Speaker 1: Now one of your pudding. I got a string going
Speaker 1: on here, something just cause my dog. Something killed your dog,
Speaker 1: my dog. We're flying through the or over the tree.
Speaker 1: I don't know how it did it, Okay, Damn, I'm
Speaker 1: really confused. All I saw was my dog coming over
Speaker 1: the fence and he was dead. And once you hit
Speaker 1: the ground like, I didn't see any cars. All I
Speaker 1: saw was my dog coming over the fence. Sat, what
Speaker 1: are you putting? We got some wonder or something crawling
Speaker 1: around out here? Did you see what it was? Was?
Speaker 1: It was standing enough. I'm out here looking through the
Speaker 1: window now and I don't see anything. I don't want
Speaker 1: to go outside. Jesus Quice, you better hello, get the
Speaker 1: Boddy out here when I'm out there. I thought of
Speaker 1: a bench about Tech forty nine. I don't know easy
Speaker 1: out there. Yeah, I'm walking right head.
Speaker 2: With everything that's been happening lately around the Patterson Gimlin film,
Speaker 2: all the controversy, all the noise, all the camps drawing
Speaker 2: their lines in the sand, I wanted to take a
Speaker 2: step back, way back. I wanted to go dig into
Speaker 2: the historical record and find the encounter stories that came
Speaker 2: long before October of nineteen sixty seven, long before Roger
Speaker 2: Patterson and Bob Gimlin rode horses into Bluff Creek, long
Speaker 2: before anyone ever used the word Bigfoot, before the headlines
Speaker 2: and the hoax accusations and the endless arguments that have
Speaker 2: consumed this community for decades. Because those stories are out there,
Speaker 2: They've always been out there, and they matter. But before
Speaker 2: I do that, I need to say something up front.
Speaker 2: I need to say it plainly, and I need to
Speaker 2: say it now because there has been real confusion about
Speaker 2: where I stand on the PGF, and I understand why.
Speaker 2: I've covered a lot of the debate on this show.
Speaker 2: I've had guests on who fall on different sides of it.
Speaker 2: I've talked about the analysis, the criticisms, the defenders, the
Speaker 2: people who think that film is the single most important
Speaker 2: piece of evidence in the history of this subject, and
Speaker 2: the people who think it's a man in a modified
Speaker 2: guerrilla suit. And because of all that coverage, some people
Speaker 2: have assumed I've already made up my mind one way
Speaker 2: or the other. I have not. Let me say that
Speaker 2: as clearly as I know how. I have not made
Speaker 2: a determination on the authenticity of the Patterson Gimlin film,
Speaker 2: and I'm not going to, not yet, not until I've
Speaker 2: personally seen the new Capturing Bigfoot documentary. That film has
Speaker 2: been years in the making. Mark Evans directed it. It
Speaker 2: premiered at south By Southwest in March of twenty twenty six,
Speaker 2: and from everything I've heard from people, I trust it
Speaker 2: presents new material, new analysis, new interviews, and new perspectives
Speaker 2: that deserve to be seen and weighed before anybody draws
Speaker 2: final conclusions. That includes me, especially me, And honestly, I'd
Speaker 2: encourage every single one of you listening right now to
Speaker 2: do the exact same thing. Watch it, sit with it,
Speaker 2: let it marinate, think about it, then decide for yourself.
Speaker 2: That's how this should work. Not based on second hand takes,
Speaker 2: not based on social media clips, not based on somebody
Speaker 2: else's summary of what the film says or doesn't say.
Speaker 2: Go see it for yourself. Then we'll have that conversation,
Speaker 2: and I promise you I'll be ready for it. There's
Speaker 2: something else I need to address, because it's been gnawing
Speaker 2: at me, and if I don't say it here, I
Speaker 2: don't know when I will, just because I'm waiting to
Speaker 2: see that documentary, just because I want to look at
Speaker 2: the new clip that's alleged to be a dry run
Speaker 2: dress rehearsal for the Patterson Gimlin film before I plant
Speaker 2: my flag, just because I'm doing the responsible thing and
Speaker 2: reserving judgment until I've reviewed all the available evidence. Some
Speaker 2: people have accused me of implying that Sasquatch isn't real.
Speaker 2: That by questioning the film, or even leaving the door
Speaker 2: open to questioning the film, I'm somehow saying the creature
Speaker 2: itself doesn't exist, that if the PGF falls, the whole
Speaker 2: thing falls with it. And I have to tell you
Speaker 2: that logic doesn't hold it. Never has. I've said this
Speaker 2: many times over the years, and I'm going to say
Speaker 2: it again right here as clearly as I possibly can.
Speaker 2: The Patterson Gimlin film can be fake and Sasquatch can
Speaker 2: still be real. Those two things can be true at
Speaker 2: the exact same time. One piece of evidence, no matter
Speaker 2: how famous, no matter how iconic, no matter how deeply
Speaker 2: embedded it is, and the culture of this research, does
Speaker 2: not define whether or not a living, breathing species walks
Speaker 2: through the forests of North America. The PGF is a
Speaker 2: piece of film. It is not the species. If it
Speaker 2: turns out to be legitimate, that's extraordinary. If it turns
Speaker 2: out to be a hoax, that changes nothing about what's
Speaker 2: out there in those woods one thing. And I say
Speaker 2: that not as someone speculating from the sidelines. I say
Speaker 2: it as someone who knows. I know Sasquatch exists because
Speaker 2: I've seen them. I didn't read about it in a book.
Speaker 2: I didn't hear about it on a podcast. I didn't
Speaker 2: watch a grainy video on the internet and convince myself
Speaker 2: of something I stood ten feet away from one in
Speaker 2: the summer of twenty twenty four in Washington State. That
Speaker 2: experience didn't come from the Patterson Gimlin film. It didn't
Speaker 2: come from anyone else's evidence. It came from being in
Speaker 2: the field, doing the work, putting in the time, and
Speaker 2: having something step out of the tree line and into
Speaker 2: my life in the most powerful way possible. So let
Speaker 2: me be absolutely clear. My willingness to wait, to be patient,
Speaker 2: to let new evidence be presented and examined before I
Speaker 2: make a call on a sixty year old piece of
Speaker 2: film does not mean I doubt what I've seen with
Speaker 2: my own eyes. It means I take this subject seriously
Speaker 2: enough to do it right, and that's exactly what I'm
Speaker 2: going to do. I hope that up any misconceptions about
Speaker 2: where I stand on the PGF and whether I believe
Speaker 2: that Sasquatch are real. Now that's out of the way,
Speaker 2: I want to go back, way back before the film,
Speaker 2: before the fame, before the word bigfoot ever entered the
Speaker 2: American vocabulary. Let's talk about the encounters that were happening
Speaker 2: long before any of that, because if you want to
Speaker 2: understand what this subject really is, you don't start in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty seven, you start centuries before that. Today we're
Speaker 2: going back to a time when there was no film
Speaker 2: to argue about, no debate about suit zippers or arm
Speaker 2: length ratios or whether the muscle movement under the fur
Speaker 2: is consistent with a biological creature. There were just people,
Speaker 2: ordinary people, most of them living on the raw edge
Speaker 2: of the American frontier, people who went into the woods
Speaker 2: because that's where the food was, where the furs were,
Speaker 2: where the living was. And some of those people came
Speaker 2: back with stories about things they'd seen out there that
Speaker 2: they couldn't explain. Things that walk like men but weren't men.
Speaker 2: Things that were too big, too fast, too covered in hair,
Speaker 2: and too utterly strange to fit into any category they
Speaker 2: had a name for. Those stories fascinate me. Some of
Speaker 2: them are credible, some of them are shaky at best.
Speaker 2: Some of them are probably fiction dressed up as frontier truth.
Speaker 2: But all of them tell us something real about what
Speaker 2: people were encountering, or believe they were encountering, in the
Speaker 2: deep wilderness of nineteenth century America. And when you line
Speaker 2: them up side by side, when you see the same
Speaker 2: details repeated by people who had no way of coordinating
Speaker 2: their accounts, you start to realize that something was happening
Speaker 2: out there, something that didn't stop when the newspapers moved
Speaker 2: on to other stories. We're going to start in Arkansas.
