Today, I want to tell you about a journey that I've been on for
most of my life. Ever since I was a kid, I've heard tales
of bigfoot and wild men while spending time with my friends and family. As
I grew older and read more about the paranormal, my interest in encryptids and
other things strange only deepened. That's why I'm so excited to share with you
what I've personally become involved with the Untold Radio Network. The Untold Radio Network
is a live streaming podcast network that airs a new show every day across all
podcast platforms, YouTube, and more. They have eight different shows on all
sorts of exciting topics such as bigfoot, cryptids, UFOs, aliens, and
much more. I even have my own show called Weird Encounters, where I
talk about all things strange. This is more than just a podcast network.
It's a community that allows me to meet so many amazing people who share their
stories and experiences with strange. If you're interested in hearing more of these stories
and learning more about the paranormal and encryptids, make sure you check out the
Untold Radio Network for all kinds of exciting shows. It's free to subscribe.
So what are you waiting for visit www dot untold radionetwork dot com today.
Hey everybody, this is left Strive. Yes, yes, I know aka
Surviving Man and you're listening to Brian on sasquatch Us. Hey guys, and
welcome back to sasquatch Us. Thank you so much for cooking play. It
is Friday. I hope you guys have had a great week. We have
an amazing guest lined up for you. But as always, I want to
start by inviting you. If you've had an encounter and you'd like to be
on the show, shoot me an email you get me a Brian at Paranamal
World Productions dot com and head over to the website, check it out,
become a member there, and I hope support the show. I got to
sit down, gosh, there's been a couple of months back and talk to
Craig wool Heater. Craig is the founder of the TBRC that is now known
as the North American Wood Ape Conservancy and he's also the organizer of the Texas
Bigfoot Conference out there in Jefferson, Texas. He's here to share his personal
experiences. We get into all kinds of things, including our love for classic
cars. In the beginning of the episode, I think you guys are really
going to enjoy the conversation. So the time has come for me to let
the music play and you guys to sit back, relax and enjoy the show.
All right, folks, want to welcome our guest to the show.
It is Craig Woolheater. Welcome to the show. Man. Hey, looking
good there. I appreciate it, man. I am so glad that we
were able to reschedule this. I appreciate you working with us on the schedule.
I know we had this on the calendar and we had some crazy things
going on here on the property. So I really appreciate you rescheduling and I'm
glad to have you. Let's get right into it. Before we get into
Bigfoot, I know that you and I have another interest in common. You
love cars as much as I do. What kind of cars are you into?
I know I'm in my specific genre of cars, but I'm gonna let
you go first. You need to tell me what your genre of cars.
I am a vintage of Volkswagen Guy. One of my best friends has a
Badass GEA. I've never owned it. Yea, I had a seventy eight
Volkswagen camper bus was follow you, and we had a sixty seven Beetle.
Now I have since offloaded both of those. The bus actually paid for twenty
acres of my property once sold it. The Volkswagen Beetle I sold it up
to but I haven't had one in a while. A buddy of mine that
just moved in full time up the street. He's about a mile away.
He's been building his house and he's got a I think it's a seventy four
Beetle that he's restoring. I get to go turn wrenches on that. That's
one of my favorite things. I love to work on the things. What
kind of cars are you into? Man? My very first car when I
was a sophomore in high school was a sixty seven Firebird four hundred, so
I got that, and then I actually built a seventy three Vega and put
a three point fifty in it. Of course, I think I've got a
few years on you, but this was back in my high school years,
and then I got tired of that thing. It seemed like every other weekend
I knocked the bottom of the oil pan out of that thing. So I
got pretty proficient with the wirebrush and the drill motor and the JB weld to
make oil pan repairs. Then I got a seventy four four fifty five Transam
my senior year of high school and had several other Transams after that. The
last vintage car I had that we sold a couple of years ago. I
had a seventy three Grimlin that's were cool. I liked those. It purple,
No, it was red, man. I think it had been repainted,
but the exterior was red and it was a blue Jeans car. It
was one of those Levi's Blue Jeans car. I really enjoyed it. We
drove it and had a really good time. It was my daily driver back
and forth to work when I was working off the property for about a year.
