Speaker 1: So we go a little bit farther. He comes back
Speaker 1: over to me and he says, somebody's over there and
Speaker 1: they're talking. Then I stop and I started looking around again.
Speaker 1: I look at him. I said, well, there's no way
Speaker 1: there's people up here, and he goes, yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: and then he goes and there's somebody over there too,
Speaker 1: and you can hear it in the distance. It's like
Speaker 1: you know when you can hear somebody talking but you
Speaker 1: can't hear what they're saying. And I can't make out
Speaker 1: any words, but it's like, yeah, that's definitely talking. So
Speaker 1: I'm starting to get creeped out because it's on both
Speaker 1: sides of us. We can't see it. Whatever it is,
Speaker 1: it's talking, and we're both thinking what we're thinking.
Speaker 2: You know, this is Bigfoot Crossroads. My name is Matt
Speaker 2: and i'd like to welcome James to the show. James,
Speaker 2: thanks again for joining me. Man, we've kind of already
Speaker 2: gotten started, so I guess just go on and tell
Speaker 2: me the story that you were about to tell.
Speaker 1: I guess a good place to start. That's kind of
Speaker 1: where we were headed. Was I live in a little
Speaker 1: town house kind of on the edge of the city,
Speaker 1: on the north side of a river, the Scadget River,
Speaker 1: and I'm surrounded by trees, woods.
Speaker 2: It's just.
Speaker 1: The whole area here is just like immense wilderness with
Speaker 1: a little town thrown in the middle of it. And
Speaker 1: so I guess the story that we were heading at was.
Speaker 1: I come out. I come out of my house one night,
Speaker 1: and I'd been smoking fish. I do a lot of
Speaker 1: fishing in the fall. Caught a bunch of co host
Speaker 1: silver salmon in the river. And my smoker had been
Speaker 1: running twenty four hours a day, seven days a week
Speaker 1: for I don't know, maybe a couple of weeks at
Speaker 1: that point. And so I come out my back door,
Speaker 1: down the stairs, out into the garage and I'm doing chips,
Speaker 1: soaking chips for the smoker. I get the chips out,
Speaker 1: drain them, start swapping. I hear all this noise outside.
Speaker 1: And I had this crazy neighbor across the street, and
Speaker 1: he'd get up in the middle of the night, two
Speaker 1: o'clock in the morning and chop a wood on his
Speaker 1: front porch, throw the garage door open, and sitting there
Speaker 1: and mess with his car of his engine. You know,
Speaker 1: just all kinds of noise, all kinds of crazy stuff
Speaker 1: all the time. Uh and uh, so I just figured, well,
Speaker 1: it's my neighbor across the street, you know. And so
Speaker 1: this noise goes on for a while and I thought,
Speaker 1: I got to go out and see what's going on.
Speaker 1: And I walk out and uh, look down the look
Speaker 1: down the street at his house and there's no lights on, garage,
Speaker 1: doors closed, everything, It's just dead quiet down the street.
Speaker 1: And I thought, Wow, that's weird, wor where's all that
Speaker 1: noise coming from? And then I realized, because we're up
Speaker 1: against the side of this hill, the noise is echoing
Speaker 1: off the side of the hill and making it sound
Speaker 1: like it's coming from his house, but it's out in
Speaker 1: the woods. And I'm like, I was like, that's just crazy.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was like, yeah, I thought he was
Speaker 1: on his porch. Chop in wood is what I thought.
Speaker 1: And I thought, oh, I'm going to run inside the house,
Speaker 1: grab the flashlight. And I've got this big shape like
Speaker 1: the old mag flashlights, you know, big long flash it's
Speaker 1: led and it's super super bright. And so I grabbed
Speaker 1: the flashlight, go out and I shine. I start shining
Speaker 1: it around in the woods trying to figure out where
Speaker 1: this noise is coming from and I see this, this
Speaker 1: pair of eyes looking at me, and it kind of
Speaker 1: they're staring straight at me, and then they kind of
Speaker 1: dip down and turn to look away. And I thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's kind of weird, because you know, I see elk, bears,
Speaker 1: all kinds of stuff out in the woods out there
Speaker 1: all the time. Uh, and these eyes were they were
Speaker 1: totally different. And it was two eyes that were looking
Speaker 1: at me with the light reflecting on them, and as
Speaker 1: the head dip down and turn and it was like
Speaker 1: both eyes kind of disappeared at the same time. Where
Speaker 1: when you're looking at an elk or a deer or
Speaker 1: something to that effect, you know you're going to lose
Speaker 1: visual within the reflection out of one eye, and then
Speaker 1: you're going to lose the reflection out of the other eye,
Speaker 1: right because they got you know, the big head the
Speaker 1: eyes around this. So I thought, well, this is like
Speaker 1: some kind of predator. I turned, I turned the light off,
Speaker 1: the flashlight up, and I wait a second, and I
Speaker 1: turn it back on and I and I look and
Speaker 1: it's staring right straight at me again. And I thought,
Speaker 1: and it did the same thing, kind of dropped his
Speaker 1: head down and turned and I thought, ow. I stepped
Speaker 1: back a little bit and I look at the house.
Speaker 1: The bedroom window upstairs is open, and my son's upstairs,
Speaker 1: and I hollered him. I said, hey, hey, come out here,
Speaker 1: you know, and it's the middle of the night on
Speaker 1: a weekend. I'm hollering. He thinks something's wrong, you know,
Speaker 1: or something comes round I did while something kind of was.
Speaker 1: He comes running down and he goes, what's going on?
Speaker 1: What's going on? I said, hey, look out here, and
Speaker 1: I kind of gave him the layout, you know, because
Speaker 1: he could kind of see some of the trees out
Speaker 1: in the woods. I said, look between these two trees,
Speaker 1: only look way off at the base of that big
Speaker 1: cedar tree out there. I'm going to turn the flashlight on.
Speaker 1: Tell me what you see. And I turned the flashlight
Speaker 1: on and you could see he did it again, pretty
Speaker 1: much exactly the same thing. Is looking right at us
Speaker 1: and drops his head, turns his eyes away, and I
Speaker 1: turned the flashlight off and I said, what did you
Speaker 1: see it? And he says, well, I see the eyes
Speaker 1: staring at me. And I was like yeah, and he goes, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're awfully, awfully tall. And we staid there for a second,
Speaker 1: I turned the lights back on again. He's seen it,
Speaker 1: and then kind of went through the whole thing again.
Speaker 1: Then my wife comes out the back door and she
Speaker 1: kind of you know, what are you guys doing? What
Speaker 1: are you guys doing? And I told her about it,
Speaker 1: and Nate's all excited, you know, my son, he's all
Speaker 1: excited stuff. And and she goes, well, are you going
Speaker 1: to go out there and see what it is? And
Speaker 1: I said, no, wait until morning. Because it's like when
Speaker 1: animals when you when you look at their eyes and
Speaker 1: you get the light reflecting off of them, they're usually
Speaker 1: a blue green And I mean, it's it's I've got
Speaker 1: to I've hunted my whole life and living up here
Speaker 1: and and stuff. I've hunted pretty much every animal on
Speaker 1: on the continent that people hunt, you know, except for moose.
Speaker 1: I've never gone up to Cannon and hunted moose. But
Speaker 1: seeing the eyes, they always give off this green blue
Speaker 1: tint to them, you know, and these it they were
Speaker 1: totally different. Looking at the eyes that were reflecting back
Speaker 1: at that at first they had they had this real
Speaker 1: funny reflection to them that I'm going to equate to
Speaker 1: a brown red color. It's kind of an orange brown
Speaker 1: red color. Not not the color of any eyes that
Speaker 1: I've ever seen on anything, right, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: right outside my back door. But we've had we've had
Speaker 1: other Well, I went out the next day. I'll keep
Speaker 1: going with that story before I changed focus. We go
Speaker 1: out the next day and we're we walk out there
Speaker 1: and look around and can't find any olk prints. I
Speaker 1: can't find any deer prints, nothing. Can't find any footprints
Speaker 1: or anything. The only thing that we could find was
Speaker 1: a log that was kind of nearby, and it had
Speaker 1: some moss knocked off of it, like something had stepped
Speaker 1: over the top or stepped on it or something. But
Speaker 1: I reached up to the branch that the eyes were
Speaker 1: looking over the top of and didn't quite have to
Speaker 1: fully extend my arm, but reached up and put my
Speaker 1: hand on that branch. And I mean, I'm not a
Speaker 1: big tall guy. I'm five foot nine and so reaching up,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say it was looking over a branch that
Speaker 1: was six and a half seven feet high.
Speaker 2: I mean that's pretty up there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, we've had things moving through the woods
Speaker 1: behind the house where I've never seen them before. But
Speaker 1: the dogs freak out and the dogs all around. It's
Speaker 1: like when there's something around, they do the you know,
Speaker 1: the bark, like you know, there's a bear, you know
Speaker 1: whatever out in the woods and they'll bark at it
Speaker 1: and stuff. Well, from the end of the valley where
Speaker 1: we're at kind of where we live at, there's dogs
Speaker 1: all around up across the top of the hill and
Speaker 1: stuff at different houses. And one night the dog started barking.
Speaker 1: They were doing this whimpery bark like they were scared.
Speaker 1: It was a totally different bark, and it kind of
Speaker 1: it kind of traveled along. It's like these dogs over
Speaker 1: here start barking, and then these dogs are over here,
Speaker 1: and then it kind of traveled along and that that
Speaker 1: happens a few times here and there, which is kind
Speaker 1: of kind of odd, you know, at the house.
Speaker 2: That's pretty funny. That's actually one of the first conversations
Speaker 2: I remember having with the Browns, which you interviewed with
Speaker 2: you know them, we're mutual friends, was we were talking
Speaker 2: about mapping their movements around their property based on the
Speaker 2: dogs barking, because like you're talking about, as they'll travel
Speaker 2: through the area, you know, the first set of dogs
Speaker 2: that they run across will start barking, then the next
Speaker 2: and so on and so forth, and you can kind
Speaker 2: of tell at least the direction that they're moving by
Speaker 2: the reaction of the dogs. Right, Yeah, Have you noticed
Speaker 2: anything like missing around your property? Do they take anything
Speaker 2: or go through trash cans or anything like that?
Speaker 1: No, I don't think so. They might have been, you know,
Speaker 1: we really don't have a problem with trash cans or
Speaker 1: anything with any of the animals, even the bears. There's
Speaker 1: only been one year that we really had problems with
Speaker 1: the trash cans with the bears, even But it's not
Speaker 1: just it's not just around the house. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: just kind of that's the story that was the closest
Speaker 1: to my house, right you know. But yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: people around here they don't really talk about it, but
Speaker 1: there's several people we've got. We've got a guy in
Speaker 1: town that used to be kind of a big foot
Speaker 1: chaser kind of guy, and I think he still takes
Speaker 1: reports once in a while. I told him that story
Speaker 1: years ago. I told him that story when it happened.
Speaker 1: Probably that was probably, oh, I don't know, that one
Speaker 1: wasn't that long ago. I guess it was probably five,
Speaker 1: maybe six years ago.
Speaker 2: So when did this whole bigfoot thing really start for you?
