Big food and be on with Cliff and Bobo. These guys are your favorites,
so like say subscribe and read it Timesta and me day and listening watching
always keep it squatching and now your hosts Cliff Barrickman and James Bubo Fay.
Hey, Bobs, how you doing man? Good morning, good morning,
good morning. Yeah. What's going on? Anything fun and unusual? Well,
certainly something unusual. You are the bobs after all. What's going on?
Well, it's the first storm of the year coming in and the first
swell of the of the year. So it's like thirteen feet at fourteen seconds
up front right now and offshore, so it's beautiful and I'm gonna get done
with this. I'm gonna go down to the jetty and check it out.
Now. Just enjoy the waves and one night you're not writing anymore, right,
you're not surfing. No, I know the I know the old time
crew, like all the old guys, like I'll see them down there and
hang out. They all show up when it's big, when the first day
of the season or you know, gets like when it's thirteen feet fourteen seconds
offshore winds, it's like it's perfect. Nice. You know, if you
ever move, you're gonna miss that. I know, dude, We're gonna
have to move. So you know, one thing that I'm helping my buddy.
He's a hardcore. He's like one of those hardcore hunters I know.
And he's like a really good business man and stuff. And he's he's been
making a lot of smart investments and saving his money and he's looks like one
of his business is going to sell for a lot a lot of money,
and he's looking for a hunting space. And I've gotten him in a big
Foot and you know, it's really gotten into this Prewit's book. Oh good.
Yeah, And he has decided because he's about sixty down and he's had
some injuries that he's still gonna hunt, but not like he like was just
hardcore, like you know, chasing cariboo up in Alaska and hike and elk
hunting in Montana. He's just like he had a bad island injury. So
he's like, you know, just kind of deer stands and stuff like that
now, but well he does more than that. But anyways, he really
wants to getting to squatch in and I've been showing him, like you know,
the equipment available, and he's totally in. He's like, let's make
up the best big foot research center we can make, you know, like
top notch thermals, like you know, showing him like the pan tilt ones
and you know some of those like thirty forty thousand dollars ones, and he's
like, yeah, let's let's do it. That's he's like, this is
gonna be my only hobby and he's looking at it. I'll tell you about
the property later because it's so unique. It'd be easy to anyone to find
it. That's a really unique isolated Property's bitch And well, good man,
I hope that happens. Yeah, I mean so it's always words until it
does. But you know, people have approached being They said, Cliff,
if I gave you this amount of money, what do you think you could
do with it? And I'm thinking, well, there's not a lot you
can do with it unless you know sasquatches are there. And even when they
are there, even in the best of circumstances, they're not there all the
time. So you have to set up a situation where you can be constant,
only vigilant twenty four seven and still somehow managed to like capture it when
they're there, because vigilance doesn't cut it. No, yeah, well that's
the idea is to have it three sixty array of high end thermals with Bluetooth
that we could stream up and people could monitor so we didn't have to watch
it and it would you know, it'd be like motion activated it. It
wouldn't be I mean, we could leave. In twenty four seven people wanted
to bit and especially now so these even these uh you can get trail cams
now that that are Bluetooth WiFi and like have Soular service and they can they'll
they'll detect humans. You can type in bears and humans to pick up those
animals and like ELK if you want to show a big game or bears and
mountains where you can click off deer or whatever and you can select what you
want to for it only to transmit those kind of images to you or video
clips. I don't know if I'd want that, because I would want the
information I would have their anim molt in the area at that time, right.
But I mean if you're monitoring several lots, yeah, I mean,
but I mean if you got like, you know what birds setting it off
and blowing sticks and branches and stuff like that. That's true, that's true.
I don't want birds. Well, I was thinking that, what if
it's a windy day and it's just going off all the time, and it's
like going, it's not setting off because of the winds, it's still going
to set up as well, is going to overload the system and not register
like a human shape or you know, because one of the one of the
I think the human thing I think it made might only go to like seven
feet or something like that. I'm not sure. I just heard some guys
talking about other hunting show about it. I don't know. I'd rather have
too much data than not enough. Yeah, it's reviewing at all. But
anyways, I'm pretty excited about that. He's gonna do it. It's just
a matter when, uh, well he's he's in negotiations to sell his business
right now, and when that goes through, he's he's he's on it.
Yeah, there's always something some thing between here and there. You know.
I try to try it to look too far ahead for that very reason.
Kind of look at what's my plate in front of me today, Oh it's
a bagel? Cool, I'm gonna eat it all right? What do you
got mine up first? Today? Yeah, today, we've got a good
one. I mean, everybody knows about small town monsters. You know,
the production company there with ten thousand videos out there. I'm not even sure
how many there are. Maybe there are not ten thousand. That makes sad
draining. Of course, Seth Bobbo loves company. Seth Bobbo loves right,
all right, Seth breedloves company, right. And he has a number of
employees and stuff, and there's a couple of smaller sort of series underneath them.
And today we have the host of one of those series. We have
Eli Watson on the podcast. He's a young filmmaker. He kind of got
thrust in the big Footing into some degree and I don't know if he loves
it or hates it or regrets it or whatever, but that's his lot right
now. So Eli, welcome to Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and the Bobs.
And how are you doing today? I'm good man, how are you?
