Speaker 1: This is that Bigfoot podcast where hoaxes die, loud, myths
get crushed, and the truth doesn't need permission. We don't
do blurry, we don't do polite. We cut through crap
and call it like it is. If you're here for
feel good folklore, keep scrolling. But if you're fed up
with the fake and hungry for real answers, let's go
that Bigfoot podcast. We're not just hunting sasquatch, We're breaking
the illusion wide open.
Speaker 2: Doctor Hogan Hiro, how are you, my friend?
Speaker 3: I'm done pretty well. How are you? Man? You had
a camp out recently doing well?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm glad to be back.
Speaker 4: I'd never like sleeping on a cot, but that kind
of goes with camping. I don't do glamping. I actually
do camping. We were about three plus hours away from
us here and Lenore. We were out in an area
in Tompkin, North Carolina. Interesting camp out, interesting place. I'd
been there earlier this year we did a camp out
in an area that was very close to there, over
and Andrews, and we had taken people to this particular
area and I actually interviewed a guy who had a
sasquat siding literally to the entrance of this campground, so
it was really cool to go back, take a group
of I think we had fifteen people that were signed
up to be on the camp out, so.
Speaker 2: I was really looking forward to it.
Speaker 4: Easy drive to get there, beautiful drive through the nanta
Hala forest area, which I love.
Speaker 2: But yeah, we had a great camp out.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 4: We're there Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and I just got
back from that.
Speaker 2: It's Tuesday as we record this.
Speaker 4: I got back late Sunday evening and got back into
the routine. Something we got to get into. I haven't
really talked about it publicly yet because as of now
what it was like. Last Thursday, I got the word
that doctor Jeff Meldrim had passed away somewhat at least
for me, unexpectedly, and I think it took the community
by surprise because I had just seen Jeff up in
the Smoky Mountains at the Great Smoky Mountain Bigfoot Conference
at the end of July. So we're talking less than
a month and a half ago. It was before the
conference opened up for everybody. At nine o'clock, Jeff was
setting up his booth. I just set my booth up
and I took the opportunity to go over. This probably
eight or eight fifteen, so there was nobody really milling
around but us, and he was just sitting at his booth,
getting his stuff ready for the day. And I went
over and he had never seen my cast in person.
He had seen pictures of him, he had seen the
scans that Cliff had done and sent to him so
he could look at him, but he hadn't actually seen
or held the cast. So I walked over with the
set of the cast. He was excited to see those
and we talked and I could tell in the beginning
of the conversation that it wasn't the same Jeff. There
was clearly something off full disclosure. He said to me.
Cognitively he had been he put it as slowing down,
was his words, and he was having some memory and
recall issues, which was very uncharacteristic for him, because Jeff
can have a conversation about something that happened in nineteen
seventy four and recall it. So it was very different.
And I walked away from that conversation. We talked for
about thirty minutes, and then we had to get ready
because they were about to open up the doors. For
the VIP folks, and he was talking about being very
excited about retiring from the university next year. He was
joking about losing all of his It wasn't really a joke.
He was seriously contemplating what he was going to do
because he was losing all that office space at Idaho
State University where he's got all of these casts and
all of his things he's collected over these decades.
Speaker 2: He said, I got to figure.
Speaker 4: Out what I'm going to do and how I'm going
to wrestle some more space away from Lauren in our
house so I can bring some of these casts home.
And where am I going to put them? He said,
Let's face it, when I leave the university, if I
get an office at all, it's going to be a
broom closet somewhere in the back of some random room.
So we talked about that, and he was so excited
about being able to slow down a little bit, spend
more time I'm on the big Foot stuff, and just
enjoy retirement. It really hit me like a ton of bricks.
I was getting text messages before the actual announcement was made,
so I knew it was coming. Everybody out of respect
I won't say everybody, because not everybody did this. Most
people waited for Lauren, his wife, to make the announcement
on his Facebook that he had passed away. There are
some people out there who had some insider information that
felt the need to be first and wanted to post
it for everybody. Congratu your fucking lations whatever they did
for you. Once that announcement came, I was just really
bummed because my phone started blowing up. People were sending
me messages. I appreciate it, I get it, but I'm
one of these people. I said this privately to somebody
over the course of the weekend while we were camping out,
And I don't know if this bugs you or not.
Speaker 2: But I don't know if I'm just a dick or what.
Speaker 4: But when something like that happens, do you ever get
the feeling that people are trying to make it all
about them. As soon as that happened, it was Oh,
I just talked to him. Here's a picture we took together.
The narrative is not about Lauren and his kids and
him and his life and the fact that he's gone.
It just becomes about everybody else.
Speaker 2: I get it.
Speaker 4: The person I was having this conversation with said I
did that. I posted the last picture that I took
with him at the conference down in Okala, and I
was in the photograph because I was right there with
him in Okaala. I was like, that's cool, you know him,
it was an event that you were a part of.
I get that, and I'm not saying that people can
or shouldn't do that, because everybody grieves in different ways
and everybody handles those kind of things in different ways.
But at times, to me, it feels very disingenuous, and
it's just human nature, I think, to make everything about them.