Speaker 1: I guess as a kid running around in the woods
Speaker 1: and stuff I spent. I grew up more down towards
Speaker 1: more down towards the city, and moved around quite a
Speaker 1: bit as a kid, so i'd come, i'd stay with
Speaker 1: my grandparents and stuff off and on. Most of the
Speaker 1: summers are spent with my grandparents, and so I'd spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time out in the woods. And then
Speaker 1: I grew up kind of near Vancouver, Washington. We lived
Speaker 1: down there for a while, and so I had some
Speaker 1: I don't know, some odd things as a kid happening
Speaker 1: in the woods, but you know, I didn't really relate
Speaker 1: it to anything, and I guess I don't have any
Speaker 1: real big stories about that. I think the first, the
Speaker 1: first real incident that I can say, oh, gee, this
Speaker 1: is like a bigfoot thing was I was in an
Speaker 1: area up above Index, which is off of Highway to
Speaker 1: in Washington, little town called Index, and you go up
Speaker 1: into the mountains to the north of the town and
Speaker 1: there's an area they call it Jack's Pass, and it's
Speaker 1: a dirt road and you cut off on one of
Speaker 1: the spur roads and you go up that road and
Speaker 1: there's this really neat waterfall. I think they call it
Speaker 1: Deer Falls or Deer Creek Falls or something. I can't
Speaker 1: remember the name of it. This would have been back
Speaker 1: early nineties, and went out black powder hunting most of
Speaker 1: these most things happen, seems to be when I'm out hunting,
Speaker 1: and with a couple of buddies of mine. This was
Speaker 1: probably early nineties. So we drove in hike down to
Speaker 1: this spot, went hunting for the day, out and about
Speaker 1: and all of that, and came back, set up a
Speaker 1: little camp more like a cowboy camp, no tents or anything,
Speaker 1: you know, just kinda set up and spent the night
Speaker 1: by this waterfall. In the morning, when it started getting
Speaker 1: light out, the sun's hitting the hillside, these rocks start
Speaker 1: falling off the hillside, and you know, we just kind
Speaker 1: of attributed it to you know, like you get the
Speaker 1: frost and heating up and the expansion of the rocks
Speaker 1: and all of that, rocks are falling off the hillside,
Speaker 1: so we kind of didn't kind of blew it off.
Speaker 1: And so we're sitting there making coffee, cooking breakfast, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of banner around with each other, you know, the
Speaker 1: typical guy stuff in the morning, and these rocks keep
Speaker 1: coming down the hillside, and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: one splashes in the middle of the pool, at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the bottom of the waterfall, and it's like
Speaker 1: we all kind of look at each other, and then
Speaker 1: we sit there and then we're quiet. We're sitting there
Speaker 1: watching and right out of the woodline comes one it's
Speaker 1: probably the size of a large grapefruit, comes flying out
Speaker 1: of the woodline, clears everything, and splashes into the water again.
Speaker 1: And then we're all like and kind of freaking out.
Speaker 1: One of my buddies was like, oh, it's bigfoot, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. And so, I mean, we all kind of
Speaker 1: came to that consensus. We didn't see anything. There weren't
Speaker 1: any roars, there was no crazy banging bushes, breaking trees,
Speaker 1: no nothing. Probably I think maybe three four more rocks
Speaker 1: came out, and then we just decided, well, we're probably
Speaker 1: not going to go hunting today, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: because realistically, I mean, we all had handguns with us
Speaker 1: and stuff too, but I mean our hunting equipment were
Speaker 1: black powdered rifles, and yeah, I don't yeah, I wasn't
Speaker 1: going to go out the woods running around with black
Speaker 1: pottered rifles with something that was throwing rocks that big
Speaker 1: off the hill.
Speaker 2: I mean, whenever you're faced with that situation, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: think the most logical conclusion to reach is it's time
Speaker 2: to retreat. Yeah, that ain't people. And if it is,
Speaker 2: for some reason, people, they're clearly you know, they're throwing
Speaker 2: rocks at a group of armed men. Yeah, then you
Speaker 2: probably don't want to tangle with them anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm probably not, you know, I mean by that point,
Speaker 1: I mean I'd spent I served in the army for
Speaker 1: thirty years, and at that point, I been in the
Speaker 1: army for ten, probably twelve years, and I'd come back home,
Speaker 1: you know, whenever i'd have leave or i'd you know,
Speaker 1: have some kind of break or something, and I'd come
Speaker 1: home go hunting. And then since since I retired, I've
Speaker 1: had a lot of my buddies coming up here, and
Speaker 1: you know, they they come up and we go hunting
Speaker 1: or go fishing, or go do something, you know, because
Speaker 1: they like the quiet, the being away from the city,
Speaker 1: the all the stuff. Some downtime, you know, some real
Speaker 1: relaxing downtime and We've got some pretty nice lakes up here,
Speaker 1: and so I've got a couple of jet skis. We
Speaker 1: go up jet ski and play on the boats, go fishing,
Speaker 1: camp out, do you know, depending on whatever time of
Speaker 1: year it is, you know. So it's kind of like
Speaker 1: it's kind of like a chill spot vacation place to
Speaker 1: online for some of my buddies.
Speaker 2: You know, until grapefruit sized rocks start getting thrown at you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that was. That was That's got to be.
Speaker 1: That's got to be about sixty miles maybe give or
Speaker 1: take south of where I'm at here, you know, so
Speaker 1: it's a lot different part of the state. Well, it's
Speaker 1: not different, it's just farther south. The mountains are a
Speaker 1: little more rugged up here where I'm at. So to
Speaker 1: give to throw it into context to where I'm at,
Speaker 1: it's I'm I'm in a little town along Highway twenty
Speaker 1: North Cascades in Washington, and from Highway twenty it's you
Speaker 1: go all the way up through thousands. Probably it's gonna
Speaker 1: be it's gonna be sixty miles I think up to
Speaker 1: the next major highway going north and then any road
Speaker 1: that you're going to cross if you come out of
Speaker 1: my town and you go straight north, the only roads
Speaker 1: that you're going to cross after you cross Highway are
Speaker 1: gonna be dirt logging roads. Until you're well into Canada,
Speaker 1: there's there's nothing that you're going to cross. And going
Speaker 1: to the west of US, the little cities get progressively
Speaker 1: progressively larger. They're not huge, no major cities up here,
Speaker 1: kind of where I'm at Bellingham up to the north
Speaker 1: north of US, but going going to the east side, it's, uh,
Speaker 1: you're going to be one hundred miles before you get
Speaker 1: to another town that's at least as big as mine,
Speaker 1: and that'd be Winthrop. To the east, and on the
Speaker 1: south side of US, there's just it's just wilderness. I
Speaker 1: mean we're up in the Cascade Mountain Range and it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's just there's literally millions of acres of land that
Speaker 1: have no houses, no development, no nothing. It's just straight
Speaker 1: up wilderness land. If you look on a map, Google
Speaker 1: Earth or something, it's just wide open for just just miles,
Speaker 1: I mean literally millions of acres of land.
Speaker 2: That kind of expanse is just crazy for me to
Speaker 2: think about even now. I mean, I know it's there,
Speaker 2: you know, we all know it's there, but we get
Speaker 2: so caught up. I see people on the internet, especially,
Speaker 2: you know, talking about you know, the population is much
Speaker 2: too large. There's no way these things could remain hidden.
Speaker 2: But I don't think people really understand how just wild
Speaker 2: and remote a lot of the United States still is. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean most people live in the cities, you know,
Speaker 2: and the towns and everything, but in between all those
Speaker 2: places is just wilderness.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm in northeastern Oklahoma, and if I drive for an
Speaker 2: hour and a half or so west, I hit Oklahoma City,
Speaker 2: you know, the largest city in the state. If I
Speaker 2: go south for four hours, I'm in the middle of
Speaker 2: downtown Dallas, you know. But out there you're just in
Speaker 2: the forest in the mountains. There's nothing out there.
Speaker 1: I mean you really have to just like get on
Speaker 1: a map or Google Earth does it the best because
Speaker 1: you can kind of zoom in and look at the
Speaker 1: highways and stuff and see what's along them. And then
Speaker 1: as you zoom out, you start realizing the massive expanse
Speaker 1: that there is with nothing here, I mean nothing, It's
Speaker 1: just immense. And the people talk about the Rocky Mountains
Speaker 1: and and all of that, Well, the Rocky Mountains are cool,
Speaker 1: but they're they're high, and they're gradually high above sea level,
Speaker 1: and they're not nearly as rugged as the mountains up here.
Speaker 1: The North Cascades are like the they're like the Alps.
Speaker 1: They're they're rugged, uh sharp steep peaks, and it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's a whole different mountain range. It's hard to
Speaker 1: get into the woods. You know, you're going to follow
Speaker 1: a You're gonna have to follow a creek or a
Speaker 1: river or something to travel off into the woods. And
Speaker 1: there's there's there's some trails in here, and you know,
Speaker 1: the Pacific Crestrail runs through from Canada down, but that's
Speaker 1: that's ways to the east of US. But I mean,
Speaker 1: you're going to get on that from a highway and
Speaker 1: then you're gonna go you're going to go from basically
Speaker 1: up here Highway twenty. You're going to go south. If
Speaker 1: you're going south, you're going to go to highway too.
Speaker 1: So you're going to go sixty miles overland with nothing
Speaker 1: in between. And then from there you're going to go
Speaker 1: overland again down to A ninety, which is going to
Speaker 1: be another forty to fifty miles with nothing. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just the wilderness is just vast, and it's thick,
Speaker 1: and it's full of it's full of stuff. These these
Speaker 1: high valleys are loaded with blueberries up here, just loaded
Speaker 1: with them in the summer, in the fall, and the
Speaker 1: fish in the river. I mean, I took I took
Speaker 1: my wife one year. She's never been much of a fisherman.
Speaker 1: She's like, well, she finally wanted to go fish the
Speaker 1: river with me, you know, and stuff. And so I
Speaker 1: took her to the spot one year and we stood
Speaker 1: up up on this high bank and I and I
Speaker 1: pointed down to the river to her. I said, hey,
Speaker 1: I said, what do you see down there? And she
Speaker 1: goes the bottom of the river. I said, yeah, I said, well,
Speaker 1: what are you see? And she goes a bunch of
Speaker 1: rocks and I go, you need to look a little closer,
Speaker 1: look at those rocks. And she's looking down there and
Speaker 1: she goes, oh my god, I can't see the bottom
Speaker 1: of the river. She says, things that I thought were
Speaker 1: rocks were salmon.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: You know. So there's plenty for them to eat. The berries,
Speaker 1: the blackberries, the salmon berries, the huckleberries, the blueberries. The
Speaker 1: I mean, there's just tons of stuff and then there's
Speaker 1: different types of ferns and things and stuff. So I mean,
Speaker 1: if you're sticking to a vegetarian diet, you're and you're
Speaker 1: actually good at foraging, you're not going to starve to death.
Speaker 1: Then then you start getting into the into the other game,
Speaker 1: the deer, the rabbits, the grouse, the all of that.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it's pretty pretty extensive.
Speaker 2: Is this a place that you had been to before
Speaker 2: previously for hunting?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that was a spot that we'd go to.
Speaker 1: I mean I took my wife there and showed her
Speaker 1: this beautiful waterfall. You know, this was years later. I
Speaker 1: took her there and showed her the waterfall and stuff.