I've met Eli on their very first episode of that on the Trail of
Bigfoot. I've met him out at so on the first episode two. A
lot of people have probably seen it, but yeah, I met him out
there and we hung out for a day. We called it big Foot at
Bluff Creek. So I know, we have a bunch of DVDs and stuff
in the museum and like I got it. We got DVDs from Smalltown Monsters
and like and of course DVDs. I don't think it's the main thrust of
the production company more. Isn't it mostly a YouTube thing now? Yeah,
so that's kind of where my specialty comes in. It's me and another guy
named Alex Petakov, and we kind of produce most of the YouTube content.
And so there's about a new video every week every week. Yeah, oh
god, how do you do that? Man? What kind of like what
kind of time constraints do you does that put on you? I'm putting together
like an hour long documentary every two weeks. Oh man, I feel for
you. I do one or two of those a month for the Patreon thing
at the North American Bigfoot Center, you know, and a Nico does one
and I do one, and it still feels like a lot of work.
Yeah, yeah, it can be a lot, but it's okay. It's
as you say, it's a lot. You don't have any help. It's
just you the whole one man show kind of yeah. I mean, like
we have different series going on, so, I mean the one we did
with you, Bobo was for a series called Beyond the Trail, and now
I do my own series called Mysteries and Monsters. So spread it out from
just Bigfoot. Yeah, I wanted to bring I wanted to branch away from
that because I didn't want to. I don't know, Bigfoot can be tiring
after a little while, blast for me give it to this heretic cliff.
Sorry, Okay, well, thank you Eli for coming on, and we've
heard enough. Well, I don't want to sound too down in the dumps
right now. I'm in full squatch either fever. Yeah. So yeah,
you know, we'll say that, you know, Sasquatches are a very narrow
niche. I mean it's a bigger niche now that it probably ever has been
back in the day. I think Tom Powell told me when he wrote his
first book, The Locals, he said that you kind of top top off
at about two thousand copies sold, and that kind of gave you some inkling
as the size of the big Foot community. Not that everybody in the big
Foot community got Tom Powell's book, of course, you know, the numbers
larger than two thousand. But back in the day, that's what you could
expect to sell, and now I don't think that's true. Now it's probably
I think Tom Powell's next book, which should be coming out shortly by the
way, we'll have Tom on the podcast again when it does come out to
tell everybody about it, probably will sell ten thousand copies because of just the
larger community and whatever else. But when you expand out to the UFO stuff
or other cryptids and Mothman and all this other nonsense like, when you do
that, then obviously the viewership will grow dramatically, and of course more eyes,
more clicks, more success. Yeah. No, I'm surprised at some
of the Bigfoot episodes I've put out have over one hundred thousand views, two
hundred thousand views. That must feel good. Yeah, I guess. So.
I never wanted to be famous for this, but it's okay. So
what did you want to be famous for? I mean, not that fame
is a valuable thing to begin with, mind you, but nonetheless it can
be more of a hassle than anything else. So what did you want to
do and how did you end up in this big foot quagmire? Yeah,
so I went to film school at cal State Long Beach, so the film
program there, and I wanted to be the next Steven Spielberg, and thankfully
that did not pan out. But I don't think I could deal with the
Hollywood politicking as much as I thought I could back when I was eighteen.
I just I have a short fuse for a polite society, I guess you
could call it. I would rather be out in the woods, sitting around
the campfire. And so that was a pretty big discovery. And Los Angeles
has a way of really beating your dreams out of you. So I kind
of decided. I was like, well, I'm just going to pursue some
kind of hobby. And that was I was working at a movie theater at
a time, and I was talking to a couple of my friends about bigfoot
and stuff. And I had always been into bigfoot. I had never had
any experiences growing up in southern CALIFORNI, but I just I knew about it
from shows like Monster Quest and obviously the Internet. The early days of the
Internet were rife with totally inaccurate information about all that kind of stuff still is.
Yeah, yeah, it is even more so now I almost feel like
but so I just kind of pitched it to my friend. I was like,
hey, we should we should start a podcast talking about Bigfoot, and
I remember distinctly he just laughed and walked away, and I was like,
oh, well, I guess he didn't like that idea. He came back
a few days later and was like, hey, I was thinking about what
you said. I think we should. And so we started a podcast called
Cryptic Campfire in twenty eighteen, and funny enough, at the Oregon Bigfoot Festival
in twenty nineteen, I gave both you Cliff and Bobo T shirts. I
got that from you. Yeah, oh yeah, I still got that.
That's rad I probably I think it probably sold it to an ABC members thing.
No hurt feelings. But and then from there I found out about Seth.
As I started to learn more about Sasquatch and learned about Seth, Breedlove
and small town Monsters, and I was like, wait, this guy,
this dude's doing Bigfoot movies and he's making a living off of it, Like
he's not living in the La lifestyle Hollywood big shot director. But he's he's
raising a family, you know, he's married. So I was like,
Wow, who is this guy? And so I ended up talking to him
on the show and we had a really good discussion and he said, Hey,
next year we're gonna go shoot at the Olympic Peninsula. You should You
should come with us, and I said, oh, I'd love to.
And so that's when I went to do on the Trail of Bigfoot the Discovery
with the Olympic Project and that was my first gig with Small Town Monsters and
it worked out really well and I'm still here today. And at some point
he decided to say, go do this as a side project. Because now
this whole side project, Seth, you're under the small Town Monster's umbrella,
but he's not exactly directly involved, or is he? And I just don't
know about it. Seems like more of an executive producer role for Seth at
this moment. It is. We were doing Beyond the Trail and that was
the first kind of flagship YouTube series that really grew the YouTube and made it
a viable, you know, source of income for us, and Seth wanted
to expand that, and that's when I kind of pitched I said, well,
hey, I have my own idea for a show that would go beyond
Bigfoot, and I want to call it Mysteries and Monsters and we could do
all sorts of stuff. And he was like sure. And you know,
this is where I have to really give Seth praise because this is a super
rare thing in my industry to where someone just gives you complete creative control.