I drove that thing everywhere. We loved it, but it just wasn't
practical here. We live out in the middle of the woods. We don't
have a garage, so it's not really practical for us to have something like
that, so I sold it. But I think Bigfoot and cars are just
those things that get into your blood. We're talking about that before you get
obsessed with a little bit of both. Let's get into bigfoot people are tuning
in to hear about that. What guy, you interested in the subject of
bigfoot. Was it something that was on your radar as a kid or was
it an experience that you had. It's both. It was actually something on
my radar as it as I was talking to you off the air about a
creature here in the Dallas fourth area in the late sixties, the Late Worth
Monster. This was something that was seen not more than a half hour from
downtown for work, but the summer of sixty nine, this thing was seen
by actually hundreds of people, which is pretty unheard of because most bigfoot encounters
and sightings are very few people, if more than a single person. But
this thing was seen out of this lake that at the time was just like
a lover's lane area where the teenagers would go out and drink and park and
stuff like that. But that summer it was seen, like I said,
by hundreds of people, including law enforcement personnel, which is pretty incredible because
there's a lot of small towns and such that have their localized monster generally named
after whatever water, whether it be a creek or a river or lake.
I know here in Texas there's all kinds of localized Chambers Creek Monster, Turkey
Creek Monster where I live in Jefferson now where I host my events as the
Big Cypress Swamp Monster. But this thing was out there at Lakeword, which
is now a city owned nature reserve refuge out there, and they now I'll
host the Lakeworth Monster Bash out there. The city of Fort Worth puts it
on and I helped them organize that since two thousand and nine. But the
next one's coming up. It's supposed to be in October of twenty twenty four
that they celebrate this legend here. But that's what got my interest started.
It was on July tenth and July eleventh of nineteen sixty nine. It was
on the front page of the foot Worth Star Telegram. We're talking a little
over a week from when man first landed on the Moon. The front page
story was about this creature that was seen out of the lake that was described
as a hairy, seven foot tallish creature that walked on two legs. So
that fascinated me as a kid. My grandparents lived in Fort Worth and they
actually had a cabin cruiser boat at the marina on the next lake over that
was just separated by a dam from a lake worth which was Eagle Mountain Lay.
I was fascinated with that story. They saved the newspaper clippings for me
and found a book by a local woman that she self published a month later.
That was I found it. My grandparents were having a house built and
they lived in some apartments while the house was finished. Went to the convenience
store to go look for, as we call them back then, funny books,
the comic books, and there on the rack was this book with a
creature on the cover. So I bought a copy of it for two dollars
and read it from cover to cover. That was in sixty nine. So
what's pretty funny is that thirty years later I actually got to meet the woman
that wrote the book and got a couple of cases of the books from her
that she still had up in her attic. That's what got me started.
Then a year or so later, I got a book by John Keel,
the man who wrote the book Mothman Prophecies that came out in nineteen seventy five.
But in nineteen seventy he had a book that came out called Strange Creatures
from Time and Space, and it had chapters on all kinds of different weird
creatures and monsters from all over the world. And I got that and read
it had really cool cover artwork by Frank who also did the cover for his
seventy five book Mofman Prophecies. I believe that edition though that had that art
work, came out later in the nineties, and then a couple of years
later I saw the famed movie The Legend of Boggie Creek in theaters when it
went nationwide distribution in nineteen seventy three. Those things cemented my interest and love
of cryptozoology. I know you had a sighting and experience a pretty early on.
Can you talk a little bit about how that happened and what happened during
your experience? Sure. For a Memorial Day nineteen ninety four, myself and
some friends, including the friend who has the cartman Ghia. There was twelve
of us, including my youngest brother, my girlfriend of time, we decided
to take a road trip to New Orleans. Like I said, this is
nineteen ninety four, pre Google Maps, map quest, GPS, any of
that. So we just got a roadmap and plaid it out and plotted what
looked like was the shortest quickest route to get there and back. And so
we set out from Dallas about five o'clock on Friday morning before Memorial Day.