So I have purposely, I really haven't felt like, frankly,
doing any kind of post on social media about Jeff
and his passing. I knew at some point in time
I was going to do something like this on this
show with you, or I was going to talk about
it over on sasquatch Otasy. I haven't remastered the episode
that I did with Jeff Gosh back in twenty twenty
one he was on the show, so I'll probably do
that and maybe incorporate something on the show. That's how
I handle it. I go into the creative process and
I try to make something Better that he was a
part of as a tribute. But I don't know did
you get the same feeling. I know you knew Jeff,
and I know you know a ton of people in Bigfoot.
Was it the same thing for you when the announcement
was made. Was it just all about reaching out and
having these conversations, what's going to happen next, Who's going
to pick up the mantle?
Speaker 2: That kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I remember I reached out to you by text
because I did see one of those early posts someone
like splash report sort of thing. I don't believe anything
I see on social media until I have fourteen verifications.
At this point, I've been fortunate. I've known Jeff for
over twenty years as a professional colleague in biological anthropology.
He was several years ahead of me in grad school
at Stonybrook. I was at Yale getting my PhD. So
by the time I was in he was I think
in his post doc maybe first year faculty member. But
I'd see him at conferences often chat with him. I
would never say we're friends. I would never say we're close.
And we're professional colleagues for a long time, and I
know him and really respected his skills, and you mentioned
his memory. Part of that is what made him such
a great anatomist, because he could really remember details of anatomy,
having taught anatomy and bake an anatomy courses. And I
am not an anatomist. I was very aware of that
in grad school. That kind of attention to detail in
memory recall is I think one of the keys to
someone who's really skilled in that area. I did see
a lot and had a lot of people. Oh man,
I remember the first time I ever met Jeff. For me,
if you were recalling a memory, if you're talking about
the time that you went up to Jeff's table and
he spent twenty minutes talking to you about some little
minute element that you found really fascinating, and Jeff really
engaged with you, because that's the kind of guy he was.
He was genuinely curious about everything. He was really generous
with his time, his knowledge, and his energy. So if
that's the case, that I think is part of the
normal grieving process is trying to make it real for yourself.
None of us were there when it happened. I think
it's part of the natural grieving process to try and
make it real. My partner. Her daughter just lost a
very close friend in a car accident this last week.
One of the things that I noticed was that she
and a bunch of her friends came together and they
kept finding situations to try and make it real because
they hadn't seen this guy in about a year or so,
so the idea of this person just being done. And
I think for the Sasquatch community, I think Jeff was
such a huge figure in it at this point, and
he was that kind of beacon of science for a
lot of people. So I think for that they're trying
to make it real. Where I have the problem is
when they and I think, this is what you're talking about,
where Okay, you posted a picture, this was an amazing
moment I got to meet doctor Jeff Meldrum. Then you
go on about how you're feeling. You're making it about
you instead of just saying, I'm really glad he added
what he did to our community, and I hope the
best for his family, because that's really all we should
be saying at this moment. In a nutshell, it's great.
I listened to Clifton Bobo talking a little bit good.
Berrickman and I exchanged some texts about it. I listened
to them talking about their stories with Jeff and Matt
pro jumping in and how he impacted them. I really
appreciated they did exactly what we're talking about. They kept
bringing it back to Jeff's impact on sasquatch studies, what
he brought to the field, the importance of his book,
the gravitas that he brought, and the validity that he
brought to me. That's Jeff. The lasting legacy, but also
the kind of proper lane that we should be in
is not oh, I did this and I'm doing this.
But I do think it's in some ways a fine
line to walk, because I think it's just people their
brains trying to make it make sense, and then it's
natural for like you said, natural for folks to to
be making it about themselves in that moment. Yeah, I'm
torn about it, man, because I think that's almost a
coping mechanism that helps people work through the fact that
we're all going to hit that point at at some point,
we're all going to leave this life, at some point
we're all mortal. I think that's one of the biggest
challenges for people to grapple with sometimes I agree.
Speaker 2: Look, I want to be clear here.
Speaker 4: I'm not trying to be a dick about people grieving
a loss of somebody like Jeff. That's not mine tent here.
It was more of it struck me as I guess
there's a better example. When you're at a party and
you're excited about a new car that you just got
and you want to show everybody pictures, or maybe it's
a new child or and I see this happen a
lot on social media. Somebody will do a post about
something they're very proud of, and then the entire thread
will be, oh, yeah, I had a sixty nine Chevy
when I was a kid, and here's the pictures of that,
And then it's the same thing. Right, I'm completely hijacking
the shit you were talking about.
Speaker 2: That really doesn't matter. It opened the door for me
to tell you everything I want.
Speaker 3: To tell you.
Speaker 4: It's almost like having those conversations in person with people
when you know they're not listening to shit you're saying.
They're just waiting on you to stop talking so they
can respond to whatever they want to say. That's the
social media version of what I'm talking about. I don't know,
it just hit me in the wrong way. I was
in a really foul mood over it because it really
bummed me out.