Speaker 2: We're going to work our way through the Civil War years,
Speaker 2: and we're going to end with a question that I
Speaker 2: think matters more than any single sighting report, a question
Speaker 2: about what we're really looking at when we look at
Speaker 2: these old accounts. The first story I want to tell
Speaker 2: you about what happened in eighteen sixty five. The Civil
Speaker 2: War had just ended, or depending on where you were
Speaker 2: and how fast the news traveled, it was in the
Speaker 2: final stages of ending, and in the remote corners of
Speaker 2: western Arkansas. The war had barely registered as much more
Speaker 2: than a distant rumble. People out there were still living
Speaker 2: the way they'd always lived, hunting, trapping, getting by on
Speaker 2: whatever the land would give them. The big battles had
Speaker 2: been fought somewhere else. The politics had played out somewhere else.
Speaker 2: Out in Severe County, Arkansas. People had their own concerns,
Speaker 2: and most of those concerns had teeth or claws or
Speaker 2: weather patterns. There was a town out there called Paraclifta,
Speaker 2: and I'd bet everything I have that most of you
Speaker 2: listening to this have never heard of it. That's because
Speaker 2: it's almost completely gone now. One old house still stands
Speaker 2: on the property, the Gilliam Norwood House, sitting there on
Speaker 2: the west side of what used to be the town square.
Speaker 2: Everything else has been reclaimed by the land. The courthouse
Speaker 2: is gone, the hotel's gone, the seminary where they trained
Speaker 2: young Southern women is gone. But in its day, Paraclifta
Speaker 2: was the county seat of Severe County. It had a
Speaker 2: real courthouse, a post office established in eighteen thirty, a
Speaker 2: large hotel called the National House that advertised well furnished
Speaker 2: rooms and fine cuisine and an up to date livery stable.
Speaker 2: Between eighteen fifty seven and eighteen sixty one, four separate
Speaker 2: newspapers were founded there. That's remarkable for a town in
Speaker 2: the far reaches of western Arkansas. This wasn't some nameless crossroads.
Speaker 2: This was a community. Severe County itself was formed in
Speaker 2: eighteen twenty eight, a full eight years before Arkansas even
Speaker 2: became a state. The county was named for Ambrose Severe,
Speaker 2: and it sat right on the eastern border of the
Speaker 2: Choctaw Nation. The town's own name, Paraclifta, came from a
Speaker 2: Choctaw chief, according to the old stories, a man who'd
Speaker 2: rescued a group of settlers being held prison by Indians
Speaker 2: who accused them of horse theft. The land around it
Speaker 2: is thick timber river bottoms fed by the Little River,
Speaker 2: and hills that roll eastward into the Washetaw Mountains. Cotton
Speaker 2: crops went out by mule or ox cart down to
Speaker 2: the Little River, where they were shipped to New Orleans,
Speaker 2: and the return trip brought supplies, and, as one old
Speaker 2: account noted, a little whiskey. The town was already dying
Speaker 2: by the time of the encounter. I'm about to describe
Speaker 2: Between eighteen forty four and eighteen seventy three, land was
Speaker 2: carved away from Severe County to create Polk, Howard, and
Speaker 2: Little River Counties, which pushed paraclift A closer and closer
Speaker 2: to the county line. In the fall of eighteen sixty three,
Speaker 2: a company of old men and boys had been recruited
Speaker 2: from Paraclifta for the Arkansas Battalion of State Troops. One
Speaker 2: of its officers, Robert C. Gilliam, was killed at the
Speaker 2: action at Mark's Mill in April of eighteen sixty four.
Speaker 2: His letters to his wife and children still survive in
Speaker 2: the Southwest Arkansas Regional Archives. By eighteen sixty seven, Locksburg
Speaker 2: had been named the new county seat. By eighteen seventy two,
Speaker 2: when the new brick courthouse was finished, nearly every family
Speaker 2: had packed up and moved. Para Clifta would essentially cease
Speaker 2: to exist as a living town. But before it vanished,
Speaker 2: something happened in the surrounding countryside that was strange enough
Speaker 2: and frightening enough to get written up and published hundreds
Speaker 2: of miles away in the Weekly Standard out of Raleigh,
Speaker 2: North Carolina. A group of men were passing through the
Speaker 2: area around Para Clifta trappers woodsmen, the kind of hard
Speaker 2: living frontier people who moved through that country because they
Speaker 2: knew it, because the woods and the rivers and the
Speaker 2: game trails were their livelihood. And they told a story
Speaker 2: about an encounter with what the newspaper identified as the
Speaker 2: wild Man. Now, I need you to understand something about
Speaker 2: that phrase. By eighteen sixty five, the wild Man of
Speaker 2: Arkansas was already a known quantity, not a well understood quantity.
Speaker 2: Nobody understood it, but people knew about it. Newspapers had
Speaker 2: been printing accounts of sightings for at least twenty years.
Speaker 2: By that point. The creature or whatever it was, had
Speaker 2: a reputation, it had a history, and this group of
Speaker 2: men claimed they'd come face to face with it or
Speaker 2: something like it, in the heavy timber near Paraclifta. The
Speaker 2: surviving details of their account are sparse. What made it
Speaker 2: through to the newspaper is the broad outline, not the
Speaker 2: granular specifics that you or I would want. They were
Speaker 2: moving through the back country when they encountered something large,
Speaker 2: covered in hair and moving with alarming speed. There was
Speaker 2: a chase, there was aggression. The thing they encountered didn't
Speaker 2: simply turn and flee. It engaged with them, it confronted them,
Speaker 2: and the experience was unsettling enough or terrifying enough or
Speaker 2: both that they told the story when they reached civilization,
Speaker 2: and an editor in Raleigh thought it was worth putting
Speaker 2: in the paper. Is this the most airtight account in
Speaker 2: the historical record? No, it's not. The original Weekly Standard
Speaker 2: article from eighteen sixty five is extremely difficult to access today.
Speaker 2: The details we have are second hand at best, and
Speaker 2: any story that makes the journey from the mouths of
Speaker 2: Arkansas Frontier trappers to the pages of a North Carolina
Speaker 2: newspaper is going to lose some precision along the way.
Speaker 2: Every hand it passes through files off another edge. But
Speaker 2: here's what makes it matter to me. It fits. It
Speaker 2: fits the pattern of what had been reported in Arkansas
Speaker 2: for decades. It places a wild man encounter in a
Speaker 2: specific location, at a specific time in history, among a
Speaker 2: specific group of people who had a reason to be
Speaker 2: in that part of the country. And it was published
Speaker 2: in a newspaper, which means someone at the Weekly Standard
Speaker 2: considered it credible enough to print. That's not proof, but
Speaker 2: it's a data point, and when you've got enough data points,
Speaker 2: they start drawing a picture. To really understand the paraclift story, though,
Speaker 2: you've got to go back further. You've got to go
Speaker 2: back to the spring of eighteen fifty one, to the
Speaker 2: event that put the Arkansas wild Man on the national
Speaker 2: map and in some ways launched the first bigfoot hunt
Speaker 2: in American history. Here's what was reported. A man named
Speaker 2: Hamilton was out hunting with a companion in Green County,
Speaker 2: which sits in the northeastern corner of Arkansas, up near
Speaker 2: the Missouri border. This is flat country, river bottom country,
Speaker 2: thick hardwood timber along the waterways, and swamp ground that
Speaker 2: stretched for miles in every direction during the wet months.
Speaker 2: Not a place where you went for pleasure. You went
Speaker 2: there because that's where the game was, or because you
Speaker 2: lived there and didn't have the means or the desire
Speaker 2: to be anywhere else. Hamilton and his friend were doing
Speaker 2: what men in that part of the world did. They
Speaker 2: were hunting, and then the cattle came through a herd
Speaker 2: of them, running in what the newspaper described as a
Speaker 2: state of a parent alarm. Not just walking briskly, running
Speaker 2: panicked and stay tuned for more sasquatch Ott to see.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back after these messages, being pursued by
Speaker 2: some dreaded enemy. Something behind them had put the fear
Speaker 2: of God into those animals, and they were trying to
Speaker 2: get away from it as fast as their legs could
Speaker 2: carry them. Hamilton and his companion stopped. They watched. They
Speaker 2: waited to see what was driving the herd in that country.
Speaker 2: It could have been any number of things. A bear
Speaker 2: coming out of the bottoms, a panther dropping off a ridge,
Speaker 2: wild dogs, maybe even another group of hunters pushing stock.
Speaker 2: There were rational explanations available, they expected one of them.
