Now one of your pudding. I got a string going on here, something
just cause my dog. Something killed your dog, my dog. We're flying
through the or over the tree. I don't know how it did it,
Okay, Damn, I'm really confused. All I saw was my dog coming
over the fence and he was dead. And once you hit the ground like,
I didn't see any cars. All I saw was my dog coming over
the fence. Sat what are you putting? We got some wonder or something
crawling around out here? Did you see what it was? Or was it
was? Standing enough? I'm out here looking through the window now and I
don't see anything. I don't want to go outside, Jesus, quice you
bick Hello, get somebody out here. Quent on out there. I thought
of a bit of about text forty nine. I don't know easy out there.
Yeah, I'm walking right. Hey. I want to welcome o guest
to the show. It is doctor Chirou from Oregon. Welcome to the show.
Thanks thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I am
glad to have you on the show. Let's get into this bigfoot thing.
I know you're not here to necessarily talk about experiences. Why don't you lay
the foundation. You are a pH d. You are a doctor. Let's
talk a little bit about your history, your background, your education, and
then let's get into the sasquatch subject. Sure, yeah, no problems.
I grew up here in southern Oregon. My dad was a hunting and fishing
guide. Spent my youth in the woods and along the rivers. Grew up
in Brogue River on the river. I love being out in the woods,
have been a longtime fan of the sasquatch mythology and the stories. Then went
off to school and unlike anyone that I grew up with, decided I was
going to study primates in the wild. I decided that when I was eight
years old, and so just continued on and ended up doing my PhD in
evolutionary anthropology. My field work was on the development of behavior and wild male
chimpanzees. I've also studied baboons, gibbons, and lemurs, a few other
species here and there, as well as studying grizzly bears, gray wolves,
and human behavior. Doing a lot of human evolutionary studies, so studying the
fossil record. When you're an evolutionary anthropologist, you have to be a Swiss
Army knife in a lot of different areas. Have to know enough genetics to
get you by, you have to understand the fossil record. You have to
my case, no behavioral ecology, which includes understanding animal behavior and human behavior.
So there's a lot of different hats that you wear. Yeah, I've
been interested being a kid from Oregon, just a guy from Oregon that I've
always been like, man'd be so cool sasquatch was out there. But I
put a scientific lens on it. It just leads you in directions where a
lot of it doesn't hold up. But I'm always like, my thing is
in biology. You should never say never. Hey, you should never say
never. You should never say always, because as soon as you do,
somebody's going to pull up a seal camp off the floor of the ocean and
off Madagascar, and your whole idea is just shot. So we always need
to be open to new evidence. We always need to be open to two
ideas. And I try and keep that perspective. And I've been a fan
of your podcast for a while. I listened to it when I'm getting my
kid ready for school in the morning, and it's a nice kind of way
to wake up to something that isn't too pressing, isn't waking up to the
BBC or something like that. So I appreciate that, and I like your
approach, and that's why I reached out and said, hey, let's have
a conversation. I think it'll be fun. I am so glad you did.
I did pick up and write down a couple of words that you said
in the beginning of this, because I famously don't get into the weeds when
I have people on the show, no matter what the topic is. I
like to be fresh and I like to hear it for the first time.
So I didn't do a lot of preparation for this conversation, admittedly, and
I wrote down mythology and stories those kind of stuck out to me when you
were talking about bigfoot. I always approached this very scientifically, or at least
I think so I try to employ the scientific method, critical thinking, Ockham's
Raiser, all of those things when it comes to bigfoot. I've straddled that
line for so long with just admitting I've gotten so much shit lately with people
read it. We talk about the bunghole of social media on our other podcast
about Reddit and going down the rabbit hole. Some of the people over there,
Hey, I don't listen to this guy because he doesn't even know if
Bigfoot's real. My thing has always been I don't think I need to be
directly in a camp of sure. Some people who listen to the show want
me to be all in on Bigfoot, and they want me to say it's
real. I'm about ninety eight percent there, just because of my own experiences
and talking to so many people who have had so many different experiences that really
can't be explained. I'm almost there, but we just address this. Wayne
and I talked about it on that Bigfoot podcast this past week. At least
for me, intelligent people form theories. We form hypotheses based on what we
know now, the information we have, what we grew up with, the
stories that we've been told, the conversations we've had, and as new things
come in, we have to adjust. I've done this in so many aspects
of Bigfoot, whether it be people in Bigfoot, whether it be evidence in
Bigfoot, or whether it just be stories anecdotal accounts of these things. I
have at least always tried to adjust my theory and adjust the way I feel
about these things based on the information I have. This new information comes in,
I've adjusted. I used to think that Patterson Gimlin film was a hoax.
