speaker 1: and he said he found it disturbing. Disturbing that I
Speaker 1: would have defined black Jack Pershing's push into Mexico in
Speaker 1: pursuit of Poncho Via as a failure. He says, yes,
Speaker 1: it failed to achieve its primary mission of capturing Poncho Via,
Speaker 1: but it's said about conditions that weakened his influence and
Speaker 1: depleted his manpower significantly. It also set conditions to force
Speaker 1: diplomatic relationships between the US and Mexico. Mexico didn't desire
Speaker 1: full out war with the US and started to take
Speaker 1: proactive measures to deter cross border raids and pursue Via
Speaker 1: like so many of today's targeted operations against specific leadership
Speaker 1: of terrorist organizations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Is
Speaker 1: it clear that I'm quoting right now? Sometimes you don't
Speaker 1: get the individual, but operational pressure pressure can neutralize their
Speaker 1: influence and capabilities, effectively nullifying them. So I stand corrected
Speaker 1: on Poncho Villa. Now another guy was saying this. He
Speaker 1: wrote him to say, he's nine sure that he's called
Speaker 1: in two different bull moose by knocking boots. Now, I
Speaker 1: know knocking boots as a euphemism for love making, but
Speaker 1: he's using knocking boots as like banging the mud off
Speaker 1: his boots. Because you think like a bull, make like
Speaker 1: a bull moose during the rock goes mhm, mhm. You
Speaker 1: do it once. M h yeah, and I could see
Speaker 1: how the thud of a vibraum soul caked with mud.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of noise you're getting by the leather
Speaker 1: that's attached to it, a little more soprano than like
Speaker 1: beating boots together, has more of like a clopping sound.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing, but I know people, all people do.
Speaker 1: This is something that happens, people calling moose by banging,
Speaker 1: like accidentally calling moose by hitting trees with axes. Because
Speaker 1: when you hear it, it's so it's such a weird
Speaker 1: sound that you can't you're not sure you're hearing it.
Speaker 1: And here's the weird thing too. I was out with
Speaker 1: my kids and my kids were hearing a bull. They
Speaker 1: didn't know what it was, but m way off and
Speaker 1: I couldn't hear it. And it was only when they
Speaker 1: it was only when they kept talking about it then
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, you're right, they're like, what is that?
Speaker 1: I'm like, what is what? It's not high. It's just
Speaker 1: like it's like when you're hearing it, it's like you
Speaker 1: feel it. It's like you're you're aware that you're hearing it,
Speaker 1: but you can't. It's strange. Yeahs strange. So he's saying
Speaker 1: he got it. Has this happen. He's banging his boots
Speaker 1: and the bull shows up. He's hunting in the Yukon.
Speaker 1: And then one showed up twenty minutes later. No one
Speaker 1: believed my theory of why he came in, but sure
Speaker 1: enough I tried to get a couple of days later
Speaker 1: and another bull strolled in, grunting right next to camp two.
Speaker 1: More the guy who's listening, um and he has he's
Speaker 1: talking about our idea that that older animals like lose
Speaker 1: their quality, like like palatability. Hunters always think that palatability
Speaker 1: is better with younger animals. So someone would get like
Speaker 1: a little buck, and he'll be like, oh, it's just
Speaker 1: a little one, and people, to save his ego, would
Speaker 1: say like, oh, it's a good eater. Though this is
Speaker 1: very common in the hunting world because the flesh is
Speaker 1: more tender because they haven't gotten all ropey and old. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's that's how. That's the thinking on it, even though
Speaker 1: there are notable That makes feel better because I'm about
Speaker 1: to hit forty, which means I'm less likely to be
Speaker 1: cannibalized because I want He would be like, that's not
Speaker 1: a good eater. So um. This guy goes on to
Speaker 1: say that he has a problem with our us, saying
Speaker 1: that like waterfowl, that you should that that older waterfol
Speaker 1: is less good because he's saying that the best goose
Speaker 1: he ever ate was at I'm reading this guy's, you know,
Speaker 1: because I like some of the lingo he uses. The
Speaker 1: best goose he ever ate was last year at Old
Speaker 1: Bob Milligan's game dinner. He brought a goose that he
Speaker 1: he brought a goose that Bob Milligan smoked, and he
Speaker 1: said that this goose was tagged. So he had a
Speaker 1: banded goose that was banded on James Bay fifteen years
Speaker 1: earlier as a mature bird a birdie. So he brings
Speaker 1: a bird it's at least sixteen years old over to
Speaker 1: Bob Milligan's. Bob Milligan smokes it, says it's melt in
Speaker 1: your mouth, tender like you would think it's still had
Speaker 1: the yolk sack attached. And he goes down and say,
Speaker 1: I highly doubt that this had anything to do with
Speaker 1: Bob's smoking technique, as his smoked venison is like eating
Speaker 1: an old boot. Last point quick to make um someone
Speaker 1: was saying that we got marked, like my talking about
Speaker 1: Mark Twain. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clements.
Speaker 1: So the author of Huck Finn Tom Sawyer Um, his
Speaker 1: name was sam Clements and he adopted the name Mark Twain.
Speaker 1: We're talking about how Mark Twain comes from. When the
Speaker 1: riverman on the Mississippi River would have a line that
Speaker 1: was marked and what I now know to be one
Speaker 1: fathom increments of fathom being six ft of water. There's
Speaker 1: a guy whose job it is to stand in front
Speaker 1: of the boat with a rope and a weight, and
Speaker 1: he throws the rope in the way out. It swings
Speaker 1: down hits bottom and he calls to the captain the
Speaker 1: depth and mark Twain is two marks, meaning to fathoms.
Speaker 1: So you have twelve ft of water, and twelve ft
Speaker 1: of water was safe passage for the boat. This guy
Speaker 1: goes on and say that that's not quite right. He
Speaker 1: teaches Twain and he says that it's it's precarious. Twelve
Speaker 1: ft is safe passage, and when you hit mark Twain,
Speaker 1: you're like saying it's safe, but who knows the next
Speaker 1: mark could be much shallower. And he talks about that Twain.
Speaker 1: His choice of that word was symbolic, and then he
Speaker 1: occupied the precarious space around safety and danger. The guy
Speaker 1: whose job it was to throw the rope has a
Speaker 1: rope that goes to four fathoms or twenty four ft.
Speaker 1: After that he yells out, no bottom. If he throws
Speaker 1: it out and it doesn't, he says no bottom. These
Speaker 1: deeper waters would be considered much safer than the call
Speaker 1: of two fathoms or Mark Twain. So his choice of
Speaker 1: two fathoms halfway between Twain zero and four suggests waters
Speaker 1: that are safe for the moment, but could change to
Speaker 1: become more dangerous or more safe with the changing level
Speaker 1: of the river bottom. Therefore, Clemen's choice seems to reflect
Speaker 1: his views of America at the time in his writing style.
Speaker 1: In general, he also goes down to say that Twain
Speaker 1: hated He talks about how we're always celebrating Theodore Roosevelt.
Speaker 1: Twain hated Theodore Roosevelt. Really, here's what Twain had to
Speaker 1: say about Roosevelt in the Seven. Mr Roosevelt is the
Speaker 1: Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: always showing off, always hunting for a chance to show off,
Speaker 1: and his frenzied imagination, the Great Republic is a vast
Speaker 1: barnum circus with him for a clown in the whole
Speaker 1: world for audience. He would go to Halifax for half
Speaker 1: a chance to show off, and he would go to
Speaker 1: Hell for the whole one. Wow, that is an awesome quote.
Speaker 1: Not did not like OTR. You don't hear many critiques
Speaker 1: Nope about him? Hated him? Okay, bigot Oh, here we go.
Speaker 1: How do you want to start out? You wanna start
Speaker 1: talking about about your relative, your elise. It was a
Speaker 1: bigfoot expert. Yeah. I think that's because otherwise people are like,
Speaker 1: this woman's crazy. But he was a legit bigfoot expert.
Speaker 1: He was, and he was also a legit anthropologist, and
Speaker 1: he probably would have had a lot more to say
Speaker 1: to you about Clovis points than I can possibly. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to listen to anything he said because
Speaker 1: he was a bigfoot person. That's unfortunate, because he actually
Speaker 1: did make good findings in the field of anthropology, but
Speaker 1: then negated him. Do you think so? I don't think so.
Speaker 1: The one finding I do know about is he his name,
Speaker 1: His name is Grover Krantz. In reading like in starting
Speaker 1: up to talk to you. You can't type in like
Speaker 1: no Bigfoot evidence without finding out about Grover Cranps. He's
Speaker 1: he's considered one of the four horsemen of Sasquatchery, which
Speaker 1: is a phenomenal phrase that I would like to try
Speaker 1: and use every day from here on out, if possible. Um,
Speaker 1: there's him and three other old dudes, all of them
Speaker 1: are dead but won a guy named Peter Byrne who
Speaker 1: is ninety three years old and still looking for Bigfoot
Speaker 1: but spent his formative is in the Himalaya looking for
Speaker 1: the Yetti because he's got I do an interview with him,
Speaker 1: a bonus one, and like his stories are crazy, Well,
Speaker 1: can you explain that real quick? Is that how it
Speaker 1: goes is that the Yetti is from down south and
Speaker 1: then no, note the south come on like the oh no, Hey,
Speaker 1: there have been Bigfoot sightings in every state but Hawaii
Speaker 1: because Bigfoot can't swim that far. Yetti. Yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: I'm asking about. Um, they're cousins, they're there, if if
Speaker 1: if they're real. The idea is that they're sort of
Speaker 1: branched off from some part of the tree way on
Speaker 1: back and that's a white Bigfoot. Yeah, I'm not sure entirely.
Speaker 1: What the what all of the didn't some dude turn
Speaker 1: off at the top of the Yeti's head and it
Speaker 1: had white hair on it. I mean, like like all
Speaker 1: Bigfoot things, that was a hoax, like a demonstrated to
Speaker 1: be yes, well, no surprise there, Um, I don't. I
Speaker 1: hadn't heard that story. There is a story about someone
Speaker 1: turning up with a hand at one point. In fact,
Speaker 1: it was Peter Byrne. He was in the Himalaya and
Speaker 1: he was at some Buddhist temple and they said, hey,
Speaker 1: we've got a Yetti hand, come take it, check it out.
Speaker 1: And he came and looked at him his huge hand
Speaker 1: with these giant nails on it, and he's like, I
Speaker 1: want to take that back, and they're like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's a holy symbol. You can't have it. And he
Speaker 1: tells this story way better. So he flies back to London.
Speaker 1: This is in the sixties, when you know all you're
Speaker 1: doing is cabling back and forth, and this is when
Speaker 1: big Foot was getting fashionable. This is yeah, this is
Speaker 1: before he even knew about Bigfoot. This was still Yetti.
Speaker 1: There was a guy named Tom Slick who was a
Speaker 1: Texas oilman who financed all these expeditions first and in
Speaker 1: the Himalaya and then in the United States, and they
Speaker 1: died in a plane crash in nineteen six two and
Speaker 1: his family was like, okay, we're done with this. Pulled
Speaker 1: all the money and that was the end of those
Speaker 1: those particular expeditions. The hand, Yeah, So the hand, uh
Speaker 1: Peter Peter Burne, this guy talked to cable Tom Slick says,
Speaker 1: they've got this hand up here, and Tom says, well,
Speaker 1: can you bring it back? This is all cables going
Speaker 1: back and forth, and Peter's like, no, you know, they
Speaker 1: this is a holy relic for them, and he said,
Speaker 1: come to London. So they go to London. They meet
Speaker 1: with the prosector of the London Zoo and the guy says, here,
Speaker 1: give them this hand. Instead pulls a hand out from
Speaker 1: under the table where they're having lunch, in a brown
Speaker 1: paper bag. And so Peter takes that hand back to
Speaker 1: the Himalaya and gets a finger off of this hand
Speaker 1: that's there, that's supposed he has a yetie hand brings
Speaker 1: it back to London. And that's a whole story in
Speaker 1: and of itself. But I'm gonna involves Jimmy Stewart and
Speaker 1: smuggling stuff out of the country. It's crazy Jimmy Stewart. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you ever see How the West is one? Do
Speaker 1: I need to? Yeah? Okay, should I write that down?
Speaker 1: He plays a frontiersman someone. I'll forget that. You know,
Speaker 1: it's Christmas movie, right, it's a wonderful life I've never seen. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's a wonderful wife. Flopped at the box office? Did it? Really? People?
Speaker 1: Like a production and company went out of business over
Speaker 1: What a failure? This is what everybody talks about. What
Speaker 1: a great movie it is? What was it was resurrected.
Speaker 1: I've never seen it. And every time I say that,
Speaker 1: people I think I'm a communist. Yeah I think so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: two strikes against you? Christmas? How many do I get?
Speaker 1: Christmas story has the same story? Then it was a
Speaker 1: it was a flop the leg lamb. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: I'm popping my peace a little bit, am I. Christmas story?
Speaker 1: Yeah flopped? Yeah, Yeah, it's a wonderful life flop. And
Speaker 1: it was made by returning you know, it's one of
Speaker 1: It was a director who was returning from World War Two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he had been profoundly impacted by things he saw
Speaker 1: in World War Two and came home and made its
Speaker 1: a Wonderful Life and the flop and it was like devastating,
Speaker 1: but then it became you know, it's a classic. Every
Speaker 1: American family watches every year. Yeah except mine. Every America
Speaker 1: should watch every Well, we're reading, We're busy reading, Karl Marks.
Speaker 1: It's a wonderful life. I'm Jimmy Stewart. Threw me for
Speaker 1: a loop. Yeah, that Jimmy Stewarts involved in this. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyway, Jimmy Stewart helped smuggle this finger out back
Speaker 1: to London where they, you know, examined it, and the
Speaker 1: guy at the zoo said, I, you know, it just
Speaker 1: doesn't look like any specimen I'm familiar with. Put it
Speaker 1: in a drawer and then it disappeared for years and
Speaker 1: years and years and years and years. Genetics. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: then they found it and it was in his private
Speaker 1: lab at the back of some building in the zoo,
Speaker 1: and they dug it out and they ran genetics on
Speaker 1: it and it was Peter Byrne's DNA that was all
Speaker 1: over it, which was really kind of interesting. So even
Speaker 1: though he'd handled it decades before, I think they did
Speaker 1: the DNA testing in two thousand thirteen. He's DNA was
Speaker 1: still like coating it, which is fascinating stuff to um.
