Big Food and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. These guys are your favorites,
so like Shay, subscribe and rade it five stock and me question today listening
watching lim always keep its watching And now you're hosts Cliff Barrickman and James Boobo
Fay, Hey Bobo, what's up? Cliff? Just getting ready to do
a podcast here? But lots and lots of stuff going on, in fact,
so much stuff that for me, I usually fill you in like what's
been going on this past week? But I got to do that in the
members episode. It's going to take too much time. So oh damn,
because he's yeah, great stuff going on all the time, all kinds of
stuff and it fits into this segment. So it's bigger than that. That's
a lot. Yeah, yeah, So anyway, I I'm going to tell
you all about that stuff in the members episode, but because it's just too
much stuff and we have a full episode this time anyway, So what about
you? Man? What's going on? Just getting rid of Uh? They
opened the gates up to Bluff yesterday, so I think I'll be heading up
there tomorrow or the day after. Nice. Nice, you know, go
up with those guys who keep finding prints on go road. Yeah, I
might go up actually with Polly. Uh, we're gonna try to get up
there and cut wood for a day, get some madrones split up, so
start drying and uh yeah there was another day after that, so we'll see
him down there hopefully. Excellent, excellent. Any chance of you going down
into the valley or is just just going to go see on the sides?
Oh, you know the film PAULI has never been to the film site.
Someone take it to the film site? Fantastic? Are you going to go
by Laus Camp? Oh? Yeah, yeah, for sure, so we'll
probably camp in there, I imagine. Oh that's great, So you gotta
spend a span. I'm really really interested on what it's like there. Hey,
man, would you mind taking some pictures and stuff and sharing anybody get
a chance, Just shoot me a couple of pictures, you know, Lared
Meadow for example. I think that's gone at this point. Yeah, but
I'm interested where the fire started and stopped. And like I said, I'm
hoping to go out there maybe later that's like late summer, early fall and
check it out for myself. But I'd like to know what I'm getting into.
Yeah, yeah, for sure, I'm definitely gonna take a lot of
pictures. All right. Well, you know again, I have so much
to tell you, Bobs, I got to save it for the members stuff,
and I don't mean to be a tease everybody who's listening who's not a
member. Sorry about that, but you know, you could be a member
if you wanted to be a member. It's five bucks a month. You
get an extra hour every single week of Cliff and Bobo, and Matt pipes
in a lot more than he does in the regular episode. So that's a
pleasure there. And also probably the biggest pleasure of being a member is that
you get this episode right now that you're listening to. The regular episode was
zero commercials, zero commercials, so you don't have to worry about all,
you know, whatever kind of crazy stuff your local advertisers are trying to sell
to you. It's just zero commercials, pure pure Globo and Matt and nothing
else, just all all the love we have to give. So maybe you
should become a member. It's good for you, it's good for the soul
Raiser IQ by fourteen point at least at least all right, Well, with
having said all that, I think it's time that we get into our guests.
And we've got a good one today. Okay, we let's go ahead
and bring our guests on. And today our guest is bigfoot researcher Michael Cook
from Central Kentucky. I met this guy, and well, I met him
throughout the years, I guess, but he's been one of these familiar faces
to me at the conferences and stuff. But I got to hang out with
them a bit more at the Forest County, Pennsylvania Bigfoot Festival a few weeks
ago. And he's a rad guy. And I mentioned it to Bobo and
Matt and bobas we got to get that guy on. He's got a great
story, and I go, shoot, I don't even know that I hung
out with him for a whole weekend. I don't even know he had a
great story. So I thought this was a great opportunity. It's not just
a story. He recorded most of it. But he'll get into that.
But it's actually on video too, because I've seen it on a TV show.
Oh yeah, yeah, he's been on a couple he's been a travel
channel. I think these woods are haunted or something like that. Yeah.
Well, anyway, let's stop blabbing together and get Michel Michael on. Michael,
you can come blab with us. Thanks so much for coming on.
Well what's going on, guys? R just doing a podcast? What about
you just hanging around? Yeah, well thanks for setting some time asight and
coming on the show with us. We appreciate it. There's Michael. I
can't even tell you, man, when I mentioned your name, Bobo flipped
out like, I mean, we weren't in the same state even, but
I could tell that he like stood up out of his chair and then like
banged his fists on the table metaphorically and said that we had to have this
guy on. So I don't know what you've done or what's in your in
your background, man, but you got Bobo fired up. Well, I
mean, you know, Bobo done miss solid several years ago at the Ohio
Bigfoot Conference. Uh huge, probably the I mean even bigger than us Bigfoot
enthusiast. My little friend Jovie her birthday and Bob send her center a personalized
video wishner happy birthday, and it made that little girl's whole life, I
guess because she still talks about it to this day. But yeah, no,
I'm with everything going on research and stuff like that, and these these
festivals and speaking events. It's just a vicious circle anymore. Well, if
you want viciousness, you came to the right podcast. So thank you very
much again for coming on. And So I guess I mean, I don't.
