Speaker 1: Today, I want to tell you about a journey that
Speaker 1: I've been on for most of my life. Ever since
Speaker 1: I was a kid, I've heard tales of bigfoot and
Speaker 1: wild men while spending time with my friends and family.
Speaker 1: As I grew older and read more about the paranormal,
Speaker 1: my interest in encryptids and other things strange only deepened.
Speaker 1: That's why I'm so excited to share with you what
Speaker 1: I've personally become involved with the Untold Radio Network. The
Speaker 1: Untold Radio Network is a live streaming podcast network that
Speaker 1: airs a new show every day across all podcast platforms, YouTube,
Speaker 1: and more. They have eight different shows on all sorts
Speaker 1: of exciting topics such as bigfoot, cryptids, UFOs, aliens, and
Speaker 1: much more. I even have my own show called Weird Encounters,
Speaker 1: where I talk about all things strange. This is more
Speaker 1: than just a podcast network. It's a community that allows
Speaker 1: me to meet so many amazing people who share their
Speaker 1: stories and experiences with strange. If you're interested in hearing
Speaker 1: more of these stories and learning more about the paranormal
Speaker 1: and encryptids, make sure you check out the Untold Radio
Speaker 1: Network for all kinds of exciting shows. It's free to subscribe.
Speaker 1: So what are you waiting for visit www dot untold
Speaker 1: radionetwork dot com Today.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, this is Left Striving Yes, yes, I know
Speaker 2: aka Survivor Man, and you're listening to Brian on Sasquatch Audisy.
Speaker 1: Hey there and welcome back to Sasquatch Odyssey. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for being with us for the show. It
Speaker 1: is Sunday. I hope you're having a great weekend. We
Speaker 1: have an amazing show lined up for you. But as
Speaker 1: I always want to start by inviting you. If you've
Speaker 1: had an encounter and you'd like to be on the show,
Speaker 1: shoot me an email and get me at Brian at
Speaker 1: Paranormal World Productions dot com. Can head over to the website,
Speaker 1: check it out, become a memory there and help support
Speaker 1: the show. As you know, last week we passed our
Speaker 1: five hundredth episode on the show, so I started looking
Speaker 1: back into the archives and wanted to remaster some of
Speaker 1: the interviews that I've done the show, and I went
Speaker 1: back to episode forty five that originally aired in July
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty one. It is Jeff Harding from Pine
Speaker 1: Island Research. He came on and shared one of the
Speaker 1: most amazing experiences I'd ever heard, and then we had
Speaker 1: a fantastic conversation about some of his techniques that he
Speaker 1: uses while he's doing his research and some of the
Speaker 1: results that he had gotten. So what you're about to
Speaker 1: hear is the remastered version where I've went in and
Speaker 1: improved the IDEO. I've taken out all the unnecessary bits,
Speaker 1: and what you're left with is one fantastic encounter story
Speaker 1: and one amazing interview. We're definitely gonna have to get
Speaker 1: Jeff back on for another round and talk about what
Speaker 1: kind of research he's doing and what's going on in
Speaker 1: his research area here in twenty twenty four. But for now,
Speaker 1: I know you guys are ready to get into it.
Speaker 1: Jeff's on the line, he's ready to go. All it's
Speaker 1: left for you to do is sit back, relax, and
Speaker 1: enjoy the show. All right, folks, I want to welcome
Speaker 1: Jeff to the show. Jeff comes to us from South Dakota.
Speaker 1: He had an encounter up in Manitoba, Canada with a
Speaker 1: big foot some years ago. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Jeff. Hey, thanks, are you fabulous man?
Speaker 1: I appreciate you taking time to come on the show
Speaker 1: and know that you had an encounter some years back.
Speaker 1: Why don't you take us back to where you were,
Speaker 1: what you were doing, and what happened here in your encounter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I grew up the son of a hunting guide
Speaker 3: here in South Dakota and northern Minnesota. I didn't know
Speaker 3: anybody who'd ever had an encounter before. When I graduated
Speaker 3: from high school, I joined the Army. I wasn't going
Speaker 3: to be leaving until the end of July. That last
Speaker 3: week and May and one of my good friends high
Speaker 3: school invited me to go with him and his younger
Speaker 3: brother who was fourteen, his dad, two of his uncles,
Speaker 3: and several of his cousins who were all in their
Speaker 3: upper twenties, so we were the youngest on the group.
Speaker 3: Where this happened was on Granville Lake as part of
Speaker 3: the Churchill Reservoir System. It's about one hundred and ten
Speaker 3: miles north of Flinthlon Flynt Swan's right on that Saskatchewan
Speaker 3: Manitoba border, so we were twenty twenty five miles east
Speaker 3: on the Manitoba side of the border. We drove up there.
