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striding. Yes, yes, I know, aka surviving man and you're listening
to Brian on Sasquatch Odison. You guys, and welcome back to Sasquatch Eyes.
Thank you so much for being with us for the show. It is
Friday. I hope you guys have had a great week. We have an
amazing guest lined up for you. But as always, I want to start
by inviting you. If you've had an encounter and you'd like to be on
the show, shoot me an email you get me a Brian at Paranormal World
Productions dot Com. Can head over to the website check it out, become
a member there, or help support the show. As I said, I've
got a great guest lined up for you. I got to sit down and
talk to my buddy Matt Pruett and talk about his new book, The Phenomenal
Sasquatch. If you guys haven't picked up this book, you have got to
get it. It is a must read for anyone who's into the bigfoot subject
at all. Matt is always one of the smartest guys in the room,
and if you're into bigfoot, you've got to hear this guy talk about his
book and his theories on what these things may be and what they probably aren't.
You can pick up Matt's book, The Phenomenal Sasquatch on Amazon or you
can get it from the North American Bigfoot Center. I will have links to
both of those in the show notes. And if you're listening to me on
terrestrial radio in Atlanta and you don't have access to the show notes, head
over to our website Paranormal World Productions dot com. You can go over to
the Sasquatch Odyssey blog there and I'll have all those show notes listed along with
those links to get Matt's book. But enough of that, I know you
guys are ready to get into it. Matt's on the line. He's ready
to go. You gotta sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.
I had, folks all to welcome my guest to the show. It is
Matt Pruett. Welcome back to the show man. Thanks for having me.
I had to blast the first time it was on your show and really appreciate
the invite back. Absolutely, man. It was one of my favorite shows,
and honestly, it's one of the most popular episodes that I've ever done
on the show. And we're three hundred and thirty Semite episodes in so people
still come up to me, like in Gatlinberg last week and talk about you
being on the show and being from Georgia and the connections there. It's a
really small world. Like you and I were just talking about before we went
on the air, what a small world it is when you start talking to
people at conferences and people are coming up to your booth and sharing their experiences
and stories. I had a blast at the conference last week. What about
you? I know you were in there selling books and doing your thing with
Cliff. How did the conference go for you? Guys? It was absolutely
a blast. I'd already agreed to help Cliff at his booth because Cliff and
I have been friends for so long and I produced Bigfoot and Beyond the Cliff
and Bobo, and so we're on the phone on a daily basis, but
we just don't get to see each other as much as we used to.
So when he was like, Hey, I'm coming to Tennessee, would you
like to help me at the boosts, it was like a great excuse to
get together and hang out. And then the book came out in time,
thankfully, and so he said, oh, you should just sell copies at
the booths. Even when I worked on finding big Foot. It's just heartwarming
to see people come up to Cliff and give him the kudos that he rightfully
deserves, and to meet so many people. And then I also managed the
social media for Bigfoot and Beyond, and so it's funny, like you just
see the same comments from the same people very often, and so people would
come up and I would recognize them from Facebook or Twitter comments and I,
beck, are you so one's on the beck Oh, how do you know?
And I'm like, thanks so much for being here. I see all
of your positive comments. We appreciate that so much, and so it's really
cool to interact with people on that level. Yeah, it's one of my
favorite things about that conference. In particular. That was the first Bigfoot conference
I ever went to as a spectator, just two years ago, and then
to be able to go back and to be involved in a small way this
year was absolutely amazing. I love RPG, I love everybody that was there.
That's the first time I've got to meet Cliff in person. He's been
on the show, and I'm trying to get him back on the show.
We're trying to do another little roundtable to promote our SQUATCHCN coming up that we're
going to be speaking out together next month, just to have the opportunity to
meet those people face to face, like the Renee. I've never met Renee.
I've never hung out with her. We gets to hang out at the
VIP dinner and she is freaking hilarious. You know people on television. I
say this often. You see people on television or maybe even hear them on
a podcast, and you have this idea in your mind of what they're going
to be like if you meet him in person. Somebody said you don't ever
want to meet your heroes and that kind of thing. And I've had bad
experiences in the past with people, baseball players and even wrestlers. I was
into wrestling as a kid. But I don't think anybody in the Bigfoot community
that I have known before I met them has disappointed me, and they certainly
didn't. I didn't get a whole lot of time with Cliff or Matt,
but I got to spend more time with Renee and we were fast friends.
And she is one of those people that just has an infectious personality. You
can tell she genuinely loves people. She's hugging everybody's neck. She's smiling from
ear to ear, and it was just fantastic to watch her do her thing.
And I really did enjoy that. You and I got to hang out
just a few minutes at the VP dinner, which is always nice because,
like you say, we get so involved and wrapped up in the shows and
the things that we have going on in our lives, and you working closely
with Cliff, and you guys hardly see each other even though you work so
closely together. It is nice to be able to kick back a little bit
and just enjoy the people, because that's really what it's all about. For
me. The conference is great for exposure and getting new people involved in the
show and listening to the show, but to go and hang out with people
like Laurie Wade. You know, I've had Laurie on the show, but
to sit down and break bread with her and her infectious personality. She's one
of those people that if you walk away from a conversation with Laurie and you
don't like her, there's something wrong with you, in my opinion. So
that in and of itself is just one of those fantastic things to see.
Anybody who has an opportunity to go to a conference, in my opinion,
if it's as well done as the one in Gatlinburg, and I know those
guys do the similar conference down in Florida. If you have an opportunity to
do that, I would highly suggest you take that opportunity and be a part
of it, because I tell you there's nothing like it. There really Isn't
you set behind a microphone and talk like we're talking now, but to get
face to face with people who listen to your show or read your books,
or know you from television or whatever, there's just nothing like that experience.
