Today, I want to tell you about a journey that I've been on for
most of my life. Ever since I was a kid, I've heard tales
of bigfoot and wild men while spending time with my friends and family. As
I grew older and read more about the paranormal, my interest in encryptids and
other things strange only deepened. That's why I'm so excited to share with you
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Now what are your reporting? I got a screen going on here. Something
just kid with my dog, something to kill your dog? My dog.
We're flying through there over the tree. I don't know how it did it?
Okay, Damn, I'm really confused. All I saw was my dog
coming over the fence and name was dead once you hit the grill. I
didn't see any cars. All I saw was my dog coming over the fence.
Mad, What are you reporting? We got some wonder or something crawling
around out here? Did you see what it was? It was enough out
here. Look, come new to window now and I don't need anything.
I don't want to go outside. Its great. Hello, hit the buddy
out here? What Quinn out thought of a bit of about text nine?
I don't know. Easy announter. Yeah, I'm walking right head. Oh
be there, and thanks so much for joining me for the show. This
is the first of a series of five episodes that I'm going to put out
for you guys while we're over in the UK and preparing for our trip up
to the Smoky Mountain Bigfoot conference later this month. Tonight's episode and the four
that will follow is all about what's going on with the wood apes and Area
X. Brian Brown, former NAWAC member, was gracious enough to allow me
to have exclusive access to this audio that he recorded for his podcast back in
twenty eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. You were going to hear
a ton of exclusive interviews with the people that have had experiences in Area X,
and in some cases they're literally sitting around the fire ring while they're having
activity around them in Area X. No matter where you are on the spectrum
with the nawac's mission to collect a specimen of one of these wood apes out
in Area X, you cannot deny the experiences that they're having and the amount
of data that they've collected over these many missions that they've had inside of Area
X. They're staying up to four months at a time in this area and
they're collecting tons of data, whether it be visual observations, note taking tons
of audio that they've captured in and around Area X. There is no doubt
in my mind that they have done some phenomenal work. So I'd like to
personally thank every member of the NAWAC that you're going to hear here and even
some of the former members like Brian Brown, Darryl Cougier and some of the
other folks that you're going to hear during these next five episodes. If you
want to know more about Area X and the NAWAC, the North American wood
Ape Conservancy, I'm going to link to the Woodape dot org website right here
in the show notes. All you have to do is click that. There's
tons of information over there, in the form of articles, audio recordings.
Any and everything you'd want to know about the NAWAC and Area X you can
find right there on Woodape dot org. But enough of that, I know
you guys are ready to get into it, so all that's left for you
to do is sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Whenever I
post to our Facebook page that we're going to be recording a new show and
I ask our listeners there to suggest topics for us to discuss, one subject
comes up again and again pretty much every time someone says they want to hear
more about what's happening in Area X. While my friends, this is the
show for you. What follows is more than two hours of Area X goodness.
Much of it was recorded on location in the mountainous backwoods of eastern Oklahoma.
As in the previous two years, the North American Wooded Conservancy, formerly
known as the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy, is performing a continuous three month field
study in their research area referred to as X. In twenty eleven, this
was called Operation Endurance. In twenty twelve, it was Operation Persistence. This
year, HiT's Operation Relentless, and it's happening right now. Up first in
this episode is a conversation I had with an AWAC chairman, Alton Higgins,
and Kathy Strain, a United States Force field anthropologist, noted author of Giants,
Cannibals and Monsters, Bigfoot Native Culture, and most impressively, I think
the all time record holder for most Bigfoot show appearances. This is the Bigfoot
show that is from the very pulsing nerve center of Area X, the epicenter
of Area X, and I have with me Alton Higgins and Kathy Strain,
And I'm excited because I realized when I was going to be down here this
week that I was going to have a biologist and an anthropologist, two ists,
and I thought it would be fun just to talk about what we've experienced
down here over the years and this year and they just get you guys' perspective
on it. So I'm going to start with you, Alton, and to
ask you. We're in our third year of the sort of long term summer
operations. How would you say this one's been going so far? It's hard
to compare years. You want activity, and there has been activity this year.
We had a lot of activity last year, so it's natural to compare
years. From my perspective, I think that the main thing we need to
keep in mind with regard to our activity here is that the apes are still
in the vicinity and they are still expressing interest in our presence. The fact
that there is activity and that the apes are here is what I think is
important and what drives me to continue with the effort. So what types of
activity are you thinking is indicative of them being in the area. Well,
vocalizations is one category, and there have been a few possible vocalizations noted.
Certainly, the most distinctive for me, other than a sighting, is the
act of throwing rocks, and we've had a fair amount of that activity.
Just earlier today, we were asking the team that was on site for most
of the day while we were gone for another responsibility, but while we were
gone, they said that there were several distinctive rock throws during the day.
If you count the evening and night hours, there were at least five distinctive
rock throws noted by that group. There's no other explanation for large rocks hitting
roofs other than either a human throwing them, and that was not the case
here, or an ape throwing them. And I heard two of those this
morning, both of them pretty clear, and one of them sounded like a
very large rock being thrown. Kathy, you've only just arrived in this and
you're going to be here for quite a while, several weeks. What do
you hope to experience while you're here. I hope to have a sighting,
of course, a visual, But what I hope to do is document behavior,
whether it's with a siting or not, what can be attributed to their
behavior, because we don't know an enormous amount about them, but we think
they're very much ap So I expect to see ape behavior and things that I
can correlate with other known apes and maybe tell me a little bit more of
what their level of intelligence may be. What the interest in this area may
be so that we can better plan for future events, because this is a
long term so every time we learn something, we can only make ourselves better
by using that information to our advantage. One of the things that we found
this year that we've not found in the pass is we have found boulders,
and on top of those boulders we have found the remains of hickory nuts.
This year we found in two separate locations boulders with the remains of hickory nuts.
But also on those boulders in one case, at least on top of
the hickory nuts, was another smaller rock, and it appeared that those nuts
had been broken with the smaller rock on top of the boulder. Can you
talk about from an anthropolgy logical standpoint the difference between using a rock to break
a nut versus some people might say that's evidence of tool use and might use
that to extrapolate their relative intelligence. Just seeing evidence of the use of a
rock to do something like that very intriguing because that is technically tool use,
taking a rock and using it in a method to crack something open, very
much like an otter would use a rock to crack open a hard shell.
Is tool use. That's the very definition. It's not tool making, which
shows higher level of intelligence that is only attributed to home sapiens, but it
does tell me that they are capable of using something in their environment to their
advantage. And up to this point, I don't believe that we have seen
anything like that. So even chimps will take a twig and use it to
help them get termines. And the other important thing that I saw that I've
been mulling over all day was finding firewood that belong to camp located a distance
away, and it appears to have been used to strike another tree to create
wood knocking. That to me is even more intriguing because to me, what
that means is they recognized something from our camp that was beneficial to them that
they could not find in the natural environment. So they found a piece of
firewood more attractive than they would a branch or other piece of material out in
the landscape. And so that's very indicative of something smart, maybe not our
level smart, but still very intelligent. The difference between a piece of firewood
and a piece of just wood in the forest is that it's been dried.
It's all hardwood for the most part, our firewood is hardwood, Alton,
You and I yesterday found one of those in the past, and this was
even further east away from our location. Just tell me what you think about
that, and tell me what you did after we found that, just to
figure out where this could have come from. Yeah, the year before last
year operational endurance, we had a number of teams that reported hearing very loud,
clearwood knocks that seemed to originate within the area of the cabins very close
and team after team reported this, and they indicated that same direction. As
we've discussed before, we stumbled across this piece of firewood that was located next
to a tree in a rock that, when struck, created the same sounds
that these teams had been reporting for so many weeks. We had that in
our heads as far as the idea of firewood with squared off ends and a
certain length, that's just kind of part of what we had in our awareness.
And when we were on this hike, we were far to the east,
hundreds of yards east of the farthest east cabin, and again we found
a piece of hardwood that was located next to a tree. It had every
appearance of having been used it was broken. Part of it was broken off,
and it looked like and maybe it was a result of being hit against
a rock or tree, and it formed a nice handle for a human sized
hand. But I don't think that it was shaped like that so that an
ape could grab it easier. I think it just broke. And the other
end of it there was a circular indentation, a mark that looked like it
was the result of an impact with something hard, either a hard bark tree
or a rock. Perhaps part of what that indicated to me was the idea
that they may use wood knocking as a way of communicating among themselves, not
just as an intimidation thing or whatever else we may have speculated with regard to
why do they exhibit this behavior. The fact that we heard it, we
found that piece of firewood in a place where we here at the camp would
not have heard it, suggests to me that it was used for communication among
themselves. After we got back to camp, behind my tent in your tents
a little path and behind my tent our tents just I don't know, was
it even twenty feet something like that, maybe less than that twelve feet or
so. Anyway, we saw right in the path a piece of firewood.
This was pine. I had the bark on it, so that was distinctly
pine. And that was a great mystery because we hadn't seen pine used as
firewood around here. And we checked all of the places where there's firewood around
here, and all of it is hardwood. This was squared off in the
end firewood length wood. I have no idea what to suggest for where that
came from, but it was not there when we arrived. That's the interesting
thing for me is that we had been through that area multiple times, and
as you alluded to, we're like looking for firewood where it doesn't belong,
and we're being very careful about where we put firewood so that we don't accidentally
get ourselves excited about something. And this piece of firewood was clearly sitting in
this trail and we did not put it there, and it had not been
there previous that. We had heard some sort of thudding sound. This is
something that we've heard here on occasion from time to time, different types of
thuds, but some sort of impact sound of the ground, a deep sound
you almost feel as much as you hear. And we had heard something from
that direction and that was in between the time that we had been in that
area and found the wood. That's conceivable. You can speculate that wood had
been chucked or something along those lines. We tested that idea too with that
very piece of wood. You threw it up in the air and when it
landed, it recreated the sound that sounded just like what all the team had
heard earlier. In that same direction we heard the thud of something. We
speculated at the time it sounded like a rock hitting damp earth or something.
But when you threw that up in the air and it landed created the same
sound from the same direction. It makes perfect sense to me that it was
that same piece of wood. So the other other piece of evidence that sort
of brings us to think there may have been something walking back there as there
was a piece of wood the ground. And tell us what you saw in
that wood. Yeah, it was a line across the path. It was
near the piece of firewood. It was a couple of inches or so in
diameter. It was just a stick and fallen from a tree, and it
was partially rotted. It was not rotted to the point where if you messed
with it it just fell apart. Still fairly firm, but if you stood
on it it compressed a little. There was an eight inch section of it
that was just absolutely smashed. It would have taken a great deal of weight.