Like I said, there was twelve of us. We were in five different
cars. On the way there, we all caravan together, and by the
time we were driving through Central Louisiana, it was mid morning. At that
time, it wasn't very spooky or anything. At that point. We stayed
all weekend and Monday was Memorial Day, and like I said, in five
cars, people left at different times to get back to town, depending on
when they needed to be back. Myself, my girlfriend, and a girl
who lived in the same building I did. We stayed until about nine o'clock
on Monday night. May thirtieth, ninety four, set out about nine o'clock
from New Orleans. So when we got to the State Highway, basically at
a two lane, unlit road from through central Louisiana, we didn't get there
until it's a ten thirty eleven o'clock. And that was a different story than
when we came down mid morning. Now it was a desolate, two lane,
unlit road out in the middle of nowhere. As we're traveling, heading
towards Alexandria, Louisiana, or on this two lane road, there is no
traffic, We see nobody. It's ten thirty eleven o'clock at night. It's
a swampy area to our left and on the right is just a tree line
that we can't see past. As we're driving, in my headlights we see
a figure off to the right of the road. We're probably driving and I
don't know seventy seventy five miles an hour, so in my headlights we see
this figure. My friends asleep in the back seat, but my girlfriend in
the passenger seat was awake. So as we approach this thing, I'll say,
whatever it was was walking parallel to the road, no more than twenty
feet from the edge of the road. On the passenger side, I'm concentrating
on driving while also watching this, but my girlfriend has their eyes locked on
it. We see it for probably no more than seven or eight seconds at
speed, I'm guessing in the headlights, but in the illumination of the headlights
it appears to be about seven foot tall. It's covered with hair that,
at least in the illumination my headlights, looks grayish color. It is actually
walking on two legs and it's slumped over a little bit. That's not strange
enough that the strangest thing is that it doesn't even notices us as we pass
it. We pass it at speed. As we passed it, she and
I both looked at each other and simultaneously said, did you just see what
I just saw? We agreed that we had, and I said, what
did you see? And she says, I think I saw a bigfoot and
I said, yeah, that's what I saw too. I said we need
to pull over and check this out, and she uttered a few choice phrases
that I probably shouldn't repeat here on the podcast, but she evhemently disagreed with
stopping. We did not stop. Shortly that after, we pulled through a
small town called Bunkie bu n Kie Bunky, Louisiana. That's about eleven thirty
at night on a Monday night now a holiday, a very small town.
The sidewalks are rolled up, there is nobody out, nothing open. It's
a little more built up now, but back then there was hardly anything.
So we just continued through town, slowed down for the speed limit, and
on the way out of town there was a small church, a Methodist church
that we pulled into the parking lot of off of the road that we were
on, Highway seventy one, Like I said, through central Louisiana. Interesting
fact, Highway seventy one, after it merges with Interstate twenty in the Shreeport
area, then turns north to Texas, Cana and Highway seventy one is the
same highway that Bisex Falk, Arkansas, the home of the legendary Fout Monster,
the legend of Buggy Creek. So it was that same highway. We
pulled into that parking lot and talked about it for about ten or fifteen minutes
while my friend that was in the back seat was still asleep. She had
to be at work that next morning, so she was asleep. We got
back on the road. At that point, we're still probably five and a
half hours from Dallas. The funny thing about it is I don't really remember
talking about it once we got on the road. It was just something really
strange that happened to us. Didn't talk about it when I got home.
Didn't really know that much other than what I was interested in as a kid.
But the thing that especially your young listeners, I'm going to believe is
that the time this happened, I was still over three years away from getting
internet access. I didn't even have that as a reference. The summer of
nineteen ninety seven, when I got internet access AOL dial up, I went
and started looking for information and found Back then, I guess the BFRO had
not much of a web presence. I don't even know if they actually had
a website at that time, but there was message boards and forums and such
that were out there, so I logged into those and bonded with people there.
I actually finally first told my story there to people that were interested,
and met another gentleman that was wanting to start a research organization. So he
and I formed the Texas Bigfoot Research Center online and a few in person meetings,
and the organization was born on June twenty sixth, nineteen ninety nine,
where we put up a free chenc angel fire website with all kinds of stupid
blinking animations and such, put up a report submission form, and people started
contacting us, reporting their experiences, encounters and such, and also wanting to
get involved with what we're doing. So that's how the organization was born and
grew. That's how my interest in Bigfoot started an outdoorsman. I wasn't a
hunter, like I said, I was a boy scout as a teenager.