Speaker 2: What came out of the brush wasn't rational. It walked
Speaker 2: on two legs. That was the first thing upright, human
Speaker 2: in its basic shape, but enormous. The Memphis Inquirer, which
Speaker 2: picked up the account and ran it, described the creature
Speaker 2: as being of gigantic stature, with a body covered in
Speaker 2: hair and a head topped with long locks that hung
Speaker 2: down over the neck and shoulders, like some kind of
Speaker 2: wild mane. It bore, the paper said, the unmistakable likeness
Speaker 2: of humanity. It looked human enough to be recognized as
Speaker 2: something related to mankind. But it was wrong. It was
Speaker 2: too big, too hairy, too fast, too much of everything.
Speaker 2: And here's the detail that gets me every time I
Speaker 2: read this account. The thing stopped when it noticed Hamilton
Speaker 2: and his companion. It didn't immediately bolt. It stood there
Speaker 2: and looked at them deliberately. That was the word the
Speaker 2: newspaper used, deliberately, like it was taking their measure, deciding
Speaker 2: what they were, deciding whether they were a threat or
Speaker 2: simply something to be curious about. Then it turned and ran,
Speaker 2: not a jog, not a lope. It ran with what
Speaker 2: the paper called great speed, and it was clearing twelve
Speaker 2: to fourteen feet with every bound about that for a second,
Speaker 2: twelve to fourteen feet per stride. That's a stride length
Speaker 2: that doesn't belong to anything human. The footprints that left
Speaker 2: behind measured thirteen inches. The stride length is the detail
Speaker 2: that separates this from a fairal human story. A man,
Speaker 2: even a very large and very fit man, doesn't cover
Speaker 2: fourteen feet per stride while running through rough uneven country.
Speaker 2: That's beyond what the human body can produce. If Hamilton
Speaker 2: was telling the truth, and if the newspaper was accurately
Speaker 2: reporting what he told them, then whatever he watched run
Speaker 2: away from him that day in Green County was physically
Speaker 2: capable of things that a person simply can't do. That
Speaker 2: story hit the Memphis Inquirer first, probably around May ninth
Speaker 2: of eighteen fifty one. Then it went everywhere. The New
Speaker 2: Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette ran it on May twenty ninth,
Speaker 2: The Vermont Watchman and State Journal picked it up. The
Speaker 2: Boston Daily be published it. Papers in Ohio carried it.
Speaker 2: The New Orleans Times Picayune ran a version on May fifteenth,
Speaker 2: and it may been the first to go to press,
Speaker 2: with it being the closest geographically to Arkansas. And the
Speaker 2: story didn't stop at the American border. The Wellington Independent
Speaker 2: in New Zealand published the account on December twenty seventh
Speaker 2: of eighteen fifty one, more than half a year later,
Speaker 2: and literally on the other side of the planet. This
Speaker 2: wasn't a local oddity buried on the back page of
Speaker 2: a county newspaper. It went national. It went international. Editors
Speaker 2: from New England to the South Pacific read this story
Speaker 2: and decided it was worth their reader's attention. That tells
Speaker 2: you something about the level of detail and the apparent
Speaker 2: credibility of what Hamilton reported. Two of the people who
Speaker 2: paid the closest attention were Colonel David C. Cross and
Speaker 2: a physician named doctor Sullivan, both prominent men from Memphis.
Speaker 2: They announced they were organizing an expedition to enter the
Speaker 2: Arkansas backcountry and capture the wild man alive. The New
Speaker 2: Hampshire Patriot reported on May twenty ninth that the expedition
Speaker 2: was being assembled and was preparing to leave Memphis. A
Speaker 2: genuine organized search party, armed men, provisions, a clear objective
Speaker 2: ride into the swamps and bottoms of eastern Arkansas and
Speaker 2: bring this thing back. And then nothing. No follow up
Speaker 2: in any paper, no published results, no triumphant return, no
Speaker 2: embarrassed admission of failure. Nothing, as far as anyone's been
Speaker 2: able to determine. The Cross Sullivan expedition left Memphis and
Speaker 2: was never heard from again in print. Maybe they found
Speaker 2: nothing and said nothing. Maybe they wrote a report that
Speaker 2: got lost. Maybe the account sitting in a box in
Speaker 2: some archive in Tennessee or Arkansas, waiting for someone to
Speaker 2: look through it. But what we've got right now is
Speaker 2: the departure and a blank page where the conclusion should be.
Speaker 2: It may have been the first organized bigfoot hunt in
Speaker 2: American history and its ending is a mystery in its
Speaker 2: own right. But the Memphis Inquirer account included one more
Speaker 2: detail that I think is critically important. It noted that
Speaker 2: the creature had been reported in Saint Francis, Green and
Speaker 2: points At counties for seventeen years. That pushes the earliest
Speaker 2: sightings back to approximately eighteen thirty four. Hamilton wasn't the
Speaker 2: first person to see this thing. He wasn't even close.
Speaker 2: He was just the one whose account reached the right
Speaker 2: newspaper at the right moment and caught fire. And there
Speaker 2: was this a planner in the area, a man of
Speaker 2: enough standing that his word would have carried weight, had
Speaker 2: recently seen the same creature, but he'd kept quiet. He
Speaker 2: was afraid nobody would believe him. It was only after
Speaker 2: Hamilton's report was published, after someone else had gone first
Speaker 2: and taken the risk of sounding crazy, that this planner
Speaker 2: came forward. Think about how many other people might have
Speaker 2: done the same thing, seen something stayed silent, waited for
Speaker 2: permission to speak. And here's something else that I find telling.
Speaker 2: After Hamilton's account went national, the Arkansas wild Man didn't
Speaker 2: just become a serious subject of discussion. It became a
Speaker 2: fixture in American newspaper culture. Editors used the wild Man
Speaker 2: as a running joke. References popped up in papers for
Speaker 2: years afterward, usually tongue in cheek. Someone would write that
Speaker 2: the wild Man had been spotted dodging the draft, or
Speaker 2: that he'd been seen at a polling station being told
Speaker 2: how to vote, or that he'd been cleaned up and
Speaker 2: made editor of some New York paper. These humorous references
Speaker 2: continued well past eighteen fifty one, which tells you the
Speaker 2: story had saturated the public consciousness deeply enough to become
Speaker 2: a cultural shorthand. But underneath the jokes, the actual sighting
Speaker 2: reports kept coming, and the people filing those reports weren't laughing.
Speaker 2: The humor and the editorial columns existed alongside genuine fear
Speaker 2: in the counties where the creature was being seen. That
Speaker 2: tension between the people who found it amusing from a
Speaker 2: safe distance and the people who were encountering it in
Speaker 2: the flesh is something you still in this field today.
Speaker 2: Nothing's changed. The people who make the jokes are never
Speaker 2: the people who've had the experience. The Memphis Inquirer account
Speaker 2: also included a detail that researchers have been chewing on
Speaker 2: for a long time. It noted that the wild man
Speaker 2: had been known traditionally in Saint Francis, Green and points
Speaker 2: At counties. Traditionally, that word implies something older than a
Speaker 2: few years of scattered reports. It implies an established body
Speaker 2: of local knowledge, the kind of thing that gets passed
Speaker 2: down at general stores and church gatherings and family dinners.
Speaker 2: People in those counties knew about this creature the way
Speaker 2: they knew about the weather or the flooding patterns of
Speaker 2: the rivers. It was part of the landscape, part of
Speaker 2: what you dealt with if you lived out there. And
Speaker 2: that seventeen year window the paper sided going back to
Speaker 2: around eighteen thirty four. Some researchers believe even that's conservative.
Speaker 2: The Memphis Inquirer was reporting what it could confirm through
Speaker 2: its own sources. But oral tradition in that part of
Speaker 2: Arkansas may well have extended much further back. The question
Speaker 2: is how much further, And we're unlikely to ever answer that,
Speaker 2: because oral tradition doesn't leave a paper trail. You can't
Speaker 2: make sense of any of this without understanding the land itself.
Speaker 2: Eastern Arkansas in the eighteen forties and fifties wasn't what
Speaker 2: it looks like today. There were no levees controlling the rivers,
Speaker 2: no army corps of engineers, drainage systems converting swamp into
Speaker 2: crop land. The Mississippi bottom Lands were a vast, tangled,
Speaker 2: flooded wilderness of slow moving water, cyprus stands, oxbow lakes,
Speaker 2: dense hardwood forest, and cane breaks so thick you could
Speaker 2: walk into one and lose the sky. Travel was punishing.
