Hey everybody, this is Less Striving. Yes, yes I know aka Survivor
Man, and you're listening to Brian on Sasquatch Honist. Be there and welcome
back to Sasquatch Ods. Thank you so much for being with us for the
show. It is Friday. I hope you have great week. We have
an amazing guest lined up for you. But as always, I want to
start by fighting game. If you've had an account here and you'll let's be
on the show, shoot me an email. You can get me a Brian
at Paranormalworldproductions dot com. Get head over to the website, check it out,
become a member there and help support the show. I got to sit
down and talk to Matt Knapp from the Bigfoot Crossroads podcast, and Matt is
not just a podcast. He has been a researcher and been into bigfoot for
several decades and he's had some really cool experiences, including a couple of sightings
of these things. So we get into that and all things bigfoot. I
think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. If you don't already listen to
Bigfoot Crossroads, check out the link right here in the show notes and go
over and listen to Matt show. I think you'll really enjoy it. As
you're listening to this right now. I am actually in Ohio for the Ohio
Bigfoot Conference. I'm going to be out there hanging out with Cliff Barrickman and
signing books on Saturday. So if you're in the area and you want to
come by and see us, you don't need a ticket to get into the
vendor area, so you can come by and see me. Cliff, Doug
Kichek's going to be there, Matt Pruitt's going to be there, Darby Orcut's
going to be there. Doctor Jeff Meldram will be there as well as Adam
Davies. We have sold quite a few autographed copies of my new book,
Sasquatch Unleashed The Truth behind the Legend. You can get those by going to
Paranormalworldproductions dot Com checking out the store right there at the top of the page.
Cliff Berckman actually wrote the forward for my book. So Cliff is going
to be signing some of those books out there in Ohio with me. So
that's going to be a unique opportunity to get both of our signatures on the
book at the same time and meet us. Of course, I will be
bringing back some of those copies that Cliff's going to sign while I'm out there,
and we will be offering those on the website as well. But enough
of that. I know you guys are ready to get into it. Matt's
on the line, He's ready to go. All that's left for you to
do is sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Welcome our guest
to the show. It is Matt from Bigfoot Crossroads. Welcome to the show.
Man. Thanks Brian, thanks a lot for having me on. Man,
I am glad to have you. We have ran in the same circle
for years now. I was actually on the show with you over on Calling
All Beings, if I remember correctly, some months back. But this is
the first time you and I have officially got together. Let's talk about Sasquatch.
What got you interested in it? To begin with? Man Crazy,
I actually grew up in what I consider a haunted house. There was a
paranormal activity going on before I was ever born. Just being a product of
the eighties, the only resources I had growing up for finding information about some
of the things I was experiencing were books in the library and at the bookstore
and stuff. Back then, they would put a lot of those subjects together.
Bigfoot was one of those subjects that you would find in like the paranormal
section. I was introduced to Bigfoot that way. And I remember there was
what we call here in Oklahoma garage cell. Other people call them rumge cells
or yard cells. I found a little paperback book called Bigfoot and NeSSI and
half the book was about Bigfoot and the other was about the lock Mess Monster.
I picked that up a quarter, I think, and it actually had
some of the more famous stories of Bigfoot en counters like Albert Osman and stuff
like that. Eight Canyon was in there. I think all those stories just
like really captured my imagination. Fast forward to nineteen ninety eight. I get
a computer for the first time, and I'm doing an Internet search, and
on just one night, I type in Bigfoot and my mind was blown.
There was all this information. At least I thought it was a lot of
information at the time. Looking back, it was like maybe two or three
websites. I found out that people were actually actively going out and looking for
this thing. I couldn't believe that it's not just random occurrence, as people
go out researching looking for them, trying to track them down, and it
led me to, of course, the BFRO website, and at that time
you could actually apply to join the BFRO and go on outings with them.
So I did. I remember, I was actually at a friend's house staying
the night over there whenever I filled out the application. So the next day
I came home and I had a message on my answering machine that tells you
how old I am. It was from Matt Moneymaker of the BFRO, wanting
to talk to me about my application. My name's Matt. His last name
was Moneymaker. So whenever I heard it, I just thought, oh,
man, this is just like a scam. No, his last name is
really Moneymaker. So I just erased the message and blew it off. And
then a little while later, after doing a little bit more digging on the
internet, I realized, No, that's really his name, He's really the
head of the BFRO. So I got his email address, contacted him,
and I joined the BFRO. At that time, that amounted to a hillebeins.
