In the Good morning, Monsters, and welcome to Monsters on the Edge.
I'm your host Barnaby, and we got a great show today. I have
the one and only Matt Pruett on the show here, and he's got a
new book out and we're gonna be talking all about that in just a couple
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All right, guys, My guest today is Matt Pruett. He has dedicated
nearly two decades to investigating the Sasquatch phenomenon. He has gained extensive knowledge of
the topic through a combination of conceptual analysis and practical field work. As an
engaging public speaker, he has been invited to share his insights on various media
outlets and platforms. In two twenty three, he published his new book,
The Phenomenal Sasquatch, Seeking the Natural Origin of a Cultural Icon, a book
that demonstrates his dedication to unraveling the truth behind this intriguing mystery. Matt is
also a member of the North American Woodape Conservancy, and he is also the
producer and editor of the podcast Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. So
now, without further ado, please welcome Matt Pruitt. Thanks for having me,
Barnaby. How's it going, Matt, It's going very well per Monday.
Yeah, that's true, that's very true. And as I said,
it's very early for me here. Well it's neon, but I work,
you know, second shift, so my sleep schedule is always way off,
you know. But I'm awake today, I'm feeling good, and I'm glad
that you're here with us because we have a lot to go over. Man,
for those of you who don't know, I got a little bit of
your bio there obviously, but can you tell us a little bit about yourself
and how you got interested in Bigfoot to begin with? Well, you know,
not to belabor the point because I know I've told the story at gazillion
times on podcasts, but essentially, I did have an experience when I was
young. We didn't see the things myself and for other people heard things,
and then, uh, you know, had no real conventional explanation for it
because we knew we weren't dealing with people. It was in a densely forceded
environment Northeast Georgia and they weren't behaving or making sounds like normal animals, you
know, certainly weren't deer or bear or anything of that nature. And it
was subsequently that I stumbled on Sasquatch related information and thought it was posterous until
I started digging into the testimonies and then hearing these purported vocalization recordings and other
sounds, and realized, like what people describe that they associate with the Sasquatch
or what they record and attribute to the Sasquatch was very much like what we
heard and experienced. So that was fairly interesting, and I thought, well,
I'll look into this. I was pretty skeptically minded and thought, you
know, I'll get to the bottom of this pretty quickly and see that there's
nothing there. And I'm still trying to get to the bottom of it.
So I've been pursuing it, you know. It just sort of grew out
of that experience, first locally in North Georgia interviewing local witnesses and other parts
of southern Appalachia, and then started traveling the country a lot, pursuing field
research and other witness interviews things of that nature, networking with other investigators and
other people pursuing it, and so moved all over the country and done field
research all over the country, and it's just grown and grown and grown,
and so over the years, had various opportunities to work on things with Cliff
and Bobo and you know, other organizations and things of that nature. And
so try to wear a lot of hats and stay pretty busy with all things
sasquats related. But still haven't seen one. Still trying to figure out,
you know, still trying to get to the bottom of it, so to
speak. Absolutely, Lee would like to know where in Northeast Georgia she used
to live there. Yeah, I grew up right outside of Helen. So
we lived in Blairsville, Georgia until I was five, and then we moved
over right outside of Helen and that's basically where I grew up. And so
most of my field research has been in that part of Northeast Georgia, like
White County, Union County, but obviously a lot in Raven County, Fanning
County, some of these other areas too, but my experience was basically close
to hell and Georgia where I grew up. Awesome, awesome, awesome,
awesome. So today we are here to talk about your new book. So
there it is, man, I have a link here. I'm gonna try
and share that. There we go, So anybody in the comments section you
can go and check this out right away on Amazon and get yourself a copy
of that. Matt, tell us about your book and what what's going on
here? What is all your book about? Oh? Well, how much
time do we have? You know? I really I've been pursuing this for
so long, and I'm an avid reader. I have a huge library of
not only sasquatch related materials, but material related to other mystery ape sort of
phenomena around the world. And then you know a lot of literature on biology,
ecology, evolutionary biology, apes, and other i would say, analogous
animals, other analogous mammals, and so, living in the world of books,
I was always interested in writing a book at some point, and then
over the years just doing so much public speaking and interfacing with people. You
know, you do here, you have very kind people in your life,
and so you should write a book one day, And so it eventually all
added up to the point that okay, I should I should try to do
this, and what I was aiming at doing was to create as comprehensive a
work as possible or that I'm capable of. Let's say that if if someone
were either brand new to the subject, they could read this one work and
have a fairly thorough education about the history of the subject, but that would
expand and develop the sort of dialogue or the conversation beyond what had been said
before that even you know, devoted students of the Sasquatch subject would see new
things and be introduced to new concepts and new information. And so, you
know, to put that in a nutshell, it's like, this is the
book that I wish had existed when I first got into the subject, because
you know, there are so many works on the topic, and people always
are like, well what should I read? And I'm like, well,
there's five essentials in my opinion, and then we could extend that to ten,
you know, five additional like near essentials, and then a lot of
other ancillary ones. And so it's like, well, how do you synthesize
a lot of this stuff into a single work, and then how do I
expand and develop it? So it's not a rehash and it's not just sort
of a recounting of things. That have already been sort of explored. So
it's my attempt to achieve all of those things wants in a single work absolutely
man. As I said, I actually did get a chance to read the
whole book, and it's it is everything that it's claimed to be. It
is an amazing work, amazing book for anybody that you know is just getting
into this, and anybody that you know, for your friends and family and
colleagues and stuff that don't believe in the Sasquatch topic at all. I think
it's all just legend or whatever. This book takes an amazing deep dive look
into all of that and you look at from both points of view, whether
it actually is a flesh and blood or it's you know, just something that
people are thinking or manifesting, or you know, from the psychological standpoint as
well, and just describing well, if it's this, this is why it
has to be that, and this is how it has to work. And
if it doesn't, well then that's not right. And it definitely is.