But I wanted to try and find answers to what my experience was that my
girlfriend and I had both seen later my wife of twenty years, we had
seen this. I don't know what else it could have been. It wasn't
a burned out tree stop. It wasn't a horse or a cow or any
kind of known animal. I doubt that it was a hunter in a gilly
suit or a prankster in a gorilla suit that was standing nearly seven feet tall
or so out on the side of the road when there's not even any traffic
out there to pray somebody. And over the years, I've talked to probably
hundreds of people that describe having all different kinds of encounters or sightings or experiences
or whatever with these creatures. Even if I discount every one of those other
stories that I've been told, I still have my own experience that I can't
explain away as anything else other than and encounter with one of these creatures.
When somebody tells me or tells you, you interview people that they've had an
experience to me, there's only a couple of options that could have happened.
They could be aligning and making it up, which I've encountered people that have
done that. They could have been hoaxed by someone else, and I've encountered
experiences of that as well. They could be under the influence of drugs or
alcohol hallucinations. They could be misidentifying known wildlife or a person. The only
other option that I know of is that they could be explaining exactly what they
saw and what they experienced. I feel at least a portion of them,
of the signing reports fall under that category, which means that there's something out
there. Like I said, even if I just ditch all of those people
that I've talked to, I've still got my own experience and I can't explain
away. I definitely want to get into the TBRC stuff. But before we
get into that, one of the things that has stuck out to me out
of the hundreds of people that I've interviewed is these roadside sidings. It's the
weirdest thing in the world to me, that these things are probably the most
elusive creature. People make millions of dollars a year on the hide and Seek
t shirts with these things, because it's just become a joke. It's the
hide and Seek champion of the world. Yet so many people have experiences very
much like you did. You're driving along a highway, albeit there's not a
lot of traffic out there, it's still a fricking highway, and this thing's
walking along like it has no cares in the world, and you guys see
it. And then you have the roadside crossings. It's like these things are
waiting on cars to come by and they cross literally in front of them.
And I'm with you, man, I don't think that every single one of
those if you threw out ninety percent of those or maybe ninety nine percent of
them, and only one percent of the roadside crossings or roadside sidings of these
things are true and accurate, And it's not a misidentification. It's not somebody
that's just crazy. Are they making up the story? That just has baffled
me over the years of looking into Bigfoot, that these things can be the
most elusive thing ever and then somebody can almost hit one once a month.
It's just the weirdest thing. Have you thought about that over the years after
you had your sighting. Have you talked to other people and considered why the
hell that is? I don't get it. Stay tuned for more sasquatch out
to see. We'll be right back after these messages. Certainly. I mean,
we did statistics with all the reports that we had gathered and the categories
of witnesses that you know. By far, the two largest were roadside crossings
as well as hunters and other outdoorsman fishermen, where the vast majority of sightings
of these creatures. I feel that these things are very elusive. But one
thing that I've found in talking to people and investigating rapports of sightings and such,
while they seemed to be very elusive, they also seemed to be very
curious about humans. I've interviewed people, I've gotten interviews from credible people.
One guy was a good friend of mine who just passed away. Came to
the conference in the early years. But he was on an outdoor outing with
a college professor at the time out in East Texas, and without looking at
it, I don't remember, I'm pretty sure it was a national forest,
but they were camping with his college professor, and one of these things came
into the middle of their camp while some were still away, and they saw
it. They left footprints near their camp and they reported it to a forest
ranger. Park ranger who came out and investigated, looked around and talked to
them and interviewed them. I've just met a lady that lives not far from
him. I haven't gone out there yet, but I may go out there
tomorrow that saw something the same kind of deal that crossed the road in front
of their car. They weren't right on top of it, but it galed
an embankment that by the time they got to where it crossed, it was
gone. There's no way a human could have galed this embatement. I haven't
seen it yet. She said that it was a very steep embatement going up
from the side of the road. When they got there, it was gone.
And she was with her son, a caregiver for an elderly gentleman that
she lives in an RV on his property out here in a very rural area,
out very near Blake of the Pines, which is twenty minutes from me.
But the same thing, saw one across the road. I haven't interviewed.
Over the years, several people in the area here in Jefferson and surrounding
areas that late at night driving saw something in the culvert next to the road.