I believe to have done that. Many of us stood on that piece
of wood, stopped on that piece of wood with one foot. Like I
say, we just compressed, And even after we'd done that, probably twenty
times or so, the wood still hadn't broken. Fairly confident based on those
observations and what happened with Jeff, that maybe something a creature and had walked
up behind our camp during the night. The interesting bit about timing around that
is that we had when we arrived it was raining very hard, so we
didn't pitch our tents. The first night we actually slept in one of the
cabins. The night this happened was the first night that you had been in
the tents over near that little trail. With regard to the different texture of
activity, I don't want to say there's been less activity, because we still
sense activity, we still hear things, but there seems to be a different
texture to the way they're interacting. There may be environmental reasons for that.
Kathy, from your standpoint, do you believe the types of activity that we're
experiencing, the level of activity we're experiencing might be different this year versus last
or the year before that. This is only year three into studies. It's
difficult to say what is less or more because it's going to ebb and flow
based on that. But so far we're halfway through and we haven't seen the
frenzied behavior that I called it from last year, where their curiosity drove them
to do some very bold things where they wanted to have that contact with us,
And so far, nothing that we have seen has risen to that level
of frenzied behavior. We have a late spring, we have lots of water
available, We have done one thing new with this new system that we've put
in, so any combination of that can lead to disruption. It could be
that their birthing cycle is not known to us, and then maybe it runs
every two years, and now there's infants involved that may not make them inclined
to be any closer to us than what they've been doing. So there's all
kinds of unknowns that we probably will never know. It's hard to hypothesize because
we're not going to be able to know. But I think the team makeup
has been pretty even from the years before. I think we're seeing the same
people return. This year. We have a little more females on one team.
Some of the team have been bigger this year, so there were more
people, but I don't know that's necessarily the problem. We have a jigsaw
puzzle and all of the pieces are the same color, and we're in a
room with no light trying to put this together, and so all we have
are the observations that we have, and then all the time in between the
observations trying to figure out why we're observing what we're observing. And I think
that's important to note that Jane Goodall was in contact with the chimps for many
years before she even tried to hypothesize what the behavior. While she was doing
was reporting this is what happened, this was the result, it's X to
Y to ze. It didn't have any speculation, And we really have to
be careful with that because what we observe now and what our thought process of
why that happened in five years may be very different. I like to use
that Neanderthal example, where we have one set of bones it ended up being
an older man who was crippled for years. Because that was the one example
we had, our viewpoint of Neanderthal was tainted as being slow, stupid,
hunched over when that couldn't have been further from the truth. And we want
to be very careful. We know that they use their environment to their advantage.
We know that there's plenty of resources here. We know there's plenty of
water here, and we know that they want to be here for some reason,
and we know that there's more than one. Other than that, there's
probably not a lot of facts that we can add to that. They knock
would, sometimes they clack rock, sometimes they throw rocks seemingly a lot of
time. What does any of that mean. Does it mean they want us
out, or they want us to come out and play, or it has
nothing to do with us. They just like the sound of rock on metal
and it just they giggle and think that's funny. We don't know. This
may go on when we're not even here, and so we have no way
of knowing that information out And one of the things we've done as a group
has tried to categorize the things that we know, the observable facts that we
know, versus the things that are in the realm of speculation and then the
things that we just don't have any idea about. So, with regard to
all of what we're talking about, how does that influence how you approach this
and how do you think it should influence how we as an organization approached our
work here. I think the main thing is to record what we observe,
what we experience, not to try to impute any kind of motives or to
humanize the creatures or do anything like that. Just be as objective as possible.
Record what we do, record what we observe, and try to do
the best that we can to use our limited store of knowledge to try to
improve our chances for obtaining more documentation. I guess my viewpoint would be that
we continue doing what we're doing. I know there's a lot of speculation when
we should go big and bold and do this crazy scheme over here or this
crazy scheme over here, But really we know, at least through the first
two years of study, that just being here, just being ourselves, has
caused some interaction, and so I think we are to stay the course of
doing what we're doing because it may change behavior, it may desensitize them,
it may overly sensitize them, And so we know that just being us walking
around making observations at this point has been successful, so we need to continue
doing that same method. I think that I'm in the organization and I see
it from the inside, but I think that in my mind we have an
internal dynamic that on one hand, we feel very strongly that a specimen needs
to be collected so this animal can be shown to be real, so that
the work of conservation and study can really go forth in a huge way.
But we're also trying to gather this data. So you have these conflicting drives
in our work here, and it just seems to me that there's a certain
level of frustration because, on one hand, collecting a specimen is a finite
objective. It can happen that when it happens, it'll be obvious that it
happens, Whereas the collection of data just goes on and on and then you
have to analyze the data and everything else. The group sitting here now,
our team is primarily looking for data, looking to collect information, but we've
had other teams that are much more involved in the other side of the mission,
which is the collection of a type specimen. One of the things that
we've talked about amongst ourselves is this idea that what happens after the species is
proven, whether it happens here or elsewhere, and how does that influence our
organization's future. And as the chairman of the group, what are your thoughts.
There's a lot of people have this idea that we will be a critical
player and that we being everybody in the big Foot community. What's your point
of view on this idea of after the animal has proven? What is the
role of groups like ours and others. I think that subsequent to documentation,
you're going to have federal agencies, you're going to have private organizations, You're
going to have just a lot of focused energy that's going to be outside of
our control. Certainly, the fact that we have years of observational data I
think will be of interest to them. I think the interpretation and use of
that we're collecting data for the scientific community. Whatever we collect that's going to
be made available to the scientific community, whether or not we're involved as an
organization, is something that is outside of our control. So I frankly don't
really worry about it much or dwell upon it. I think that our primary
objective is to achieve documentation and along the way. I don't see them as
contradictory to collect as much information as we can regarding hows and whens and watts
in terms of our activities. People that have different perspectives, I think when
they look at all that kind of data will come up with things that we
might not have considered. Our job is not so much interpretive as collecting,
and our role will be out of our hands. Hopefully we'll have some kind
of involvement in subsequent years in terms of trying to express to emissions or primatologists
whoever it is that ends up responsible for the follow up research that will entail
huge amount of energy, rest sources time. The questions that come from the
documentation of the species will be endless, and probably the first one is where
does this species live? And that just by itself the distribution of abundance question,
that's going to be a primary focus. I think that once the documentation
is achieved, the species will be declared an endangered species. I think it's
the Secretary of the Interior that has the prerogative to do that, and that'll
provide some time then for scientists to address this distribution and abundance question and habitat
requirements and all that. It would make sense to me that they would look
at the databases of some of the organizations besides ours that are out there,
since we have a regional focus. The interesting thing about the endangered species declaration
is that it isn't necessarily because we know them to be endangered, just because
that sort of freezes the table and nothing else can happen until that nation is
made. I think what we're doing is providing the baseline data, and that's
I got to emphasize data. We're not going to be providing baseline analysis or
baseline This is what we think these monkeys are doing out here. It's the
baseline data. They can are excellent at taking raw notes and turning them into
just factual sheets that can easily be turned over to if it's Fish and Wildlife
Service or whoever would be leading the charge of that, and I think that
will provide them important information because at that time of discovery, you're going to
have everything in the world coming out of the woodwork going. They're telepathic,
they are here from aliens, and I think our documentation clearly proves that they're
flesh and blood, that they're clearly not capable of reading our minds or making
us telepathically do things, and so I think that will help them rule out
some of that stuff that they can just go no, thank you, have
a nice day, and just push it out of the way. I'm pretty
sure it'sychic monkey made me drive my truck through a creek that was too high.
I'm very sure. I kept do to myself and why did you do
that? And I thought he was told to do it? It was the
monkey's doing it. Yeah, And I think that they would be declared in
endangered species right off the bet and it would allow, at least in my
mind, a twenty to twenty five year time period to do that research in
order to protect their habitat or protect them from hunting, would protect them from
maybe some of their habitat being destroyed by unnecessary means, And it will be
a root shock to a lot of industries and a lot of other individuals,
but I think in the end it will all be for the benefit. It's
pretty exciting to me that that is a potential out there, because many times
when you're just by yourself. You don't see the benefit of you being out
there for ten days and sweating it out and really having nothing happen. Ultimately,
we're a conservation group, so ultimately we're trying to make sure that their
habitat is preserved so that they can be preserved. So everything we do should
be focused on that. And that's what's most exciting to me, is that
after the animals established, then the work of conservation can take place. That
will make what happened with the spot at Owel look like a birthday party.
But the other thing I noticed as I'm sitting with he with you guys,
is that Alton, you've been coming in here longer than anyone in an organization,
and Kathy, you were here with me when we had our sighting last
year, which I've talked about on the show, but only from my perspective,
and now you're here. So what I'd like to do is get to
a sort of transition to a conversation about experiences it. Alton, can you
give us a quick version of how did we end up here? How did
this place or how did it show up on our radar? I was in
the BFRORO at the time and a fellow member and I came to this region.
I was interested in some spots that I'd found on topo maps, and
we by if your luck. Ran into a for service supervisor who was retired
and he'd had these creatures on his property. In visiting with him, he
started out to show us how to get to the place I was wanting to
get to, But there's so many roads out there for service roads that don't
show up on any maps. It was really confusing. So I asked him,
if it was up to you, where would you go? Told us
about this place and said, I think I can arrange for a guide to
show you how to get in there. On that first trip, I was
fortunate enough to find a really good trackway. It was in dried mud,
sixteen inch tracks. Paralleling the tracks was a set of bear tracks, large
and then small. So that's what started. And then I started talking to
people that owned property here and those that had long experience with this area,
and we organized a couple of expeditions when I was with the BFRO and we
came in here had some experiences that reconfirmed in my mind that this was a
place where the species could be found. And so when I joined the TBRC
now the NAWAC. We were looking for areas to put camera traps, so
we came in here with the operation Forest Vigil and had cameras in here for
a number of years. We didn't get any photos, but we became convinced
that the species was here. We were already convinced that's why we were here,
but we decided to take a different tack and employ a longer range on
site strategy. That's what we're doing now. Why do we not disclose the
location from an organizational standpoint? Why do we not just basically put a big
red X on a map and tell everybody where it is? Why do we
try to keep this place to ourselves for as long as we can. You
want to control as many variables as possible when you're doing anything from a scientific
perspective, and one variable we do not want to have to mess with is
that of other people. That's our primary concern. We want to know that
the things that we're observing and documenting are the result of native species of animal,
and that they're not the result of people coming in here. And this
is an area that's very difficult to reach and a beautiful, pristine area,
and we're blessed to be able to come here and observe document in an unspoiled
state. For more Sasquat Jotasy will be right back after these messages. I'm
thinking specifically about the rocks that we found, the boulder and the nuts and
the little crushing rock, if that's what it is, the only way that
could be used in the way that it appears to have been used. If
there's, as I said before, there's a boulder, there are remains of
nuts, and on top of that there is a rock. So the nuts
are under the rock and around the rock, so that you can sit there
and look at that all day long, and you cannot come up the way
that without the intervention of some kind of animal, those things came to be
organized that way. It can't be explained by anything that I can think of.