I'm about ninety nine percent sure that's probably a real sasquatch there, But
it took a long time for me to get there. It took a couple
of years. Frankly, I'm still there with the subject in general, still
not one hundred percent because I haven't seen one of these things. I think
it's very important to approach it from that standpoint. I've always done that,
and most people who listen to the show, I think they're glad that I
do that, because I don't drink the Bigfoot kool aid. I call people
out if I think something's BS. If I don't agree with something, I'm
gonna say it. Just given your history, your background, your education,
obviously you're generally interested in the subject. Let's just go down that rabbit hole
for a second. From your lens as a scientist and what you know and
what you studied about primate behavior. Just give us your elevator pitch on what
you think in general about sasquatch one way or the other, pro or con
sure, Yeah, and let me just say really quickly before I do that
that one of the things that got me into your podcast was I really appreciated
your perspective on the Todd's Standing videos when they came out. I appreciated that
you called it like you saw it, Like you said you didn't drink the
kool aid, but you weren't. Also, I'm going to dismiss this out
right. I'm gonna call it like I see it where I think it's BS,
I'm gonna say so, but I think that is possible. I'm gonna
say so. And I've listened to some of your stuff about going up and
spending some time with them. I'd love to hear more of that at some
point. But yeah, from my perspectives, for me, whenever you're thinking
about any kind of population living in an area, the first thing that you
got to think about is the ecology, and you got to think about can
the ecology support that population. Now we all know that based on what folks
use as their evidence, people in the Sasquatch world say absolutely it could support
a large ape. And to be clear, if Sasquatch exists, from my
perspective, I don't go into any of the portals or anything like that.
It is a biological entity if it exists. But that's also my perspective on
pretty much everything. So that's where I start. There's a couple of things
that immediately when you hear the current narrative around sasquatch that stand out. The
first is a lot of people characterize them as some sort of op level carnivore,
something along those lines. It's really difficult for a carnivore to get as
big as sasquatch are reported to be really difficult. That requires some really high
hunting success of really large animals. People will say bears are that big.
Yeah, grizzly bears are carnivores, but they're carnivores that scavenge a hell of
a lot and they eat a lot of things that are berries, fungus,
all sorts of things that a carnivore, an obligate carnivore like a big cat,
isn't going to eat those. So bears are omnivores. And that's one
thing where I push back. And actually, when I was talking to Cliff
Barrickman about this, I was saying, for me, it's far more believable
knowing primate evolution. Knowing the ecology of what carnivores require, it's far more
believable that if sasquatch exists, it's something that has adapted to eating really low
quality foods. And part of that is the descriptions of people give when they
say that they saw them, they saw their teeth. They don't see any
canines, they don't see any shearing, any carnid teeth. They see big
flat teeth. Those are teeth that are made to be basically a primate version
of a cow, right chewing up low quality foods, fibrous foods. So
that's the first thing, is thinking of the ecology. And along those lines,
I don't understand why a lot of the sort of sasquatch researchers and I
put that in finger quotes, because I don't know how much controlled research is
going on or how much it's just armchair stuff. And that's all fine.
I'm good with that. I love citizens science and everything else, but we
probably shouldn't confuse that with decades spent researching a subject. It's really interesting that
people tend to talk about although they have to have shelter. I don't understand
that concept because most primates don't use shelters. I've been in monsoon qualit environments
with chimpanzees where all they do is duck their heads and just sit there and
wait it out. I've also seen them walk into empty crevices at the base
of a tree, a hole at the base of a tree, back into
it like it's a little phone booth, and just waited out. And so
sometimes yeah, oranguet ansel sometimes use leaves to cover their heads during a heavy
rainstorm, but most of the time they just put their heads down, cross
their arms and waited out. So again, doesn't mean that would be what
sasquatch has to do. What we know big apes do isn't something like making
tree structures and things like that and making homes for themselves. So that's the
other part, thinking about things like the temperature gradients. Most primates can't survive
at places where sasquatches are said to be seen. So again the ecology comes
back, and that all leads me to one of the biggest things. And
actually Meldrum and I talked about this, and Jeff and I have known each
other for years. We have cross pathsic conferences. I have a ton of
respect for Jeff and we talked about the niche that sasquatches would fill. All
too often people are describing black bears, and my thing is, you don't
see two really large mammals filling the same niche in the same environment. Like
people say, oh, if black bears can live there, then sasquatch can
live there. Sure, but they're already bears there. And even if one
is nocturnal and one is diurnal. Again, the amount of food that you
need to support those kind of body masses you'd have to be in really tiny
numbers. So probabilities are always in my mind that way of the ecology.
Then there are some biological components that I think of things like structurally, for
a biped regardless of what kind of foot structure and everything else. When people
start talking about nine and a half but tall bipeds, there's a reason why
the tallest people in the world live to be forty years old that are really
age, their bodies just break down. And that kind of vertical structure is
really difficult to establish for anything that is on two legs. Again, we're
talking biology, so it doesn't mean it can't happen, it's just the probability
of it's really low. And then the final thing I'd say, and this
is where the mythology comes in, is if you listen to how a lot
of people describe sasquatch. When they do like a full description, they sound
like superheroes. This was the biggest, strongest, fastest thing I've ever seen.