Speaker 3: That's the other element is that for some folks who
knew Jeff and who interacted with them regularly, it's a
lot more personal than it is for fanboyfangirl online who
then want to talk about the experience they had with
thatsquatch in nineteen eighty four. I do a lot of
coaching and and consulting with folks. That's my main gig.
It's a very fine line that you have to walk
of how do you make things relatable where you're reaching
out and saying, let's use your example the brand new car.
Oh yeah, man, I remember my first brand new car,
the feel, the smell that they put it into the car,
but just feels different. That's great. But then when you
go and I'll tell you what I took it, and
you take the next half hour talking about the first
road trip you took it in your brand new car,
and the first time you took your wife on a
date in your brand new car, your partner on a
date in the brand new car, or whatever the case is.
That's when you're hijacking. I think it's something that you're
absolutely right. It's so prevalent with social media. People get
going on a post and they're replying to something, man,
they just go crazy. The difference is you're talking about
somebody passing here. I know that's where you're getting at
with your example of the brand new car. Is there's
a difference between hijacking someone's conversation about a brand new car,
which it's still rude, hijacking the passing of someone. I
don't think you're being a dick about it at all.
I think that's where you're pointing out. Let's take our
own ego out of the situation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this happened when Jeff had his incident a couple
of years ago on the Alaskan Bigfoot cruise and he
was life flighted off. He almost died. He had a
very serious medical event, had to be life flighted off
of this Alaskan cruise. And it was happening in my
Facebook group big Footing Counters and Field Research on Facebook.
A few days after the factor, maybe a week after
the fact, I was in contact with people who had
been to the hospital to see Lauren. Drove out there,
got an update. It wasn't good. Jeff was in intensive
care on live support, and people were posting in the
group glad to know doctor Jeff's home, resting comfortably, recover
soon best wishes. I, of course, wasn't going to say
anything publicly about what I knew private lee, So I
just got in there and said, hey, guys, I don't
know how else to say this, but just be mindful
of what you're posting. If you have not gotten direct
information from someone in his family, are very close circle,
don't put that shit out. Because I was frankly afraid
that he was going to pass away. Then then you've
got all these people saying, oh, I just read that
Johnny over here said he was fine home resting.
Speaker 2: Jesus, what happened.
Speaker 4: Not that it really fucking matters, but that could have happened,
and people are just posting and piling on, Oh he's
resting comfortably at home. No, he's in intensive care, fighting
for his life. Just things like that. Let it be
a cautionary tale for everybody. This is my coaching session
to all of you people. If you ever get in
the situation like that on Facebook, just don't post it.
Just don't please. If you don't know, don't say it.
But tell you what's not fine line here. There is
a fine line with that, and I totally agree with you.
Here's what's not a fine line. Let me read what
this ap A hat posted on Facebook.
Speaker 1: We've got to pay some bills, but don't go anywhere.
That Bigfoot podcast will be right back after.
Speaker 4: This in the Coalition for Critical Thinking group about a
day and a half ago. I guess maybe two days ago.
I don't remember when this was sent to me, but
I'm gonna read it verbatim. I'm gonna leave his name out.
Hogan didn't want to use his name. I respect that
because I would be blasting this fucker.
Speaker 3: Let me just say the reason why is I don't
think he deserves any kind of recognition on air. I
love that you're reading the message, but I don't think
he deserves by name anything.
Speaker 2: So he who does not deserve to be named.
Speaker 4: This is a Facebook post on his Facebook page a
couple of days ago.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 4: A lot of tributes going out anytime someone passes. It's
a sad thing for those who love them, a shock
to blind followers, and with all due respect, rip, but
personally I rejoice anytime the damn is cracked and truth
seeps free, even more so when it fails completely and
truth has the chance to flood and clear the valleys
full of long standing sediment of miss info behind us.
Now is the world of the ancient ape. It's time
for the relic human to enter the room and the
seeds of the truth to mature and to trees of understanding.
Only when the old lives pass away can the new
light of truth blossom.
Speaker 3: End quotes.
Speaker 4: I'm not gonna name this person, but maybe by deduction
people can figure it out. Let me give you some
Easter eggs here. He was one of the speakers with
me at the Ozark Mountain Bigfoot Conference in Missouri last year,
and I'll be honest with you, I set through his
presentation and thought that ninety nine point nine eight percent
of it was complete and utter horseshit. Here's the problem
that I had with this particular person who is clearly
talking about the passing of doctor Jeff Meldrum and the
lies that he spread. Because he did mention Jeff in
his presentation last year at the Ozark Mountain Bigfoot Conference
about how he's spreading this ape or nonsense. He clearly
knows based on whatever the fuck. He thinks he's done
in his research that Bigfoot, the forest people aren't apes.
There's something much greater. So I said, through all this
horseshit that he was spewing last year, that people were
eating up slopping it up with a biscuit like people
tend to do.
Speaker 2: He was making definitive statements about his research and knowing
that they were encountering a female Sasquatch versus a male Sasquatch.
I don't know.
Speaker 4: He never talked about checking the genda tale you or
seeing it, so I don't know how this was. Maybe
it was based on the fuzzy feeling he got whether
this thing had a vagina or a penis, But it
was just things that just didn't sit right with me.