So therefore, if it is as it appears that the rock was being
used to crush the nuts, you need to have an animal that can hold
a rock. So humans can hold rocks, and so presumably can wood ape.
So we need to be able to know that there aren't people in here
setting up these things for us to find. Now, it's interesting that We've
been finding these boulders with nuts on them for many years, so this isn't
the first time we've seen this. It is the first time we've seen it
with the little pounding rock in place. What are just one or two of
the or three year eight of the sort of interesting experiences you've had in here
over that time. I think I've mentioned before about hearing rock hitting buildings.
Unless you experience that, you can't imagine the adrenaline rush that produces when you
know positively that a rock hit a building or a rock was thrown at you
from this steep mountain side that's right behind us, and that people are not
involved. That's an incredible rush. But it's also great confirmation that you're in
the right place and that the undiscovered, undocumented species in the neighborhood. Unless
you see this place, you can't really appreciate how rugged it is, how
dangerous it is, how difficult it is to get around, how thick the
vegetation is, and how terrible the visibility is here. Animals can be extremely
close to you and then they just take a few steps and they seemingly disappear.
We've seen this happen with deer bear and these creatures. It's hard for
people that don't get out in this kind of habitat very much to really appreciate
the extreme difficulty of the task that we face here. But so that's part
and parcel of it, too, is being able to just be in this
place. Don't know how many people I've heard talk about how this is a
magical place. Like I said, it can be hot and miserable, it's
filled with ticks and greenbrier and horrible dangers, but at the same time,
it's beautiful and it's just a majestic place. When you're here, it's almost
like you feel like you're back in time or something other than around the cabin.
So it doesn't seem to be jets flying over here. It's a very
quiet place. You're just in the middle of an area that almost like being
dropped into the Pleistocene or something. Mentioning yesterday that you spend a week in
here and you get to the point where you're ready to go right and you
load your stuff in your car or your truck and you get out. A
day and a half after you get home, you're like, I wonder what's
going on down there? And you want to go back there again. So
of course we've talked about this another broadcast. But yeah, the rock thing
is, that's one of their favorite behaviors. It seems I don't know why
they do it. We've noted coincidence in terms of rock torn events and our
comings and goings. It seems that there's something pertinent along those lines. I
don't know if they do it for fun or what it is, because we've
had these things that guys called rock wars where we're throwing up into this green
abyss behind us, and I guess an abyss as a hole. Anyway,
this green wall behind us, they're throwing rocks up there and rock's coming back
out of it. I don't know if that's play or what that is,
but we know that they do it. So that's a memorable thing. And
I was up on the roof collecting the rocks. For whatever reason, I
would ape through this rock, look at a keychain, and it'll stamp our
logo on it. So, Kathy, we're very close to the area that
we had our sighting last year, but you were here too. If I
had the worst view of what we saw, you had the best view.
So could you relate the reader's digest version or just what did you see and
what sticks with you today? And this is, I think the first time
you've been back since that time. Just what are your feelings about it now?
Just a little over a year later, what I saw was very distinctly
two individuals walking towards us, and I wasn't paying as much attention to the
small one as I was the big one. It just seemed like they were
oblivious that we were there. They were trying to find a place to go
up the mountain to get to safety. Could hear their rustling of their feet
at first, and then they broke out into the open completely, like I
said, oblivious to us being there. I jumped up and said, there
they are, and then I ran towards them. My actions caused them to
bolt up the hillside to get away from us. Of course, in hindsight,
I wish I had just let them see how close they were going to
get to us before it dawned on them that we were sitting there. But
my attention then focused almost immediately to the big one because it was larger.
I felt like I could get more details from their body type, what they
look like, how they were going to move than I could the small one
quick, That's what kind of took my breath away. They went up the
hillside like they had been ripped up on a bungee cord. The big one
took its arms and tucked into its sides much like what I would envision a
power runner going up a hill would do, and was pumping them not on
all fours, nothing like that, not swinging. It was very tight to
their chest. I envisioned that they were doing that because breaking through vines and
using their forearms to crush through it. Then it turned its feet to walk
duck like, but not webbing or anything like that, but just turned its
feet to the side in order to get better grip going up the hill.
And as much to my surprise, I really expected that more classic tight rope
type walking that's talked about often, but this was definitely not that. This
was a I'm going to get up that mountain side as fast as I could
possibly get and it was just like lightning going up the hillside. And then
there was other action after that. There was actually quite a busy week,
But being back here now, I feel still very blessed that I had that
experience, but also very enthralled that maybe I can have something like that again,
because initially I think the whole setup of why that happened was that they
were very curious and I can't help but wonder if that wasn't something unusual that
they heard that there was like what in the world is that horrible scratchy noise?
Meg it stop, God, leg it stop. And they were trying
to come in to smother me with a pillow or something. But hopefully we
can use that kind of intrigue to bring them back in again to make an
observation. But it also made me realize that they can easily lose track of
us because they should have known where we were sitting, but they were oblivious
to it, so they clearly had lost track of where we were. I
just think that probably happens more often than not where they think X, And
it's really why going on, and that's why those encounters happened, because they're
not intentional. I can't think of any of the encounters we've had here where
it seemed obvious that the animal wanted to be seen. There have been occasions
the animals reacted in a way that made it seem like it didn't mind that
it was seen, but those seemed to be very specifically around certain individuals.
Others have been very active to get away as quickly as possible. The distraction
thing is interesting to me, or the fact that they didn't know we were
there, even though we weren't that far away. We had been moving around
quite a bit prior to that, and we had just come back to our
sort of base camp. You had an observation specifically around how they were moving
that may help explain why they were not as focused on us as they may
have been. Can you speak to that. In the few seconds you had
seen them, what did you observe them doing? What it looked like what
was happening is the big one was trying to break to go up the hillside
forward, and so the big one would go and then try to catch up
with the little one and go, we're going this direction, much like a
mother would try to coach their child, you need to come with me now,
and the child wasn't willing to, and so that's how it appeared,
was like, Okay, let's go. No, okay, you're not coming,
come on, let's go. And it wasn't until I said, oh
my god, there they are that they both became in tune with each other
and they both went boom. But even then they didn't go the same path
as each other. So the big one went at first without regard to the
little one at all, and the little one I don't think followed exactly the
same path, but I'm not sure of that, because, like I said,
I was totally focused on the big one. It really felt like mother
and child. It did not have the appearance of a father who would have
been a little more forceful in directing that child and where it wanted to go,
And so it was more of a mother with a precocious little one who
was curious but unaware that there was maybe danger just another five feet. Oh,
the big one was huge. We put Mark McClerkin, who is about
six foot three and big boy, up on the hillside, and I stood
in my perspective, and the big one dwarfed him, and the little one
was roughly half that side. And when you say little one, you're thinking,
well, foot tall, but it's really not at least three to four
foot tall, and I'm sure up against me because I'm not that tall,
it would have been just slightly smaller than us. But it was completely black
face was black. There was no other color that was represented, and it
was pure daylight. In fact, it was not all that much from where
we're talking now, and you can see how well you can see out into
the forest. I think for me, the reason why I think it was
powerful was it wasn't what I expected. I really was expecting the slow mo
Patty. I had all the time in the world to observe it and all
that, and it was it reinforced that. Oh, that's why people say
I didn't have time to react. And then for me, even though I'm
professional and I came here to see one, my reaction to it was very
not what I expected of myself. I really lost my cool. I was
really okay, honey, it's time to go home now, and I've had
enough. And I had a slight meltdown because I had to get that stress
out of me that where before or I was going to have a panic attack
or something because it was is not what I expected. Again, what I
expected was Patty. I expected her to. I guess stroll through can give
me half an hour? Does photographer in various positions. It's the freaking out
thing, at least for me, because I think we were all pretty affected
by what we had seen, and I kept going on about this when I
talked about it, But the speed of the thing was just mind blowing.
And it's interesting you say that I expected it to look like Patty, because
we have another member who had a siding early on this year. He didn't
process what he was seeing at first because he said he always thought he would
see Patty. And it seems that that image is almost to our detriment now
because we all expect it's going to be the Pattison Gillman subject. A lot
of them that we see here, the three or four that we've seen,
perhaps they don't fit into that, but they do in a way. You
can tell somebody all you want to is some things they flot Tom Weays five
hundred pounds. But until you see what that looks like, you don't have
a perspective of what that's supposed to look like. And I've grown up in
the forest. I've seen barrafs and everything, and when I see a baron,
when I see a bearf I see coyote, I want to say coyote.
And this didn't fit my image of what I was expecting. So if
you comparing contrast to the Pattison, England subject, which I believe anyone who
listens to the show knows that I think that this is a genuine film of
a genuine animal. We've got as an organization, have photos we've collected from
other parts of Oklahoma that seem to show an animal that look like Patty.
The gray one that we've seen here, the bits of it that we have
seen look very much like Patty. That animal looks more like Patty than any
others. So now what you have just collection of different body types. So
if now Patty is genuine her lack of alacrity in getting away from Patterson and
Gimlin, all you're left with is this is the observation. We cannot say
why Patty didn't bolt, didn't jump and move as quickly as we've observed them
moving here. The gray one doesn't either. Yeah, it behaves indifferently when
it has been observed, it seems. And the question so why people ask,
We don't know. In the end, what we're going to hopefully be
documentaris because we're documenting time of day, time of year, season, condition,
what we saw, what color was it, the height, whatever.