One woman said that she thought it was just a bunch of trash bags,
black trash bags that were piled up. She saw that and was very
curious. After she drove a little farther and she came back and it wasn't
there. There was a peach orchard right on the other side of the road
from where she passed this thing. Another woman just north of town here saw
something that was on the side of the road, a large dark figure,
and as she slowed down and passed it, she looked in her rear view
mirror and she saw it actually stand up and crossed the road in just a
couple of steps. Personally, I think that for the most part, when
people see these things that it's probably an accident on the part of the pick
pots, that it just happened to be at the right place at the wrong
time, just like any other wildlife crosses the road. These habitats have roads
up and down and across, so to get from one area, maybe a
food source, to a water source, they have to cross a road just
by the luck of the draw happened to do it when a car tops the
horizon and they're already going across or think that they can make it. I
know that mile. My friend Lyle Blackburn's investigated reports same thing happening in the
Foul area with the Foul Monster. He had a case where this thing crossed
the road was actually caught in the headlight between vehicles coming from opposite directions.
One of them was a semi truck and one was a car. Mode of
guys that were just out at night driving in the area that lived in the
area. So they stopped. The truck driver stopped. He didn't know anything
about it. They stopped, got out of their cars that had gone off
the road and into the woods. The guy was wondering what the heck that
was, and so they told him he didn't know anything about the movie or
the Foug Monster, and he promptly got back in his truck and hauled ass.
That's apparently all he wanted to do with the Foug Monster. Like I
said, I've talked to people that have had these come into their campsites and
rummage through their food, their cooler, their backpacks, whatever. I've had
people that lived in rural households. I had one woman that was a housewife
that was doing the dishes at night, had the window right above the seint
no curtain, just happened to look up and saw a large hairy face looking
back in at her. I've heard of people that watching TV at night the
same kind of circumstances in their living room, no curtains in their window.
There's not any neighbors. They didn't feel the need to have curtains in the
windows and look out in the yard and see something standing out in the yard
looking in at them. I don't know they are coined the world champion hide
and seek player, but they are seen. And the thing is that if
somebody sees one of these things, that's just a very tiny sliver of that
creature's twenty four hours of that day for people to say, oh, this
is what they do, or this is how they are, or whatever you
might see. The average sighting is in the few seconds range, five to
ten seconds. Maybe there are some longer ones where people have witnessed them for
a couple of minutes. Just such a small sliver of that day of what
goes on in the day of the life of a bigfoot. Even more so
for there to be a bigfoot sighting. It takes two things. It takes
a bigfoot to be somewhere, and it takes a person to be there to
also witness it. So the other twenty three hours, fifty nine minutes and
fifty five seconds of the day, it's out there encountering nobody and just happens
to buy accident, come across a person. Very good point. I say
that often you have to have those two things. There has to be a
sasquatch and there has to be a person there to see it. Let's talk
a little bit about the TBRC that has morphed and changed quite a bit over
the decades. Talk about some of that early research that you guys did.
I know you had some camera projects going on. Talk a little bit about
that research that eventually moved into today the North American Wood Ape Conservancy. We've
had quite a few of those guys on. I've had Darryl Collier, I've
had Brian Brown, Matt Preu, it's been on the show. We've talked
about that and what's going on out of Area X. But talk about those
early days of the Texas Bigfoot Research Center and what you guys were into back
then. Back then we were a no kill organization. We operated under the
guys that through discussion with the guy that was in charge of the Rare and
Endangered Species for Texas Parks and Wildlife, he was going to come speak at
our ofference I believe it was in two thousand and seven, but had a
conflict and didn't get to come out. But he was interviewed in a story
that we were involved in that was a TV station or newspaper that claimed that
it wouldn't necessarily take a body that if they were able to verify the chain
of custody of photographic or video evidence that it wasn't photoshopped, hoaxed, whatever,
that it would go a long ways towards them declaring that as a species
here in Texas. Now, this was many years ago and certainly before the
just recent proliferation of AI. Our work, which at this point, I
don't know if you can trust any image that you would come across or be
presented to you, because there's so much that can be done technology wise with
imagery. But that's what we were operating out in the early two thousands.
We had a camera project, Operation Forest Vigil that We had at that time
approximately forty game cameras, and majority of them big raconic game cameras, which
back then those game cameras were six hundred dollars apiece. We had those in
several different areas over the years, up in southeast Oklahoma and what is called
Area X. We were down in the Big Thicket of Southeast Texas. We
had cameras up in sam Houston National Forest, sometimes overlapping, so we had
members who would go out and service those cameras, cool memory cards, change
out the batteries, and very remote areas and rugged terrain, mountainous up in
Oklahoma, very swampy down in Southeast Texas, and wooded in all the places
we actually worked with government agencies. Area ACTS was governed by the Nature Conservancy.