Speaker 1: And I've never had any other experiences around there, particularly
Speaker 1: at that spot. But I mean we've had some. We've
Speaker 1: had some pretty good ones. I guess. The one, the
Speaker 1: one that Sarah called about or that I we got
Speaker 1: in touch about, was we had this this encounter up
Speaker 1: here at this little lake. And uh, it's it's a
Speaker 1: spot where my wife had been camping for years as
Speaker 1: she grew up. And it's a little place they call
Speaker 1: it Depression Lake. They used to stock it with fish
Speaker 1: for the kids to make it a spot can take
Speaker 1: kids and they'd catch fish pretty easily. And a lot
Speaker 1: of people used to go up there and camp. It
Speaker 1: was free camping, kind of disperse camping like BLM camp
Speaker 1: type stuff. And there were a bunch of people camped
Speaker 1: up there, and we went up for a weekend and thought,
Speaker 1: you know, so did the regular camping thing. Took the
Speaker 1: kids out fishing for the day, sat around the fire
Speaker 1: at night, all of that went to bed and in
Speaker 1: the motor room. We had our motor room up there.
Speaker 1: And I'm like I said, I was in the army,
Speaker 1: I served thirty years. I've got PTSD issues. I don't
Speaker 1: want to go down that road too far, but I
Speaker 1: get nightmares and stuff. And so I'm laying there sleeping
Speaker 1: and I'm trying to blow off this nightmare that I've
Speaker 1: gotten go back to sleep, and then my wife starts
Speaker 1: poking at me, and I start realizing, well, I'm not
Speaker 1: having a nightmare. All of this noise and all of
Speaker 1: this stuff going on is is real. It's happening in
Speaker 1: the real world. I'm actually awake, and my wife's pushing
Speaker 1: on me, and she says, since you hear that, I said, yeah.
Speaker 1: We sat there and listened to it, and it was
Speaker 1: it was so loud. We're we're inside the motor home
Speaker 1: and it's a a permeating noise. I mean, you can
Speaker 1: you can feel the sound of these things on the
Speaker 1: hill right behind where we're camped, and it's going and
Speaker 1: it's just it's cora. It's just crazy. I mean, I've
Speaker 1: heard I've heard cougar's fighting, which is probably the second
Speaker 1: craziest scariest type noise that I've heard out the woods,
Speaker 1: tungers fighting, bears, you know, all all of that. This
Speaker 1: thing was so it was so deep, it was it
Speaker 1: was like you you've felt the sound in your body
Speaker 1: and it's like all my hair started standing up. And
Speaker 1: I was just like, I can't I can't place and
Speaker 1: couldn't place the noise. Can't place the noise to any
Speaker 1: kind of and it was it was angry, loud, violent,
Speaker 1: just overwhelming and uh uh, my wife. That's when my
Speaker 1: wife says, uh, it's it stopped. And as it stopped,
Speaker 1: all the coyotes there's all kinds of coyotes were going
Speaker 1: off and stuff. And that's when my wife says to me,
Speaker 1: we we we don't belong here. We got to go
Speaker 1: and uh I And I said to her, and I'm
Speaker 1: being the the consummate smart ass that I am. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just up. I looked at her and I said,
Speaker 1: all right, honey, I said, I'll start the motor home
Speaker 1: and you run outside and grabbed the lawn chairs, right.
Speaker 1: And she looks at me in total fear and says,
Speaker 1: I'm not going out there, and I said either the
Speaker 1: am I and uh so we we didn't go out.
Speaker 1: But there's all these other campers out there, and they
Speaker 1: start lights are coming on, cars, trucks are starting up. It. Uh.
Speaker 1: People were just at that point, it was like people
Speaker 1: intents were packing up to leave. Wow. Uh, it was
Speaker 1: crazy bye bye probably And this was probably three o'clock
Speaker 1: in the morning. By seven o'clock in the morning there
Speaker 1: was there There were us, another guy in a camp
Speaker 1: or with his three dogs. And then on the other
Speaker 1: end of the campground there was a gal who'd camped
Speaker 1: in a tent with her three kids. And I didn't
Speaker 1: I didn't know any of this until the next day
Speaker 1: when we talked to her. She camped there with her
Speaker 1: three kids, and her husband worked the night shift at
Speaker 1: a place down in town, and so they'd stay up there.
Speaker 1: He'd come up for the day, spend the whole day
Speaker 1: up there. Then he'd go work from midnight until like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, eight o'clock in the morning, and then
Speaker 1: he'd come back sleep for a couple hours. And then
Speaker 1: so they were doing that, they'd been camping up there
Speaker 1: for a week. Oh wow, was all alone in the
Speaker 1: tent with those kids. Well, all of that was going on.
Speaker 1: And the next morning she comes walking over and she's
Speaker 1: walking along the road and she's real meek, and she goes,
Speaker 1: she's like hi, and my wife's like hi, you know,
Speaker 1: we got a little fire going. And she goes, she goes,
Speaker 1: did did you guys hear that last night? And my
Speaker 1: wife was like yeah, it wasn't that crazy. And then
Speaker 1: they're both like, I mean, just going on and on
Speaker 1: and on about it and stuff. And so we had
Speaker 1: planned to leave that day. We were just going to
Speaker 1: spend the one night. But my wife was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not going anywhere until your husband gets back, and
Speaker 1: we're probably not going anywhere real soon anyway, And we
Speaker 1: promised to leave her all of our camp, all of
Speaker 1: our firewood and stuff that we had and all of that,
Speaker 1: you know, so yeah, when her husband got back, I
Speaker 1: think it was probably still it was probably three four
Speaker 1: hours and then we finally left. But it was it
Speaker 1: was crazy. The guy in the camphor with the three dogs,
Speaker 1: he wouldn't even talk about it. He wouldn't even talk
Speaker 1: about We were just like, do you hear all that
Speaker 1: last night? You know? And he's like, yep, I mean
Speaker 1: that was it. It was just like yep. Then he
Speaker 1: just like turned around walked off like you know, and
Speaker 1: then he packed up. He left before we did.
Speaker 2: Well, was it more of screaming or roaring? How would
Speaker 2: you describe the sound?
Speaker 1: It was a screaming, roaring, violent screaming. I mean it
Speaker 1: was like it was like, I'm I'm I'm totally convinced
Speaker 1: that that that whatever, whatever it was, because I didn't
Speaker 1: see it, I'm totally convinced it's it's press. What it
Speaker 1: was doing was trumck was chasing us out of there.
Speaker 1: It was to chase all of us out of there
Speaker 1: because it was it was so intense and there was
Speaker 1: more than one there. There was more than one. I
Speaker 1: don't oh how.
Speaker 2: Many were they all in the same area, all in.
Speaker 1: The same area. It's uh, they were on top of
Speaker 1: this hill that's at the end of this little lake,
Speaker 1: And they were on top of this hill behind where
Speaker 1: everybody was camped at, And it kind of makes like
Speaker 1: a quarter of the little camp makes like a quarter
Speaker 1: of a circle around the bottom of that hill. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were right on top of it, right on top
Speaker 1: of that hill, right behind us. They couldn't have been
Speaker 1: one hundred yards from the camp. And I can't think
Speaker 1: of anything, I mean, I can't think of any creature
Speaker 1: that I can relate it to that could make that
Speaker 1: much noise, that loud, that long, that sustained that. I mean,
Speaker 1: just absolute crazy noise.
Speaker 2: Did it sound more human or more animalty?
Speaker 1: It sounded more I'm gonna say more like but not
Speaker 1: a gorilla, but like that kind of solidness to this,
Speaker 1: to the noise, you know, I mean, it's like the
Speaker 1: vocal strength of whatever it was that was making that
Speaker 1: noise was absolutely incredible, absolutely incredible.
Speaker 2: I mean, whenever it comes to people, anytime we scream
Speaker 2: or shout or get loud, it's a very quick duration.
Speaker 2: And and what you heard was much more sustained than that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh yeah, I mean it was. Boy, some
Speaker 1: of the some of those haulers I'm gonna say, went
Speaker 1: on for twenty fifteen twenty seconds. Oh wow, loud, I
Speaker 1: mean loud, but it was it was more like it
Speaker 1: was like there were there had to have been multiples
Speaker 1: of them because they were made, because you could hear
Speaker 1: you could hear the overlays in the sounds. It wasn't
Speaker 1: like one of them just stood up and did some
Speaker 1: kind of you know and then another one did it
Speaker 1: or something. It was like it sounded like they were
Speaker 1: fighting each other kind of you know, where it was
Speaker 1: one was making some big, violent, loud scream and another
Speaker 1: one to join in right over the top of it,
Speaker 1: and another one in there, you know, and I mean
Speaker 1: it just kept going back and forth and back and forth.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was just it was just crazy crazy.
Speaker 2: Once you kind of woke up and realized what was
Speaker 2: going on and had time to process everything, did you
Speaker 2: instantly think that's bigfoot?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I thought. I totally agreed with my wife.
Speaker 1: It was monsters. Monsters we don't belong here. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean yeah, I mean, you know, I'm not I'm not kidding.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've done a lot of hunting and I've
Speaker 1: I've heard lots of stuff. I mean, I've been I've
Speaker 1: been tracked by cougars in the woods. I've heard cougar's fighting.
Speaker 1: I've heard bears fighting. I've heard you know. I mean
Speaker 1: I sat on the back porch here the elk scream
Speaker 1: and rattling antlers and you know, and I uh, it's
Speaker 1: uh yeah, it was uncomparable. I have it was. It
Speaker 1: was uncomparable hearing cougar's fight. Have you ever heard a
Speaker 1: recording of two cougars fighting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's scary, it is.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's okay, that's nothing. That's nothing, I mean,
Speaker 1: nothing compared to this amount of this amount of craziness. Nothing.
Speaker 2: So we have two different situations here. We have a
Speaker 2: situation where you're with a couple of armed individuals hunting,
Speaker 2: and then we have a situation where you're camping with
Speaker 2: your wife and there's other people camping. In one situation,
Speaker 2: you have rock throwing, but the rock throwing it didn't
Speaker 2: seem like you guys were targeted necessarily definitely trying to
Speaker 2: get your attention, but they weren't throwing the rocks at you,
Speaker 2: is what I mean by that, But no vocalizations. And
Speaker 2: then you have this other scenario where no rock throwing
Speaker 2: that we know of, and just intense vocalizations. I would guess,
Speaker 2: you know, tell me if you agree or disagree that
Speaker 2: both of these scenarios, although completely different, had the same
Speaker 2: purpose behind.
Speaker 1: Them, right absolutely.
Speaker 2: Why do you think one handled it one way and
Speaker 2: one handled it the other?
Speaker 1: Well, if my opinion on that's going to be one
Speaker 1: was three guys and the other one was probably thirty
Speaker 1: to forty people. There had to have been between between
Speaker 1: the people that were camped there, their kids and everything.
Speaker 1: There had to have been thirty plus people in that campground.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not a very big campground, but there
Speaker 1: had to have been thirty plus people in there, and
Speaker 1: you know, people having campfires at night and all that,
Speaker 1: and just the amount of people that were there. If
Speaker 1: they were trying to drive something away, well I think,
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of the they needed more backup.
Speaker 2: I don't know any idea why they would want to
Speaker 2: drive you out of the area in either scenario.
Speaker 1: I think the first and the first one where we
Speaker 1: were at the waterfall, I think that one, uh, that
Speaker 1: one was more like, hey, this is kind of our place,
Speaker 1: you know, I just want you to know that we're
Speaker 1: here and maybe we kind of don't appreciate people being
Speaker 1: around and I the second one was more like, boy,
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 2: Know, pissed off.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it was. It was an angry thing. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, you know, it's like I've joked around
Speaker 1: with the story in this experience a few times. It
Speaker 1: like it's like, you know, it's like, hey, Freddy, what
Speaker 1: do you say? You and me and Scotty and we
Speaker 1: get together and we go down and scare a bunch
Speaker 1: of campers, you know. Yeah, I mean, you know, or
Speaker 1: or maybe they really were trying to drive us out
Speaker 1: of there or what. But I mean, yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: I mean I've been back to that lake plenty of
Speaker 1: times since then. It's you know, I've gone up there
Speaker 1: and gone fishing since since then, though it's probably been
Speaker 1: I think it was, Oh, it probably took him five
Speaker 1: years or so. But they closed that campground.