Speaker 1: They think it was human. I think it was human.
Speaker 1: It's just like some guy with a really big hand.
Speaker 1: Oh I know, right, not. Yeah, it does. It helps.
Speaker 1: It helped feed the legend for decades. Right. Anyway, back
Speaker 1: to Grover. My relatives over cransans the same last name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and what is the what is the relationship?
Speaker 1: He is my grandfather's cousin. So I didn't know who
Speaker 1: he was. He had gotten this big right up in
Speaker 1: the Washington Post because he donated. First, he donated his
Speaker 1: body to the Tennessee Body Farm, which is where they
Speaker 1: run forensic analysis. They'll take bodies that have been donated
Speaker 1: and they'll leave him in a field or in a
Speaker 1: pond or in a trunk of a car and see
Speaker 1: what happens to them as they decay. And then they
Speaker 1: use that stuff to do forensics on crimes and you know,
Speaker 1: missing persons when they do find a body, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. So he did that first, and then his
Speaker 1: skeleton went to the Smithsonian Um, along with the bones
Speaker 1: of his three Irish wolfhounds. Yahoo, Ikey and Clyde. Clyde
Speaker 1: was his favorite, and the Washington posted this huge article
Speaker 1: on him, and that's how I found out about him.
Speaker 1: I had no idea who he was. And then at
Speaker 1: the last section of that article there was this sort
Speaker 1: of I don't know, three or four paragraphs about how
Speaker 1: he was known for driving around the Pacific Northwest with
Speaker 1: a spotlight and a rifle searching for sasquatch. Uh you
Speaker 1: mean to tell me that, Grover, you'r kin um? He
Speaker 1: was prepared to he was prepared to do the unspeakable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he uh. He actually came out and told a reporter
Speaker 1: this because he knew that for science, you have to
Speaker 1: have a type specimen to prove the existence of a species,
Speaker 1: to get it put in the Linnaean system, to get
Speaker 1: it categorized, you have to have, you know, the equivalent
Speaker 1: of a big foot stuck in styrofoam with a big
Speaker 1: pin like that, like the butterfly, like the same kind
Speaker 1: of thing. So he told a reporter this that he
Speaker 1: was prepared to shoot one for the purposes of science.
Speaker 1: That story got syndicated in newspapers all over the country,
Speaker 1: and Grover got so much hate mail that they had
Speaker 1: to resort to a form letter, as did Washington State University,
Speaker 1: where he was a tenured anthropology professor. They were sending
Speaker 1: out letters left and right saying you've misinterpreted this. But
Speaker 1: people were angry, even people who didn't think Bigfoot was
Speaker 1: really over. Like pist Off, I can see both sides
Speaker 1: of it. Tell me, why do I see both sides
Speaker 1: of it? Because sometimes you need to burn a village
Speaker 1: to save it. If you were to prove, if you
Speaker 1: were to prove definitively that there is this species, um,
Speaker 1: it would no doubt lead to a lot of protections,
Speaker 1: legal habitat. Otherwise um and people would have to reckon
Speaker 1: with this reality that grow over believed in. So you're
Speaker 1: killing one. And people like to have this idea that
Speaker 1: Bigfoot is like a thing, it's like a singular specimen.
Speaker 1: But you'd have to have here's here's this. This is
Speaker 1: where I start. This is one of the many areas
Speaker 1: in which I start to not believe in Bigfoot, is
Speaker 1: that you'd have to have a breeding population that is
Speaker 1: serve vibed here for tens of thousands of years, and
Speaker 1: so um, there there must be a couple of thousand
Speaker 1: of them in order to carry on. That's one of
Speaker 1: the theories. If you look at like you look at
Speaker 1: what it takes the support. I mean, we're talking about
Speaker 1: something that's six pounds. It's enormous um. And then you
Speaker 1: look at what we know about other animals of that size.
Speaker 1: It's very hard to have. It's very hard to maintain
Speaker 1: stable populations of large mammals that are in that. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't carry on for ten thousand years or just
Speaker 1: two or three of them running around. You need a
Speaker 1: breeding population of them. But people like to have this
Speaker 1: idea that it's just this lone wandering thing. I think
Speaker 1: that part of that idea stems from tabloid stuff. What
Speaker 1: ida the idea that there's just one because I hear
Speaker 1: that a lot from from people who aren't bigfoot experts,
Speaker 1: where they just say, oh, is he still alive? Sure,
Speaker 1: But as people who are really steeped in this world,
Speaker 1: they believe that there is a breeding population. The idea
Speaker 1: is roughly two thousand. So there's But then there's been
Speaker 1: bigfoot sightings in all fifty states. Yeah, I don't know
Speaker 1: how many of those came out of the bottom of
Speaker 1: a whiskey bottle. So so big we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Speaker 1: The bigfoot, Bigfoot people, Bigfoot believers. They don't like to
Speaker 1: be called believers. What did they to be called? I
Speaker 1: don't know. I haven't figured that out yet, but the
Speaker 1: term belief is a bit of a They put that
Speaker 1: with faith. Well, that's we're gonna keep. I want you
Speaker 1: to supply me, supply me. I don't have a better
Speaker 1: one either, And I actually fought I had a lot
Speaker 1: of conversations about this. I'm just saying that belief is
Speaker 1: a hard word for them to swallow, but they actually
Speaker 1: end up using it because they don't have a better one.
Speaker 1: Don't have a better one. So Bigfoot believers, like the
Speaker 1: top tier bigfoot researchers are are saying that, like, let's
Speaker 1: just let's go down to core Bigfoot country, the Pacific
Speaker 1: northwest right, northern California, Oregon, Washington. It seems like Bigfoot
Speaker 1: ground zero is the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. I'd say
Speaker 1: up in to Canada. Too open to Canada if you
Speaker 1: were going to consider. So they're they're they're suggesting that
Speaker 1: there are two thousand big Foot's running around that turf.
Speaker 1: Is it bigfoot or big feet? Big feet. I don't
Speaker 1: know what they would go, but what do they go? Like,
Speaker 1: I say, there, I'm running a poll on this right now.
Speaker 1: There seems to be tied between bigfoot and big foots?
Speaker 1: Is in bigot like deer? Yeah, okay, big Foot's two
Speaker 1: thousand big foots. You know how many grizzly bears are
Speaker 1: in um? You know how many grizzly bears are in
Speaker 1: Montana and Wyoming and Idaho? No, about two thousand? You
Speaker 1: know how often people run into those things? How often?
Speaker 1: A lot? Many people? Every day? Many people every day
Speaker 1: You're not not by they get hit by cars, they
Speaker 1: show up in chicken coops, they're in people's backyards, backyards,
Speaker 1: they're down at Yellowstone National Park lingering around. Um. They're
Speaker 1: nowhere near as elusive. But I want to get back
Speaker 1: to him shooting one, so you see in both sides. Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, you you wouldn't shoot at a big
Speaker 1: foot if you ran into one, you know, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about it, Yeah, especially after listening to uh Laura's podcast. Definitely,
Speaker 1: because you shoot and kill a big foot you have
Speaker 1: to have a specimen. Yeah, dude, I never would do
Speaker 1: that because otherwise we've had this conversation before. Otherwise you
Speaker 1: come back and you're just then another another guy that
Speaker 1: you're gonna be like that guy was cool, but now
Speaker 1: I'd consider him crazy. And in talking about this before,
Speaker 1: I said that if I saw one, I would absolutely
Speaker 1: not kill it, and I would never tell anyone that
Speaker 1: I saw it. I see, I had the same problem
Speaker 1: because if you see one and then you're like, I
Speaker 1: can't tell anyone about this, They're gonna like just think
Speaker 1: I've gone off the deep end. I've been out in
Speaker 1: the woods too long, or I've been around bigfoot people
Speaker 1: too long. Now if I could, if I follow one dead,
Speaker 1: just you know, oh, wrestle that in yeah, shouting that
Speaker 1: from the rooftouse. But no, I wouldn't kill a big foot.
Speaker 1: Why not because you, of all people me, of all people. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm just saying because you don't believe, and wouldn't you
Speaker 1: want people to I wouldn't kill one because I just
Speaker 1: don't go off shooting guns and whatnot at things that
Speaker 1: I don't have. That's not what I'm saying. Just because
Speaker 1: you don't because you don't believe, when if you did
Speaker 1: see one, and knowing what the sort of general populace
Speaker 1: thinks of this or what people would think if you
Speaker 1: were to come back and say, you just wouldn't tell anyone,
Speaker 1: You just and then you bury it in the back
Speaker 1: of your mind and never think of it again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I would do. Okay, what else have you
Speaker 1: seen out there that you're not telling this about? Thankfully?
Speaker 1: Thankfully nothing? Okay, thankfully nothing. Um, but no, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: kill one. You're honest. I'm disappointed he would kill one.
Speaker 1: I don't. I feel like you'd be in some trouble.
Speaker 1: Is that not true? Well, it's not like it's a
Speaker 1: protected species. I believe Grover's saying was, and I don't
Speaker 1: know if I have this correct, but he was the
Speaker 1: first person who shoots one should get a medal, the
Speaker 1: second one should go to jail. So he really from
Speaker 1: a science perspective, he felt you needed to have a
Speaker 1: specimen in order to prove its existence. Now d n
Speaker 1: A would change that to some degree, because if you've
Speaker 1: got d n A off of something and that was
Speaker 1: significantly different from anything else in that phylogenetic tree, then
Speaker 1: you might have more of a case. But even then
Speaker 1: I don't think they allow you. Well, I don't know
Speaker 1: this for sure. You might be able to name a
Speaker 1: species based on DNA alone now, but but you can't
Speaker 1: do it for footprints, you can't do it for other stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you mentioned the Linnaean system. That's like us being Homo
Speaker 1: sapien kingdom phil um class order, family genus. Yes, that's
Speaker 1: like our when you see like the Linnean name, or
Speaker 1: some people call it the Latin name for an animal,
Speaker 1: and there's by like binomial. Yeah. I got a refresher
Speaker 1: on high school biology when I started doing the second episode,
Speaker 1: which is on evolution. Yeah, we haven't. We haven't established
Speaker 1: this yet. Your show. Oh oh right, I have a show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: tell people about that. So the Grover thing got me interested,
Speaker 1: and then I kind of sat on this story for
Speaker 1: a few years. I didn't really know what to do
Speaker 1: with it, but with the background in radio, and then
Speaker 1: when I was living in Denver. When I moved to Denver,
Speaker 1: I found out that Grower's fourth and last wife lived
Speaker 1: about thirty miles away, and I thought, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm just going to go talk to her. And she
Speaker 1: had some good stories about Grower that weren't necessarily Bigfoot related.
Speaker 1: They were just like about an interesting, really kind of
Speaker 1: a fascinating guy. And then she put me in touch
Speaker 1: with a few more people, and by that point I
Speaker 1: was realizing that these interviews were really pretty compereng and
Speaker 1: pretty fun to do, and I was like, I'm going
Speaker 1: to do a podcast, and so that's what I decided
Speaker 1: to do. So I had a podcast started on October two.
Speaker 1: It's called wild Thing, and it's about Grover, this relative
Speaker 1: of mine, and it's about the people who are looking
Speaker 1: for Bigfoot and who are spending all kinds of time
Speaker 1: and money and energy. And then it's sort of suspending
Speaker 1: disbelief and saying, Okay, if Bigfoot is a thing, where
Speaker 1: would it fit in the evolutionary tree? How would we
Speaker 1: what does the evidence look like? Um, what are some
Speaker 1: of the encounters that people have had? And then it's
Speaker 1: also looking at the cultural significance of Bigfoot, because even
Speaker 1: for people who don't believe in Bigfoot, don't think Bigfoot's real,
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of silly. There is a fascination
Speaker 1: and a lot of companies have tapped into that too.
Speaker 1: I mean, um, you know Bigfoot beers and Bigfoot bikes
Speaker 1: and a small cooler company called Yeah that's Spaghetti totally different,
Speaker 1: totally different, wouldn't learn anything. Yeah, I mean they're that
Speaker 1: the YETI I think falls into the same category in
Speaker 1: terms of this smifical what's the word crypto? Cryptozogy crypto
Speaker 1: studying stuff that doesn't actually exist? Um, crypto. Well, it's
Speaker 1: kind of secret. I guess I don't know that full.
Speaker 1: I didn't really do the etymology of the word. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to move on from grow over. But I
Speaker 1: understand like you're the genesis of your interest came from him,
Speaker 1: came from realizing that you were long lost relatives with
Speaker 1: leading bigfoot researcher. Yeah. Not many people get to claim that,
Speaker 1: but I want to. I want to point out something
Speaker 1: that I'm that I'm picking up about Grover. Four wives, right,
Speaker 1: what happened to the other three? No, the first two,
Speaker 1: the first three were divorces. Um, I don't think the
Speaker 1: first two lasted very long. The third one didn't really either,
Speaker 1: and then the fourth one he was married to Diane
Speaker 1: for over twenty years. So a bunch of spouses donates
Speaker 1: his body to be to learn how to study rotting corps.
Speaker 1: His bones and his dogs go to Smithsonian. I'm getting
Speaker 1: the you're painting a picture to me of a person
Speaker 1: who has and like outsized perspective of themselves and who
Speaker 1: is a uh an eccentric and wants people to know
Speaker 1: about it. I think that is probably fair, which is
Speaker 1: also not what you're generally looking for when it comes
Speaker 1: to a researcher that there is some truth to that. However,
Speaker 1: I did talk to students and friends and people who
Speaker 1: had worked with him, and he was very well liked
Speaker 1: and well respected. His classes were always full. People loved
Speaker 1: him as a professor. So I don't think he was
Speaker 1: just and you know, egomaniac running around look at me,
Speaker 1: look at me, look at me. And ultimately I feel, well,
Speaker 1: maybe this isn't the case some you know, some showmen,
Speaker 1: they do stuff because they want people to like them,
Speaker 1: and they want people to pay attention to them and
Speaker 1: respect them and think that they're great. I think Grover
Speaker 1: I didn't really care what people thought. He just had
Speaker 1: kind of weird ideas and like to pursue them. At
Speaker 1: one point, he was trying to figure out why certain
Speaker 1: human ancestors had this sort of prominent brow ridge. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so he took a piece of styrofoam and he
Speaker 1: or styrene and he carved a brow and he glued
Speaker 1: it to his forehead, and he walked around campus for
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks like that, just to kind of
Speaker 1: try and understand why, what's the point of something like
Speaker 1: that so you don't have to walk around his hand up.
