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the intellectual elites with Bobo. These guys are your favorites, So like Shay,
subscribe and read it says watching. Please keep it squatchy and now your
hosts, Cliff Berkman and James Bobo Fay. Hello, Cliff, Hello Bobo.
How are you doing? Man? All righty? How are you?
I'm doing all right? Did you get your computer situation all set up?
Rowdy came by. Rowdy from Bluff Peak Project just came by and mind me
up with his borrowing that for the night, and then I'm gonna hopefully get
one ordered this week. Excellent. We all get by it with a little
help from our friends, as they say, right, yeah, excellent.
Anything else going on? Do you want to share? No? Okay,
cool? All right, that's good enough for me. Because we have a
fantastic guest this weekend, it might be a good idea just to jump in.
Our time is a little bit limited, so we want to get into
this as quickly as possible. Our guest today is a friend of mine.
I've known him for years now. I looked towards him for information. He
has served as somewhat of a cultural Let's see what should I say as cultural
layis on? I guess for the NABC. Um, he helped me a
lot with my my Indigenous knowledge section of the North American big Foot Center.
I met him on expedition. He is a Skokomish Indigenous person, the Sacomish
tribal member. He also has a PhD in education. Um. I think
he lives down in central Oregon right about now. But here it is man
a good friend of mine. I think, Bubba, you think you know
him as well? Kevin Burgo, doctor Kevin Burgo. So Kevin, thank
you so much for coming on man. Such an honor and so odd to
hear anybody actually employ doctor in front of my name. I don't get that
much. I've heard your name, but we have we hung out. I
don't know if I've actually met you in person. I was it a couple
of the conferences, and I just didn't have an opportunity to go up to
you because everybody wants to go up to you, and so I kind of
hang in the back and fly under the radar as much as I can.
Okay, Yeah, because you're one of those names I've heard, I'm like,
God, have I met Because you know, when you meet so many
people, especially at those things, you never sure that I talk to that
person to say their name a lot. I'm here today to talk a little
bit more about not only the American Indian Native American oral history approaches to all
things big Foot, but then also there is a host of other things that
I'm kind of privy too that I don't think a lot of other people are.
And so I'm kind of one of these odd balls that is in between
the cultural aspects of the phenomenon, and then like the intellectual academic communities,
and so I've had toes in both. I'm not really part of either,
so that has within itself its own certain tensions. Well, but but you
are, you are definitely in touch with both. I mean, I don't
know if you feel like you're not involved in either of those groups. But
you you literally grew up on this Kacommish reservation, didn't you. Yes,
And so as I was preparing to participate here today, I was having to
go through like an inventory of where I come in on this whole topic.
And so for me, it goes almost all the way back to the beginning.
So I was brought up in the Miller household, which anybody in the
Northwest community, in the indigenous community, they know who who they are.
So I got a lot of cultural exposure to Siyatko as a kid, and
so to me, I grew up in a household into which there was like
an instant immersion. And so it's been an arc to go beyond like having
that as the basis of my inculcation into having my own experiences and then coming
across other people's experiences and then having to come up with some kind of plan.
Okay, how do I take an individual account and turn that into some
kind of a product that can I think help answer one of three primary questions,
and that is where they were, where they are, and where they're
going to be In other words, the Sasquatches themselves, like trying to locate
them. Yeah. Yeah, And so having had a lot of cultural exposures,
I think it provided me with like a mindset that I think is different
than a lot of other people's in that Bigfoot was one of many beings in
this pantheon of culture which my people talked openly about. And so along that
kind of evolution, there were things that I got off of the oral history
which prepared my eyes and ears for what I encountered both in my teenage years
and then also in my adult years up to having experiences last April. Yes,
because you've actually you've actually seen these things too, Yes, yeah,
with your own eyes, and you continue to do research on your own even
though you're not living the reservation any like at the moments, you have family
and friends, Aaron went up, But you also do your own research in
Central Oregon as well. Yes, So what I'm trying to do is provide
access I think that otherwise is not openly talked about with people that aren't a
part of the tribe, and then take that and employ that in the places
that I occur only inhabit, but I go all over the place if there's
an encounter. But but again, I'm trying to develop up these tools in
order to move beyond where the animal or the being was and where it is
and where it could be. And so along that way, I've had to
employ a lot of the things that I had picked up in my academics and
then also in my military experiences. And so there's kind of a convergence here.
