Hey, yeah, welcome to Blurry Photos. I'm your host, David Flora.
I've got a fun interview coming up for you, and if you're interested
in seeing the film Shadows in the Desert the thing Derek Hayes and I have
been working on it for the past few years. It'll be in a couple
of theaters soon, with hopefully more on the way. I'll tell you the
details real quick and then we can get into the episode. So, as
of right now, you can see the film in Coshocton, Ohio on August
twenty fourth. That's if we can work out the details of playing the film
there, But right now we're scheduled for August twenty fourth at the Shelby Theaters.
You can see it in Joplin, Missouri from September eighth to September fourteenth
at the book House Cinema. And you can see it in Crested Butte,
Colorado on September sixteenth at the Majestic Theater. We could be adding more,
so keep up to date on possible additions by going to Borego Triangle dot com.
We're still awaiting a stream date, and as soon as we know,
I'll post on all the socials and announce on shows when that will be so
on to the episode. I had the pleasure of meeting journalist, editor,
producer, and author Laura Krantz at a recent literary festival and suckered her into
coming on Blurry Photos to chat with me. Laura is the creator and host
of wild Thing Podcast, a long form narrative podcast about the obsessions that capture
our imaginations. She has produced three seasons of the show, each focusing on
a different topic, including bigfoot, UFOs, and nuclear power, and she
has parlayed these seasons into a book series for middle grade readers, starting with
the Search for Sasquatch. She joins me to talk about the book and her
experiences getting to know the world of bigfoot research. Here is my interview with
Laura Krantz. Enjoy. She's the host of wild Thing podcast and the author
of the new book, The Search for Sasquatch. Laura Krantz, Welcome to
Blurry Photos. I am very excited to be here and to discuss all of
the blurry photos that I have not taken. It's funny because throughout the series
you do say blurry photos quite a bit in there, and every time my
ears were like doing. Oh, Laura and I were recently on a panel
at the Mountain Words Literary Festival here in Kristibute, Colorado, and I was
lucky enough to grab a copy of the book, which I'll talk more about
later, But first I want to ask you about this journey you've taken to
get to where you've been able to write a book, and particularly about your
experiences being relatively fresh to this realm of the unknown. So you actually have
a connection to this stuff, a connection that you didn't know about for a
while, Is that right? Yeah, So I really found out about this,
Well now I found it's two thousand and six, so now we're closing
in on twenty years ago. But what happened was I was living and working
in Washington, DC, and there was this big article in the Washington Post
about a guy named Grover Krantz who had just donated his bones, the bones
of his three Irish wolfhounds, who are already dead. I have to clarify
that some people think he killed his dogs and the Smithsonian he did not.
The dogs were dead, but he had donated his bones, the bones of
his dogs to the Smithsonian for them to have in their collection. And they're
always looking for you full specimens to have, and he really wanted to be
put on display, and they were like, yeah, that's probably not going
to happen. But as luck should have it, they were doing an exhibit
on forensic anthropology and like how you can find out stuff from bones, and
the last piece of the exhibit, they wanted to do something really, really
cool, so they recreated a photo of Grover standing in someone's backyard with his
dog, Clyde, who was his favorite of his wolfhounds, and the dogs
got its paws up on Grover's shoulder, it's standing on its hind legs,
it's like licking his face. It's a very sweet photo. They recreated that
with the two skeletons and put it on display. And so this article in
the Washington Post is all about this particular you know, exhibit and Grover and
all of the interesting things he'd done. He'd been a tenured professor of anthropology
at Washington State University. He was a scientist. Oh and he was the
country's pre eminent academic expert on bigfoot. And you're real I'm reading this and
I'm like, who the hell is this guy? What a weirdo. Can
you be a man of science and a man at bigfoot? Oh? Also
same last name, born in Salt Lake City, which is where my dad's
family was from. And so I find out through my grandfather that, yes,
Grover had been his cousin. He would show up to the family picnics
with calipers and measure people's heads. My grandfather, who was several years older,
seven or eight I think, actually stole a hand from the University of
Utah's medical lab and gave it to Grover because he knew he was so fascinated
by all the all things that anthropological and anatomy. I don't think that's legal,
but you know, my grandfather is now dead as well, so it
goes. But yeah, I found out about this connection, and for a
long time it was really just like cocktail party conversation. Hey, I have
a relative in the Smithsonian and b he was a bigfoot expert. Ha ha
ha isn't that hilarious? And then I decided to do a podcast about it
after I found out that Grover's fourth wife, number four, lived about thirty
miles south of me here in Colorado, in Parker. Actually, I don't