Speaker 2: Oh, they closed it.
Speaker 1: Completely, put big boulders at the end of the road
Speaker 1: so you can't turn off the main road to even
Speaker 1: drive down in there. And then the other end of
Speaker 1: the lake is kind of over by the dam on
Speaker 1: Baker Lake and it's got an actual gate put across
Speaker 1: the other end. Of the lake so that you can't
Speaker 1: get in from the other end at all.
Speaker 2: Huh makes you wonder. Yeah, in that first event, whenever
Speaker 2: you were hunting and they are throwing the rocks and
Speaker 2: you guys decided to go ahead and leave, anything happened
Speaker 2: on your way out, did the rock throwing just instantly stop?
Speaker 1: No, it just it just it pretty much stopped after
Speaker 1: those few that were thrown, after the initial ones that
Speaker 1: we noticed that went into the into the pool. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was kind of obvious that we were going to
Speaker 1: pack up and leave. I mean, we pretty much just
Speaker 1: started packing up and leaving. I mean, none of us
Speaker 1: were going to wander off into the woods that day.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not uh, I'm not. I guess I'm
Speaker 1: a little bit fatter than I used to be, but
Speaker 1: I'm not a big guy, you know. Uh. And I
Speaker 1: didn't feel comfortable going off into the woods that day
Speaker 1: with a black powdered rifle, you know, I mean I just, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't gonna happen, you know, after that. And it's
Speaker 1: and it's not because I saw anything. It's that it's
Speaker 1: that sense of whatever it is growing up here in
Speaker 1: Sasquat stories all of that, you know, I just didn't
Speaker 1: feel comfortable right going out separated from you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: and we'd had separate, separate spur logging roads area that
Speaker 1: we were going to go off into different areas, you know,
Speaker 1: and had it all mapped out how we were going
Speaker 1: to do it that day and circle back in and
Speaker 1: you know, in what we were going to do, the
Speaker 1: different places that we had picked out that each one
Speaker 1: of us were going to go. It wasn't like we
Speaker 1: were going to walk off, you know, three guys together
Speaker 1: walk off, you know, I mean, that's kind of not productive.
Speaker 2: Interestingly enough, there was in my younger years I used
Speaker 2: to go out and do actual bigfoot investigations and look
Speaker 2: for these things. And the area I would go to
Speaker 2: was a National park, a big camp ground site, and
Speaker 2: just south of there there was another campground area by
Speaker 2: a lake that kind of connected to it. It was
Speaker 2: about seven miles south of where I was normally at
Speaker 2: this place, it's called Buckhorn, and we I've camped down
Speaker 2: there before. Nothing happened while I was there, but we
Speaker 2: would hear stories every now and then because I was
Speaker 2: friends with some of the people that lived in the
Speaker 2: local town nearby. And these campgrounds would have a camp host,
Speaker 2: usually a retired couple that lived in, you know, an
Speaker 2: RV at the campsites and just kind of look after
Speaker 2: the place, and we befriended them and they would tell
Speaker 2: us stories and everything. And one of the things that happened,
Speaker 2: and again I did not experience this, so this is
Speaker 2: only second hen but it was in the summer, and
Speaker 2: there was quite a few people in the campgrounds. I'm
Speaker 2: not sure how many, but it was, you know, pretty
Speaker 2: well occupied, and something which the people that were there
Speaker 2: and witnessed it believe it was a bigfoot around three
Speaker 2: o'clock in the morning, just like you're describing, just started
Speaker 2: screaming and roaring and walking right through the middle of
Speaker 2: the campgrounds, and it wreaked everybody out, and the majority
Speaker 2: of them all packed up and hauled it out there
Speaker 2: in the middle of the night, just like you're talking
Speaker 2: about another campground with another very similar situation. So I
Speaker 2: wonder if that's just maybe a tactic they use in
Speaker 2: those situations.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, they want you to know it's their place,
Speaker 1: and I don't know, we don't want you here. I've
Speaker 1: got so many theories about a lot of that and
Speaker 1: a lot of their behaviors, you know, because I mean
Speaker 1: and those are by no means the only two experiences
Speaker 1: I've had. I had one right on the other side
Speaker 1: of the river from where we're at. There's another spot
Speaker 1: that I go. I used to go grouse hunting all
Speaker 1: the time. I don't go up there by myself anymore,
Speaker 1: but it used to be one of my favorite spots
Speaker 1: to go up and go grouse hunting alone. You know,
Speaker 1: it's all wilderness. It's another big area, and there's old
Speaker 1: logging roads. There's a couple of forest service roads that
Speaker 1: go all the way through, and then there's these old
Speaker 1: spur roads that go off and they're all rocked and
Speaker 1: they have been for years, and they've got trees grown
Speaker 1: up through the roads and all of that. And so
Speaker 1: I go up there and walk these roads and go
Speaker 1: grouse hunting. And on one of the first times into
Speaker 1: this one area, I walked down this road and this was, oh,
Speaker 1: this was probably ten years ago, I think, the first
Speaker 1: time I started hunting in there. And I walk in
Speaker 1: this road and I remember this spot very clearly because
Speaker 1: I walked down this road and I walked around the
Speaker 1: corner and heading down this road and there's trees. It's
Speaker 1: a conifer forest area, you know, and the trees are
Speaker 1: kind of grown in over the top of the road.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if you've ever grouse on it
Speaker 1: or any experience with grouse when when they take off
Speaker 1: and it's like an explosion with their wings, their wings
Speaker 1: slap above them and below them, so they're slapping their
Speaker 1: wings as they're flapping their wings. So I walk into
Speaker 1: this area and I'm looking down the road and I'm
Speaker 1: looking around, and I walk under this tree, and four
Speaker 1: feet from my head is this grouse that I missed
Speaker 1: seeing on this branch. And he just explodes into his
Speaker 1: wing flapping to take off, you know, and he flew
Speaker 1: down the road in front of me. His mistake, you know.
Speaker 1: So I ate him for dinner that night. But I
Speaker 1: remember this spot specifically, and I've got a little Forest
Speaker 1: Tracks GPS that I wear on my wrists, and so
Speaker 1: I'll mark all of these spots that I've shot a
Speaker 1: grouse because they're generally you can almost you can almost
Speaker 1: guarantee if you find grouse in one spot, you're gonna
Speaker 1: find more grouse in that spot next year, and the
Speaker 1: year after, and the year after within you know, one
Speaker 1: hundred feet of that spot. For some reason, it's like
Speaker 1: the type of clover that they're eating, or the berries
Speaker 1: or something. But so I always mark those spots. And
Speaker 1: on the other side of the road from where I
Speaker 1: was at, and I'm talking an overgrown, old logging road,
Speaker 1: it was probably thirty feet wide, and on the other
Speaker 1: side there was this tree stump on the other side
Speaker 1: of the road right there. And so I'd gone up
Speaker 1: there probably five six times after I shot that grouse,
Speaker 1: And the last time I went up there, I walked
Speaker 1: down that road and there was this big rock that
Speaker 1: had always been at the bottom of this tree stump,
Speaker 1: and it was on top of the tree stump. And
Speaker 1: it's a rock. It's probably slightly larger around than an
Speaker 1: average garbage can lid. And it was picked out of
Speaker 1: the hole, picked out of the spot that it was
Speaker 1: sitting in, and set on the top of the stump.
Speaker 1: And I mean, you can't you can't drive back in
Speaker 1: there because there's trees growing up through the road. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was no sign of anybody, you know, like wrestling
Speaker 1: this rock out. It was literally like, you know, you
Speaker 1: reach down, you pick up a rock that's like half
Speaker 1: buried in the ground and you pluck it out of
Speaker 1: the hole. It was just like that. There was no
Speaker 1: disturbance around the area. It wasn't like the rock was
Speaker 1: rolled or levered out of that hole. It was like
Speaker 1: somebody plucked that rock out of that hole and stuck
Speaker 1: it on the top of that tree stump.
Speaker 2: And how tall is the tree stump?
Speaker 1: Oh, it's uh. If I walked up onto the root
Speaker 1: ball and put my hand up, it was about about
Speaker 1: that tall. I could just reach up and touch that rock.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's requiring heavy machinery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it'd take I mean, if it was
Speaker 1: guys doing it, you know, a bunch of guys together.
Speaker 1: I got to figure it'd take ten fifteen guys to
Speaker 1: wrestle that thing around realistically to be able to pick
Speaker 1: it out of that hole like that. I don't know
Speaker 1: how you do that without.
Speaker 2: You know, And what would be the point exactly exactly?
Speaker 1: And then I still wonder that exactly too, Really what
Speaker 1: is the point? What's the point of the rocks on
Speaker 1: the stump? Because I've seen that, and I've heard people
Speaker 1: talk about that, and I've and I don't know, is
Speaker 1: it a territory marker? Is it a pathway marker? Is it?
Speaker 1: You know, I don't get it because I've seen other
Speaker 1: rocks on stumps. Yeah, and I've heard other people talking
Speaker 1: about rocks on stumps, you know, but I never really
Speaker 1: I always kind of I've always in the past. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like I come through the woods. You know, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: here's the spot, you know, it had been logged off
Speaker 1: years ago, and here's a rock on the stump, you know,
Speaker 1: and I've always been like, oh, you know, it's always
Speaker 1: been a something the loggers do to mess with people
Speaker 1: or something, you know. I've always been semi skeptical about it,
Speaker 1: you know, and and stuff. But no, no, no, well
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what firsthand. I've said. I've seen that
Speaker 1: rock sitting there for years that I walked through there,
Speaker 1: and I always remember that spot. It was marked on
Speaker 1: my GPS, you know, I've shot grouse right there, and
Speaker 1: then here I am years later, and that rock's plucked
Speaker 1: out of that hole and stuck on the top of
Speaker 1: that stump.
Speaker 2: And and other than the rock, there was no other
Speaker 2: sign or anything that you can recall while being in
Speaker 2: that area that would ever alarm you.
Speaker 1: No, that's one of those spots, you know, you always
Speaker 1: get kind of the creeps, like something's watching me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I I get to a lot of those
Speaker 1: spots out in the woods. You know, a lot of
Speaker 1: people are into the big foot thing and want to
Speaker 1: go out and chase around and find a big foot,
Speaker 1: come face to face with sasquatch and all of that.
Speaker 1: I guess I get that, but I don't. I'm not
Speaker 1: that guy, you know, I'm I'm not out in the
Speaker 1: woods looking, you know, for him. I'm not chasing after him.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's cool. I wish somebody had
Speaker 1: come up with some really good proof, you know, short
Speaker 1: of killing one, you know something, you know that way,
Speaker 1: But I'm not the bigfoot guy. I've I've had enough experiences.
Speaker 1: I've I've done a crazy stuff in my life. I mean,
Speaker 1: I I went to the Army in the eighties and
Speaker 1: I've I've jumped out of airplanes, I've repelled from helicopters.