It didn't go on on eighty outings. I didn't have access to any
of the private side message forums or anything like that. But I was a
member and about once a month or so. I think they still do this,
where they'll put like their upcoming outings on their homepage. Back then,
they had the option where you could click the button to try and join the
outing before it took place, if you were a researcher and lo and behold
they were coming to Oklahoma. So clicked the button, fuilled out the form,
Hey I want to go with you guys, I'm in Oklahoma. I'd
love to go. Got a message back. Eventually. It took several tries,
but basically they said that I didn't have anything to offer. They were
going to be using some high end camera equipment and stuff. During the application
process, they asked you to list what equipment you have and resources and stuff,
and I didn't have anything. I was just a kid in my early
twenties, so I had put that I had like a camcorder, like an
audio recorder, but that's like nothing. So I got turned down for the
outing. So at that point I started looking into other resources and I found
a group that was actually based out of Oklahoma and did things in this region
and ended up joining them. They were called the Monkey Chasers, which was
a great name in hindsight, but at the time I didn't care. And
yeah, went on my first outing with them, met up with everybody.
I think it was November of two thousand and one, was whenever I first
met everybody for the first time. Quite the origin story man. Everybody has
a BFRO story, I think in some shape form or fashion. Yeah,
they're like the Kevin Bacon of the Bigfoot world or something. Yeah, there's
six degrees of separation between the BFRO and everybody who's into Bigfoot and moneymaker.
I tell you, I hung out with him in the Smokies this past year
up in the Smoky Mountain Bigfoot Conference. He, Cliff and Renee were there
and I got to hang out with all of them. He's one of those
gregarious personalities. He is larger than life. He is what he is.
He rubs a lot of people the wrong way, for sure. But just
recently I had a guy on the show. I aired his story I think
last week. He had reported it to the BFRO in his area over in
Louisiana years ago. This happened back in twenty eighteen, I think, and
he had found a couple of other people that subsequently had sightings in that area
that had also reported it to the BFRO, they'd gotten no response. As
soon as I aired his episode, he went over. I guess he posted
the episode or something in their Facebook group. I think he said. Within
a matter of an hour or so, he gets an email or a phone
call from Matt Moneymaker apologizing for the fact that his stuff wasn't on there,
going to have an investigator follow up with him. Just the fact that he
took the time to do that. I had to give him props where props
are due. At least he's reaching out and having conversations with people. So
whatever you think about Moneymaker and the BFRO, I think they serve a purpose
for sure. And I know quite a few BFRO investigators that I've had on
the show. Laurie Wade comes to mind. Laurie's a great researcher. She
takes a lot of people out and has some really cool experiences and things on
her outings for the BFRO. But I think the problem is, and I
know the problem is they're understaff. There's not enough people, there's not enough
investigators to handle the influx of reports. So it is important. Hopefully this
was back you said late nineties when you were having this kind of experience.
Hopefully things have changed in twenty twenty four and maybe if people are into that
sort of thing, they can go over to the BFRO website, become an
investigator and help with some of the backlog and clearing some of the shit up
because people are seeing sasquatch and it's not getting put on the bfr A website
because there's just simply not enough people to go through it. I understand that
because we do interviews with people all the time. The backlog here is months
and months that we're scheduling out to do these interviews. It's an interesting dichotomy,
and it's interesting just in general to see the amount of reports. This
is one of the things I wrote about in my book Shameless book plug Sasquatch
Unleash. The truth behind the legend is out for everybody. If you want
to copy of that, you can pick up a copy. But that's one
of the things I talk about in the book is shows like yours, Matt,
shows like mine, other podcasts that feature bigfoot sasquatch encounters play a role
in the increase in my opinion of said encounters, and I think it's twofold.
I think it's almost like defining Bigfoot expedition, bigfoot sort of syndrome.
You bring it into people's houses and in their ears, and in their cars,
at work and wherever, and it brings it to them in a way
where it makes it more normal to talk about. So let me ask you,
at least my opinion is I think we have played a part these shows
played apart obviously the television shows have in the increased amount of citing reports versus
what you might have gotten back in the say, seventies, eighties, and
nineties. Have you seen that in your last twenty plus years of being in
the bigfoot community in the zeitgeist, have you seen that and do you think
that plays a part in it as far as podcast and television. Oh?