Nothing could hurt it. It moved faster than a cheetah. It was
stronger than a gorilla. So you were hanging out with the incredible Hulk.
Biology usually doesn't work that way. You usually don't maximize all of these features.
You aren't going to run seventy miles an hour if you weigh one thousand
pounds. Typically, if you're an a NFL fan and you watch the combine
and watch the college players coming out, there were some three hundred pounders that
went four five six four six forties, and that's fast, a lot faster
than I could ever run. But they weren't running a four to two forty
like the wide receivers were. And that's just within our species. That's not
even talking about different species and their abilities. So that's the part where I
get into there's a lot of mythologizing where I would believe it much more if
they talked about they were fast and a short burst, and then they're just
there. But these reports where man it ran across that hillside or up that
hillside at a speed that a human could never do. Again, I go
back to where's the energy coming from. So there's a lot of biological improbabilities
that make it really hard to imagine this species actually existing in North America.
We've talked about this recently, Wayne and I over on that Bigfoot podcast.
We're talking about Robert Wadlow. I think he was something like eight foot eleven.
He had a size thirty seven double D foot, which I think his
foot measured out a little over eighteen inches. Because you always hear that I
use the word always. If you're saying always or never, you're probably lying
and the truth is always in the middle. So I try not to do
that. But typically it's very common to hear of fifteen to seventeen inch tracks
when people find footprints, for example living the Sasquatch, and we were talking
about a particular story. I think somebody was on the show, I don't
remember who it was. Somebody was talking about having a twenty or twenty two
inch footprint and how somebody immediately, and I think he actually said it might
have been Jeff or somebody who was speaking on behalf of Jeff or knowing what
Jeff knew. That was just too large. There was no way that something
could have a foot that big. And we were talking about Robert Wadlow,
because this is a man, right although he was certainly an extreme for our
species, had an eighteen plus inch foot. So I was like, Okay,
if we're talking sasquatch, it's not out of the realm a possibility for
the foot to be that big. I too, agree with you on a
lot of things that you were talking about. I started with the size,
and this is where I have changed my theory. I've changed my working hypothesis
about these creatures. I think a lot of times when people start talking,
and it happened to me recently. I think somebody told me on an interview
recently that somebody described a sasquatch that was possibly ten to twelve feet tall,
according to this witness. I just shake my head there, because I don't
even play a PhD on television, and I don't get into anthropology and people's
make up, the body, the skeleton, any of those things. But
I know that it's difficult. If you saw Robert Wadlow as an example,
towards the end of his life and even in his early years, he's walking
with a cane, he's having very difficult joint issues, the weight of his
body pressing down on those joints. It's just not built to do that.
I have adjusted my hypothesis on these things to think that if they exist and
people are seeing what they say they're seeing, because I certainly want to get
into some of the anecdotal reports and go down that rabbit hole, but if
people are seeing what they're describing as a large bipedal ape, I don't think
they're nine feet tall. I think when you get into those situations where you're
heightened, the adrenalines pumping, you get in a bar fight with a guy
who's five toot six, You tell the story next week to your friends.
The guy was six seven, right, you took him out with a pool
que he was six foot seven, three hundred pounds and actuality. The guy
was probably closer pushing five to seven above twenty five. It just happens that
way. It's the fishing story, right, you go out and catch it's
just gonna say, you catch a huge five six pound bass, and it's
probably really closer to three it's probably more like eight inches, but it becomes
eighteen inches when you get home. It's that human nature. And I don't
think it's people trying to be deceptive. I don't think they're trying to lie,
they're not trying to embellish. It's just what happens to you physiologically when
you get in those situations. Holy shit, something scared me to death.
That thing was nine feet tall and that had to weigh nine hundred pounds.
Is it possible that it could have been six and a half feet and maybe
two hundred and twenty pounds. I'm just saying, so I believe that is
a possibility. Let's get into the footprints. Let's get into the morphology of
the foot Let's talk a little bit about that. Because you mentioned doctor Jeff
Meldrum. That is his speciality, as they say, really, I had
a conversation with Jeff probably two years ago, maybe over two years ago now,
and he's single handedly almost had me convinced that the Patterson Genlin film was
real back then, just based on his analysis of the footprints and the cast
from that day, Let's talk a little bit about that, because that's something
that I mean, frankly, it's really what we go to when it comes
to bigfoot these days as proof of existence. If you're talking to somebody,
it comes back to the footprints, because people are finding footprints. I have
found footprints on our land here, I've cast things that I can't explain.
How do you deal with that as a scientist? How do you have a
conversation with somebody like Jeff and say, look, I think you're wrong here,
dude, I don't think this is an upright bipedal eight that's making these
footprints. What is your take on this? Because when you get into those
conversations, and he's not the only one, when you get into breaking those
things down, and he is very good at breaking down that morphology and showing
you exactly what he's seeing. What are we looking at here? Are those
fakes? In your mind? Are people out there making these things and they're
fooling somebody like Jeff? What is your opinion on just the footprints alone?