At some point we're going to be able then to put male female age,
other thing going on, and it may be what we see in the end
is genders act differently, situations act to who else is also present. Maybe
the great Man acts differently because he knows or she knows that she's got four
others in the sidelines. We're just recording the data and at some point it
will make sense and it will all come together because somebody will see the other
half that we're not seeing. The best and clearest view of the great One
we've had here was later in the season, and Patty was filmed in October,
and it's interesting to me that those are late in season. A lot
of animals put on a lot of weight over the summer when the food is
plentiful, so that's just another possibility they just get fat. They're going to
be cold, and there's gonna be a lot of food. So again,
you just need more observation. If we could have somebody here three hundred and
sixty five days a year, we would then be able to tell what goes
on when we're not here because we don't have any clude. For all they
know, they sit at the table and to play poker and rummage through all
our stuff. And now it was an observation that I wanted to make before,
was why the firewood is so important to me is because there are items
that they can take at any time, including food, and that has not
happened. And why firewood when I have my choice of meat or free food,
vegetables, fruit, all this stuff. None of that stuff has ever
been disturbed, which is what you'd expect with bear behavior, of course,
but instead they're choosing to take firewood, which to us is a throwaway nothing
item, And so it adds a perspective of what they consider valuable. That
they're not interested in metal items, they're not mess interested in tools that we
already have, producer mirrors or any of that items. We had an experience
earlier in the operation that I'll just say there was activity near our woodshed and
what we heard was the sound of the metal corrugated roof being messed with.
When we found that fire, it changed our perspective on what may have been
happening over there. It probably indicated that the firewood was the objective, and
the sound I think was secondary to that. I don't think they went over
there to rub the sheet of There was a loose sheet up there. You
can rub it back and forth and make a really loud noise. I don't
think they were there to make noise. I think that was incidental to their
primary objective, which is a snag themselves a good piece of firewood. In
my mind, all of this, to me ties back. We have so
many questions, and we have remarkably little actual data and practically no answers whatsoever.
And the only way the data and the answers will come about is with
concerted study, with twenty four seven three sixty five study of these animals where
they live, and that won't happen until they're proven to exist. So for
me, all of this just ties back neatly into a little package for us.
One of my favorite things is seeing the reactions of other people when they
come here. You can't guarantee that anything will ever happen, or that anyone
person will have something happen, But over the years it's been terrific to bring
in people like you. We brought you in here and you saw and experienced
things that you probably never would have imagined. And remember John mind since give
you brought him in here and he had some really neat observations and experiences,
and Kathy, it's very different when you have one person who makes outlandish claims
and they keep going and coming back and saying, I have this, I've
seen this, when you're bringing in lots of people who you trust and who
you have confidence in yourself. Kathy and Bob Strain, they were brought in
here and they were able to confirm for themselves. At least. It certainly
hasn't convinced the scientific community, but it's a great joy to see the people
observing and experiencing the same things that we've been saying and seeing. We're upwards
of a dozen people who have had really compelling experiences down here, excitings like
an actual I saw a big harry monkey and I know they're not monkeys,
all right. Thanks guys for sitting down. I know out and you're getting
ready to bug out, and Kathy, you're just getting ready to settle in
here. So I appreciate this little nexus of the time that you were both
available. We've known each other since ninety nine. I think we figured out
for probably for four years. We were like BFRORO friends communicating with each other
to the Investigator Curator forums, and we met in two thousand and three,
and it's just been great to be able to see her again. Thank you
guys very much, and thanks for talking to me. Next up, it's
Kathy again, along with Monica Rollins. They were talking to me one dark
night, as we said, around a campfire, waiting for those pesky wood
apes to make themselves known. You're going to hear us make mention of various
things during this interview. They were happening around us, but you won't be
able to hear them yourself due to the type of microphone I was using.
In fact, I had headphones on and I can only hear what was recording,
so I didn't hear any of it as it happened either. You can
only barely make out the nice fire we had going and all of it's popping
and crackling. So anyway, here's Kathy and Monika. Okay, So now
it's a few days after my conversation with Kathy and Alton and in the middle
of actual bigfooting at this point, aren't we It's funny we were talking about
how the activity was low on the last conversation and now we've actually had some
interesting activity. So I thought it would be a good opportunity now to talk
to Kathy Strain again and Monica Rollins. We're the only three here right now.
We've had a larger crew, but two of them have left today,
so it's just the three of us and we're sitting around a campfire. Kathy,
what's happened in the past couple of days. How would you characterize the
activity that's happened around us. It's been very active. We've had lots of
rock throws, lots of appearing to want to be close to us and observe
what we're doing. We've had at least what I would call a primate display
out of anger or the need to show that we have a dominant mail in
this area. So it's been very exciting and a little intimidating all at the
same time. But I'm enjoying it because it's behavior that needs to be recorded.
I'm excited to be here to see it firsthand. Monica, it's been
a while since you were in x when's the last time you were here,
so I think it was January of twenty ten. What are your impressions of
it thus far? I am very impressed with the increased activity because the last
time I was here, there really wasn't much going on. We would always
when we would come in, mostly in the summers, we would hear what
we assumed. We're not sitting the roof of the place where at Now seeing
that that's leading to more and more activity in this area is very interesting.
So you were here daring Was it the camera trap operations? That's the last
time you were here? Yes, Kathy. The other night. One of
the first notable things that I'm remembering off the top of my head that happened
is we're sitting around a campfire ring that's maybe thirty or forty yards from where
my truck is parked, and my truck is parked up against the woods,
and you saw something over there. Can you describe what you saw behind my
truck? Yes, we have a pretty large fire going almost every night.
I was looking towards your truck and the only light was the fire. I
saw two orange eyes that were perfectly round that was on the driver's side looking
at me, and I could see it through the passenger window, and it
looked at me, it looked away, then it looked back at or not
me in particular, I guess, more like at the fire and the firelight
was catching its eyeshine. Then I saw it lower like it was going to
move, and then we heard something big move off into the brush fairy.
Suddenly, those aren't reflections because I'm looking at my truck then and now and
the fire is not reflecting it in the window. So that's not what that
was. What's interesting about that is we've had some of the other members who
were here perceived what they thought was motioned. And also last night, I
was going to my tent is pitched over there, and I was going to
go into my tent, and as I walked over towards my truck, I
heard from behind the truck in the woods right behind my truck three loud,
very discernible footsteps sort of crunch moving away from me as I was walking over
there. So I put everything down, lit up the area. I told
everyone what I had heard. It took a lot for them to come over,
maybe I don't know, twenty seconds. And as I was moving around
the woods over there, I can continue to hear something in there moving further
away. But I also heard what I can only describe as like a gibbering
whispering, a sort of a kind of weird ass sound that I've never heard
before in my life. Moniky, you also heard some interesting sounds last night,
not too long after that. What were those like? As I was
collecting my things from my tent, I turned around to walk back to the
cabin, and I could have sworn I heard from a very low, garbled
whisper similar to what you heard. Wow, and it was. It sounds
weird. It's not something you expect to hear while you're trying to get into
a cabin from a tent. So there's all kinds of sounds that happen out
here. You get used to the ones that are quote unquote normal, and
then when something new comes along. One of the things we had experimented with
NAWAC recorded some vocalizations a couple of years ago during Operation Endurance that sounded to
those of us who've listened to it not unlike the Sierra Sounds. One of
the things that we had talked about doing last night was actually call blasting part
of the Sierra Sounds. It's Sierra Sound vocalization one is the one we were
using. It's the one that the people on the Sierra Sounds I think is
a female. We picked it because we thought it was the least aggressive,
but in listening to it, maybe we were wrong about that, especially in
light of what happened. We had sent that out. We had decided to
go to bed. The first time we decided to go to bed was when
the thing walked behind the truck. That sound that got us riled up for
about another hour or so. Then we're like, Okay, this time,
we're really going to go to bed, even though part of it happened to
me. You're tired of listening to my voice. I'm going to have Kathy
describe what happened next. Essentially, we had decided that we were going to
attend for a second time to go to bed. The girls had gone inside
to the cabin to get ready. Brian had a radio and he was going
to do a radio check. So I was busy bothering around and he had
called a couple of times. Then I had not responded, and then he
yelled out radio check and I heard him. So I called back on the
radio to do the radio check and verified that both our radios were working,
and I shall yelled at really loud because I heard it actually echo in the
valley when I did it. And next thing I know, I'm getting ready
to go to bed, and Brian get moved our chairs over to a side
area to protect it from any rain that we were expecting to come. The
following morning, Brian realized that he had left his gun attached to his chair
and he was walking over to the east side of the cabin all of a
sudden, all I can describe is, at first what I heard was all
these rocks starting to dislodge, and then I heard the very distinct cracking of
a tree coming down, like it was being pushed over. And I heard
Brian yell out tree, and we all heard the crashing noise, and it
took me just a little bit to recognize cracking representative tree. So I ran
outside barefoot. I didn't even have my gun or anything, and we just
all ran out, and we could still hear the thing kind of clamoring down.
It was still in the process of trying to come to rest someplace.
It was very clear to me what had happened is Brian had now whether it
would have pushed a tree down, whether or not. But Brian's action of
going to the side of the cabin while the rest of us were inside safe,
I think was very intimidating to what was on the hillside already watching us,
and so its reaction was one you would expect an ape, a chimper
guerrilla to do to try to intimidate the dominant male that was encroaching on its
territory. And so had Brian not gone and gotten his gun, would it
have happened. We don't know. Was there an imaginary line that those wood
apes have that they don't want anybody crossing? Probably yes, Had a female
genet would they have reacted the same? Probably not. That's ape behavior,
and it doesn't mean that even though we recognized that it was a display that
was any less intimidating. For sure. It was just like because then all
of us left in the county, nobody dead off limits to that point.
So we had done the Sierra sounds, and then I had been making calls
myself. I was trying to imitate the bar owl. I wasn't trying to
make big foot howls or anything, but I was making loud noises and screaming
and yell. And so the situation that we had had here for the past
couple of days, it was myself and four women. So if you're looking
down there, and you're a primate and you have a collection of people around
you, of a monkey's or apes around you. I don't know, did
they think that I was a dominant mail did they think that they need to
make some sort of display. I did feel that when I walked over there,
I took a bee line right towards where my chair was, where the
holster was slung over the chair. Directly above that is where the tree was
pushed down. Now I had lit it up with my flashlight. I didn't
see any emotion up there, but it sounded huge and you could hear it
just like crack, snap, snap, snap, and then crash really loud.
So yeah, I felt that it was that it was aimed at me.
Monachy, you were in your tent when you heard that. What was
going through your mind when you heard the tree come down? I knew immediately
from the sound what it was because I've heard trees fall before, and it
was that crack and crack, quite quite crash, And I just said,
they're thinking, I hope it doesn't hit the cabin, And then I thought,
all that activity is going on the other side of the cabin. I'm
sitting over here by myself. I was fully expecting something to happen behind me,
the area behind me, which is heavily wooded, and we have had
activity going on back there, and then you started yelling. Everybody came out,
and I was concerned because I didn't know where the tree had landed.