Speaker 2: But I let it go.
Speaker 4: He didn't go on the camp out. He left before
the camp out, so I didn't have to spend another
four days listen to his bullshit. I'm just gonna say this.
Everybody is entitled to their opinions about Jeff, about me,
about Bigfoot, about anything. We live in the free country.
All I'm going to say is this, some things are
better left unsaid, just my opinion. If you think that
about Jeff and what he believed to be the truth
about Sasquatch. I would argue that at least what Jeff
had to say about Bigfoot was based on science, upon
his knowledge, training, and experience in anthropology, foot morphology, the
evidence that has attributed to Sasquatch that he has examined
over the years. Absolutely, this cat that made that post,
I think he just makes up shit whole cloth. I
don't think there's any thread of truth in anything he says.
I would be surprised if he's had any interactions with Bigfoot. Frankly,
I think it's all either in his head or he
makes it.
Speaker 2: Up whole cloth.
Speaker 4: So sometimes it's just better to leave those things unsaid,
in my opinion, and I took that very personally is
the right way. But I didn't know Jeff, and I'd
worked with Jeff and I respected him very much. I
think it was just a little too soon to post
shit like that, basically saying he's glad the dudes did
because all the lies that he's been spewing about Bigfoot
die with him, is what I read into that. How
did you feel when you saw that post?
Speaker 3: I was angry, man, I was pissed. Because, like I said,
I've known Jeff for a long period of time. First
and foremost, you said it right. Jeff was, in addition
to all the wonderful aspects of him as in human,
which he genuinely was a really good person, he was
a consummate professional. He strove for objectivity, He strove for replication,
two of the cornerstones of science. He knew that none
of us can be completely objective, but he figured out
ways to what we call control for variables, so he
could present things objectively, and so others could repeat the
steps that he took and see if they come up
with the same results. That takes real intestinal fortitude, That
takes real courage, especially the way he went out on
the limb with sasquatch stuff, with mainstream academia, to say,
here's the data that I've collected, here are the results
I have. Go ahead, run your own tests the if
you come up with the same thing. So to disparage
him as a liar, I know this individual didn't name him,
but like you said, it's easy to infer what you're
talking about. Yeah, it made me angry, and right away
I completely discounted this individual and anything that I read
from this individual moving forward is now just garbage. I
don't have space in my brain to consider you in
any kind of realistic, practical way. I want to go back,
just really quickly. You said something that I think is
spot on and goes to the earlier making it your
own about you posts that people were doing those times.
It's better just not to say the things that may
be going through your head publicly. We got to take
a picture of the dinner that we're eating, We got
to take a picture of the walk that we're taking.
Anyone who wants to do that, fine, But it also
doesn't mean that you have to post in every situation
because everyone has their opinion. Not all opinions are equal.
Not all opinions are things that are going to add
in a positive way to certain situations or certain conversations.
I love that you said sometimes things just are better
left and said I wish more people would do that,
just in general when they go to post something, Hey,
is this something or is this just I'm bored and
I'm in a habit now of I'm posting about my morning.
You just took a sip your coffee. I have friends
who I have stopped following them because they post their
morning coffee and say good morning everyone, and I'm like,
I don't need to see your fucking mug. I don't
need to see that you're the greatest aunt in the
world or whatever. Good morning to you, too awesome. But
do we really need to take up face in the
cyber world and use energy to do that?
Speaker 4: Absolutely, one hundred percent, you need to see my coffee.
I have a guy who I've met in person and
talked to him a couple of times in the past.
Speaker 2: Who does this about bigfoot stuff.
Speaker 4: He goes into these groups that shall remain unnamed where
people are posting pictures of sticks, leaves and trees. It
clearly rubs him the wrong way, and he can't say
it in the group because they kick you out, So
he does screenshots and post it on his personal Facebook
page like twenty seven times a day, and it's just
ranning what the fuck is wrong with this person?
Speaker 2: And I'm saying, what is wrong with you?
Speaker 3: You?
Speaker 4: I saw that one time in that group, and of
course I've talked about it because I try to steer
people from it. I don't think that's what he's trying
to do. He's just ranting about these crazy people that
are posting sticks, leaves and trees and calling it bigfoot.
Can't you see the baby that it's holding and all
this shit the dog man's playing the flute in the
background or whatever's happening. I'm like, dude, I appreciate it,
but I don't need to see that in my feed
forty seven times a week. I know what's going on.
Nothing has changed. It's the same over and over again.
If you're listening and you can hear our voices when
you start to post on Facebook or Instagram, breathe and
take thirty seconds and ask yourself should I do this?
Most of the time the answer is going to be no.
You're welcome that you're coaching. It's free. You got it
free from a PhD doctor, Hogan Chirou and me. I
don't even play a doctor on television, but there you go.
Speaker 3: The other part that I want to say is Jeff
what I say, the consummate professional. He never preached his
position to anyone. He presented what the conclusions he has
come to. The last time I saw Jeff in person
was actually at the Glide Sasquatch Festival. We had a
conversation because of his ideas around niche separation and things
like that. He was like, Hey, Hogan, I know the
behavioral ecology. I'm not going to try and tell you
that world and I know Jeff as a world class
anatomist and functional morphologist. I'm not gonna try and tell
him how the footworks. That would be an exercise and futility.