Speaker 1: I think that's ultimately what he decided is. You know,
Speaker 1: it served as an eyeshade, which may not have been
Speaker 1: enough for it to stick around as a residual evolutionary trade.
Speaker 1: But on the open savannah, yeah it could help. Okay
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Speaker 1: where did you sit on what was your sort of
Speaker 1: feelings about knowledge about an opinion on bigfoot before you
Speaker 1: realize that you had that you were related to a
Speaker 1: bigfoot research and I thought this was tinfoil hat stuff
Speaker 1: like all the way that just conspiracy theory and like
Speaker 1: people who are a little unplugged from reality. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: it's tabloid. It's like Bigfoot had my baby headlines on
Speaker 1: the Weekly World News and the National Enquirer. My one
Speaker 1: movie that I'd ever seen was Harry and the Henderson's Yes,
Speaker 1: that's supposed to be your relative. The guy with the
Speaker 1: gun trying to kill bigh That is uh. The guy
Speaker 1: who's supposed to be closest to Grover is Walter. What
Speaker 1: did his last name? He's the nice guy, the older
Speaker 1: guy who's like, I'm never going to see a big
Speaker 1: Foot and then he like turns and looks and there's
Speaker 1: Harry right there. I forget what his name is. That
Speaker 1: was your relatively supposedly loosely modeled on Grover, and the
Speaker 1: gun guy was modeled on a guy named Renee to
Speaker 1: hint and who was a Swiss immigrant to Canada and
Speaker 1: was supposedly a little unhinged. But I also don't know
Speaker 1: how closely these hued to their actually yeah, just like
Speaker 1: but maybe informed the It's like in Jaws, um in Jaws,
Speaker 1: the the Shark Hunter has modeled off of Frank Mundus,
Speaker 1: who was a guy in Montalk who would take people
Speaker 1: out to kill big as sharks and would wear the
Speaker 1: teeth and Okay, I don't think I knew that was, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was. He was. Spielberg modeled okay, took attributes from
Speaker 1: Frank Mundus yea, and called the monster man informed that
Speaker 1: informed that character. So is there a conspiracy you mentioned
Speaker 1: like you thought of it as conspiracy theory stuff, But
Speaker 1: there's no like conspiracy like Bigfoot. Bigfoot people think the
Speaker 1: government's hiding the truth. Well, so here's the other thing
Speaker 1: I learned Bigfoot people from the outside, it's a monolith.
Speaker 1: When you start in sigating a little bit more, it
Speaker 1: kind of starts to divide into smaller groups. So there
Speaker 1: is a group similar to Grover who are looking at this.
Speaker 1: You know, Bigfoot is a a m undocumented primate. It's
Speaker 1: flesh and blood. It's beholden to the same laws of
Speaker 1: physics and nature that the rest of us are. Then
Speaker 1: there's a whole group that are like Bigfoot was dropped
Speaker 1: off by aliens. It can move through dimensions, which is
Speaker 1: why you don't see it because you'll like see the rustling,
Speaker 1: and then it moves into another dimension and then you're
Speaker 1: not seeing it anymore, but it can still see you,
Speaker 1: and it can you know, it's got telepathy and you know,
Speaker 1: you know what Mitch the comedian Mitch Hedberg, Uh, he's
Speaker 1: blurring around the edges, which I didn't know that joke,
Speaker 1: and I used that. I was like, I thought I
Speaker 1: was so clever. I was like, look at this funny
Speaker 1: joke that I wrote, and I put it into the
Speaker 1: third episode and then someone's like, Mitch Hedberg wrote that joke,
Speaker 1: but there's no new material out there. I was reminded
Speaker 1: of it by the third dimensional, like the third dimensional
Speaker 1: idea that that so there are people that they both
Speaker 1: dimension actually because we're moving through Yeah, you're three dimension Okay,
Speaker 1: so there's that's so does a school thought that grow
Speaker 1: over occupied it's a species. It's just it's been an
Speaker 1: undocumented subject to all the things that we're subject to.
Speaker 1: And then there's people who are like, no, it's it's supernatural, paranormal,
Speaker 1: but you know, it's not beholden to the laws of
Speaker 1: physics and nature, which I just I didn't spend any
Speaker 1: time looking into that, because if you decided to suspend
Speaker 1: the laws of physics for Bigfoot, you probably ought to
Speaker 1: do it for everything else. To a Native American man explained,
Speaker 1: because we dog on big Foot a lot. A Native
Speaker 1: American man explained to me. Um wrote a letter to
Speaker 1: me once trying to explain sort of the position that
Speaker 1: that they didn't call it bigfoot, but there was there's
Speaker 1: a Native American tradition about this large Yeah, and he
Speaker 1: explained it in that way, like he used the term
Speaker 1: of a shape shifter, like a sort of magical creature,
Speaker 1: and that was the way it was discussed. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I didn't know that there's a lot of creatures in
Speaker 1: Native American folklore, in a Native American stories, that are
Speaker 1: everyday creatures that are imbued with these kinds of magical qualities.
Speaker 1: Um Grower's theory was well with those, if you strip
Speaker 1: out all the magical stuff, you have the animal. So
Speaker 1: he thought maybe Bigfoot would be the same kind of thing,
Speaker 1: like coyote was a trickster or raven or you know,
Speaker 1: thunderbird they think was the condor, which apparently should be
Speaker 1: extinct according to John Muellum. Oh yeah, I guess people
Speaker 1: riled up. Does it strike that from the record. So
Speaker 1: that's all I've been meaning to talk about more at
Speaker 1: some point, more condor thoughts. So we've got a lot
Speaker 1: of condor feedback we talked about, Um is there another variety?
Speaker 1: So you have the magic, the metaphysical Bigfoot, and then
Speaker 1: within there's also some people who think there is an
Speaker 1: actual government or logging industry cover up. The idea being
Speaker 1: that's similar with the spotted owl, is something like Bigfoot
Speaker 1: actually is proved to exist in the forest of the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest. Well, ship, you're not going to be can
Speaker 1: I swear? Yeah? I'll try and cut it out and
Speaker 1: get carried away. Um, we you know we can't go
Speaker 1: in there and log anymore. It's going to ruin our industry.
Speaker 1: I mean, if they did that for the owl, what
Speaker 1: are they going to do for Bigfoot? So there's a
Speaker 1: there's a conspiracy idea that either the Forest Service or
Speaker 1: the logging industry is somehow involved in covering this stuff
Speaker 1: up because they want to keep on business as usual,
Speaker 1: all right. That brings up something that brings up a
Speaker 1: real problem for me with something in your show that
Speaker 1: I feel like it needs better explanation early on and
Speaker 1: without giving too much way to the listeners. Early on
Speaker 1: in your series on Bigfoot, you go out with some
Speaker 1: fellers to investigate some Bigfoot nests and they explained to you,
Speaker 1: and I had a very hard time with this. They
Speaker 1: explained to you that a timber cruiser, like a person
Speaker 1: who assesses timber ahead of a timber harvest, see like
Speaker 1: you know, timber cruiser would go out and would be like,
Speaker 1: you know, does cutting is cutting here warranted? How many
Speaker 1: board feed are here? What's the except around the tree
Speaker 1: accessibility of the timber? That the timber cruiser goes out
Speaker 1: and finds bigfoot nests and these individuals bigfoot people suggest
Speaker 1: to you that they then called off the timber harvest
Speaker 1: in order to give them a couple of years to
Speaker 1: do research on the big foot nests and locked off
Speaker 1: all access to the area on the Olympic Peninsula. Locked
Speaker 1: off all access to the area in order to allow
Speaker 1: them to carry out their research. And only they can
Speaker 1: go into the area. Really mhm. The land was already gated.
Speaker 1: It was private timberland, okay, So it wasn't like it
Speaker 1: was for a it was private forest land. This guy
Speaker 1: was out and it's his family's land. And so this
Speaker 1: guy was out doing, you know, looking for timber and
Speaker 1: figuring out like what the cut was going to be
Speaker 1: on this particular plot, and then came across this stuff
Speaker 1: found the nests, called an the Department of Natural Resources
Speaker 1: from Washington and called an the Olympic Project. Now my
Speaker 1: feeling is is if you called an the Olympic Project
Speaker 1: is probably because you already have some sort of ideas
Speaker 1: about bigfoot in your mind, because they're they're Bigfoot research.
Speaker 1: They're Bigfoot Research, very nice people, very down to earth.
Speaker 1: They run some really interesting programs that actually, um, well
Speaker 1: we can get to this later. But I like the
Speaker 1: idea that some of the stuff that happens with bigfoot
Speaker 1: research is people get trained to recognize animal calls, to
Speaker 1: recognize things in the woods, so they're not assuming that
Speaker 1: everything out there is a bigfoot. But that's kind of
Speaker 1: a sidebar. Anyway, uh DNR came out and Olympic Project
Speaker 1: came out, and everyone's kind of looking at these things
Speaker 1: is thinking I don't know what they are. And so
Speaker 1: the timber guy, because it's his family's land, said, you know,
Speaker 1: we'll log somewhere else. You get five years. What did
Speaker 1: the why don't they allow anyone to photograph the big
Speaker 1: foot nests. Oh they will, They just wouldn't let me.
Speaker 1: How far are the big can google? If you google
Speaker 1: Bigfoot nests Olympic Peninsula, you'll find them online. No problem. Pictures, Okay,
Speaker 1: how can you just give us a rough sketch? I'd say, yeah,
Speaker 1: eight nine ten diameter, like they're pretty, they're they're woven,
Speaker 1: They're like a bird's nest. Now, I saw them two
Speaker 1: and a half years in three years in after they
Speaker 1: had been found, and they were pretty degraded, but you
Speaker 1: could still tell that they had been woven up the
Speaker 1: edges and up the sides. Um, and why hasn't anyone
Speaker 1: just run Why hasn't anyone run genetic swabs on these
Speaker 1: things they have? That's in the podcast there and what
Speaker 1: what what? What is the This isn't running until after
Speaker 1: December four? Right? Correct? Okay? What species is it that
Speaker 1: left the um? They found? Any kind of species you
Speaker 1: would have expected in the Pacific Northwest? Uh? The only
Speaker 1: primate they found was human, real human human human, not
Speaker 1: close to human. And then they found horse, which was
Speaker 1: kind of weird, but somebody probably tracked that in on
Speaker 1: their boots and so it was contamination so these were
Speaker 1: run at a lab in New York, probably whoever made
Speaker 1: the nest or these guys out there cutting samples out
Speaker 1: of it, because it's going to be very unless you
Speaker 1: go in like your and even crime scenes get cross
Speaker 1: contaminated all the time, unless you're going in and like
Speaker 1: a full level four biohazard suit. Um yeah, yeah. Any
Speaker 1: I mean, if if that finger that Peter Burne touched
Speaker 1: seventy years ago, the Yettie hand still had his DNA
Speaker 1: on it, that stuff could have been there for But
Speaker 1: when you usually when you pull DNA from a bone
Speaker 1: usually go in, you know, you go into a very
Speaker 1: control old atmosphere and pull material from inside of the
Speaker 1: bone where you don't have as much surface contamination. Well
Speaker 1: they did, they took big pie shaped wedges out of
Speaker 1: the nests. They bagged them up um, but there were
Speaker 1: some problems with the materials still having moisture in it,
Speaker 1: so you know that hastens um degradation of samples. And
Speaker 1: then they also did not do DNA testing on the
Speaker 1: nests immediately. They waited a few years. So wind and
Speaker 1: rain and sun and all the rest of that had
Speaker 1: also done some some damage to it, so you know,
Speaker 1: and that that sort of has people holding out hope
Speaker 1: that Okay, maybe these samples were contaminated and so we
Speaker 1: didn't get everything we needed out of it, or maybe
Speaker 1: whatever Bigfoot is, it's so closely related to humans that
Speaker 1: we're perceiving this human DNA as contamination but it's actually Bigfoot. Okay,
Speaker 1: can you lay out just like like totally, like just
Speaker 1: straight face, like never mind mind negativity, Like layoff for me.
Speaker 1: What in the community, in the Bigfoot community, what are
Speaker 1: the biggest like in the Bigfoot community, what are the
Speaker 1: right now sort of the hot pieces of evidence, like
Speaker 1: right now, like what is the you know, if you're
Speaker 1: really gonna sit down and present at a conference of
Speaker 1: of of of scientists, Okay, you're going to present and
Speaker 1: you get the best, brightest mind from the Bigfoot world,
Speaker 1: and he needs to come in and be like this
Speaker 1: is real. We need to pay attention to this. What
Speaker 1: are the three or four things that he's gonna lay
Speaker 1: out for us, um the Patterson Gimblan I'm not he
Speaker 1: or she will lay out for us. The Paterson Gimblin
Speaker 1: film will always come up. This is that nine seven
Speaker 1: footage Extremely Shaky was shot in the Six Rivers National
Speaker 1: Forest area of northern California, so sort of near Eureka
Speaker 1: Willow Creek. UM. That is always held up as being
Speaker 1: a piece of evidence. Um. It's called the Pa Person
Speaker 1: Gimblin film, and you have seen it. Everybody has seen it,
Speaker 1: or they've at least seen the still from it, which
Speaker 1: is the big foot sort of one hand in front,
Speaker 1: one hand behind, looking back over its shoulder. But didn't
Speaker 1: that didn't the big Foot? Wasn't that person? They were
Speaker 1: going out to film a big foot. They were out
Speaker 1: if so Roger Patterson, Yeah, I know. Roger Patterson and
Speaker 1: Bob Gimlin were down there looking the tracks. There had
Speaker 1: been tracks found in that area around some um logging
Speaker 1: equipment that had been put in over a weekend, and
Speaker 1: then the loggers came back in on a Monday morning
Speaker 1: and there were these tracks, and everybody got all kerfuffled
Speaker 1: about this. So Roger Patterson and Bob Gimblin came down
Speaker 1: from the Yakama, Washington area and spent three weeks, three
Speaker 1: or four weeks out there just kind of looking around.