I mean I hung out with you and stuff, but I don't know
that much about you, and I'm certain that some of our listeners probably don't
either. What can you tell us about yourself and your Bigfoot journey? Oh,
it started twenty two years ago this October, and I had a wild,
random encounter. I always tell people, especially during my presentations at these
events, So tell people, you know, twenty two years ago and so
many minutes before, I didn't believe in Bigfoot. Bigfoot did not exist to
me. And then it literally fell out of myth and into reality on me.
I was fishing on a river bank in eastern Kentucky and this whatever it
was at the time, took a wrong step, trip, slipped, it
done something off this ridge, and rode end over end until it hit the
river in front of me, about fifty feet or so away. At first
I thought it was a bear, obviously, you know, because let's go
back then let's just transport ourselves back to that moment. Bigfoot didn't exist.
There's no such thing. It's make believe. So I said, oh,
there's that's a bear. And when it stood up, I really knew it
wasn't a bear, but I was still trying to rationalize things. And it
pulled itself upon the bank across from me and shook itself off and started to
turn and walk away, and then it looked over its shoulder squared up with
me, and we stood there for a moment of eye to eye contact.
And one of the most distinctive things wasn't the size. It was around eight
foot tall, maybe four hundred pounds, kind of straggly for you know,
what people perceive a big foot would be. But it's hands, very human
like hands, gestures that facial expressions on almost acted like it was embarrassed that
it that it had actually fallen into the river in front of a human.
So I was ready to run. I still couldn't run. I was trying
to find fight or flight, and it bought its fist up and let out
these just guttural screams toward me, and that's when I figured out how to
run, and I ran to my car, got in, had full intentions
of telling my parents when I got home. When I got home, I
couldn't tell them because I thought they would tell me that I was crazy or
I was lying seeing things and all this stuff. Were you in high school?
I was? I was. I skipped school that day. That's what
you get. That's what I get. Don't try to encourage because to skip
school, Cliff, it's it's karma. Man, You played hooky stuff like
this? In fact, didn't this happen to the Little Rascals one time?
When they did? They played hooky and then did school. I think they
went camping, and then a gorilla, the bite pedle gorilla started chasing them
around. Isn't I wrong? On that? Sounds right? Sure, I'm
right. I thought they were playing hooky that day. But I could be
wrong about that, but I do. Yeah, anyway, I'll try to
find that, verify that anyway. I'm sorry, Michael, like that.
When Little Rascal was popping my head, I get distracted. I promised you,
well, if you start calling me spanky at these events and stuff we're
gonna I'll probably let you call me spanky. Why not? That's a badge
of honor man. That's a badge of honor. So we get about a
year later. I don't know how long later. This happened in October of
two thousand and two, but about a year later, my dad and I
were watching Unsolved Mysteries, and you know how they normally the normal show was
about missing persons, unsolved murders, stuff like that. Every now and then
they would have something like the Travis Walton case with the abduction. That particular
night, they were talking about Bigfoot and how it is an unsolved mystery,
and I look up. They were showing the Patterson gain Win film. I
look up and Patty turns and looks over his shoulder, and my dad said,
I just dropped all the color out of my face. And he immediately
got worried. He said, someone's wrong. And I said, Dad,
I don't know how to tell you this, but I saw one of these
things. And he said when where you know? And I told him the
story. The whole time I was talking, though, I realized my dad
was like looking at me intently and not laughing, not brushing me off or
telling me I'm lying. And I said, Dad, what do you know?
And he said, well, Son, they're out there, and he
goes into these accounts that he had heard over the years of wild men of
the forest, feral people, so forth and so on, and it made
me realize that I wasn't the only one. So I began my research journey
then and tried to dive on into it. And now it's twenty two years
later, I'm still out there in the woods doing my thing. That makes
you part of the older generation? Now, man, how do you feel
about that? I do feel like an old man sometimes, especially at these
do you feel that way? I mean, you do these conferences and these
events too, and you have these kids come up to you and you just
look at them, like, go go to the playground, go go somewhere.
Yeah. You know, I hear quote unquote experts that have been doing
her for you know, five years. I know, I'm thirty years in.
I don't know anything, man, I'm no experts. That's a weekend,
Yeah, one sighting the next day, they know at all. I
wanted to bring us back to before we lose sight of the sighting that you
just shared with us. Of course, so it fumbled and rolled down the
hill. Is that we're into the creek? Is that we're how far away
was it from you? It landed about fifty feet from me, just up
the river. I mean it was straight in front of me. So I'm
standing at the river bank and it was, you know, to my left.
But for probably twenty or thirty minutes before this happened, I kept on
hearing something shuffle around the ridge across from me, which was across the river,
and I thought it was squirrels, maybe a deer. You know,
we had just released elk in this area, back in this area from years
of them not being here, and I thought, well, maybe it's an
elk. And the ridge I've been there several times over the years. You
can imagine it's very very hard to transverse. It's very hard to stand on.
So I'm thinking this thing probably lost its footing. I mean, I
don't mean to bring the woo or anything like that into it, but that's
where I have a problem with some of this, where people are like,
oh, these are supernatural beings. They can do this, they can do
that, they can stop the space time continuum and step into a different universe.