So I'm glad it went well for you guys. It was certainly a success
for us. I had all the guys from the Kentucky X Files were there,
I had the guys from the Basement hang Out. Wayne of course from
Paranormal Odyssey was there, and we met tons of people, got to take
tons of pictures with people, sold some merchandise, and it was just a
really good time. I'm already looking forward to next year. Absolutely. It's
funny because those things do get so hectic. That's why I really enjoyed there
was like the VIP dinner that you mentioned because there is some downtime. There
was another conference that I was at with Cliff last year, and he was
very hectic and I was in seeing it, so I was always running back
and forth to make introductions and speak between speakers. And at the end of
the weekend, he and I realized, like we actually spent more time talking
on the phone on an average day then we got to spend talking face to
face at that event. So I'm always grateful for the downtime around the events
too. So it's a good chance to see people, and yet they're overwhelmingly
positive and it's very heartwarming for sure. Yeah, I love it, man,
So let's get into this. The last time you were on the show,
it was more about experiences and the research the North American Woodade Conservancy and
some of those things that you've had going on for years. But since you've
been on you've been working on a project. And I am so excited to
announce that you've finished the book, The Phenomenal Sasquatch. I have my copy.
I got it as soon as I possibly could off of Amazon. I
couldn't wait to dig into the book. Man. You mentioned it earlier the
first time you were on the show. I was so impressed with your approach
to the subject. You walk into the room, in my opinion, and
you raise the IQ when you're talking about just about anything, but specifically Bigfoot,
and I was really glad to see that someone like you was going to
take the time to write the kind of book that you wrote. You've said
before, I think you and I've talked about it privately. I think you've
even said it on the show before. You run into people in the Bigfoot
community that sometimes want you to dumb things down for people, and I think
we need exactly the opposite for that, And to me, your book is
that. So let's get into the book. Let's talk a little bit about
Ay, why did you decide to do that? Because it's not easy.
I just started my own book a couple of weeks ago. I'm writing my
own book now and I'm about twelve thousand words in and it is more work
than I could have ever imagined. So writing a book number one is a
labor of love. So talk a little bit about the process for you,
about a making that decision and what was that like for you. Yeah,
and I know what you mean. I would just clarify for the sake of
the listeners. I've actually never had anyone in the Bigfoot community asked me to
dune it down. It's always been media personalities, not even media personalities,
but the gatekeepers in media, and we all have our accruede experiences that sort
of bias future experience is right. If you have certain negative interactions, you
might enter into other interactions with a little bit of a guard up. Then.
I used to be in a major label band, and I have a
lot of friends that we went through that same major label system back when those
sort of companies mattered. Nowadays they don't really matter anymore. But this is
the late nineties and the early two thousands, and one of the things that
we experienced in the things that I've seen over and over again is that very
often an artist would be discovered, let's say, and put into a context
by the people that discovered them, and then other things would work in the
market. Other bands are their acts, other genres, and the people that
were the gatekeepers, the decision makers, would say, you what you're doing,
but this thing works, and so if we can make you like this,
you will work, which is just ridiculous. It's over the years that
I started speaking publicly about the Sasquatch subject in two thousand and seven. Terrestrial
radio and internet radio, blog talk back in the day, and podcasts and
public speaking has just gone on through the years, and audiences have always been
thankfully, very receptive. But it's always been these sort of media types that
have reached out and said, hey, we love what you're doing, we'd
love to talk about a project, like oh great. But I always try
to take the calls, even though I almost always end up saying no because
they just sound so stressful. I don't really think i'd be a part of
this. And it's the same sort of discussionist. We want you to dumb
everything down and be more like this other sort of like reality show that has
nothing at all to do with science or biology or the pursuit of wildlife.
And it's again, hey, this thing works, and so if we can
make you like this, then you would work. And I've heard that so
many times. That's always the reason I end up saying no is that these
people are assuming that the audience is not intelligent, which is the worst mistake
that they could make, because, as you know as a podcaster, there
are podcasts with people that are much more articulate and burbose and much more intelligent
than me, talking about subjects that are much more mainstream, even some that
are much more esoteric than the sasquatch, that accumulate millions and sometimes tens of
millions of views and downloads, and some of those podcasts have been around for
many years, and so you look at those numbers, you go, there's
not a single network show that's doing anything close to these numbers. And yet
these people want to tell me or these other podcasters what an audience can or
can't handle, and they're not even coming close. And so I've heard that
so many times. And then through the process of writing this book, which
I always knew I wanted to self publish because I thought this might be the
only thing I ever write after twenty years of pursuing the subject. And there's
certain things that I can absolutely live with, and failure by my own devices
is one of them. If I write exactly the book that I want to
write and no one cares, I can live with that. But if I
count out all these other people's wishes and demands and what they think people want
from a subject that they don't even understand, the gatekeepers and then it fails.
It's I couldn't live with myself. And so the last straw. I
had already written the manuscript and there was no preface at that point, and
then a literary professional weighed in and read it and said the same thing everyone
else says, Oh, you need to change everything. You need to get
rid of all these technical terms. You need to get rid of all the
sort of scientific nomenclature and ditch all this sort of language. And I just
thought, that is the last straw, like, I'm not doing this.
And then I thought, oh, you know what I'll do is I'll just
write in the preface here's exactly why I use the language I use. And
it's primarily because I will never underestimate the audience and I won't underestimate the reader.
And it's that simple. But yeah, it's definitely a labor of love.
And it's very difficult because I've just lived in the space of dialogue for
so long, like I said, since two thousand and seven, and so
when you're having a conversation, and I find this even in public events too,
because even when you're speaking to a crowd, you're getting feedback all the
time. You can see when people tilt their head and squint their eyes,
or if they lean in and they're really listening and they're enjoying it, and
so you can modify what you're saying. If you can tell you you've thrown
a term out there, let's say, and people are cringing yours, Okay,
I think of it like this, and you can define that term.
Or you can use some analogy. You can pick and choose your analogies based
on that room. If I'm speaking to the biology department at some university,
I'll use certain analogies, and if I'm speaking to a room full of like
my musician friends, I'll use different analogies. But when you're writing a book,
it's you have to say it one way for all readers for all time.