And I'm gonna halt right there, because, like I want to tell
the audience, there's all these like overlaps that I could go off on tangents
for hours, if not way more. And so I'm just going to try
to approach this as a big bowl of spaghetti and I just want to pull
out I want to tease out a couple of the noodles. As I know
this is an entertainment podcast as much it is an educational podcast, I think
I would want to talk about like what kind of arc it was to be
a believer and then being a knower that tension of coming from a cultural background
where it's belief and experience, and then an academic or intellectual approach'd that's kind
of thinking about having those two tensions pulling at each other. There must be
a way, there must be some middle ground in there, because for exam,
I mean bears free, I mean, I'm sure, I mean correct
if I'm wrong, I have to assume Scacomish people have stories about bears and
coyotes and all the other animals. But is the tension that we see in
the Bigfoot realm present in those spheres as well? The primary tension that I
come across when I'm interacting with tribal people is they first want to know what
are you gonna do? If you see one? Are you gonna kill it?
And it's I have to tell him, no, No, I don't
want to kill this thing. If anything, I want to protect it.
And so I think I can only do that through a certain kind of acknowledgement.
But I also have to get to this point of developing up a air
quotes proof and so what are the different ways to prove that this this being
is present? And so the primary tension I mean even even if we want
to go back a little bit more and I'll pull out my two dollar PhD.
Words is it's between ontology and epistemology. Ontology being what is the world
created out of? And so for the Western academics it's things are objects.
On the other hand, kind of the cultural aspect is all about experience,
and so their ontology is the world is primarily made out of breath, and
that breath is between different animals and beings and trees and plants and everything.
And it hints at this idea of the objectivists are above in this position of
dominion over all the all the plants and the animals, and they just count
things and taxonify things. On the other side, the like the American Indian
community is much more horizontal, and that animals have an equality to them,
and that there's an interdependence between the bear and the bobcat and bigfoot and owls
and everything. That's a nice way to put it. I'm not sure I've
I've heard it put as a horizontal relationship versus a vertical one, but that
does make sense. And in that there are I think different ways to know
and so as again, this primary tension I have with intellectuals and academics is
that they want to count it, kill it, taxonify it, put it
in it's where it's place in comparison to everything else. And on the other
side, the culturalists are just trying to live with it. I'm at the
point where as a person who does not who's had experiences, there are things
I can't explain. There's other things I can't explain, both culturally and rationally,
and so I'm in this constant tension between what counts and to whom.
Well let's talk about that though. Let's let's talk about that. Let's maybe,
um, can you go back to one of your your earliest experiences with
one of these things and tell us what happened and what you what you experience,
What did you see something or is it just sounds or was it just
stories or because I know you've had visual encounters and I'm sure audience would love
to hear about those things or every loved stories. So yeah, yeah,
if I can go back to when I was probably three years old, I
remember we were at somebody's house and there was the episode of the six Million
Dollar Man came on and I had Andre the giant, and I was like,
wow, cool. And then I started hearing other people, like adults,
go oh, yeah, I had this encounter with something like that.
Oh I had this one here, Oh I had this one here. And
then and then I heard my mother talk about her experience at a cabin out
in Matlock, and so that was like, wow, you know what,
there's this, this actual animal out there. But it wasn't until I didn't
really get a good education on what this is until my great uncle would come
down to the house and he would come around dinner time and he would start
to talk, and he sometimes he would talk all night long, and he
would tell tale after tale after tale of of our our house, our our
clan, our people. And in those tales, he would talk about having
these interactions with big foots, and so I remember thinking like, well,
he's had interactions too, and then he would talk about, oh yeah,
I had one here and it was underneath the chicken coop, you know.