Okay, that's once slipped off a ridge and landed in a river in
front of me. And if I possess those abilities, there's no way I
would stumble off ridge. Paranal doesn't mean perfect high was the ridge? How
high was the ridge? Very steep? It's very steep. It's a steep
terrain like iron roll like forty feet down or thirty feet or oh we've ever
been of forty Yeah, I've heard of them, like when they roll like
how humans like if we like, if we fall out, how we start
rolling, we like, you know, try to spread out, like like
spread our arms and legs out whenever. When I've heard people talk to like
that, say they see him come down cliffs like that slip and fall that
they ball up and rolled down like a ball faster like that. Is that
what it did? Holy crap, that's exactly what it did. So when
it rolled off into the river, that's what I saw was a ball of
just this dark reddish brown, very dark around uh fir hit the water.
That's what made me think, Oh, it's a bear. So yeah,
when you said that, that's exactly how I describe it, like at these
events, it balled up into a ball. I've heard I believe from bear
hunters that that's a bear behavior as well, that when they're stressed out and
like they're really under the gun, no pun intended. They they'll roll downhill
to escaping area quickly. Have you Am I wrong about that? Is this?
Am I making this up? You get a few minutes, you get
bored, you want a good laugh, Look up TikTok or YouTube or something
bears rolling down a hill, and that's exactly what they do. They panda
bears. They will they will ball up into almost a perfect sphere and roll.
It's it's wild to see these creatures do that. Now, you you
commented on the creature's hands. What stood out to you about the hands because
you just kind of you mentioned it briefly, but you didn't go into details.
Don't want to hear about I want to hear about those. They were
huge, they were, but they were five fingered like herrors, a posable
thumb and everything. That's what stood out to me the most, even though
the sheer size, the magnitude that this creature is not make believe. This
is this is standing in front of me right now. Its hands. It
had dexterous hands. And while it was when it was drying well, I
say, drying itself off, it's hard to describe this, but it was
taking its hands and it was pushing the water downwards off its fur, and
then the fur the hair that was hanging off its elbows. It was doing
like a ringing motion like you would ring a washcloth out, and it would
ring the water off switch sides, wring the water off that side, and
then on its chest. It was pushing the water from the top of the
chest all the way down and it was pushing the water off like it was
drying itself off. An intelligent behavior. The way it was used in its
hands is what I was what I was trying to convey. But yeah,
I believe that's the same emotion that you're describing that we had described to us
by that Elk hunter a few weeks ago in episode two sixty. He saw
the thing, and I think he saw that like it was like pushing,
like he said, drying himself off kind of with his hands and like pushing
the water down. Bobo, Am I right remembering this? Yeah, Yeah,
it seems to me that you're describing the same behavior but a different location
in the state and all that other stuff. So that's interesting. Stay tuned
for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo will be right back after these
messages. So that was your first incident with a sasquatch as your wake up
call. Shall we say, My god, what a crazy wake up call
that is. But from there you started researching. So bring us back to
then, because that was a while ago. That was, you know,
twenty over twenty years ago. Now what did research look like to you in
those very very early days of your bigfooting career. Well, I would say
that I would I would think that it would look the same as it did
to you. A lot of pen and paper stuff, notebooks, trying to
get people to talk. I put an ad in a local paper and I
said, has anyone had any strange encounters that they cannot explain in the woods,
so forth and so on. We'll meet it the Harlan County Library this
day. So I reserved the library conference hall and there was a handful of
people showed up. Of course, a lot of them were paranormal stuff.
I saw a ghost or something like that, And I'm like, okay,
cool, I know people now that you can go to and talk about that.
I'm not that guy. I want to know if you've seen something that
you would think is a bigfoot, but getting people to talk back in those
days, and you know, we didn't have at the conferences and the festivals
and all this going on like we do now. So you can throw a
rock at most of these conferences and hit somebody that's had a big foot encounter.
And unfortunately you can throw a rock and hit somebody that's just there to
make fun of us. But but it was, it was very archaic back
then. You know, well, I'm gonna write this down. I'll go
home, pull out my big computer and type it up on a report and
put file it away. Print it out and file it away. I've got
I've got a couple of hundred not class A visual encounters, but I've got
a couple of hundred encounters that I've taken over the years before the mainstream way
of taking reports and stuff. But I'm not a very big report taker anymore.
I'll listen to them. I love hearing bigfoot encounters that do. But
I'm in it to research for myself now, and I like getting out in
the woods and doing it. If I hear of a report that happened fifty
years ago, I can't go back to that same place and see the evidence
that I left behind. So, and that was another thing. Some people
would have encounters back then, and it would be a week, two weeks,
three weeks afterwards, and by the time they'd get to me, it'd
rain or snow or do something, and all the evidence that could have been
there had probably been washed away by then. So do you have a goal
with your researchers, it's just something that you like to do. I'd like
to know exactly what these creatures are. My goal is to find out what
these creatures are, do everything in my power to protect them. And I
think they are very special creatures. I think they're just as important as every
other animal on this earth, if not more important, because I do truly
believe they are closest, the closest thing to humanity that you could get,
and I think they hold secrets that we could learn from. They've survived this
long without quote unquote proof. They've been spotted on every continent on this Earth,
with the exception of Antarctica. And I would like for mostly though the
protection of these creatures, but the protection of the people that have witnessed them.