Speaker 1: But yes, the fact that they were out looking for
Speaker 1: Bigfoot and Roger happened all running a camera adds questions
Speaker 1: to it. The flip side is, no one has ever
Speaker 1: brought the suit out, the suit that was worn in
Speaker 1: that film. And there's some questions about something that is seen,
Speaker 1: like someone can see a clasp and they argue that
Speaker 1: it was dry dung. That's a new one. I haven't
Speaker 1: heard that one. I don't know. But this is the thing.
Speaker 1: If you go to the if you go to the
Speaker 1: Patterson Giblin, WI Wikipedia page, we'll see you next year,
Speaker 1: Like you'll be in there. Every link that could you
Speaker 1: could possibly imagine. It's one of the deepest rabbit holes
Speaker 1: I've ever spent time in. And I just finally I
Speaker 1: was like, I can't, I'm done. I have to move
Speaker 1: on to something else. Um. But three different people have
Speaker 1: claimed to be the guy in the suit. No one's
Speaker 1: details match anyone else's details. It's just there's a lot
Speaker 1: of like questioning about it in the same way that
Speaker 1: there is about a lot of the other other evidence,
Speaker 1: like what is real, what is not. They still hold
Speaker 1: that famous because no one has disproved it, so they
Speaker 1: still put it up as being a significant piece of evidence.
Speaker 1: There were also footprints taken from the creature that day
Speaker 1: there's plaster casts and those are around as well, and
Speaker 1: seen as there's a I think it's the meta is
Speaker 1: that the metataurs break. It basically is the break halfway
Speaker 1: in the foot where it would be bending, whereas if
Speaker 1: these were fake feet, they would have been you know,
Speaker 1: flat on the ground, and this has a break in
Speaker 1: it so it looks like it's got pressure, so that
Speaker 1: you know, the on that foot anatomy and and mobility
Speaker 1: is brought into play there. Yeah, so it's like these
Speaker 1: little tiny bits that those are the kinds of things
Speaker 1: where you're like, well and they're hanging, they hang on
Speaker 1: to that one the you know the other. The other
Speaker 1: thing that's brought up a lot is how many footprints
Speaker 1: they're actually are, and the idea that someone could be
Speaker 1: hoaxing all of those and being you know, out there
Speaker 1: with fake feet seems impossible. So if you've got one
Speaker 1: one hand, all these fake footprints and they're all fake,
Speaker 1: and on one on the other hand, it's like bigfoot.
Speaker 1: Both seem equally silly. But what seems more likely, well,
Speaker 1: they tend to sink. Bigfoot is more likely. Um, what
Speaker 1: are some of the other ones, I mean, the DNA,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of hope being held out for DNA stuff,
Speaker 1: and who knows if that will ever turn anything up.
Speaker 1: It would be helpful if they could actually get samples
Speaker 1: of something that is is different from you know, bear
Speaker 1: poop or human DNA or dear hair, because a lot
Speaker 1: of samples get sent in and then some guys saying,
Speaker 1: oh I saw this weird thing out in the woods,
Speaker 1: and then sends in the sample and then it ends
Speaker 1: up being the same as nothing, nothing unusual. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: want to come back to good pieces of and unless
Speaker 1: I mean, are there anymore? Are there any like real
Speaker 1: zingers right now? The print? I know there's a body
Speaker 1: print from two thousand where someone put out some fruit bait.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and it slipped and it is impressure the
Speaker 1: butt print. I think that one's called I can't remember what.
Speaker 1: And someone proposed this scookomb cast that's that one. And
Speaker 1: someone proposed that he the bigfoot in getting the bait,
Speaker 1: didn't want to leave trap, that they don't like to
Speaker 1: leave tracks, and so he approached the bait somehow, laying down,
Speaker 1: and someone pointed out, well, if he doesn't want to
Speaker 1: leave footprints, it seems that he would also not want
Speaker 1: to leave a large body impression of himself. It seems fair.
Speaker 1: And that was in two thousand and that was researched
Speaker 1: by the big Foot Field Research Organization. Familiar with them. Yes,
Speaker 1: that was a group started by a guy named Matt Moneymaker,
Speaker 1: who I know is not a great name, it's his
Speaker 1: actual name. I did any him. He was on UM
Speaker 1: Finding Bigfoot, that TV show that was you know, ran
Speaker 1: like nine seasons, seven years, nine seasons something like that
Speaker 1: UM and was extremely popular. We were talking a minute
Speaker 1: about d NA UM and if if more evidence comes up,
Speaker 1: let's come back to evidence. But we're talking about DNA,
Speaker 1: which brings up this question of what is the idea
Speaker 1: of like what is it? How did it get here?
Speaker 1: Do they believe that it DNA? I was like, I
Speaker 1: can't help that. Okay, Again, imagine that that Bigfoot people
Speaker 1: are in explaining this UM in a in a you know,
Speaker 1: in a symposium. There's sort of two theories on this
Speaker 1: UM that I found sort of. I mean, I again,
Speaker 1: the stuff I did in this was very big foot
Speaker 1: one oh one. So there's much more elaborate theories out there.
Speaker 1: But the way I saw it was, there's people who
Speaker 1: think that that bigfoot would be closely related to humans,
Speaker 1: would be descended from an ancient human ancestor. Um. There's
Speaker 1: a guy named Jeff Meldrum who is a professor of
Speaker 1: anthropology at Idaho State University. He's kind of picked up
Speaker 1: the mantle from Grover, my relative as being the academic
Speaker 1: bigfoot guy, and he thinks it's probably descended from an
Speaker 1: ancient human relative and you know, branched off a couple
Speaker 1: million years ago and pasted the bearing land bridge um
Speaker 1: or passed through Bryingio and arrived here ahead of humans. No,
Speaker 1: when you know, I don't remember what he said about
Speaker 1: how it ended up in Yeah, No, it would have
Speaker 1: come here around the same time as humans. It would
Speaker 1: have been following along the same time as everyone else.
Speaker 1: So the interesting one of the interesting things I learned
Speaker 1: during this process was about evolution. And the idea for
Speaker 1: a long time was the evolution was a straight line
Speaker 1: that we you know, it was this slowly evolving line
Speaker 1: from primitiveness to perfection. And that's not the case. That
Speaker 1: it's just it's a shrub. Basically, there's all these different
Speaker 1: offshoots and branches and things that like you know, looked
Speaker 1: like they were promising and then just poof kind of
Speaker 1: died out, and at one point in time there was
Speaker 1: as many as like eight or nine hominid species walking
Speaker 1: around the planet at the same time. Yeah, you get
Speaker 1: in the area of um around the southern Mediterranean, in
Speaker 1: the Middle East, in northern Africa, and there's just all
Speaker 1: kinds of different Dennis Evans and Neanderthal and homle Forlorensiensis,
Speaker 1: and I mean, there's just lots of different things. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like nature throwing spaghetti at the wall and
Speaker 1: seeing what sticks to some degree. But many of these
Speaker 1: things had like enormously long you know, like Neanderthal's were
Speaker 1: in Neanderthals. Yeah, I know, but it's like, you know
Speaker 1: what you mean, there's certain things, there's certain things you
Speaker 1: know they're right and you don't care anyway, but you
Speaker 1: don't do it because it just winds up making a
Speaker 1: statement about itself. Like there's certain words you struggle with,
Speaker 1: like like the niche or it's niche, right, So you
Speaker 1: wind up being like, Okay, I get I understand it's
Speaker 1: supposed to do it this way, like buffalo and bison. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I struggle with it all the time. Um, So I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna go Neanderthal. Okay, that's fine. That's what I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna judge you, Um, knowing that I should that
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it right. That they had, that they occupied,
Speaker 1: you're for far longer than modern humans. If they were
Speaker 1: there for there were six thousand years. So to call
Speaker 1: him a failure, it's like by what measure right? And
Speaker 1: I'm not saying they're a failure necessarily. Um, that's not
Speaker 1: what I was trying to imply in the least. But
Speaker 1: what's interesting and what they found out in recent years
Speaker 1: is they may not have in fact died out. They
Speaker 1: may have just inner bread and now like you could
Speaker 1: do those twenty three and me ancestry dot Com DNA
Speaker 1: tests and people are like, oh, I'm I have I
Speaker 1: have less than average, I have less than average Neanderthal
Speaker 1: intro aggression. And it turns out that, um, what does
Speaker 1: that mean for you? Nothing? But was surprised the dickens
Speaker 1: out of me. Was I always thought I was one
Speaker 1: fourth Sicilian and you weren't well like Italian, two North African.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, Yeah, And it's it's all gets I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a hard This all gets so complicated because
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of how accurate is all kinds of
Speaker 1: things in your lineage that don't pass down, you know,
Speaker 1: friendly like it's it's just it's alder conversation. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I took note of being less Neanderthal than average for
Speaker 1: the number of people who have submitted themselves to the testing,
Speaker 1: but still a little bit. So yeah that Neanderthals. Yeah
Speaker 1: they didn't. It wasn't like the last one one day
Speaker 1: faded away and died. There're somehow interbreeding with modern humans. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyway, the idea is that maybe Bigfoot is another
Speaker 1: one of these like relic comminated species that has existed
Speaker 1: and traveled a long damn ways. Well pretty much most
Speaker 1: most humanids did travel fair distances, but that's a long ways.
Speaker 1: It's a long ways. Um. And then the other theory
Speaker 1: is that Bigfoot is descended further back on the evolutionary
Speaker 1: tree and is more closely related to primates and is
Speaker 1: descended from an ancient Asian ape called Gigantipithecus, of which
Speaker 1: there is very little information. They have some jaws and
Speaker 1: like several her teeth, several thousand teeth, and that's it.
Speaker 1: They don't have any long bones, they don't have any
Speaker 1: anything that would really help with descriptor so some people think, okay,
Speaker 1: giganti pathagus. Look at the size of the jaw, look
Speaker 1: at the size of the teeth. This thing must have
Speaker 1: been huge. And some people say, this thing ate a
Speaker 1: lot of course grass and fibrous plants and needed a
Speaker 1: big jaw and big teeth to be able to get
Speaker 1: through that kind of food, and probably wasn't that big.
Speaker 1: But nobody knows. So everything, all of this stuff is
Speaker 1: just theoretical. What is the most fashionable idea in the
Speaker 1: community about what they eat? But the same stuff as bears.
Speaker 1: It's very omnivorous. That's what I heard over and over again.
Speaker 1: It's like if it's if an area can support a
Speaker 1: bear population, it can support a big foot population, and
Speaker 1: there then that will kill and eat meat. Um. I think,
Speaker 1: so yeah, there's a guy. Um. I own a cabin
Speaker 1: in southeast Alaska, and I bought it from a guy
Speaker 1: who bought it from a guy who bought it from
Speaker 1: a guy who had had a big foot who had
Speaker 1: found a nest Prince of Wales Island. And he found
Speaker 1: the nest because uh, he found the nest because he
Speaker 1: could smell it I've heard the bigfoot smells very bad.
Speaker 1: This is actually something that's come up in Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there's rumor in that part, in those parts that this
Speaker 1: bigfoot population that exists out on this island, which creates
Speaker 1: a whole problem for it limited resources unless it's getting
Speaker 1: they got john boats. It's a huge island like it
Speaker 1: could support you know, sports, thousands and thousands of black
Speaker 1: bearris right. Um. But yeah, there's just some these folks
Speaker 1: feel that there's a sustainable a handful of people that
Speaker 1: I've run into field, there's a sustainable population of mouth
Speaker 1: there or that that that's existed over the eons. Um
Speaker 1: that they like to stick deer up in trees. I've
Speaker 1: heard that the stashed their deer up in trees. Cougars
Speaker 1: do that too, though, don't they know they don't stashm trees.
Speaker 1: They don't know leopards do that. Yeah, that's true, but
Speaker 1: cougars don't. They bury him at the basis of they
Speaker 1: scratch up dirt and sticks and leaves and wedges under
Speaker 1: so they're cashing them. And you say under onto, Oh
Speaker 1: I don't. I didn't. That doesn't surprise me. But I
Speaker 1: haven't heard that. I've never heard of a mountain lion
Speaker 1: drag and deer up into a tree. We'll say this
Speaker 1: and then someone's gonna have a bunch of we're gonna
Speaker 1: get You're gonna get a letter. Yeah, but leopards stash
Speaker 1: them in trees. Um, what's that going with that? Uh?
Speaker 1: You a guy had a cabin. He was a believer
Speaker 1: in the nest. But I had another thing about that.
Speaker 1: What about it? What was it? What you're talking about?
Speaker 1: The smell smell that he went by, that he located
Speaker 1: it based on its odor. Bears in here don't smell
Speaker 1: very good either. Though. There was a there was a
Speaker 1: grizzly attack in the park like two years ago, Yellowstone
Speaker 1: National Park. Um, and it's actually the kid of a
Speaker 1: friend of my parents, I think, and he just got
Speaker 1: ripped to shreds. Lived. But he said the things he
Speaker 1: remembers the most was how bad it smells. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: smelled all man or bears. How do they smell? I
Speaker 1: haven't found it to be pleasant. No, I haven't found
Speaker 1: it to be on unpleasant ris depends what it had
Speaker 1: been into. Yeah, I guess how it depends on how
Speaker 1: close your face could have something I wouldn't be surprised
Speaker 1: that it would have something all over its fur that
Speaker 1: might smell like they don't have like a bad like
Speaker 1: like they don't have like a general odor about like
Speaker 1: a skunker. So I've heard the smell thing a number
Speaker 1: of times, and you were asking about evidence. The one
Speaker 1: other thing that still sort of makes me question is
Speaker 1: the eyewitness accounts that I've heard. Some of them are
Speaker 1: just crazy. Can hold onto that because I know what
Speaker 1: we were talking about. We're talking about like the diet,
Speaker 1: So diet would be similar to a black beard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the thought, and they might eat meat, fish, pretty
Speaker 1: much anything they can get their hands on. I was
Speaker 1: also told that they like fruit pies that I remember
Speaker 1: reading the thing that research or the Bigfoot researchers will
Speaker 1: try to lure move watermelons. Oh that's a new one.