We had their permission, their knowledge that we were there conducting research in
the ticket that is governed by the National Park Service. And I know Darrell
headed this part up, so I don't know if it came up when you
interviewed him, but that camera project was permitted by the National Park Service.
We had to apply and be approved for a permit for camera study of bigfoot.
I'm not lying. They approved our permit for a camera study for Bigfoot
in the Big Ticket the National Park Service, and at the end of the
year we would have to submit a report of our findings and a copy of
every photo that our cameras took. But that was an annual deal that we
had to submit to them for them to go over for them to issue us
another permit to permit the study to continue in those areas and as well as
in the Sam Houston National Forest. We had a project there for a short
time and that was under the permission of the US Forest Service, and at
one time up in southeast Oklahoma, we had along with the cameras we ended
up because there's so many bears up there. We had to protect our cameras
because one of our earliest video camera that we had was my personal video camera
that we got on another game camera that was trained at it of a bear
ripping that video camera out of the housing that it was in. But we
ended up having investing in plate steel bear boxes to put our cameras in there
to protect them from the bears because they were attracted to I guess the petroleum
byproduct that bodies of the cameras were made with. We actually put up hair
snares near these cameras up in Oklahoma to try to get hair samples from sasquatch
bigfoot. We got a couple of anomalist photographs, but nothing that was definitely
a bipedal primate. But we did have a lot of bears that were reaching
into these hair snares and were snaring their hair in these things. Actually,
in conjunction with Texas Parks and Wildlife, we were supplying them with hair samples
that we collected, and they were using DNA on these hair samples to compare
to hair samples that they were getting of bears coming into East Texas, where
they were trying to elaborate where these bears were crossing over into Texas, whether
it was from the north in Oklahoma or from the east of Louisiana or the
northeast in Arkansas. So we worked with governmental agencies that didn't ridicule what we
were doing, that were very interested in what we were doing, which I
thought was pretty incredible. As a matter of fact, the first time in
the Big Thicket they had a research laboratory. It was barracks, bunks,
kitchen, laundry, and a laboratory. They're in the Big Thicket when we
went to go reserve that for a week long research mission. I believe it
was Darryl that went in there to go reserve this place, and it had
a drop down list of scientific research organizations if you were in their database to
reserve this place. And when he went down the drop down list, our
organization, the Texas Bigfoot Research Center, was already in the drop down list
for this reserving this research facility. You know, we didn't have to go
in and enter ourselves and apply to do this. We were already an approved
research organization that could use this, and so we did and base there for
a week to put cameras out or to go service cameras or whatever they're in
the Big Ticket. That's the kind of stuff we were doing when investigating taking
in reports. We investigated on site reports that came in from the four state
region of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana. Most often would go and
interview the witness on site where it happened and interview them. So that was
what we did. I resigned from the organization in twenty ten to focus on
other things, including my personal life and my business. The organization reorganized in
two thousand and seven as the Texas Booklet Research Conservancy, still the TBRC,
but as a five oh one C three nonprofit where people could make tax deductible
donations. In twenty thirteen, they reorganized as the North American Woodock Conservancy,
and at the end of twenty three, Team I decided to reorganize the RC
the Texas Big Book Research Center and start hosting the annual conference again. I'm
sure that's another question you have coming up to ask about the Texas Big Book
Conference. I definitely want to get into that. That's something that not everybody
does. Not everybody organizes a Bigfoot conference. Is that something that was in
your wheelhouse already? Talk a little bit about how that first conference came about.
I know it was back in two thousand and one, so there's definitely
a story there. Talk a little bit about that first conference and how it's
progressed over the years. What happened was in two thousand, basically the first
full year that the TBRC was in the works, was organized and investigating,
I saw about the Ohio Bigfoot Conference that had actually been going annually since nineteen
eighty nine. So in two thousand, myself and the guy that I co
founded the T A b or C with Luke Gross. He and I and
another member Daniel McCallister, flew up to Ohio and went to the Ohio Bigfoot
Conference at that time. It was hosted actually in the cafeteria of an elementary
school. It was in either March or April of two thousand, so it
was quite a bit different weather from Texas in March or April. As a
matter of fact, it was knowing that weekend went up there. That's where
I actually met Smokey Crabtree of Falk, Arkansas. Actually met probably the most
influential person I've ever met in Bigfoot research was where doctor John Bendernagel. He
was a speaker there that year and I spent quite a bit of time with
him, hiking with him. We went on a high c up there.