And that's what Seth has done. He said, this is your series.
Do whatever you want with that, and yeah, so I've been doing that.
There's eight episodes out now. Three of them are about UFOs, about
five of them are about Bigfoot. Well, you're very lucky to have an
overlord like Seth breed Love because you know, in La I mean seems to
me and I think Bobo could probably I think you'd probably agree with me on
this seems like a Hollywood, if you want to call it, that is
mostly run by fear. You know, for a quote unquote creative industry,
there's a very little creativity there. It's always regurgitation is something that accidentally worked
before. You know, how many copycat shows are there of any any popular
show? Dozens? Right, And there's over a period of a decade,
they'll be a dozen shows trying to copy that one format. And it's sad
because there's there are a lot of creative, fantastic people working in the film
in the TV industry, but they're not let loose, which is the advantage
that you have working with Seth and working as an independent publisher essentially. I
think Matt Pruitt actually and I were talking about something like this this past week
with the publication of his book, because he didn't go with the publisher because
he didn't want somebody over looking over his shoulder. Matt, do you want
to comment on that or anything, or I've experienced that many times, you
know, coming up as a musician and going through the major label process as
a major label musician, dealing with that, you know, in various like
one off things that have been a part of whether those were like television series
or things of that nature. And so yeah, I definitely when it came
time for me to put out something that was uniquely my own, I did
not want to have to deal with mediators or gatekeepers, and a few people
were kind enough to put me in touch with, you know, not that
I asked them too, but said, oh, hey, I know someone
in the industry, you should have a conversation, and I would have a
conversation. It would be, you know, along the lines of the things
that I was concerned about. If like, oh yeah, this would be
great. All you need to change is everything about it. And your book
needs to be more like this book that sold but has nothing to do with
you or your subject matter. It's like, hey McDonald Solilos Hamburgers, Mcambergers
like that exactly. The amazing thing I think about what Eli's doing and what
the generation has at their fingertips now is that you don't have to deal with
those gatekeepers or intermediaries. You can publish things direct to the market. And
when production companies reach out to me, you know, I just had a
conversation with the production company two weeks ago. You know, they didn't know
anything about me or my background or how long I've been involved in the subject
or various productions that I've been involved in. You know, they just assume
they're talking to someone who wants to be on a reality TV series, which
is the furthest thing from the truth. And they were mentioning shows that they
had made that were not related to like Home renovation shows and things of that
nature, and so you can google and find some rough numbers. And I
realized, okay, well, here you've got this show that's done whatever viewership
per episode. And I just went and pulled up Eli's great Bigfoot at the
Border episode, which he was very generous to have me speak about one particular
case in there. And at this point that episode had been out for like
three weeks and there's one hundred and thirty thousand views, and I thought,
well, you know, if we're just talking about eyeballs and people who are
paying attention, like you don't need television. And I didn't have to say
anything. I didn't believe. All I had to do is hang out with
my friend Eli for fifteen minutes and here's my words and my true thoughts and
beliefs about this particular case to the tune of one hundred and thirty thousand people
viewing it, you know, in the context of a broader story. But
it's like, that's the kind of thing that you would have wished upon a
star for twenty years ago, and there was no chance in how that it
could ever happen. And so the fact that it is happening now today.
I mean, there's so much to be grateful for, for the audience,
for their attention, for the technology, for the ability. I mean,
it's really an incredible time. And you're right there in the middle of the
middle of it all, Eli, because you have the best of every world.
You have exactly what you want to do. You have you have a
benevolent overlord like Seth breed Love who's saying, yeah, I'm empowering you to
do all this. And you're also onder the Small Town Monsters umbrella, you
know, which gives you an automatic audience, because that's one advantage of being
on a network, like you know, finding Big was on Animal Planet,
well, animal Planet had an audience, and if something was on Animal Planet,
some audience would come over there for sure. Until you know, so
small Town Monsters platform has given you a very high platform to be visible from.
And now it's just your own work. How good of a producer you
are is what's going to carry you into the future and make you a viable
product on your own. So you are a very very fortunate person to be
born at your time, into the tech technological age of your time and doing
what you like to do. So man more power to you man, you're
kicking ask good job. Well, thank you. This has been very flattering,
one after the other, so thanks stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond
with Cliff and Bogo. We'll be right back after these messages. So so
far, you live in Los Angeles, and that must be pretty tough to
get out to Bigfoot country. And I know that from first hand experience.
I lived in Long Beach, California for a long time until I finally achieved
escape velocity and ended up here in a Pacific Northwest. But you're smart about
it too, because sure you went to the Olympic Peninsula and hung out with
the Olympic Project. You've been all over the country, I think probably.
But the series that you're making now is about southern California Sasquash, and that's
brilliant for a couple of reasons. Number one, saves in your gas money,
and number two, it's it's a topic that almost nobody has ever touched.
Yeah. Yeah, So, speaking of my benevolent overlord, Seth was
like, you know, it would be great if you could do your series,
you know, local to you, and if you could do some Bigfoot
episodes as well. And I was like, Bigfoot in southern California? What
are you talking about? And I had to figure that out. But as
I've looked into it more, you know, obviously I interviewed you for it,
Cliff, and I've interviewed money Maker and Daniel Perez and people like that.