What would you be protecting them from ridicule? Being called crazy? Being
to self doubt. I know a god dear friend of mine who used to
research and now he's just like you know, years later, and his encounter
happened forty years ago. Years later, he looks at me now and says,
you know, maybe I did see something, maybe I was seeing things.
And I say, you know, John, no, listen, you've
told me the story. You actually saw something. I wasn't there, but
you saw something. You wouldn't just seeing things. And you wouldn't have spent
over half your life looking for this stuff if if it was just that.
And you know, but people have put so much self doubt in his brain
that it's made him believe that maybe maybe I was just seeing things that day,
or maybe it was a limb moved. And his story wasn't limb moved.
It was it was an actual bigfoot walking across the field in front of
him when he was when he was about twenty years old. And you know,
but people are the worst enemy to humans that's ever been. These creatures
are not I don't think, in my opinion, are not dangerous, but
humans are. Humans kill humans every day. Humans will will drive each other
down. And that's just like the Bigfoot community some of the worst critics on
this earth is in the bigfoot community and having friends in the paranormal community.
I mean it's hand in hand, you know. So if you're not there
seeing something with your own two eyes, you cannot say that that person didn't
see it. You can say I have a hard time leiaving that, but
at the end of the day, I wasn't there. You're a real researcher,
Mike Michael, what uh what have you What have you discovered? Like
what have you learned that you can say I know this about them? Like
they go here at certain times you really go eat this thing? Is this
time of year I find scot like this or you know what I mean?
Like, what have you learned like patterns or things you'd recognize? Or here
in Kentucky, I see that they there's a the sidings are scarce in the
summer. I think they move underground here. You you very rarely hear of
a footprint or anything like that found too during the summer. So that tells
me then that they are going deep in the woods, deep deep deep in
the woods where people don't go, or they're going underground. So you all
know as well as I do and everybody listening to this that Kentucky is riddled
with cave systems. The Mammoth Cave system stretches from the western part of the
state all the way to the eastern part of the state, and they're mostly
all connected. So the caves tend to stay around sixty five degrees a year
round. That's a constant climate. Maybe send maybe send one or two out
at night to grab some food, you know, and head back underground in
the daytime. But they start amping back up toward the end of July,
going into the dog days of summer. I think that has to do with
the bury harvests. We have blackberries and all kinds of wild berries that pop
up during that time across the United States. And I'm with surmised to say
that even the western part of the United States probably has an influx of sightings
during that In my particular research area, the one that we were talking about
earlier, that Bobo knows about, there were mainly juveniles there, and I
could not tell you all why. I still wonder that to this day why
there were so many juveniles there. And this is location where you had your
initial sighting. This is a location where I had the big sighting in two
thousand and eight. Yeah, the gnarly one. Oh, that wasn't the
two thousand and two, wasn't then early one? No? Oh, So
you still have something to share with this. Okay, I'll let you finish
your thought, But then I want to hear about that, please. So
another researcher and I went into this area in twenty fourteen, and we saw
an old BFRO report back from way back when, and I said, you
know what, it's worth it, Let's go in here. Let's see what's
going on. It's a crazy hoke. It's it's nine miles if you do
the whole thing, but it's worth it if you go up and you see
the lookout and stuff. But we had a couple of weird things. So
in twenty fourteen, nothing happened any Probably any other researcher out there would have
been like, this place is dead, this place nothing's here and moved on.
But we were persistent. We went in there. We felt like this
was a squatchy area. So move up to November of twenty sixteen, and
I can't explain this, So I don't know how to explain this. We
were walking across the ridge the main top ridge at night, and ahead of
us there was this light and it looked like a headlamp like you would wear
on your head, but it was a brilliant blue color, about the size
of a baseball. And my colleague and I we said, you know,
I wonder who that is. And I said, I don't know. Nobody's
crazy enough to be up here at night but us. So we walked toward
it. Usaid, when I get up here, I want to tell this
guy, I want to know where he got his lot at because it was
lighted up the whole forest. And we got probably fifty sixty feet away from
it, and it raised up in the sky and it got real bright right
above the tree line, and it burst in this flash, no sound,
no nothing, and we were frozen where we were standing. And I leaned
over. I said, you saw what I saw, correct, And he
said I did. And we're standing there talking about it, and from out
of nowhere, this rock about the size of a football comes flying over our
heads and bounces off trees going down the ridge, and it was followed by
what sounded like really low grunts. So we both high tailed it out there.
It was obvious that we did not belong there. They didn't want us
there. Whatever it was, they didn't want us there. So we went
back December, January, February, March, April, May, all twenty
seventeen. Nothing happened again. Normal researchers would have probably said screw this,
we're going home and left it. But I was dating this girl at the
time in twenty eighteen, and she wanted to go squatching, and our friend
Kenny wanted to go squatching too, And I said, I was already researching
over into Daniel Boone. We had a very good research area over there,
and I said, I'm going to take them to this other area, you
know, and show them more. The rock got thrown at us. We're
not going to go into a very active place. So we go in there
that night or that evening. We went in about three o'clock in the evening
October sixth, twenty eighteen, and as soon as we entered the forest,
my phone died completely. It was on charge in the car we go in.