Organizer Don Cheating had had earlier filmed some footage of what appears to be a
white sasquatch up There. Also met Scott Harriet, several other Bill dring Ginnis
who passed away a couple of years ago, that was a very technical person
building technical equipment to gather credible evidence. Met a group of people that just
felt at home with felt welcomed, had a great time. But I also
had in my mind that there's nothing like this in Texas. I bet that
I could do something like this. I bet that I could organize something like
this, and so the wheels started turning. My parents had the year before
that bought a bed breakfast actually here in Jefferson. And this is actually a
story that is not told very often, but the real reason that Jefferson is
now the Bigfoot Capital of Texas and that it is the home of the Texas
Bigfoot Conference is that my parents owned a bed and breakfast here in town,
and my mom was on the events committee for the Bed and Breakfast Association.
So when I started planning to host an event, I used the resources that
I had, which was my folks here in town, and started the conference.
Went to the Ohio conference the next year in two thousand and one,
was already working on my event, and it was the next year in two
thousand and one, And as you mentioned, the date of the very first
Texas Big Book Conference was September fifteenth, two thousand and one. So if
that doesn't bring bells with anybody, it's only four days after nine to eleven.
I woke up on Tuesday morning, Tuesday before the conference was set to
take place, I woke up to turning on the television and seeing the second
plane crashing into the World Trade Center. I'm sure you remember those days,
and it was turmoil. I had just recently actually been laid off from my
job. My job was relocating actually to Atlanta, Georgia, and I did
not want to relocate from Dallas, so I took the buyout or whatever to
retire and not to go with the company. So at the time that I
was playing the conference, and that happened like the first of August two thousand
and one. At that time, organization was very new. We didn't have
funds to a host of events, so I was funding it myself. At
that point I decided to go forward. We had some speakers who were not
able to fly in. Louren Coleman was coming in was not able to fly
out of Banger, Maine to get here because that airport was used by one
of the terrorist groups, which some of the airports started opening back up on
Friday for limited air travel. I had another speaker flying in from Los Angeles,
I believe, with Linda Moulten Howe and she didn't take into account there
was no pulling up or dropping off at the terminals, so she actually missed
her flight. But I did have other speakers, including dot John Bendernaudel who
did not fly, who was driving in from Vancouver Island and had been on
the road for five weeks at that time. Stay tuned for more sasquatch out
to see We'll be right back. After these messages that nine to eleven happened
stopping in and visiting friends and Bigfoot eyewitnesses on the way from Vancouver Island to
Texas, we still held the event. We still had about one hundred and
thirty five people that showed up, so it was deemed a success, and
so we just continued and it got bigger and have to move locations. In
two thousand and five, leading up to the conference, there was a seven
page cover article in a large publication here Texas monthly magazine. It was Bigfoot
in Texas, Our Bigfoot in East Texas. I don't know. I've still
got a copy question mark on the cover, of course, which featured the
Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders didn't feature an image of big Foot on the cover, but
it had the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and also had another large article on the world
famous wrestling Van Eric family that was from Dallas. It was also in that
magazine, but like I said, a seven page article about the Bigfoot organization.