And it was at that point that I began to ask him, you know,
could you tell me more? Could you tell me more? And so
he had tales going back to pre contact where one of our great great ants
or whatever they had actually captured a small one up in the San Juan Islands
and took it to the longhouse and kept it as a pet until it was
about a teenager, and then it went and ran off and had kids and
it would come back by. Do you happen to know how they managed to
do that? Like, how would you capture a task it was a smaller
being. I was told it was on one of the beaches. It got
caught at like high tide and they just pulled up in it with a canoe
And I don't know how they put it in the in the canoe, but
that's what I was told, And so I was like, oh wow,
cool, you know, hey man, we owned one. It wasn't treated
as an animal, it was treated as a person. And I think that's
one of the tensions I have with the current, like academics who come at
this and they say, well, it's a gigant epithecus, and so everything
a culturally I've heard is like, no, it's not. It isn't it's
a person. And I was going through that today, like what what do
they mean person? In a lot of the tales they talk about this animal
as being a cannibal. So what does a cannibal mean in this context,
Well, cannibal means it eats other people. So it was embraced as a
person, as a different tribe. They weren't as technologically advanced, but they
were a people. And so there's like the two primary camps out there at
present, and it's the gigant Epithecus or even the parenthesis group, or it's
this being from another dimension Da da da da da. And so I'm not
a part of either of those. And so when I hear those and I
hear people, you know, they talk about, well, this is exactly
what it is. I'm always wanting to be like, yeah, okay,
well I guess if you want to go that way, and go that way,
stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. Will be
right back after these messages. You mentioned the perhaps paranormal versus flesh and blood.
See, I think we're perhaps the two categories that you mentioned just recently.
Yeah, yeah, and and somebody recently flippantly kind of said, oh,
you're an aper, so blah blah blah, you wouldn't even listen to
this or whatever, and then and then and then I don't know, then
that same person complained about somebody one of their friends being categorized as woo or
whatever, and and well, categories they just still seem to fit a lot
of times, you know, definitely not with what I'm coming across. Yeah,
it just isn't you know. I'm it's for me at least, and
maybe Bobo can chime in or something. But to me, it's tiring to
be this or that. It seems that that's so much of a limit of
the human perspective on things and really has almost nothing to do with the actual
animals or creatures or whatever they are themselves. It's really just like I feel
more comfortable to know that it's this or that, and it can't be anywhere
in between. It can't be anything else but that, because I'm uncomfortable with
that. But I'm not uncomfortable with them being this or of that, or
as long as I can that makes sense to me, and I can have
my little teddy bear and grab onto and that would just make me feel better.
Pete. I think humans are just programmed or perhaps conditioned to desire resolution
so strongly they have to have it fit nicely in these compartments. They're not
this or that man. They're sasquatches, and that alone deserves our respect in
my opinion, sasquatches, like why can't it be this or that? Oh
no, they're not apes or that or humans. They're not either one of
those. They're sasquatches, and that alone is worthy of our respect. How's
your opinion changed, Kevin, of these like because you're introduced the concepts when
you moved in with them, and then how did it change as you saw
them and heard them observe them over the years, just in reinforce or did
you kind of come to your own conclusions several of the seato Having had some
experiences in places where I was told that, like other people in our house
had had experiences, I tended to gravitate towards more of the cultural explanations.
It's only because there has been a couple of experiences that I have had that
would be almost inherently subjective, and that I can think about half dozen were
being in the presence of these creatures. There is an experience to me of
terror, like real terror. And as much as I want them to be
like a Harry and Hendersons and they come out of the woods and they put
me on their backs and they take me around, and that I've also been
told they are evil, they kill, they kidnap kids. There is something
innate when when you come across these these creatures up close that is terrifying.