Yeah, so really quickly before we get into that. The lesson I love
to use when we're talking about the size, because I agree with you about
the body size estimates. The lesson I love to use is because the fishing
story is great. But talk to any hunter who hunts big game. When
they see a buck that's the biggest buck they've ever seen, they take that
buck. They're sure that buck weighed four hundred pounds. They take it to
the butcher and it dresses out at one hundred and ten pounds after skin and
everything's been moved away, which means probably weighed about two hundred pounds. They
doubled its size just based on and I agree with you, it's your adrenaline
kicks in it and your ability to rationally judge things gets altered. I think
your background was in law enforcement, right, you saw this all the time
eyewitnesses. It's part of the reason why eyewitnesses are not good witnesses, because
there are adrenaline starts to kick in and they don't see things factually as they
are. And I don't blame folks at all. I agree with you.
I don't think they're trying to embellish. I think that's what's happening in their
brain. So moving on to foot morphology first, I don't argue with Jeff
is an immaculately trained an atom and morphologist. I know the folks that he
trained under. He has some of the best schooling in the world when it
comes to anatomy of morphology. He understands the foot in a way that I
would never want to because I'm not into the morphology the foot like that,
and I don't think i'd ever be able to. He really knows his stuff,
so when Jeff is sure, and he and I haven't had a lot
of conversations on this, only a couple. I saw him this last summer
here in Oregon. There's the Glide Sasquatch Festival that I went to for the
first time, cool little community gathering. Jeff was there. He had given
a lecture the night before, and I saw him at his booth and we
talked for a little bit, but of course, you know how it is
when you're at a booth, you don't get to have real conversations with folks.
We've exchanged a few emails. I've been grateful to him for indulging me
that way. I would say this, I don't think the majority of cases
are people intentionally trying to hoax people. I think that there are a lot
of times that you probably have a situation where you have someone sees a print
in the ground, is sure that's what it is, then goes in and
happens to carve out what it is so they can get a good casting.
Then they pour the cast. We'll say this, I don't think I can
make a sufficient argument that Jeff's hypothesis on the structure of a sasquatch foot is
wrong. I don't think that I can pull out the data that would refute
that hypothesis. I think it's a really interesting hypothesis of having that mid tarsal
break and having that absorption that way, being a different style of bipedalism than
what we see in humans and human relatives and direct ancestors. But I don't
think that I could say, oh, no, here's why that is wrong.
And so for me that remains an unanswered thing, something that I haven't
seen enough direct evidence of. I know the hundreds of casts that Jeff has,
I know the hundreds of casts that Cliff has, know that we can
separate all of those that we know that's doing a really good job of cataloging
things. Now. I think maybe in another five to ten years we might
be in a place where you've really been able to track down that you're not
getting duplicates from folks, that you're not getting those sort of things. I
do think that things like the cripplefoot example are really interesting examples because there are
growths and anomalies that look like they're in that track that again, you'd have
to be an expert to be able to do that, I think, so
those are ones that you know honestly. I think this is part of the
reason why I stay openly skeptical is that I think there are a lot of
people out there who are like yourself. You've found stuff. I have no
reason to think, Oh, Brian's just trying to pull one over. He's
trying to promote something. You don't seem that way, and I'll have no
reason to think that was the case. So I think that people are again,
they think they're experiencing what their mind is telling them. It is.
I don't know that the facts match up with that. Their own personal truth
might be that, but the facts might not match up. And really quickly
on the size of the feet, yeah, there have been these anomalous human
beings that are eight plus feet tall and have these gigantic feet at the time
when they existed, there were two billion people on the planet. There are
four billion people on the planet. It's a numbers game. When you get
to that kind of variation and you get to the far ends of the Bell
curve, you're not going to have an eight foot eleven human being in a
population of ten thousand, and if you do, they're probably not going to
survive. This is why when you look at let's use mountain gorillas as an
example, there are a few thousand mountain gorillas left in the world. Thankfully,
the numbers have been continually ticking up for several years now. You don't
have a lot of variation in body size. When someone says a male gorilla
weighs four hundred and fifty pounds, they all come in pretty close to that
if they're a full grown, healthy, adult male gorilla. Whereas you look
at eight billion people on the planet, you got Shack and the rest of
us. And I think that's something that we need to always keep in mind
when we're talking about a biological population, is that the numbers game is really
important. Variation is going to be just naturally increased the greater the numbers,
So it's hard to use humans as an example I agree with you that twenty
two inches isn't out of the realm of possibility. If sasquatches exist for their
foot size, for a big male that would be on that far end of
the tail, that would be a really rare individual, doesn't mean it can't
exist. It just means that the likelihood of it. I think that's why
maybe somebody like I don't want to speak for him ever, but I think
maybe that's why somebody like Jeff would say, old Tardo, imagine a foot
that big, because he's thinking and probabilities of a population, and he's thinking,
Yeah, the likelihood that you're going to get that crazy giant anomaly,
this person from Washington State is just going to find it. Those numbers get
really minuscule. I think I'd start buying lottery tickets. I think you might
be right. I'm all about the totality of the circumstances when it comes to
anything, but particularly with bigfoot. Let's move in and talk a little bit
about vocalizations, because this is the other thing that I have experienced that I
frankly can't explain. I've heard some of the weirdest shit I've ever heard here
in North Carolina and now up in BC, Canada. I have my feelings
and theories about the Sierra sounds, some of the things that people have put
out there. But there is the ohio how. I think everybody who's into
bigfoot has probably heard Matt Moneymaker's ohio how from I think ninety two or whenever
he recorded it. I've heard almost the exact same thing fifty yards from my
house here in North Carolina at eleven o'clock at night, except sounded like there
was a weird bark on the end of it. I've heard a lot of
things I can't explain that. I've never said it was bigfoot. I never
will say it was bigfoot because I didn't see it. Let's talk a little
bit about some of the vocalizations that people are hearing, whether they're recorded or
not. David Ellis at the Olympic Project has come out with a lot of
audio and a lot of different people that have had things. Julie Rinch comes
to mind here in the Uari National Forest. I had heard David on a
couple of years ago. There was a gentleman I just interviewed. I was
working on his audio today before I hopped on with you, who has recorded
some really weird stuff out in his area on the reservation he lives on,
and David has analyzed it and he can't find a known animal for this sounds.