It's like paralysis by analysis, because you know what I kept telling people
during this process. You can ask yourself, is there a better way to
say this? And the answer is always yes, because it's a better way
for who, for which audience, Because depending on who your reader is,
there might be a better way. And so trying to be meticulous about every
word choice and the structure and the order of everything that was very time consuming
and labor intensive for sure. Yeah, I can only imagine, and I'll
be honest, I have a pretty decent vocabulary, but I definitely had to
look up a couple of the words. They were in the book as I
was reading, though, because it's not something that you necessarily hear in everyday
discourse and just regular conversation. But I like that because it challenges me to
go outside my comfort zone. If I'm reading a book and I have to
look up if it's eight, ten chapters, whatever the length of the book
is, and I have to look up five or six words, over the
course of the time of reading that book, I tend to get to the
end of it and think, Wow, that was challenging for me, and
it makes me want to go back and read it again to make sure I
haven't missed anything. It keeps me on my toes. And that's exactly what
your book did. I found myself over and over as I was finished the
day, I would try to at least read one or two chapters. Every
day. After I'd finished work before bed, you're winding down, having some
tea, and I would pick the book up and I would read it.
I found myself at times going back and picking up where I left off in
the previous chapter to make sure that I didn't miss anything because there was so
much information there. Let's talk a little bit about the fundamental question that you
really start the book with. Is that something you've always struggled with as a
researcher or is it something that's come around most recently for you and the zeitgeist.
We know the phenomenon exists. That's one of the things that you talk
about in the book. I've talked about that on the show. I think
you even mentioned it before when you were on the show. We are all
aware that the phenomenon itself exists. The real question is it boils down to
two that you pose in the book. Those fundamental questions are there for everybody.
How did you arrive at your answers? And have you really arrived an
answer for yourself about those fundamental questions about is it a psychological is it a
biological creature? Where are you on that and how did that help you frame
out the book when you started the process. It's changed a lot over the
years, and when the beginning, I'd had an experience when I was young
that was consistent with what other people described maybe a tribute to the Sasquatch phenomenon.
Though I didn't see these things. It was dark and it was in
a dense forest at night, and so there was this kind of question at
that point of what could that have been that we encountered that was so frightening,
And through doing research and speaking to other local Sasquatch witnesses and people that
have claimed at least to see Sasquatch, the propositions emerging maybe there are the
undiscovered animals that fit this description, and maybe that is what you encountered.
And so in the beginning it was very resistant to that because I thought,
oh, there's just no way, there's just no way. I'll get to
the bottom of this in no time flat and I'll figure out that it's all
nonsense. And then, of course you have these transformative experiences of meeting claimants,
let's say, witnesses, face to face and hearing their stories. Because
for me, it started with local witnesses. My dad was the local doctor.
So some of these people were people that he'd known for years, that
were his patients and that they entrusted their lives with him, and he had
this great deal of trust in them. And so when it's someone that you
know or respect personally that is seemingly of unimpeachable character or has some sort of
like authority or responsibility in their lives. It's a transformative experience to be face
to face with them and hear about what they say they saw and where to
go in those environments and see it. And so I would definitely say that
from that sort of initial position, it didn't take me long to be and
that true believer can stay tuned for more Sasquat Jotsy will right back after these
messages. And I think that's just the natural part. A natural progression of
anything that you're interested in, is that like just a full blown acceptance,
I'm convinced or I'm starting to be convinced and therefore like absolute true believer.
And then life happens, right, and you meet people that lie to you,
and you meet people that are lying to you, maybe just because they
want something personally or because they are maliciously trying to fool you to pull a
gotcha, people that fabricate evidence, people that you trust, and then you
find out relying to you. So these sort of things happen. Maybe true
believer through being cautious and then cynical, because you will encounter these sort of
negative elements that every human endeavor is infected with, not just errors or misidentifications
or wishful thinking, but actual like fabrications and things. And so I definitely
spent some time in that vitriolic cynical space and thought, I've just been lying
to myself all along, I've been fooling myself. What was I thinking?
What was I doing? But then I still had not only my own experiences,
but all this information to contend with that I've been accumulating for so many
years, and again these questions that just can't be answered simply to say if
it's just a psychological phenomenon, because that's the setup of the book. It's
like, you have these claims, and you have this evidence that associated with
the claims, and either there are animals that fit the description of the claims
and that have feet shaped like the footprints attributed to these animals, or if
no such animals exist, then it has to all be the product of the
human mind in some shape or form, creatively involuntarily, some sort of archetypical
motif, etc. And spoiler alert, the fact of the matter is that
those things can all occur simultaneously, that there could be these real animals that
people have brief encounters with or even extended encounters with, and then their representations
of those observations. That's what we're all focused on, because we don't have
the actual animal. That's why the question hasn't been answered to the satisfaction of
society. All of our time and energy is spent on the representation of what
people claim to have seen. A footprint is not the foot, it's a
representation of the interaction between the foot and the ground. Now, if there
is no such animal, then there can't be a footprint. It's just an
artistic manifestation, let's say, of this idea, this imaginative form. And
so that was part of the impetus behind the book, is trying to say,
let's break through this sort of veil that is the representation claims, stories,
narratives, the mythos, the art associated with it, artistic representations,
its iconography, and see, could there be a real empirical biological source for
this phenomena or is it in the absence of that all just the product of
the human mind. And so I'm convinced that there is a biological source.
I've had experiences consistent with that, but I've never seen one, and so
that's slight cosmically maddening. That was one of the things I think Brian Brown
mentioned to me. I think Michael May's mentioned it to me when I was
talking to him a couple of weeks ago. Is everybody is so upset that
you haven't had that experience where you've actually seen one of these things. I
certainly agree with that, because I don't go out in the woods and do
a lot of boots on the ground research as much as I would really like
too, frankly, but to seek the subject for twenty plus years and to
not have that definitive because that's where I am. Even after reading your book.