even know what it's thirty It's like thirty minutes. So I was like,
Okay, I'm going to go interview her and then we're going to see where
this goes. So the impetus for it all was connecting those dots that Grover
was kined to you and he had an ex wife or you know, his
fourth wife, you said, near you. If she hadn't lived near you,
do you think you would have gone that that route? I probably would
have eventually, but I think that really it was one of those like signs
from the universe kind of things. Not that I believe in that kind of
stuff necessarily, but you know, I'd been sort of sitting on this story
for a while and was My husband was like, you should write a book,
and I was like, I can't write a book. That's there's too
many words in books, and I'm used to doing audio. But I kept
seeing bigfoot stuff everywhere, and like, you know, we moved to Colorado
and there's a big Foot museum like not that far from us, up in
Bailey, Colorado. There's just bigfoot stuff everywhere. And then the more I
was just thinking about it more and more and more, and then I was
like, Okay, I'm going to sort of look up and see if there's
anyone who knew Grover and try and reach out to them. And I probably
would have reached out to Diane Horton, that was his fourth wife, even
if she'd lived far away. But then finding out that she was in Parker,
I was like, Okay, you kind of have to do this.
Yeah, yeah, it kind of writes itself after a while, right,
yeah, Right, So you talked to her and did that kind of kick
off what you thought you could put together with this. It was that that
was the deciding factor that you then packed up and decided to see what all
the fuss was about. Yeah. So after talking to her, you know,
she would talk about Grover's fascination with this. She talked about also just
how well loved he was as a teacher at Washington State, and like how
well regarded he was. We talked a little bit about the other kind of
work he did, which was really you know, he was kind of on
the forefront of a lot of the discussions about human evolution and migration patterns in
North America, and he'd waded into a lot of discussions about sort of evolution
versus creationism. There'd been a big debate at Washington State in like the nineteen
sixties, and he'd been the face of that in terms of the evolution side,
so he was a well known guy in anthropological circles. And then a
lot of people feel he shot himself on the foot because he basically wouldn't give
up the bigfoot stuff, and everyone was like, what the f are you
doing? Man, Like what does this have to do with science? But
he really was trying to approach it from a very scientific perspective. And I
found that fascinating, Like how this guy who was so science oriented was also
out there looking for a creature that most of us consider mythological or you know,
at least something in the very distant past that is not around anymore.
So that kind of fascinated me. And then it's like, why do people
believe? Why are we so fascinated with this idea of bigfoot? Why is
there? Why are there bigfoot bumper stickers and chocolate and socks and tires and
you know, music festivals, and you know, you can I can just
go on and on and on and on and on and on and on,
because once I started thinking about this bigfoot idea, there was just like bigfoot
stuff everywhere, So it's clearly captured our imaginations, even for people who were
like, yeah, it's not real, but wouldn't that be cool if it
was. Yeah, it seems like it's kind of the closest thing to magic
that we have. You know, I think a lot of people cling onto
that hope just to have something else to believe in, you know, besides
just like, oh, reality is harsh. You know, it's not that
reality is necessarily boring, because you could go into all kinds of stuff and
you know, really be fascinated by the minutest details. But a topic like
this, it really is easy for people to latch onto and then to want
to know more about and to understand. I think, yeah, for sure,
And I think for a lot of people, it's like this idea that
the world is still wild enough, that it's still unexplored enough that we haven't
like paved, impruned and you know, plasticized every single thing out there,
and something like this could exist, Like that seems magical. You know what
you think about the explorers of old like going off into the jungle and not
necessarily knowing what they were going to find out there, Like there's an element
of still wanting that to be the way the world is. Yeah, and
I can see the appeal to that. It's it's fascinating and fun and adventurous
and a little dangerous. You know, there's all kinds of stuff you can
get out of it. But there are several audio clips that you include in
the series on what Grover said, Like literally from Grover, he first of
all, has an amazing voice. I know, right, it's so good.
It's like perfect for radio, it really is. And he's kind of
like the Carl Sagan of Bigfoot stuff. And I thought that, you know,
from the get go, and then later in the series it actually comes
up someone mentions Carl Sagan in there, and uh, I think it was
Matt Moneymaker actually when you interviewed him. I think, oh, yeah,
vaguely. It's really funny that you are because I have I have not listened
to it since I put it out. I was so sick of it,
and so now people ask me about like little moments and I'm like, I
don't remember. That's well, this was also twenty eighteen, twenty seven.