That's the other thing. And I've got some theories i want to throw
out here in just a minute. I want to talk a little bit about
monkeys and apes and chimps and some of the other things that we've talked about
on the show recently. Has there been anything you've heard just because of your
interest to this that has peaued your interest, maybe like the Ohiohio or the
Sierra sounds or anything like that you find extremely odd, like maybe some of
the footprints that may sway you one way or the other towards going if there
was something that was going to convince me, maybe that was it. And
stay tuned for more Sasquatch out to see. We'll be right back after these
messages. Yeah, I find it sounds really interesting because sometimes you hear people
talking about the whoops, and quite honestly, when I've heard the recordings of
those, that sounds like somebody recorded a gibbon in a sanctuary somewhere. I
wonder sometimes, again, I've never heard any of these things firsthand. I
only get the recordings off the Internet or listening to a show or something,
and I wonder sometimes if people have not recorded things and messed around with things.
Because I've also heard a wookie that was created using a couple of different
classic sounds and combining things. I'm just saying that sound engineers can do a
time. I'm not throwing shade at anybody for what they're claiming. I'm just
saying that can happen, and that wouldn't surprise me with something like sounds,
because let's say people are in the woods they hear something. When we were
just talking about people with what they see not being accurately reflected, sounds are
a whole different level. Human hearing is not particularly amazing for an animal.
We don't rely on it super heavily, and even folks who have trained themselves
to rely on it super heavily, it's not something that's instinctive for us.
Talk about being up for interpretation. Now, I don't doubt that you may
have heard something that sounded just like the Ohio sounds. When I heard the
Ohio sounds, I went interesting. I lived in Ohio for seven years.
I spent a lot of time in the woods there. I've heard the wind
howling in a very similar way lots of times. I think there's a lot
of times when folks are out in the woods, they're so ns are heightened,
they're hearing something. Here's another thing. I wouldn't say that the Ohio
howl is necessarily the wind. But one of the things that we had in
Ohio that I didn't know about until I moved back there and I studied dog
behavior for years, is that they actually have wolf coyote hybrids there, so
they're not just a typical coyote with that high pitched yip. They get a
little bit of a howl into their calls, so you'll hear them. I
wouldn't be surprised when you hear a bark at the end of something. You're
probably talking a canid to some kind. I think that most of the sounds
that people hear, and again haven't experienced myself. I'm totally open to having
that experience. I hope I do at some point. I think most of
the time they're misidentifying an animal that they're hearing, maybe for the first time.
I love these kind of comparing catalogs to I couldn't find any animal,
any known animal that sound matched to all. Right. To really do that,
you're going to have to control for every variable, and those animals have
to be in the exact same environment, and you're never going to get that
in a wild situation. The wind's always going to be slightly different, the
substrate around you, the trees, the rocks that it can bounce off of,
everything's going to be slightly different. And all of that impact sound waves
so drastically that it's hard to use those as a reliable That is a piece
of evidence. Now, that's not to say that people who have studied for
years or who have lived around them for years can't sit there and tell you.
I can sit there and probably ninety nine percent of the time accurately tell
you if it's a coyote calling. I can tell you if it's a wolf
calling, because I studied wolves for a little while, and we have wolves
that are out in the areas that I hike and hunt in. I can
tell you when it's a cougar. Some of the bigfoot calls that I've heard
that people claim are a woman screaming. You've just never heard of cougar before.