I felt it vibrate and I looked at it, thought it was somebody
calling me, look at it and it was dying. Her phone dies,
Kenny's phone dies. I said, this is weird. You know, it
is strange. This is just a strange area. It's you know, probably
some hooky pooky supernatural stuff going on. It's not Bigfoot related, but whatever.
Because this place is adjacent to a battlefield, so there's probably some residual
stuff going on there. And you know, I'm not a paranormal researcher,
so I don't know. But we get up there. I show them where
the rock got thrown at us, and we went up to the lookout and
you can see everything from the lookout. You can see it's where the mountains
meet the bluegrass of Kentucky. So we're sitting there watching the sunset, and
it dawned on me that the sun is setting. It gets dark really quick
here. We need to get out of here because we didn't bring any flashlights
with us. I had no intentions of being there after dark, and we
made our way out. Kenny came to the rescue with a couple of little
flashlights. You know, the keychain flashlights you buy Walmart has a little button
you have to push and hold. That's what we were working with. So
we get down about halfway down the mountain, down the trail, and there's
this rock formation you have to climb down. And we climbed down it and
I was helping my girlfriend get off the rock and I heard something up on
the hill above us, and I stopped and I thought for a second.
I said, that sounded like footsteps, and I just played it off with
Kenny. Kenny hears it and he freaks out, what was that? And
I said, I don't know what you're talking about. I played it off
because I didn't want to freak any anybody out. And we get down to
the bottom of the trail, and the whole way down though, we hear
I hear these this footfall paralleling us all the way down this mountain. And
Kenny finally breaks and he goes, all right, something's out there. What
is it? And I said, Kenny, I don't know. I don't
know what it is. I haven't seen anything yet. I'm hearing things,
but I don't I don't know what it is. And I'm not a big
tree knocker, but I'm really not. I'm not a big whoop where.
I don't Mostly when I go out research and I go out, I sit
down and I listen and I look. I use all my senses, and
I said, you know, what it's worth a trial. Let's let's do
a tree knock now on these woods are haunted Bobo. It shows the actor
playing me hit the tree three or four times. I never hit the tree
three three or four times. I hit it once and instantly, how right
above us, something smacked the tree and Kenny just has this complete and total
meltdown on us, and he's freaking out. My girlfriend, she draws this
circle in the in the dirt. She says that it's something to do with
Native American culture. It's a symbol that will protect her and protect her own.
You're on your own, Yeah, you're on your own on that one.
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo will be right
back. After these messages, for about fifty fifty three minutes, I told
her, I said, listen, you need to get your phone out and
start recording. She had a battery pack and she had charged her phone on
the top of the mountain, so her phone was fully charged, but the
battery pack completely sapped of power. She starts recording this right before she drew
the circle in the in the dirt, and for fifty three minutes, these
creatures were walking around us, just out of that small flashlight range, and
they were grunning, and they were they were rowling. There was like gutter
or grouse. Then I hear what can only be described as chatter. It
was I couldn't understand it. It was a completely different language. Did it
sound like the Sierra sounds? No? Did it sound close to them?
Absolutely? I don't know what they were saying to each other. But I
walk up to Kenny and I put my hand on his chest and I said,
Kenny, are you okay, buddy? And when I put when I
laid my hand on his chest, it was cold. I could feel his
heart beat. I said, Kenny, you you got to get out of
here righted. And he said, yeah, I'm going to run. I
said, don't run. Don't run, because I don't know what these things
will do. If you run, you could lose that race, okay.
And I said, I'm gonna get you out of here, buddy. And
that was probably the most terrified I was at the moment, because I was
afraid something would happen to Kenny. I was afraid something would happen to Gwynn.
I was afraid that if either one of them something happened to either one
of them and I survived, I wouldn't be able to live in myself because
I put them in this situation. So I am a card carrying member of
the firearm community, and I always carry a pistol with me, and to
be blunt. It is not for bigfoot. I do not wish to kill
one of these creatures now if it came down to life or death. Absolutely
my life for its life. I've got kids, I've got to live.
But I walk. I get my gun and I placed it on my hip.
I get it out of my backpack. I placed it on my hip,
and I walk up to Gwen and I put my hand on my shoulder
and I said, Gwen, Honey, we gotta go. We gotta get
Kenny out of here. And as soon as I said that, this one
rushed just bluff charge straight toward us. And you could hear it just to
to too too, the foot fall from it stomping toward us, and subconsciously,
I guess, I don't know. I didn't mean to. I drew
my firearm, I drew my pistol, and I said, stop, whatever
you are, you gotta stop. I don't know if you can understand me.
I don't. I don't care, but you have to stop. We're
leaving. Let us go. And Gwen gets up and she says, okay,
I'm ready. I said, all right, let's let's get out of
here. But I want you and Kenny to walk ahead of me. And
she said no, and I said, yeah, go go ahead of me
here, it's okay. And I said, if something should happen, run,
don't tell Ken I told you this, But run as hard as you
can get to the car. Calm on one one, but don't say bigfoot
because they won't come. And she said, what are you going to do?