Yeah, I was twenty eighteen when it came out, so it's been a
while, but yeah, he did. He did mention Carl Sagan. I
remember that. Now, that's funny. Yeah, I think it's great because
Grover was also an educator, and you know, he you could hear in
his voice that he loved teaching and that he loved learning. And that's that's
kind of the approach I like to take with this as well. You know,
I'm in it to learn, and whatever I find out, I'm happy
to teach. And I don't know, man, it's it's hard when you
come up against some difficulties with people who maybe don't share that same view.
And we can into that later, but I wanted to ask you, how
did your professional background prepare you and help you for the journey that you took
with this. Yeah. So I came from a journalism background, which was
great. I'd worked at NPR starting in two thousand and six, and I
worked with them on and off for well almost I basically for ten years,
both in DC and in Los Angeles a little bit and in Los Angeles,
and essentially like that gave me a lot of background in terms of like how
to conduct an interview, how to do the technical side of things in terms
of recording, how to think about story structure, and then a lot of
it. I just kind of winged it, like I podcasts had been around
for a while, but really it was like twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen that
they were really kind of hitting like a big stride with those longer narrative formats,
and I would listen to Cereal. I listened to Finding Missing Richard Simmons,
which was Dan Toberski's podcast about Richard Simmons and he like sort of vanished
out of the public eye and there was all these questions about where he'd gone.
And it's a great podcast if you haven't heard, he's fantastic. Dan
to Bersky's one of my favorite hosts of all time. But I listened to
that and I was like, I could do this, Like I know how
to do all of these things, and that was really helpful to hat to
be to realize that I knew the technical side of things. I knew a
lot of how to frame this stuff diving into it, and also like an
outline was very important, and coming from journalism and knowing that you need to
sort of have a structure set in place before you get started so you're not
just sort of wandering in the wilderness without any signposts. That was really helpful
too. So those were kind of the big things that sort of set me
up, I feel like, for you know, success in actually making the
thing. And you have a ton of interviews in some pretty big names that
folks would recognize. To Jeff Meldrum, like I said, met money Maker,
he's known with BFR and stuff like that. You even get Michael Schermer
in there, which I was very impressed to hear him speaking of why people
think the way they think, you know, why people want to believe or
whatever. I've got that book back here on the shelf. Yeah, I've
got it down here somewhere too. Yeah, what was the price? Did
you call these guys up? Did you have any inside track on getting those
guys like those are some pretty big names that I don't know if they do
a lot of interviews. Yeah. So the first thing that I you know,
Grover's wife Diane was instrumental in like sort of making helping me make those
first connections with people who were inside the big Foot community and knowing where to
go and who to talk to and where to turn because you know, like
you said, I came into this with like zero zero knowledge. I'd seen
Harry and the Henderson's and that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge or
real really interest in Bigfoot. And so Diane was like, you should talk
to this guy. You should talk to this guy, and she was like,
feel free to use my name. These people will be very happy to
talk to you. It also helped that I had the same last name.
I think that that really did open a lot of doors. And I was
very transparent with people up front. I was just saying, look, this
is the background for this. I'm interested in learning more about this world and
the people who are in it and what it is fascinates us. I am
not looking to poke fun at people. I am not looking to laugh at
beliefs. And I think that sort of transparency about what I was trying to
accomplish also helped. But with someone like Michael Shermer, I mean a lot
of these were just sort of like I'd send an email and he wrote back.
So I think some of these people are more willing to talk than it
might seem like at the outset, And it could be that they've gotten more
cautious as time has gone forward, and they've perhaps become bigger names or there's
been this sort of explosion of podcasts and everybody wants to talk to them.
They might be a little bit pickier, but I think too. Also saying
you know, I come from an NPR background probably helped add some gravitas to
the question I was asking. Yeah, I get that because I once emailed
to ask someone if they'd come on for an interview. This was back when
the show was my show was a little a little younger, and we were
I had a co host. We came from an improv background, so we'd
add a lot of humor to the episodes. And you don't want to be
that transparent when asking for interviews when you're like, hey, we you know,
we approached the stuff with a little bit of humor. We don't take
it that seriously, this and that, and then just got the nastiest response
back, being like, why would I want to come on a comedy show?