Not only did he not preach, but he was so
relatable and so jovial in his approach to people that
even if someone came up with a cuckoo idea of
I think sasquatch are actually mermaids who have adapted the
lad or whatever, Jeff would entertain them in conversation. The
beauty of Jeff was he was relatable that way, he
was approachable, He was really patient. He would then bring
it back to science. He would bring it back to Okay,
but are those things that we can actually record? Are
those things that we can actually observe? Can we document
it in some way? Can someone else go out and
test it? While not telling the mermaid theory person that
they're a fucking loon, which may have been going through
Jeff's mind. I'm not going to speak for well. He
was really impressive in that way, I think the scientific
validity that he brought because he was publishing papers in
highly respected journals about the functional morphology of New world
monkey feet, he was posting things on fossil primates years
before he published his book. He was a well established
anatomist and functional morphologist who could have just continued down
that road not gone into this. And the service he
did by bringing a scientific approach, which you know that
I really appreciate, and that's what I'm trying to do
with behavioral ecology and how to study behavior with sasquatch.
But that in itself the community owes him a huge debt.
Combine that with his approachability, his acceptance of everyone who's
interested in this subject, opening up his vault of knowledge
to people just because they said they saw something as
they were driving down the highway that they couldn't explain,
and now he's gonna have a fifteen minute conversation with
them to talk about things that there just multiplies his impact.
I personally think that anyone who wants to post anything
about Jeff should really just be saying thank you and
honoring his legacy.
Speaker 4: That way, I definitely agree, I couldn't have said it
any better. I think what it boils down to for
me is very similar. We only get one life. Like
you said, what you do with the dash in between
your birthdate and your expiration date means the most to everybody,
because that's what it's truly all about. And if you
think about how many years Jeff was into this and
how many of those fifteen minute conversations he had with
literally I would estimate tens of thousands of people. You
add that up over the course of his sixty seven years,
that's a huge chunk of time that was dedicated to
the subject that he cared so much about. If nothing else,
like you said, that warrants a thank you, because not
everybody's like that. Not everybody you meet in Bigfoot has
the time to sit and talk to anybody, or even
wants to sit and talk to people about their experiences
or do the gracious things that Jeff did with his
time for people, So that in and of itself, if
he contributed nothing else to this subject, just all the
people that will cherish those ten or fifteen minutes that
they got that he gave them freely, and it was
his most valuable resource when you think about it, was
his time and he gave it freely and willingly to
people throughout this country and literally around the world. So
I say thank you, Jeff. Rest in peace, my friend.
Let's shift gears a little bit before we get out
of here and talk about something.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's worse, Probably worse.
Speaker 4: So everybody knows about the contentious relationship that I have
with Mike Patterson of Sasquatch Ontario. We've talked at nauseum
about the NEF photographs. This tends to bring people out
of the woodwork. I have not heard anything from Mike directly,
but I did hear from someone who is, let's say,
a fan of Mike's who has been out in the
field with him and had experiences reached out to me
a couple of weeks ago and said, hey, I see
you're in full on hoax mode. You don't believe Mike.
I've had experiences with over one hundred and ten sasquatch
in my life. I'd like to come on and share
my experiences and talk about those, and some of those
experiences were with Mike in his research area. I was like, absolutely,
come on the show, so as we record this. I
had this interview last night. I think he picked the
alias David. It's not his real name. I didn't see
his face. He was blacked out on the video. He
wanted to remain completely anonymous, but we had about an
hour or so conversation, and during that conversation, he tells
me that when he got into the subject, he got
into Mike Patterson stuff, he got into his YouTube channel.
He had some problems with the photos of nef because
when he showed him to people I his friend group,
they all laughed and said, dude, that's clearly a mask.
And he even admitted to me on the show last
night that it could be.
Speaker 1: We've got to pay some bills, but don't go anywhere.
That big Foot podcast will be right back after this.
Speaker 4: He said, people like Todd standing and people like Mike,
he thinks they have real experiences, but sometimes there's a
lull in activity, and he's got to get views and
clicks on his YouTube channel, So maybe it's possible that
he hoaxed those photographs he did. He was talking about
playing some of the alleged vocalizations. That's Dwayne doing the
voice of Nefatia right. He said he's played those a
couple of times and he's had sticks breaking, and he's
had all this activity.
Speaker 2: Those vocals really bring.
Speaker 4: The Sasquatches out, right, And I said, have you ever
heard of The Truth Prevails YouTube channel?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Okay, The Truth Prevails has all of the documentation. They've
got screenshots of text messages, emails, They've got videos of
Dwayne in his own words, speaking in the voice of
Nefatilla saying that it was all bullshit. He hoaxed it,
he made it up. He is the voice of nef
But this guy just wasn't hearing it. Man, he just
didn't believe it. He was like, there's no way that
is him. There's no way he could fool Mike and me,
and there's no way he could fool Sasquatch. Because I
play these vocalizations and I get all this activity, and
I'm thinking, dude, you could go out into the wild
and play a really loud cougar call, right, and you're
probably gonna elicit some kind of a response from something
in nature back. So I think it's possible that if
you played a human vocalizing in that weird way, that
you might get some kind of response from the local wildlife.