And it picks up like you said, where you know, you have Meldrum
book. Who I've heard a lot over and over and over again that Sasquatch
legend meets science. The first book is the you know, the epitome of
you know, big foot books. You know that if you're going to read
this book and you talk about it, you cover it, and you say,
this is great, here's a little bit of information, But go read
that book. You know, you don't waste the reader's time rehashing stuff like
you said, that's ben already written about in other books, but you still
keep it fresh and manage to cover all of those little details enough that the
reader has an understanding without having to read that book, but still gets gets
the grasp of it. So very well done. Well I appreciate that,
and I don't want it to be a proxy for anyone else's book. Like
the way I wanted to treat it. It's like here's here's this sort of
as comprehensive of you as I could provide. But if you wanted to do
a deep dive into certain elements of the history or certain you know, testimonial
claims, go read John Green's The Apes among Us because it's it's a deep
dive into that. If you want to do do a deeper dive into you
know, inferred foot morphology or the sort of technical aspects of footprints and what
we can learn from them. Read Krantz, read Meldrum. You know,
if you're looking for other elements of the history or maybe the worldwide mystery a
phenomenon, go Readive and T. Sanderson's Abominable Snowmen Legend come to Life.
So it's hopefully a jumping off point into these other great works. You know,
I certainly wouldn't want to treat it like as a replacement for them.
It's just that rather than handing someone five books and saying like, well,
if you read these you'll have a pretty strong foundation, it's like, well,
as you can start with this one single work and have a strong foundation
and then from their branch out into these others, because I do consider some
of those works so essential because people are seeing, you know, different aspects
of the subject through their various lenses. And to me, you know,
John Green is a huge influence. I think he's probably the most important of
all the original luminaries to this day in my estimation. And so you know,
there's there's people that haven't read Sasquatch leaves among us. You've got to
absolute you must read that book. And it's the same with the Anderson's book
and on and on. So hopefully it does introduce people, you know who
might not have read those works to go check those out too. Absolutely So
for me, you know, I I we were talking before the show,
and I've I've interviewed a lot of great people and I've I've tried to read
as much as I can, you know, being you know, as we
talked about leading up to this interview, I don't have time to read physical
books. I work twelve hours a day. I can listen to podcasts and
I can listen to audiobooks, and I've I've I've gotten a lot of information.
But for me, the one thing that stood out of your book that
I took from it was your your your presentation of the whole Sasquatch as a
predator. And that's why we can't find it because we're treating it like this,
you know, gentle giant, you know, just sitting around eating grass
or leaves all day and not like a like a cougar or a wolf or
any of these other creatures. And I want you to kind of touch on
that and your thoughts on you know, treating this more as a predator when
we're out there trying to get evidence and pictures and tracking and stuff like that.
Certainly, well, it's it's certainly not a theory or a hypothesis that's
novel to me, although when it started to emerge from me it was in
about two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine. But you know,
there were many other people that sort of arrived at that same conclusion inferring that
or seeing what patterns emerged from testimonial data. Let's say, you know,
eyewitness reports or claims. So you know, one of the earlier references,
I think Archie Buckley at one point had written about you know that in his
estimation they were cooperative ambush predators that primarily relied on ungulate resources and places.
You know, Matt Moneymaker with the BFRO had written about that. I think
he first started seeing those patterns in the nineteen nineties when he was living in
Ohio and finishing his law degree in investigating reports. They are seeing this connection
between these dear kill sites that local farmers had stumbled upon and reported that we're
happening concurrently with either sasquatch sightings or hearing vocalizations, things of that nature.
There was a great investigator out of Kansas named Keith Foster in the late nineties
early two thousands, who was investigating reports in Colorado that was seeing this connection
between what seemed to be predation sasquatch is preying upon elk and following elk movements
and things. So it's certainly not novel to me. But the thing that
to me, the major insight into that is that, well, could you
posit the existence of some big animal that's just that difficult to detect? And
so a lot of people think of the almost like mythologized sasquatch, which to
most people it is mythologies because it's not been proven to exist, you know.
But their version of the mythologized sasquatch is this big, gentle giant,
you know, bear eating collecting nuts, you know, eating leaves, things
of that nature. So it's hard to imagine some you know, thousand pound
plant eater being that difficult to detect. And the way that a lot of
people end up interpreting that is that it's all that their lifestyle is based upon
avoiding human detection, which is certainly possible, you know. I try to
explore that a bit when we're talking about the fossil record is that we do
know that Gigantopithecus and the genus Homo overlap for about a million years, little
over a million years, maybe longer, depending on how late gigantipitheciins survived or
if they're still around today, and you know, when early Homo sapiens were
occupying those areas too. But you know, there's a lot of discussion that,
well, did Homo erectus hunt Gigantopithecus. It's certainly possible, and so
it could be the case that at some point in time our ancestors put a
tremendous amount of pressure on the whatever the ancestral form of the sasquatch is,
whether it's Gigantopithecus or some other form of ape or maybe even hamanin as some
people have it. But I think it's more parsimonious or a simpler idea to
think, well, if we look at all these eyewitness testimony and the claims
and some of the physical evidence, there seems to be, you know,
a suggestion that they do rely on animal protein. In fact, I think
even in Green's database, you know, there were multiple analyzes of Green's database
that were performed over time, one of which he writes about in the Apes
among Us, which was published in the late seventies. But then, you
know, as his database continued to grow and he accumulated more reports, and
there were various other analyzes. But when you looked at categories of food that
sasquatches were either seen or claimed to have been seen, you know, obtaining
or processing meat constituted over half of the reports, and so clearly there's some
sort of Now some of that could be scavenging. Some of that, you
know, people claim to see them pick up a road kill or abscond with
a deer that was shot during a hunt, or you know, stealing a
deer carcass from a hunt camp. But most to those are claims that involved
seeing the sasquatch ambush whatever the prey animal is. So when you look at
an animal that has that sort of lifestyle, you know, a great analog
is the tiger. You know tigers. Now, tigers are obligate carnivores,
so they only eat meat. You know, sasquatches, if they exist,
seem to be some sort of omnivore, but with predatory tendencies or behaviors.