Here in East Texas, we had a two page spread in Texas Highways
magazine that morn photographer that I guess sold a photo in an article to USA
Today that was on the front page of the Live section in USA Today from
the event, and as a matter of fact, it was a crawler on
CNN at the bottom of the screen. That weekend Bigfoot conference in Texas draws
hundred and two thousand and five. Was very big, and other cities started
taking notice of it, and we started getting courted by other Texas cities to
host the event there. At the time, Jefferson was about two thousand people
population here in East Texas. It is almost three hours away from DFW Airport,
forty five minutes from Shreeport, an hour away from Texas Canta. So
we had larger cities including Athens, Texas and Tyler, Texas, which actually
has a population of one hundred thousand came a courting us, wanting us to
move the event. There By that time we were reorganized as a five to'
one C three, so everything was done by committees. At that point we
had a conference committee, and the committee felt that it was advantageous to move
to a more populous area. I did not want to move it from Jefferson,
but it wasn't just up to me. It was up to a committee
of seven people, and these other two cities courted us, took us around,
showed us venues and what they would do for us in all, and
it was finally decided to move it to Tiger, which is home to several
universeies and a population of one hundred thousand. While it was successful there,
it did not grow exponentially from what it was here in Jefferson, which was
the assumption of those on the committee. So it was hosted there in Tyler
for three years. In the middle of that conference tenure, I resigned from
the organization in July of twenty ten. I had already organized the conference and
ranged the speakers and everything, so I attended that year. But in twenty
eleven was the last year it was held in Tyler by the then Texas Bigfoot
Conservancy. They did not host it in twenty twelve, when I was no
longer involved with that. In twenty thirteen, they moved it to actually to
Fort Worth, to one of the conference rooms at the Terrent County Convention Center,
and even moving it to a much more populated area there in the DFW
Metroplex. I forget what the population of that is several million people. The
attendance did not grow accordingly, so as in an organization, they for whatever
reason decided not to host the event again. After that happened, I went
ahead and, like I said, reorganized the TBRC and brought the conference back
here to Jefferson in twenty fourteen. The original Texas Bigfoot Conference originally in Jefferson,
originally hosted by the Texas book Foot Research Center and originally organized by myself.
So now coming up next month will be the tenth year that it has
been back here in Jefferson. Yeah, it's coming up. When is the
date in October? I think is the twentieth, Maybe is when the conference?
Yeah, the twentieth and the twenty first of October here in Jefferson.
As a matter of fact, both Darryl Collier and prud are speaking at the
event. The headliner, the keynote speaker is doctor Maria Bayer from Expedition Bigfoot,
who is a good friend of mine from before the show. Back in
her early days, she had actually written a school paper about the Yetti.
She has been coined the female Indiana Jones. She has explored the rainforest of
Madagascar. She has discovered a species of lemur herself. So she is someone
who has ventured out into the wilderness for sure, dealt with adult male silver
back guerrillas being charged by silverback guerrilla with many wild animals. Ant Geo Explorer
hosted several other nat GEO television shows about wildlife and the fourth season of Expedition
Bigfoot last month on Discovery. She will be coming to Jefferson next month.
Like I said, Darryl, call you and Matt Pruitt of the North American
Wood Ape Conservancy will be coming to speak. Sabella Irwin of the BFRO,
who has led many expeditions for the BFRO, but also is an eyewitness sketch
artist that she sketches. They put witnesses descriptions just like police eyewitness sketches,
go back and forth, draw it, send it to them, let them
look at it and ask them. But if there's any differences, go back
and forth and fine tune it to get what the witness saw. And then
Shelley Covington, Montana, who is another outdoors woman that you know. She
nearly every summer spends four months solo camping in the Pacific Northwest. She did
not go this year, but she has the last I don't even know six
seven, eight years that she's been doing that. Also Ashlyn Brown, who
is a genetic scientist. She studied biology in college and as a degree biologist
genetic scientists who also experienced in her childhood a bigfoot activity on her family's farm,
and she's written a set of three semi fictional books about that as well
as been involved with the scientific aspect of sasquatch bigfoot, which is pretty incredible
I think as far as Bigfoot conferences go. That actually four of six speakers
are females, and actually Chester Moore, local Texas outdoorsman, will be coming
and bringing an underprivileged child and his family to the conference through his Wild Wishes
program for underprivileged or traumatized children that have lost a sibling or a parent,
or have been very ill. He will be bringing their family to experience the
Texas Bigfoot Conference. So he's going to have thirty minutes speaking slot. So
actually they're seven speakers, so four out of seven are females. Up will
be speaking at the event at weekend. Very cool stuff. I will link
to that in the show so you guys can go over and check it out.
Craig Man, I really appreciate you taking time to come on the show.
I've had a blast talking to you. I enjoyed it. Like you
said, I've done many of these and nowadays I generally turned them down unless
it's a friend. Considering yourself lucky hit you're a friend. Hopefully our pass
pross sooner in the future they say you don't have to go home, but
you can't. Stays joy this job, that char everything, calling ricket back,
prying back, Joy for me, Joy, stay right, you come
it right away. Steps step ste do do do do do do do do
do dossamest stas ussst usss