As I've dug into it more, there's there seems to be almost like
an higher world of researchers that have just been completely forgotten about unless you're really
really into the niche. And I've been kind of wrestling with that, and
it's like, I don't know if it's well, let me go back.
The biggest resource I've found was a chapter in John Green's book The Apes among
Us, and I think chapter sixteen is called So Close to Hollywood, where
he talks about all the stuff in southern California. And you're talking about,
you know, the San Bernardino Mountains, the San Gabriel Mountains up into the
Tachapees, the southern Sierras, and then a little like Palamar Mountain, places
like that. But this world of researchers he talks about, they just don't
exist anymore. The groups like the Bigfoot co Op and the California Bigfoot Research
Organization, which was based out of Palmdale. Those groups don't exist anymore,
and there archives haven't been digitized, and I don't know if their records are
even still around, who they're with, or where they're stored. Doesn't it
Dan Press probably does have some of those things. But I have a considerable
archive of the Bigfoot co Op because not only was I a subscriber back in
the day, but since then, I've been slowly gathering my missing you know,
my missing additions or publications. Well, no way, whoa Yeah,
Daniel Press probably has some. I know Daniel Press has some things that I
really want to get a look at. Yeah, yeah, hopefully he'll he'll.
I know that he has the Bay Area Group's archives, for example,
Warren Thompson and all those guys. And he was saying that he after he
passes, after Daniel checks out, he wants to give it to Stanford.
I'm not sure that's the best use of it. I mean, I hope
it is. I hope that Stanford values it and everything. But without sasquatches
being a real animal, I just kind of see all that stuff disappearing into
their archives and sitting on a shelf somewhere at least until Discovery Day happens.
So but yeah, I don't know there. He does have a I've been
to his house several times. I consider Daniel friend. He has shared a
lot of the stuff from his archives with me, and he's let me go
through his files and stuff. He has a lot of stuff, but Daniel
does like he's very generous. But you need to go to Daniel and then
Daniel will find time to go find the stuff and then share it with you.
It's not one of those things you can kind of go through the archives
because it's at his personal residence and you know, very understandable reasons, of
course, but Daniel likes to go to go through it because he's got so
much stuff. He's like me in a way, like he's got so much
stuff, is not exactly sure what he has, like I have memory,
oh you know what, I think some and so wrote a letter to Barbara
Watson about this. I need to go dig it up and that could take
forever, so at least until it's properly archived. And I don't know if
Daniel's working on that at the moment, but I know we are at the
North American Big Foot Center. We have a archivists come in. I'm working
with a professional archivists in Oakland about working on this. And we have a
volunteer who comes in about every month or so too, and she just plows
through the stuff and I'm thinking, God, you're a goddess. You know.
Her name is Joanna. She's fantastic she and she just loves going through
this. To me, it'd be mind numbing, terrible work, but she
goes, oh, I'd like to be organized. So I think the most
recent episode of this Southern California Sasquatch series that you've been producing is that?
Is it? Am I getting the name right? The Inland Empire Sasquatch or
Bigfoot? Is that right? Meth Capital of the World. Okay, yeah,
the Inland Empire Sasquatch. That one is. Actually I did some major
digging into a case that happened. It's called Buenafoot. I was so stoked
you did that, by the way, because that's been sitting on the back
of my back burners for years and years and years, and my memories like
I remember that and then when you dug up and you dug up not only
the location but the witness and the evidence that was gathered there. It's like,
that is fantastic. I'm so I was, I'm so happy you're doing
this. And again I'm butting into talking talking over my guests, unfortunately.
But but one of the things I really appreciate about you, specifically, Eli,
is that you're one of these rare big footers that if I can't even
call you a big footer, I don't know if that's that's something you want
to be called. But you're one of these these rare researchers that really cares
about the history of the subject and these cold cases that were years and years
and decades ago. And the fact that you dug up the actual photographs from
this and the hand cast I blew my mind. So tell tell our tell
our audience, because a lot of our audiences are perhaps new to big foot,
they've only been doing it for five or ten years or something like that.
They probably have no recollection or no knowledge about this sort of thing.
So tell us tell our audience about this particular case and then the depths you
dug into it. Yeah. Well, first off, I want to say
I appreciate that. For me, I fancy myself as kind of a Sasquatch
historian. I just like I like history, and I like documenting the history
of researching and the cases into this into the subject. And so I found
out about this particular case from a guy named Todd Hale of the Olympic Project.
And Todd was telling me that when he was into Sasquatch in southern California,
his friend's dad, who's a guy named Dennis Rumner, was into Sasquatch
and he investigated this case out of Buena Park in back in the day nineteen
eighty two I think it was. And for months I was trying to track
him down and he just wasn't responding to any of my messages. And then
I don't know why we never thought about this, but Todd is still friends
with his friend Matt, and so we reached out to Matt. And this
is not moneymaker. This is Matt Rumner, Dennis Rumner's son. And so
Matt reached out to his dad and was like, Hey, this guy's trying
to interview you for a documentary. You should do it. And he was
like, oh, okay, I had no idea. It's like, okay,
all these emails and these Facebook messages, I guess he just never checked.