Absolutely. I'm one of those people that sometimes Moneymaker rubs the wrong way because
before I was a podcaster, I was a researcher. I was going out
in the field all the time. I was putting boots on the ground,
as they say, And so the researcher side of me still every now and
then has a little bit of conflict with some of the things that other researchers
say, or the conclusions they reach. It's just natural for human beings to
be that way. But Matt Moneymaker is arguably the most influential person in the
bigfoot world ever. He's probably introduced more people to the subject than anybody else
on the planet through the BFRO and through the television series Finding Bigfoot, which
I'm sure this happens to you as well. I get quite a few guests
on the show where their introduction to the subject was Finding Bigfoot. That show
made the online bigfoot community grow by tenfold easily. It spread the word of
bigfoot, and since that, you have a double edged sword, because you
do have just a huge influx of reports coming in nowadays. But obviously I
would say a lot, if not most of those reports are going to be
misidentifications. People just lying for whatever reason, or maybe they are a Bigfoot,
but for whatever reason, it's something that happened in nineteen eighty five and
they're just now reporting it because they watched Finding Bigfoot or they learned about the
BFRO. But you still do have that small percentage at least of ongoing sidings
that are happening. People are still submitting them to the BFRO, and they're
still getting posted on a regular basis. Without being directly involved with the BFRO,
I can't tell you exactly what their backlog is. I know at one
time it was like a couple of years, I think, but they are
consistently still putting out regular siding reports. I know, just not too long
ago. I did my one hundredth episode and I pulled a couple of reports
off the BFRO that happened in the past couple months. So in that I
said, they are doing tremendous amount of work or Bigfoot and just the education
to the general public, which I think is extremely important. Yeah, I
definitely agree, man, and I've said it so many times. I'm friends
with Cliff. Cliff wrote the forward to my new book, and Cliff was
obviously on finding Bigfoot. I enjoy Renee, I even like Matt, but
I say it's a double edged sword because it did so much to bring Bigfoot
into the homes of so many and make it more palatable to talk about.
But I think it did a real disservice in a lot of other ways in
some of the tactics they use, some of the things they did for television
that probably aren't the best research. I think it's great in many ways,
very much like these podcasts. That's one of the things we deal in.
It's all about encounter stories. Over here on Sasquatch Odyssey. People enjoy hearing
those. They're entertaining, but I don't know how much it pushes the ball
down the field for researchers. You can get a lot of information from these
sightings. I think it's a lot of data that has collected because I've done
that just my show. I'm four hundred plus episodes into this podcast, and
I can go back and listen to those first twenty twenty five thirty shows that
I did years ago and compare what's happening now versus then, and there's a
lot of similarities in the stories. I heard somebody talking about it. It
might have actually been you on another podcast, to be quite honest with you,
who is talking about some of the things that come up in the nomenclature
and how people will pick up on They'll hear something on your show, or
they'll hear something on my show, and they have an encounter of their own,
and somehow something they've heard somebody else say about their encounter, it gets
merged and maybe this one phrase and how somebody says something about their encounter gets
woven into the fabric of their own story, and then that gets passed on
and then somebody hears you know what I'm talking about, it's that oh yeah,
yeah, one hundred percent. But that's just that's the thing. That's
what I consider the folklore of the subject, and I try to keep that
separate from the research side of the subject as much as possible. I think
if you ask any researcher, they're going to tell you that at the heart,
eyewitness reports are the most important thing, but at the same time,
they're not anything you can depend on. And you know that better than anyone.
Being a former police officer, you end up having to look at the
evidence and let the evidence lead you. A lot of times with these stories
that come out on the podcast and even on the television shows, you do
notice if you spend enough time listening to witnesses tell their stories, you do
notice repeated phrases, repeated scenarios and situations. I've talked to a lot of
guests on my own show that we're guests on other podcasts or listen to bigfoot
podcasts and then had an encounter and now they want to share their encounter,
so the researcher side of me hardly ever comes out on the podcast. I
keep my opinions for the most part to myself and provide the platform for the
witness to share their story, regardless of what it is. And most of
the time I'm trying not to hear their story before we actually start recording.
I want to give them my full undivided attention. I don't want to lead
them with questioning, and I want to have an honest reaction to what they're
saying. That wasn't something that used to happen before Bigfoot podcast took off back
in the day. Whenever I first got involved in Bigfoot podcasting, this is
back in two thousand and fourish, I think all the shows were researchers.
There wasn't any platforms for witnesses to come on and just share their stories.
So you were hearing a lot of opinion and a lot of conjecture and theories
as to what the different factions of researchers thought, and every once in a
while you'd get a story from their perspective of whenever if we went out on
an outing and something happened and we came back and did a show about it.
But this whole just neutral platform of letting witnesses share their stories, just
like they're doing sighting reports. That wasn't a thing, and now that is
the thing. Bigfoot stories lead the charge in the world of bigfoot on the
internet at least, and like you said, and have found out that's what
people want to hear. They want to hear the stories. Damn it,
Matt, you stole my secret, sauce Man. I thought I was the
only one that didn't like to hear the stories. I say that all the
time on the show when I'm talking to people right before we do the interview.