That's The other thing I love too, is a lot of these witnesses
are man. I grew up in the woods. I've heard every kind of
animal. I know what every kind of animal sounds like. Okay, maybe
I'm not saying I can do it all the time. I've been in the
woods my entire life. Too. There's a certainty and almost a level of
arrogance that comes in. I think for some of the folks who are identifying
calls where they say, oh, that's a squatch for sure. Unless it's
sitting there breathing its nasty breath on your face while it's making that call,
you don't know if it's a squatch for sure. I've heard deer makes sounds
that I never knew that they could make. Then you get into individual variation.
I'll tell you a quick little story about sounds. So chimpanzees have all
sorts of different calls they do for different situations. One of the classic calls
is to do a panthood or a long call. That's the one where they
and they build up to a big call. We had a male chimpanzee site
there I did most of my research at named Pincer. You could identify him
from a half a mile away because his call went and at the end he
went, and no other chimp did that. So it was really easy when
he would make his call when he'd be like three hundred yards away coming into
a fruit tree, El Pincer's on his way. One of my field assistants
I worked with had a really great ear. He could identify over thirty five
males based on their calls, and we would play the game. We'd be
sitting at a fruit tree where there's some chimps already, and the males all
come in in a call as they come in, basically announcing their arrival,
and he would say, oh, dexter, bru bec Basie, and he
would just be calling them. If you noticed, those were three jazz musician
names. My professor was a big jazz fan. Sure enough, he was
never wrong. I got to the point before I left where I could get
thirty two of the males just by their calls. So individual variation in the
calling, right, you can have a species typical call, but then you
put in all the variation around it, and that again, if you've been
exposed to this call twice in your life, three times in your life,
for this certainty of absolutely that was really Again, I leave the door open.
I would love to be in a situation where I heard something that was
absolutely created by an animal and absolutely I couldn't identify that is probably this animal.
I would love that, But I've never been in that situation, and
the recorded calls that I've heard there's either so much wind noise with them everything
else that I go. I don't know where the true sound is there.
I don't know that I trust for myself. I would love to be shown
this. I don't know that the sound engineers pulling it out, putting it
through, and I don't know this stuff, and that's not my area,
the technology around it. But if you have stuff where you say, absolutely,
Hogan, check this out, I would love to hear it, because
I have yet to hear something where I go that also could possibly be or
I can't say that also could possibly beat this animal. It's far more common
in North America than a sasquatch would be if they're around. You've listened to
the show long enough to know where I sit on this. But again,
I go back to the totality of the circumstances. It happened to me in
Radium. I was convinced I was going to be hoaxed. When I went
up there, I had to clear my brain and get ready to possibly have
some experiences and try to stay open minded about it, because I was going
into a situation with Todd and I just thought he was going to hoax me.
But once I got there and I saw the area, we hiked enough
to know we were eighteen miles deep in the woods. There was nobody else
there, and I knew where Todd was. At least a couple of these
times when we had these experiences, One of them was in the middle of
the day where I heard a couple of whoops, then what sounded like wood
knocks that responded to me doing a call of my own pretty quick succession there.
That same night we had more whoops. While we're around the campfire,
we had things being thrown at us. Couldn't figure out if it was small
rocks or possibly little pine cones. I don't know what throws pine cones or
rocks in the woods. This wasn't the same night, but a different night
we were having things thrown at us. We heard and I recorded what sounds
like samurai chap into the woods. I can't explain that man. I heard
that with my own ears, and three other people heard it. Todd was
talking, of course, one of the things he does the most. He's
the best at I heard that recording he was talking over, but I heard
it clearly. Ash heard it, and I think Kyle I didn't hear it.
I heard that in real time, and I got chills because it sounded
like I was listening to something off of the Sierra Sounds, which I find
weird because I have some issues with the Sierra Sounds I always have. It's
just the total of the circumstances for me. Again, I didn't see a
sasquatch. I can't definitively say anything was Sasquatch related. All I can say
is all of those experiences and the culmination of those things coming together. I
left there feeling that I had possibly heard a sasquatch and or possibly even live
interacted. I hate to say that because that's such a toddism. I can
take you out and show you a Sasquatch. Are you going to live interact
with one? But I feel like that's what happened. Can I ask you
a question about the radium experience? Absolutely? Okay, So It's really two
questions, and I may have misunderstood this when I was listening to you describe
it on your podcast. Well, you were just saying you guys were up
there totally alone, except you're talking about that guy who was doing the solo
and was in camp when you first went up there. Do you know where
he was the whole time he was at the top of Radium Mountain when that
happened, supposedly, I know it was because he filmed while he was up
there. He filmed the entire time he was up there at a GoPro it's
time stamped video. I didn't know that ye and I don't have a dog
in that fight. But I will say this about Jason. We took him
a good ways up to where he was going. We drove him miles and
then he went another thirty eight hundred feet in elevation up the mountain. And
I've seen im post videos from being up there, so I know he was
there and I know it wasn't him in the woods doing what we were hearing.