The reason why I'm fairly confident saying that it's aprilated is as we looked up
there, I saw Kathy saw. I think it was just the two of
us. Saw some flashes of orange eye shine. What do you point in
a rock? Just what hit over by the tent? Excellent? Excellent?
Maybe I did not hit my truck. I'm gonna be pissed off. So
we were looking up there, we saw some eye shine. Then we came
back around the fire Monica. About half an hour later something happened. What
happened after that? Oh the rock, Oh my gosh, that was very
interesting. It was definitely not a nut falling out of the tree, which
is always something that we have to try to discern. Was it a rock,
was it in a nut. It's hard to tell a lot of the
time, but this I could hear it. Actually, the leaves starting far
away, getting closer than thud it landed about fifteen feet from the fire,
which was incredibly close because so far, nothing that's been tossed at us or
fallen from trees has been quite that close. So that was very interesting.
And I was able to walk over and look right at what had been thrown.
You saw the rock on the ground that had just landed there from up
on the hillside. Yeah, that was very interesting. I hadn't ever experienced
anything quite like that before. It was very close, and I could hear
the trajectory of the rock coming through the leaves far away, closer thud there
is. That's what it's really compelling, is when you can hear it moving
through the sort of the foliage of the trees, because then you get a
sense of the directions coming from. And it did come from the direction almost
exactly where we perceived eyeshine and in the direction of where the tree had fallen
down. The other thing that happened directly just after the tree was pushed down
is there's another cabin to our south, and we heard unmistakable sounds of rocks
hitting the tin roof of that cabin. So that happened immediately afterwards. You
saw a little eye shine up here. Okay, cool, that's essentially the
sort of headline of the activity. I think that it was fun. Yeah,
today when the sun was up, it was fun. The other thing
that happened I'll mention before we sign off here and pay more attention to what's
happening on the hillside above us. The other day I was driving out.
We had some people who were leaving and I was driving them out of the
canyon because they didn't have a vehicle that could make the trip. Unmistakable sounds
of rocks hitting the roof of one of those cabins over there, And as
Monica said, the nuts are falling this time of year. Especially the nuts
are green and the ones that are being chewed on by insects have started to
fall, so you have to be careful. But the nuts sound is a
sort of a lighter, plinkier sound. When the rocks hit it's a much
deeper and more sort of noticeable rock sound. In any event, we had
heard that twice in about five minutes from the direction that we were about to
be driving. So as we were driving out, I was keeping my eyes
open. We were all keeping our our eyes open looking in that general direction.
And as we came around a clump of trees and one of the cabins
became visible. I saw on the left side of the cabin motion. It
was tall. It was taller than the fence. It was brown. It
was taller than it was wide. All I can say is that couldn't make
out a head or arms or anything like that. But it was a definite
brown. It was in motion when I saw it. It was over as
soon as I saw it. It was a second long. I believe what
happened is that whatever it was moved behind the cabin and took off into the
undergrowth behind the cabin. So I don't know what to call that. I
don't know. I'm not going to say that's an actual sighting. I don't
know what it was. It was brown, tall, and moving, so
I'll leave it at that. So that's what we got here from aria X,
and I'll leave it at that, and don't just keep paying attention to
what's happening on the hill behind us. Finally, I have an interview with
the inimitable Darryl Collier, field coordinator of the NAWAC. Daryl receives and compiles
each team's field notes and analyzes the results He's the guy to talk to if
you want the big picture of what's happening in x I reached Dale at his
home in Waco, Texas. So you've heard the interviews that I did with
Alton mccathy and Monica's interesting because over the course of just the few days that
I recorded those, it seemed as though the activity level had been increasing.
What's happened since the time that I spoke to Kathy and Monica the interview that
everyone just heard, What's happened in the couple of weeks since then, we've
had what appears to be our substantial increase in rock throwing. The team we
just came out of there, we refer to them as Golf Team. We've
already took together what we call the after action Report. That's a report that
we put together and it's based on the field journals of the team. We've
already put that together and we've already begun to do an analysis of the activity
and that took place there. Golf team, which was there for one week,
had more rock throws during their week than any team choir. And that
includes all of Operation Relentless, Operation Persistence, and Operation Endurance. So basically
almost three years now of these fields that and they experienced just an incredible number
of rocks. And stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see. We'll be
right back after these messages. Incredible, ridiculous and they'll putn't you gether in
the after action report. I was sure you're going to let up in.
It was perfect for the name of the drill study, which is operational relentless,
because the rock throwing was relentless. Now my question, I wonder falling
victim to some nuts falling from tree, because there are nuts falling from trees
and they're not ripe yet, but some of the raw nuts are falling.
And the thing is that that trace is covered with hickory tree, kickey trees,
and black walnut trees. It's bothered with them. Obviously, logically,
out of all the rock throws will be docued in when I'm able to see
all those rocks. In fact, not even able to see the vast majority
of them, And you would have to tune it. Perhaps a small percentage
of those the probably nuts. But you're da interesting thing if there are nuts
falling. I don't say that all the rocks that they documented are rocks that
I think the batchment card you have them were truly rocks. But if he's
suppose fifty percent of them or now we've got frank finalenon going on, because
there were a very few impact down that they recorded as rocks during the daytime,
right, so what with god? If you're in the daytime, the
team here a significant number of what we call wood knocking cauring the daytime,
and then once the thund goes down, the wood knocking subside and it's replaced
with a more regrettive sort of bound which is stolen on metal, whether it's
the cabin they're staying in or whether it be other cabin in the immediate area.
But the wood knopping all that get the piers after dark, and it's
replaced by banging on metal or rocks or rock impact noises on metal. You
might be able to argue somewhat that they're mistaking some nuts falling at the watch,
but I don't see how because one thing they catch it, the differences
expect that that's the fall all day long. Yeah, that's your point,
right. If you want to take the most skeptical point of view, then
then you'd have to come up with an explanation is the white nuts only fall
during the night, and they don't fall during the day because we don't hear
during the day. When I was in there, the nuts would fall.
And the thing is, you learn to tell the difference because the sound of
a little nut, a little woody piece of vegetable matter hitting a tin roof
is one thing. And whenever I heard that, even though those things could
have been also thrown by whoever or whatever was throwing the rocks, you can't
know for a fact where it came from, so you'd have to discount that.
But when a rock hits a metal roof, that's a very different sound.
And our came bent to debt. First of all, they do roof
sweeps almost every day or every other day, and they found on the on
the roots of the structures a significant number of rocks. Some would have died,
the large coins, and some, interestingly were the side of beans small.
So it cants some difference between the small beam sized rock, the hittory
nuts and the black walnuts, and the sound. The theme there's a pretty
good difference, and that the rocks don't roll, the nuts roll, they
sound the fame when they hit these nuts in these very small rocks. But
it's the after effects of the nuts or the rocks the coality to tell the
difference. But here's the thing I'm reading straight from our after action report,
Dear. This is in the early morning howls of Wednesday, the twelfth of
June. Our chin has been subjected to rock going put the gun went down,
they went to bed at three am three o nine. The documented another
rock hitting the roof of the cabin. Three twenty one, another rock strikes
the bait cant cabin metal root. Three forty three. Yet another rock hits
the bait can't cabin roof. Rocks whirl continue to strike the roof of the
bait camp cabin. Hayes wondered if the h ever rested as another rock hit
the bait can't cabin roof with the fun just from rising, another rock pops
the cabin rooge. Now guess what they stopped right there? The sun is
coming up. The rocks stop. I'm just standing here. It's not until
going to look to the next rock frill. It's not until much later then
eleven o'clock the next night. Right, So there you go, no nuts
and the time the sun would up until a couple of hours after the sun
would down, and then if you want to think for nuts, go ahead.
But the nuts start falling again at eleven o'clock the next night. They
continue until oh six hundred. The next morning, the rock wrote seat at
old six hundred, just as a bundet coming up here, another one at
ten towards bixail here any more rocks until the next night after nine to pet
them. There's definitely a correlation between's activity that we're observing and whether or not
there's daylight, which doesn't make sense if you're trying to describe to the nut
theory. So it's interesting what's different this year. I had talked earlier without
LN Cathy. Things seem to be slower at the beginning of the operation,
where in years past we had activity in the second week where we had some
pretty intense things happened. I know I was there last year in the second
week and had some interesting things happen, but that isn't really what we've seen
this year. We have a gent environmentally that things changed. I think everybody
that's participated so far this year wearing There are eight team right now, Hotel
team about dinner, so everybody that's participated in the first four to five weeks
agreed pretty much for a person environmental conditions being to be late. Seemed to
be a late spring. It's definitely a letter spring than it had ever been.
It just we've been going in there. I don't remember I've been going
in there for a decade. Just unbelievable amounts of rain and day after day
of it, and indebted. It was pretty cool late into the year this
year aloud. For the first team this year, and we only started a
week earlier than we did last year. I would put the first team it
would found out Philly first week, and I think it was part of that
way the second week as well, if you were there for the second team.
Yeah, it was much colder, comparing the two Bravos Bravo Persistence and
Bravo Relentless. But there was a week shift. But the foliage was maybe
maybe seventy percent what it had been a year before. I was needing to
wear a jacket much more often. It was much cooler and as we had
said, much wetter. Though that week wasn't as bad as my second week
in there. That was a really wet week. I bet we had ten
inches of rain that week, unbelievable mounts of water the week that I was
in there for Bravo this year, I came out thinking a few things that
happened, but it wasn't as eventful. It really in the past couple of
weeks seems to have picked up quite a bit. I think anckle ching was
really the turning point, the hinge. Right, Yeah, I will not
classify the first full week and it's dead at all. Well, the reason
I said we're coming out of operation, which was just incredible, I think
we're a little bit defensive. Dodge went a little bit numb to what's going
on out there. I think if you brought somebody in that was told me
fresh and had never experienced any of this before, I think could be away.