They are definitely an animal. But then I also have to keep in like
my back pocket that I've been told how to handle an encounter. I've been
told things to do and to not to do, primarily don't try to make
eye contact because they can paralyze you. I've had to come to the point
of I'm not sure what it is. If it's an animal, if it's
a like a hominin, I think, I mean obviously that, but this
thing seems to be imbued with certain powers such as hypnotism, such as invisibility
that kind of have a line with a couple of the experiences that I've had,
and it's it puts it in this in this place where I want to
say it's an animal, but then there's something else there and I don't know
how to explain it. And I think that's why why I'm so interested into
this whole trying to get my arms around what are the eyewitness accounts? How
many other people have had these experiences because I think these experiences might actually be
clues to have other experiences. Well, so you followed these things around,
and I trust you as a tracker. I've been in the woods with you.
I know how good you are in the woods. Like I said,
we've been friends for a long time. We met on expedition. But the
face to face encounter where you actually put eyes on one of these things tell
us about that because people love to hear those sorts of stories, and from
your perspective, it might be a value. Okay. So I was I
was on the way home to go to GIS project at the Tribe. I
was driving between There's a place in Wyoming which is a little America. It's
like this place to pull over. They have hotel rooms and everything. But
I was, I was wanting to get home, and so I cut through
a highway between there and Pocatello, Idaho. And so it was twilight.
It was in the end of June or early July. And I'm in the
car. My buddies in the car too, who's an anthropologist. He and
I are talking about X and Y, and I'm almost to Pocatello and there
is a black object and it's in the ditch, and I think it's a
person. And we're driving down the highway and I'm getting probably within like like
a half a mile of it kind of he was blabbing onto me, and
I just went quiet because I in my head, I'm thinking, like,
what kind of an asshole? Hitchhikes and all black and we're coming up on
it, and it's hit me. I'm about maybe about a quarter mile way,
and I'm thinking, this is a big dude, and then it hit
me he's not on the road, he's in the ditch. And then it
hits me he's as big as if you put my S ten on its end.
And as I'm pulling into this thing, and I can't believe it,
I'm like, I'm like, what is this? And so the anthropolois of
the car he turns, he goes what the hell? And as we're pulling
up to it, it pivoted. It put down an arm and pushed off
and there was like an incline. It must have been in about fifty degree
incline to the left. I watched that thing push off with one arm.
It hopped through the air maybe twenty foot a hop it did It did a
couple hops. It was like bing bing, bing, and gone kangaroo,
like two feet could I thought it was only on the one. It was
just hopping, incredible and it was so quick and I got out of the
hit hit the brakes. I had a rifle in the back. I pulled
that out and by the time I got my hands on it, that thing
is already up over the edge and gone. And so he gets out of
the car. He's like, what was that. I go, I think
we both know what that is. And we didn't hear anything. And then,
um, I remember going to Pocatello and we had to pull over to
get gas and there was like like a police officer and it was like a
part of an am PM and and so I go in there and like I
paid for everything, and I go over to the one of the police officers
and I go, sir, I don't know, I don't know how to
tell you this, but I think we just had an encounter about ten miles
away. And the weirdest thing was he never said a word. He didn't
ask me for my name, he didn't ask me if I've had anything to
drink. He said he was just his I it was it was all in
his eyebrows of like huh, and I was like, so you might want
to get somebody out there. I got in the car and then came home
and it wasn't until I saw I think it was like a USA today.
About ten days after that, where I think eight other people it had some
encounter in that same place. I can tell you I was not prepared for
how powerful that thing was and how quick it was. It was amazing.
I don't know. I'm glad I had that encounter, but everything to date
has been trying to have another one of those. And I come close a
couple of times, but it's like, I don't know. It's this odd
thing of where that creature terrifies me, but I am drawn to it like
nothing else. It's all I do is try to improve my odds of having
like another encounter, an eyeball to eyeball encounter. Stay tuned for more Bigfoot
and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo will be right back after these messages. The
only other encounter that I think is on par with that is one that I
had with my dad in our property that's contiguous along the reservationum he and I
were out, I must I was a teenager and he wanted to get some
dirt to put in one of his I don't know. It was like herb
garden or something. And so he and I are back there and digging and
talking, and out of the blue, this yell comes across the pasture.