The other thing that stood out for me was when I was listening to
the recording, I think it's interesting how and this may just be I don't
know Todd at all. This may just be Todd Standing's personality. But when
you guys heard the samurai chatter and you're recording when I was listened to it,
and you guys said, did you hear that? And Todd stops for
a second, he goes those whoops, and you guys corrected him and said,
no, it wasn't whoops. It sounded like samurai chatter. Oh yeah,
yeah, and he quickly went over it again. This is my skeptical
brain man. But when I heard that, I was like, he was
expecting something else. He was expecting to be able to confirm you heard whoops,
and it wasn't what he expected. And that, to me is interesting
because I spent a lot of time around Carnival Barkers. I've watched people selling
snake oil a lot of times. I have great respect for your ability to
see through the bs and I wasn't there, And I don't doubt your experiences
at all. That's a guy who's got a real dog in a fight of
proving to people and having someone like you who has that experience where you can
come back and say, hey, it's stuff I can't explain. So that
for me as an outsider just leads to more skepticism, where I say,
what is someone like Todd willing to do to make sure that an experience happens
for someone? And I'm right there with you, and I tell you,
I don't even recall that. I'm gonna have to go back and listen to
the audio because all I remember him saying is no, I didn't hear that
because he was freaking talking. I'll have to go back and listen to that.
If that's the case, then that's something I need to take a look
at, because here's what's happened recently with him. Everybody's probably rolling their eyes
as they listened to this about Todd. It's happened to me recently. I
have admitted openly that I was so euphoric about just being there. It's a
beautiful place. I was there for seven days. I got away from work
completely cut off. Sounds awesome to some people, it sounds like torture to
me. It's like heaven, being that far into the woods and not having
a cell phone, things dinging and going off, and those responsibilities. So
I think I was really euphoric about that. I tried to separate those experiences
from Todd, because Todd didn't really have a whole lot to do with my
experiences there because outside of the time we spent, my experiences were what they
were with nature and all the other things that were going on. But I've
seen it recently and I called him out recently about a video he posted over
on his YouTube channel where he was clearly leading this lady that he was out
with. It was something he had filmed for wild TV or something, and
he's clearly leading her. He's correcting her when she doesn't say what's fitting his
narrative. And I called him out on it and he got pissed off.
And let's just say, when I anymore ran this is what I really appreciate,
man, I seriously do. Honestly. It makes me a fan of
yours. Not that you and he had your issue. It's that you called
him out, that you said whoa, because that's exactly my thing. You
want to truly let people have their radium experience, pick them out there and
make sure that they're trained up to hang out for five days on their own,
and leave them alone, don't be there guiding them. Very good point.
And to that point, when I said that, I didn't just call
him out for it, I said on the show. When Wayne and I
talked about it over on that Bigfoot podcast, I said, look, I
was probably guilty of overlooking a lot of that with Todd because he tried the
same thing with me, and it sounds like we have it on recording of
him doing it around the fire. I just was oblivious to it. I
wasn't really listening to him because I knew he didn't hear it because he was
talking. I was talking to the other people that I thought might have heard
it. But he does that a lot. He tries to lead people in
the direction of his narrative, and I'm just not picking up what he's putting
down. I don't pick that up from anybody. If anybody says anything definitive
like you said, oh, that's definitely a sasquatch, I'm usually turning you
off, and I'll have a conversation with you, but I'm not listening very
hard because I think you're full of shit, because you don't know anything definitively
about these things unless you're living with them. I don't think anybody's doing that.
I don't know. I saw something on online about a woman who's been
living with one for a few years. I'm having Janis Carter flashbacks. Man,
you're killing I want to shift gears a little bit here and talk about
something that we've been talking about over on that Bigfoot podcast. If you guys
don't listen to that show, and I know y'all don't because I see the
downloads every week, you should go check out that Bigfoot podcast. Wayne and
I have been talking about this crazy story that came up. Something happened.
We got an email months ago about sasquatch swimming. Because there are stories I
think I've documented a couple myself from people who have talked about sasquatch swimming.
It comes up, can they get to certain areas? Can they be in
places like Australia? Can they be in places like the UK? And specifically
can they get to some of these islands that people have experiences That means they
got to swim. If they're not building boats, they got to get there
somehow, they got to be swimming. Let's talk a little bit about this.
We just did a show last week. We have a newsletter, the
Bigfoot Weekly Newsletter. If you guys haven't signed up for that, you can
do that on the website. It's free. All you got to just put
in your email address and we put these out every Sunday, and I wrote
one about an interesting story. I thought it was interesting about these wild animals,
these wild monkeys. I think it's macaque, possibly lemurs, some other
type of monkey that's living an Ocala, Florida, of all places. And
that came up because one of the first videos that I found about these monkeys
in the Silver Creek area, I think near Ocala, was all these monkeys.
They're jumping out of trees from twenty feet up and they're swimming everywhere.
Everybody's seen monkeys swim, right. We had this lady send us an email
talking about chimps. She said she used to work at a zoo and they
had an enclosure where they separated these chimps with water features because they can't swim.