You and I agree on most things, but it's very difficult for me
to stay off of that cynical path because I am a very skeptical person.
And after talking to hundreds of people that have claimed to have had interactions with
these things, some very physical, some citing, some not, some having
physical interactions to the point of some people even being injured by them allegedly,
and I want to believe more than anybody on this planet that all of those
stories and anecdotal accounts are in fact real, I'm just not convinced that they
are. I too believe that there is some sort of biological creature that is
responsible in part for at least some of those interactions. But I do believe,
and that's something that I've talked about addressing many times on the show,
and I'm still trying to wrangle the cats and get everybody together to address some
of the psychological effects. Maybe it's mental health issues, maybe it's other things
and personality traits that lead people to do some of the things they do.
I fabricate evidence and embellish stories and makeup stories altogether. And that's something that
I'm working on putting together because I think it's something we really don't do a
whole lot of in the community as podcasters and researchers. Frankly, everybody just
wants to dismiss that you hear a crazy story. I was editing one before
I hopped on with You today, and I had this guy with this really
out there situation, and I have struggled because I've been sitting on this episode
for two months, and I finally just came to the realization literally yesterday in
a conversation with Danny, I was like, shit, I post this or
not, because people are going to hear it and they're going to say that
is the craziest shit I've ever heard. There's no way that happened. And
this guy is one off of his rocker, and I'm like, that is
definitely a possibility. On the flip side of that, I have created the
show to give people a space to come and share their experiences. I do
not sit in judgment of anybody's experience. I don't sit in judgment of your
experience any more than I do the guy who has this weird, wild claim
that he made about an interaction he had with a sasquatch. It's this catch
twenty two for me, and I have to admit sometimes those stories do push
me towards the more cynical take on the subject. But hopefully people will have
the same experience I did. When I read your book, it brought me
back in because I'm like, Okay, I can track with what Matt's saying,
I can feel that way. It's okay for me to feel that way
about certain parts of this as long as I stay centered and I just make
up my mind. Like you said, Eventually, you just have to make
up your mind about what you believe, and I do believe that there is
a biological creature that's responsible for at least some of the interactions that we hear.
Let's talk a little bit about some of the things that you obviously did
a lot of research in on the book, and that really stuck out to
me, and it's one of the things that has always grounded me when I'm
talking to people about this subject, is the indigenous people's take on this,
their art, They were represented in their history, their oral history for so
long. You address a little bit of that in the book. Can you
talk a little bit about what that journey was like for you into the research
into the indigenous connection with Bigfoot and Sasquatch. Yeah, it's very difficult because
narratives are subjective and they're constantly evolving. And when people would say, oh,
we know that there have been stories about these things for many thousands of
years, we could assume that to be true, but we don't know because
these are oral traditions, so they weren't externalized in some written form that we
can date carbon dating or something of that nature, where you have these documents
that you could difinitively pin down to a certain date in time, but clearly
they're very old stories that have been transmitted for who knows how many generations.
The other difficult thing about parsing those is that we're looking at so many disparate
cultures that often get thrown under the single rubric of Native American or Indigenous North
Americans. It's there's not some monolithic culture. You have to look at these
things on a almost like cultured, a cultural basis, or these sort of
almost individual bases. And then the difficult thing is that when they are externalized
into written form, it's by non natives. As Westerners arrived, they're recording
their sort of versions of these narratives or these oral traditions in Western language,
and very often editorializing as they're doing so, and so accumulating all that information,
I think there's probably so much more that hasn't been accumulated yet, because
obviously, if we're to believe that there were no other non human apes in
North America, which is a institutional paradigm, then of course whatever people described
in these older societies, they wouldn't have some referential animal to compare that with.
And so you do have these other cultures where let's say the mystery ape
or the sort of wild man. Let's say in parts of Africa or Asia
or even South America, there are apes and monkeys that live on those continents,
and so they'll say this is like that, but different because they have
a comparative thing, Whereas in North America, if we know, there's no
other apes besides humans and maybe sasquatches, and no monkeys or anything like that,
until you get down to Central and South America, very often they are
couched in these terms that make them akin to other animals, akin to humans,
or something in between, some mediator between those worlds. So it's hard
to try all those things down because there's not like a nomenclature that you can
trace down. It would be the same that if societies, archaic societies,
let's say, around the world, referred to whales as big fish, and
then Westerners came along and said, well, that's hogwash, because whales are
not fish. They're mammals. Well, phenomenologically, they're in the water,
they breached the surface, they've got fins, they'd look like big fish.
You would experience them the same way you would experience big fish. And so
when you're seeing those non native descriptions of those traditions, they're in that sort
of dismissive fashion, and mostly because a I would say that the association with
supernatural abilities or attributes metaphysical sort of attributes, and be the fact that even
the non natives didn't have a very strong understanding about non human apes. Some
of these things hadn't been discovered yet. For example that lowland gorillas weren't discovered
until the mid eighteen hundreds, and later mountain gorillas in the early nineteen hundreds,
So there aren't these sort of comparative animals, and in most of the
fossil apes that we might associate with this or at least have similar forms,
hadn't been unearthed yet. Of course, they encountered these stories and dismissed them,
that the subjects of these stories or these traditions or narratives were simply spiritual
mythological beings because they didn't have some real world point of contact to associate it
with. So I think even what I covered in the book, there's probably
so much more information, but it's just very difficult to find because a lot
of those ethnographies, some of those are probably collected in published works that might
have gone out of print one hundred years ago. But the fascinating thing is
that if you're making the proposition that these large homonoids made it into North America
at some point in time, whether that's during the Miocene, Pliocene, some
point the Pleistocene, whenever they would have been co occurring with early North American
inhabitants, that there should be some clues, but you wouldn't expect for them
to be just totally absent in the record of indigenous traditions and artists, stick
representations, and low and behold, there are these ape like creatures there that
are described as larger than a person, very often with long arms, very
often with this sort of typical no visible constriction at the neck, very active
at night. They produced these whistling sounds. They have beat much larger than
the humans, but a man like footprint, and they hurl stones like all
the things that we would associate with sasquatch now and all that stuff's present.