Speaker 2: Oh shit, what the fuck is that? I'm out of here.
But it's not necessarily bigfoot. It was a hoax.
Speaker 4: It was admitted, and I said when Dwayne and Mike
got together on camera for the first time a couple
of videos back, Dwayne showed his face for the very
first time and they talked about that there's people going
to be asking the question. Hey, Dwayne said that was
all hoaxed. He was the voice of nef But we're
here to tell you that's not true. We only said
that because people were threatening us. They were pushing into
our area, they were threatening our families, so we just
wanted all that to go away, so we just said
it was a hoax so people would leave us alone.
But just kidding, that's not true. It's true that it's
not a hoax, but this guy refused to see it
outside of the photos. He was very open with the
fact that, yeah, the photos may be faked, but that
doesn't mean that everything else is happening it's fake.
Speaker 2: It's very much the.
Speaker 4: Same way with Todd. I believe he's had experiences in Radium.
I believe he's probably seen sasquatch. I've had experiences there
that I believe were Sasquatch related. It doesn't change the
fact that he faked those videos, because this guy was
immediately like, oh yeahs I'd faked those videos, and he said,
I don't like anybody faking anything or lying about anything
with Bigfoot. I think it goes against everything that Sasquatch
the forest people, as he prefers to call them their beliefs.
We just had this roundabout conversation and he just never
would get it.
Speaker 2: It's solidified to me.
Speaker 4: I've always wanted to have a magnifying glass or even
a crystal ball to look into some of the people
who buy into the Mike Patterson Sasquatch Ontario hoax and
what characteristics, what mental state you have to be in
to be indoctrinated into that. So it was a little
bit of a peek behind the curtains. I can't wait
to edit and get that out for you guys over
on Sasquatch Otyssey. It'll probably be out in the next
couple of weeks, so make sure you check out that
episode with David from Ontario talking about Mike Patterson and
some of his other experiences with Bigfoot.
Speaker 2: I don't know what it is.
Speaker 4: You're a smart guy, You've got a PhD. You coach people,
you help people. What do you think it is that
makes people so susceptible to believing Mike Patterson and anybody
who's hoaxing and LARPing the way that he is. How
do you fall victim to that? Is it like these
people that get into these cults? Is it the same mentality?
Because Todd and Mike are very much like cult leaders
in my opinion.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I haven't seen a lot of Mike, but what
I've seen of Todd. You equating the two in their
behavior very much like cult leaders. And I'm not saying
that they are intentionally trying to indoctrinate anyone into a cult.
I think this guy that you talk to hit the
nail on the head of content create. You're not a
fucking researcher. I'm sorry. You're a content creator. You live
in a world where you're creating content every single week.
You know how that goes. But there's a little word
that I want to throw called credibility and the damage
you do to your credibility when you create content just
to get clicks and traffic on your site, on your podcast,
whatever the case, it's YouTube channel, whatever service you're using, whatever, outlet.
You're using the damage and it does to the credibility.
I don't want to dive back into the jet stuff.
But again, that's that's what Jeff was really striving for,
is credibility in this. You hear out of one side
of their mouth, you hear that this is a face
of nef on the other side of the mouth. They
don't understand why the general population doesn't believe them that
sasquatches out there, that they've had these experiences. When you
post a Halloween mask is the face of something and
you stick to it, I'm not going to believe anything
you say after that. When you post a video of
an obvious fake arm reaching and grabbing an apple and
you claim that's sasquatch taking your gip and you've given
it a name, and you claim that you know their
ages and on, which I find phenomenal because after thousands
of hours in the field with wild primates, I can
tell you general ranges of age, but I can't tell
you if somebody's a teenager or not without knowing when
they were born. But yeah, if you post that, I'm
not to believe anything you say after that. I'm gonna
be so skeptical and every person who's trained in science.
That's the trigger for that is as soon as you
throw away your credibility for the sake of I'll give
you a great example right now that's going on, all
this stuff about the Homo meletti in South Africa, this
hominin that may have intentionally buried their dead in a
cave that's hard to get to, and things like that.
Part of the reason why there's so much pushback on
that is, and I won't get into the methodology, but
part of the reason is that the primary investigator on
that research has in the past made really extraordinary claims
about things that then the data have shown didn't back
it up. When they first came out with this, rather
than going the regular route and publishing a journal article,
they held a press conference. They put it out there
to the world. There's I think that maybe a Netflix
there's some sort of dreaming movie about it that they
had done. When you do that, it damages the credibility.
And I'm not going to weigh in right now on
whether or not I think they intentionally bury their dead.
I just think that you now have set up roadblocks
for people to trust what you said so there's that part,
the cult component. Absolutely, man, I think you're right on.
