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