Speaker 1: I've done what they call stable extractions, where you know,
Speaker 1: you yank a bunch of guys out of the jungle
Speaker 1: on a rope to to a helicopter. You know, I've
Speaker 1: done I've done uh helicast where you jump out of
Speaker 1: helicopters into the water. I've I've you know, halo, high altitude,
Speaker 1: low opening parachute jumps, I've I've just I've done, I've done,
Speaker 1: and I've been you know, uh Central South America, drug wars,
Speaker 1: wars in the Middle East.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Just I mean, I've I've done it, you know, And uh,
Speaker 1: I just uh, I'm just not I'm I I've got
Speaker 1: a really uncomfortable story on on one of these that
Speaker 1: I haven't told yet. And uh, I'm just not I'm
Speaker 1: just not that guy. I'm not gonna I'm just not
Speaker 1: the Bigfoot guy.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't think, I mean, I think that's perfectly fine.
Speaker 2: I Mean, my own personal story was I was just
Speaker 2: kind of always interested in the stuff, just in general,
Speaker 2: anything unexplained. Bigfoot just happened to be one of the
Speaker 2: things that I'd read about, you know, growing up and everything,
Speaker 2: and got curious one night on the Internet and looked
Speaker 2: up Bigfoot and kind of went down the rabbit hole,
Speaker 2: found a group of people, you know, here in Oklahoma
Speaker 2: that was going out and looking and ended up meeting
Speaker 2: up with them, and just I wanted to go out
Speaker 2: and Okay, well, let's see if there's anything to this,
Speaker 2: because the idea of it was really cool to me.
Speaker 2: But then you get out there and find out that
Speaker 2: it's not just a myth and there really is something
Speaker 2: to it, and things start to change. And for a
Speaker 2: person that isn't going down that rabbit hole intentionally and
Speaker 2: just kind of has the curtain jerk back in front
Speaker 2: of them, I mean, that can be pretty overwhelming.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and I think that that experience up
Speaker 1: at the lake with all the campers and everything that
Speaker 1: was that was pretty intense. That was pretty spooky. That
Speaker 1: sold me one hundred percent on the Big Foot one
Speaker 1: hundred percent. I mean, it's it's just like the rock
Speaker 1: throwing thing, the other stuff, you know, all of that,
Speaker 1: all the things that I've seen, you know, a little
Speaker 1: weirdness as a kid, the being watched in the woods,
Speaker 1: hearing the tree knocking, you know, all of that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. I mean, my son and I were in
Speaker 1: a canoe going along the edge of the lake trolling flies.
Speaker 1: It was like the water was like glass. They're just
Speaker 1: perfect reflection of the mountains off of the water, with
Speaker 1: that little bit of mist that floats on the top
Speaker 1: of the water. Just absolutely calm, still beautiful morning, know,
Speaker 1: and something's following us along the bank, and every once
Speaker 1: in a while it did bang a tree, and it
Speaker 1: was far enough back in the woods we never got
Speaker 1: a look to see what it was, but there was
Speaker 1: something there, and it followed us. Probably that was probably
Speaker 1: only oh, I don't know, half mile, maybe maybe three
Speaker 1: quarters of a mile it followed us, but I mean,
Speaker 1: it was clearly there, but it wouldn't show itself, which
Speaker 1: kind of, I guess, kind of leads me into the
Speaker 1: other story. I guess the one that's the one that
Speaker 1: pretty much drove me out of the woods.
Speaker 2: I mean, nobody's forced to tell anything they don't want to,
Speaker 2: so I of course would love to hear the story.
Speaker 2: I'm sure the listeners would love to hear the story.
Speaker 2: But if you're not comfortable with telling it, I don't
Speaker 2: want you to tell it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I uh, well, I'm going to tell it. I
Speaker 1: mean a good portion of it enough to figure out,
Speaker 1: you know why I don't go up into the deep woods,
Speaker 1: especially by myself anymore. You know, when I was younger,
Speaker 1: I used to go out in the woods all the time.
Speaker 1: All the time, I'd go out in the woods I'd
Speaker 1: spend days out in the woods, me and my dog.
Speaker 1: I had a wolf husky hybrid dog. He was the
Speaker 1: greatest dog for the woods. I'd lay down, make a
Speaker 1: bed someplace, and he'd pick out a spot where he
Speaker 1: could overwatch stuff at night and he'd do his thing.
Speaker 1: I'd do mine, you know, and if there was anything weird,
Speaker 1: he would come down to where I was at real quiet,
Speaker 1: wake me up with his nose in my sleeping bag,
Speaker 1: and then he'd look off in the direction of something
Speaker 1: that he hurt or something, and he'd go buff, and
Speaker 1: then he'd look back over there. Then he'd look back
Speaker 1: down at me again and he'd do this real quiet
Speaker 1: buff and then look back over like there's something over there,
Speaker 1: you know. And he'd always he was the greatest dog
Speaker 1: to go out in the woods. And so I used
Speaker 1: to spend a lot of time, I mean, the majority
Speaker 1: of my free time. If I didn't have, you know,
Speaker 1: no responsibilities that I hadn't take care of it home
Speaker 1: or with family or anything, you know, and I just
Speaker 1: pack up and go to the woods, disappear and places
Speaker 1: with no trails or anything. I didn't want to go
Speaker 1: where there were trails, you know, because I didn't want
Speaker 1: to be around other people. You know. I'd pick out
Speaker 1: a spot, find some little lake up in the top
Speaker 1: of the up in some little top of the mountain
Speaker 1: someplace or something that had specifically no road, no trail,
Speaker 1: no nothing to and hike into it and spend at
Speaker 1: least a night around in the area. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: this one, this goes back to another another event with
Speaker 1: buddies of mine that had come up and go hunting.
Speaker 1: And so I had a friend of mine and we're
Speaker 1: still friends. It's not like had a friend nobody of mine.
Speaker 1: He come up and he was still active in the
Speaker 1: army and had just come back from a deployment in Syria,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to spend a little time hanging out
Speaker 1: with me and stuff, you know. And I'd retired two years,
Speaker 1: I think two years before this, and he just wanted
Speaker 1: to come hang out, go hunt and relax, play in
Speaker 1: the woods. You know. He was a hunter too. And
Speaker 1: so I had this old friend of mine that I
Speaker 1: that I knew lived in the valley up here, and
Speaker 1: he'd told me, oh, there's a spot you know, he
Speaker 1: used to go hunting all the time up here, And
Speaker 1: I thought, oh, yeah, I know, that place. I fly
Speaker 1: fished that little creek, but I'd never gotten excuse me,
Speaker 1: never gone up that creek. And he's telling me, oh, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I used to go up there and go hunting all
Speaker 1: the time, and I always got, you know, my dear
Speaker 1: that I was after whatever, you know, and he'd kind
Speaker 1: of chuckle and stuff, you know, and I've seen I've
Speaker 1: seen the racks that from the deers, that he's got
Speaker 1: a deer that he's got up there and stuff, and
Speaker 1: you know, so I was like, all right, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: check it out. I mean, at this time, he was
Speaker 1: probably seventy five push and eighty years old. He didn't
Speaker 1: go hunting or anything anymore either, you know, so he
Speaker 1: was kind of giving up some of his spots to
Speaker 1: people that he trusted, you know. So I tell my
Speaker 1: buddy and we check it out on the map and
Speaker 1: figure it all out, and he gets up here and
Speaker 1: we get all all set everything, and then the next
Speaker 1: day we take off and go out and we go
Speaker 1: this is to the east of me where I live,
Speaker 1: and you go up Highway twenty, you cut off to
Speaker 1: the south down another little highway, and then you get
Speaker 1: on a dirt road you go nineteen miles up this
Speaker 1: dirt road into the woods and gets up on top
Speaker 1: of all of these peaks on the pretty much on
Speaker 1: the edge of the National Park. Up here, we're still
Speaker 1: outside of the park, but we're in the North Cascades,
Speaker 1: the you know, right on the edge of the National Park.
Speaker 1: And so we parked the jeep and stuff at the
Speaker 1: little bridge that goes over the creek, and we brought
Speaker 1: our brought our waiters because we figured, well, we're going
Speaker 1: to go up this valley about five miles through the
Speaker 1: woods and then it's going to open up into where
Speaker 1: all the little headwater streams come into this little river,
Speaker 1: and it opens up into this whole great big bowl
Speaker 1: and it's and it is. It's like a big bowl
Speaker 1: with one side broken off. It's just got these real
Speaker 1: high peaks all the way around this valley. And there's
Speaker 1: really no other way in there other than to go
Speaker 1: up this creek. And so we're walking up the creek
Speaker 1: and heading up into there and walking along and uh,
Speaker 1: I stepped down, I almost step on this fish darts
Speaker 1: out from in front of me and goes up the river.
Speaker 1: And I was like, hey, he said, that was a
Speaker 1: big fish. You know, and he's like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: told him I almost stepped on and he's like, oh, yeah, whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, stepping on fish, and uh, I go a
Speaker 1: little bit farther and another one darts out and I said,
Speaker 1: now I almost stepped on another one. He's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, get a little bit farther up the creek
Speaker 1: and he's like, oh, big fish. And I'm like, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, buddy, whatever, you know. But there's so
Speaker 1: many fish in this creek. And this is uh, oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It was modern deer season, so it
Speaker 1: must have been uh, October, October, late October, I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: early November then uh and uh. So we keep going
Speaker 1: up the up this creek and climbing over stuff and everything,
Speaker 1: and we make it almost up into where it starts
Speaker 1: to open up into the big We're starting to come
Speaker 1: out of the trees and it's starting to open up
Speaker 1: into this alpine meadow valley, and my buddy says, he says, hey,
Speaker 1: I feel like we're being watched. And I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I get that feeling a lot when we're
Speaker 1: up here, you know, and you know, up in the
Speaker 1: woods and stuff, and I kind of blow it off,
Speaker 1: and we go a little bit farther and we're kind
Speaker 1: of away from the creek by the time we get
Speaker 1: up there because it had opened up enough that we
Speaker 1: can move away from the creek. We'd changed into regular boots,
Speaker 1: kind of dropped our heavy gear and stuff because we
Speaker 1: figured we're going back out that way anyway and keep
Speaker 1: heading up aways. And he comes over to me a
Speaker 1: little bit. He's probably about ten feet off from me,
Speaker 1: and he comes over and he gets right next to
Speaker 1: my shoulder and he goes, there's somebody over there. I
Speaker 1: go somebody and he goes, well something somebody not sure,
Speaker 1: and so we stop and we're looking looking around, looking around.
Speaker 1: We stand there for a minute. It's like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't see nothing, hear anything, nothing. So we start start
Speaker 1: moving because we're still trying to get up into this valley.
Speaker 1: Before we split off and try to go one was
Speaker 1: going to go around one side of the valley and
Speaker 1: one was going to go around the other side. Kind
Speaker 1: of work our way around, and we'd figure we'd set
Speaker 1: a time to meet back up and see if we
Speaker 1: can flush something out, chase something to one or the other,
Speaker 1: get a good you know whatever, and so we go
Speaker 1: a little bit farther and uh, I've got really bad tonight.
Speaker 1: It's my ears ring constantly, so I don't detail noises.
Speaker 1: He comes back over to me and he says, somebody's
Speaker 1: over there and they're talking, and I'm like, then I stop,
Speaker 1: and I start looking around. And by this time, I'm
Speaker 1: I mean, we're five miles plus up this valley, A
Speaker 1: good five miles up this valley. There's no trail. I've
Speaker 1: had absolutely zero sign of any human activity at all whatsoever.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can get off in the woods out here,
Speaker 1: and as you kind of move off into the woods,
Speaker 1: sometimes you'll come across something that says, hey, people have
Speaker 1: been here. I hadn't seen a rapper, I hadn't seen
Speaker 1: a beer bottle, I hadn't seen nothing. I seen no
Speaker 1: sign whatsoever of any kind of human activity at all, period.