I think that part of what we deal with in
the Sasquatch world is that for too many people, because
they don't have something to hold on to, they may
have had an experience, they haven't had anything since, they
may have never had an experience, they may just be
making it up in their mind, whatever the case is,
it becomes a belief system instead of again, in a
scientific endeavor, you're striving for objectivity. You not only have
the tangible factor of there is a species there, but
it's that elite system that then messes with our perception
of our entire world. Oh, if there's a crack in
the wall here, the whole house of cards can come
tumbling down if you pull one of those cards out,
the whole thing. And it's not that these people are convinced,
oh I'm wrong here and we're just making it up.
It's a natural thing that happens in our brains that
it's almost and I think we may have talked about
this briefly before, it's almost like a defense mechanism that
happens in our brains that protects our view of reality.
Our brains basically will double down on our narrative. However,
our reality is constructed. Again, that's contrary to what science
is trying to achieve. There's a reason why science didn't
recognize chimpanzees until the mid to late eighteen hundreds. There's
a reason for that, and it wasn't just gatekeepers who
didn't want to believe it. It was no, we need
to have verifiable evidence. From my perspective, that's what everyone
in the sasquatch world should be striving for. You're not
trying to meet the standards of people that maybe don't
respect or anything like that. Verifiable evidence. This kind of
hoaxing doesn't move the needle that way. It doesn't improve
the science.
Speaker 2: I agree.
Speaker 4: We talked for about ten minutes or so after the interviews,
and he said, look, the main reason he said, I
agreed to come on your show was I want you
to let go of this drive to bring Mike and
all these people down, and I.
Speaker 2: Want you to do your own research.
Speaker 4: I want you to go out and have your own experiences,
come at it from peace and love, and they'll be
so generous to you if you do that. And I
want you to have an experience where you see them
and you have all these amazing experiences that they give you.
I didn't break his heart and tell them that I'd
had three sightings last summer, and I don't think it
had anything to do with any of the shit that
might excuse. But I appreciated at least his message, which
was just be kind to people, be as loving as
you can, and spread light as much. I think that's great,
But I think there is a missing piece, and I
think it is important for shows like this one and
people like us to have these conversations about some of
these people who are fooling people, because it is dangerous,
whether you believe it or not, when someone is lying
to you and they lie to you over and over
and you believe these lies. To me, that is a
form of abuse almost right. They're abusing you in ways
that most people don't even realize. They're certainly taking advantage
of your gol ability, and they're making money off of
what they're doing to you.
Speaker 2: So those are the reasons.
Speaker 4: And I told him I've never had anything personally against Mike.
Mike has tried to make this personal many times. I
really don't care about Mike personally. I don't have anything
against the man personally, I'm just upset with the lies
that he tells and the way that he fools people
into believing what he says about bigfoot. I think it's
all complete horseshit, and it's damaging people. It is making
people look at real evidence and real scenarios and even
real scientific approaches to this, and they scoff at it
and call us apers. It just creates even more of
a division from the people who are trying to approach
this scientifically, to get that verifiable and repeatable evidence. They
throw that out because you don't need that. All you
got to do is listen to Mike and he'll enlighten
you about everything about the forest people because they talk
to him and leave him notes. That's the problem with this,
and that's why we have these kind of conversations. It's
never a personal thing. It's never personal with Mike or
Todd or any of these people. It's just simply a
subject that I care deeply about that I would like
for other people in the community to be able to
have access to real data. At the end of the day,
I don't think those people are going to be saved.
He's clearly not the audience for this. I've had people
reach out and say thank you for doing those photos.
When I saw that, I completely unfollowed Mike and I
don't listen to anything he says anymore because he lied
about that, and if he's lying about that, he's probably
lying about everything else. That's really the point to this,
So we hope that comes through with this. I'm not
trying to be malicious. I'm not trying to tear him down.
That's what he kept saying. You're trying to bring Mike down.
You're trying to tear him down. No, I'm not necessarily
doing that, but I am trying to poke holes in
all of his bullshit so people can see through. Maybe
if I poke enough holes, maybe the sunlight will come
through and people will go, yeah, I'm not really sure
about those photos. Or maybe Neft's not taking selfies in
his house and leaving him notes, and maybe that voice
is Dwayne because he said it was. I had this
conversation offline with somebody about the way someone was acting
in the community, and they were concerned about an event
that's coming up, and I said, look, I had to
learn this the hard way many times over, but you
know how you have something happen with somebody and you go, oh,
that's not his personality, that's not like him.
Speaker 3: He wouldn't do that.
Speaker 4: If he does it ten times, guess what he's showing
you the person that he is. You just have to
decide if you're going to take that information for what
it is and see it for what it is, or
you're going to live in denial. And that's ultimately what
I think is happening in most of those cases with
the Todds and the Mics and the other people out
there that we could name that are perpetrating those kind
of hoaxes.
Speaker 3: When you talked about this kind of line to folks,
there's a term that's now become a psychological term. It's gaslighting.
And that's what they're doing. They're gaslighting people saying what
you think is reality is wrong. Here's what it is,
and they're using the hoax to do it. And if
you do it over and over again, yeah, you're ready,
it's considered abuse. Then you know. And now Mike and
Todd probably both hate me now even though they don't
know me. Great, but the reality is none of this
and you said it right, none of this is personal.