Weirdest thing I've ever heard. It was the highest high and the lowest of
the low I've ever heard. It went on for I would say, like
a minute, NonStop, and I've heard cougars, I've heard bears, I've
heard coons, I've heard everything in between. Holong was the duration of the
high, like ten seconds of high. Ten seconds was high and low.
At the same time. I was sitting there trying to contemplate, like what
is coming at us? The next thing I hear, my dad hops in
the truck and takes off, and here I am all alone wonderon, like,
oh God, something's coming. And so I have to turn and sprint
and I hop in that car and I started slugging him in the arm,
and I'm like, why did you leave me to die like that? I
was really pissed off at him. But the odd thing of all that,
too, was that he and I had that account he was pale, and
he was he was a big guy. He didn't know what it was.
We never talked about it ever again, he not even when he got older.
We never spoke of it again ever. And I always thought like why,
like what was going on? And the only thing I can put it
in some kind of a context is that he had to go out into the
woods again. He had to compartmentalize whatever that was. The Skekomash reads itself.
It has mountains, it has flatlands covered with woods, and it has
a huge swamp area. This intertitle zone that just must be a cornucopia of
everything these things would want to eat. It's by Shelton, right down by
you guys, lucky doctors. You know, yes, yeah, okay,
I would say, don't eat there. It's not good. We don't have
a lot of time left. And so there is a quick thing that I
think, if I'm going to get anybody to help me with this, is
it this entire effort we have a problem, and that we are good at
data collection, not so good at the analysis portion. And it's that analysis
that's going to be the key to actually developing up the models that can provide
us the power to know where to go, when to goo, what kind
of activities? No pun intended with that wind to go right? Oh yeah
yeah yeah yeah yeah pun intended. And I know this isn't gonna make me
like well loved, but I am sick and tired of these groups collecting information
and not doing anything with it. That information, if it's not put into
a pool, is worthless it. I mean, it's neat in terms of
you have a collection, but a collection just to have a collection is not
the point. It's not going to help any of us. And so I'm
calling for the big push of like we need to organize up the accounts into
some organization or some it design a protocol. The one that I'm pushing is
called an API, an Application programming interface, and what that does is it
takes information and it organize it into keyword pairings. And so it's these keyword
pairings that that allow me to do these analysis because otherwise what I'll get from
people is like an MS doc X deal and everything's all smashed in there,
and I gotta pulls out, like the time, parse out the day,
parse out like what was the eyewitness account? And it's really taking me forever
to do that this whole thing can be automated quite quickly if we could just
get the people who hold this to organize it up for the people that are
going to do the analysis on the other end, and these people on the
other end, maybe these like the open aies. We've got these tools that
are potentially coming out that are gonna provide us instant, instant answers of the
best place to go, the best times to go activities, and so we
need to do what we can as a project to get that more aligned to
the type of coding and databases that need to be built. If you want
to know what to do or you got questions, well, if you have
any hate mail, that's um to doctor Kevin care of Cliff and Bobo and
they'll take care of it. We'll get lost with all mail. Yeah,
I'll hate smells the same at the end of the day. Right, Well,
I mean, like let's talk about baby steps, so along that line.
I struggle with myself because I was thinking about this this past week and
I've given you full access to my citing report database, which I need to
talk to you about too, because I lost some of those reports and I
bet you have copies of them because I had website problems last year and a
lot of these things disappeared, so I have to get those from me again.
But yeah, there I am. I figured, Okay, what is
my role here from a larger perspective, what is Cliff's position here? Like?
What am I doing besides just enjoying myself with the change right conduit?