Speaker 2: Roads barely existed outside the settlements, and during the spring floods,
Speaker 2: enormous stretches of lowland simply disappeared under brown water. Everything
Speaker 2: that lived in those areas had to move to higher
Speaker 2: ground or swim. Running through the middle of all that
Speaker 2: flat land was a geological eye called Crowley's Ridge. It's
Speaker 2: a narrow band of elevated terrain two hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: to five hundred fifty feet above the surrounding bottoms, stretching
Speaker 2: about one hundred and fifty miles from southeastern Missouri down
Speaker 2: into eastern Arkansas. The ridge was covered in dense oak
Speaker 2: and hickory forest. Settlers used it as a travel corridor
Speaker 2: because the swamp land on either side was impassable for
Speaker 2: much of the year. Saint Francis, Green and pointsett counties
Speaker 2: where the wild man was reported most frequently sit right
Speaker 2: along Crowley's Ridge or in the bottomlands flanking it. This
Speaker 2: was true frontier, widely scattered settlements, very few people per
Speaker 2: square mile, thousands of acres of forest and swamp and
Speaker 2: river bottom that no one had explored or mapped in
Speaker 2: any meaningful way. If you'd wanted to design a landscape
Speaker 2: for a large, intelligent animal to remain hidden from human
Speaker 2: beings for decades, you couldn't do better than the eastern
Speaker 2: Arkansas bottoms in the nineteenth century, miles of cover in
Speaker 2: every direction and almost nobody looking. The first newspaper account
Speaker 2: that can be definitively traced came in February and March
Speaker 2: of eighteen forty six from the Crowley's Ridge area. The
Speaker 2: Baltimore Sun published it on March thirteenth. The track the
Speaker 2: creature left behind, the paper said, measured twenty two inches long,
Speaker 2: the toes were as long as a common man's fingers,
Speaker 2: and in height and general build the creature was said
Speaker 2: to be double the usual size of a human being
Speaker 2: twenty two inch footprints, toes like fingers, twice the Normal
Speaker 2: Height of a Man, published in the Baltimore Sun in
Speaker 2: eighteen forty six, a full one hundred and twelve years
Speaker 2: before the word Bigfoot would enter the American vocabulary. Now,
Speaker 2: people at the time weren't arguing about whether this was
Speaker 2: an undiscovered primate. They didn't have that framework. What they
Speaker 2: had was a much simpler explanation, and it tells you
Speaker 2: a lot about how nineteenth century Americans processed things they
Speaker 2: couldn't fit into the world as they unders stood it.
Speaker 2: The most popular theory was that the wild Man was
Speaker 2: a survivor of the New Madrid earthquakes. That theory wasn't
Speaker 2: as outlandish as it sounds today, because the New Madrid
Speaker 2: earthquakes were among the most catastrophic geological events in North
Speaker 2: American history, and they happened right in the middle of
Speaker 2: the territory where the wild Man was being reported. The
Speaker 2: New Madrid seismic zone, centered in northeastern Arkansas and southeastern Missouri,
Speaker 2: unleashed a series of earthquakes in eighteen eleven and eighteen
Speaker 2: twelve that were almost beyond comprehension. The ground split open
Speaker 2: across hundreds of square miles. Entire forests sank into newly
Speaker 2: formed swamps, sand blue skyward, and geysers from cracks in
Speaker 2: the earth. The Mississippi River for a period of hours
Speaker 2: ran backward. Islands in the river vanished. New lakes appeared
Speaker 2: overnight where dry land had been that morning. Real Foot
Speaker 2: Lake in Tennessee was created by the quakes. The landscape
Speaker 2: of eastern Arkansas was physically, per permanently reshaped, And all
Speaker 2: of that happened in exactly the same region where thirty
Speaker 2: years later people would start reporting a gigantic, hair covered
Speaker 2: creature in the woods. So the thinking went like this,
Speaker 2: a child had been separated from its family during the earthquakes,
Speaker 2: lost in the catastrophe, orphaned in the chaos, and over
Speaker 2: the decades that child had grown into something feral, something enormous,
Speaker 2: something that was technically human but had never lived as one,
Speaker 2: had never spoken, had never worn clothing, had never been
Speaker 2: inside a building. It was a comforting theory in a way,
Speaker 2: because it meant the thing in the woods wasn't truly unknowable.
Speaker 2: It was just a person who'd gone wrong, a tragedy,
Speaker 2: not a mystery. But even at the time, the theory
Speaker 2: had problems. The earthquakes were in eighteen eleven. The first
Speaker 2: sightings appeared around eighteen thirty four. That's a gap of
Speaker 2: about twenty two years, and it would mean the creature
Speaker 2: had survived alone in the swamps from infant see or
Speaker 2: very early childhood to adulthood without any human assistance at all.
Speaker 2: Possible in theory, maybe, but the physical descriptions never really
Speaker 2: matched a feral human being, no matter how long they'd
Speaker 2: been in the wild. A person raised without human contact
Speaker 2: might be strong, might be fast, might be covered in matted,
Speaker 2: unkempt hair, but they wouldn't leave twenty two inch tracks,
Speaker 2: They wouldn't clear fourteen feet per stride. They wouldn't be
Speaker 2: described as double the size of a normal man. The
Speaker 2: earthquake theory was the best explanation people had available to them.
Speaker 2: It just wasn't a particularly good one. Here's where the
Speaker 2: story turns violent. And this is the part that changes
Speaker 2: everything for me. Because it's one thing to read about
Speaker 2: a creature that runs away when it sees people. That's interesting,
Speaker 2: that's curious. You can file that under mystery and move
Speaker 2: on with your day. But when the accounts shift to
Speaker 2: physical contact, to actual violence, to a human being getting
Speaker 2: torn apart by something, he couldn't overcome the conversation changes.
Speaker 2: You're no longer talking about sightings, You're talking about encounters,
Speaker 2: and encounters leave evidence on the bodies of the people involved.
Speaker 2: In eighteen fifty six, the nature of the wild man
Speaker 2: reports shifted sharply. People weren't just spotting the creature at
Speaker 2: a distance and watching it vanish into the timber anymore.
Speaker 2: Confrontations were happening, and they were brutal. The Pittsfield Sun
Speaker 2: reported in January of eighteen fifty six that a wild
Speaker 2: man standing seven feet tall had been seen roaming the
Speaker 2: Great Mississippi Bottom in Arkansas. Numerous travelers and hunters claimed
Speaker 2: they'd seen him, but the paper noted that nobody had
Speaker 2: been able to get close enough to provide much detail.
Speaker 2: He appeared, he was glimpsed, he was gone, same pattern
Speaker 2: as always, but the reports were coming more frequently now,
Speaker 2: and they were spreading across a wider territory. Whatever this was,
Speaker 2: it was moving, or there was more than one of them,
Speaker 2: or both. And stay tuned for more sasquatch ott to see.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back after these messages. And then came
Speaker 2: the encounter that makes the hair stand up on the
Speaker 2: back of my neck every time I read it. Not
Speaker 2: because of the theatrical details, though there are plenty of those,
Speaker 2: but because underneath the embellishment there's a core of physical
Speaker 2: reality that's very hard to invent. Later that year, a
Speaker 2: much more detailed account appeared. The Wisconsin Patriot published it
Speaker 2: on May tenth, eighteen fifty six, describing events on the
Speaker 2: Upper Red River near the Louisiana border. The creature had
Speaker 2: also been reported in northern Louisiana itself, which tells you
Speaker 2: something about the range this thing was covering. A group
Speaker 2: of men on horseback had organized a hunting party to
Speaker 2: pursue it. They'd located the creature near a frozen lake.
Speaker 2: And here's a detail that strikes me as oddly specific
Speaker 2: and not the kind of thing someone would make up
Speaker 2: for dramatic effect. The creature was breaking ice on the lake. Why,
Speaker 2: we don't know, Drinking, maybe fishing, if you want to speculate.
Speaker 2: But the details there, and it has a mundane, observed
Speaker 2: quality to it that reads like something someone actually saw.
Speaker 2: The creature was described as athletic, about six feet four
Speaker 2: inches tall, well muscled, covered in hair of a brownish cast.