And then these artistic representations that accurately depict ape like cranial facial features that they
couldn't have had any real world inspiration for unless they were seeing some form of
living apes and so to me, that's fascinating and that's got to be the
starting point. So the book is structured as I introduced the phenomenon and why
it's in the state that it's in, this unresolved state where you have people
that claim to have observed the phenomenon. Let's say you have people that have
documented evidence or documented things that they tout as evidence. Then you have contenders
like myself who investigate those claims and look into that evidence. And then you
have the institutions science, peacademia, the government who say there's nothing to the
claims and evidence at all. And so the goals should be, like,
how do we arrive at an answer that satisfies all of those parties independent or
not independently, but collectively right, because the witnesses are satisfied with their interpretations,
which are vast and varied, the contenders are satisfied with their investigations,
and there's many conclusions. Let's say that investigators have arrived at what the sasquatch
actually is, most of which are like diametrically opposed, and in the institutions
thin gets just all nonsense. And so how do we get to a point
where all of these parties agree. And so you start with the fossil record,
and that's where I started in the book. But then, Okay,
if there's animals and the fossil record like this, shouldn't we expect to see
that in the record of human occupation in North America? And my estimation we
do. And so that's the crux of that whole chapter. The other thing
that I've always found fascinating is the historical account that people dive into. It's
one of my favorite things to do. I try to dig back and find
some of the older what I consider to be sasquatch encounters that people are reporting
back a lot of years ago. And it's one of the things that you
talk about in the book. Can you talk a little bit about the historical
record and what you found. Did you find commonalities throughout some of these historical
records that you reference in the book, and if so, did that point
you in a different direction the same direction you were headed in? What did
you think about the historical record versus what people are experiencing today in twenty twenty
three. Oh, for the most part, they're describing identical phenomena, albeit
with maybe different language because now we've updated our nomenclature, let's say, because
now we live in this modern sort of society. But they're describing what inarguably
exactly the same phenomena, whether it's a biological or psychological phenomenon. For me,
that was what set the hook first, beyond interviewing local witnesses. So
when I first started researching this, that's where my sort of path fled,
was like, if they're really are Because I grew up in northeast Georgia,
that's where my first encounter was, the first experience. Let's say, I
thought, they're really real animals. They can't have just gotten here last summer.
They have to have been here for quite a while. And as I
was reading the first books that I could get my hands on the subject,
there were these references to historical reports from the Northwest, referencing like mountain devils
and wild men, etc. And so I thought the same thing should be
happening here, if these are real animals. The problem was that most of
those early researchers were so focused on the Northwest that they weren't looking in other
areas, and there wasn't like a Georgia specific or a Southern Appalachian specific website
or group or anything at that time. And within the first year of searching,
I found almost forty print media articles that predated nineteen hundred from Northeast Georgia
alone that were describing as some of those I included in that chapter because I
wanted to pull some from other sources, like chat Are Men's The Historical Bigfoot,
especially that second edition that's like that thick that's so great repository of those
stories. But to see that it went back so far in time at least
to say, okay, this is not something that came about because of some
radio program or the television in search of or whatever, or maybe precursors to
that, that this goes back a very long way, these descriptions or claims.
And of course, if you look at the broader collection of those,
even a lot of the ones in the Historical Big Pot, some of those
are just so obviously fictionalized stories, because some of them are like wild men
that are covered in hair and fish scales, and they wear clothes, and
this is all sorts of this bizarre amalgam of all these different you could almost
say, like mythological features. But then there is that set. That's for
all intents and purposes, they're describing non human apes that behave in accordance with
what we know about apes, and they appear their physiology, their morphology is
in accordance with that. And to me, those are fascinating because they resonate
as more likely to be accurate because there wasn't as much material to influence such
things, not even material about the living apes. Now that changes at a
certain point when Dushaiu's book is published, and I pointed that out with one
example in the book, because Paul Deshaiu was essentially credited with discovering, let's
say, or at least introducing to the western world, the lowland gorilla and
published a book about his expeditions and his observations there, and so I have
a few references in the book to his essentially recording of the indigenous people's beliefs
about gorillas in those regions. And then also I was going through the historical
Bigfoot and there's one particular report in there that's super detailed and it describes,
among other things like chest beating. I thought, oh, that's really interesting,
And I was writing that sort of mid eighteen sixties time frame. So
I thought, I wonder what the first print reference to gorilla chest beating is,
because if this is the precursor to that's really important significant if this was
first reported in this Sasquatch thing. So I was going through Yu's book and
then, like in the report, I think it was from Pennsylvania. I
could look it up just to to be sure. Here, yeah, I
was printed in the Stark County Democrat from Canton, Ohio. But the reports
supposedly happened in Pennsylvania. And so the way that this report has written,
this sort of correspondence talks about this ape that's encountered of a certain size and
build, and this gray parchment like skin and with roars and beats its chest
and this sort of attack. And then I was going through Jashai's book,
and he talks about encountering this ape of a certain size and build with gray
parchment like skin, and it beats. It's just and it's a verbatim plagiarism,
almost verbatim word for word. And thought, okay, I've got to
put that in here. I have to show that in this book to say,
hey, at least one example, and there's probably many more. But
once the gorilla is introduced, Now there is an inspiration that journalists, let's
say, or whoever's writing these things. Maybe it was just a prank letter
and they printed it, or maybe a journalist made it up and there was
never a letter that was received to begin with. Once there was a real
world inspiration, people could then derive these sorts of ape like characters or generate
these stories that have some degree of their similitude because they're based on real ape
encounters. But the ones prior to that, when you read about cathemral activity
in certain sorts of this omnivorous diet, or certain sort of dietary preferences or
behaviors, and you think, what was the inspiration for that? What could
it have possibly been? Either it was entirely imaginary and yet somehow perfectly accurate
and predictive, or this person really saw what they said they saw, and
that's what's being described here. So the historical record is fascinating, and I
think there's probably so many more of these print articles that have just not even
been found yet. Let's talk a little bit about you mentioned it earlier.