Yeah, I'm an educator, I'm a conduit, but I also am out
there kind of gathering data. And I was sick. I was literally so
funny that you bring this up, Kevin, because I was literally thinking this
week that, beyond some pretty obvious patterns like you know, these footprints,
I've been casting in the same twenty yard area over a period of two or
three years, a lot of the obvious pattern or a lot of the other
patterns that are more subtle, I don't know how to access. And that's
why I was asking. I'm not necessarily a civilian on that level as far
as the big foot thing goes, But at the same time, I'd like
to up my game. I'm always interested in upping my game. I think
all of this should and that includes me. So where does the how does
one begin to go about the data? Analysis. If I have thirteen hundred
reports sitting on my car drive, which I do, okay, So primarily
how I approach things is through qualitative inquiry approach called grounded theory. And what
that is is it's a way to take a bunch of open ended interviews or
like accounts, and you go through a portion of them and apply different types
of coding. So is this an objective event or was this more of a
like an experiential deal? Out of that, like, what I do is
I take a small portion of everything I got, I create individual codes off
of each of those. Then I take that and I apply that to like
everything else, and so out of that, depending on how how the information
is collected and put into print and then presented, there are different I guess
presentations of an experience. And so all I'm trying to do at present is
just take like, the amount of information is actually pretty big in terms of
what I would have to do to code, and so I'm just trying to
build the codes that I will apply to everything else. And when you say
codes, do you mean like computer codes? Are you talking about like some
sort of qualitative weight measurements? Well, they could be qualitative. They could
be quantitative. It's hard to know what parts and pieces, if any,
you're going to come out of that, but that's generally a good way to
begin when you're dealing with like an eyewitness pool. You know. One of
the things I struggle with as well is because I've taken a sasquatch database survey
myself back in the day for another PhD. Actually that she developed this thing,
and it was many MIDI pages long. It took me quite a long
time to do it, and I realize that, like the vast majority of
bigfoot witnesses are not going to be filling one of these things out. And
whereas the sighting report form I have on Cliff Barrickman dot com right now where
I get most of my reports submitted to me, and even if you click
a report of sighting on the NBC website, it brings you to that web
page I want on my data in one place. It's fairly user friendly,
but I also know I'm missing information and missing little tidbits that could turn up
something interesting in the future. But that's just the balance I had to come
come to, based on user experience from people who perhaps aren't comfortable writing or
whatever else. You know, they're not they're they're they're they're embarrassed about their
spelling or their grammar, their punctuation. Maybe they lack like the grammar education,
um, you know, and they don't want to type out this stuff.
You know, they don't want to write a five paragraph essay, which
is why I would really encourage you to um increase that to like an either
or or maybe like a both and and have them explain it in their own
words. And that could be done through like an iPhone, and then it
would be up to someone like me to like pull out apart. Well,
you know, Kevin, I think you've given us a lot to think about,
especially big footers in general, who are out there. Maybe they're at
part of a group, a larger group, Maybe they have their own thing
going. Maybe you're quietly gathering data on the sidelines, like in the shadows
and just watching watching the circus pass you by. Give that data up.
Yeah, yeah, whatever that case is, I think you've given us all
something to think about. And yeah, if you don't mind, we'd like
to have you stick around for the member section. Maybe we can get into
the weeds a little bit more about what that looks like or how it works
or something we'd really appreciate it. But Kevin, you've been my friend for
a long time and you're one of the very few people that has ever gotten
access to my entire database, and I can't wait to see what you come
what you come to from that data and whatever other in data that you've been
gathering over the years. And I want to thank you for not only your
time today but also your friendship. I do value it, so think oh
well, absolutely no. I was extremely happy to be asked to be a
part of this. It's um ben, I think I wanted to do.
I just was holding off until I was getting a little closer in being able
to provide some tools and possibly some explanations, and so you gave me that
opportunity today and I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for coming on, Kevin.
I've heard a lot of abuce, so it was great to finally get
to talk to you and here what you're up to. That's uh, we
got to have you back on and you got some more results in the future.
Yeah, all right, Bob, take us out of here. Man,
let's go to the member section. We're gonna have some more with Kevin,
right now on the Patreon section of Beyond Bigfoot and Beyond, So sign
up joints like five bucks a month and you get an extra episode a week,
and we're gonna get you that right now. So thanks for listening to
y'all and keep it squatchy. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot
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