I've actually had people get pissed off at me before not doing a pre
call or a pre interview before the interview to get their story. I want
to hear it, cold turkey. I want to hear it for the first
time when I have them on. Like you, I did a little research
on you and I wanted to listen to some of the things you had talked
about. Now, if I've had somebody on that does a lot of podcasts,
I will go and make sure that I don't try to cover the same
things that you've said a thousand times. But if it's just Joe Shmoe or
Jane whoever who's had a big Foot encounter, I don't want to hear it
before you tell me on the show for the first time, because, very
much like you, I want to give you undivided attention. I want to
be taking notes, which I do during every interview, and I want to
hear it for the first time when you're telling me, so I can react
to it the same way that the audience is going to But more importantly,
I don't come in with any preconceived notions. I don't come in thinking your
story is complete bullshit. Now a lot of times I get surprised because I
don't do these interviews before. Yeah yeah, you find yourself waiting and writing
out into the middle of the swamp before you know it exactly, And fortunately
most of them aren't live. I had the sex with the Sasquatch guy on
last year, who claimed to have sex with a female Sasquatch on a camping
trip. That was interesting. And then I had Tyler Bounds on a couple
of weeks ago, who worked on finding Bigfoot for about five years. I
had no idea who Tyler was and he starts telling these stories about going out
with Cliff and Matt and Renee and doing their thing in the field, and
how he feels like he probably hit a big foot in the car where he
was going out and doing camera work at two o'clock in the morning, and
just all these crazy stories. And I had no idea. He starts telling
the story, and it's completely a surprise. As it unraveled, he said,
I think the exact statement was, I don't know how much research you've
done on me, or how much vetting. And I thought, oh shit,
here it comes. He the other shoe is going to drop. What's
he going to say? And then he says, Hey, I just worked
on finding bigfoot for five years. But you get those hopefully pleasant surprises most
of the time. Let's talk a little bit about the research. We've been
all over the place, so let's get into the research. You get out
into the woods in two thousand and one. How long did it take you
when you got out into the woods to have your first experience with these things?
Oh? Man, I completely shot myself in the foot within a year.
I'll just leave that one hanging for a second. Within a year.
It sounds so bizarre whenever I say it was September of two thousand and two,
whenever I had a sighting, and that's not supposed to happen. And
as a researcher who caming like I had something to prove because I was at
the time, like I said, in my early twenties and considered very young
for the bigfoot world. All my peers were much older than I was.
Unless they're listening than they weren't that much older. So to go out there
and just man, have a sighting, whenever I'm following the stories of all
these legends who have been in the field for decades and found a couple tracks
and never had a sight in I'm just like, what's going on? Which
played hell on my mind for a while, not just the initial incident,
trying to wrap my head around act, Oh my god, I just saw
a freaking bigfoot. But what could it have been? Are these people messing
with me? Was I set up? And trying to unravel the situation?
Because I was in a parking lot in Oklahoma. Granted the parking lot was
in the middle of the National Force, but I was in a parking lot.
I was in a place where I'm not out in the middle of the
woods in the Pacific Northwest, so I came back. I actually filed a
report on the big Foot and Counter's website, which was ran by a woman
named Bobby Short. She's no longer with us, but she was amendous asset
to the bigfoot world. The group I was with at the time, the
Monkey Chasers, I don't even think we had a website yet. We didn't
have a sighting report database or anything like that. So the leader of the
group just told me to send it there, so I did. And then
it was like I was reluctant to share the story with other researchers because I
knew how witnesses got treated by researchers. From my own perspective, I don't
expect anybody to believe anything I was saying, or still to this day,
I don't expect anybody to believe me, because as a researcher, that was
the train of thought. You don't just believe a story, you believe the
evidence, you do the investigation. You got to see it with your own
two eyes, and that's how I was. The problem was I was seeing
it with my own two eyes. Actually, it wasn't even a real research
outing. It was more of a social gathering. It was a barbecue,
like a camp out, weekend barbecue. We chose this location. It was
down in sulf For Oklahoma Chickasaw National Recreation Area. It's got a history of
Bigfoot reports sidings from tourists every year. We knew some locals that lived down
there that were involved in bigfoot, which, as a researcher, another red
flag. Yeah, we went down there. They took us to some of
the better known hot spots in the area, and this was just one of
them that we happened to be at. The parking lot was a U shape
where you could drive in on this forest road and go into the parking lot.
It was actually the parking lot of a nature center where you could pick
up pamphlets and stuff, and they had a few of the local wildlife on
display. There was quite a few of us, probably about ten people there.
Everybody was spread out. There's this guy named Robert, who is the
leader of the group, who's standing off to the side of me by the
tree line, and he's got a Gen three night vision scope, a monocular
scope that he's looking through. It was actually a hunting rifle scope that had
been fashioned for bigfoot research because you had to kit bash everything back then.