Speaker 1: And so I'm thinking. I look at him. I said, well,
Speaker 1: there's no way there's people up here, and he goes, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, and then he goes and there's somebody over
Speaker 1: there too, and points to the other side of the valley.
Speaker 1: So we sit there for a little bit, we're looking around,
Speaker 1: and then I start hearing and you can hear it
Speaker 1: in the distance. It's like, you know, when you can
Speaker 1: hear somebody talking, but you can't hear what they're saying.
Speaker 1: It's this really deep, gruff, rumbly, solid sounding voice. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's you know, I mean, it's just deep and I
Speaker 1: can't make out any words, but it's like, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: definitely talking. And so we're looking around and then we
Speaker 1: start hearing things moving and I can't you can't. I
Speaker 1: couldn't see anything because they're up in the edge of
Speaker 1: the bushes and it's like it's that whole thing where
Speaker 1: it's like it's right at the edge of where you
Speaker 1: can't see it, but you can tell where it's at,
Speaker 1: you know. And it's heavy movement. I mean it's heavy movement,
Speaker 1: like bear heavy movement. And so I'm starting to get
Speaker 1: creeped out because it's on both sides of us. We
Speaker 1: can't see it. Whatever it is, it's talking, and we're
Speaker 1: both thinking what we're thinking, you know, yeah, And so
Speaker 1: we decided, looking in the valley up where we're at,
Speaker 1: we're going to go. We're going to move into an
Speaker 1: area where it's full of blueberry bushes that are about
Speaker 1: four feet tall, and you can you can walk through them,
Speaker 1: you know. And it's like it's like we're both kind
Speaker 1: of old schoo when it comes to hunting stuff, and
Speaker 1: because we've done so much stuff that way. It's like,
Speaker 1: I've got a brand of hunting gear that's made by
Speaker 1: a company called Filson's. It's old world oil skin stuff,
Speaker 1: so it's real. It's they call it a tin cloth,
Speaker 1: so it's real heavy snag resistant canvas, and so you
Speaker 1: can walk through the thickest, nastiest, craziest briers and you
Speaker 1: don't get stuck. You just walk through it. It's not
Speaker 1: like modern material where it hangs up on everything, so
Speaker 1: you can you can move through the bushes real freely,
Speaker 1: real easy. But I'm thinking we're moving up into this
Speaker 1: area where I'm just going to be maybe head above
Speaker 1: the bushes, and I'm not comfortable walking out into this
Speaker 1: valley where I can see over the top of everything,
Speaker 1: but everything can move underneath the bushes. Even though I
Speaker 1: can to the bushes, i can't see really what's in
Speaker 1: the bushes ten feet in front of me. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and we've got at least three things that are big
Speaker 1: that are in that valley with us that aren't showing themselves,
Speaker 1: but are talking with each other.
Speaker 2: I would assume that they would be aware that you
Speaker 2: guys are there.
Speaker 1: Oh I'm one hundred percent convinced.
Speaker 2: So your training, both of yours training would dictate that
Speaker 2: this is not a good situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're on the low ground. They've got the high
Speaker 1: ground on both sides of us. There's three of them,
Speaker 1: there's two of us. They clearly can move faster than
Speaker 1: we can, and have proven that already, mostly moving fairly silently,
Speaker 1: but at a couple of spots they started well, and
Speaker 1: this is when they started making the noise. No no hollering, no, no,
Speaker 1: nothing like that. No verbalization towards us at all. I
Speaker 1: swear they were talking to each other. But they would
Speaker 1: charge through the bushes and and it was so fast,
Speaker 1: and they wouldn't they weren't coming towards us. Now a
Speaker 1: barrel do a false charge or even charge right at you.
Speaker 1: I mean, but they'll do a false charge where they
Speaker 1: charge at it is scaria, you know, and then they
Speaker 1: back off to see what you're going to do. But
Speaker 1: these things weren't doing that. They were charging in flanking
Speaker 1: moves like they were like they were maneuvering on us,
Speaker 1: flanking us and like, and it was like they were
Speaker 1: trying to prove to us. Now we hit each had rifles,
Speaker 1: we were armed. And I was carrying a forty five
Speaker 1: cold pistol with plus p's and my buddy was carrying
Speaker 1: his forty five magnum or forty four magnum, you know,
Speaker 1: and rifles, and he's carrying a scope rifle of I
Speaker 1: don't remember what it was, probably a Remington seven hundred.
Speaker 1: He's into Remington's. Now. I was carrying an old Winchester
Speaker 1: ninety four thirty thirty caliber, and so I mean, we've
Speaker 1: got we're armed. And so that's kind of the thing
Speaker 1: that I was looking at is that I was wondering
Speaker 1: if they thought we were up there hunting them, or
Speaker 1: if we were up there hunting or what. But they
Speaker 1: were they I'm one hundred percent percent convinced that Sasquatch
Speaker 1: they're they're intelligent. They're not just some dumb animal. Right,
Speaker 1: So they they know we're armed, they know what we're
Speaker 1: capable of. They all know, you know, they've been around
Speaker 1: people and seen enough. They all know. So they're not
Speaker 1: gonna they're not going to show themselves. They're not going
Speaker 1: to charge in. They're not going to do something where
Speaker 1: they can get close enough, but they're going to do
Speaker 1: whatever they could do intimidate us and chase us out
Speaker 1: of that valley. And boy, I'll tell you what they
Speaker 1: sure did. They sure did, and they followed us all
Speaker 1: the way we went. We were coming back out of
Speaker 1: that valley and going down and moved down. We went back,
Speaker 1: got our packs everything, and it just it's it just
Speaker 1: killed me because my buddy had a rifle of scope
Speaker 1: on it, and I don't I don't know hunters hunting,
Speaker 1: I don't care what you do. It's just not it's
Speaker 1: not the thing to go scope in the woods with
Speaker 1: a rifle. So he did it very limited, you know.
Speaker 1: And we didn't want to be pointing our guns at them,
Speaker 1: our rifles at them, you know, because I figured if
Speaker 1: it was a big foot, they knew well, we knew
Speaker 1: it was bigfoot. I mean it was. We were well
Speaker 1: sold into that, but we didn't want them to perceive
Speaker 1: that we were trying to get them, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. I mean, we'd already made it clear that
Speaker 1: we were leaving, but I didn't have a pair of
Speaker 1: monoculars with me, and I always take monoculars with me, always, always, always,
Speaker 1: and I didn't have them. I didn't even have them
Speaker 1: in my pack. We just brought minimal because we were
Speaker 1: moving so deep, five miles up into the air, and
Speaker 1: then we figured we were going to go another couple miles.
Speaker 1: If we, you know, actually scored a good a good dear,
Speaker 1: then you know we were going to have to pack
Speaker 1: it out. We were going to have to pack it
Speaker 1: out a long way, so we were going to have
Speaker 1: to have to gut and quarter and pro you know,
Speaker 1: and everything to pack it out. Split it up between
Speaker 1: the two of us, because I'm not going to sled
Speaker 1: drag something that far. And you couldn't through all that anyway,
Speaker 1: So we minimalize the gear that we were taking and
Speaker 1: I and I still get to this day, I keep
Speaker 1: kicking myself for not having my binoculars. But anyway, we start,
Speaker 1: we start moving out, we're moving down. He's scanned a
Speaker 1: couple of times with his scope. I've been watching stuff.
Speaker 1: We've gotten to a couple of spots where we've moved
Speaker 1: off from the creek so that we could sit down
Speaker 1: and just listen and see if we could see anything.
Speaker 1: And and it was pretty apparent they were still around us.
Speaker 1: You'd hear a branch snap, you'd hear heavy thumping noises,
Speaker 1: you know how you know how bear does that where
Speaker 1: they bounce, and they bounced their front seat onto the stomp. Okay,
Speaker 1: it was like that, but it wasn't exactly that noise,
Speaker 1: you know, but it sounded like it really sounded to
Speaker 1: me a lot like that, like something was stomping to
Speaker 1: let us know, hey, we're still here.
Speaker 2: Like something fleshy hitting the ground hard.
Speaker 1: Something fleshy hitting the ground hard, like something like they're
Speaker 1: stomping a foot, you know. But so we keep moving
Speaker 1: and we're going down, and we we've already we've well
Speaker 1: resigned ourselves so that we're being tracked by sasquatch and
Speaker 1: I'm and moving down, but we still wanted to see
Speaker 1: if we could get a look at anything, and we
Speaker 1: jump over this little uh. There were a couple of
Speaker 1: them coming up, but this one was as we came
Speaker 1: up the river, but this one was the best. It's
Speaker 1: like a logjam. You get all these logs across and
Speaker 1: it kind of plugs it up, almost like a beaver dam,
Speaker 1: and then over the years the silt fills in behind it,
Speaker 1: so it raises it up. So it's like you're walking
Speaker 1: in the river bed and you come to the and
Speaker 1: then you can drop down a couple feet. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: a little waterfall over. Well, this one was about four
Speaker 1: to five feet tall, and so we kept talking about
Speaker 1: that and that when we got there, we were going
Speaker 1: to drop over that and we were going to take
Speaker 1: off into different directions, just straight out of the sides
Speaker 1: and see if we could see anything, you know, flush
Speaker 1: something up, if we could charge up the side and
Speaker 1: see anything. And uh, this always cracks me up. So
Speaker 1: my buddy he goes, he goes, well, I'll go up
Speaker 1: to the west, you go up to the east. That
Speaker 1: always cracked me up because the west side was the
Speaker 1: side that had one on it, and the east side
Speaker 1: of the valley had two.
Speaker 2: Go get the lawn chairs.
Speaker 1: And so I was like, oh yeah, send me into
Speaker 1: the two. All right, Well I was. I was up
Speaker 1: for it anyway. So we did. We did the charge,
Speaker 1: and you could hear them. You could hear them. They
Speaker 1: took off through the woods. Uh, and the there was
Speaker 1: one on each side of me when I went up.
Speaker 1: When I went up, they went through the woods and
Speaker 1: one and they went at an angle to where I
Speaker 1: was at, down towards the river on each side, uh,
Speaker 1: down towards the river, and and so then I started
Speaker 1: getting nervous because I was thinking, they're going to cut
Speaker 1: me off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the one way in and out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're going to cut me off from the river.
Speaker 1: And and so I immediately turned around and headed back down.
Speaker 1: But I headed back down at an angle towards the
Speaker 1: one that was down river from me, so that I
Speaker 1: wasn't going to go straight back to where I came from.
Speaker 1: I went down I paralleled that path down to the river,
Speaker 1: so that if something happened, I was going to be
Speaker 1: up against one, not having both of them, yes, and
Speaker 1: and uh so I get back down to the river,
Speaker 1: and when I get back down by the river, everything's
Speaker 1: dead quiet. My buddy come down the river and he's like,
Speaker 1: you know, he he had seen that I'd come back
Speaker 1: down to the river, you know, heard everything going on.
Speaker 1: And I'm haulering at him at this point everything and uh,
Speaker 1: I was just like, no, no, I'm done. I'm not
Speaker 1: coming out of the river again. I'm not coming out
Speaker 1: of the river again. I'm staying in the river all
Speaker 1: the way to the jeep. And that's what we did.