But animals that rely on hunting and especially ambush hunters. Their entire existence is
reliant on being undetected. You know, they need to not be noticed by
anything, or else they'll never get to eat. And so if that's a
primary driving force, a selection pressure, let's say over millennia, well,
then of course you would produce an animal. It's very difficult to observe.
And you know, again tigers being a great example of that. There's a
fantastic well, there's a few great books about tigers that I would recommend people
read because they're so analogous to the sasquatch. But one of the points they
make is that most of for example, the Siberian tiger, most of the
food that it eats are herd animals, and so it's not just lone individuals,
you know. So the tiger has to be undetected. It has to
you know, not be noticed at any time ever. And not only that,
but it has to infiltrate these herds in order to make it kill.
And so it has to basically slip past the defenses of dozens of pairs of
eyes and ears and nostrils, and so its entire lifestyle is predicated on that.
So when you look at the sasquatch, and you see this animal that
is so furtive and is capable of this stalking behavior and is very difficult to
observe and is very active at night. I mean, I highly doubt there's
that many nocturnal leaf eaters and you know, barry collectors and nut collectors.
So you think, well, what's what pressures would produce an animal of this
size with these behaviors you know, that exhibits these scenes in these certain contexts.
And it seems like, well, not only predatory behaviors, but specifically
ambush hunting behaviors, and especially the cooperative ones, because a lot of those
involve two individuals that seem to be working together, and many people's experiences seem
to be involving multiple individuals. People's claims of encountering sasquatches very often there's more
than one, and they seem to be working in you know, cooperatively,
in concert in some way. And so I think that as an explanatory model
really makes the most sense of like, why is it that an animal like
this would be so difficult to predict and observe and pursue and document. And
it's like, while most ambush predators fall in that sort of category, you
know, absolutely, and I may have misspoken, I'm not, you know,
I've always considered them to be, you know, the omnivores and the
carnivores as well. But more so what interests me about your book was you're
talking about how they hide, and you kind of touched on that as well,
you know, being that their whole life is based on being able to
ambush and hide like that. And that's what more stuck out with me,
not not the fact that they were carnivores, but oh certainly because yeah,
if they were moving around producing a lot of noise and you know, being
very visually out, they'd never they'd never get protein because everything would run away
from them all the time. And again, there's many other animals with similar
lifestyles that you could point to to say, okay, well that's a fairly
useful analog. What lessons from this animal might apply to the Sasquatch. And
you see those things emerge from the Sasquatch claims or reports, and to say,
well that it begins to put it into a more to me, a
more useful context to understanding, like this is why this is so difficult and
why most encounters are serendipitous or just seemingly random. You know, we might
say they're good luck, but most of the witnesses will tell you like,
it wasn't good luck. It was bad luck. You though, because they're
fairly frightening encounters. But to me, you don't have to invoke you know,
the supernatural or the mystical or the paranormal to explain the elusiveness of the
sasquatch, Nor do you have to invoke the this idea that they're just trying
to avoid human detection at all costs. It's like, well, they're probably
trying to avoid all detection at all costs because acquiring food is totally dependent on
that or at least to a large part, even if that's whatever portion of
their diet. Let's say again, if they exist, I'll try not to
keep making that caveat because obviously, you know, you can't prove that this
task watch exists in a book or a podcast. We're still waiting on that
ultimate proof. So I end up making that caveat a lot. But you
know, if they exist, then who knows what portion of their diet is
protein, you know, animal meat, let's say, but it might be
significantly important that it's it's the major driving force in what they are physiologically and
behaviorally. And I think if you look at it from that perspective, the
rest of it kind of makes a lot more sense, at least biologically and
ecologically speaking. So you know, not only are you a researcher, you're
also a field worker as well, and get out there and look for these
things. So when you're talking about these things being the predator aspect, how
would you approach trying to get evidence and tracking these things as opposed to how
you know a lot of people have been doing it. You know, what,
what do you do different to track a carnivore or this this ambush predator
as opposed to any of the other things that we're out there looking for.
Well, it seems like that when you look at a certain sort of report.
You know, if you look at reports of people that have encounters in
viable sasquatch habitat, especially people that are on foot. Let's say, so
we can do away with motorists shusium crossing the road, or people in campgrounds
where one voluntarily comes into a camp at night or something of that nature.
But you know, there's there's the vast majority of them, or are these
serendipitous, very fast encounters where you know, they basically run into each other
and the person sees the sasquatch and the sasquatch sees the person, and they
both tend to, you know, turn the opposite direction and run as fast
as they can, basically simultaneously. But then you have this subset of reports
where there's intimidation or aggression involved, you know, where it's like, instead
of immediately fleeing, the things stick around and they almost betray their presence by
being somewhat confrontational. Now you really dig into those it's really not that confrontational
because they're still, according to the claimants, you know, behind large obstructions
like big trees or big boulders, and so they're making a big noise and
thrashing stuff and banging things, but they're still doing it from behind the safety
of cover. You know, like they're big whimps, you know what I
mean. But when you experience those things, it's pretty terrifying. It doesn't
seem all that whimpy. So you think, well, what is it about
those situations that makes them willing to be confrontational with humans? Sometimes multiple humans,
Like, why is it that they didn't just exit in that situation whereas
they do in these other places. And very often you'll find when you read
into the sort of environmental context where those aggressive encounters occur, they match almost
point for point the sort of environmental context where people claim to see them ambush
prey as if you know, perhaps you know, I think to me,
what I would see in that is that, well, ambush hunting is a
difficult endeavor, right, and so you would want to have every advantage that
you could possibly muster. So some of those things would be okay. Well,
if the terrain creates some kind of a natural choke point or bottleneck where
animals are funneled into a very specific place to move through, that's a great
place to facilitate an ambush versus you know, if you are on some big
flat plane, you know, with a sort of monotonous environment, or what
are they going to do chase down prey that could run anywhere and everywhere.