He just called me over and he was like, hey, take a look
at this and see if you can see what I'm seeing. So I look
through the night vision scope and I can see his finger pointing in this general
area, and I see these two eyes eye shine very bright, maybe about
thirty yards away at an angle from me, but just inside the tree line,
not too far. So I'm letting my eyes focus on it and everything
to try and see what it is it's got. Forard facing eyes, I
can tell that seems to be looking right at us. That's when I noticed
that those eyes were part of a face. I say face because that's what
it was. It was a face. It wasn't a head, it was
a face. This thing was hiding behind the tree branches, so the top
of its head was cut off by a branch in the bottom of its like
right below its mouth. I couldn't see the chin, and I can see
the top of the head, but I could see everything in between completely clearly.
The scope that I was looking through had a small about magnification to it.
I'm not sure how much, but it wouldn't have been very much,
so I could see this thing pretty clearly. I looked at it for probably
a good thirty seconds. The eyes were almond shape, set very deeply into
the face. The brow ridge was very heavy, not what I had seen
depicted as a browridge, if that makes any sense. The center part of
the brow ridge between the eyes was actually the thickest, most protruding part.
Then it tapered around on the sides of the head. The forehead completely covered
in hair, but shorter hair, and it was growing backwards up over the
head, and it had this afroish, old, long chainy wolf man appearance
to it. That was the first thing that popped in my head as a
comparison to what this thing looked like. The nose was very similar to ours.
The bridge of it, it looked scooped. It was much thinner than
I would expect, because keep in mind everything I've seen bigfoot wise, you
had Patty Harry and the Henderson's, the older movies, Legend of Boggy Creek,
things like that. Then you had a few artists nothing like it is
today, that had done depictions and tried to do like eyewitness sketches and everything.
And this didn't look like any of those. The cheek bones were set
really high and very prominent. The jaw was wide and muscular. The flare
of the jawline actually was wider than like the temple area next to the eyes.
The lips sat right underneath the nose, which The nose was wide flat,
like you hear people describing it, didn't have a nose tip on it
like we do. The nostrils were slightly upturned, but not so much as
like a gorilla or anything like that, but almost like in between a human
and a gorilla, that sort of angle. The top lip was a little
bit thinner than the bottom lip. The hair on the face was the same
pattern as a male human has if you just let your facial hair grow out.
The most distinct thing about it was the jaw itself. It looked like
it had an underbite. The bottom lip was sitting out farther than the top
lip. This thing was just staring at me. I couldn't see any ears.
I couldn't tell you what color of the hair was because it was just
green. I was looking through night vision. I took the night vision scope
down and I'm looking at Robert, and I was like, is that a
face? And I put the night vision scope back up to look at it
some more. I don't remember what his response was because I was just completely
hyper focused on this situation. The thing was just gone. There was no
noise of it leaving nothing, There was no movement. It was just gone.
I could see clearly the exact space where it had been, and now
that bottom limb was a little bit closer to that top limp. So I
think, I don't know, it's just a guess, but I think it
was like holding that bottom limb down and kieking the between the limbs at us,
and then whenever I looked away, just for that brief second, that
gave it an opportunity to haul ass. And that's what it did. How
it moved without making any noise. How these things move without making any noise,
I have no idea that's what happened. That's one of the things that
kills me about people's encounters with these things is the fact that they are so
huge in most cases, and yet you hear that over and over again.
It just moved off. I heard nothing, There was no movement. Versus
some of the experiences that I've had people come on and share, including my
own when I was a kid, I think I was bluff charged by one
of these things. That's all I heard was loud crashing and huffing and grunting,
just all of the things. Right. So it's weird that people have
similar experiences, but they can be very different in that these things can disappear,
it seems, at will. We're not getting into the wu here.
Folks by disappear, go into blend into the surroundings and disappear, just like
a trained Armed Force RUS operator can go out and disappear. You can be
standing right next to these people that are trained in camouflage and those tactics and
they could be standing two feet from me and you'd never know they were there
unless they wanted you to know. So obviously that's quite a way to start
off a year or so into your field research having this fighting like that.
How did you top that? Man? What was the next experience that you
had? With these thoughts? Stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see.
We'll be right back after these messages. Do I even want to say it?
The next experience, oh boy, happened about thirty minutes later and about
fifty yards from where that one was there was a trail right by the road
at the entrance to the parking lot. This one is definitely a holatif,
but I'll go ahead and tell the story. There's again a group of us.
There's myself and maybe two other individuals that are up by this trailhead.
We had smelled a skunky type smell. Being from Oklahoma, that meant nothing
to me. I grew up smelling skunks all the time, but it's of
note due to the situation. So on this trail, we're all standing there.