Speaker 2: The paper also made a note that I find interesting
Speaker 2: in hindsight. It said the creature was clearly an adept
Speaker 2: at what it called the Southwestern system of fighting, meaning
Speaker 2: biting and gouging. That's a very specific reference to frontier
Speaker 2: fighting culture, and it suggests the newspaper was trying to
Speaker 2: frame this creature's behavior in terms its readers would understand.
Speaker 2: This thing fought the way the roughest men on the
Speaker 2: frontier fought. It wasn't random violence. It was targeted, effective,
Speaker 2: and devastating. One writer got ahead of his companions. This
Speaker 2: always seems to happen in these old accounts. There's always
Speaker 2: there's one man who decides he doesn't need the group.
Speaker 2: This man rode straight up to the creature and attempted
Speaker 2: to take it on his own. I don't know how
Speaker 2: to describe what happened next without it sounding like something
Speaker 2: from a nightmare. But it was published in a newspaper
Speaker 2: sourced to people who were apparently telling a story. They
Speaker 2: believed the creature saw the horse and rider and came
Speaker 2: directly at them, no hesitation, no bluff, charge, no retreat.
Speaker 2: It rushed the man, dragged him out of the saddle,
Speaker 2: and attacked him with a savagery that the paper described
Speaker 2: in precise and sickening detail. It clawed out one of
Speaker 2: his eyes. It damaged the other so severely that the
Speaker 2: man's companions didn't believe he'd ever see again. It bit
Speaker 2: large pieces of flesh from his shoulder and from other
Speaker 2: parts of his body. It left him shattered, blind and
Speaker 2: barely alive on the ground. And then it took his horse.
Speaker 2: According to the account, the creature stripped the saddle and
Speaker 2: bridle from the horse, climbed onto the animal's bare back,
Speaker 2: and rode away at a full gallop. The hunting party
Speaker 2: gave chase. They were joined by a group of Choctaw
Speaker 2: Indians who happened to be in the area. Together they
Speaker 2: pursued the creature deep into the Washataw Mountains, which were
Speaker 2: buried in snow from a particularly harsh winter. The chase
Speaker 2: went far into the rough country. They never caught it.
Speaker 2: I know how that reads a wild creature ripping a
Speaker 2: man apart and then stealing his horse and riding it
Speaker 2: bare back into the mountains. That sounds like the kind
Speaker 2: of story that starts as a grain of truth and
Speaker 2: grows six feet taller every time someone tells it. Around
Speaker 2: a fire, and the horse riding detail is the part
Speaker 2: that I think is most vulnerable to that kind of inflation.
Speaker 2: That's probably embellishment, I'll give you that, but stripped the
Speaker 2: theatrical elements away, and something remains underneath, something real. A
Speaker 2: man was attacked. He lost both of his eyes. He
Speaker 2: was bitten so badly that pieces of his flesh were missing.
Speaker 2: He nearly died. That level of physical injury didn't come
Speaker 2: from a tall tail. Something happened to him, something with
Speaker 2: the strength and the ferocity to overwhelm a man on horseback,
Speaker 2: whether it was a creature we don't have a name for,
Speaker 2: or a feral human being who'd been surviving in the
Speaker 2: wild long enough to become indistinguishable from an animal in
Speaker 2: its behavior. Something tore that man apart. The embellishment might
Speaker 2: be fiction, the wounds weren't. And there's one more thing
Speaker 2: about that eighteen fifty six account that I think deserves attention,
Speaker 2: because it speaks to something we don't talk about enough
Speaker 2: in this field. The newspaper noted that the creature had
Speaker 2: also been seen in northern Louisiana, not just in Arkansas.
Speaker 2: That's important because it suggests range. It suggests movement across
Speaker 2: state lines, across river systems, across different types of terrain.
Speaker 2: The Arkansas wild Man wasn't stationary. It wasn't confined to
Speaker 2: one county or one patch of swamp. If these accounts
Speaker 2: are describing the same creature, or even the same type
Speaker 2: of creature, then we're looking at something with a t
Speaker 2: territory that covered hundreds of miles. That's consistent with what
Speaker 2: we know about how large primates move. It's consistent with
Speaker 2: modern bigfoot sighting patterns, where clusters of reports often trace
Speaker 2: out corridors along waterways and mountain ridges. And it was
Speaker 2: being documented in the eighteen fifties, decades before anyone had
Speaker 2: the concept of a sighting corridor or a migration pattern.
Speaker 2: The sightings in Arkansas continued to appear in the nation's
Speaker 2: papers right up until the eve of the Civil War,
Speaker 2: when understandably other news took over. By the time the
Speaker 2: war ended, the Arkansas wild Man had almost been forgotten
Speaker 2: by the national press, but the creature itself, whatever it was,
Speaker 2: hadn't gone anywhere. The term even survived as slang for
Speaker 2: years after the war. Calling someone an Arkansas wild man
Speaker 2: was a way of saying they were uncivilized or rough
Speaker 2: around the edges. The real thing had faded into a
Speaker 2: figure of speech. But in the counties where it had
Speaker 2: been seen, the memories didn't fade made that easily. And
Speaker 2: then the war came and the newspapers had other things
Speaker 2: on their minds. By eighteen sixty one, the wild Man
Speaker 2: of Arkansas had been showing up in print for at
Speaker 2: least fifteen years, probably longer if you count the oral
Speaker 2: reports that never found a newspaper. But the country was
Speaker 2: splitting apart at the seams. Six hundred thousand men would
Speaker 2: be dead before it was over. The Arkansas wild Man,
Speaker 2: whatever it was, wasn't going to compete with Shiloh and
Speaker 2: Antietam and Gettysburg for column space. The sightings didn't stop,
Speaker 2: the coverage did. And there's an important difference between those
Speaker 2: two things. I want to take a moment here and
Speaker 2: put all of this into a wider frame, because Arkansas
Speaker 2: wasn't the only place people were reporting wild men in
Speaker 2: the decades before the war. The concept of a wild man,
Speaker 2: a hairy, often gigantic figure living beyond the boundaries of civilization,
Speaker 2: runs deep in the American consciousness. It goes back further
Speaker 2: than the colonies. European folklore from the thirteenth through the
Speaker 2: fifteenth centuries is full of references to wild men thought
Speaker 2: to inhabit the dark parts of forests and open countryside.
Speaker 2: By the Middle Ages, the image had evolved into something
Speaker 2: with a thick coat of hair and the habits of
Speaker 2: a wild animal. The idea crossed the Atlantic with the
Speaker 2: first settlers and found fertile ground in a continent where
Speaker 2: the forest really was dark, really was vast, and really
Speaker 2: did contain things that Europeans had never encountered before. And
Speaker 2: the indigenous peoples who'd been here for thousands of years
Speaker 2: before the Europeans arrived, they had their own traditions. The
Speaker 2: Salish people of the Pacific northwest had sasquatch. The Algonquin
Speaker 2: of the north central region spoke of wendigo. The Ojibwe
Speaker 2: of the northern plains knew the rugaroo, a hairy figure
Speaker 2: that appeared in times of danger. The Cherokee had their
Speaker 2: own stories. Tribe after tribe across the breadth of the
Speaker 2: continent had traditions of large, hairy manlike creature inhabiting the
Speaker 2: deep woods. By the eighteen hundreds, American newspapers had begun
Speaker 2: dedicating space to wild man sidings. One of the earliest
Speaker 2: published accounts in the United States appeared in The Exeter
Speaker 2: Watchmen on September twenty second of eighteen eighteen. But the
Speaker 2: Arkansas accounts from the eighteen thirties through the eighteen fifties
Speaker 2: were different. They were more specific, more detailed, more numerous,
Speaker 2: and more consistent than anything that had come before. They
Speaker 2: named witnesses, they quoted measurements, they described behavior, and they
Speaker 2: appeared in enough different papers in enough different states over
Speaker 2: enough years that they constituted something that looked less like
Speaker 2: isolated anecdotes and more like a pattern of observation. That
Speaker 2: pattern went quiet during the war years, but it didn't
Speaker 2: go away. The people who'd been living alongside whatever was
Speaker 2: out there in those bottoms and mountains didn't suddenly stop
Speaker 2: encountering it just because the country was fighting itself. And
Speaker 2: the soldiers who march through those same landscapes, men from
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania and Ohio and Tennessee and Alabama who'd never been
Speaker 2: in that kind of country before, sometimes found more in
Speaker 2: the woods than they expected. During the war itself, there
Speaker 2: are a handful of accounts that claim to describe encounters
Speaker 2: between soldiers and wild men or creatures in the wilderness.