This is about. And I think that's one of the
dangers of any kind of pursuit like this. I see
it in biological anthropology and everly sh anthropology. I had
a friend in grad school who once said to me,
the further and further you get from concrete data that
other people can also collect and analyze, the further and
further you get into egos driving whatever study you're doing.
I don't know if it was you asked me this once,
or who it was someone asked me once, why are
people doing this? Because they're not getting famous off of this?
And I would say, bullshit, they're not. In their little world.
They're getting really famous. Everyone knows outstanding of Mike Patterson's
names in the Bigfoot world, and that's the world that
matters to them. They're not trying to compete with George
Clooney and Brad Pint. They're trying to compete with Klick
Berrickman and Brian king Sharp. They're in their little pond
and they're trying to be a big fish in their pond.
Context really matters.
Speaker 1: We've got to pay some bills, but don't go anywhere.
That Bigfoot podcast will be right back after this.
Speaker 3: I mean there's the element of yeah, they're trying to
become famous and they're gaslighting for it to get clicks.
But I think that there's also the part of when
someone makes it personal when you challenge them on what
they presented, that to me is a gigantic red flag
that they don't have any confidence in what they presented.
They are full of shit because they've got to go
to a place that you never took it. There's no
reason to make it personal. That kind of defensive, aggressive
reaction is something that you'll see well when people know
that what they put out is horseshit, that is very true.
We like to keep it personal with you, guys. We
would love to hear from you. If you want to
suggest a topic for us to talk about, shoot me
an email Brian at Paranormal World Productions dot com, or
you can head over to the website Paranormalorialdproductions dot com.
There is a leave us a voicemail button right there
in the contact section. You can talk to us for
five minutes at a time. I've literally had people send
me like five or ten of those at a time.
I've got fifty minute diatribe from people five minutes at
a time.
Speaker 2: We'd love to hear from you, guys, if.
Speaker 4: You want to leave us a voicemail, let us know
what you think about what we've talked about on the show,
anything you want to hear us talk about on the show,
or you just want to tell us how much we
suck or how great we are.
Speaker 2: We'd love to hear that either way, So send us
an email, send us a voicemail, and maybe you might
even hear yourself on the show at some point. Hogan,
What you got coming up man? Anything special?
Speaker 4: I'm about to go on vacation here next weeks doing
nothing to do with Bigfoot. I'm sure they'll be bigfoot
people there. We're actually going up to Ohio. We've got
some things planned in West Virginia and Virginia. We're going
to Point Pleasant and we're going to the Mothman Festival
for a couple of days. First time I've ever done that.
We're not going to be there vending or anything. We're
just going to be there hanging out, having a good time.
Speaker 3: Should be fun.
Speaker 4: Get my picture made with the famous or infamous Mothman
sculpture up there. So what do you got coming up man?
Anything fun or special?
Speaker 3: First? I'm glad you're taking a vacation. You guys deserve it.
Have fun. I've been to that festival once. I lived
in Athens, Ohio for several years right across the border.
Had to go check it out once. Yeah, you'll have
a great time. I'm currently working on a book, and
I've talked about this, working on a book that's going
to be a really detailed field methods for that's watch
studies of everything from behavioral ecology of sasquatch to collecting samples,
whether they be tracks or genetic samples. Tapping into some
of my contacts and colleagues or experts in those areas
and getting their input. I'm excited about working on that.
That should be completed here before the end of the
calendar year and hopefully out next year. Also, I'm starting
to put together a potential Bigfoot boot camp where we're
gonna similar to the camp out, but a little more
extensive and a lot more extensive about the educational component,
so give people almost a master's class when they come
out into the woods with us. We're going to go
and check out the now famous Bigfoot trap in the
Applegate and Oregon and just get people out into the
woods out here. I think about what a mutual friend
of ours, Cliff Berrickmanoffen says about Sasquatch studies, where his
big recommendation for folks is enjoy themselves. Get out in
the woods. Enjoy yourselves. If you go out, Oh, I
got to see a sasquatch, I got to see a sasquatch.
You're probably going to be disappointed because it just doesn't
happen a lot. So enjoy yourselves. My whole thing is
getting people in touch with nature, getting them to think
about the impact they're making while they're out there, the
connection we have to nature. Yeah, working on those things.
I just want to add on to what you said
about folks reaching out about things on the show. I
think it'd be cool if we gave folks an opportunity
to do a question and answer at some point where
they could call in their questions, anything they want to
call in, and we'll address it on the show. Maybe
we can figure that out, maybe get some folks calling
in live. That's something you and I can talk about more.
But I just had that idea and want to throw
that out to folks if they want to send a
voicemail in give questions, and like you said, we can
go through them and figure out one that we want
to address and kind of use as bouncing off of.
If you're listening, you've got ideas, send them in. I
know Brian and I both love to get into new things,
learn new things, talk about new stuff, so please do.
Speaker 2: There you go, folks, but for now we're out of here.
We'll talk to y'all later.
Speaker 4: Byss