Then they wandered off, and something's catching my attention on this trail,
and I'm looking down the trail but about I don't know how far, and
probably fifty feet or so. It was just blacked out. Now it's nighttime
and there's a really bright moon out and I can see like the light coming
through the limbs of the trees and everything, but I can't see as far
down this trail as I should be able to. And that's what I was
staring at, because it looked like something was standing there on the trail.
But whatever it was, it would have to be massive. Absolutely, It's
like taking up the entire space of the trail and I'm staring and staring,
and it looks, like I said, it looks like big giant foot very
slowly raises up and slowly withdraws into the shadow. I can just barely make
it out as the moonlight is going through and hitting the ground, and it's
like the light's getting caught on the foot as it moves, and I'm like,
what is that again? Appears to be the silhouette of large shoulders and
a head pull back into the shadow just a little bit, and it's moving
so slow, and I'm thinking my eyes have got to be playing tricks on
me. I'm just shook up because of what I just saw. You can
hear a car coming from towards the entrance to the area, and it's coming
down this road, and this road eventually curves and comes around to where the
entrance to the parking lot is. So I'm waiting for that car because I
know that car's headlights is going to just light this trail up as it comes
around that bend. So I'm waiting the car's coming. I can see the
headlights sweeping through the trees. It's just about to get to where the angle
will hit the trail and all of a sudden, there's this huge crash,
brush breaking, and I'm still looking down the trail, but now as the
lights go down the trail, I can clearly see down the trail, just
as far as the trail goes until it curves off into the woods and you
can't see it anymore. I don't hear anything else. It sounded like something
running off into the woods and then just stopping after a short ways. But
now, like I said, I can clearly see down the trail. So
was that a Bigfoot? I don't know. I think it might have been.
I ended up spending the majority of my research years in this park,
in that section of woods. That's where all my research was done, so
I came to learn things about it. This park is a special place.
Everybody knows about it. Now if you're in bigfoot research, you've probably heard
of this park. You may have been there. It's a location where you
have, like I said, TODs every year, so you have a lot
of people and it's just on the outskirts of a town. But it's almost
like the bigfoot over the years got used to being around people, so they're
not as skittish or they don't really care about being hidden as much they raid
trash cans and stuff there. What seemed like absolutely crazy. I'm going nuts,
something's going on here. Seven years later, I'm like, yeah,
that's pretty normal for this park, So it's not that big of a deal.
But I had a friend with me at the time, and we went
back to that location later on that night. I had him walk down that
trail where I saw this silhouette and I was looking at him through the night
vision and I'm like guiding him because the part where I saw what it looked
like pulling its head back into the darkness, there was a branch of a
tree limb hanging across the trail right there, and its head was just underneath
that limb. So I had my friend go and stand underneath that limb.
And he's a short guy. He's five foot four, he'll like to say
five foot six, but whenever he was staying in that spot, that tree
limb was at least two of him. So this thing would have had to
have been around nine feet tall and probably about three to four feet wide at
the shoulders, which you hear stories about them being that size, but I
don't think people really realize how big that is. That's absolutely massive. So
I don't know if it's what I saw. I'm pretty sure it's what I
saw. I guess it'll just be one of those things that'll just plague me
for the rest of my life. But yeah, that was the second incident,
and it happened the same night, just shortly after the first one.
Wow. So let me ask you, this man that's starting off with a
bang. Like I said, how do you think your sightings that early into
research affected the rest of the research that you did, Because, as you
said, there's people who have researched these things for six decades. Peter Burne
comes to mind. Peter was on the show last year before he passed away.
I think I was probably the last person to interview Peter, and we
talked about that. He was out there for six decades and I don't even
think he found his own footprint ever, and he certainly never saw one of
these things. It never even really came close to it. But how do
you think you seeing one that early into your research affected the way that you
researched the subject and went about your business moving forward from that point on?
Obviously, that was one of the first conundrums, one of the first pieces
of the puzzle is Okay, how did this happen to me? Why did
it happen? How is it possible that I could just go out here and
see what that's crazy? That doesn't happen. Ultimately, the conclusion that I
reached, which like I said, I spent the majority of my research years
in that park after those sightings. That's why, like I said, I
was in an area where I felt they were used to people. So you
get away with a lot more. You get more activity going around you than
say, if you go out to a place where you might go to a
public hunting area or something like that, deep in the wilderness where they never
come across people. The other factor was in Oklahoma, the woods are not
that big. We have a lot more forest here than people realize. But
the haystack I always use this analogy, my needle in a haystack. The
haystacks here are much smaller than other places. I think that's an extremely large
benefit. I think if you're out in an expanse of forests that's tens of
thousands of acres like you have in the Pacific Northwest, with these rugged mountains
and impossible train your odds of running into a bigfoot. Come on, you're
wasting your sign in my opinion, in Oklahoma. And it's not just Oklahoma,
in a lot of southern states as a matter of fact, you have
a lot of rural communities. You've got a lot of people that live out
in the woods in these spaces where these things occupy and they get more use
to humans. We have a large Native American community here. A lot of
those Native American communities around the state are well aware of these things and encounter
them on an almost daily basis. Sometimes that's the situation that I immersed myself
in. I was also approaching it from a strange perspective of I'm now a
knower. I am working with the answer backwards. Now I don't have to
try to figure out are these things really out there? I know they're out
there, So now I can look at things and be like, Okay,
this might actually be from a bigfoot because I know they're there. Now.