And it's just like okay, oh no, that that helps the old
self esteem. Yeah. Was that from someone who was like a bigfoot person
who didn't want you making fun of it or it was the same realm.
It wasn't specifically a bigfoot person, but someone who deals in that stuff.
And writes books, and they're not a very good person outside of that anyway.
So I've heard okay, so it all made sense, But it was
an experience. So I you know, lesson learned. You learn as you
go. But speaking of learning, how you have taken the process that you
come from and know and applied it to this. The first series of wild
Thing brings listeners with you on your quest to basically embed yourself in the culture
and learn about all the aspects of sasquatchery. It's nine episodes full of interviews
and audio clips and field recordings. I'm curious how long did it take you
to put it all together? It took a while. I was also working
a couple of part time jobs at the same time, which you know,
as you well know, there's not a lot of money in podcasting, so
I was doing other things to sort of supplement income, and also was kind
of at the whims of other people's schedules. So in terms of doing the
field recordings, like when could I fly out? When was going to be
convenient for them? You know, when were events happening, Like there was
an event called beach Foot which is and yeah, have you been no,
no, it sounds super exclusive. I do not think they would want me
there. Oh they might, you never know. They were a lot of
fun and they were really, really nice, and so I think I don't
remember how I made the connection with them. That was one of those it's
like Diane connected me to someone, someone else connected me to someone else.
Like I kept like laddering people on top of each other and like using those
connections as much as I could, because I think that really helps. But
you know, you're at the mercy of schedules of like that and in putting
things together. And also this is the first time I had done something this
big, and it took a while, Like I think the first episode probably
went through five or six iterations before I settled on a structure I really liked.
And then some of the episodes I could write really quickly. The second
episode, which was all about evolution, that was that was a breeze like
there was that was very straightforward to write. There was another episode that was
about sort of the taboo surrounding this topic for a lot of the people who
are fascinated by it, they don't like to talk about it. That one
went through a lot of iterations as well, and sort of figuring out how
to how to present this information in a way that was not going to be
just like look at these people like that, which is not what I wanted
to do, Like everybody was very nice and thoughtful, and that's not what
I was I was out to do. So all told, it took me
about a year and a half from when I first started working on it until
like the episodes were going out the door, and I also finished it in
advance of launch, and then spent about a month doing press, like trying
to get interest in it before I launched, so that it wouldn't just sort
of like into the you know, the abyss of meat of like all the
media out Yeah, throwing a water bottle in the ocean. Yeah, exactly.
We're going to take a quick break for ad space and be back in
just a couple of minutes. Well, you have three seasons of the show
out now, and the other seasons focus on different topics, namely UFOs and
season two and nuclear power in season three? When did you get the notion
to assemble your notes into book form? Yeah, So what happened with that
is season two was out and I had started to get lots of letters mostly
from parents who were listening with their kids, which I had not anticipated with
season one. Actually, this would have happened before season two came out,
because what happened was I started getting those letters and I was like, oh,
crap, I have to take the swearing out for subsequent seasons because I
had not anticipated the kids would be listening to this, and I swore a
little bit, not a ton, but a little bit in the first one,
and so then you end up with a you know, an explicit rating,
and that makes it harder for people to find it. So in any
case, letters from parents who are listening with their kids, letters from teachers
who were using elements of the podcast in their classroom to talk about evolution,
evidence, scientific method things like that, and I realized, oh, there's
a way to approach a different audience with this. And my agent suggested middle
grade nonfiction because she said there's a dearth of material in there that kids find
interesting. It's often very dry, it's not something that they get very excited
about, but teachers and parents are looking for that kind of material. So
yeah, A did a whole pitch to a bunch of different publishers and they
went for it, and they wanted a three book deal, so yeah,
that's kind of how that happened. Yeah, the book is gorgeous, the
art and even the covers a blend of matt and shiny, glossy stuff and
a little puffy I love it. Yeah. Raphael Obray is the guy who
did the illustrations, and he nailed it. Like I had sort of a
different idea in my head of what it would look like, sort of more
dreamy water colory, but when they sent me his stuff, I was like,
Yeah, that's great. I love it. Are you sticking with him
for later? He's doing book two and I believe they're talking to him about
book three right now, So awesome, that's great. Yeah. So when
you're putting season one together, what kind of difficulties did you encounter some of
the things I encountered or things that you encountered where it's like people didn't necessarily
want to talk to me, and this was more on the science side of
things. Yeah. I had reached out to the Smithsonian initially to talk to
them about the human evolution stuff because I thought it made sense to go there
because Grower's stuff was there and they wanted nothing to do with it. So
that was a little I was a little surprised, but not wholly surprised.