Speaker 3: It was a long guy from where we lived. It
Speaker 3: was a couple of days just driving to get there.
Speaker 3: The last sixty seventy mile was like diving on a
Speaker 3: tank trail. It was really remote where we went. We
Speaker 3: knew these guides up there that Paul's dad had worked
Speaker 3: with before. There were three guides that were native to
Speaker 3: the area. They lived at this place here, so they
Speaker 3: were hunting guides on fishing guides. We had sixteen foot
Speaker 3: aluminum boats with twenty twenty five horse tiller motors. We
Speaker 3: were going to be up there fishing for eight days.
Speaker 3: The first few days, me and Paul, my buddy, and
Speaker 3: his younger brother, the three of us since we had
Speaker 3: all grew up in the outdoors. Our parents are cup
Speaker 3: boat with us being on our own in the outdoor,
Speaker 3: so the three of us were in a boat by ourselves.
Speaker 3: The first three days. We'd go out and fish in
Speaker 3: the morning and they come back mid afternoon for a
Speaker 3: little while, and we'd go out in the evening before supper.
Speaker 3: While we were fishing. On that fourth day, Paul's brother
Speaker 3: had to take a leak, and he's one of these
Speaker 3: guys that can't go out of a boat. So we
Speaker 3: pulled up on the shore of this little island. It
Speaker 3: was probably about I would say, maybe thirty acres in size,
Speaker 3: heavily wooded. It was a rise. There's a gravelly beach
Speaker 3: around the edge that we were on. The beach is
Speaker 3: about twenty creet wide to the edge of the tree line.
Speaker 3: We pulled the boat up on the shore and I
Speaker 3: walked over to what appeared to be a game trail.
Speaker 3: It was about maybe four or five foot wide, and
Speaker 3: it had rained that morning off and on. It was
Speaker 3: pretty cool out the first week in June. It was
Speaker 3: cold up there, especially in the mornings, and then by
Speaker 3: the afternoon would be seventy degrees. But I'm looking up
Speaker 3: at this game trail and it rose steeply. When you
Speaker 3: looked up with the birch pine and poppers, it was
Speaker 3: like a corridor that you could see about fifteen twenty feet.
Speaker 3: Because of that dense cover, you couldn't see it further.
Speaker 3: It was intriguing to me because I grew up hunting.
Speaker 3: Most of my hunting was elk and deer and things
Speaker 3: like that. But I'd been deep in the back country
Speaker 3: with my dad and other hunting guides before, so I
Speaker 3: really was afraid to walk up the trail. I guess
Speaker 3: I started walking up. It was steek. I'd say it
Speaker 3: was like a thirty degree incline. Just with tennis shoes on,
Speaker 3: it was hard to walk up, slipping on this greasy, high,
Speaker 3: neatly mud packed down the trail. I told those guys,
Speaker 3: I was gonna walk up here quick. I'd be right back.
Speaker 3: I walked up, probably about twenty yards up this thing.
Speaker 3: It took me a little bit of time to get
Speaker 3: up it, because you'd walk five feet, slide a foot
Speaker 3: or two back, and then get your footing again. While
Speaker 3: I was walking up, I heard a really loud, cracking snap,
Speaker 3: and I really wasn't sure what carved that. It was still,
Speaker 3: we had no wind at all out to that day.
Speaker 3: The water was smooth as glass, and I thought, because
Speaker 3: I figured there's got to be a bear here, and
Speaker 3: I didn't want to walk up on a bear that
Speaker 3: time of year that may have come. So I just
Speaker 3: stood still, and it came from my web side. I'm
Speaker 3: looking into the trees, and I'm confident that I'm going
Speaker 3: to see movement of what made this sound because it
Speaker 3: was closed. It felt like this thick pop and crack
Speaker 3: sound was close to me, within thirty yards probably. I'm
Speaker 3: looking to the left and stood there for almost two
Speaker 3: bold that scanning waiting to see a black bear. I
Speaker 3: turned my back and looked down the trail at the beach.
Speaker 3: I can't see the beach. I'd to only see about
Speaker 3: ten to fifteen yards through this heavily forested trail, and
Speaker 3: because of stuff overhanging in the incline, you just can't
Speaker 3: see forward that bar. So I'm looking down the decline
Speaker 3: at the beach and I can't see the edge of
Speaker 3: that gravel. I was looking downward, and as I turned
Speaker 3: back up the trail, I'm staring at the knees of
Speaker 3: something standing right in front of me, like fifteen feet
Speaker 3: in front of me. What was standing in front of
Speaker 3: me was in elevation, was probably three foot higher in
Speaker 3: elevation than I was. Because of the rise of the trail.