I said, I'm okay with this. I really am. At the
time it was it was like, you know, I'm okay with this.
Be a hell of a way to go. I joke about it during my
presentations. I say, you know, if something would have happened to me,
I would have got to the other side and my grandpa would have been
like, what happened. I'd say, well, you got you had a
heart attack, I got ripped apart by a bigfoot. We're not the same,
old man. Yeah, you would win that one. But they walked
ahead of me. They got about fifteen foot ahead of me, he or
so, and I'm walking, walking, walking, and I just got this
feeling, you know, you get that feeling. And I took that little
flashlight and looked over my shoulder, and one took one ginormous step across this
trail right behind me, probably ten maybe eleven twelve feet, and all of
a sudden, every bit of the bravery that I had left, and I
briskly walked up to both of them, put my hands on both their backs
and said, don't run, but you got to go a little faster.
And we get down to where at the bottom of the trail, the main
bottom where the parking lot stuff is, there's a shelter house and we're standing
there and I'm like, okay, we are safe, We're good. There's
lights here. I don't wanted to know what their thoughts were, how they
were feeling us. How do you all feel this just happened? How do
you all feel now? Mind you, the camera is still going, the
video was still playing, and we're talking, and all of a sudden,
out of nowhere, guys, these rocks the size of the foot of soft
balls came flying out of the air and landing around us. Now they're not
heating near us, but around us, and we high tailed it to the
cars. But when I got down there, I'm leaned against the car and
I'm just completely mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausted at this point, and
I said, I don't know, I don't know how I'm going to tell
anybody this. This is crazy. This is craziest encounter I've ever had.
And up on the ridge we hear this whoo, and we all three just
stopped and I was like, y'all heard that, right, And I just
above it, and all the way up to the top of the mountain,
these things were sounding off, and it was almost like they were celebrating that
they run us out there. And I lean over to Gwenn and I said,
please tell me you are still filming this, and she said, oh,
yes, it's okay. This might be something to bring to the table.
And they went off several minutes, and then all of a sudden,
everything in the forest, crickets, frogs, chirp, and everything stopped.
And that was it. It's like the switch got turned off. And we
stood there probably another twenty minutes. Way off in the distance, you could
hear some cows bellering and moving but Gwenn goes to save this video and her
phone glitched and I said, okay, just you know it saved, it's
turn it back on. And guys, when she turned it back on,
it said nine minutes and so many seconds. And I said, no,
no, no, no, no no, there's fifty three minutes of that,
every bit of it. We never could recover it. It was the
first nine minutes and so many seconds of the encounter. And we don't know
how the hell that happened. Yeah, the batteries died before that. Those,
I g it's weird. We went back up there several times after that
when and I did, and it was just once in a blue moon something
like that, not like that, that's never happened before. It never happened
again, but something would happen and it would draw us right back in.
And then two thousand May of twenty nineteen, I know you all know Darby
or Cut. He's a college professor out of North Carolina. Darby calls me
up and he says, Mike, Darby had already heard about the story and
all this, and he says, Mike, I'm coming to Central Kentucky.
I want you to take me to where this happened at I said, okay,
So we went up there and I took him to where we saw the
lot in the forest. It took him to where we had the encounter with
the one surrounding us, and we went up on the ridge. And it's
funny because my colleague, Glenn Mink, and myself took Darby up there.
Glenn and Darby were standing on top of this one ridge looking down into a
valley, and I said, guys, I don't want to be rude or
anything. Got a pee and I'm going to head on back to the trail.
You all good, I'm good, let's go. So I went straight
down the side of the side of the hill and went over to the other
side of the trail and done my business. And Darby yells at me.
He says, hey, Mike, which way did you go down? And
I said, well, I went down the way that I knew I wouldn't
finally kill myself and all that. But it's kind of a steep, but
if you come straight down you can see where I've brushed up the leaves and
stuff. He said, that's not what I'm asking. He said, you
didn't go off the side of the ridge. And I said, not the
side you're looking at now. I came straight where if you draw you straight
line from where I'm standing at to you, that's the way I come off.
He said, you might want to come back up here, So I'll
walk back up there. And we found footprints, and I think Darby would
know more. And we found twenty eight footprints over two hundred yards and it
was a trackway, but it looked as though they were running. Now,
when I go back to what I said about them being juvenile, none of
the footprint there were two sets of footprints, none of them neither one of
them was over twelve to thirteen inches long, but there was like a seven
foot gap between them, so it looked like they were running. And one
took a clear step right into a dead log and left the impression of that
footprint there. But Darby was with us the whole time when this happened.
We documented every single one of those footprints. We run out of plaster and
was not able to cast all of them, and the ones that we did
cast, the kind of lobsquatching there, there's no definition, and I think
that's probably because where they were running, it didn't they didn't hit the ground
hard enough to leave a really good toe impression. But it was wild to
see that. Yeah, Derby's referred to a strange experience. I believe that.
I thought, maybe he can Kentucky. Maybe this is what he was
talking about, because he's been so cryptic about what he actually experienced, had
never really you know, pushed him on it to find out what what what
actually occurred, So maybe this is what he was talking about. Darby and
I we we saw each other up at the OBC back in back in May's.