Which team Will went in with. But comparatively speaking to say, Bravo,
Alpa and Keto, I think had the most activity last year compared to
the other free team for just now in the last two or two to three
weeks, seeing it for high level of activity, and I can't account for
it other than maybe environmental conditions, but it's also another factor. Kathy straining
in her third week now and coincidentally, things started to pick up really a
little bit before Cappy got there, but when Katy got there, it is
what it is, right, Kathy was on Fox Trot team. She's on
Echo and we haven't heard from Hotel, but we don't know what's been going
on out there. For the last several days. She's been out there with
Hotel team. Fox Trot and Golf were the two most active teams. Probably
Album would have been third. We haven't crunched all the numbers yet. I
was on the Fox Trot team and it was almost as active as we'd experienced
last year in the second week, just a different texture of things. But
besides the rocks, what kinds of we've had a member with a clear daylight
sighting. We've had just one of those this year, right, Yeah,
we had one very queer siding. We've had a few others that were likely,
and in the first week I actually had a very possible siding. I
don't know what help that could have been, but I did not get a
clear enough visual and the way these things, the color of the two animals
that I saw, just the way things happened. We had just heard a
large rock one of the cabins, and so I went over there to investigate,
and I thought two large charcoal animals through gaps in the vegetation, running
along one one appeared upright, the other the one behind the horizontal. They
were passed. They were large. One cut across the creek, or they
cut off the creek. I could hear them. I could hear their feet
watching in the water. That happened, and said, then I went to
the east and awful tempted to perceive them that I was not. That's why
I got away. But then I went back in the direction where athletics things
could come, thinking they not double back, because we had some experience where
it seems to have happened in the path. So all I went east,
probably one hundred and fifty yards. Meantime, Paul Bowman and Bob's strain or
looking in the area where I had just come from. Paul Bowman dal of
brownish upright figure from about eighty yards away walking to the west. His first
instinct that he was seeing me. But he walked at the five or big
decades and it had classic arms swing, they had a pointed head, and
he dark the whole animal dark brown a ship. He described the faith like
a model color, and it was a uniform color. The chest was darker,
but the head and the shoulders there was all sort of one sort of
brownish color that clearly was that didn't match the discretion of anyone who was there.
At first it was me, but when I came from the eat,
he knew there what he had seen was not me, and he had difficult
beginning when he had not had a big dual gang before that. And with
most people, when they perceive one, it shocked them, no matter how
much they convinced themselves in the past. But the things you did once you
have that visual reality really settles in and you have to deal with it for
a little bit, I think, and Paul would block that what's interesting about
his experiences is that it illustrates two points, and that if you're interested in
collecting the specimen that the Nawac feels needs to be collected to establish this animal
as real so that we can actually begin the work of conservation. If you're
interested in doing that and you have not yet seen one before, it's a
very tricky thing because when you see one like he did, it looks like
a person. Your brain tells you it's a person, so you therefore don't
want to shoot at it right, especially a different He believed it was probably
seventy five or delay, and thoughts he knew I was in that area.
He thought I might being downright, and to say, yea, if you
want to make sure, you definitely want to make sure. Although what he
saw did not appear to be me, it'd still the first thought. And
I'm not seeing Darryl. It looks like Daryl, but they're all down there.
He's that he's really expecting in his mind. I guess you had this
scenario already laid out in his mind. It would be with Quassic, Patterton,
Gimlin animal, paddy walking and very clear to see and all that,
and he didn't have that. He was not that thick bigger than that.
Because Kathy said the same thing an interview I had with her. So many
of us have seen that figure so many times. That's what your brain is
expecting. And what we found is that for the most part, at least
the animals that we're seeing, there's only one that seems to clearly fit that
description. The rest of them have a different body shape altogether. Yeah.
Yeah, definitely the one that we recard to as old gray in the large
way. When that thing looks just like Patty. I'm telling you mc clarkin
saw I pour several seconds. You had a distance of about twenty yards at
night. I don't know if the listeners have heard about Dins in Canada,
but August, remember August McClerkin went in there. He and Alex Gids arrived
at about midnight. They had just been there for a few short minutes.
I think you'd only been there five or Kennedy. They were sad in the
truck all he had taken a loading into the cabin. Martin was standing outside
by his truck. He heard some rock kick behind him him. There was
just big gray one about twenty yards away, just standing looking at him.
And he stood there and just looked at it, and't it good? There
after a utro fives fixed seconds, I ran and wafted off from the bark,
not in a hurry. It seemed like you he threatened. It did
not threaten him. Was not at all scared or intimidated of him. Very
confident here. The scripture was more de killed than mine, and I had
already digged. I didn't look very much like Paddy. He got a much
better look at it, and I did. He did, absolute me spit
an image of Patty, but it's gray from top to bottom. And he
said, there was thick all the way down, just the way she is.
She was every bit of eight feet tall. And what's interesting to me
about that, And we touched on this when the conversation I had without is
that some of the animals are very reluctant to be seen and seem to be
expending an awful lot of energy to move quickly so that they aren't. But
ones like this one almost purposely not expending a lot of energy. They like,
yeah, I know you saw me, so what and they just walk
off. But they're not running off. This one has I don't know that
we've ever seen this one moving very quickly. It seems to have this attitude
of I'm not going to make a big show of leaving right now. I'm
just going to basically do it in my own sweet time. It's interesting to
see the different personalities almost of the way these animals act around us. Some
of the chad scary that this one way repurach to is maybe atriarch or matriarch,
and it doesn't bow to anything, It doesn't happen. Well, we're
not all great. It was not moving quickly. It just stepped up on
the big rock and stepped up on the bank very casually and was long.
What's interesting and this is and I'm clearly not a primatologist. I went to
the zoo the other day, so I didn't even stay the holiday inn,
so I'm not that big of an expert. But we were at the Como
Zoo here in Minneapolis or over in Saint Paul. Actually, they have a
new primate. They've redone their primate exhibit, and they have an exhibit with
some orangutangs in it. And what I found interesting is there's four orangutangs in
there. Three of them came outside, Two of them were playing, one
of them were just hanging out. And then the big one came out.
When it was a female, and she moved very slowly, very purposefully.
The other ones got out of her way. She didn't look threatening, but
she was really big. What struck me at the time was that she's acting
the way that I think about Old Gray, about the way that one doesn't
move in a big rush. It seems like it just waits for the world
to get around it. And we don't know, but based on our observations,
I think it is a safe assumption that one seems to be pretty near
the top of the pecking order. Yeah. Absolutely. This year there's shaped
to be a little bit of a different dynamic, and that is they're being
very stingy their appearance. Yes, sir, we had one clear when we've
had a few others that were possible or even probable. You're in banner,
I think was more unlikely one of these apes. You had heard banging on
one of the cabins, You got in your truck, drove out, and
you stand the area, and then you saw a neck flight brown figure twite
just tall as the fence up away or move away after the cabin had just
been rocked. Rock and get the throne of that cabin. You have to
you see that upright brown animal near at the cabin and it FETs away as
you pull up. You didn't get to look at it again. Circumstance to
me, I don't know what else could have been there. One of the
people saw my brown helots animal jump from the top tree to another tree.
Now, my own theory is may have been a young one. There's okay,
all the animal would be uniformly brown. And the thing is that two
thousand and four, I thought I saw something Denmark, but I don't think
I got as good of you as what this person clearly saw the animal.
And we actually have one of the sort of quote unquote historical sightings, one
of the older sightings from the area from one of the family members who's been
going in there was of an ape like animal up in a tree yet and
one of our investigator class year caught one up in the tree correct the arm
wrapped around the legs, the knee sticking out. It was up the tree
about twenty feet. I know that the incredible for people to believe. Art
Caey you we're just telling you everything that's happening there, and hopefully we'll be
able to get that definitive evidence. One of our investigators callow it up in
the tree. He saw it throw a lock at him from up in the
tree, saw the arm swing. And we have reason to believe that they
do take to the trees, either to look to watch us or to go
out there and throw rocks at us. But since then, and what's interesting
about that is that week there was another person in there who wasn't a member
of the group, but who had a lot of experience around monkeys, specifically
monkeys and actually raise the monkeys. When our guy said, how are they
getting the rocks up there, he immediately said, oh, they're putting them
in their mouth. For him, it was clear that they would put stuff
in their mouth as a way to hold on to it as they were doing
that sort of thing. So who knows if that's what really happens, but
they remember. We had what we called the rain of Rock that ye before
that it was riding the thin town frame and we wondered how in the world,
Oh, so many rocks one light after the other. We ship a
constant barrage of rocks. It's incredible to let's see to it on the recording.
But I want the linteners to know that it's incredible to be there.
You were there. I was there for three mornings in a rollo act.
People the water don't should go after them, We're trying. You go out
fire and then you go around to the back and you hear all these big
animals move it off in the woods and you can't go aft. It's frustrating.
So then the next morning you just why they're in the bed, because
when you get up out of the bed, you run outside. I don't
care truck. I busted out that door more times and acts count. You
run outside and you can hear stuff moving off, and then you'll hear it
the tout. You'll hear one of them bust the cabin that's seven yards a
way that you can't get to. It's very frustrating. It's so difficult for
people to understand how thick these woods are and they come right up to the
structure that we stay in. Yeah, it is an excuse, it's also
true. Right, So if you're an agile forest animal and you know how
to move, we can't sneak out of that cabin because it makes all kinds
of sounds. It's creaking, it's old, it's wooden. There's no way
for us like tiptoe out of that thing without them knowing if they're paying attention.
And I think that's what I've experienced, and I've been in this situation
where activity is occurring. You want to keep experiencing it. So there's a
part of you that says, if I try to get up and run out
there, there's a half a percent chance and I'm going to see something,
but if I lay here, stuff will keep happening, So you choose to
lay there. Yeah, that's the only way that we ever actually see them.
It's when they make them and fake, when we'ren't able to capitalize on
their ability to try multiple people at the same time, or when they don't
know we're there, which is not very often, and they walk out infernally.
That's the only well doing all kinds of stuff around the cabin you try
to check back on just the run off fuck a game. I don't know,
it's crazy, but we'ren't lucky if we see them correct, and if
that's what it is, a big piece of this is luck. I remember
it's interesting you say that about if they make a mistake because I remember talking
to Rick Knowle several years ago. In fact, one of the first podcasts
I did was with Rick Nole, and he said to me either on that
podcaster at that time, that people see them when the apes make mistakes,
that's when you see them. And when I was talking to Alton earlier in
this episode, I know, unless the gray one is okay with being seen,
I don't know that they've ever purposely shown themselves. I can't think of
a time where that would have happened. So I agree with you. I
think that that when you see one, it's because they've someone miscalculated, involving
Martin m That's the one I was thinking too, right, I wondered about
that. I'm thinking about that a couple. I wonder if it was trying
to intimidate, and just by its sheer presence, maybe Dickon is so confident,
it's so bold that it's stepped out there and here I am. And
of course all we have is what we observe. When we spend so much
time, we try to connect these dots. But really the purpose of us
being out there right now, besides trying to collect a specimen if we can,
is to just make these observations. Kathy made the point earlier in the
episode two about how you just have to observe these things, write things down,
and in time you can start to draw connections. And that's what we
try to do, because we're humans, and we try to do that.