Speaker 2: Some of those accounts are intriguing, and some of them,
Speaker 2: I've got to tell you plainly, aren't very good. I'm
Speaker 2: going to cover both kinds, and I'm going to tell
Speaker 2: you exactly which I think is which. The strongest wartime
Speaker 2: account comes from Bridgeport, Alabama, and I want to walk
Speaker 2: through it carefully because it's both the most detailed Civil
Speaker 2: War era wild man story on record and the one
Speaker 2: that raises the most complicated and most human questions about
Speaker 2: what we're really talking about when we use the word monster.
Speaker 2: Bridgeport sits on the Tennessee River, right at the Alabama
Speaker 2: Tennessee line. During the war, it was a strategic choke
Speaker 2: point railroad bridge across the river river crossing for troop movements.
Speaker 2: Both armies wanted it. General Braxton Bragg's Confederate command was
Speaker 2: in the area at one point during the war, and
Speaker 2: that's where this story begins. According to a newspaper article
Speaker 2: published in the Pittsburgh Dispatch on August second of eighteen ninety,
Speaker 2: a Captain George Anderson told the following story about his
Speaker 2: time under Bragg's command near Bridgeport. Something was prowling the
Speaker 2: perimeter of the Confederate camp. Over the course of four days,
Speaker 2: five pickets from Anderson's company vanished, one at a time,
Speaker 2: one per night, not killed, as far as anyone could tell,
Speaker 2: not found dead, but gone. And at every post where
Speaker 2: a man had disappeared, there were unmistakable signs of a struggle. Ground,
Speaker 2: torn up, equipment, overturned. Whatever had taken them hadn't done
Speaker 2: it gently. Anderson gathered ten men and went out looking.
Speaker 2: What they found looked like a man about six feet tall,
Speaker 2: around two hundred and fifty pounds of dense muscular weight,
Speaker 2: and every inch of it covered in hair. When the
Speaker 2: ten soldiers tried to restrain the creature, it fought them hard.
Speaker 2: It took all ten men to bring it down. They
Speaker 2: tried to talk to it, tried to get it to speak,
Speaker 2: but every vocalization it produced was just noise, no words,
Speaker 2: no language. Anyone recognized, raw animal sound. Anderson did something
Speaker 2: that surprises me every time I read this account. He
Speaker 2: let it go. Then he followed it. He wanted to
Speaker 2: know where it went. He wanted to know if it
Speaker 2: had anything to do with the five missing men. The
Speaker 2: creature led them to a large cave up in the
Speaker 2: hills above the river. When it realized it was being followed,
Speaker 2: it panicked. It scrambled for the summit of the ridge,
Speaker 2: and as it climbed, it began throwing rocks down at
Speaker 2: Anderson's party, large rocks thrown with force and accuracy. These
Speaker 2: soldiers were under fire, essentially from a creature defending its
Speaker 2: ground with the only weapons it had. Then it reached
Speaker 2: the top and rather than be captured again, it threw
Speaker 2: itself off the cliff face one hundred foot drop. It
Speaker 2: died on impact. Anderson's men went into the cave and
Speaker 2: found their five missing pickets, all alive, all uninjured. They'd
Speaker 2: been taken and held, but not harmed. Now I want
Speaker 2: to pause on that detail because it complicates the story
Speaker 2: in a way that I think is important. Whatever took
Speaker 2: those five soldiers didn't kill them, didn't wound them, didn't
Speaker 2: leave them for dead. It captured them and kept them
Speaker 2: in a cave, and when they were found they were fine.
Speaker 2: That doesn't sound like the behavior of a mindless predator.
Speaker 2: That sounds like the behavior of something or someone who
Speaker 2: had a reason for taking them and a capacity for
Speaker 2: restraint that goes beyond pure animal instinct. If this was
Speaker 2: Bill Patten, a man whose mind had been shattered but
Speaker 2: whose body still remembered how to survive, then what do
Speaker 2: we make of the fact that he held five men
Speaker 2: captive without hurting them. Was there still enough of the
Speaker 2: man inside the animal to prevent him from doing real harm?
Speaker 2: Was he lonely? Was he afraid in hoarding people the
Speaker 2: way he might hoard food. I don't know, but the
Speaker 2: detail haunts me. And then came the part that changes
Speaker 2: the meaning of everything. Anderson later spoke with a local
Speaker 2: resident who told him exactly what they'd found. The creature's
Speaker 2: name was Bill Patten. He'd been a Unionist, a man
Speaker 2: who opposed the Confederacy in a region where that opposition
Speaker 2: was dangerous. Home Guard forces had captured him, intending to
Speaker 2: drag him to a recruiting station and force him into
Speaker 2: Confederate service. During his escape attempt, he was struck in
Speaker 2: the head with a cavalry saber. The wound didn't kill him,
Speaker 2: but it destroyed something essential in him. It shattered his
Speaker 2: ability to think, to speak, to function as a person.
Speaker 2: And whatever was left to Bill Patten after that saber
Speaker 2: blow fled into the mountains of northern Alabama, where he
Speaker 2: survived for months or years as something that was no
Speaker 2: longer recognizably human. Think about what that means. If the
Speaker 2: identification's real, and I've got to stress that it's unconfirmed,
Speaker 2: then what those ten soldiers fought to the ground near
Speaker 2: Bridgeport was a man, a human being who'd been so
Speaker 2: severely damaged by the violence of his own time and
Speaker 2: his own neighbors, that he could no longer speak, couldn't
Speaker 2: live among people, couldn't be reached by any human attempt
Speaker 2: at communication. His body had gone wild, his hair had
Speaker 2: grown thick and matted, his behavior had become primal and defensive.
Speaker 2: He captured soldiers and held them in his cave, but
Speaker 2: didn't hurt them, which suggests something still human operating underneath
Speaker 2: the animal surface. And when he was cornered again, when
Speaker 2: he knew what capture meant, because he remembered what had
Speaker 2: happened the last time men put their hands on him,
Speaker 2: he chose to die rather than go through it again.
Speaker 2: That's not a monster story. That's a war story. And
Speaker 2: it's one of the most devastating things I've ever in
Speaker 2: ca in all of this research, not because it proves
Speaker 2: anything about Sasquatch, because it proves something about us. And
Speaker 2: the thing is the Bridgeport account, even if every details true,
Speaker 2: fits into a much larger and very real phenomenon of
Speaker 2: the war years. And stay tuned for more sasquatch Otyesee,
Speaker 2: we'll be right back after these messages. The mountains of Appalachia,
Speaker 2: from Virginia down through Tennessee and into Alabama were full
Speaker 2: of men who'd fallen out of the human world during
Speaker 2: the Civil War. Deserters, draft evaders, unionists in Confederate territory,
Speaker 2: Confederates in Union territory, men who'd committed acts of violence
Speaker 2: that made it impossible for them to go home, men
Speaker 2: who'd simply broken under the weight of what they'd experienced.
Speaker 2: The numbers are staggering when you look at them. Estimates
Speaker 2: suggest that over one hundred thousand men deserted from the
Speaker 2: Confederate army alone during the course of the war. The
Speaker 2: Union numbers were even higher. Not all of these men
Speaker 2: went home. Many of them went to ground. They hid
Speaker 2: in the hollows of the Appalachians, in the coves of
Speaker 2: the smokies, in the river bottoms of Alabama and Mississippi.
Speaker 2: Some formed bands, some lived alone, and some of them,
Speaker 2: over months and years of isolation, became something that the
Speaker 2: people around them no longer recognized as fully human. I've
Speaker 2: spent sixteen years in law enforcement. I've seen what isolation
Speaker 2: and trauma do to people in the modern world with
Speaker 2: modern resources and modern support systems available to them. Now
Speaker 2: strip all of that away. Put a young man through
Speaker 2: two or three years of the worst combat the nineteenth
Speaker 2: century could produce, let him watch his friends die of
Speaker 2: disease and wounds and exposure, let him participate in things
Speaker 2: that his mind can't process or forgive, and then turn
Speaker 2: him loose in the mountains with no food, no shelter,
Speaker 2: no one to talk to, no reason to believe that
Speaker 2: going home is even an option. How long before that
Speaker 2: man starts to look like something other than a man.