Speaker 3: I've seen the knees and it looked like I was
Speaker 3: looking at maybe the lower area of a black bear
Speaker 3: that's standing on its hind leggies. I just about freaked out,
Speaker 3: but I thought so still, And as I looked up
Speaker 3: at the waist level, I seen two huge hands cradling
Speaker 3: underneath holding about a five to six foot section of
Speaker 3: birch tree trunk that had about a six inch diameter
Speaker 3: to it. So it wasn't light, and on one end
Speaker 3: there was a giant like a five gallon bucket size
Speaker 3: the root system with dirt. As I'm looking up for
Speaker 3: it's like standing under a basketball rim trying to look
Speaker 3: straight up at it right. And as I rise up
Speaker 3: and look, as soon as I seen its face, was
Speaker 3: making eye contact with it. It took this birch tree
Speaker 3: that it was holding at its waist level and through it.
Speaker 3: The only way I can describe it is if you
Speaker 3: were to bounce past a basketball to me, how you're
Speaker 3: not winding your hand behind your body, You're just from
Speaker 3: your chest forward or you're waist forward pushing the ball later.
Speaker 3: That's how it shook this birch trunk at me and
Speaker 3: hit it downward so that it hit me at waste level.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you what. It launched me completely off of
Speaker 3: my beat. I flew backwards, landed on my back. Now
Speaker 3: this branch is diagonally cross, my chest is under my
Speaker 3: right arm, and my west legs wrapped around and I'm
Speaker 3: sliding down this mud trail. As I'm looking back up,
Speaker 3: I could see its legs still. I watched it jump
Speaker 3: up and down twice as I'm falling down this trail.
Speaker 3: I could feel the ground, the percussion of these two
Speaker 3: stumps on the ground. The only way I could describe
Speaker 3: it was if I walked up behind you and patted
Speaker 3: you on your back. I could feel the ground that way.
Speaker 3: As I was sliding down, I could feel it. It
Speaker 3: never screamed or made any noise as I slip down.
Speaker 3: I ended up at the edge of the gravel at
Speaker 3: Obomba's Hill. I had twisted my left ankle pretty badly.
Speaker 3: When I scurried up to my feet, I couldn't put
Speaker 3: my weight on my left foot. I'm yelling at Paul
Speaker 3: and his brother getting the boat, getting the boat. They
Speaker 3: start panicking because I think they had heard the snap too.
Speaker 3: I think they thought that I was attacked by a bear.
Speaker 3: Jamie ran to the boat at fourteen years old. He's
Speaker 3: just in a panic mode and he gets in the
Speaker 3: boat and Paul grabs the nose of the boat and
Speaker 3: pushes it out into the water. I'm walking backwards across
Speaker 3: this gravel beach. I don't want to take my eyes
Speaker 3: off that game trail. I really felt like what I
Speaker 3: had just seen, if I turned my back to it
Speaker 3: can come flying out and tackle me. I walked backwards,
Speaker 3: just limping on my leg I get to the water
Speaker 3: about a foot and half. He flopped myself over the
Speaker 3: gun well of the boat. I'm sitting in the middle seat.
Speaker 3: Jamie's back there trying to get this outboard and started,
Speaker 3: and it's not starting. Paul had been driving the boat
Speaker 3: for three days. Jamie never operated an outboard motor in
Speaker 3: his life. I don't know if he didn't pump up
Speaker 3: the ball or used the joke. He's pulled this thing
Speaker 3: fifty times and it's not starting. He's probably got it flooded.
Speaker 3: At this point, Paul's freaking out. Jamie is frantically looking
Speaker 3: back at the motor. I'm sitting there looking at the
Speaker 3: game trailer because I can't take my eyes off it,
Speaker 3: but my body I can't say what I want to say.
Speaker 3: Maybe that's shock or the adrenaline dump of what happened.
Speaker 3: I just kept looking at my mouth taking and open,
Speaker 3: trying to process what I'd just seen. When I got
Speaker 3: back on the beach, I'm standing there immediately trying to
Speaker 3: justify what had just happened. Some people that grew up
Speaker 3: with that reference of hearing stories or having relatives at
Speaker 3: head encounters. Maybe in that position, they'd look at this
Speaker 3: and say, Wow, I just saw a big fleet. But
Speaker 3: I didn't have that. I didn't have that history. So
Speaker 3: I'm going through a checklist of what I know. It wasn't.