Let me get it directly. You're the expert on this that Wayne and
I we're hoping we'd have two weeks ago. So let's talk a little bit
about swimming and apes. Is it a thing where monkeys can swim and apes
can't because they're too danse is it the muscle? What say you on the
swimming thing. Okay, it's not necessarily Monkeys can swim, apes can't.
Apes typically avoid deep water of any kind. Like make chest up they typically
avoid. For years, people reported that they did have too low of body
fat ratio to be able to swim. They don't stay afloat is a thing.
Doesn't mean that they couldn't put in a lot of effort and swim.
It just means that their body doesn't float like most humans do. I've always
laughed at that because I don't float. I'm a pretty dense individual, probably
in multiple ways. I sink readily. So that was the thinking for a
long time. Then they found orangutans regularly going into the water and waiting in
relatively deep water, sometimes actually crossing where their feet aren't touching, sometimes having
to swim. And rings have really short legs relative to body size, so
they're not going to stand up and be out of the water in much of
anything. And so people like we, yeah, but orangutans, they've lived
in Southeast Asia where it's incredibly swampy, so they've had to adapt to this.
A couple of years ago, someone got some really nice video of bonobos,
So our other closest living relatives same distance from US as chimpanzees standing up
waiting in almost Chess, Taiwan, and then gorillas wading through deep water using
a stick actually not as like a cane, but more I think probably probing,
because if you think of it, especially all of those apes, there
are crocodiles in almost every place where they live. There's a good reason to
go into deep water. You can't see the bottom in almost any of these
waterways, but there's a good reason to avoid it. Not only that,
but you're also vulnerable for everything else because you can't move through it very fast,
so it's more an avoidance. I think chimpanzees typically will not go into
water. I've watched them go fifty one hundred meters to get to a log
to cross over a creek that they probably could walk through up to their stomachs
when they're knuckle walking. But again, avoiding any kind of deep water is
probably a smart move, So that's that case. There are some monkeys Proboscis
monkeys were some of the first ones that they found that really good swimmers.
They'll actually jump in and they'll actually swim around. There's some caque species the
crab eating macaque that will dive and get crabs, submerge itself. The ones
in Florida, there's probably a macque population because they probably escaped from some sort
of captive situation, probably a testing facility. I know that there's a vervet
population that's an African monkey, the relatively small monkey that's in Florida, and
are really adaptable vervets between verbts and the caqus you're looking at. If there
is a coyote of the primate world, a verbetcaq or baboon, So it
wouldn't surprise me that they're going in and wading through water, sometimes swimming.
But no, it's not that biologically monkeys can swim. Apes can't. They
all have relatively low body fat densities compared to us, so most of them
are not going to be really great swimmers, not going to be able to
float, which most people don't realize. That's what kind of allows us to
be pretty good swimmers for a terrestrial biped because a lot of the effort is
taken off, we can stay afloat. That way doesn't mean that the aquatic
gape hypothesis has any validity. It doesn't, but it's a byproduct of us
having that body fat. So yeah, that's probably the case. But for
the most part, apes do not like to swim, but they will cross
waterways when they can. What is it would be Island I think, where
there's been a lot of sasquatch reportings, and you'd have to cross the waterway
unless you're ride in the ferry with an awfully big trench coat on, you'd
have to cross the waterways to get If they exist, if they're anywhere near
the body size a gimbo, it's hard to imagine. The way they're described,
they've got almost no body fat at all other than patty. Other than
females. When people describe them, they talk about, oh yeah, breasts,
which I think is really interesting because humans are the only primates that regularly
have breasts all the time that are prominent, So that I thought was a
really interesting component. But yeah, the males especially are described as can I
get on that workout program? I don't know, they're pretty impressive thinking of
them as again, this is where I go back to them being described almost
like superheroes. Oh and they swim like a dolphin. But there's got to
be something they can't other than drive a car. There's got to be something
else that they can't do, right, not according to Igor Berts. If
they can drive cars, I'll have to send you the pictures of that.
I don't think we're going to get into any kind of consensus about Bigfoot.
Do you did hear it, folks, Hogan said, sasquatch can swim?
No, I'm just kidding. This was definitely not the conversation I thought I
was gonna have today, but I have definitely enjoyed it. We probably need
to get you back again. I think we could definitely go down some more
rabbit holes here we didn't even get into. If Sasquatch exists, and we
can get you down maybe the hypothetical rabbit hole about what some of the possible
candidates might be. I think that might be a great conversation to have at
some point in time. So if you're willing, we're definitely willing to have
you back on the show. I'd love to have you back at some point.
Oh yeah, no, I'd love to have a part too. I
think we should definitely, Brian, it'd be great. I definitely think we
should set that up. But in the meantime, I've had a blast talking
to you. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Yeah, thank
you. I've enjoyed it too. I looked forward to the second part.
They say, you don't have a goal, but you can't stay science steps
step, trying this chart, that chart, everything calling right, pry back
joy from me, joy staying right, you call it right away. Still
still st assssst not not not not dot abouts stssts things used these things