Speaker 2: How long before the locals who catch a glimpse of
Speaker 2: him through the trees start telling stories about the wild
Speaker 2: man who lives up on the ridge? Not long? Not
Speaker 2: long at all. I'm not saying every wild man's story
Speaker 2: from this era is a traumatized veteran. I'm saying the
Speaker 2: war created exactly the conditions that would produce encounters with
Speaker 2: people who'd stopped being people in any social or behavioral sense,
Speaker 2: and those encounters would have looked and felt a lot
Speaker 2: like encountering something truly non human, especially at night, especially
Speaker 2: at a distance, especially when you were already exhausted and
Speaker 2: afraid and standing guard in territory you didn't know. There's
Speaker 2: even a post war account from southwestern Virginia that illustrates
Speaker 2: this perfectly. In Washington County, near the old Jonesborough Road
Speaker 2: between Bristol and Abingdon, locals reported the appearance of a large,
Speaker 2: hair covered creature in eighteen sixty eight or eighteen sixty nine,
Speaker 2: right after the war ended. This one was different from
Speaker 2: the usual descriptions. It was the standard size for a
Speaker 2: bigfoot seven to nine feet, with twenty inch foot prints
Speaker 2: and a distinctive smell, but instead of dark hair, it
Speaker 2: was described as light gray or white. Some people called
Speaker 2: it a ghost for that reason. Over the following years,
Speaker 2: this creature killed livestock, stripped fruit from trees, and reportedly
Speaker 2: dug up a recently buried body from a mountaintop grave.
Speaker 2: Armed parties searched the mountain for days without finding it.
Speaker 2: Then a violent storm came through, felling large trees across
Speaker 2: the ridge. After the storm, the creature was never seen again,
Speaker 2: and years later hunters found a massive human like skeleton
Speaker 2: pinned beneath a chestnut tree that had been brought down
Speaker 2: by that storm. Now, is that a Bigfoot story or
Speaker 2: is that the story of a man, possibly a returning soldier,
Speaker 2: possibly someone who'd been living wild in the mountain since
Speaker 2: the war who finally ran out of luck when the
Speaker 2: weather turned against him. I honestly don't know, and I
Speaker 2: think that ambiguity is the point. In the years during
Speaker 2: and immediately after the Civil War, the line between monster
Speaker 2: and man got very, very blurry, and the people telling
Speaker 2: these stories weren't always able to see which side of
Speaker 2: that line they were on. But the source, we've got
Speaker 2: to talk about the source. The entire Bridgeport account rests
Speaker 2: on a single man, Captain George Anderson, telling his story
Speaker 2: to a newspaper reporter in eighteen ninety, more than twenty
Speaker 2: five years after the events he's describing. There's no contemporaneous record,
Speaker 2: no military diary, no letter home, no corroborating witness quoted
Speaker 2: in the article one man, one newspaper, One story told
Speaker 2: a quarter century after the fact. That doesn't automatically make
Speaker 2: it false. But it means we're trusting a single narrator
Speaker 2: across a long stretch of time, and anyone who works
Speaker 2: with historical accounts knows what that distance can do to
Speaker 2: a story. The core may be solid, the edges may
Speaker 2: have shifted. We simply don't know. Now we get to
Speaker 2: the accounts I've got real problems with, and I owe
Speaker 2: it to you to be direct about why. The first
Speaker 2: is the Harper's Ferry story. It surfaces regularly in online
Speaker 2: discussions of Civil War bigfoot encounters. The story goes like this.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety nine, a collection of autographs and old
Speaker 2: letters was appraised for an estate sale in Hertford, Connecticut.
Speaker 2: Among the items were several letters by a private James
Speaker 2: Moore of the sixty seventh Pennsylvania Infantry Company K. One
Speaker 2: of those letters, reportedly dated February twenty sixth of eighteen
Speaker 2: sixty three, describes an incident during guard duty at Harper's Ferry.
Speaker 2: Moore writes about a cold, still night, a sudden commotion
Speaker 2: in the garrison, men shouting that a man beast was
Speaker 2: on foot, rifle fire toward the river. Afterward, the witnesses
Speaker 2: described something that had rated the food stores climbed. The
Speaker 2: wall stood maybe eight feet tall and was covered in
Speaker 2: thick dark hair. Named soldier, named regiment, specific date, specific location.
Speaker 2: It sounds verifiable, but the letter isn't publicly accessible. The
Speaker 2: estate sales never been independently confirmed, and the auction catalog
Speaker 2: that reportedly contained the letter's transcript was destroyed in a
Speaker 2: house fire. The one piece of supporting documentation that could
Speaker 2: anchor this story is gone for a reason that conveniently
Speaker 2: prevents anyone from checking it. That pattern should make you cautious.
Speaker 2: It makes me cautious. I'm not saying the letter was fabricated.
Speaker 2: I'm saying it can't be verified, and there's a meaningful
Speaker 2: difference between a compelling claim and confirmed evidence. Until someone
Speaker 2: produces that letter, this one stays in the unverified column.
Speaker 2: The second week account is the Bryce's cross Road story,
Speaker 2: and this is the one that frustrates me the most.
Speaker 2: An unnamed confederate who the road with Nathan Bedford Forest,
Speaker 2: was allegedly wounded at the Battle of Bryce's cross Roads
Speaker 2: in June of eighteen sixty four. While lying on the field,
Speaker 2: he was found by multiple Sasquatch who carried him to
Speaker 2: their dwelling, nursed his wounds, and eventually released him. The
Speaker 2: source is a YouTube video. The narrator claims a local
Speaker 2: historian showed him an eighteen ninety five letter describing the encounter,
Speaker 2: but wouldn't allow copies, photographs, or recordings. The entire story
Speaker 2: was reconstructed from memory. No name for the soldier, no
Speaker 2: name for the historian, no explanation for why the letter
Speaker 2: couldn't be documented, no independent corroboration of any kind. I
Speaker 2: included it because it circulates widely and people deserve to
Speaker 2: hear an honest assessment. This doesn't meet any reasonable standard
Speaker 2: of evidence. It's a story. It might contain a seed
Speaker 2: of something real, but in its present form, it's not
Speaker 2: something I can stand behind, and I'd be doing you
Speaker 2: a disservice to present it as though it carries the
Speaker 2: same weight as the documented Arkansas newspaper accounts. So where
Speaker 2: does all of this leave us? It leaves us with
Speaker 2: a question that I think is more important than any
Speaker 2: individual account, and it's a question I want to sit with,
Speaker 2: not rush past. What were these people actually seeing? I
Speaker 2: can identify four reasonable possibilities, and I believe the honest
Speaker 2: answer is that different accounts probably reflect different realities. The
Speaker 2: first possibility is the straightforward one. Some of these people
Speaker 2: were seeing what modern witnesses still report, a large, undocumented primate,
Speaker 2: a biological creature a sasquatch. The Arkansas wild Man. Descriptions
Speaker 2: viewed as a body of evidence stretching across twenty years
Speaker 2: and multiple independent newspapers, are remarkably consistent. Gigantic size, hair
Speaker 2: covered body, long hair on the head and shoulders, stride
Speaker 2: links of twelve to fourteen feet, footprints of thirteen to
Speaker 2: twenty two inches, livestock urbans, habitation in remote, heavily forested terrain,
Speaker 2: aggression when cornered. Those details repeated by witnesses who couldn't
Speaker 2: have coordinated their accounts, argue for something real being observed,
Speaker 2: not imagined, not invented seen. The second possibility as feral humans.