No, you would probably want to lay and wait in hiding somewhere that you
know that animals will come into and they don't have anywhere to go, and
you could just easily grab them, and so that tends to be the case
when you deeply read again those predatory reports and then the aggressive of reports.
They are almost always describing the same sort of environmental context landscape, and it
seems to me that maybe they figured out that like, oh well, if
humans are here, our prey won't come around because there's this disruptive thing,
these loud and noisy, smelly, bright people, you know, flashlights at
night, whatever the case may be. And so we need to we can't
afford to leave, to go over to the next valley. You know,
we need to get these humans to leave of their own volition, and they
basically have a near success rate if you listen to the reports. You know,
people always are like, we got out of town, you know,
we got out of dodge, And so those would be the kind of places
that I would target. Is you know, you're looking at topographical maps and
aerial photo, satellite imagery, whatever the case would be, and you're trying
to find the places, okay, well where what in the environment constitutes a
natural choke point or bottleneck and start there, and so you want to scout
those places during the day. And if there's no dear son, there's no
deer track, there's no deer scat doesn't look like deer been browsing. Well,
this probably isn't the best place. So you want to find that sort
of confluence of you know, where are the concentration of prey animals like deer
or in other parts of the country it might be wild hogs elk up in
the northwest or the inner Mountain West, etc. And then trying to find
the kind of places that constitute those natural bottlenecks, and then put yourself out
there at night and try to replicate those If they're around, maybe they'll try
to encourage me to leave, and you could document those things under those circumstances.
Now, I've had experiences to that degree, but you know, I've
never gotten footage or photos or anything of that nature. So people are free
to, you know, take what I say with a grain of salt,
because it's not like I have some catalog of sasquatch evidence that I can say
here, this works. But at least that's how I approach that particular part
of it, trying to use that information to make decisions about well, where
to put yourself, how to conduct yourself, etc. So that's a very
good point. Awesome We need to take a really quick station break here thirty
seconds and we'll be right back. If you guys have any questions for Matt
Pruett, get them in the comments section and put them in all caps so
I can tell that there are questions and get to them and we'll cover them
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support. Send your super chats and stickers now, guys, we are here
live talking with Matt Pruett, author of the Phenomenal Sasquatch, Seeking the Natural
Origin of a Cultural Icon. It's a great book, I have read it
myself and covers a lot of different aspects of the phenomenon of sasquatch, from
Native Americans to ancient beings and more. Kind of off topic, but we
got a question here, Matt. Say a person is brand new to going
out looking, what would you say is a must take in the field for
equipment. Also, I'm planning on hitting the area you recommend me. Recommended
me to go to in North Carolina. Thanks. Yeah, Jay's very cool,
very grateful for Jay send along some excellent feedback for the book. So
I appreciate that so very much. You know, it's I probably will get
grief for saying that's what I've said it many times, you know, because
yeah, every question has its sort of like limitations and boundaries, you know.
Otherwise we could create a laundry list of like, well, what's necessary
gear. Well, there's a lot of necessary gear. But it came up
recently among friends the other day of like, what one piece of gear do
you have to have? And I would say the smartphone because it's a you
know, four K sixty frames per second video camera, it's a high resolution
still photo camera, it's a GPS. I have multiple mapping apps. I
take field notes in it. The microphone is pretty good, so I get
great field audio recordings with it. It does a number of things, so
I don't think you could beat that device. Now, obviously, you still
want to have hard copies of maps, and you want to have a compass,
and you want to have backups of all these things. But you know,
if you're looking for if you're pursuing the Sasquatch and you're trying to document
something, I think nothing will ever beat visual evidence in my opinion. You
know, people respond to that so much more strongly. And would I mean,
look how how long the Patterson film has captivated people and that people are
still looking into it versus you know, footprints, you know, documented casts
or or things of that nature. So I would say like a DSLR camera
or something of that nature, because you might have an encounter and get to
document it, or you might find sign and document it that way, you
know, and take photographs of tracks or something of that nature. But you
really can't beat the smartphone for you know, all the applications and the us
as it has. And so if I could only ever take one piece of
gear out, that would be it, because again I put all my field
notes in it. I have various different mapping apps, and you know in
airplane mode or GPS still works, So even if you have no cell signal
whatsoever, and you're an airplane mode, you can still watch your progress in
real time and drop pins wherever you're finding interesting things. And sort of synthesize
all that later. And then you know, not only do I take field
notes, but I'm always taking photos and videos and those are timestamps, so
I can sort of reconstruct my day in the field based on the time stamps
of photos and things of that nature. But that's probably a long winded question.
But you know, it really depends on what you're aiming at too.
I mean, if you're if you're an audio oriented person, then didn't get
a great field recorder, and you know that has its advantages, and a
lot of people are interested in visuals and so you know, a camera has
its great advantage. So it really depends on what is it that you're trying
to accomplish. But the smartphone can kind of do it all for a lot
of reasons. Absolutely, if I could add my two cents to that as
well, I have an AGM Glory pro phone and this actually has built in
thermal imager and night vision, so I can shoot with IR light on this
and pitch black wherever I go out in the woods, built in thermal imager,
and then again the photo of the audio everything else that you're talking about.