But so Dennis I met him. He's probably in his mid eighties now,
but he was actually part of the big Foot co op back in the
day and that was kind of cool. And it was him and his friend
Tom Muzilla who heard about this sasquatch being sighted in Buena Park. And I'm
not sure how Tom Uzilla found out about it, but they were there within
a few hours of it happening. But I guess as the story goes,
there's four or five young boys who witnessed this humanoid creature walking down this kind
of it was a creek that led into the Santa Anna River and I can't
remember what it was. I don't know what the proper term is, but
it's one of those typical La style rivers where there's cement like a flood control
almost more than anything else yet, right, right, and so, but
they witnessed it walking through there and then it dipped into a like this kind
of water outlet that led to somewhere else and it went in there and it
never came out. And it was also it happened to be next to like
a girls Catholic school and apparently there was about six little girls who also saw
this thing as well as a homeless man. And so Dennis and Tom Muzilla
went in there and to kind of see where this thing might have went because
it never came out, and they found in the mud they found these kind
of like huge fingerprints, and they took photographs of it. They put their
hands next to it for scale, and then they casted the thing, or
casted the best one they could find, because they found multiple imprints and it
looked like just the first three fingers and the thumb that it was kind of
using to stabilize itself as it walked through this tunnel. Yeah, so that
was pretty cool. Dennis still has the cast to this day. I include
some of the pictures that I took of it in the in the documentary and
then but the media, the news articles that I dug up to kind of
corroborate with it. The news people decided that it was a homeless man,
that everyone had seen a homeless man completely covered in hair, and that was
like six and a half feet tall. I think it's kind of interesting.
Well that still goes on. I mean, I investigated a sighting in two
thousand and eight over there by the Sandy River, and the guy who saw
it. I interviewed it in depth, and actually we did an episode of
Finding big Foot with that guy. His name was Robbie. But there were
police officers there when Robbie came back to the site with his brother immediately after
the sighting, and he asked the police officers about, hey, what are
you doing here? Are you here for the big Foot? And then they
go, what, no, now we're here for the naked homeless guy that
people are reporting or whatever. So, yeah, that that's sort of a
misidentification thing still does happen to stay, but even more so in Buena Park,
for goodness sake, because what are by nuts Berry Farm? It's like,
yeah, but this is nineteen eighty two, you know, And then
it's you can't look at went in Park in twenty twenty and then compared to
nineteen eighty two, that was a long time ago. And if you look
it up online, if you get the images from back then, yeah,
yeah, absolutely can't. But there were I mean, I remember driving to
Irvine or whatever, and it was mostly strawberry fields. And now it's like,
you know, you know, Lexus Dealerships, it has changed, the
change a lot. Yeah, sure has and of course even then, though,
even back in nineteen eighty two, that was a long ways in for
a sasquash to be cruising around. But you know, as you pointed out
in the documentary, it is very well connected to the more rural areas of
the San Ana River, et cetera. Right, what I wonder too,
is is it went into the tunnel and it never came out, and I'm
assuming that it opens up on a different side at some point. I don't
know if it knew that, or or if it was just went super far
back in there and was waiting people out. But that's something else to consider
too, because actually the follow up to that story was a week later,
I think Dennis got a call from a police officer who was stationed at another
kind of creek down the Santa Ana River, and he was in his police
cruiser. He was just kind of on break, and he heard this noise
from behind him, this crashing sound, and he got out of his car
and he looked at it and it was another one of those tunnels, like
the one where they found the handprints, but this one had been blocked off
with bricks, and this thing was holding a railroad tie and smashing a hole
in the brick wall, and as soon as it realized it was being watched,
it threw down the railroad tie and walked away. And that's from a
police officer. That's from a police officer. Yeah, And Dennis and Tom
Muzilla also investigated that one, and there's photographs of the hole in the wall
and stuff, and that's all in the documentary as well. But that to
me, it's like it wanted into that tunnel. It's like, what does
that mean. I found the photographs of the area where the initial encounter happened
to be very impressive as well, because you know people say, oh,
it's a flood controls all summit. No, it's it's actually you know,
pretty pretty thick with with with brush and whatever else. You know, as
they'd get in southern California from the silt washing down from the woods, you
know, things start growing in it and whatever. Yeah, the historical photographs
that you tracked down for this episode of just are fantastic. It was so
cool to see that stuff. Well, that's all credit to Dennis Rumner because
he is one of those people who I envy him in some ways because he
was like, yeah, the Bigfoot thing was cool for five ten years,
and then I just decided I didn't want to do it anymore. It's like,
that's amazing, Well can you found that? I mean, you're in
southern California, where those guys are at. You're not. It's not like
being on the Olympic Peninsula. We're gonna get fresh material every week. It's
like every couple of years something pops up. Probably you know, sure,
sure, But for having been involved with it for such a short amount of
time, he did an incredible amount of documentation and honestly more document more documentation
than some people do nowadays. And that was back in the nineteen eighties when
everything was shot on film and he was developing the film and then preserving the
photographs and stuff. And it's like now you could just take a lot of
photos on your phone and people don't even do that. Stay tuned for more
Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo. We'll be right back after these messages.