And then when Ian Tattersall, who is the curator over at the American Museum
of National Natural History in New York, when he said, yeah, you
know, I don't believe in Bigfoot, but i'll happily talk to you,
I was like, Okay, well that's a pretty sweet score, Like,
yeah, he's no joke. So, you know, ultimately, a lot
of these things ended up working out. I think some of the other problems
I ran into were you know, there were times where I was kind of
struggling with what the structure was going to look like and how to cover this
material fairly. And then I made a decision pretty early on to not do
anything that would be considered woo. So you know, telepathic Bigfoot, Bigfoot
as an alien, Bigfoot lives in my basement, Yeah, multi dimensional Bigfoot.
I just was like, like, we haven't even proven any of that
exists in the normal world, Like, why are we just attributing that to
Bigfoot? So I stuck with what Grovers, Yeah, well he just teleported,
that's why you can't see him. Yeah, duh. Yeah, if
we would just unlock more than ten percent of our brains. We could,
We totally could. You're just not using your brain, right, man.
So I did run into a little bit of pushback where we'd be talking to
people and they would sort of go in that direction. I'd be like,
thank you, and they'd be like, what, you know, you have
to keep your mind open and embrace all possibilities. And I'm like, well,
if you can bring me some really solid evidence that, you know,
the nineteenth dimension does exist, then we can talk about Bigfoot existing in it.
But yeah, let's let's start at the let's begin at the beginning.
Other issues I ran into. You went out in the field a lot.
Yeah, the field was that was a lot of fun. Yeah, and
I was surprised. Usually something will go south on those kinds of trips,
like really south. And the biggest problem was it just poured rain at Willow
Creek when I went for the fiftieth anniversary of the Patterson Gimblin film, Like
it was just dumping rain the whole weekend. But in some ways that actually
ended up being helpful because it kept people indoors and in one place, and
so it was easier to find them and talk to them. Granted it kind
of prevented you from going out to the site of where the supposed film was
shot, but I didn't really need to be out there for that, So
yeah, I got kind of lucky. Like I feel like a lot of
things fell into place with this, like the opportunity to go see those nests,
which was, you know, great, Like they didn't have to take
me out there. They'd certainly denied other media the opportunity to go do it.
But I think by that point I had talked to enough people. This
was a late enough in the reporting process, and I'd talked to enough the
people who were adjacent to that project or involved in it that they trusted me
and they were willing to let me come out there and see it, provided
I didn't take any photos, which I didn't. And then people were like,
well, why didn't you take any photos? And I was like,
they didn't ask me to, but if you go online you can find them.
So how many times through the process, because there's several field recordings that
you have and you went out multiple times, how many how many times did
you do you think you went out there to good stuff? Because you went't
like there were sometimes where you went for you saw the nests. There were
sometimes you went and did like the whoops and then tree knocks and things like
that. Is that the same trip or yeah, some of them were the
same trip, And some of the times I would use material from one trip
in multiple episodes to sort of talk about different aspects of it. So there
was let's see went out to see the nests, And that was actually towards
the end of all the reporting. As I mentioned, beach Foot was the
first field recording event that I went to and I was like, what am
I doing here? Who were these people? I'm sure they were like,
who's this lady walking around with a microphone? And that was actually one of
those moments where you know, it was like, hello, my name is
you had the tag on and I said Laura Krantz and people were like,
oh, are you related to Grover? They all knew who Grover was,
Like one guy, one guy actually got down on his knees in front of
me and was like, you know, Grover is my God and like you
know that kind of thing. I was like, whoa, okay, And
that was sort of my first introduction to how much people really really loved Grover
and what he stood for and what he represented the represented to this community.
So there was beech Foot. Then I did the Bigfoot Expedition with Shane Courson
and Cindy Caddell, who were both involved with Bigot Field rear. Cindy was
with Bigfoot Field Researcher Organization and the Olympic Project, which are two of the
Bigfoot recon groups. She's the anthropologist. Yeah, she's one of the anthropologists.
Kathy Strain was the other one, and she's one I met at beach
Foot. And then I also went to Willow Creek for the fiftieth anniversary.