Speaker 1: I'd heard like fruit pies. But my feeling is if
Speaker 1: you put a fruit pie out, you're going to get raccoons,
Speaker 1: I mean, anything anything out of the sun it campers nearby, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: anybody who knows is going to walk in the door
Speaker 1: of the fruit pie and do anything that eats something
Speaker 1: has excrement. How do they explain the lack of that
Speaker 1: do they clean up their own droppings? Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: theory they might bury them. Oh um, But yeah there
Speaker 1: is no. So there's a I at New York University
Speaker 1: who's a molecular primatologist and he's got you know, he's
Speaker 1: an anthropologist and he works in DNA, and he does
Speaker 1: not think Bigfoot is really he said, the chances are
Speaker 1: adjacent to zero. But he's one of these guys that's
Speaker 1: just fascinated by the phenomenon. And he will work with
Speaker 1: a few very select researchers if they raise the money,
Speaker 1: um and send them hit their samples, he will run
Speaker 1: tests on them. And he says, I just get so
Speaker 1: much bear crap because people will send it in they'll
Speaker 1: be like I found this, and then he'll run it
Speaker 1: through the test and it's bear over and over and
Speaker 1: over again, nothing nothing different. Is it true that right
Speaker 1: now someone still has a million dollar reward out for
Speaker 1: a dead Bigfoot? That's a distinct possibility. Um. There is
Speaker 1: a guy named Tom Biscardi who I think put up
Speaker 1: a reward for that for a carcass. Yeah, what do
Speaker 1: they feel the people you interviewed, what do they feel
Speaker 1: is happening to the big Foot? Carcasses. Um, they're scavenged.
Speaker 1: They're saying, you know, how often do you see a
Speaker 1: bear carcass in the woods, and see, I've never seen
Speaker 1: one find bear skulls, I should say all the time.
Speaker 1: But I found a bunch of bear skulls. The idea
Speaker 1: their their theory is that you don't find bodies of
Speaker 1: animals in the woods very often, that they get scavenged,
Speaker 1: that the porcupines eat the bones, that the bones get
Speaker 1: scattered as the animals, you know, it dies, It's eight
Speaker 1: hundred pounds of stinking meat and it just gets eaten up. No,
Speaker 1: that's their theory. But I have not, as someone who's
Speaker 1: hiked in camped pretty much their whole life, not probably
Speaker 1: not as far into the backwoods as you've gone. In fact,
Speaker 1: I'm positive of that. UM. But I've only ever seen
Speaker 1: one dead, full dead skeleton ever. It was a deer
Speaker 1: and it was gone by three months later. But they
Speaker 1: but the but bones are capture in the paleontological record.
Speaker 1: You're like LaBrea tar pits. They are and they're not.
Speaker 1: This was actually another interesting conversation I had with a
Speaker 1: guy named Ian Tattersall, who is the UM is an
Speaker 1: anthropologist out at the American Museum of Natural History in
Speaker 1: New York, and he said, it is incredibly hard to
Speaker 1: become a fossil, but things managed to become fossil. They do.
Speaker 1: But what we have available to us is only a
Speaker 1: very small fraction of what the full fossil record is,
Speaker 1: because if you think about it, you have to die
Speaker 1: in the right place, at the right time, under the
Speaker 1: right conditions. It has to be the right kind of
Speaker 1: material that you're buried in, and then you have to
Speaker 1: be uncovered at the right moment. And then and the
Speaker 1: the elements and the conditions can't be wearing it down,
Speaker 1: and you have to be discovered by someone. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: it's think about this minute. We're talking about a population
Speaker 1: of give or take maybe two thousand things that weigh
Speaker 1: eight hundred pounds six hundred pounds. There is no other
Speaker 1: large mammal that exists in North America that we don't
Speaker 1: find the remains of all the time. All of our
Speaker 1: large mammals get hit by cars every year. Even when
Speaker 1: you had fifty Florida panthers, when the population was as
Speaker 1: low as fifty, multiple ones would get hit on the
Speaker 1: highway every year in Florida, It's like you can't say that,
Speaker 1: you can't look someone in the eye and explain to
Speaker 1: them why that two thousand animals that have coexisted with
Speaker 1: humans here not just remember like never mind like coexisted
Speaker 1: with Native Americans for what we now know to be
Speaker 1: at least fifteen thousand, five hundred years, coexisted with euro
Speaker 1: Americans here for hundreds of years that no one's ever
Speaker 1: found a own because we find, like all of our
Speaker 1: other large mammals are well established in the Palion's logical record.
Speaker 1: You got a Librea tar pit, the Librea tar pits,
Speaker 1: dozens of mammoths, hundreds of dire wolves, every creature that
Speaker 1: we know would show up there routinely. So it is
Speaker 1: a real problem to say that there is a thing
Speaker 1: that's alive right now that we don't have any bones for,
Speaker 1: because the porcupine's got them all. I know the bones
Speaker 1: I know here. The one other thing that has been
Speaker 1: presented to me is that the DNA analysis on a
Speaker 1: lot of bones is fairly recent. So if somebody found
Speaker 1: bones before and they ended up in a collection somewhere,
Speaker 1: they are not running. And Ian tatters All told me this,
Speaker 1: I said, you know, well, what if we've got all
Speaker 1: these you know, hominid species that we're finding, now what
Speaker 1: else is there? What have we misidentified in these collections
Speaker 1: of bones? All the museums have he said, there's no
Speaker 1: he's going back and digging through those collections because there's
Speaker 1: no glory in that. Essentially, it's like if you find
Speaker 1: the new thing out in the world, that's exciting. But
Speaker 1: who wants to go back to the storeroom and be
Speaker 1: the guy sorting through the bones and running analysis on those.
Speaker 1: Maybe someone's like, man, it's supposed a pound person, yeah,
Speaker 1: or like a you know, this is a weird bare
Speaker 1: bone and then it ends up in some locker somewhere
Speaker 1: and nobody ever does anything with it. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that that's the case, but I think that, you know,
Speaker 1: people will find reasons to make this creature real. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: can we talk about sightings? Yeah? And I bet you will.
Speaker 1: I want to get around. It's like a wild You're
Speaker 1: going to get letters about this. I want to get around.
Speaker 1: Let's um. I heard. These are actually the hardest thing
Speaker 1: for me to throw out because some of the people
Speaker 1: I talked to or you know, thirty year US Forest
Speaker 1: Service fishing game BLM Like they're outside all the time,
Speaker 1: familiar with wildlife, familiar with the ecosystems that they're in,
Speaker 1: and then they see something that completely alters their view
Speaker 1: of wildlife out there and their beliefs. Yeah, their beliefs,
Speaker 1: And it's hard for me to throw that out because
Speaker 1: they clearly had an experience that shook them. Whether it's bigfoot,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I wasn't there, I didn't see it,
Speaker 1: I wasn't part of it, but it clearly is something
Speaker 1: that has just rocked them to their core. Did you
Speaker 1: talk to a lot of people who had I witness accounts?
Speaker 1: Can you tell me about a couple, Tell me about
Speaker 1: a couple of the ones that's like surprised you where
Speaker 1: you're like, wow, this seems like a sane, rational pers
Speaker 1: So one of them came from a guy named John
Speaker 1: mayan Zinski. He is um. He lives down in Wyoming,
Speaker 1: in Atlantic City. If you know where that is, Atlantic City, Wyoming, Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I don't, teeny tiny, it's sort of it's not far
Speaker 1: from Pinedale. Yeah, all civilization you'll ever need. According to
Speaker 1: their sign um, he was working for must have been
Speaker 1: the Forest Service at the time, and it was his
Speaker 1: turn to go out and run this sort of scouting thing.
Speaker 1: They were doing research on big horn sheeps sheep, not sheeps,
Speaker 1: big feats um And he went in, got his gear
Speaker 1: from the depot and grabbed his stuff and then headed
Speaker 1: out into the woods. And on the way out the door,
Speaker 1: this guy yells to him, hey, I spilled baking grease
Speaker 1: on that tent. Just f y I. So he goes
Speaker 1: out and wyoming um a open well not all of it.
Speaker 1: There's forests over there. It's pretty air and open. I
Speaker 1: think he was in the winds um and he was
Speaker 1: camped out there in the forest somewhere and had gone
Speaker 1: to sleep and then woke up to the sound of
Speaker 1: something breathing, and for a while I thought it was
Speaker 1: a bear, And then he said it sounded different from
Speaker 1: a bear. It sounded like maybe a sick bear. And
Speaker 1: then whatever it was kind of came up to the
Speaker 1: tent and pushed its its basin. He thought, right where
Speaker 1: that baking grease spot is. And he's like, well, damn,
Speaker 1: it's a bear. So he like yells and like wax
Speaker 1: it on the nose to try and scare it off,
Speaker 1: and it runs off back behind the sort of um
Speaker 1: the dog hair pines that were on the edge of
Speaker 1: his camp, and he hears it breathing again. Then it
Speaker 1: comes back a second time. It does the same thing,
Speaker 1: and he does that, hits it again, and it comes
Speaker 1: back a third time, and this time it seems like
Speaker 1: it's over top of the tent because he can silhouette
Speaker 1: see it silhouetted over the top. The moon was full,
Speaker 1: and he thinks it's holding onto the lodge pole pine
Speaker 1: above his tent, and he's standing there kind of are
Speaker 1: He's sitting in the tent trying to figure out what
Speaker 1: he's gonna do to sort of scare this thing off.
Speaker 1: And then another face sort of presses itself into the
Speaker 1: bacon grease stain, and he's like, well, it's a mama
Speaker 1: bear in her cub Like this is the worst possible
Speaker 1: situation to be in, but he wants to sort of
Speaker 1: like get them away from the tent, so he wax
Speaker 1: it again, and this time it's not soft like a nose,
Speaker 1: it's like rock hard, and it's whatever this thing is.
Speaker 1: He throws it off. It's b elens and it comes
Speaker 1: crashing down onto the tent. He's getting out of the
Speaker 1: tent and trying to wiggle his way out of it,
Speaker 1: and then the thing takes off and it's big, that's
Speaker 1: all he can tell. And it's hiding behind these pines
Speaker 1: on the edge of camp, and he's sitting by the
Speaker 1: fire with a blanket over him and his forty five
Speaker 1: in his lap and just thinking, what the hell is
Speaker 1: this thing? And then whatever it is starts lobbing pine
Speaker 1: cones at him and lobbs thirty forty pine cones, and
Speaker 1: he's not in any hurry to get away from the fire,
Speaker 1: and then the thing kind of just shovels off. And
Speaker 1: the next morning he gets up and he looks to
Speaker 1: see if there's any footprints or you know, bare tracks
Speaker 1: or anything like that, and there's too much pine stuff
Speaker 1: so he can't see what it is. So he goes,
Speaker 1: gets up his stuff, goes back into UM the station
Speaker 1: and tells his boss about it. And it's it's his
Speaker 1: boss who says, I think you might have had a
Speaker 1: big foot encounter, because apparently there's been a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who had reported something similar UM in that area
Speaker 1: over the past you months. And this is a guy
Speaker 1: who worked on the Lunar Exploration module in the sixties,
Speaker 1: when he was like, you know, a graduate student or
Speaker 1: an undergrad in college. He'd worked in fish and wildlife,
Speaker 1: he'd worked with BLM. He's very soft spoken, he's not grandstanding. Um,
Speaker 1: just like rational, Like he's just like the kind of
Speaker 1: guy that he just was so down to earth. And
Speaker 1: he tells you the story and you're just like, what
Speaker 1: was it? And he's like, I still don't you know
Speaker 1: to this day, I still don't know. Hit me with
Speaker 1: another one. Okay, I go comment. You got to listen
Speaker 1: to episode four. They're full of them. Um. Another guy
Speaker 1: talked to was a guy named Derek Randalls who is
Speaker 1: up in the Olympic Peninsula and he's actually one of
Speaker 1: the best. Yeah, and he is one of the founders
Speaker 1: of the Olympic Project because of an experience he had
Speaker 1: in the eighties where he'd gone out camping. He was back.
Speaker 1: They were in the back country, he and a couple
Speaker 1: of friends, and um, they were setting up they were
Speaker 1: getting ready to set up camp on this sort of
Speaker 1: ridgeline maybe a quarter mile half mile off the trail
Speaker 1: that they've taken up, and something started throwing rocks at them. First,
Speaker 1: they were all coming into the right of them and
Speaker 1: then they were all coming into the left and then
Speaker 1: they could hear this thing sort of coming through the
Speaker 1: trees at him, and they all flipped out, grabbed up
Speaker 1: their packs and like took off down the trail. And
Speaker 1: then Derek remembered he had a gun in his bag, um,
Speaker 1: and so he you know, pulled off the pack, pulled
Speaker 1: out the gun, and then he saw this things standing
Speaker 1: in the trees just staring at him. And I asked him, well,
Speaker 1: what was it? And he said it was eight feet tall.
Speaker 1: It was just absolutely enormous, and he just said, just
Speaker 1: scared the Jesus out of him. And these are the
Speaker 1: kinds of stories I heard where people were kind of
Speaker 1: out doing their own thing. They're used to being in
Speaker 1: the wilderness, they grew up being outside. They're not the
Speaker 1: kind of people who are going to be easily startled
Speaker 1: by the animals and the things that they see out there,
Speaker 1: and this just really changes everything for them. Do you
Speaker 1: you have a background as a journalist. You are a journalist, Um,
Speaker 1: why is it that journalists what is it about journalists
Speaker 1: attraction to people who believe in Bigfoot? Like I'm obviously
Speaker 1: part of this. I'm wanting to talk to you because
Speaker 1: this is like, like for me to talk about it,
Speaker 1: I gotta talk about it to someone like you. For
Speaker 1: you to talk about you want to talk about to
Speaker 1: the actual people who I have more of a difficult time.
Speaker 1: You need to have a little bit of you. I
Speaker 1: like the buffer because I can because I can just
Speaker 1: get the questions that I have answered better if there's
Speaker 1: like a layer between that. But but why do journalists
Speaker 1: like the story? Well? I think part of it is
Speaker 1: it is it is a colorful story, no matter how
Speaker 1: you slice it, like, there is a lot of color
Speaker 1: to this. There was a you know, last fall, there
Speaker 1: was a well this fall, it is still fall. There
Speaker 1: was a Bigfoot festival held in North Carolina and probably
Speaker 1: six different North Carolina, every state, every state but every
Speaker 1: state in Hawaii. UM, there was probably like six or
Speaker 1: seven journalism outfits that showed up there because it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's it's zany, and it's you're going
Speaker 1: to talk to characters. It's going to be interesting and
Speaker 1: you know, especially I think right well, anytime, any time
Speaker 1: when the news is difficult and hard to swallow and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of hard things going on, you're looking
Speaker 1: for stories that will get people interested, but won't necessarily
Speaker 1: turn into like a political knife fight. Um. And I
Speaker 1: will say bigfoot is a fairly universal topic. I you know,
Speaker 1: aside from my accountant who there's only and you who
Speaker 1: hates bigfoot. Um, there's been I have not had a
Speaker 1: conversation yet with anyone who's not. First they'll like laugh
Speaker 1: or they'll kind of joke about it and be like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is dumb, but then they have all these questions.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, So there's something about bigfoot that people
Speaker 1: do find appealing, and then journalists are among them. There's
Speaker 1: the thing I've talked about a bunch. I need to
Speaker 1: go like reread it to make sure I'm getting it right.