So what you spend some time up in Big Bear. It looks like
as well, I remember, right, you tried to get into Deep Creek
but you couldn't. Yeah, I tried to get into Deep Creek and that
was I found out about Deep Creek through money Maker and yourself, Cliff and
try to get in. And it was the weekend after that hurricane. The
tropical storm came through and I'm I'm thinking that the dirt road to get in
was all washed out, and you have like a Prius or something. I
have a little Toyota Corolla that's two wheel drive. And me and my brother
try to go to this other campground that's called Crab Flats and that's that's actually
above Deep Creek. And I tried to get in there and the road was
so rough, like thirty feet in. I was like, I don't want
to get stuck here. I really don't want to get stuck here, So
I had to turn back. I want to go back with a four wheel
drive vehicle because that's what I'm gonna need. But yeah, it's a pretty
rough terrain and a lot of people maybe listening to our podcasts, they really
cannot understand the how remote and difficult the Southern California Mountains really are. To
put in perspective for people, I mean, the Southern California Mountains were some
of the last holdouts of the of the grizzly bear in California because it is
so food rich and so difficult to get into. The early pioneers complained about
it because it's all chaparral. They said, the stuff is too thick and
thorny to go through, but too tall to sea over, so you're just
stuck almost wherever you go there. It is tick ridden. There's rattle snakes,
The altitude changes precipitous. It's it's a dangerous, dangerous place and people.
Eli High is not for having one of the like for search and rescues
known amongst like the search and rescue groups like that's Eli Highs are the gnarliest
places you can go in the lower forty eight really. Yeah. And of
course there's wilderness areas, like legit wilderness areas, quite a few of them
out there. Yeah. And and the smattering of sasquatch reports over the years.
It's very very interesting. I got I had a video tape, but
not video. I had thermal image footage that sent to me by a Boarder
patrol agent, like right when the show came on, like so like two
thousand and eleven, probably two thousand and twelve, and it's buried in my
the it's buried in my Facebook messages from like, you know, I've had
like over one hundred, way over one hundred thousand messages since then, and
I don't know, how do you have to dig that stuff out? Eli,
Yeah, you can search your Facebook messages if you remember some of the
words that he said in his message, or if you remember the dude's name,
Yeah, it should. It showed a group of people walking like five
or six I guess it was a coyote leading a like a you know,
it's five six people whatever, and behind them and they're all, you know
whatever. You figure it's the average sized person secret huse. The board is
probably you know, five foot to six foot and behind them this thing is
nine foot about my foot ten foot, they estimated. And they had it
on film for a good forty five fifty seconds. Sent me a clip it
had had. I didn't post it because it had all the like, it
had all this it looked like looking at like a fighter jet when they had
like their stuff, you know, all the time and longitude, latitude coordinates,
the date at the time, and it would have just totally identified the
officer and like, you know, like he's letting out this he can lose
his job for looking that outside. Then we were back on the road and
I was getting so many messages because he had to keep going back. And
I remember that when I was when i'd searched for it. At that point,
I had thousands of messages in between. Every time I got a new
message, like someone would write me back in the middle. I'd searched in
the middle of the night specifically so I wouldn't get interrupted, but I'd get
it like a random message, and it would kick me back to the very
first message, and I like load through for like hours to get back through
like hundreds and hundreds of messages, and I just got so barrious. I
was like, well, some i'll I'll be able to figure it out how
to dig it up, and then never did. Dang, I would love
to see that. That's crazy. Yeah, I mean it's not detail,
it's just they're just glowing blips. And I mean, well, you can
see their upright bipedal figures, but you can't see like any definition or anything
like. You just see that. You see the arms a little bit and
the legs a little bit, but it's supposed to the solid up looking blurs.
Sure. Yeah, thermal technology has improved a lot since then, especially
stuff that you know that the FEDS have. Oh I'm sure. Yeah.
But I was even out with the Olympic project not too long ago, filming
another project and they just got all new thermal equipment and it's I was probably
two hundred yards away in the woods and you could see my hat I was
wearing in the jacket I was wearing, and I was like, WHOA,
that's pretty intense thermal detail. Yeah. I'm actually pretty stoked about that one,
because I needed something stylistically different, you know, because mysteries and monsters,
I try to channel that in search of energy, and I have a
pretty hokey looking bigfoot suit and oh it's terrible. Yeah yeah you want you
don't want to get one? And said, people accuse your cheating exactly exactly.
Those are wise choice. I thought it was funny. Personally, I
liked it. Oh, I love it. I love it, you know,
And that's what I wanted. I wanted no CGI in my series.
I wanted it to be like these live action, practical recreations. So even
my UFO episodes, I'm using miniatures and I'm compositing the images together and It's
been a lot of fun, and it all looks super cheesy. People have
commented that it looks like they say, oh, your budget must be like
lunchbox money, and I'm like, I don't know, it's it's intentional and
I like it. But the Road to Discovery is a totally different tape on
a documentary, and I wanted to ask the harder questions of bigfoot researchers,
which is like, why are you even looking for bigfoot in the first place?
What value does it hold in your life? Do you do you feel
like it's going to change the public's perception on things? Or I mean,
and just boil down to it, you know, like if Bigfoot was found
today, would you still go out and look for it tomorrow? That that
type of thing. So I'm kind of excited about that one. And you're
filming that now, And is this going to be another weekly thing or that
you're trying to pump out or what. No, it'll be a six episode
series and there might be a season two, but depending on how season one
goes, right, but it'll be a six episode series. Now, when
when can we expect to see that? November is when the first episode will
be coming out. Oh gosh, that's fast. Yeah, I know.
Yeah, not to tell you that I mean to get under the gun here,
man. So it'll be it'll be once a month though, so the
episodes it won't be too bad. So November it will be the first episode,
December the second, and then into April of next year is when it
will be over. But you can breathe deep and just do your regular one
a week. Yeah, it's cool. I'm excited. I try to make
every project as different as possible, and so I was like, well,
how do you go from a fun in search of style historically investigative style documentary?