So I highly recommend this. This is my daily phone. It also
has a huge flashlight on the front of it, so if you get lost
at night, you got a light. AGM Glory Pro. I'm not sponsored
by it or anything, but it's my phone, so very cool. Definitely
definitely a great piece of equipment to have with us. I like this comment.
Also thanks Jay for being a super Chats member of the Untold Radio Network.
Did Matt just call Bigfoot a whimp? That has to be a first?
I do agree though all bluster, Well, it is funny, I
mean you because I've experienced those things myself, and they're they're very unnerving,
but they really almost never escalate past that. Now whatever's causing it, let's
say. But you know, I obviously I'm convinced that there is a biological
reality to the sasquatch phenomenon, and I've had experiences that were consistent with that.
So I've heard these intimidation displays, and you know, they're very loud
and powerful, but oftentimes, you know, if you sit through it and
sort of power through it, and especially the way you conduct yourself, it
can turn a little bit more. What I would interpret is almost playful,
as if they're so accustomed to you know, people fleeing, and when they
don't, but the people are still not being threatening. But it is kind
of funny because it's not like they're stepping out into the open and exposing themselves
to risk and you know, beating there like some horror film. You know,
they're always behind these things. And one of my favorite stories. You
know, Bobo has always been an absolute wild man and very kind of a
fearless individual. And if you've ever seen the old show Mysterious Encounters the Duck
Hicheck produced for OLN back in the day, you know, Bobo's in a
lot of those episodes, and he would always his approach was always really aggressive.
He'd do these really aggressive calls and beat his chest and roar and stuff.
And before I ever met Bobo, you know, I wondered, like,
oh, is that just a character on this show? Is he kind
of putting on a show for the camera. And then a good friend of
mine from Washington, a guy named Clifton Barnes, had told me he said,
no, man, that guy's really he said. They were on an
expedition on the Olympic Peninsula and there was a few of them. I forget
how many people, just a small handful of people and there was this semi
aggressive, like intimidating encounter like that, and these guys were also shaking and
very scared, and Bobo's scared, you know. So he got up and
he rushed towards the sound at the line, roaring and beating his chest and
they said they heard this thing like tear off run away at high speed.
And then Bobo turned to the rest of the guys and he goes, yeah,
that usually freaks him out, like you've done it so many times before,
but that doesn't need to be the case. Is that you know,
they will bail out if you look at a lot of those those stories.
So I'm sure it's very frightening of what people experience. I've experienced and frightening
things, but yeah, they they're kind of doing it in a cowardly way
from behind obstructions and not exposing themselves. So yeah, I'm calling him whimpy.
Well, that's that's very similar to you know, like whenever you hear
somebody get like attacked or confronted by a bear too, you're supposed to stand
up, make yourself bigger, because a predator doesn't want to get hurt.
And if it's you know, trying to be confrontational with you. If you're
bigger than it, if you're more ferocious than it is, it's going to
back off because if it's hurt, it can't hunt, it can't defend itself,
you know, So it's it makes that's what you're talking there, you
know, Well, it depends on the bear. You know, black bears
their normative response to like a frightening or surprising stimulus is to run. Grizzlies
and brown bears are quite different. They want to neutralize the threat, and
so that's why you know, if you encounter a black bear, the vast
majority of the time, it will bolt, it will run away just from
the first contact. Whereas you know, that's why they say with you know,
brown bears and grizzly bears, essentially that very often the best strategy is
to play dead because then you act like the once the threat has been neutralized,
they don't need to continue the attack. Now again, I'm not trying
to offer survival advice, so encourage all you to read quite a bit about
bear behavior and the distribution of bears across North America and bear attack literature.
But that's essentially the gist of it, yeah, is that you know,
they have these very different responses. So luckily I operate in black Bear Country,
so I don't have to worry about grizzlies, thank goodness. You know,
same here the big big Foot influencers would like you to talk a little
bit about your art concept of the book certainly. Yeah, I drew some
original sketches and I'm not a visual artist. So my very good friend Jesse
Phillips, who's in Hell and Georgia, I grew up with Jesse. He
did this tattoo for me as well, brought the art to life, and
so I've been toying with different sort of cover concepts for a while, all
sort of in the same vein, and then last year that would sort of
emerge for me because that sort of sums it up in a nutshell. Is
that, you know, we spend so much time looking at the representation of
the phenomenon. That's what most people are studying, you know, because we
don't we can't bottle the sasquat phenomenon and you know, put it under a
microscope or hand it out to people to study, and so people's descriptions of
their experiences, their claims that's a representation of their encounter. Artistic representations are
obviously attempts to sort of visualize what it is that people are seeing, either
realistically or through some sort of you know, cultural lens in this particular case,
and so the question is like, well, what does this cultural representation
come from? Does it have natural origins? And so, you know,
I'm a huge fan of Carl Jung, a great admirer of his, and
so the archetypical tree of life is a you know, very powerful image,
imagistic motif, and so I thought, oh, it wouldn't it be cool
to have sort of a hominoid skull, something like the approximation of the Gigantopithecus
skull or something of that nature, with the roots of the tree of life,
so to speak. But what's growing from it is this sort of representation
of the actual biological thing. And because the representation is very much alive,
that's why I decided to make the tree, you know, the living thing.
Also the representation is because it changes and it evolves over time, and
that's why, you know, I was so drawn to the hair Man pictograph,
you know, which I'm sure you spoke with Kathy about you know,
she's that's within her realm of expertise, for sure. That image obviously was
very sacred to the people who created it and to the people who are now
the sort of caretakers of it. But as a living image, you know,
it's gone cross culturally, it's gone beyond that because it's been used in
so many different ways in association with the Sasquatch sort of mythos or the greater
Sasquatch subject. And so I thought, like, that's sort of the most
compelling, at least for me, visual representation of like a cultural image that's
associated with the Sasquatch, and like, could its roots be in a real
living species of animals, something really biological. So that's where that image came
from. And maybe one day I'll put in my terrible sketch of it out
online. So I'm glad my friend Jesse was able to make it something.