And I might actually be doing these in the wrong order. It might have
been beach Foot, Willow Creek, the camp out in Mount Hood Wilderness,
and then the nests. So I went out in the field at least four
times. Oh, and then there was the trip to Bailey to the Sasquatch
Outpost. And but I find going out in the field, hey, it's
a lot of fun. It's a lot more work because you're just having to
pay attention to a lot of stuff and it's a you know, it's like
three or four days of just recording everything you can and then you have to
come back and kind of sift through all that and figure out what you want
to use. But you get all this great ambient sound. It's an opportunity
to, like you said, take people on a journey with you if you
can create sort of a nice, you know, soundscape behind you when you're
talking about some of this stuff. So, yeah, the field recordings were
a lot of fun. I didn't get to do as much of that with
other ones, or at least the sound wasn't quite as rich with some of
the other ones. For lack of a better term. Was it very creepy
or scary at times or was there a lot of priming going on in your
head that maybe made it seem that way. So I will say the Mount
Hood one was a little bit on the creepy side, mainly because we got
all set up to camp and this was an area that Shane had brought us
to because he'd been camping there before and he'd had an experience. And so,
you know, the sun goes down, we sit by the fire and
he tells his story, which we deliberately set it up that way so he
would do it, you know, at the at the creepiest possible moment,
right and then he finishes telling the story and you're like, oh shit,
what was that? And then you know, my tents on the very edge
of the camp site, and I'm like, maybe I want to move more
towards the middle. Like and I'm not really a nervous camper, like I
enjoy camping. I've never been someone who's totally, you know, freaked out
about anything other really than bears of when you're like backpacking and wyoming grizzlies,
that's some scary shit, yea. But yeah, after hearing that story,
and then we went on this kind of night hike and like you're wandering around
and pitch black darkness. Well, we had headlamps on, but we would
turn them off from time to time just to get a sense of like how
oppressive the dark was. And yeah, I mean that that had a little
bit of an eerie quality to it for sure. Yeah, it sounds fun.
It was fun. I had a blast. If you ever get a
chance to go on a big foot expedition with anyone, you should totally do
it. Did anything in particular or surprise you on this journey? Yeah,
that I became open more open minded about the idea of bigfoot. I think
that was the biggest one, because I went into it being like total hoax,
big joke, total myth, like there's nothing to it. And then,
you know, after listening to the stuff about evolution and hearing about other
species that had been alive at the same time as Homo sapiens, and thinking
about how difficult it is for you know, the fossil record to hold onto
evidence of everything, I was like, well, maybe there was something back
then. It's hard to know. And then there was also just people's stories
and the stories because I had been so particular and selecting, you know,
a path for this podcast in terms of steering clear of the wo I ended
up. I did end up talking to a lot of people who were fairly
scientific or had spent a lot of their time in the woods and were fish
and wildlife people or anthropologists and had stories that you trusted them more, because
at least I trusted them more because they seemed so grounded in reality. And
then they would tell the story and they're like, I don't know what it
was. I know, I can't say it was bigfoot because that's not science.
But this was the weirdest thing I have ever experienced, and I don't
know how else to describe it. And now those kinds of things, it's
like, well, something clearly happened to them, it's true to them.
Yeah, yeah, And I think that's what surprised me as I sort of
came out of it. I still want, you know, I would want
scientific evidence. I want the body, I want the big piece of the
body, I want the DNA, I want all the things that science require.
But I'm open to the possibility that that might exist, whereas before I
was just like total joke. M. I kind of empathize with you on
that because shooting this documentary that I will hopefully be releasing this summer, we
went into it thinking, well, there's all these stories about a Sasquatch in
southern California in the desert of all places, and how is that possible?
Like that that sounds ridiculous. But we talked to biologists, we talked to
people who study the plant life out there and other species, and how many
forms of food you can find if you know where to look, where to
find the water, if you know you know where to look. Migration,
you know, up into the cooler elevations at the it's only thirty forty miles
away. You know, and and that's an easy trek for a big eight
foot tall thing to if theyd he's a snowbird. Absolutely half the time he's
in Texas, the other half he's in Aspen. So but we came out
of it being like, well, you know, it's not impossible. It's
uh yeah, if you know what where to look, what you're doing.
Yeah, it's it's possible to survive. But my question has always been,
and this is something that Michael Schermer mentioned in that episode with him in it.