Speaker 1: But no doubt you're familiar with the writer Joan Didion.
Speaker 1: Early it's early in Slouching towards Bethlehem or early in
Speaker 1: the White album. I think it's early in Slouching towards Bethlehem. Um,
Speaker 1: she talks about away in which people and this is
Speaker 1: she's writing pre Internet. Okay, so she brought this before
Speaker 1: the Internet came out. But she's talking about a way
Speaker 1: in which people rebel against information. I'm paraphrasing what she's
Speaker 1: saying but there's people who as information becomes so available
Speaker 1: and we know about so much and we can find
Speaker 1: out about so much, there's a way to rebel against
Speaker 1: information by like tenaciously grabbing ontos and myths and conspiracies
Speaker 1: because it gives you a sense of knowing something that
Speaker 1: everyone else just can't see. This thing that like I
Speaker 1: know the truth, I'm special, I'm inside, I'm I'm aware,
Speaker 1: and all the rest of you people are not aware.
Speaker 1: And that gets that that's the conspiracy theory thing too.
Speaker 1: I think that just gets taken to the sort of
Speaker 1: a very extreme level. But it's this idea that somehow
Speaker 1: I have knowledge about things that you don't and that
Speaker 1: makes me special. Yeah, you're rebelling against widely held information
Speaker 1: to become that like you know the truth but no
Speaker 1: one can see it. And it's like a type of
Speaker 1: mind frame or it's a mindset. Yeah, And I find
Speaker 1: that mindset in your in the time you spent with
Speaker 1: big Foot believers. Yeah, I mean, I think you know,
Speaker 1: I've I've found that in a lot of the different
Speaker 1: people that I've ended up talking to over the course
Speaker 1: of my journalism careers. People like to feel like somehow
Speaker 1: they have knowledge somehow they're different, somehow they stand out,
Speaker 1: somehow they're they're able to separate themselves from what society
Speaker 1: is trying to make you do, or what the government's
Speaker 1: trying to tell you to do, or what you know
Speaker 1: conventional wisdom is um. The part I've never understood is
Speaker 1: why why is there that need to feel special? I mean,
Speaker 1: we all have it, I think, and to some degree,
Speaker 1: pretty much everybody wants to feel like they're an individual.
Speaker 1: They're different, they're not just thinking things because someone has
Speaker 1: told them to think those things. But yeah, where where
Speaker 1: that comes from, I don't know. Is the bigfoot world
Speaker 1: predominantly male? I expected it to be more male than
Speaker 1: it was. There were quite a few women, And actually
Speaker 1: next summer I've been invited to go on an all
Speaker 1: women's month long Bigfoot expedition. You can do it, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do. I think I'll probably go on part of
Speaker 1: it because there was some women I met before really nice.
Speaker 1: And part of what they really want to do is
Speaker 1: they just want to educate people about being outside too.
Speaker 1: Like you know that screaming sound is not a bigfoot,
Speaker 1: that is an owl. You know that this is how
Speaker 1: you set up a proper camp like. Part of it
Speaker 1: is wilderness education in some ways, which is part of
Speaker 1: the reason I think I also like Bigfoot is because
Speaker 1: it's I don't know, I'd rather have people go out
Speaker 1: look for bigfoot than play video games. I think that's
Speaker 1: a more valuable use of your time. When you were
Speaker 1: doing your research for your podcast series, tell us a
Speaker 1: name of the podcast series. We want to hit it
Speaker 1: multiple times. Wild thing singular, two words, two words singular.
Speaker 1: When you were doing the research, did you came into
Speaker 1: it thinking it was Holcomb did you evacillate through your
Speaker 1: journey a little bit? Like the first time I saw
Speaker 1: those nests, I was like, this is weird, Like this
Speaker 1: is not something I've seen before. And you know, again,
Speaker 1: I do not have the level of expertise that you
Speaker 1: guys have with being out in the woods. But I
Speaker 1: grew up in Idaho camping and hiking and being outside,
Speaker 1: and this was not like something I had seen before.
Speaker 1: And then you would hear someone would show you. They'd
Speaker 1: be like, oh, I've got a picture of a bigfoot footprint.
Speaker 1: You gotta see it, and you get your hopes up.
Speaker 1: You'd be like, this is going to be it, and
Speaker 1: it would look like a puddle and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's nothing. So that you know, there was a lot
Speaker 1: of kind of this back and forth, and especially like
Speaker 1: I said, when I heard those stories from people, those
Speaker 1: those were hurt for me to dismiss because it's hard
Speaker 1: to say to someone you didn't see that, like you're
Speaker 1: just making stuff up like that. They just wasn't that
Speaker 1: kind of situation? Did you? Did you find yourself needing
Speaker 1: to act like you were more or of a believer
Speaker 1: than you were? Um? I mean I when I went
Speaker 1: into this, and no matter where I went, I made
Speaker 1: it very clear, I'm going coming into this as an
Speaker 1: objective observer. You know, tell me what your experience has been,
Speaker 1: tell me what you've seen, tell me about your evidence.
Speaker 1: But I haven't made up my mind one way or
Speaker 1: or the other. Would the people you talk to feel
Speaker 1: that it was a betrayal that you right now? You know,
Speaker 1: like the way we like to put it, if God
Speaker 1: can put a gun to your head and said it's Bigfoot,
Speaker 1: real or fake, you'd say fake in this situation, right, yeah?
Speaker 1: Would they feel like it's a betrayal that you that
Speaker 1: you would say that now? Is there like is there
Speaker 1: like a code of honor here where you're supposed to
Speaker 1: believe when you're in the community. No, I don't think so,
Speaker 1: because I would ask questions. I asked people a lot
Speaker 1: of questions, you know, and I asked them to like,
Speaker 1: how can you keep going out day after day or
Speaker 1: year after are and look for this thing when there
Speaker 1: is so little, when there is no physical evidence, And
Speaker 1: they say, you know, sometimes it's hard, But I just
Speaker 1: I really think it's out there. Like I think they
Speaker 1: understand too, that what they have is very tenuous. There
Speaker 1: are peeples, some people who are adamant that there is proof,
Speaker 1: but a lot of people I think are quite shaky
Speaker 1: on it. But it's something that they want. Do they
Speaker 1: feel protective of it, Like let's just say for a minute,
Speaker 1: let's say from it. All of a sudden, uh, one
Speaker 1: gets hit by a car. Okay, he's crossing I five,
Speaker 1: you know where it runs up through Washington and it's
Speaker 1: like down in l Am he's migrating eastward, He's like,
Speaker 1: and Wyoming has him. There's gotta be some genetic exchange that,
Speaker 1: I mean, there can't be a thriving population of Wyoming
Speaker 1: they migrate. He's had an East Peninsula gets hit on
Speaker 1: hit on the Highway. It's a pregnant theme. Wh right
Speaker 1: gets rich, right pregnant female. Also, it's like, wow, they
Speaker 1: were right with the people you met, Uh, would they
Speaker 1: be like great? And then the inn the real scientific
Speaker 1: community comes in and it becomes this whole thing. Would
Speaker 1: would it lose its luster? I think there's an element
Speaker 1: of that. Um. I think there is some recognition that
Speaker 1: if Bigfoot was emphatically proved to be a real species,
Speaker 1: that your your citizens saschologists, you're you're amateur bigfooters, they're
Speaker 1: gonna get kind of cut out of the cut out
Speaker 1: of the game, because, yeah, because it's gonna be government
Speaker 1: scientists and you know, primatologists from all the finest research institutions,
Speaker 1: and all these forests are going to be off limits,
Speaker 1: and you know, all of a sudden it's going to
Speaker 1: be it's gonna be a very different thing if that
Speaker 1: were to happen. And I imagine I'm sure they've thought
Speaker 1: about the fact that if Bigfoot is in fact proved
Speaker 1: to be real, then what what do you do? Then
Speaker 1: you're not gonna be able to pursue it with the
Speaker 1: same abandon Are you familiar with the comedian Joe Rogan. Yes,
Speaker 1: Joe feels that he spends he spent some time looking
Speaker 1: at similar to you, but from it from a comedian perspective,
Speaker 1: digging into the world. I don't want to use the
Speaker 1: word that he used, but he used the word that
Speaker 1: like he found that bigfoot researchers are um white men
Speaker 1: that people would not want to make love too. Oh
Speaker 1: that's me. Yeah. He had a term like, I'm I
Speaker 1: can guess um that there was that that there's like, uh,
Speaker 1: there's a sort of that that there's a sort of
Speaker 1: pulling away from that there's a sort of pulling away
Speaker 1: from the normal ext changes and and things that make
Speaker 1: up our lives among this community. I didn't feel that, honestly, No.
Speaker 1: I mean I thought I thought it was actually a
Speaker 1: very robust social community. Like everything I went to was
Speaker 1: like a big family reunion and people would come in
Speaker 1: from all over and they were buddies and know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think in any group, I don't know.
Speaker 1: That just seems kind of mean to me. He's a comedian,
Speaker 1: like he's like, okay, you know. He also made a
Speaker 1: joke that like, why is no one mad at Bob
Speaker 1: Marley for having shot a sheriff. It's a good question, right,
Speaker 1: He's just he's just he's a comedian. Yeah. Um, I
Speaker 1: specifically went in with the idea that I didn't want
Speaker 1: to be making fun of people and being mean. Um.
Speaker 1: I can see his point. But there's a lot of
Speaker 1: subcultures in American society that are filled with a similar descriptor.
Speaker 1: Like I think you can I think it's unfair to
Speaker 1: just be like, oh, big bigfoot people are not the
Speaker 1: kind of people you'd want to have a relationship with.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not gonna say anything else because I
Speaker 1: don't want to get hate mail. But sure there's a
Speaker 1: lot of there's a lot of subcultures that are filled
Speaker 1: with people you might not consider conventionally attractive or interesting
Speaker 1: or socially adept. I mean Silicon valleys like loaded with them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I bet you know. A lot of people would say
Speaker 1: the exact same thing about hunters. Yeah, big game hunters,
Speaker 1: but a broad, broad stroke of folks. It wasn't like
Speaker 1: a particular demographic that you found white largely white, some
Speaker 1: Native American. But I would say that that like if
Speaker 1: you had to do a demographic term for it, it's
Speaker 1: this is a whider phenomenon. Yeah, and I don't think
Speaker 1: there's too much you really read into that accident, communityographics, demographics, distribution,
Speaker 1: rural and the pet kinds of people who are going
Speaker 1: to be out in the woods. To begin with, I
Speaker 1: actually had a really long conversation with a woman named
Speaker 1: rue Map who started a group called Outdoor AFRO, which
Speaker 1: is to get more African Americans comfortable with going out
Speaker 1: into the woods. And she and I had a big
Speaker 1: conversation about this, and she said, look, you know, up
Speaker 1: until very very recently, for black and for African Americans
Speaker 1: to be outside in the woods that was that was
Speaker 1: a sketchy proposition, not because of bears or cougars, but
Speaker 1: because of like other things that would could potentially cause
Speaker 1: a lot of harm. So you know, it's it's all
Speaker 1: it's relative on who's going to be out in the
Speaker 1: woods and and doing those kinds of things to begin with. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I don't read I don't read a bunch into that one.
Speaker 1: Is there things that, uh are the things that I
Speaker 1: haven't asked you about that you wish I was going
Speaker 1: to ask you about? Just do those things for a minute,
Speaker 1: state the question within your answer statement, question within my
Speaker 1: answer like things that I really ought to know about,
Speaker 1: like things you were dying to talk about that we
Speaker 1: didn't touch on. I feel like we got to a
Speaker 1: lot of it. I think the one thing I do
Speaker 1: kind of want to talk about is what the appeal
Speaker 1: comes from, Like why people do want Bigfoot to be real? Okay,
Speaker 1: so not you as a journalist, I know. I actually yeah,
Speaker 1: me too. This also gets to why I want Bigfoot
Speaker 1: to be real, because my feeling is is, um if
Speaker 1: you can't imagine the possibility of Bigfoot, if you can't
Speaker 1: imagine a landscape that's like wild enough and and can
Speaker 1: that they can hold something like Bigfoot, that everything is
Speaker 1: already so mapped out and pruned and paved and like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's all on Google Maps, it kind of
Speaker 1: sucks the magic out a little bit, Like there's something
Speaker 1: I don't want to talk about magical Bigfoot, but there
Speaker 1: is something magical about Bigfoot, about something like a creature
Speaker 1: that's clever enough to elude us, that can exist in
Speaker 1: this wilderness out there that has a lot of appeal.
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought of it in that way that it's
Speaker 1: a belief, that it's a belief in wilderness when you
Speaker 1: say that to me, I haven't thought about it. But
Speaker 1: what comes to my mind pretty quickly is that right now,
Speaker 1: in pondering wildlife and pondering wilderness, I think that realism
Speaker 1: is real important. I think that that that instead of
Speaker 1: exaggerating its potential, it's really important right now to look
Speaker 1: at it as a finite thing that is there because
Speaker 1: we're making a commitment to having it there, and that
Speaker 1: it's not this unknown, unconquered thing. That's something that we
Speaker 1: get and we can count it down to the acre
Speaker 1: and we can watch it vanish, and it is not
Speaker 1: like anything that fosters this idea of it, And it's
Speaker 1: the thing you find, you know, the thing you find
Speaker 1: often with people who I would call it, people like
Speaker 1: like outsiders or people who are not accustomed to being
Speaker 1: in wilderness thinking about wilderness. But they look at I
Speaker 1: sometimes think that they have a naive perspective about what
Speaker 1: its potentials are. You know that it could that what
Speaker 1: we have left could harbor a six hundred pound primate.