I want to address the fossil record. That's something that always comes up outside
of the fossil record. It comes up about why we don't have bodies,
why we can't find a body of a sasquatch, Why is there never been
one found? Why are they not in the fossil record? Some people say
they are. That's one of the things that you talk about in the book.
Can you talk a little bit about the fossil record and why that?
I think, what is it? Less than one percent of the total collection
of everything on Earth? Is it really in the fossil record? And it's
astounding if you really think about it, how little is actually in the fossil
record. Can you talk a little bit about that and why that is and
why it's so difficult to find fossils, particularly of apes. Oh, certainly,
there's so many factors that have to play out in a specific order of
proverbial stars that have to align for an animal to expire and eventually become a
fossil, And so it is one of the rarest processes in nature. And
the reason I think that the fossil record in this context is important, and
especially the Asian ape clay that produced Intopithecus and Gigantopithecus, is because it at
least demonstrates that there have been massive apes, that we had broad generalist diets,
a wide variety of foods that they exploited, that lived in closed canopy
forests with dense understories, and that especially the younger form Gigantopithecus Blackie, lived
alongside the genus Homo for a very long time, well over a million years.
And now there was a paper that was recently published, and I wish
i'd had it at the time when I was finishing that part of the manuscript,
because basically argues that there's a series of teeth. I believe it's five
teeth from one of these gigant Epithecus sites that has been dated now to a
roughly eighty to one hundred thousand years ago. So it's pushing it closer to
us in time in terms of their survival, let's say, because obviously the
paradigm is that they went extinct. But you could say that, okay,
because so few of the living animals that have ever occurred on this planet were
ever fossilized. Statistically speaking, if we were to discover a new animal,
the likelihood would be that it's not represented in the fossil record, or that
its lineage is not represented because if you only have one to five percent of
all living things represented, we're all possible let's say genera or species represented there.
Then statistically you like it's more likely not. But if you're arguing for
the existence of the sasquatch, but you can't really say, hey, the
best argument I have is that it's not in the fossil record, because it's
like I'm making an argument from nothing from a vacuum. And so you could
say, what do we know? What animals do fit this particular description or
at least come close and approximate it. And that's why I think the Intopithecus
gigant epithecus line is so very important, because what people describe with sasquatches is
something much larger than a human, much larger than any extant or living ape.
It's something that exploits a wide variety of foods, this sort of vast
array of has the world is. It's like dietary options are open to it.
They live in dense forests, etc. Etc. And so in gigant
Empithecus, you have something that fits that description, and then again something that
lives alongside at least for a very long time Homo erectus our ancestors and likely
was contemporaneous with early Homo sapiens. So if everything you need is right there,
Big eight, a huge diet, lots of variety lives in these dense
forests alongside early humans like Okay, Now is the proposition that it could be
here, that it makes it that much more likely. But it rises up
to the level of plausibility, Let's say, because it already occurred once and
where did it occur? It occurred in a continent that's connected to North America
at various points in time. There's at least, to my understanding, in
the Pleistocene alone, we're aware of at least sixteen points in time during that
epic that the continents were connected, and go back further in time into like
the Miocene for example, And so you have this massive interchange of mammals to
include elk and wolverines and bear and the probositians, you know, mammots,
etc. That we're coming and going. You know, it's not all just
this Asia into North America flow. There's a lot of North American animals that
ended up in Asia, and so it becomes more and more plausible. So
that the argument I'm making once you understand the totality of the information we have
about Gigantopithecus, which I try to condense in that chapter and put it all
in there, because I do hear people say, frustrating, we know next
to nothing about Gigantapthecus. No, we actually do know quite a lot based
on these jaws and teeth and the distribution in China and Thailand and Vietnam and
down to Indonesia and Java. There's two mandibles found in like twenty fourteen or
two mandible fragments, and so we know quite a bit about them, what
their diet was, and how they co existed, or that they co existed
with us, but we don't know exactly how, And so it brings it
to the level of plausibility where you could say, all right, the only
two questions that need to be answered in the affirmative to make Gigantopithecus the sasquatch
would be like, did they it's in North America? Are they still around?
That's it? Now. What I really want people to understand is that
in the book, and for years of speaking about this, I'm not arguing
that Gigantopithecus Blackie is the sasquatch because a clade will produce a radiation of genera
and a genus will produce a radiation of species. And so we know that
this Asian ape clade existed, but we're only aware of two genera Intopithecus,
which is the older form when it comes eight point six million years ago roughly,
and that's India and Pakistan essentially where those fossil sites are, and then
Gigantopithecus. So you could reasonably assume there would have been other genera, and
each genus would have produced other species, some of which may have been a
lot more sasquatched than others. And so it's not necessarily because no gen is
what they call uni specific or monotypic. Now there might just be one species
left. Stay tuned for more sasquatch jobs will be right back after these messages.
Supposedly Homo is a unit specific genus at this time because we are supposedly
the only species of Homo around, although doctor Gregory Fourth in his excellent book
about the potential survival of Homo flores the Interest, makes a pretty interesting case
that's worth thinking about. But so my argument would be that some form within
that eight clade, if not one of those known genera, and if not,
some form of Gigantopithecus could have gotten over here, doesn't have to be
specifically Gigantopithecus Blackie. It's important to understand all that so that people could see
that, Oh, I'm really not asking for that much. Now if you
talk about a lot of other fossil candidates like paranthropists, Now we have to
ask a laundry list of questions, or you could say, make a laundry
list of assumptions to account for that to become what's responsible for the North American
sasquatch phenomenon or legend or mythos with again, Gigantopithecus, two little assumptions they
got over here, they're still around. That's it. And so the fossil
record at least provides us a great candidate that only requires a couple of assumptions.