I saw you there for I just stopped in for the night. I
was on my way to West Virginia that night, and it was just a
strange occurrence that we uh. And oddly enough, guys, nothing that's happened
since then in that area. We've I've been diligent about collecting stories and stuff,
and I have a dear friend that lives in the area, and he's
not said anything here or there about any encounters in that area. So maybe
they've moved on by now. But I'm researching in nwm A now and I
haven't found anything crazy. I mean, I've found a few squatchy things,
but you know, nothing that I would ever bring to the table stuff that
I look at and say, well, that's that's kind of cool. Take
a picture of that, you know. Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like
you've had two visuals, right, two verifiable? Yeah, the two that
you just described to us, so one in two thousand and two and then
this one that was when it was escorting you out of the area. Is
that is that the second visual you've had? Yes? Okay, now you
said verifiable. What do you mean by that, Well, the first one
I was by myself. The second one I was with other people. I
know what I saw. The second and third the ones we were talking about
earlier when when I said, you know, I don't really talk about it
a whole lot because don't really know what I was looking at. I don't
ever bring that one up because we saw something. Did it favor a bigfoot?
Yes? Yes, absolutely it did. But was it at I can't
tell you that, and I won't say it was a big foot. I
hate it when people do that, when they come up to you and say
I saw a bigfoot, it's great. Did you have any doubt what it
was before you? You, you know, come to the conclusion that it
was a big foot? Nope, I saw a bigfoot. Cool, So
it sounds like you have a maybe on your hand too. Well, what
happened at the maybe? And what makes you think it might have been a
big foot? If you're not so sure? The movements? It was definitely
organic in nature. It was a it was something. It was very large,
it's covered hair, and it moved when we went to step toward it.
It moved very very quickly, a lot quicker than a bear would a
bear black bears are very very fast, but they're very lumbery too. You
know, this thing moved quicker than a deer. And it was down that
ridge in a heartbeat. You could hear it going up the other other ridge
across these all little little valley you can hear it running back up the ridge
over there in just seconds. So that tells me there. I don't know
what it was. Could it have been a big foot, absolutely, it
could have been something else possibly, I don't know. But what makes me
think it was a big foot was the speed, the quickness of it.
So and you know, over the years, visually that's the only visual ones.
But I've heard vocalizations and wooden ox and all kinds of b encounters.
But those the two that I talk about are the first ones and the last
visual. The first one and the last visual. That's the two I talk
about the most. Yeah, because that's what you can actually hang your hat
on a little bit too. Oh yeah. And you know then people see
it on travel Channel and you all get it to you get to finding big
Foot fans coming up and you know, I can't believe you, and they
look at me and say, I can't believe y'all kept on telling him not
to run, but you run anyway, And I'm like, guys, listen,
TV is TV Okay. Ninety percent of that show happened. Ten percent
of it was amped up a little bit, and I'm always forthcoming with that.
I'm always honest to fault. They amped a little bit of it up,
mainly the guy playing me, And it was so funny because when I
walked out of the studio that day, I told the producer, I said,
make sure when you get the actor to play me, he's good looking.
And man, they did not disappoint. I remember that watch like it
looks kind of like him. If you blur your eyes, you squint a
little bit, maybe maybe look somewhere else. Yeah, that's my stay tuned
for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo. Will be right back after
these messages. What was your episode called? Was it hunting us? Because
during the production of it, you all done the TV thing. You know
how grueling this is. It took me ten hours to do the forty five
minute second and I told the same story at least one hundred and fifty five
times, and at the end of it, the last time I told it,
I was almost in tears. And when I was talking, I said,
you know, was it paralleling us or was it hunting us? I
don't know. I would say no, because it it was hunting you,
you would have been all dead right, Yeah, exactly. I think they
were trying to just run us out. I feel like they were just juveniles.
I feel like if they wanted to do us any harm, we wouldn't
been having this conversation. What was your episode calling and you said was the
end of it? Was it hunting us? It was episode six, season
two. Let's see. Yeah, uh, these woods are hunts Season two,
episode six, The Hunted. I'm sorry, the hunted? Okay,
yeah, And it says three hikers encounter Bigfoot and a tour guy awakens a
civil war spirit. That was a great episode. Yeah, and you know,
the producer has we've we've kept in contact and stuff and talked about a
few other projects, and you know, he said that that's actually one of
the most watched episodes, and I'm like, that's that's that explains a lot.
I've done a few other projects. We got this new YouTube series out
called I Believe in Bigfoot, and uh, my first encounter is actually the
first episode of that. David Bacara from Expedition Bigfoot. David is a really
terribly good friend of mine. He is such a nice him and Milanda both.
I can't talk enough good things about them people, because they are just
genuine people. And David told the guy that's making this documentary about me and
he got a hold of me, and Ron Moore heads on it myself.
There's several other researchers out there on it. But I got that thing going
on, and then I'm writing. I'm writing a book right now, been
writing a book for about four years. I'm finally getting to where I've got.
I've got an interview with Cliff and we've done at OBC that year,
Remember that, Cliff, Nope, I don't remember anything. That's a general
rule. Now that's a that's a rule of mine too. I write everything
down and then find it later. I'm like, oh, that's what.