He said the same thing I was thinking. You need a population to
survive, right, you need yep, couple hundred to make sure that it
can continue unless there's some like freak of nature where they survive for hundreds of
years at a time, like turtles or something, you know. But or
maybe they're like one of those jellyfish that like they get to a certain age
and they sort of like dissolve in on themselves and then they like reborn.
Yeah yeah, yeah, they're like a phoenix creature. Yeah. But again
that's one of those where it's like, well, that jellyfish is really the
only example of that. I'd like to see something with bones, maybe that
does that yeah, or something observable at the very least three. Yeah,
And I think you know you're right, it's possible, But is it plausible?
And I think that becomes the big question. Yeah, the world is
full of possibility, but what's the plausibility of it? Yeah, that's kind
of the thing that I always kept bringing me back. I like the idea
of bigfoot. I think that would be great if Bigfoot were out there.
I am hard pressed to believe that that's the case. Yeah. And also
the photos. Let's talk about the photos. Everybody has a camera in their
pocket. There are untold numbers of trail cams and gain cams and security cams.
What do we have blob squatches? Yeah, bingo. This whole podcast
might not exist if it weren't for those those photos, very photos. So
I wanted to ask you, is there two pieces of advice that you could
give. One to the folks who are convinced Sasquatch exists, and then one
to those who are skeptical that open minded. My piece of advice to the
people who are convinced that Bigfoot exists is keep looking, but you're gonna have
to find if you want people to take you seriously, and you want people
to take seriously, you're going to actually have to find the kind of evidence
scientists and the scientific community are willing to accept. And there's not a conspiracy
to keep Bigfoot hidden or keep you down or anything like that. Like,
you haven't found the kind of evidence that will convince them, and you won't
convince them until you do. So that's that first piece of advice to the
people who are skeptical but open minded. I don't know if I have advice
for them. Necessarily, don't laugh at people, I think would be my
advice. You know. I think one of the things that I have been
concerned about with the bigfoot stuff is it feels a little bit like a gateway
drug into bigger conspiracy theories, and so, you know, that is a
problem. I think we kind of have to set that aside and maybe we
talk about that later. But there's no need to laugh at people who have
a genuine question about the world and are interested in learning more, as long
as they are sort of staying within the bounds of reality. And so that's
sort of my general feeling, and I think that's why I really liked doing
this topic for kids. In some ways, it's because kids like have this
wild imagination and all these ideas, and there's an opportunity here to be like,
let's harness that imagination, you know, think about it anyway you want
to, but then look at the sort of boundaries that you have to consider
it in for it to be a real creature. And it's this lesson in
in the scientific method and in evidence and in learning to think critically about things
and not just accepting everything at face value. Yeah, a great, A
great endeavor, boy, something I wish that more people would put some time
into. And you interview several people who do bring up the point that anecdotes
are great, but it's not data, it's not empirical evidence. I mean,
there's a reason that I witness a testimony is often not being considered in
court anymore because it's not reliable. So, yeah, you had a crazy
experience, I don't doubt that, But what are the facts on the ground.
What is the actual evidence of what happened to you? And you can't
say it's bigfoot unless it's bigfoot and you have proof that it's bigfoot. So
so I'm excited for book two about UFOs to come out. That's coming out
in October, is that right? Yeah? October third. It's called is
Anybody out There? Or is there Anybody out there? And it's about the
search for extraterrestrials from amiba's to aliens, So it's beyond UFOs even it's that's
part of it, but it's also like, you know what kind of life
might be out there? Zenobiology? Yeah, is there are there a little
tiny one cell the organisms living under the crust of Mars? Or are we
alone in the universe? You know that kind of thing. Nice. Well,
we'll have to get your back on here to discuss your experiences with that.
Excellent. She's the author of The Search for Sasquatch and host of wild
Thing podcast. Laura Krantz. Thank you for talking to us today. I'm
blurry photos, Laura, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having
me on. This has been fun. Thanks once again to Laura for speaking
with me. You can find her book and podcasts at Laura Krantz dot com
and by searching for wild Thing on any podcatcher. Don't forget to check out
more paranormal topics taken not too seriously by searching for hysteria fifty one, find
a bunch of trivia by listening to Quiz Quiz, Bang Bang, and listen
to some short spooky stories narrated by me on Five Minute Frights. All of
those are searchable on your podcatcher. Thank you for listening and for this episode
of Blurry Photos. I have been David mild thing Flora. Don't stop blur even