But it's very difficult, even at this stage, even after being in there
for three years and having all the experiences we've had, it's difficult to really
know what the motivations are of these animals and what's making them do the things
they do. Oh yeah, absolutely. Now, all we have for observations
we do have shoot physical evidence. We have collected physical evidence while we've been
in there for these observations. I've been more tract in there now than I
can camp. I've seen more than a cat. Even when I could take
a three or four or five instages were out seeing the track and never have
been more than that. The very first thing that brought a endeded area were
tracks at Alpin Higgins. Yeah, and that was over a decade ago.
These apes or whatever even and yet I referred them to age because that's what
I definitely believe they're age based on our experience and the behavioral that's played that
they did. That these apes have been there for them at least a decade
at least where were reason the resident there they found and determined to study and
upfront and there over the last few years. The things we've done and not
that played them are still there. As Golf Team indicates by the way,
I don't think I'm dead. We're talking them over one hundred and sixty block
throws during Golf Team it's amazing. The next four interist team with the team
from last year that had over sixty rock throws, incredible, didn't have any
visuals and we have some of the rocks that to your point earlier, we
sweep the roofs and Rick Hayes, I remember he posted a picture for us
to look at of many of the rocks that he had pulled off this roof.
Yeah. And what's interesting also about the rock Joees for Golf team is
that there seems to have been more infinances of our people being targeted. Yeah.
Or Canty Stray personally had at least a couple of rocks wins by her
body and I'm talking with an inchest wound to byre Jerry Estin. He had
to retreat because he actually went around you. He tried to get away to
the stopped for on rocks head because every time he moved another rock would be
thrown. It would bash the wall right beside him, mentioning by two feet.
He has to think about that for a second. That is a bit
of an escalation. I haven't ever felt like I was specifically a target,
and I don't know that a lot of us have felt that way, But
this is a change. Paul had that experience in the creek that landed very
close to him. Yeah, and when out one time one fear of rock
and nitting by a couple of feet in the big rock. But for Stewet
probably playing the thiever all the plame night, Jerry Henstein had a rock thrown
and his confident was going to him and hit the shed and speared him because
of the king out of nowhere. And then he walked over behind the cabin
and then here comes a rock out of it out of the woods in front
of him to gin it fashion the wall right the side of it. And
then he decides to fall out and he moved back, throwing on the other
side of the cabin. But then Chaffy becomes the target and she had tree
rocks with by her. Now these things are hitting. We can't see them
throw the lock said, so take that into account. They remain hidden.
They're throwing rock and they're almost hitting our people. I played baseball in life.
I don't know that I can do that at night in the bar from
twenty five to thirty to forty yards away, concealed and stay can killed without
people are throwing affee you and I have both done it. You get up
there where we believe they are, and you try to throw the down and
you try to hit where they hit, and most of the time you're hitting
trees. Most of the time they're deflecting. They got to be fair to
close. Why because if they're not, then the walks that they go,
we're gonna get leaves, you're gonna get branches, you're gonna get trees.
And each each rocks are coming through and they're they're bashing the wall. They
didn't they're wish they're landing at the feet of our people. Leave the bother
headed. During Foxtrot, a rock land right next to the firing that may
have been aimed at us. It was very close when it landed, and
it looked right over and pointed. I said, there's the rock that just
landed here. It's ten fifteen feet away from us. One of the interesting
things that happened to me, to all of us really on Foxtrot was the
tree thing. Now that happened again, can you speak to what happened the
week the team after Foxtrot they had another tree incident that was very similar to
ours. Yeah, we talked about that. Ryan, You and I had
a conversation about that because I wanted to pick your brain about it. Let
me take a step back out. But the listeners have heard so far was
an interview in a conversation we had about it. But what they have not
heard is that I did go up to find that tree. I did find
the tree. It was due north of where I had been standing, just
as it had sounded, but it was much higher up the slope. And
what I found was a tree that probably had been that one point fifty feet
tall in that neighborhood, and the trunk in this thing was probably fifteen inches
across, and it was a big tree. About halfway up. The tree
had been broken off, and the top half of this tree had died for
whatever reason. The bottom half was still alive. There were still some green
branches on it, but the top of it was dry and dead. It
fell away from the slope, and so it left me puzzled because it was
surrounded by ape activity. We had seen eyes. One of our team members
had seen eyes a head higher than the top of my truck. And then
afterward we'd had the rock land very close to us. We saw red eyeshine
up on the slope, so it was surrounded by what we perceived to be
ape activity. In my mind, it was an incredible coincidence that this dead
tree fell in the middle of all of this. We how did it push
a tree over halfway up twenty five feet up in the air the top of
it falled down. So I was left perplexed about that. What is interesting,
particularly in light of what we discussed five or ten minutes ago about our
cognitives, now that they take to the tree, that we've actually seen them
in the tree. So imagine, for a checking, a five hundred pound
animal that climbed a fifteen inch thick tree. It gets a certain point up
in the tree, at some point the tree just gets his way, it
breaks because of its weight. At the possibility, it is possibility, is
that it went up the tree and broke the tree on purpose at part of
an intimidation display. What I did is I want back, and I did
an analysis of after action reports for Operation Endurance, Operation per System, and
operational relytus up to your team Box Drive Team. What I found is that
we actually documented Team three crashing all around the cabin. Over the last twenty
eleven we've been going in there during the time that we did in the long
term program and leave eventsure all surrounded by under activity, rock throwing, vocalizations,
a lot of different things that we attribute to would a behavior trees,
you fall in the wood, absolutely, we'll see that all the time.
But also we know that apes manipulate vegetation or given clippet, team ape like
exhibit inclination displays. And I think there's a good bottom of what's you experience
with the form of bad and it didn't scare you right given Yeah, and
I had a similar experience in two thousand and six. I was in the
davy Crock in that before ship. My wife if at about one in the
morning, call blashing very loud love with veget In ten seconds, we heard
the crashing of a tree. We heard the tree footing, and then we
heard the tree crashed to the ground and it sounded like it was right on
top. So we never found that tree. But after that we heard banging
on metal. We don't know how they found metal in the davy Crocket National
Park, but they were banging on metal. There were ocalizations would knocked at
the time ill, but in hindsight now in that look back, now I'm
positive that's what it was. You all had been playing Sten, you'd been
doing well, Yeah, we've been called blasting this air sounds and one of
the snippets that are on that CD. And I'd been making some weird vocalizations
myself and trying to imitate and call in some bard owls because it's fun when
the bar dowls come in and start making their hooting and holler. And who
knows how they were interpreting that, if that's what they were doing. Golf
team, the one right after us was a golf right, they had a
similar thing where a tree broke, but it was half the tree. Again,
it wasn't the whole tree. And in this case their tree was healthy.
They actually thought it. They saw the top of the tree fall.
They could see the top over the trees a furmed. They could see the
top of this tree fall. I could see a break and then fall.
And they went to inspect it and found they was not rotted doing oaks.
Times that they could discern of black bear claw mark, nothing up in the
tree on honey or anything like the black bear with a pig ore. And
again this was right there near the cabin. But this was definitely with a
kareen tree that there was a nothing wall. With ditch tree, it was
a red oak. I think yours was a hatory tree. So yeah,
us with the hate crey and its own was a red oak. And I
think jures had two signs of degradation of the tree. And yeah, they
looked like termites have been in there. I mean it was old and dead
on toime. Uh yeah, so you know this is what you played in
your head, this back and forth, the ping pong of is it or
isn't it? And at the time it happened, I thought it was and
then I found and maybe it's not. But then you think about it,
and then this happens a week later, and it's the same mo Right,
it's a tree getting broken off towards the top, but in this case the
tree is totally healthy. So that's on. The speeches remained undocumented because everything
they do, even the way they look, can be attributed to something else.
Their footprints, Right, some guy's walking in the woods and you see
if she's barefoot footprints out in the woods middle of nowhere. They strangely,
what kind of freak would the out here walking around back? I don't know,
you've got a hunter in a hunting stant. She gets up, bite,
figured walk and coughs the cutaway one hundred yards away. He thinks it's
a hunter. What the heck is the hunter doing? Who weren't a big
long black col in early November or whatever? Fucking thinks it's achieven. They
fell a log. They make these weird sounds, but all of it can
be attributed to something else. We've got getting away with murder right here under
the very knowledges of using by it. And they're just masters at using the
environment of their advantage. It's just incredible how cognitive they are of the environment
and how to use it to their advantage. Your master's of camouflage and using
their environment to camouflage their movement to camouflage where they are. Stay tuned for
more sasquatch out to sea. We'll be right back after these messages to your
earlier point about how people may experience something and then they discounter or they expland
it off to something else. I talked to Bob Strain and this is after
Paul's exciting This is a week later. Our speculation was that if Paul had
been out in the woods by himself hunting, had not been looking for bigfoot.
He may have had that experience and done what you just said, what's
that guy doing on here? Like why is he wearing a brown coat or
whatever it was. He would have written it off in his head and he
would just would have kept doing He would have just kept doing his thing.
And the other funny thing is Alton has told the story of being out in
an area close to X, not right in X, but not too very
far away with some people for entirely different reason, for about ancillary biological kind
of survey of animals, and they heard a very loud tree knock, very
clear de super loud wood on wood sound, and some people in the group
just completely ignored it as if it didn't happen. And another guy said,
he looks up and says fireworks and then keeps going to it just goes to
the point that people My analogy is that there's little slots in your brain that
are certain shapes, and you get these pegs, and your brain just keeps
putting them through these holes, and sometimes it gets a peg that doesn't fit,
so it just shoves it through a hole and keeps going. And that's
what happened there. I think. I don't know cal they're able to.
I don't have an exclamation for how they can avoid field cameras. I just
know what I've experienced. And we had dugons of cameras. We want cameras
here where we are now in area acts out for five years, we didn't
get a single pictures. How they are lord those cameras. I have no
explanation, I have you no idea. I just know that there's something going
on with Gilm and cameras. Either they either because the cameras are so stead
with humans, which doesn't really make sense, because they approach other things that
are associated with human Their rods and cones in their eyes developed to such an
extent that they can actually detect the infra rent from the cameras. I don't
know. I just know that we don't have a picture, nor does anybody
else with a game camera, and we don't even use them anymore. We
don't even use them. And when I hear somebody saying I'm gonna take the
fruit and I'm gonna go put it up with a legend, I'm gonna put
a reconic cameras. Oh wait, we did one and fifty times it doesn't
hurt. Yeah, you're just taking minute and you're spinning coward frustrating. If
it don't work, I don't know why, but they just don't work.