Speaker 1: And they followed us all the way peril but you know,
Speaker 1: just uh parallel this all the way all the way
Speaker 1: back to the jeep, all the way back to the jeep,
Speaker 1: and like five you know, is a good five miles
Speaker 1: and they were with us the whole way back to
Speaker 1: the jeep. And when when we were at the jeep,
Speaker 1: it was like everything up there and you know it's
Speaker 1: got you got cracket's, you know, all that stuff up
Speaker 1: in the woods. There's always some kind of bird noise something.
Speaker 1: And this was and this was getting to be late afternoon,
Speaker 1: it wasn't getting dark yet, but it was dead quiet.
Speaker 1: I mean it was dead quiet. There was no there
Speaker 1: were no bird noises, there were no nothing, nothing. It
Speaker 1: was just whatever little bit of sound we were making
Speaker 1: and a little bit of breeze it was going through
Speaker 1: the woods and everything was just dead quiet, dead quiet.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean after we got back to the jeep,
Speaker 1: never heard another noise, never heard nothing, nothing, nothing at all.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what, that's the last time I ever
Speaker 1: went up there. If those things wanted to get us,
Speaker 1: I am one hundred percent convinced, one hundred percent convinced
Speaker 1: that they would have gotten us if they wanted to.
Speaker 1: One hundred percent. I have zero, no doubt whatsoever, zero none,
Speaker 1: no doubt. Zero. It was to drive us out of
Speaker 1: there and to make sure that we didn't come back.
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you what, I ain't going back.
Speaker 2: Was there a certain point something that triggered the decision
Speaker 2: to leave the area for you guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they hearing them talking and them moving around us
Speaker 1: when we were up there. It was the it was
Speaker 1: the fact that it was. It was how fast they
Speaker 1: were moving and the fact that they were moving around
Speaker 1: us yet you know, it's like it's like I felt
Speaker 1: like the dog with the wolf, the sheep dog and
Speaker 1: the wolves circling around me. Yeah, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: that was that was the feeling and the fact that
Speaker 1: we couldn't figure out at that time, you know, at
Speaker 1: couldn't figure out what was going on. But it was
Speaker 1: it was the fact that we heard them talking, heard
Speaker 1: them talking before they ever made any noises, that really
Speaker 1: exposed the positions that they were in. You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that would implay planning, yeah, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, and animals don't do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, but these things, these things did absolutely, one
Speaker 1: hundred percent. No, absolutely one hundred percent planned their whole
Speaker 1: thing and did a very well execution of it and
Speaker 1: the amount of movement and noise and everything that they made.
Speaker 1: And I never saw one. I never saw it. That's
Speaker 1: that's what gets me. I never saw it. I've I've
Speaker 1: never I just and that's that's what gets me. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like they are. It's so they can
Speaker 1: be so overt with all the noise and commotion and
Speaker 1: everything without exposing themselves to where you can see them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's the most elusive. Just crazy. Man, I'm shivering.
Speaker 1: I got goosebumps. It's uh man, it was nuts. It
Speaker 1: was just nuts. I I don't care, you know. It's
Speaker 1: like I think, I'm I'm I'm convinced with oh, rifles, pistols,
Speaker 1: it don't matter, it don't matter what we had. It
Speaker 1: just it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you can't see it, you can't shoot it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But I mean I think I think they could have.
Speaker 1: They could have maneuvered on us and gotten one of us.
Speaker 1: A couple of times when we were separated, they could
Speaker 1: have gotten one of us. Hell, they could have maneuvered
Speaker 1: on on the two of us together. I think and
Speaker 1: and gotten us when we were together without us being
Speaker 1: able to I don't know. Maybe we might have shot one,
Speaker 1: but I don't. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously you don't have to go too far
Speaker 2: into this, but with your military background and training and everything,
Speaker 2: you know, you mentioned some of the things that you
Speaker 2: are involved in, is there anything in your training or
Speaker 2: anything that you faced in adversaries that you can compare
Speaker 2: like their movements and strategy to.
Speaker 1: Nothing, well, their strategies are I mean, as far as
Speaker 1: the maneuvering and being able to being able to get
Speaker 1: a goals on us and everything, I can equate that
Speaker 1: to stuff that we did maneuvering, combat maneuvering and stuff
Speaker 1: that way. But as far as staying hidden and all
Speaker 1: of that, I mean, it's it was like going up
Speaker 1: against one of the most skilled opponents that I would
Speaker 1: have ever faced in any situation that way at all, whatsoever.
Speaker 1: I mean, if it would have been an armed conflict,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have come out of that up against whatever
Speaker 1: that was. I never saw them, and they clearly knew
Speaker 1: where we were every second, and I never saw them.
Speaker 1: Neither one of us ever saw one.
Speaker 2: What do you equate that to just their ability to
Speaker 2: blend in or just their speed. How do you think
Speaker 2: they can pull that off? Because I've been in situations
Speaker 2: myself where there would be There was this one situation
Speaker 2: in particular down in Texas as a matter of fact,
Speaker 2: where we're in a very remote area and we're on
Speaker 2: this old oil road is what they are called. And
Speaker 2: on one side of the road is some sort of
Speaker 2: like down in Texas, there'll be these expanses of thousands
Speaker 2: of acres where they have like exotic game hunting and
Speaker 2: deer hunting and stuff, and they build these huge perimeter
Speaker 2: fences around where the game can't get out. And so
Speaker 2: that's on one side of this. On the other side
Speaker 2: is just woods, thick woods, and there was something man
Speaker 2: that this thing it sounded like a bull coming through
Speaker 2: the woods, an elephant, huge, just crashing, breaking limbs, tearing
Speaker 2: towards us, and it's coming directly at us. There's a
Speaker 2: large cedar tree between the edge of the road where
Speaker 2: we're at and there's maybe five or six of us there,
Speaker 2: and this thing's on the opposite side of the cedar tree,
Speaker 2: and it charges right up to the opposite side of
Speaker 2: that cedar tree. This cedar tree might have been eight
Speaker 2: feet in diameter. We kind of form a semicircle around it,
Speaker 2: start moving around as much as we could on the edges,
Speaker 2: trying to see this thing. We've got flashlights on and everything. Nothing,
Speaker 2: couldn't see a single thing, never heard anything walk off. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it's just like, how does something that big just
Speaker 2: move around like that, just effortlessly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I've watched cougars walk behind a tree and
Speaker 1: never come out, disappear. They just walk behind a tree
Speaker 1: and they're gone. Yeah, but something that big like that, Yeah, yeah, no, no,
Speaker 1: I hundred percent believe that.
Speaker 2: And then the talking also, I only experienced that one time.
Speaker 2: I think it was a bigfoot. I don't know. I
Speaker 2: never saw anything, but I heard two individuals talking. Couldn't
Speaker 2: make out anything they were saying. I would have to
Speaker 2: assume they know that you can hear them. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: they just don't care, and they're just talking to one another.
Speaker 2: And just to be completely honest, I mean, that situation
Speaker 2: to me sounds terrifying. I've heard a lot of bigfoot stories,
Speaker 2: but that one is one that I would personally have
Speaker 2: worried about if I were in your scenario for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I'm the smart ass to the end,
Speaker 1: and I've been I've been shot at, mortars coming in
Speaker 1: on me, all that kind of stuff. And one of
Speaker 1: the things and this is, yeah, I had I had
Speaker 1: a one hundred and twenty milimeter mortar hit right behind me,
Speaker 1: and I got wounded from it hit, but it was
Speaker 1: far enough away. My best took everything. Luckily. All the
Speaker 1: shrapnel that flew hit from my waist up and I've
Speaker 1: got a he could chunk of shrapnel that I pulled
Speaker 1: out of my vest that I kept. But it went
Speaker 1: off and I was directly between it and a buddy
Speaker 1: of mine. And when that hit, all this dust comes flying,
Speaker 1: and it made like this car like you'd see in
Speaker 1: the cartoons. It made like this cartoon cut out where
Speaker 1: I'm looking through a tunnel of dust and it's perfectly
Speaker 1: clean between me and my buddy. And I looked at
Speaker 1: him and I said, well, you don't see that every day,
Speaker 1: you know. You know, I could not at any point
Speaker 1: of this entire situation, I couldn't. I couldn't. I there
Speaker 1: was no smart ass in me at all, whatsoever. It was.
Speaker 1: It was so that whole situation once it led up
Speaker 1: to the intensity was so intense. I couldn't muster up
Speaker 1: a single comment. And that's that was always my thing
Speaker 1: with with my guys when we were in any kind
Speaker 1: of situation, was always I kind of do that to
Speaker 1: break tension in it, you know. I mean, and that
Speaker 1: was kind of our thing in the military, that picking
Speaker 1: on each other and stuff all the time. It's all
Speaker 1: to it's all to break the tension of the situation, right,
Speaker 1: to get every focused back onto Okay, this is what
Speaker 1: we got to do. This is what's going on, you know,
Speaker 1: But to break that stress of the situation. And I couldn't.
Speaker 1: I couldn't. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: I was I was so stressed that whole time.
Speaker 2: I mean, five miles is a long way, yeah, and
Speaker 2: plenty of time, yeah, to figure things out and get
Speaker 2: a glimpse of something, you know, and kind of figure
Speaker 2: out a way to take control of the situation. And
Speaker 2: it sounds like the emotions you were experiencing was just
Speaker 2: not being in control completely at the mercy of whatever
Speaker 2: they wanted.
Speaker 1: Yep. Man, it was so crazy.
Speaker 2: I mean, I've heard lots of stories about you know,
Speaker 2: people being paralleled in the woods. You know, I've had
Speaker 2: I have a good friend of mine that's been on
Speaker 2: the podcast that was paralleled out of the woods for
Speaker 2: a ways. And usually it's like, I mean, I may
Speaker 2: have heard a couple of stories about a mile or
Speaker 2: two miles, and it's typically just one other individual and
Speaker 2: it's just doing the whole you know, paralleling with the footsteps,
Speaker 2: not making any vocalizations. They take a step and they
Speaker 2: hear another step before it stops, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: But yeah, but this is different, This is way different.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it was. Uh, it was one of those
Speaker 1: I mean, I've been in a couple of tight spots,
Speaker 1: but it was like this was like, man, it was intense.
Speaker 1: It was it was I'm one hundred percent convinced. I
Speaker 1: am one hundred percent convinced that if they wanted to
Speaker 1: stop us from getting out of there, we were done.
Speaker 1: That was all there was to it. That was all
Speaker 1: there was to it, and that was that was the
Speaker 1: only thing. As we got down the when we got
Speaker 1: to being within about a mile of the jeep, was
Speaker 1: when I was feeling like they were gonna let us
Speaker 1: get to the jeep and get out of there. Is
Speaker 1: that That's when I when I really had started to
Speaker 1: have the feeling that they were gonna let us get
Speaker 1: out of there, that all they wanted to do was
Speaker 1: get us out of there and to make sure that
Speaker 1: they caused enough that maybe we would never come back,
Speaker 1: you know. And boy, I'll tell you what, I ain't
Speaker 1: ever going back up there. You can't. I'll tell you
Speaker 1: where it's at.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I'll leave that one alone. Yeah, did
Speaker 2: your buddy have any problems coming to the realization that
Speaker 2: Bigfoot's real?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he won't talk about it period to this day.