And I was like, oh, well, you take Warren or Hertzog
and give him the sasquatch subject. So I have to admit i'm you know
me, man, I don't watch any big foot stuff at all, you
know. And I sat down and I watched the episode four The Inland Empire
Sasquatch the other day, so I hear, oh, ELI is gonna come
on, I'm gonna at least do this for the guy, right, But
I didn't. I didn't watch one, two or three. What are some
of the cases that you investigated in one, two and three? Just to
give me a little bit of background for the series here. Well, the
first one is called The Legend of the Southern California's sask Watch. That one
introduces just the kind of terrain, the landscape of southern California. I dig
deep into the grizzly bear aspect of the story. How much Southern California has
changed, specifically, not just in the past forty years, but in the
past one hundred years. It's virtually almost completely different. And I talked about
some stuff from the San Bernardinos, some stuff from San Diego County. It
kind of touches on a bunch of little stuff. And then the second one
was The Sasquatch of the Southern Sierras, which focused on me going to the
Southern Sierras with Matt Moneymaker Lucky. And that was on a BFRO expedition,
wasn't it. It actually was, Yeah, But so that was my first
BFR expedition. It's funny because I called Matt and I asked him, I
said, Hey, I'm doing this series on Southern californ and I would be
interested in interviewing you. And he goes, there's a BFO expedition in November
if you drive me to it, I'll let you go. You're so lucky.
How hard you laugh on that trip? Oh dude, it was.
It was a trip because I live about an hour away from Matt, so
I picked him up and it was a five hour drive to our location.
And that's baptism by fire man. Dude. I know, I don't mind
you. I love me some Matt Moneymaker, I really do. But I
mean, for the uninitiated man, he's kind of like a harsh whiskey,
you know, he said, takes a little bit of getting used to before
you get a lot of pleasure and joy out of it. And of course
most people only know him from the episodes of Finding Bigfoot or whatever, and
they just rub him the wrong way for whatever reason. I don't think that
I'm saying anything Matt would disagree with at this point. Now, the more
you know him, the more you love him. Yeah, yeah, Matt.
Matt is actually a very generous, very intelligent, very kind person,
even though he doesn't necessarily come across that way from the edits of Finding Bigfoot.
So best conversations whatever, Oh yeah, and it knows a little bit
about everything. There's a lot about everything, or yeah, yeah, well
he knows actually a little bit about everything or more. Yeah. So yeah,
so that that must have been just like a sun burning experience for you.
No, I quite enjoyed it. I mean, oh yeah, he's
great. He's great. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean,
so many characters on on these trips, you know, it's like, uh
geez, But Matt Moneymaker is definitely one of my favorite people I've met.
So I'm pretty stoked. And and you know what too is like like we
were talking about the he didn't know how to feel about my production, and
I think that five hour road trip of me driving and us just getting to
know each other for that period of time, it it opened the door and
he was he was very fond of me by the end of that trip and
fully supportive of the documentary. So I like it a lot better just talking
to it for the last five minutes. Thanks for Well. Matt's been burned
so many times. He's been in the game a long time since the eighties,
you know, and he's been burned by so many people talking behind his
back and saying thing and just like so he I can see why he made.
He may be slow to trust, but yeah, and once you're in
though, like you know. Yeah, so that was fun. Oh,
I guess continuing what I was talking about. The third episode of the series
was Bigfoot at the Border, and that one features the incredible Matt Pruett talking
about the Zoobies case. Yeah. I thought maybe we could talk a little
bit about the Zoobies case in our in our members section and in just a
little while, if you can stick around for that, but very briefly,
maybe you can tell us, just like you know, the Reader's Digest version
of the Zoobies case, and we can go a little bit more in depth.
Because Pruett here was he's been on the property, He've interviewed folks,
he knows all about it, and I think that'd be a really interesting case
to do a deep dive in for the members section. But but for our
regular listeners who may not know what that case is, why don't you tell
us about that for a moment. Yeah, So the Zoobi's case is,
just in a nutshell, is a man and his family bought this home in
Alpine, California, and shortly thereafter we're having experiences, repeat experiences with a
group of sasquatch on his property. As many as three is what he reported
seeing at one time, So gotcha? Got And how long did that that
case go on? I'm actually not sure. A couple of years. It
happened in the seventies, and as far as I know, there seemed to
be a rotation of researchers looking into the case, but no one ever stuck
around to see how it ended. Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and b On
with Cliff and Bobo. We'll be right back after these messages. So that's
the third of the series and we've we've talked to some depth in the fourth
of the series. Is there are there five? And six? Are you
doing more of these things? Aren't gonna be coming out soon? Yeah?
I will, I will. Eventually. We're gonna be going on a seasonal
break here after October. I'll be doing one more episode in October, not
about Sasquatch. It's actually actually going to be my first dog Man episode.
Is that a southern California thing too? Or is it somewhere else? No,
it's actually Wisconsin. So weird story and how that one came together as
Actually I interviewed Doug Hicheck for something and Seth was like, hey, you
need to do more than just interview Doug, and I was like, okay,
and I had a contact in Wisconsin and we kind of worked it up.
I interviewed a bunch of people about dog Man out there, and so
I'll finally in December of last year, and so I'll finally be putting all
of that together just in time for Halloween. You were doing interviews driving around
Wisconsin in December. Yeah, was it pretty brutal. It was very cold,
that's for sure. I mean it was maybe fifteen degrees and I'm freezing
and everyone's like, oh, dude, it's actually pretty warm. And I'm
like, yeah, warm for you, not warm for me. You know,
I got something when you go back there, if you go see or
maybe actually called Seth. I just got an email yesterday, like frantic,
like she was just freaking out. She was at her place in Ohio and
it's just right up in one of the last rows, goes into like the
Hawking Hills, and she hurts the weirdest screaming sounding like crazy sound. She
thought it was like a Bobcat's fighting or something, but just sounded different.