That didn't mean I was no longer skeptical. I would say I was more
skeptical at that point, especially of my own findings of the evidence that I
had scrutinize myself more than anybody but I had that ace up my sleeve of
knowing that they're out there, which ultimately to the conclusion that everything you find
that might be bigfoot related is either going to be ultimately either made by a
bigfoot or made by a human. But a lot of the time, the
odds the possibility is of it being due to a human, whether it be
a track or a structure or a vocalization or whatever, the odds are actually
better that it's a bigfoot, which is a weird thing to say, but
it's the truth that you find yourself in a lot of strange scenarios where you're
just like, yeah, the only thing this could be if it's not a
bigquot as a person, and what are the odds of a person being responsible
for this? It just doesn't add up. But at the end of the
day, you have that conundrum of if you don't see a bigfoot do it,
then you don't know a bigfoot did it. But at some point you
have to just say, okay, even with that, just for the sake
of research, let's say it is a bigfoot and let that lead you to
your next step and see where it takes you. Yeah, it's weird to
say but I got to that same point when I was up Radium this past
year in October. It's so far out there, it's so remote, eighteen
miles deep into the woods. Okham's razor becomes different there because Ockham's razor really
points you in the direction that most of the things that we were finding and
I was seeing were probably bigfoot related. It was made by a bigfoot.
Those tracks, the footprints, the tree breaks, the weird structures, the
things that again, it's one or two things. Either a person made it.
Todd Standing made it, or he had somebody make it, or it
was a bigfoot. There's just really no two ways about it. So I
really had to do some work in my brain, and I've talked a little
bit about that on the show before. I had to get to the point
where I was opening myself up to maybe having some sort of experience that wasn't
faked, that wasn't me being hoaxed, because I was really going into that
situation thinking that was probably going to happen. But when it didn't, I
really walked away from that going, you know what. Those experiences that I
had, those vocalizations I heard, the things that I saw were probably more
likely than not related to Bigfoot. Can't say it for cirt, can't say
it definitively because I didn't see it, like you said, didn't see a
bigfoot do it. So I can't say that definitively. But I walked away
feeling that's what I had experienced. Let me ask you this, This is
something that happens to me. I mentioned I joked about the WU a little
bit earlier, but I'm always curious for somebody who's been doing this. As
long as you have wearing the two hats, I have to wear those hats.
And it's a delicate balance because, like you said, you have your
research, your hat that you're looking into this, you're finding your own answers,
you're doing your thing, you have your opinions about things. But you
also have the podcast or hat where you're interviewing people and giving them a place
in a platform to share their stories. How do you handle and balance the
WU, the high strangeness, weird shit that people experience sometimes in relation to
Bigfoot, sometimes not. How do you balance that as a researcher number one,
looking at into the subject and knowing that they're real, and then how
do you balance that as a podcaster when you hear those strange tales from people
that claim to have these outlandish, high strangeness situations with bigfoot. Oh man,
that's a great question. As a researcher, I haven't been a researcher
in years. Eventually I reached the point where I've had a sighting. I
know these things are out there. This is costing a lot of money,
it takes a lot of time. I don't think people quite understand how much
researchers actually put into it if you're anything beyond the hobbyist. And I was
definitely beyond the point of a hobbyist. But there was nothing more I could
accomplish, especially on my own. I didn't have the financial means and I
didn't have the time, and so I hung it up. I had some
health issues going on. I just reached the end of that journey, I
felt. But at the time, whenever I was an active researcher and I
heard somebody have some sort of paranormal or supernatural story or something like that,
I didn't even entertain it. I didn't even give it a second thought,
Like, this person's full of shit. They're lying. They didn't experience what
they thought they experienced. This thing's an ape, some sort of primate.
And that's just how I felt. Flesh and blood all the way. Everything
I experienced in regards to Bigfoot, things that I attribute to Bigfoot were definitely
the results of a flesh and blood creature. I never experienced anything paranormal.