Speaker 1: He won't talk about that. And uh, yeah, he totally
Speaker 1: swore me to secrecy on the thing because he was
Speaker 1: still he was still in and he was still running
Speaker 1: missions and doing stuff, you know, and he didn't want
Speaker 1: that stigma of anything getting back to anybody. And then,
Speaker 1: you know, he's a big dude. He's a he's a
Speaker 1: big dude, and he's you know, over over six feet tall,
Speaker 1: very broad shouldered, very big dude. And he didn't want
Speaker 1: the oh yeah, here comes the bigfoot hunter, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean he didn't want any of that stigma,
Speaker 1: stigma having to do with it. He won't he won't nothing,
Speaker 1: not a word to this day, won't nothing nothing.
Speaker 2: I mean, everybody has to, you know, cope in their
Speaker 2: own way. And like I certainly get it that that
Speaker 2: would have been a terrifying scenario for anybody, let alone
Speaker 2: people that were trained and aware enough to actually know
Speaker 2: what was going on.
Speaker 1: And and he's the one that he's the one that
Speaker 1: caught what was going on first, you know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's because his head st up high enough that
Speaker 1: he could hear things that I couldn't a lot, bigger,
Speaker 1: lot taller.
Speaker 2: I think it's also kind of important to mention, at
Speaker 2: least in fairness, that I agree with you if they
Speaker 2: didn't want you to leave, you weren't going to leave,
Speaker 2: but they did let you leave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, which which after all of that, I'm pretty
Speaker 1: convinced was their intention the whole time was just to
Speaker 1: drive us out of there. But when it was going
Speaker 1: on at first, when we were all the way up
Speaker 1: in there, I didn't have that feeling at all, not
Speaker 1: at all. It was so I thought I was dinner,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: For my interesting you didn't even tell your wife about this?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, we didn't tell anybody about it. For
Speaker 1: years years. Yeah, my wife just recently found out. And
Speaker 1: then she's like, she was kind of like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: a lot of this makes a lot of sense now
Speaker 1: looking back on things and looking back on your actions
Speaker 1: and your lack of going to places that you used
Speaker 1: to go fishing, and lack of going to you know,
Speaker 1: this spot over here and not being out in the
Speaker 1: woods so deep by yourself. And yeah, and then then
Speaker 1: she was teasing me last night too because uh we
Speaker 1: listened to uh who was it. Oh, it was Sarah's
Speaker 1: one of Sarah's new newest videos and that she put out.
Speaker 1: There was a guy on there talking about a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff and bigfoot experiences and he's had a lot
Speaker 1: of them, uh says sasquatch, and uh he's a bigfoot researcher.
Speaker 1: And he was talking about cameras and game cameras and
Speaker 1: stuff and all of this, and my wife goes, oh, oh,
Speaker 1: I get it. I get it. So that's why, uh,
Speaker 1: that's why you put the motion sensor lights up and
Speaker 1: why uh you've got the cameras up and all of
Speaker 1: that stuff. She's like, yeah, yeah, I get it. Keep
Speaker 1: them away from the house.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Well we call him booger lights out here,
Speaker 2: booger lights. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But that's another thing too that that gets me is
Speaker 1: a lot of people are like, oh, you know, there's
Speaker 1: there's great I'm gonna switch to a lighter side. I
Speaker 1: want to de stress from that story and be kind
Speaker 1: of done with that. Yeah, because that really gets me
Speaker 1: talking about that. It's like, man, but uh, talking about
Speaker 1: the cameras and stuff, a lot of people do a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of bigfoot stuff and and uh,
Speaker 1: I'm one hundred percent convinced they see in for red light.
Speaker 1: I have no doubt. And that's the thing with the
Speaker 1: game cameras, the motion lights, the all that kind of
Speaker 1: stuff is they're all triggered with ir. It's like people,
Speaker 1: people don't realize you you carry your cell phone in
Speaker 1: your pocket and if you've got if you've got some
Speaker 1: kind of a some kind of a starlight vision scope
Speaker 1: or something, Uh, take your cell phone out at night
Speaker 1: and set it someplace and look through your starlight scope
Speaker 1: at it, because it'll if you've got if you've got
Speaker 1: a smartphone, almost every smartphone I know, Samsung iPhones, there's
Speaker 1: a there's a bunch of them. They they're flashlight does
Speaker 1: an infrared strobe about every one to three seconds, depending
Speaker 1: on the brand. So wherever you're going with your cell
Speaker 1: phone in your pocket, you're putting off an infrared strobe.
Speaker 1: So I think with a lot of this modern technology
Speaker 1: trail cams, they're triggered by infrared. You know, all all
Speaker 1: of this stuff that uses infrared, they can see it.
Speaker 1: And I think, I'm I'm I'm convinced they can because
Speaker 1: I've I've I've hunted coyotes and stuff at night and
Speaker 1: lots of varmint animals and stuff, and so I use
Speaker 1: night vision and an IR laser for hunting varments. And
Speaker 1: so I was sitting in a spot one time, sitting there,
Speaker 1: and I'm watching this owl on this tree branch and
Speaker 1: he was probably fifteen maybe twenty feet away from me,
Speaker 1: and I'm watching him, uh with my with the set
Speaker 1: with a PVS fourteen military grade Gen three night vision
Speaker 1: and I'm watching him, and I thought, I'm going to
Speaker 1: turn on that illuminator, and so I turned on the
Speaker 1: infrared illuminator on it, you know, which boosts your vision.
Speaker 1: It's like if youre's someplace that has like zero light,
Speaker 1: you can turn on the illuminator and it gives an
Speaker 1: infrared light off right, So I and as soon as
Speaker 1: I clicked that on, he spun his head around and
Speaker 1: looked right straight at me, and I thought, wow, I wonder,
Speaker 1: I wonder if that was a coincident, if coincidence or something,
Speaker 1: if he heard the click or something, you know, but
Speaker 1: I'd been made that he would have. So I shut
Speaker 1: it off, and he kind of goes back to looking
Speaker 1: around and looking out across the field, you know, looking
Speaker 1: back out and the you know, in the edge of
Speaker 1: the woodlines, and looking around and looking around. And I
Speaker 1: clicked it back on again. He spun his head back
Speaker 1: around instantly and looked at me, and I turned it off.
Speaker 1: I sat there and the third the third time I
Speaker 1: turned it on, he spun around, looked at me, and
Speaker 1: then he flew away. But so that was the first time,
Speaker 1: and I thought, he sees that in for red light.
Speaker 1: He can see it straight up. Now, I've I've shined
Speaker 1: it around coyotes, I've shined it around bears, I've used possums, raccoons,
Speaker 1: just all all kinds of animals, elk, deer, all kinds
Speaker 1: of animals, and nothing pays any attention to it. Nothing.
Speaker 1: The only animal that I've seen that pays attention to that.
Speaker 1: Our light is the owl, our owls, and and and
Speaker 1: I just kind of do it all the time now
Speaker 1: as anytime I see an owl, I'll turn my laser
Speaker 1: on or click the illuminator or something to see what
Speaker 1: they do. And every single species of owl that I've
Speaker 1: come across will spin their head around and look right
Speaker 1: at me instantly, no no hesitation, instantly spin around, look
Speaker 1: at me. And no other animal seems to pay any
Speaker 1: attention to it at all. And so I'm convinced that
Speaker 1: the sasquatch see the infrared. I'm convinced that's what it is.
Speaker 1: And so they avoid it like the plague, because it's
Speaker 1: a technology that they know that we use, that we're
Speaker 1: trying to trap them with in some way. Even though
Speaker 1: it's just a picture, they know it comes from us,
Speaker 1: and that it's a weird thing that that permeates. It's
Speaker 1: the area that we've put something in and they won't
Speaker 1: get near it.
Speaker 2: That could very well be there's something going on, because
Speaker 2: the way those things, again, at the size that they
Speaker 2: are and the speed that they move in pitch black conditions,
Speaker 2: I mean, we couldn't do it we'd be running into
Speaker 2: trees and knocking ourselves out left and right, tripping over
Speaker 2: our own feet. And these things don't seem to have
Speaker 2: any problem seeing in the dark.
Speaker 1: No, not at all. And it's like it's like there's
Speaker 1: so many technologies out with your camera on your phone
Speaker 1: or any digital camera focuses with an infrared beam. It
Speaker 1: uses that ir to range whatever you're pointing the camera
Speaker 1: at to do its focus. So you pick up your
Speaker 1: cell phone, it's using that. That's what maybe gives it
Speaker 1: the focus, like a rangefinder like guys use on the
Speaker 1: golf course or used for shooting or whatever. It uses
Speaker 1: that infrared laser to range, so then the camera focuses
Speaker 1: in on it. So every every digital camera, every cell phone,
Speaker 1: everything like that uses that infrared. He mits that infrared.
Speaker 1: So I don't know. That's that's my crazy sasquatch theory
Speaker 1: thing that I'm pretty well stuck on.
Speaker 2: I know. I mean, that's a theory that a lot
Speaker 2: of people have, and there's nothing crazy about it at all.
Speaker 2: That's one of the problems with this whole thing is
Speaker 2: once you hit that realization and become a knower and
Speaker 2: that these things are out there, then you start trying
Speaker 2: to figure them out and trying to understand why they
Speaker 2: haven't been discovered and why they're so hard to see
Speaker 2: and everything else. And it never stops. Man, it just
Speaker 2: never stops.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know. And I've got family members that are like, oh, sasquatch,
Speaker 1: you know, and they're like, oh, I've spent spent plenty
Speaker 1: of time out woods and I've hiked and done this
Speaker 1: and done that. Well, you know, I hear that from
Speaker 1: so many people. But it's like it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: you get all these people that are like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm the experienced hiker, but I'll always no, they're trail walkers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: their trail walkers. They find a trail in a guide
Speaker 1: book and hiked to some little lake on the trail
Speaker 1: that's like a road through the woods, you know. You know,
Speaker 1: and it's like, I know, I know several people that
Speaker 1: around here that man, they've had things, sightings, stuff loggers
Speaker 1: up here that won't talk about stuff. They're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: same things. Yeah, well you want to know, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, people, so so many people. There's so many
Speaker 1: people that are like, oh, yeah, Sasquatches are a well
Speaker 1: have you ever seen anything?
Speaker 2: Yep, Yeah, and that's it. That's all you're getting out
Speaker 2: of them.
Speaker 1: That's all you're getting, you know. But you know, and
Speaker 1: then you get the other ones that are just like
Speaker 1: you know, it's like my family. I've got several people
Speaker 1: in my family that are just like so n but
Speaker 1: they don't live up here, they don't at the time,
Speaker 1: out of the woods, they don't. You know.
Speaker 2: Well, James, I appreciate you coming on here and sharing
Speaker 2: your stories.
Speaker 1: Oh you bet, man, Yeah, absolutely, no, it's fun. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna tell you straight up. And I'm not kidding. This
Speaker 1: is the last time I'm telling that story right there.
Speaker 1: That's it. I'm I'm you know, I might tell somebody whatever.
Speaker 1: I'm not going on any more podcasts, I'm not doing
Speaker 1: any more interviews, nothing. That's it. You and Sarah got
Speaker 1: my stories and that's it.
Speaker 2: Well. I feel honored, sir, really do. It's quite an
Speaker 2: experience that you went through. And yeah, I'm very appreciative
Speaker 2: that you were willing to share it with me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you've been, You've been. It's just like you know,
Speaker 1: it's just people have to share some of their stories
Speaker 1: that way because they're real and they're out there, and
Speaker 1: people have to come out and share it so that
Speaker 1: the other people that are doubters can actually look at
Speaker 1: the experiences that people have really had so that they
Speaker 1: can understand that, yeah, there's man, there's something out there,
Speaker 1: you know, for real,