Now, in terms of why some of these things aren't found, a
big part of that is going to be where are people looking? Because excavation
sites and people that are professionals or even amateurs lay people, they're not necessarily
looking in some of the best habitat, which would be densely forested mountains that
have a tremendous amount of annual precipitation. Now those places are less likely to
preserve bones as fossils anyway, But even if they were, all things considered,
you're only going to find fossils where you're digging for them, unless somehow
it fortuitously washes up in like a plast or side. Or have you watched
any of this stuff about the bone yard in Alaska? I have not,
Oh man, I won't belabor the point that there's a gentleman there who he
and his family bought what was previously a mining company that mined gold, but
they also found these bones. And so in this one particular area that's like
an acre of however large, his acreage is like they've pulled now like a
quarter of a million fossils. I don't even think they're fossilized. I think
they're just preserved bones, like in a sort of permafrost. And so they
use water from the creek and they blast away these surfaces. And I think
he said, just the mammoths alone are the individuals represented there in the thousands,
maybe the tens of thousands. So I feel like sending him this and
being like, hey, would you read chapter two and if you find anything
like this, let me know anything that looks like that skull right there.
So it's certainly possible, and it is frustrating that they haven't found a fossil,
but to me, like, I can guarantee you even if we found
a fossil in North America, I could say that a skull was dredged up
at the bone yard in Alaska and it's ten thousand years old or twelve thousand
years old. You can guarantee that the institutions would say, oh wow,
they did get over here. Looks like they to about Alaska and no further
and their survival there it peaked about twelve thousand years ago. And I bet
that the encounters that they had with humans are what gave rise to the Sasquatch
legend. But there's no reason whatsoever to think that they're still around now.
And so even a fossil be a huge win, a huge discovery. I
would welcome it. It probably raise a lot of eyebrows, but it wouldn't
be like they're real, they're here. There'd still be so much work left
to do, and so the fixation on fossils. I understand it, But
at the same time as well, what would that really mean Even if we
could respond to the skeptics with a fossil, that would be the argument.
Maybe they did get here, but they're not around now. Good point.
Let's talk a little bit about an out there question. It's not necessarily directly
related to the book, but it's something that's been out there in the zeitgeist
just recently. It was a topic of conversation at the conference last week.
Is DNA and DNA studies. There's been tons of things that have been done
by people in the past, there's things that are happening right now, there's
plans to test DNA in the future. Where are you on the DNA question,
Because here's the problem I have, as a very skeptical person, bordering
non cynical sometimes unfortunately about DNA and DNA studies. I'm not a scientist.
I don't even play one on television. My thought behind DNA is you can't
just test something and say, Okay, this is what that is if you
don't have something to compare it to. And that's been the crux of maybe
it's a misunderstanding about DNA and what's in the works now. But if we
don't have a type specimen, if we don't have a comparison sample to place
against possible DNA from a sasquatch or anything, really in your opinion, I
know this is subjective and it is your opinion. In your opinion, how
do you see DNA moving the ball down the field towards maybe eventually discovering these
things as a scientific They're on the map, they're real, just based on
DNA alone. How do you think that's even plausible? What is your thoughts
on some of the current things that are going on just in general with DNA
and sasquatch. As I understand it, which is very genetics is extremely difficult.
I am certainly not a scientist. I don't even I only have two
semesters of community college under my belt, like almost twenty years ago. So
it's I do a lot of recreational reading and popular science and on fiction,
and I try to stay up on things. But genetics is definitely outside of
my scope of commanding understanding. So as I understand it, most of what's
been done in that genetics space where the DNA testing space with sasquatch has been
for lack of a better word, or for lack of me knowing a better
word, a sort of cursory or superficial or preliminary sort of testing of these
purported or potential sasquatch stamp and I think the problem is is that obviously these
things, if they exist, would be some sort of non human aid,
even if they are our closest living relatives. Because I know a lot of
people really lean towards this idea that they are us or near us or semi
us or whatever, but they're clearly not us, because do you know anyone
who's a sasquatch, then I probably you will probably won't meet a sasquatch.
That's a person if you get me the person that's a sasquatch. Right.
So, now where they would fall in that range, So let's say that
the proposition that they are some part of that Asian giant ape line is correct,
that ape lineage diverge from a common ancestor with the orangutan about ten to
twelve million years ago. As a quick side note, that's why I get
so frustrated when people think that gigant Epithetzin were just giant orangutans, because they
get depicted that way in the media very often. It's ten to twelve million
years of divergence hardly be the same thing. We only diverge from a common
ancestor with chimps about six to seven million years ago, and you would hard
say that we're just chimps with shirts on or something like that. We're quite
different animals. That being said, arrangs share roughly like ninety seven percent of
our genetic material that's shared DNA, so there's only a roughly three percent difference
between us and them. So if these things were from that same Asian line,
they probably share about the same degree of DNA. Just for the sake
of argument, let's say now, if they are derived from an African line,
something either prior to or after the split with the common ancestor with chimpanzees,
as some people have suggested, with something like paranthropists, we share like
ninety eight to ninety nine percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. So if it's
something after that split, it would be somewhere between somewhere around that ninety nine
percent plus percentile. And so in order to detect those differences as small as
like one to three percent, you would really need to either sequence the entire
genome of that sample or to be extraordinarily lucky, and that whatever fragment you
get shows enough of that difference for you to differentiate from a human. And
so one of the things we've seen over and over again in this subject,
and it's happened with the Asian mystery phenomenon too, is that samples are collected.