You know, I wanted the cover to be very different. I wanted it
to be very minimalist and sleek and very simple, sort of monochromatic like that,
because you know, a lot of things in the Sasquatch world, you
know, there's a certain sort of stylistic thing you see a lot in the
cover art of Sasquatch books, and so I was like, I'm just want
to go on one eighty in a sort of different direction. And so I'm
happy with the way it turned out. And no, Buddy Jesse's images is
great. Awesome, Yeah, definitely, definitely really cool. They're way it's
all tied together, all right. I think we're good for all the count
questions right now. So I want to talk to you a little bit about
you're in the book. You talk about how a lot of people associate these
paranormal side with the Sasquatch, you know, the ability to cloak or you
know, possibly interdimensional and the other things that you know, we hear that
that Bigfoot can do the orbs of light or et cetera. And you make
some really interesting comparisons with other animals that are in the native lore around the
world, their mythos and their lore of these creatures like the tiger. So
can you talk a little bit about how you know these the tiger itself has
this you know, supernatural abilities associated with it as well, and and comparing
that with Bigfoot. Oh, certainly. Yeah. I would say the one
of the bigger challenges was putting that into a single chapter, even though it
gets called back to a couple of times, because for a while there,
I thought I was going to write an entire book about that element of the
subject, and I thought, no, I mean, I'll just I'll have
this be a component of the larger project. But yeah, there's so much
to go into there. But yeah, essentially, I guess to to begin
with looking into that, I mean, it's always been the case that people
have associated certain sort of supernatural attributions with the Sasquatch, or they've seen it
through a sort of metaphysical or mystical lens and magical thinking, let's say.
And so it's really easy for people either on the skeptical side, to make
any sort of contact with any of those supernatural ideas or magical thinking and then
reject the entire phenomenon as such. And it's also I've seen it a lot
on sort of our side of the fence, let's say, the proponents side.
And I was guilty of it too for many years, of really utterly
rejecting and pushing back against any of those sorts of interpretations, because obviously my
position is that it's a perfectly normal, biological animal, and I felt like
any association with the supernatural was just purely damaging and sort of just wishful thinking.
And then I got older and less cynical and started to realize, well,
actually, magical thinking, the sort of mystical lens that we see the
world too, is the normative way of human thinking. Which is why you
can see these recurrent sort of motifs or elements of belief or certain supernatural attributes
associated with natural phenomena, including animals, cross culturally the world over as far
back in time as we can look, which would tell you like, that's
the normal way of perceiving the world. Because this endeavor, you know,
the scientific endeavor is fairly new, it's only a few centuries old, and
it's not the normative process. And you know, I've people have written to
me and either ask deeper questions or one individual pushed back and said, oh,
no, it is natural to think scientifically. And I even say in
the book, like, no, it's not because we developed science. It's
a process. It's a method. Now, if we thought that way naturally,
we wouldn't need the method, right, and we would just that would
be the way we see the world. But we developed a method in order
to strip away the subjective, to get to the objective reality, to arrive
in an understanding of the natural world almost you know, an objective reality and
material reality, wherever the case may be. But you can't do away with
this part of us that is mystical leaning. I mean, it's it's normative,
and so you can see that time and time again in the Sasquatch literature
going back as you know, as far as when people really started to pursue
the Sasquatch in the late fifties, but even if you look into older reports,
like when non natives first made contact with indigenous peoples of North America and
they're sort of collecting their beliefs, let's say, about the natural world,
which belief I think is sometimes used in the wrong connotations in these systems because
you know, it's it's traditional ecological knowledge, and these you know, belief
systems are really these databases of accrued There are observations, but their experiences as
well. You know, science is basically rigorous experimentation and the observations of the
results of such experience experiments, et cetera. Whereas most of what we live
in we are observing, but we're also experiencing. You know, we're not
objects, we're subjects, and so we live in this sort of subjective world.
So when you read a lot of the non native interpretations of native oral
traditions or beliefs, let's say, you know, they'll record certain information about
landscapes or known animals as indicative of reality. But when it comes to these
other forms of creatures, let's say they're like, oh, it's it's superstition.
They write it off. Oh, they believe in a hair covered race
of giants. Bear with me if I trouble you with some of their superstitions.
And so it's this very dismissive thing, usually because it is associated with
some sort of supernatural attribute. Now we should be looking at this to say
like, well, what is it that you would experience in these encounters if
such animals exist, that would lead you to a supernatural interpretation. And so
again to look at it an analogous animal like the tiger, Well they share
these things in common. They're both fairly large, they're both very difficult to
pursue or to detect or to observe. They're both pretty frightening, you know,
because tigers obviously are predatory, and they prey on humans oftentimes. You
know, sasquatches might not be praying on humans through that degree, but they're
no less frightening. And so you could look at these animals that have those
shared characteristics again, tigers, bears, and I even pull examples from gorillas
to say, well, what sort of supernatural attributes do they share cross culturally
among the indigenous populations that write or describe them. And then you collect that
sort of list of things, these supernatural powers or abilities, and you see
that it matches almost point for point with the sasquatch. And so what I'm
trying to accomplish with that is to say, well, if the sasquatch exists,
you should expect that people develop supernatural beliefs about them. Not only that,
but based on the kind of category of animal that they are, here
are the specific ones you should expect them to accumulate and lo and behold,
that's exactly what you see. And so it's a way to say to skeptics
like, we can't dismiss this solely because people see it to this particular lens.