Speaker 1: You're like, it's not like that anymore. Man, We're down
Speaker 1: to the last little nubbing. He even used the term
Speaker 1: vast anymore in in our wilderness is almost a stretch, right,
Speaker 1: But isn't that kind of depressing with people using vast
Speaker 1: when they know what the relative picture they're trying to
Speaker 1: present is, Like, I use it too, but to be that, um,
Speaker 1: I think it almost like over sells where we're at
Speaker 1: right now. That it could hide the greatest tap that
Speaker 1: ever lived. Yeah, that it could hide two thousand because
Speaker 1: look at what's going on with the with the giant gorilla.
Speaker 1: H go on, tell me about the jan guerrilla. They're vanishing.
Speaker 1: You're talking about the girls in Africa silver backs. There's
Speaker 1: very few. They vanished. We find them dead all time.
Speaker 1: There's no mystery there. There was a mystery for a
Speaker 1: very long time. Now, for thousands of years, there was
Speaker 1: a mystery around panda bears. And species do crop up
Speaker 1: from time to time, although they tend to be more
Speaker 1: ocean species than Yeah. I even read for a while
Speaker 1: someone was comparing the hunt for Bigfoot with the hunt
Speaker 1: for the giant squid. Okay, and here's the giant squid man,
Speaker 1: a very mysterious thing lives deep in the darkest zones
Speaker 1: of the oceans. It was a mythological creature. But now
Speaker 1: and then, now and then every now and then one
Speaker 1: of them sons of bitches washes up on the beach
Speaker 1: and there it is. And then you gotta wrestle with
Speaker 1: the fact that there it is. I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: it's a logical belief, but I think that it does
Speaker 1: touch on something that's important to humans, and important has
Speaker 1: been important for a long time to tell me that
Speaker 1: this idea that something outside the campfire ring, the thing
Speaker 1: lurking in the woods, that maybe we're not in control,
Speaker 1: that maybe we're not the toughest species out there on
Speaker 1: the planet. That maybe you know, you like, well, at
Speaker 1: least most people I know sort of like that that
Speaker 1: thrilled down the back of their spine and a little
Speaker 1: sense of mystery and a little sense of of the unknown.
Speaker 1: And even if that is not the reality anymore, people
Speaker 1: still want that. But why can't they be Maybe this
Speaker 1: is my right. Why can't they be happy and inspired
Speaker 1: by what is there? I think a lot of them are,
Speaker 1: But I think them want more. I think people want more.
Speaker 1: They always it never is enough. I mean, look at
Speaker 1: us as a species, what we have is never enough.
Speaker 1: That's a good point. We want robots that drive our cars,
Speaker 1: we want we want to have the blood of younger
Speaker 1: people so we can day young. We want to bottle
Speaker 1: our consciousness. We want to live forever, like it's never enough.
Speaker 1: We're living at the best point in time you could
Speaker 1: ever live for humans, and still they want more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's never enough, never enough. Would you would you like
Speaker 1: Bigfoot to be real? I don't have an opinion about it.
Speaker 1: If all someone got hit on I five, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: would cause I can't say that I would like it.
Speaker 1: It would cause me to reevaluate everything I've ever thought.
Speaker 1: It would change everything for me. Um. Yeah, it would
Speaker 1: shake me up. It would shake me up. I would
Speaker 1: all of a sudden become I would at that point,
Speaker 1: would become obsessed. Would you invite me back to talk
Speaker 1: to you again? Okay, I would become I would become obsessed,
Speaker 1: and I would in my primary thing would be how
Speaker 1: is it possible that we miss stid right? And then
Speaker 1: I would hold these people, Grover Grover Crans. I would
Speaker 1: all of a sudden think that he was an American
Speaker 1: hero and a genius. And I would go to Rushmore
Speaker 1: and I would like, uh, you know, scrub someone's face
Speaker 1: off there and chisel his up on there. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: take OTR down. But someone would uh yeah, I would
Speaker 1: be like, what a visionary and that would everything would
Speaker 1: be different. But I'm not worried about one getting hit
Speaker 1: on I five. Um what else you got? You got?
Speaker 1: There are more points you want to bring up, keep
Speaker 1: you want to you want to plug the podcast a
Speaker 1: little bit about how people can go find it, because
Speaker 1: they'll learn way more doing that and they will listen
Speaker 1: to this. That's a good that's probably a good point.
Speaker 1: You're comfortable, Yeah, I'm comportable time. Yeah that's fair. Um.
Speaker 1: So the podcast is available on pretty much any platform
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts on iTunes or Apple podcasts. You
Speaker 1: can't call it iTunes anymore, Apple podcasts, Stitcher, tune in
Speaker 1: for the sports people out there, Um, Google play has it.
Speaker 1: I know there's another one that I'm forgetting. I Heart
Speaker 1: radio whatever they are, and uh yeah, it's available in
Speaker 1: all those platforms. You can also if you don't feel
Speaker 1: comfortable with podcasts, you can find it on our website,
Speaker 1: which is wild thing podcast dot com, stream direct, yep,
Speaker 1: and we also have some cool t shirts. There is
Speaker 1: it a thing to not feel comfortable with Apple podcasts? Well?
Speaker 1: I think if there are some people who maybe are
Speaker 1: a little older and don't quite either don't have a
Speaker 1: smartphone or don't necessarily know how the technology works. It's
Speaker 1: just easier to go. And you know, we're trying trying
Speaker 1: to be open to all. We're not a just Um,
Speaker 1: there's a Facebook page, wild thing Pod. We're on Twitter,
Speaker 1: which is you know, Twitter, wild thing Pod, Instagram, wild
Speaker 1: thing Pod. They're all the same. And then za people
Speaker 1: with a couple, uh that, people with a couple titilating
Speaker 1: details about things they'll find if they listen that we
Speaker 1: didn't cover today. Well, you'll learn a little bit more
Speaker 1: about Grover because he's a pretty fascinating dude. You'll get
Speaker 1: some more you'll get some fun stuff about evolution. Um,
Speaker 1: we'll talk a little bit about the different evidence that's
Speaker 1: in there. You get to hear more of these eyewitness encounters,
Speaker 1: and they're way better told by the people who actually
Speaker 1: experienced something than they are by me. Um. There's some
Speaker 1: whole bunch of stuff about DNA which we didn't really
Speaker 1: get into. But there's a lot of really cool info
Speaker 1: about DNA that's not even necessarily Bigfoot related. That's just
Speaker 1: like blow your mind science, which is pretty awesome. Um,
Speaker 1: I go on a big Foot expedition, you can join
Speaker 1: me on that. And we get into the sort of
Speaker 1: cultural taboo around Bigfoot, and uh, the all the different
Speaker 1: companies that use Bigfoot as the you know, the mascot
Speaker 1: or the name or in there there um labels somehow,
Speaker 1: and why there is this sort of cultural or this
Speaker 1: commercial appeal. Um. All these companies have realized that even
Speaker 1: if Steve here doesn't think Bigfoot is the neatest thing
Speaker 1: since slic spread, there's a lot of people that do,
Speaker 1: and they'll spend money on those kinds of products, marketing
Speaker 1: Bigfoot marketing, the exploitation of big Yeah, here's the other thing.
Speaker 1: Bigfoot ever realizes just how much exploitation is going on.
Speaker 1: I would not be surprised if it comes out of
Speaker 1: the woods and it's like there's gonna be litigation, trademark infringement. Alright,
Speaker 1: so wild things, damn. I know that wild thing, wild thing.
Speaker 1: But I was pried. I gotta say. I was listening
Speaker 1: over the weekend, you know, prepping and how much my
Speaker 1: old is my daughter was like following because I just
Speaker 1: put in my back pocket, you know, I'm listening to
Speaker 1: the podcasts and walking around the house doing stuff and
Speaker 1: she's like following along, Okay, well hold on, you know,
Speaker 1: and she didn't. She's seven, you know, she came quite
Speaker 1: grasp everything. So there's a lot of stopping and pausing
Speaker 1: and asking questions. But it was I found it to
Speaker 1: be very family friendly because I enjoyed having conversations with
Speaker 1: my daughter about what she was hearing. And that's the
Speaker 1: other thing. I know. There are some swears in this one.
Speaker 1: I think there's like the S word gets dropped like
Speaker 1: ten times over the course of the episodes, and there's
Speaker 1: a couple of little risque areas. But I am going
Speaker 1: to release a clean version because I know a lot
Speaker 1: of people would prefer not to have swearing. A kid
Speaker 1: friendly version. Yeah, well it'll be it's basically going to
Speaker 1: be the same thing, but I'm gonna cut out the
Speaker 1: swear words and some of the sexy stuff, and UM
Speaker 1: have that available starting in January. I think I got
Speaker 1: one last thing, man, You're good. Yeah. Yeah. It's making
Speaker 1: me nervous, Like how I keep thinking you're dressed up.
Speaker 1: I realized the only thing you did different is you
Speaker 1: talked your shirt in It makes me nervous, like there's
Speaker 1: something going on. There's like something going on in your life.
Speaker 1: I don't know about you just talked your shirt in No.
Speaker 1: I felt like we had a special guest to make
Speaker 1: sure you know, I'm so embarrassing. Looks very nice. UM's
Speaker 1: gonna say you had to quit sexy stuff. I didn't
Speaker 1: know if there was. Oh, here's the thing. Can you
Speaker 1: tell me? No, you tell me what the bigfoot community
Speaker 1: has to say about this? At trail cams. Man trail
Speaker 1: cams have rewritten the story of wildlife in America. This
Speaker 1: is my question. Distribute like just distribution issues and like
Speaker 1: all not just in America, all around the world. It's
Speaker 1: rewriting our understanding of where of the distribution maps of
Speaker 1: certain species and what they're doing. What is it? What
Speaker 1: do the bigfoot guys have to say about the lack
Speaker 1: of trail camp footage that they're smart enough to avoid them? Oh,
Speaker 1: or bigfoot is blurry? An invisible? Could be invisible the
Speaker 1: fourth dimensional one? I cannot because I never know. You
Speaker 1: can't take a picture of ghosts. Yeah, well you can, though,
Speaker 1: isn't there like some wasn't there some TV show that
Speaker 1: was like pictures of ghosts or something like that? I remember,
Speaker 1: but you get the aura. Yeah, they explain it away.
Speaker 1: Trail cams like they jbs the trail camps they can
Speaker 1: hear some high sort of high frequency something or they're
Speaker 1: going on, how there must be thousands of trail cams
Speaker 1: set specifically to catch bigfoot at this point in time
Speaker 1: right now, I'm guessing right you did. You probably talk
Speaker 1: to people that say, yes, I own hundreds and I
Speaker 1: have them set to catch big Yeah. I mean, I'm on.
Speaker 1: I mean the amount of money that gets spent on
Speaker 1: some of the gear. It's like Sennheiser mikes and flear
Speaker 1: and night vision and you know, high end recording devices
Speaker 1: and trail cams and you know, we're talking like tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of dollars that gets spent on gear and
Speaker 1: we don't have anything. They're bringing trail cams into the fight.
Speaker 1: Well they're but but they're developing the idea that he
Speaker 1: knows and he avoids it or she or it or
Speaker 1: they those females. Of course, you won't have any, so
Speaker 1: that like damn it should have known bigfoot you can't
Speaker 1: catch could be a good source for some hunting spots,
Speaker 1: if you know, if you live in that area and
Speaker 1: you know a bigfoot person. Yeah, oh yeah, if you're
Speaker 1: like the other thing, Yeah, here's the other thing is
Speaker 1: the bigfoot people though often aren't just out doing bigfoot
Speaker 1: like they're out hunting like bigfoot is just sort of
Speaker 1: it's on it's on the side in addition to the
Speaker 1: other stuff that they're they're doing out there like they're
Speaker 1: I think the first love in some cases is off
Speaker 1: in the woods and just being outside, and this becomes
Speaker 1: part of that experience. You got one last question for you.
Speaker 1: Is anyone in the community now still walking around with
Speaker 1: the gun. There's still guys that would drop one if
Speaker 1: they saw a Couple of the ones I've talked to
Speaker 1: who are scientists that yeah, like, unless you have a
Speaker 1: body or a big piece of a body, you're never
Speaker 1: going to convince anyone. And they condone the idea of
Speaker 1: seeing one and killing it. Some of them do, yeah, no, ship, Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of them. A lot of them carry guns
Speaker 1: though for other wildlife what I mean, protection protection, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they would. There's guys out there right now in
Speaker 1: the community would be like, I would kill it if
Speaker 1: I saw it. Dude, you want to see a blow
Speaker 1: up on social media? I'm not going. I do not
Speaker 1: want to step into that mess. You're welcome to go.
Speaker 1: You go, let me holl go send me a note
Speaker 1: saying that guy is gonna get major trouble and the
Speaker 1: name of signed. Well, that's what happened. If you want
Speaker 1: me to read the letter that Grover got or some
Speaker 1: of the letters, I've got them on my computer. You
Speaker 1: want to, can we put them up on our show notes? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I don't see why not be the best thing for us. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll send them to I'll send you a couple. I'll
Speaker 1: let you have them in the show notes and any
Speaker 1: other kind of great stuff. We'll put up the bigfoot
Speaker 1: video of the famous thing from the fifties or sixties
Speaker 1: sixty seven, we'll put the show notes. We'll put up
Speaker 1: links for your stuff. Okay, Um, yeah, I've got all
Speaker 1: kinds of photos and illustrations too, if you I'll show
Speaker 1: them to you when we're yeah done. What in your
Speaker 1: mind from from what you looked at? Okay, here's the
Speaker 1: thing I got to with the email. I want to
Speaker 1: establish real quick. Okay, just give me a yes or no.
Speaker 1: Do you believe do you believe that there's a that
Speaker 1: that that that bigfoot in the way that we're discussing it,
Speaker 1: not the one that passes through space. Um, do you
Speaker 1: believe that there is the Bigfoot as a living, breathing,
Speaker 1: sustainable like like species, or as just a fluke freak
Speaker 1: occurrence that was dropped off by an alien ship? Like
Speaker 1: do you believe that it's true or not? Right now? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Right now, it's own here right now. You don't know.