Again, referring back to how I got started in this whole thing. I
grew up in a haunted house. Man. I was experiencing paranormal shit that
I can't understand to this day whenever I was like five years old. So
I felt for some reason that Okay, I'm out here. If there's anything
paranormal to this, I'm going to notice it. I'm going to pick up
on it. It's going to happen to me. That's just the way it
is. And nothing ever did. With that being said, and I will
not throw anybody under the bus. I haven't ever revealed any but if you
spend enough time in this community, it just happens. Researchers who are extremely
in the flesh and blood camp and never stray from that. Around a campfire
when everybody's talking getting loose lips, you hear these stories every now and then
there was this one time that this happened. I don't know, I don't
know what it was, but it never happened again. I've had people that
I trusted very much say there was this one time where this voice popped in
my head that said get out of here, and I listened to it and
I did. I had one guy talk about seeing a video supposedly some sort
of I think it was a night vision video of a UFO or something like
these things coming out of orbs and things like this, and these are people
that are just like flesh and Blood researchers. That's before I'm ever a podcaster.
Then whenever I started podcasting again, the show was Flesh and Bloo.
Never strayed from it. Still hear these stories. Well over the years,
I decided, you keep hearing the stories, and even though I consider them
a very small minimal amount, they're still out there. Usually whenever somebody comes
to forward on the Internet or on a message board or whatever, they just
get attacked and it gets shut down. I've experienced things that I can't explain.
I know that there's things out there that our science doesn't understand. Yet
we may never understand it. It may be beyond our abilities to understand.
So I wanted to provide a platform for people to share their stories, regardless
of their beliefs, regardless of what kind of experience it was. So that's
what I started doing. I don't know if it burnt bridges in the process.
I think it has. I think there's a few people that I used
to be associated with that probably have said some things behind closed doors about me
for going that route. But I wanted to give everybody a fair shake because
I felt like over the years I had never given it up fair chance.
I wasn't giving an open mind, and that little kid in me scared to
death because the footsteps were coming down the hallway every night and there's nobody attached
to them. It wasn't fair to him. A lot of things we can't
explain that happened. So that's why I did. I started letting these people
on, and a lot of times, honestly, somebody will come on and
they'll share their story and they'll have some paranormal factor to it. Still to
this damn, I don't know. I wasn't there because with the paranormal stuff,
the only thing that you have to support it is being able to have
other people witness it with you. A lot of times they don't have that,
so there's really no way for them improve it. And a lot of
times get from the context clues that this person is probably telling this story for
other reasons, whatever it might be. But then every now and then that
you run across someone who is still shaken by it, you can hear in
the tone of their voice, you can hear their eyes welling up with tears,
you can that lump gets in their throat, and you can tell this
person's telling the truth. So I don't know what to make of it.
I don't know. Is Bigfoot responsible for these events? I don't know,
But I don't believe that door should be closed on anybody. I definitely agree.
Man, tell us about the show. Where can people find it?
What can they expect when they tune into Bigfoot Crossroads. Yeah, the show
available on every major podcast platform, So wherever you listen to Sasquatch ODYSSEYE you
can find Bigfoot Crossroads. More than likely it's on YouTube. Then the simplest
thing is Bigfoot Crossroads dot Com. You can find all the past episodes there.
I like say, everything you need all in one place. I am
primarily a witness based show. I have guests come on and share their stories.
Over the past year or so, I've opened it up even more.
I like to hear encounters about anything man, anything unexplained, not just Bigfoot.
It can be dog man, UFOs, ghosts, anything, chewpcabra.
If you've seen it cheep Ofcabra, send me an email. I'd love to
hear about it. Also, I don't always have the person come on the
air. There's still that inner researcher in me that just likes to hear the
stories myself. So if people aren't comfortable with going on the air, they
can still email me and share their story if they want. You're probably just
going to hear witnesses talk about their story. Like I said, I don't
like to listen to the stories beforehand if I can avoid it, or maybe
just get a few notes. Whenever I call a guest and start recording,
that's usually the first time that I've talked to them, first time I've heard
their story, so I let that dictate how the show goes. I just
let the conversation lead itself. Sometimes we end up going in a completely different
direction than I ever expected. Sometimes they mention something that kind of gets my
attention. We go down that path for a little while. I try to
keep it different, I try to keep it fresh, and I try to
put the spotlight on the guest itself and not myself as much as possible.
It is an excellent show. Folks, go check out Bigfoot Crossroads. I
will link to it in the show notes. Go show Matt some love,
subscribe, download the show. Will not be disappointed. Matt, thanks so
much for coming on the show. Man. I've had an absolute blast talking
to you. Yeah, man, thanks for having me. Gonna have to
get you to come over to my house sometime and share some of your stories.
They say you don't gotta go home, but you can't stay. I
don't want to be world out it. Joy this job, that chart everything,
Joy for me. Joy stay right you come in right away. Side
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