And these things are their massive and there are eight. There are a very
unique type of epe. But they are apes. There's nothing that we've seen
that indicates in on your spears. They don't wear clothes. They make them
though. Rabbit bull want through lock and back to the cabin. For the
one hundred times I hear football, then I hear the cabin and that's eight.
It's pure eight. Then once they're doing they throw rockets. So the
playbook from chimps right, And to my experience, people who want to ascribe
something beyond the animal intelligence to them haven't really done the research to know what
even apes are capable of doing. Because gorillas and ranguetangs and chimps are are
capable of doing some really incredible things, but none of the things that we've
experienced are outside the scope of capability foreign a ranguetang and champer gorilla. Yeah,
no one had discovered orangutans yet. It's just for the cycle. Barget
stay with me here for a second, nobody discovered orangutan. It is an
undiscovered that people are reporting the seeding and get this, they're reporting that the
rangutans are stealing their boats. They're reporting that they're stealing their boats, and
not only stealing their boats, but they're stealing their fish from the cages and
they're eating the fish. And then they get in the boat, they go
across the river and they get out on the other side. Now people will
be saying, and you're not, that's crazy that it's ends than that.
It's not an ape, it's a forest person. It's got to be a
person. It's got to be a human doing that, because that's true.
Smart, But I'm news for you people. Orangutans have been documented, they
happened documents. And Orangutans have been known to pick locks. Yeah, it's
my favorite story. Be deceptive about it. They hide it in their mouth.
They're not just like storing it in there. They're trying to keep their
zoo keepers from knowing that it's there. Yeah, and chips are known to
collect rock and then hot the stack of rocks, all of them. You
just project. I get the humans who are laughing at the chimps. Water
in the moon, going to chumps the rocks, and they throw the proof
and they throw the locks, and they got to fix that. You help
continue to throw lot. We're seeing all of them. That strikes me.
The more I'm there, and the more that I read the field journals of
our people who are in there, the more I learn about large primate behavior,
the more parallels I see. And this also goes back. I'm not
trying. I don't know why I'm talking about Rick Noel on Night Long,
but but Rick Nola said the same thing if you he said that at one
point to me, if you want to know about bigfoot, learn about gorillas.
Absolutely, people, because there are some people who don't want to hear
that. Well again, I'm going to go here to golf after action.
But who's going to read you a couple of things here where they hurt some
bocalizations sit here I can find there. Here's the part about what I found
the tree that we were talking about. I just read this real quickly.
Larrnton hay Height find a healthy tree that the team have deserved breaking. At
midday on Tuesday, eleventh June, Lawrence and Hayes found the tree on the
second Mountain, wood identified it as they read the tree with indeed healthy and
green. There appeared to be no readily apparent reason for the break. The
team wondered if a large animoid climbed the tree and it being gave under the
animal's weight. While at the tree, the men heard a vocalization from the
northeast. They described it sound a similar to how a human might found just
as he or she were sneezing. Species would have evolved differently, would have
been evolved with a down sort of unique characteristics. Oh marking he purchased before
up all the two charcoal animal and before the rock bashed that cabin. We
all heard sounded like a barking sound, and Travis talks about it, and
this after actual half he heard he had a lock flown at him from up
in a tree. It came from up in a tree. And then we
pursued that with a strange, deep, loud barking sound from so he thought
of it was trying to diverge him away from the first tree to where's that
vocalization? Here we go, now these guys have been another rock thrown in
the camp Particlely Hayes and Lawrence unloaded. They threw about twenty yos r right
after together into the Middlewoods and onto the mountain. Usually another rock war golf
team had several rock wars with these things. During their their week now twenty
five, Who's on a Friday night train, Hayes and Lawrence heard a very
bizarre vocalization from what we call them Middlewoods. They described it as a deep
growling, almost pant hood type of vocalization. But according to Lawrence, who
ord at the best of the three, found it almost like a deep maniacal
pant hood. That's the way it described because it was really loud and go
through the woods. Lawrence continued to throw rock to the version. Hayes immediately
quickly ran around the middle Wood observed the Middlewood from the south, but he
wouldn't able to seem really strange stuff man again, very ape White, remarking,
when you and I were there a couple of years ago and we heard
the pant hoot, which sounded just like if you do a Google search for
pant hoot, you're going to hear what you and I heard. Has that
ever been a step of a show. I believe it has. I believe
I brought it up. But you and I and another member were in very
near where the cabins are that we operate out of, and and we heard
a pant hoot and we worked at the time figure itea yeah, yes,
oh yeah, And it was very loud. And what was interesting in what
we heard is at the end a bunch of coyotes that were yipping and yapping
at the end, and then the coyotes whining, so almost like something bad
happened to a coyote, You know what cool about that? I didn't realize
that, but later on I think you sent the chition my diad about let
drought. We heard that sounds very similar to what you and I heard shell
end of it if they clearing a patch through the woods, because there were
the free huge logs across the trail, and so we had to cut these
smaller trees so we could drive and get back to the cabin. I started
out a truck engine and pulled them fucked through the full narrow gap that we'd
check that we'd been sowing this tree for thirty minutes. And I looked at
you in the wearview mirror, and you're doing your paying the coffs your neck
like you were good bat it's deder cop kill it, kill it and killed
my engine. I got out and hour this most god awful sound. They
just kept all in hour to fume seconds and I think y'all wered it for
being twenty seconds night and it was. At first I was trying to figure
out if it was some kind of weird bird vocalization, and in my head,
I was like, is that a turkey? I didn't know what it
was. But this is what you do, right, You experience these things,
and this is your brain taking a new peg and trying to find a
hole that it fits into. Many it's just queer and chill bumps went down
my spine. It was a freaking cent and at the end of it,
the coyotes were getting involved. Towards the end, yepping any appen and then
when it stopped, the coyotes were crying, they were whining. And that's
so what my speculation is, because this is all speculation that we had just
heard this interaction between these forest animals, this coyote and perhaps an ape.
But we remarked at the time that it sounded almost like laughing, because that's
what it sounds like if you hear what a pan who sounds like it sounds
like a laugh. It's weird, crazy stuff. It's a remarkable place,
and it's that Ocum station. We're like a chimp on steroid. Really imagine
an eight football up that puts ended like what happens next down there? With
fill continue operation relentless. I'll be going in a little over a week taking
another team in there, Alf and Jiggins and not Travit. Lawrence will be
taking another next week and continue to observe it. And we're going to continue
to chimp to collect irreputable evidence Speaki in North America. We're on have like
a dollar with the bone and not going away. And I want people to
understand this different presentation about three weeks ago and one of the last questions bad
me. I wouldn't let us go once I got through at the presentation,
they wanted to ask questions for another forty comment. They wanted to find in
the questions, which how long do you think it will be? Or the
thing has proven to be. I don't know how long it will be,
but I will see you. This thing could have and at any time,
yeah, any day that three from the pic cerature. I want you to
understand that it could happen at any time. I'm not not a problem,
but the promise that it could happen at any time. What I'm saying is,
I you know, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I can
tell you that it very well could happen. Yeah. Everyone, not everyone,
but people who know me personally have been asking me for percentages like odds,
And I don't know that I can give you odds, but I agree
with you it could be happening right now. Is sure your odds? When
no drops are thrown, you just want to say to the every day there
is an ape at the other end of that rocks. They can't speed anymore
for reasons I've already talked about. They can't eat any more than thirty yards
awake when it's gonna Bilbow's blocks. They can't be So there's your odds now.
They've got darkness on their side, they've got fin foods on their side,
they've got this tremendous physical ability, they've got some very sharp cognitive field.
It got through decided the advantage. But we don't have to be tricked
about believe the world that the Moore have been pay it off for. But
they he'll get back in up favor a little bit. They are the good
that we're going to be able to solve it. Some people don't want to
hear that. No, some people do not want to hear that, And
I'm sorry for that. But I believe the progress of science. I don't
believe in Godma, I don't believe in in Modi. I don't believe in
that. I believe the progress of science. And the thing is, science
needs to know about it. The world needs to know about it. There
could be great benefits for humankind by discovering this animal. Great things we could
learn about our bills, about our history, about our path, about our
future, about our mention such it needs to happen. And uh, you
know fet people say, why are you not? Are you? You're coffee
about the advancement of fighting of the age. That's why needs to happen yet
today. And then all the things that I've talked about on the show before
about how we don't know what their populations are like all the other sort of
analogs of large apex predators, omnivorous animals, none of them are doing well.
Right. There's not one that you can point to that isn't being protected
and purposely trying to be brought back. All of the ones that are out
there have suffered dramatically in the past several hundred years, So there's no reason
to believe that what apes aren't in the same bucket. And we'll continue along
the same trajectory until such time as they're real and that they get official recognition.
The primitive big thicketgentimated to you, have been at one time one meridian
acres side the big Ticket National Preserve now is probably one hundred a acres.
It's high frightenment. It is all broken up right. It isn't one big
clumb. It's serenity encroached. It's surrounded by development, highways, by residential
development cities that are growing to the south thirty miles southeast. You've got Houston,
their millions and manads of people in Houston. Their habitat is dwindling,
and we've got to be able to do something to be able to stay that
habitat where we are now area are going to turn that into a national wildlife
refuge. So I think any of it in our organization will want to see
in that entire area out they're fragmented a human development. Now, don't get
me wrong, I'm all for a human Bogert and I'm expanded. We have
to be able to develop, we have to be able to expand. But
at the same time, I'm also for the preservation of our precious reach forces
in our environment, particular where you've got an animal like this seems to prefer
large wild bances, wilderning you go. If you go in, you start
fragmenting that, you start logging all of it, and you start developing it.
Then maybe a family group needs five hundred square miles and that got to
be protected somehow. That's why the sense of urgency. This is definitely a
period issue, and it's critical. I think. I think it's very critical
if we can we can do something to say that and to keep these plates,
the big thicket threnches are think further fragmented it could have been think well
this species. Then we need to do it, and we need to do
it quickly. Agreed, Daryl. I I really appreciate you you coming on.
I know that we've we've just scratched the surface of of of the things
that have happened in there, and we could we could keep going for two
more hours telling stir. But I do appreciate you, you coming on the
show and and and taking your time, and and filling in the background of
of UH this year's Operation Relentless. And that's it. They say, you
don't gotta go home, but you can't stay. I don't want to be
uppings step step child, this child, that child everything. Can you ride
back, right back? Joy for me, joy staying right, you come
it right away? Still step sisters shout, knocking down doubts, Still STASSSS used THESS