Speaker 1: But I based on the evolution stuff and the long
Speaker 1: history of Native American stories, there may have been something
Speaker 1: like Bigfoot one upon it once upon a time. That's
Speaker 1: sort of where I am. But here's the thing, and
Speaker 1: this is what I get to in this last episode
Speaker 1: based on the evidence. No, I don't think Bigfoot is real,
Speaker 1: but I still really want Bigfoot to be real because
Speaker 1: I like that idea so much, and I think that's
Speaker 1: where a lot of people come down. Okay, I'm with
Speaker 1: you there. Yeah, I feel the same way, just the
Speaker 1: same way you feel about aliens. Like, right, like, there's
Speaker 1: no evidence. We all know there's not, there's nothing, but yeah,
Speaker 1: if one shows, they'll be like hell, yeah, great, unless
Speaker 1: they're trying to kill you. Unless they're trying to kill you.
Speaker 1: But the problem with aliens is that it's um, it's
Speaker 1: a totally different conversation because then you get into questions
Speaker 1: of infinity. Yeah you know, I mean like the Fermi
Speaker 1: paradox or no, there are like more planets than grains
Speaker 1: of sand on Earth, and so you get into this like, right,
Speaker 1: it's just a totally different It's like you're you're dealing
Speaker 1: in such different concept scale entirely. But the fact, you know,
Speaker 1: if aliens existed, where are they? Why haven't they reached
Speaker 1: us out to us by now? Or are we the
Speaker 1: most advanced species in the entire galaxy or are we
Speaker 1: totally alone? Like there's a lot of like questions around
Speaker 1: that too, for sure. And we talked about this a
Speaker 1: bunch for with aliens. Is that uh And if you're
Speaker 1: from the physiologist Jared Diamond, Yeah, he talks about this
Speaker 1: idea that with with life and other places, that life
Speaker 1: takes so many different forms, and planets have life cycles
Speaker 1: and species have life cycles, and that of all of
Speaker 1: the species that have ever existed on Earth, only one
Speaker 1: has developed the ability to transmit signals mm hmm, like
Speaker 1: an electronic transmission of a signal. After tens of thousands
Speaker 1: upon thousands of species one did that, we haven't been
Speaker 1: doing it for very long. Our future as a species
Speaker 1: is probably not terribly bright, meaning like, are we're here
Speaker 1: in ten thousand years or if we self obliterated. So
Speaker 1: the fact that on some other planet that you'd have
Speaker 1: another species contemporaneous with ours trying to transmit electronic signals
Speaker 1: at this little blipping time that we are, it opens
Speaker 1: up like even if you, even if you can get
Speaker 1: over the hurdle of imagining other life, that it would
Speaker 1: somehow be contemporaneous with ours and have motivations using electronic
Speaker 1: signals to talk. It could be else entirely like we don't.
Speaker 1: Life could look like that coffee cup like we don't.
Speaker 1: It could be coffee cup planet and they don't look
Speaker 1: like that, and we don't even know how to talk
Speaker 1: to him. So he doesn't put it out as evidence.
Speaker 1: You can't put out the lack of communication as evidence
Speaker 1: that is not there, because well, science can't prove a negative. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is the which is an argument you hear with Bigfoot.
Speaker 1: But I also here to some people in reading about
Speaker 1: big but I hear some people say the biggest piece
Speaker 1: of evidence against the Bigfoot is all of the evidence
Speaker 1: because it's so contradictory the tracks. I've heard that argument
Speaker 1: to the tracks, but people can't agree on how many
Speaker 1: all of the tracks that show up because they have
Speaker 1: five toes, as they have six toes, as they have
Speaker 1: four toes. What is the size and structure of the tracks.
Speaker 1: People are like, that's a Bigfoot track, But there's no
Speaker 1: commonality between the Bigfoot tracks, descriptions of size, descriptions of diet,
Speaker 1: descriptions of sound. It's sort of big extremely contradicted. Bigfoot
Speaker 1: occupies this thing of like unknown things, and so people
Speaker 1: take like they have a known concept of this thing Bigfoot,
Speaker 1: and they take unknown things enforce it into a shape
Speaker 1: that comes out being Bigfoot for the unknown. Why why
Speaker 1: is that the shape? That's another question that I kind
Speaker 1: of am interested in exploring, too, is because so many
Speaker 1: cultures have something like Bigfoot. Think about Grendel, like Bayowolf,
Speaker 1: did you read Bayowolf? Like way back in there, Greg Grendel,
Speaker 1: the Epic of Gilgamesh, like these giant, hairy human like creatures,
Speaker 1: Like there is something about that shape as you're talking
Speaker 1: about that fascinates us, and what is that? And then
Speaker 1: any other final concluding thoughts embrace Bigfoot. Just do it.
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's it's a embrace the mystery, Embrace
Speaker 1: the mystery, and embraced the fun of it. I think
Speaker 1: that's part of it too, is it's meant in some ways,
Speaker 1: it's meant to be. There's a lot of fun that
Speaker 1: comes with this. You know, there's a lot of silliness,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of stupid stuff, but there's also
Speaker 1: just like there's a lot of interesting science, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of interesting people, and it's been a big part
Speaker 1: of American culture for a long time. So there, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's worth spending a little time roughly four and
Speaker 1: a half hours to listen to my podcast Wild Thing.
Speaker 1: If you tag this on you got any concluders, uh no,
Speaker 1: then you should definitely go listen to it. I thought
Speaker 1: I found it thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable, So nice way
Speaker 1: to pass the time listening. Um yeah, man, Bigfoot tears
Speaker 1: me out. Why can't it? Why can't it become fun
Speaker 1: for me too? I don't know, why can't it? God
Speaker 1: just not that kind of guy. I'm gonna trying to
Speaker 1: make it more fun for me instead. It just is
Speaker 1: something that makes me pull my hair out. But obviously
Speaker 1: here I am sitting here. Even people who think Bigfoot
Speaker 1: is the dumbest thing they've ever heard of, they end
Speaker 1: up asking me all kinds of questions. You can't help yourself,
Speaker 1: you can't. I can't help myself. Him. No, I'm like, like,
Speaker 1: I heart big Foot. Man. Maybe it's a friend of
Speaker 1: me thing, you know what, Maybe you know what, it's
Speaker 1: probably a friend of Yeah, you're right. It's like I'm
Speaker 1: one of those people that you know, I'm one of
Speaker 1: those people that you know, they get like a real
Speaker 1: axe to grind and they're like primary thing in life
Speaker 1: is like fighting against something. Then you realize that that's
Speaker 1: what they do at night, right, and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I get it now. It was like this self loathing.
Speaker 1: You're a you're a self loathing, self loathing Bigfoot lover. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's like you just can't. It's like a flame
Speaker 1: that you can't. I think Janice and I can probably,
Speaker 1: you know, we can have online meetings and help you walk.
Speaker 1: There's probably twelve to help me, help me get to
Speaker 1: a point where I can just come out and say,
Speaker 1: you know what, I just love Bigfoot and I love
Speaker 1: talking about it. I should probably know this from listening
Speaker 1: with the Weekend. But what's like the first recorded bigfoot
Speaker 1: sighting or evidence or anything. How how many foot span
Speaker 1: of years we're talked about that this thing has been around. Well,
Speaker 1: there's tons of Native American stuff, um, And some of
Speaker 1: them are sightings, some of them are just more part
Speaker 1: of the mythology, um. But the one that I think
Speaker 1: most people stands out for most people came in the
Speaker 1: fifties in California. So it's a pretty new thing then
Speaker 1: for like modern American culture. Yeah, first seventy years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the first the first time the term bigfoot was actually
Speaker 1: used was in the fifties, fifty eight, I think. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I was going to make the point that I feel like,
Speaker 1: had you been around, maybe the exes would be just
Speaker 1: so much easier to dismiss it. Right, something new, it's crazy,
Speaker 1: like whatever. But now that it has seventy years behind it, well,
Speaker 1: other than years of false leads, I'm a believer now, Buddy. Well,
Speaker 1: I just think a lot of other things that also
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of like true solid evidence, but
Speaker 1: they have people have now believed in for many, many years,
Speaker 1: and they sort of become more real and easy to
Speaker 1: believe to match onto the more time goes by. But
Speaker 1: you must have. I mean, the hunting community is full
Speaker 1: of these stories, stories, bigfoot stories I have talked about.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like you you can't, you can't make
Speaker 1: it real. No, But I'm just saying you must have
Speaker 1: been like hearing about this from people who listen to
Speaker 1: your show all the time. I used to live in
Speaker 1: Michigan's Uper Peninsula for a very short period of time,
Speaker 1: and it was the thing up there and even here
Speaker 1: here in Montana, Like it was a year ago or
Speaker 1: two years ago, a guy jumped out in front of
Speaker 1: a car with a big foot's big foot stud on,
Speaker 1: got hit by the car and killed him. What. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was in northwest Montana. Yeah, I remember hearing about that.
Speaker 1: So it's like like trying to pray a prank on people.
Speaker 1: You traumatize someone who's not going to live with the
Speaker 1: idea they hit and killed. Well, and also you're dead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, I mean I mean that. I mean
Speaker 1: it's like, but that's like your own call. Get that
Speaker 1: out of that's your own call to make, that's your
Speaker 1: own call to maker. You want to if you want
Speaker 1: to put a student on and jump in front of
Speaker 1: a car that comes with inherent risks. I think that
Speaker 1: anyone could point out to you, But I'm just putting
Speaker 1: a person. You're putting a motorist in the situation of
Speaker 1: having had to live with the fact that they killed you.
Speaker 1: But I'm wondering, have you heard stories from some of
Speaker 1: the hunters that you've interacted with and talked to that
Speaker 1: are similar to what I'm talking about. Where's the stories
Speaker 1: that have really sort of shaken them to their core.
Speaker 1: I've heard stories from a lot of hunters about seeing
Speaker 1: inexplicable things in the woods, but not that in particular.
Speaker 1: I no doubt hang out with people who um, I
Speaker 1: have a friend who tells the story of a mule deer.
Speaker 1: They can bowl bullets away by going okay, So yes,
Speaker 1: I I know and hang out with an associate with
Speaker 1: people who are open to the metaphysical UM. But but
Speaker 1: I do not tell me more about this mule deer.
Speaker 1: I don't know a lot about it. Could be my
Speaker 1: next be that could be season two. I was told
Speaker 1: about it. UM one last thing for me. We're good.
Speaker 1: Oh well, yeah, that did brought up a thought that
Speaker 1: I had that didn't make a note of but is
Speaker 1: there is there? Season two? D see big this is
Speaker 1: a one season thing. I'm moving on to the next thing.
Speaker 1: What's the next thing? Not the Lockness Monster, not the Yetty,
Speaker 1: I'm going fishing in Lockness did So here's an interesting thing.
Speaker 1: So there's a scientist out in Scotland right now who says, Okay,
Speaker 1: I am going to look for the Lockness Monster. He
Speaker 1: doesn't think Lockness is real, but I'm going to do
Speaker 1: this by doing DNA environmental DNA analysis of the lake
Speaker 1: and we will see what else has been in there.
Speaker 1: I think the chances of me finding a Lockness Monster
Speaker 1: are slim to zero, but who knows what else has
Speaker 1: in in there because they can get so much information
Speaker 1: out of these teeny tiny pieces of DNA, now that
Speaker 1: it's like they can. They might find DNA of ancient sharks,
Speaker 1: they might find all kinds of stuff. So that's one
Speaker 1: of the other cool things about this cryptozoology stuff is
Speaker 1: often you will use something like Luckness or Bigfoot or
Speaker 1: the Yety as the hook to get people interested, and
Speaker 1: then you go out and find out all this other
Speaker 1: cool stuff. Yeah, so you lure him in with bullshit
Speaker 1: but then teach them something, teach them something real and interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know who we do. We don't
Speaker 1: necessarily a really long wrap up go ahead. No, I'm
Speaker 1: just saying that it's like a good thing. If the
Speaker 1: end result is that people know more about science, wildlife,
Speaker 1: outdoors and whatever, it's great. Yeah, if it gets him
Speaker 1: out into the woods. I think of the risk you're running, though,
Speaker 1: why not lurement with something that's not Why not lurem
Speaker 1: in with If we're gonna talk about Washington State all
Speaker 1: the above, why not lure them into the problem with
Speaker 1: the fact that, like at this very moment, there may
Speaker 1: or may not be a grizzly bear on the U. S.
Speaker 1: Side of the you know, on the U. S. Side
Speaker 1: of the Northern Cascades. Yeah, that's a great question that
Speaker 1: gets a certain segment of the population excited. People because
Speaker 1: there we got a thing that really is mysterious and
Speaker 1: really does need some protection and really is something that
Speaker 1: we need to get people on board with. Or the
Speaker 1: fact that we now do not have any caribou in
Speaker 1: again Bigfoot central Washington State, We do not have any
Speaker 1: caribou that cross into Washington State. Though in your father's
Speaker 1: and grandfather's lifetime, there were. We don't have any caribou
Speaker 1: that cross in the ido and in your life lifetime
Speaker 1: there were. There's plenty of rare wildlife out there to apply,
Speaker 1: are you know? Emotions and science too. You're in a
Speaker 1: constructive fashion, Um quick, Laura was going to answer what's next?
Speaker 1: You were? I thought you were like not. I actually
Speaker 1: I don't know what's next. I have some ideas that
Speaker 1: are like very nascent, but they are not ready to
Speaker 1: be shared with the world. So you're kicking some stuff around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I just need to figure out, like if they're
Speaker 1: even feasible at this point from a getting access to
Speaker 1: information point of view. You know, I think you ought
Speaker 1: to do what now? Never mind what I I'll tell
Speaker 1: you later. Oh real quick, before you go, not you
Speaker 1: just other the people, the people listeners, real quick. I
Speaker 1: got a handful of famers needed to do one. Go
Speaker 1: to uh the meat Eater dot com Please and subscribe
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Speaker 1: bunch of Mediator podcast paraphernalia. You even get yourself a
Speaker 1: genuine bouch shirt. Um, we didn't say bouch when we're
Speaker 1: talking about someone shooting at a big foot, which seems inappropriate.
Speaker 1: So all that. Yeah, do that and you'll be in
Speaker 1: good standing with me and Laura Crants. Thank you very
Speaker 1: much for coming on. I'll tell you my hot tip
Speaker 1: about what's your next show out to be about, and um,
Speaker 1: I look forward to getting a lot of angry emails.
Speaker 1: Anyone who's seen a bigfoot, please right in. I will
Speaker 1: share your story on a future episode of the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening and thanks for having me on.