Otherwise we'd have to dismiss very well known animals, the tiger, the
gorilla the bear based on the same things, but duly to say that,
Okay, well, people still hold these ideas today. Now they update the
nomenclature, the language changes. So in the past we might say that,
you know, an animal is believed to be the sort of mediator between two
worlds, very often the physical realm or the spiritual realm, or the world
of humans and the world of animals. Some things seem to straddle that border,
so to speak. But today we might call it interdimensional. It's a
very old idea, even though it's a newer term, and you see these
things on and on, you know, whether it's ambush predators again, they
do appear to like materialize out of nothing and vanish back into thin air because
their lifestyle is dependent on like not being seen during ingress or egress. And
so of course they were described that way in you know, pre experimental times,
that they could disappear or vanish into the spirit realm. And now we
might say cloaking. So it's an updated version of the same archetypal idea,
so to speak. And so to say to people that hold those ideas,
now, well we can understand what it is about the experience that gives rise
to that interpretation, but we have to differentiate that experience doesn't have a one
to one relationship with objective reality, and so we no longer think that tigers
have all these supernatural powers. We don't think that bears have these supernatural powers.
So if the Sasquatch exists, we probably shouldn't expect that it actually has
literally these powers, and that we shouldn't treat it like the last holdout of
metaphysical abilities in the in the animal keydom, so to speak. So I'm
trying to sort of accomplish two things by laying all that out. And I
know I've been rambling for a few minutes. I still haven't scratched the surface
of that, So hopefully people will read that section. I do have on
my YouTube channel as well. I gave a presentation at the Ohio Conference in
twenty twenty one about this specific element of the subject, so they can watch
that entire lecture there as well. What's your YouTube channel, Oh, it's
just if YouTube dot com slash Matt pruittt online. It's the same as my
like website and online handles and those sorts of things. Awesome, Awesome,
guys, we are coming up on the end of this hour, So if
you have any more questions formatt please get them in the comments as we go
here speaking of the tigers and the bears and stuff that you've talked about,
you know, like in your book, Like you said, you just scratched
the surface of this in this interview here for you know, the last five
minutes. But you know, all of these animals in native culture, you
know, the wolf, the coyote, the spider, all have legends,
lore and supernatural abilities in these cultures. So when you're you're talking about you
know that you expect the sasquatch too as well. It all makes sense because
they're they're all there, you know, and and we know, well,
let's talk about this, you know, the fact that every day we're learning
more and more about animals that we know exist and stuff that we didn't know
about them. I do a presentation on cryptozoology and I talk about the platypus
because there's so much weird stuff and we know this animal exists, and we're
still learning more about it, about the bioluminescence of the black light and the
skin and the hair and stuff like that, and it's just a matter of
you know, science only goes into research what they're being paid to research.
So if you don't have a grant, if nobody's looking for these different things,
we're not finding them until somebody finally puts that aspect under a microscope.
So all these animals, you know, I'm not saying that they can cloak
or you know, do these mythical things. But there's probably a lot more
to animals that we do know that we don't know about those animals, if
that makes sense, Oh, certainly, you know. But again, so
much of it is experiential in the way that you know, we experience again,
you know, to I know we're coming on the end of the hour
there. But for example, if you have an animal that has a very
large home range and is very rare, and it is very mobile within that
home range, then you having an on demand encounter or observation is extremely difficult.
And so you know, for some of your audience might have hurt me
make this analogy already, but or this comparison. But you know, the
Siberian tiger mail has a home range of about fifteen hundred square kilometers and it's
always on the move. So even if you knew which fifteen hundred square kilometers,
like it's in here somewhere. You might spend a decade in there and
never see it, you know, just you're just not in the right place
at the right time. So most in owners are serendipitous, they're random.
You just happen to be in the right place at the right time, and
the Sasquatch is no different. And so because of that juxtaposition, you could
imagine that well, most of the sightings and encounters that people had were random
occurrences. And so if they went back to their group or society and said,
hey, I just saw this thing, come with me, let me
show it to you, it's not going to It could be many miles away
by that point, and all the attempts to subsequently find it are just as
fruitless. But other people in your society or generationally, let's say, might
have had other serendipitous encounters. So the way that you experience that would be
that you can't see them when you're looking for them. They know when you're
looking for them. You know, they avoid you because they can read your
thoughts or they understand your intentions. And that's a very old idea that people
had about all these animals about tigers, bears and the sasquatch. And I
still hear it said today people, Oh, you don't find them, they
find you. I mean, how many times have we heard that at And
it's because that's the way that you experience such things. And so there is,
you know, this legitimate experiential or phenomenological element behind that. But that
doesn't mean that the things are actually telepathic and can read your thoughts and understand
your intentions. Most of the time. It would mean like you're just in
the wrong place at the right time and in a dense forest and environment.
If you only have you know, like an area X where we go,
if you're lucky, most places you might get like thirty yards line of sight
if it's not within that line of sight, and if it's not making sound,
you know, because you can hear something in a greater distance. But
if you're trying to see something, if it's not within thirty yards or let's
be let's say ninety yards, just to be even more generous, it might
as well be on another planet, because if you're half a mile from it,
it might as well be on the moon. If you're a quarter of
a mile, because you're not going to see it in that dense forested environment,
and so it doesn't matter how close we actually are, like you have
to have this visual context. So yeah, it does feel like most of
the time you can't find them when you're looking for them. Doesn't mean they're
aware that they're being looked for or anything of that nature. And so so
much of what we see, again, we're looking at the representation of the
Sasquatch. We're not looking at the Sasquatch yet, and so that representation is
built up out of people's brief sidings and their experiences and in their interpretations,
and so we have to kind of separate like the subjective from the objective as
much as we can, but still respecting the fact that, like, of
course people see things in this sort of mystical way because that's what humans are,
that's how we think. As you said, you know, with your
dense woods and stuff like that, and your forests, even with thermal and
technology, there's only so far in that that can go before it's completely blocked
off as well. I mean, thermal can see anything heat in these woods.