And she went out there. When she round at the corner of the house,
go into the backyard that was in the wood into the woods. She
got beaned in the face like super hard by a red rubber ball, and
she's laying on the ground. She heard like like like a cackling sound or
something, and she looks up and there was a dog man hanging by one
arm from the tree looking at her at the woodline. I just passed it
on the b mill. It's just to see if it could possibly be a
she wanted, you know, just contact her to it could be a big
foot thing at all, or if it was just not a her wheelhouse.
But yeah, I mean that's something fresh at least, that's just you know,
two days ago. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what
to make of the whole dog man thing. So it's just it's a phenomenal,
dude, No one really can't. I mean, it's just it's a
phenomenal people report and some of the people are trustworthy, So it's just it's
just a it's a it's just a mind blower, you know, Like you
can't. I mean, we can. We just don't have the information to
wrap her. We don't have the technology to observe these whatever. Whatever the
phenomena is, like sure. Yeah. So anyways, hey have you so?
Did you ever look into that footage where that guy was catching live on
like Facebook live whatever and the thing ran through the backyard. It's like a
pictelated looking, blurry upright thing. Suppose like a nine ten foot dog about
you looked into that one? No, I haven't. No, that's kind
of like the most famous one I know about. No. I was on
the Navajo reservation earlier this year and I was given a video file. I'll
end up using this in a documentary at some point down the line. And
I don't know what to make of this footage. But they didn't have like
a game cam. They were having stuff happened in their backyard, so they
set up a camera with the infrared in their backyard and this dog is like
running through their backyard. And the weird thing is that it doesn't have a
head. It looks exactly like a dog's body, and it's running through the
yard and then it floats up into the air, gonna just be a pug
with gas. I don't know, man, it's freaky, Like, I
don't know what to make of it. Cliff, It's you got It's down
Fruitland, right. We did Brenda Harris one. Yeah, it was Brenda
Harris. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we seen a cliff Okay, I
don't remember that one. I don't remember that one, but I do love
Brenda. She's great. Yeah, yeah she is, Yeah, very very
helpful, great resources down there has repulse in the community. That's how that's
how she came on the radar was because of that video. Oh really,
I'm kidding. Yeah, well it sounds awesome. Yeah, yeah it is.
I'm looking forward to, uh getting back to the PNW more next year.
Every time I get burnt out on the Sasquatch subject or something, I
seem to end up back in the Pacific Northwest and everything is revitalized in me.
That's certainly what happened last time. You live in Los Angeles, and
as you said, as a way of beating the life out of you down
there and just sucking your soul. Pacific Northwest is a great place to get
revitalized, as you say, yeah, it really is. Plus, visiting
your museum is one of my favorite places in the world. So oh,
thanks, thanks. It'll be all sorts of new stuff by the time you
come back to Oh, I'm excited. I'm excited. The picture. I
love to show this to people when people ask me about sasquatch, and people
always talk about how big these things are. And you know, people,
oh, nine feet tall. And I took a picture of my dad standing
in front of Murphy back in the day, and my dad's six foot three,
very large dude. You know, he's He's not like a six foot
three lanky person. He's a six foot three large person and standing in front
of Murphy, who's seven a half feet and it's just you get the idea
of how much bigger these things are. Just their sheer mass is often underestimated.
I think, So, Eli, if you wouldn't mind sticking around for
our member section, we'd really appreciate it. We can do a little deep
dive with Matt Prude into the Zoobie thing, learn a little bit more about
that certain case and some other interesting things that you've dug up historically speaking.
But in the meantime, even though all these things are going to be in
the show notes below, so if you're on your computer or something, you
just click the link. For people driving, where can they find out more
about what you're doing and keep up on what Eli is up to. Sure
I guess the easiest way. My series is on the small Town Monsters YouTube
channels. So if you go to YouTube, type in small Town Monsters and
if you click on the channel, go to playlists, you'll find Mysteries and
Monsters all their listed together, so that in order as they've been released,
So that kind of helps out. But you can also find me on social
media as well. That's just my name, that Eli Watson as well.
Yeah, and I've been reminded that the playlist will be linked in these show
notes of this episode. Okay, very good man. Well, we really
appreciate it. We'll really appreciate you hanging out with us and tell us about
what's going on. And I really do appreciate your the depth and the historical
perspective that you bring to the work that you're doing. I think that that
stuff is lost on a lot of modern day big footers who came into it
with finding big Foot or something like that. They don't realize whose shoulders were
standing upon. And I think that's one of the most important things you can
do as a bigfoot researcher is look at those who came before you, because
we have there's a lot there and I've said it several times over the last
say, maybe six months. Every time I go in and I brush off
the dust of one of these cold cases, more stuff is revealed, and
you're doing that work and putting it out publicly. Thank you very much for
that, and also thank you for coming on big Foot and Beyond with me
and that other guy. Thanks for having me. Thanks Bobs. You want
to take us out of here? He didn't say you're welcome. Oh,
you're welcome. Where's your manners? Boy? Kids today? Man kids today?
Sit xers? Anyways? All right, well cool, Thanks Eli.
We'll talk to you in the member section here coming up, and tell our
listeners out there, thank you very much and keep it squatching. 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 to Bigfoot and Beyond
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