Speaker 2: The Bill Pattent identification at Bridgeport, if it's true, is
Speaker 2: the sharpest example a person who, through traumatic brain injury,
Speaker 2: had lost the ability to function in human society. Over
Speaker 2: months in the wild, such a person would become nearly unrecognizable,
Speaker 2: hair matted and long, body, filthy, behavior, nonverbal, and aggressive,
Speaker 2: and the Civil War produced this kind of casualty in
Speaker 2: vast numbers. Deserters from both armies hid in the mountains
Speaker 2: for years. Some were never found. If a soldier on
Speaker 2: picket duty in eighteen sixty two stumbled across one of
Speaker 2: these men in the dark, wild eyed and snarling and
Speaker 2: barely clothed, what would he think he'd found? I think
Speaker 2: he'd think he'd found a monster. The third possibility is
Speaker 2: closely related. Traumatized recklesses who hadn't entirely lost their minds,
Speaker 2: but had made a deliberate choice to leave the human
Speaker 2: world behind. Men who couldn't go home because of what
Speaker 2: they'd done or what had been done to them, Men
Speaker 2: who were wanted by military authorities, men who'd lost everything
Speaker 2: that connected them to the civilization they were supposed to
Speaker 2: return to. Some of them went into the deep woods
Speaker 2: and stayed there. Locals would glimpse them at a distance,
Speaker 2: a shape crouched at a creek, a figure moving through
Speaker 2: the trees at last light, and not know what they
Speaker 2: were seeing. The fourth possibility is mythology. The frontier was dangerous,
Speaker 2: the war made it worse, and human beings have always
Speaker 2: always told stories about creatures in the dark. Sometimes those
Speaker 2: stories grow from genuine encounters. Sometimes they grow from fear itself.
Speaker 2: The sound in the night becomes a creature, the shadow
Speaker 2: at the tree line becomes a figure. The general tear
Speaker 2: of living on the edge of the known world takes
Speaker 2: a shape and gets a name, the wild man. I
Speaker 2: think the truth lives in the overlap. I believe some
Speaker 2: of the Arkansas accounts represent real encounters with something that
Speaker 2: wasn't a human being. The consistency of those descriptions their
Speaker 2: specific anatomical and behavioral details is very difficult to explain
Speaker 2: as folklore alone. But I also believe the Civil War
Speaker 2: era generated conditions that could easily produce wild man sightings
Speaker 2: from entirely human sources. And I think those different threads
Speaker 2: got tangled together over time until the whole thing became
Speaker 2: one undifferentiated category wild men, monsters, creatures, things in the woods.
Speaker 2: The honest answer is that we can't always tell which
Speaker 2: is which from a distance of one hundred and seventy years,
Speaker 2: and the integrity of this field. The thing that separates
Speaker 2: research from wishful thinking is our willingness to say that
Speaker 2: out loud. There's something else I want to address before
Speaker 2: we wrap up, because I think it connects to the
Speaker 2: larger conversation happening in this community right now. When we
Speaker 2: talk about the PGF, when we talk about modern siding reports,
Speaker 2: when we debate thermal footage or audio recordings or footprint casts,
Speaker 2: we're always talking about evidence, the quality of the evidence,
Speaker 2: the chain of custody, whether a particular piece of data
Speaker 2: meets some threshold of reliability. And that's the right conversation
Speaker 2: to have. But I think sometimes we lose sight of
Speaker 2: the fact that the evidentiary record for this phenomenon doesn't
Speaker 2: begin in nineteen sixty seven. It doesn't begin in the
Speaker 2: twentieth century at all. The Arkansas accounts give us something
Speaker 2: that no piece of modern footage can provide. They give
Speaker 2: us historical depth. They show us that the same basic phenomenon,
Speaker 2: a large bipedal creature covered in hair, living in remote terrain,
Speaker 2: was being reported by ordinary people long before there was
Speaker 2: any cultural template to copy from. In eighteen fifty one,
Speaker 2: there was no Bigfoot, there was no Sasquatch, there were
Speaker 2: no movies about eight Men, there were no television specials.
Speaker 2: There was no financial incentive to fake a siding. There
Speaker 2: was no fame to be gained from claiming you'd seen
Speaker 2: a wild man in the bottoms of Green County, Arkansas.
Speaker 2: If anything the opposite was true, you risk ridicule. That
Speaker 2: planner who stayed quiet because he was afraid nobody would
Speaker 2: believe him. Is proof of that. So when someone tells
Speaker 2: you this is all a modern myth, a product of
Speaker 2: popular culture, a feedback loop where movies inspire sightings that
Speaker 2: inspire more movies. Point them to the Memphis Inquirer. Point
Speaker 2: them to the Baltimore Sun, point them to the New
Speaker 2: Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette. Point them to eighteen forty six,
Speaker 2: when nobody had ever heard of Bigfoot and people were
Speaker 2: already describing the same creature were debating today. That doesn't
Speaker 2: settle the question. Nothing settles the question short of definitive
Speaker 2: physical evidence. But it changes the terms of the debate.
Speaker 2: It makes the cultural contamination argument much harder to sustain,
Speaker 2: because if this is a modern myth, you've got to
Speaker 2: explain why people one hundred and eighty years ago we're
Speaker 2: independently generating the same myth with the same physical details
Speaker 2: in places where the cultural conditions to produce it didn't exist.
Speaker 2: I don't think you can explain that a way easily,
Speaker 2: and I don't think we should try. I also want
Speaker 2: to say this, and I want to say it directly.
Speaker 2: The way we handle the weak accounts matters just as
Speaker 2: much as the way we handle the strong ones. I
Speaker 2: know there are people in this community who will be
Speaker 2: frustrated that I didn't present the Harper's Ferry letter or
Speaker 2: the Bryce's Crossroads account as solid evidence. I know there
Speaker 2: are people who believe those stories are genuine and feel
Speaker 2: that questioning them undermines the field. I understand that perspective.
Speaker 2: I don't share it. What undermines this field isn't skepticism.
Speaker 2: What undermines it is credulity. Every time we circulate an
Speaker 2: unverifiable account as though it carries the same wait as
Speaker 2: a documented newspaper report, we hand ammunition to the people
Speaker 2: who want to dismiss all of this as nonsense. Every
Speaker 2: time we blur the line between what we can demonstrate
Speaker 2: and what we want to believe, we make the job
Speaker 2: harder for the next person who comes along with something real.
Speaker 2: I've been in this field long enough to know that
Speaker 2: the strongest evidence doesn't need to be protected from questions.
Speaker 2: It holds up under scrutiny. The weak stuff is what
Speaker 2: needs protection because it can't survive examination. And our job,
Speaker 2: if we're serious about this, is to let the weak
Speaker 2: stuff go and focus our energy on the material that
Speaker 2: can stand on its own. The Arkansas wild Man accounts
Speaker 2: can stand on their own. They're documented, they're independently sourced,
Speaker 2: they span decades, they contain physical details that match modern
Speaker 2: reports with uncanny precision. That's where our attention belongs. One
Speaker 2: more thing before we close. The people who saw the
Speaker 2: wild Man in Green County, Arkansas in eighteen fifty one
Speaker 2: didn't have trail cameras. They didn't have thermal imaging. They
Speaker 2: didn't have DNA labs. They didn't have podcasts or research
Speaker 2: organizations or databases with thousands of entries. They had their
Speaker 2: own two eyes and a newspaper editor who'd listen. And
Speaker 2: what they put into the record with nothing more than
Speaker 2: those tools is a body of testimony that aligns almost
Speaker 2: perfectly with what people are reporting today one hundred and
Speaker 2: seventy five years later, in the same kinds of places,
Speaker 2: under the same kinds of conditions, using descriptions that match
Speaker 2: detail for detail. That doesn't prove anything, but it means something,
Speaker 2: and what it means is that this phenomenon, whatever it is,
Speaker 2: didn't begin in nineteen sixty seven at Bluff Creek. It
Speaker 2: didn't begin in nineteen fifty eight when Jerry Crewe held
Speaker 2: up a plaster cast for the Humboldt Times. It was
Speaker 2: already old when the camera showed up. The people of
Speaker 2: eastern Arkansas knew about it before the Civil War, before
Speaker 2: the first shot at Fort Sumter, before where anyone alive
Speaker 2: today was born. And the fact that we're still looking
Speaker 2: for it, still finding people who say they've seen it,
Speaker 2: still arguing about what it is and whether it exists,
Speaker 2: tells me the story isn't finished, not by a long way.
Speaker 2: And whatever you conclude about any individual account, whether you
Speaker 2: think the Arkansas wild Man was a Sasquatch or a
Speaker 2: feral man or a newspaper editor's invention, remember this, the
Speaker 2: people who reported these things weren't seeking fame. Most of
Speaker 2: them didn't even want to be believed. They were just
Speaker 2: telling someone what they saw, and what they described, again
Speaker 2: and again across decades and state lines and oceans was
Speaker 2: something that didn't fit the world as they knew it.
Speaker 2: That's where every investigation begins, with someone saying, I saw
Speaker 2: something I can't explain the only question is whether we've
Speaker 2: got the honesty and the patience to listen. I don