But from experience myself, I was across the river for one of these
creatures and flights and nothing could see this thing and you could see it on
thermal. But I mean it's it's that you're you're still limited by today's technology
even you know, for the people that are saying, well, why an't
there better evidence with all this all this technology, the new equipment and stuff,
I mean it's still dense. I mean for anybody who hasn't been out
there. You know, sometimes you get in the woods and you know,
five feet is a long way out there. Certainly I had another point I
was gonna make. Oh for the people that say, you know, like
you were saying that these things are amblish predators and appear out of nowhere in
that and know when you're in the woods, put yourself in your own your
own shoes, in your own house, your own apartment. Okay, if
somebody came in your house and let's say you're in another room. You know
all the sounds that your house makes. You know every creaky floorboard in your
house. So when someone enters your home, you're gonna hear them. You're
gonna know that they're there before you can see them, before you can you
know, even know what's going on. You know that there's someone in your
house. And that's the same thing with these creatures that they're in the woods.
They know every sound out there even better than we do. For even
the experience hunters that spend years and years out in the woods hunting and exploring
and stuff, you still don't live out there and these creatures do. So
they're going to be a million times better at, you know, knowing where
you are. The second you step out of your car. You know,
they're going to have that good hearing for being a predator, and eyesight and
all that stuff. You know, that's that's supernatural, that's not psychological,
that's just knowing their environment. So oh certainly. Well again to stick with
that analogy, I mean, that's if we were lucky enough to find a
core area, you know, because your home is like your core area.
You know, you have your home range, which is everywhere you have to
travel to accumulate the resources that you need to survive. So for us,
it would be like your workplace and your favorite grocery stores and your favorite coffee
shop and the gas station where you like to fill up, and you know,
there's all these different places around town that you frequent, you know,
anytime. And then you have your territory, which your property, let's say,
and then or you know, maybe your greater core areas like your home,
and then you're a real core are your din you know as your badroom.
That's where you feel the most safe, where you let yourself go to
sleep without feeling vulnerable, you know, because it's the most protected area,
let's say. And so even if you knew the home range of an animal
like that with a very large home range, just the fact that you could
be anywhere where it might be. I mean, like our home range for
example, would include let's just say, you know, wherever we get our
shirts. We don't buy new shirts every week. So if I heard there
was a barnaby siding at such and such shirt store, I could stake that
out for the next six months and never see barnaby there, right, because
that's a resource that you don't require every single day, you know, or
even every single week or something like that. And so so much of what
we're doing with sasquatchy is these serendipitous encounters, brief sidings and glimpses, and
then we're trying to throw all these resources at that place where it might be
long gone. It might have been miles away, you know, later that
evening, and we're going to keep going back there over and it might not
come back ever, it might not come back for a year. I mean,
who knows what the case may be. And so a lot of it
really is that there's just no proxy for luck being in the right place at
the right time, and so I think that's a big part of it too.
It's like, yes, they probably do know when people are intruding on
their defensible areas, but for the most part, wherever, all they have
to do is be where we're not, you know what I mean, the
people that are pursuing them. And so if I enter some three hundred square
mile area and I have whatever, you know, thirty yards the line of
sight, and I can hear a little bit further than that, this tiny
dot in a sea of wilderness, all it has to do is be anywhere
except there, and I won't know it, you know what I mean.
Absolutely, let's everybody listening out there, anybody interested in the topic. I
mean, you're never going to find them sitting on your couch. So if
you're interested in going to find them, be safe, be careful, go
out there and look because You never know when you're going to have that encounter
and what's going to happen, So you gotta you gotta get out there.
Certainly, absolutely, Matt. It's been an honor, it's been a privilege
talking to you. I definitely highly recommend again your book. Can you tell
everybody where they can get more information on you? Your YouTube, your website
again, and if you've got any public appearances or speaking engagements coming up,
feel free to promote that for sure. Yeah, you can find me Matt
prewittt online dot com. And I think there's a link to my YouTube there.
But even if you just go to YouTube dot com slash Matt prut online,
there's only I think two videos up there, but one of them is
that particular lecture about phenomenology and the Sasquatch in that particular aspect of the subject.
The book is available on Amazon is probably the best place to get it
in print and digital. The kindle version. Autograph copies are available at the
North American big Foot Centers website, so you can check that out. And
then the next public appearance that I'll be making is speaking at the Texas Bigfoot
Conference in Jefferson and on October twenty feet and then I'll be a cryptocon and
Lexington too. I saw that you'll be there, so it'd be great to
meet in person for sure. Definitely looking forward to that. All right,
guys, the phenomenal Sasquash seeking the natural origins of a cultural icon. I
did put a link. If you go back up in the comments section,
there's a link for this, and if I remember, I will hopefully get
that in the show notes as well, so that you guys can go and
check that out. Matt, thank you again so much for coming on.
I look forward to meeting you in person in Lexington, Kentucky and all your
episodes of Bigfoot and Beyond and your wonderful theme song. Love it Gotta tell
you again so well. Thanks so much for having me as a blast talking
to you. Really appreciate it. Definitely, Thank you very much, Matt.
Thank you all right, guys, thank you so much for watching this
week's episode of Monsters on the Edge. I'm your host, Barnaby, and
coming up next week it will not be live. I am going to be
out on expedition out in the woods looking for the elusive creature that we have
been talking about for the last hour, so I won't be here, but
there still will be an episode. That's right, I have a pre recorded
episode for you guys next week, right here, same time, same place.
We'll be talking with Kathy Strain. She'll be talking about Native Americans history,
legends and lore of the Sasquatch creature and her work with that, as
well as a little bit about the North American Woodape Conservancy. I know this
because I've already talked to her. So there you go, and I will
be back then the week after that live with all kinds of cool stuff for
you then. But next week Kathy Strain, so make sure you tune in
and until then, guys, I'll see on the Edge one