Let's say, hair samples are a great example ABYSS where they are morphologically
distinct from human hair, like it's there in terms of their structure and their
anatomy, like, they're clearly not human hair. They might have similarities,
they show like shared characteristic but they're not the same. They're you can differentiate
them. But that when these sort of superficial cursory preliminary tests are conducted,
there's so much homology with human DNA. That's, oh, that's a human
hair. And if you say, wait a minute, it is absolutely distinct
morphologically from humans, you say, I don't know what it is. But
then it was contaminated by human handling, and we're just not getting the DNA
from the actual hair. Going DNA we're getting as human. But again they're
only looking at these sections, these fragments, and so again, as I
understand it, the technology exists now to sequence a full genome from as few
as three cells. So if someone had, like the samples that were tested
over the decades, I heard stories about there's a great one from Washington,
a blood sample that was collected. A couple saw a sasquatch on the porch
of their cabin from the door, and it spooped it and it turned in
it it hit its head on this light bulb, the porch light, and
it left blood. And this was collected, and the porch light's very high.
Apparently some tests were done and it was like, oh, it's indistinguishable
from human DNA. And the researcher who collected that, who was a stellar
researcher, And I wish they were still involved and engaged at least on the
public come. Maybe they still are behind the scenes. But as I understand
it, the person was like, I'm done with this because I know that
could not have been a human that deposited that blood, but that's where it
was left. And so are those sorts of stories over and over again.
And so I think you don't necessarily have to have a type specimen to derive
a full sequence now, because you know, it was Doug Hicheck who described
this to me, and I think the world of Doug and trust him that
there are technologies now that if you had as few as three cells, you
could sequence a full genome if you had access to that technology or the lab
or the budget, or whatever the case we may be. I do think
we're in a better position now to do that. But the fact that so
many samples have come back as quote unquote human when they're only looking at fragments.
This is such a bad analogy, and it shows you how bad I
am it thinking about genetics. But if you imagine something like some vast library
and the analogy I always use, like the Encyclopedia Britannica, and you had
this series of however many volumes and however many pages per volume, and you
were to change it by one to three percent, where you change a colon
here to a semicolon, and a common here to a period, and an
uppercase letter to a lowercase letter, and you and they're not even evenly distributed
that one to three percent. They're like little regions where you just change these
small bits and then you rip it into corners, tiny pieces, let's say,
two inch squares, and you fly over western North Carolina and you throw
it out of a helicopter and people are picking up these fragments and going,
oh, this is just the regular old Britannica as far as I can tip.
First of all, they don't even believe in the existence of the alternate
Britannica that's one to three percent different. And then what are the odds that
have the pieces they get there's enough to differentiate and not just go, oh,
that's actually just a typo that doesn't prove the existence of a different version
of this thing. When that's, as I understand it, what the problem
has been for all this time. If sasquatches exist. Now, if they
don't exist, then we're just testing raccoon hair and possum hair that are contaminated
by humans with a lot of wishful thinking. But I don't think that's the
case. Because the hair section and the evidence chapter alone, there were so
many examples that I didn't some of them, many of them I wasn't even
aware of before I started collecting all that into a single place. And so
I do think that there's something there now that the technology is progressed and we
might have the ability to fully sequence a genome. We could identify that.
So I know that's a long winded answer to part of the question. But
as for whether that will constitute proof, it's really hard to win people over
with something as cerebral. I don't even wrap my head around genetics. For
me, as just an unexperienced lay person observer, they're no different than a
story because it's like, I don't know anything about this, and whatever you
tell me, like I can either choose to believe it or not because I
don't know. I can't interpret all this information. I don't have the qualifications.
And so even if you could prove that they existed via d ada,
the public is going to go, what do they look like? Where are
they? What's their skeletal structure, what's their mating happen? People will still
want to see images and understand them, So it would still, I think,
be a long time before proof or acceptance occur. You know what I
mean. I definitely know what you mean, man. So let's do the
final word on the book. What is it that you want to have people
experience when they read the book? What's the final thing that you want them
to take away from picking up and reading the phenomenal Sasquatch. There's a whole
lot of things. I hope it accomplishes. At number one, I think
for the lay person, I hope that they see the complexity of this phenomenon
and go, oh wow, I had no idea that there was so much
here, because I think most people who are uninterested or disinterested just think that
there's this like legend and these are just spooky campfire stories. And occasionally someone
finds a divot in the ground and they think it's a footprint, and they
don't realize how much complexity and history there is. So I'm hoping that for
the lay person, they would come away with even if they didn't know anything
about the subject, they would have a very thorough education on the subject itself
when they finished it, and that they would see the validity or the potential
validity of both of these arguments. That there could be a biological source,
but there's a lot of psychological things occurring as well that are obscuring the potential
biological source. And I do hope for even the most dedicated ardent sasquatch students
that there's some things in there that you go, oh wow, I never
heard of that, or I've never thought of it that way, or that
it offers fresh perspectives and it expands the conversation or develop some of the ideas
further than what's been written before in a way that you know it's certainly not
just a rehash of the old classics. Let's say I really tried to make
a significant contribution, and Cliff is very generous to say it gives people bigfoot
one on one, it takes them straight through three zero one, And I
was like, oh, thank you. That's what I was aiming for,
and so I hope that's what people come away with. That is certainly what
I came away with. So where's the best place for people to pick up
the book? Certainly it's on Amazon basically exclusively. That was the best place,
in my opinion, that I could offer it because it gets to people
very quickly. It's all direct because I'm on the road a lot. I
travel, especially for field research, so not in a position to have stock
and send it to people. So you can buy the print book on Amazon,
or it's an Kindle version. There will be an audiobook that will be
released in early twenty twenty four and then if you want autograph copies, you
can find me in an event or they are available at the North American big
Foot Center's website. And so that's the only place where you can get signed
copies like shipped directly is from Cliffs and North American Digfoot Center, So I
can sid need the links for that as well. I will link to that
in the show notes. You guys go check it out. The phenomenal Sasquatch
Seeking Natural Origins of a cultural Icon. Matt Brewett, It's always a pleasure
and an honor to have you on man. I've had a blast talking to
you. Thanks so much for having me. I always enjoy talking with you
and hopefully get to see you again sooner than later. They say you don't
gotta go home, But just as Girls and Y sign things, stays and
uses Girls and By signs