Yeah, I don't I mean, I don't know. I do a lot
of these interviews and stuff. I just don't pay attention to what what what's
going on with them? And I guess not remembering things like that alleviate some
responsibility about what I said. Yeah, I mean I can attest to that.
That's that's a good answer. I like that. I'm gonna quote that
actually. But no, I got this book, Bigfoot out of the Woods.
It's going to be a general book about Bigfoot, the history of it,
the past, present, and future where we're we're leading to. And
I just got finished writing the chapter about AI technology and stuff and how we
could utilize it for research purposes and it not hinder us in any way,
shape or form. I feel like this audio AI, I feel like we
could do some stuff with it, with the Sierra sounds or any vocalizations caught
on a recorder, we could actually possibly talk to these creatures in their own
language. Someday, someday. Do you have do you have some like your
researchers. Do you have cameras or long term recorders out I do have cameras.
I have several trail cams out there. Three of them are the cell
phone cameras. The they have the little ANTENTNA on them. They probably give
it back in real time, right yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah,
And I can access them at any point, like I can pull them
up right now. It's really bad for batteries if you pull up the live
view. But but yeah, they do very well. I've gotten several pictures
of deer, black bear. I got a big black bear on one trail
cam, Bob kat here and there, I had a blur. I don't
know, And I'm pretty real when it comes to this stuff. Some people
would look at and say, oh, that could be a big foot,
and I'm like, it could be every any it could be a million other
things. Let's not go straight to bigfoot, because I'm sorry. I think
these creatures I think, I don't know. I don't know if they have
I think they have abilities that we can explain, but I can't explain if
that makes any sense that don't you think when we do discover in the study
that it will it seems like explainable, but it will be explainable like normally,
like a conventionally. I think it's going to be, like, you
know, to put it in this perspective, there's this picture on Facebook everywhere
else I don't know. You can google a snow leopard photo. So you
will sit for hours looking at this picture of this cliff with a little snow
on it, and it'll say find the snow lip and you could sit and
look at it forever. But when you find it, you can't not see
it like it's right there and you're like, oh, that's how that's it's
right there. I believe that when we discover this creature and we have that
verifiable proof that everybody wants, I think that all the abilities will be explainable.
So so, Michael, what an opportunity do we have to see you
for the rest of the summer? You doing any events pretty soon or anything
like that? Or in August? I have the Central Pennsylvania Bigfoot and Paranormal
Festival. I'm actually a keynote speaker there, and that happens in Ellisburg,
Pennsylvania, August third. Okay, we'll put the link in the show notes
for people who are interested in that. Then I'll be over hanging out with
Eric Altman at the Pennsylvania the Big Pennsylvania camp Out. Oh, always a
good time. I did that gig before. That's that's a great gig.
I saw Eric over at the Forest County thing and he Eric and I have
known each other for about fifteen years. First time we've ever met in person.
Talked on the farm. Good good guy man, and he told me
that he wouldn't take a no for an answer. He wanted me to come
to it, and so I'm going to it. And then in October I
have the This is one that you people listen if you live on the eastern
United States or you have the means to make it from the west side over
to the east side. The South Carolina Bigfoot Festival happens in Westminster, South
Carolina. It's a small town outside of Clemson, and my grandmother lived there
for many many years. I spent most of my childhood there. But not
just because of that, but this festival. It brings in so many people.
There's such good, wholesome people. I've not met anybody there that is
malicious intent or anything like that. Always have a good time. We had
the first year that i'd done This was two years ago, and they put
us up in a cabin and they didn't tell us that there were bigfoot reports
from around that area at the cabin, and we were out near the campfire
one night, and sure enough we started hearing vocalizations and wooden knocks and everything
else. So it was it was wild. But cannot wait to do that
one fantastic, fantastic. What do people want to get ahold of you for?
Anything? Like? Maybe give give you a report because you're in central
Kentucky and you know they think that it might be in your neighborhood or something.
Is there a way that you collect reports and data that people can grab
you? Yeah, you can go on Facebook is the easiest, probably the
easiest way to grab me. Go to cook Cryptied Research. It's my one
of my social media pages. I also own a barbecue sauce company called Sauce
Watch and that's s O S S s q U A T C H.
And you can go on that Facebook page or the website and check it out
and I will uh and you can pick up that stuff anywhere. You can
find me at one of these events speaking or whatever, and I will tell
you. What if you tell me you heard me on Bigfoot and Beyond,
I'll give you. I'll give you a handshake. There you go, a
free handshake. Awesome. Yeah, I'll do a curtsy. Yeah, I'll
even pull a little bit. Well heck went back to my see I'm gonna
I'm gonna that one out. I definitely want to see you. Curtsey.
Yeah. Sweet, well cool, Michael scart you came on and joined us,
and I'm talking to people. If you got Discovery Plus or I don't
know if it's on YouTube or not, but that episode what season two,
number six, check it out. It's pretty fantastic. Got it on films.
It's your your hair gets raised on that. So thanks so much Michael
Cook for coming and joining us. And till next week, y'all keep it
squatchy. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond. If
you liked what you heard, please rate and review us on iTunes, subscribe
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