Speaker 3: I'm telling myself it wasn't a black bear. It was
Speaker 3: the brown bear. It wasn't a motion. The more I
Speaker 3: can't come up with an explanation, the more I started
Speaker 3: to panic. Finally, Paul had told Jamie. He said, you're
Speaker 3: not going to get that thing started. Let me get
Speaker 3: in the boat. I started yelling at Paul, just get
Speaker 3: in the boat, Just get in the boat. So Paul
Speaker 3: jumps in the boat and switches spots as Jamie and
Speaker 3: he starts pulling it. He's not having much luck. I
Speaker 3: looked down the shoreline from us, about seventy to eighty
Speaker 3: yards away. I see a black bear come running out
Speaker 3: of the tree line. It runs down onto the beach.
Speaker 3: It's not even looking at us. It's walking our direction
Speaker 3: once it gets to the beach, but it's not looking
Speaker 3: at us. This thing's going to look up and see
Speaker 3: us here and stop and go the other way. But
Speaker 3: it just would not take its eyes off this tree line.
Speaker 3: It's walking towards us with its head ninety degrees rest,
Speaker 3: staring at the tree line like something had startled it
Speaker 3: and scared it out of this tree line. That's when
Speaker 3: I realized maybe this thing was getting by the same thing.
Speaker 3: And it kept walking in our direction, and finally it
Speaker 3: looks up and sees us, and when it sees us,
Speaker 3: it starts picking up its pace. It just was odd
Speaker 3: some of this said. When I comment on this, it's
Speaker 3: in retrospect. It's not what I was thinking at the moment.
Speaker 3: In retrospect, I feel like this bear saw us and
Speaker 3: felt relieved, but it was making its way towards us.
Speaker 3: And Paul Junger brother was literally crying. He had tears
Speaker 3: in his eyes. He was freaking out, kept saying what happened,
Speaker 3: what happened, what happened. I felt like, until we're out
Speaker 3: of here here, I didn't feel safe. The boat's only
Speaker 3: twenty feet on the edge of the beach. We're not
Speaker 3: blowing anywhere. There's no wind that we can't get a
Speaker 3: motor started. Now that we got this bear getting closer,
Speaker 3: so I told Jamie, I said, we had caught some
Speaker 3: northern four or five pound northern pike that morning that
Speaker 3: we had on a stringer. I told Jami, I should
Speaker 3: get world fish off the string or hurry up. Jamie
Speaker 3: grabbed the stringer and got a fish off, threw it
Speaker 3: up on the shore. Enough bear walked right up. He's
Speaker 3: only twenty five feet from the front of our boat.
Speaker 3: That's probably two years old, and it reaches down. That's
Speaker 3: why I realized it's missing. It's right paw. It's not
Speaker 3: a recent injury. It looks like maybe it was caught
Speaker 3: in a trap at some point. Right at the wrist.
Speaker 3: It grabs this fairsh pinches it against its wrist, lifts
Speaker 3: it up and bites the head off and stairs back.
Speaker 3: Looked at the trees as it chomps his head three
Speaker 3: or four times and swallows it. It drops that finish
Speaker 3: and takes off in a sprint. I didn't even know
Speaker 3: bear could move that sass back in the direction that
Speaker 3: it came from, like it was getting out of it.
Speaker 3: Paul gets his motor started. I should get out of here.
Speaker 3: We got to get out of here, because whatever made
Speaker 3: the bear runaway was what had thrown this log at
Speaker 3: me on this trail. I just knew that it was
Speaker 3: still here, so we backed the boat up reversed just
Speaker 3: backing away from the island. We back out till we're
Speaker 3: about eighty two one hundred yards out. As we're watching
Speaker 3: the shore, we watched this thing through the log. We
Speaker 3: watched the big foot walk right out onto the beach
Speaker 3: and probably three strides that covered the treeline to the
Speaker 3: water's edge. When I say it bent over and picked
Speaker 3: up a stish, I don't mean like me or you would.
Speaker 3: If I was to pick something like that up, I'd
Speaker 3: pop down on one knee almost to grab it, and
Speaker 3: then you get yourself up. This thing just tilted its
Speaker 3: shoulders at forty five degrees and lowered itself down like
Speaker 3: an elevator, grabbed it in its right hand, and just
Speaker 3: stood straight back up and held it right in front
Speaker 3: of its chest. It's just staring at us for ten seconds,
Speaker 3: just staring at the boat. Even though we were eighty
Speaker 3: two hundred yards away. It was mostly cloudy, It wasn't
Speaker 3: direct sunlight anywhere. There wasn't glare you can see the
Speaker 3: Claire's day. Especially after just watching this bear for three minutes,
Speaker 3: we knew that we weren't looking at a bear. It
Speaker 3: stared at us after about ten fifteen seconds, turned around
Speaker 3: with a fish and walked right back into the tree.
Speaker 3: The whole time that this thing, from the moment it
Speaker 3: walked out from the trees on the beach through a
Speaker 3: moment I walked away. Paul and Jamie are just yelling,
Speaker 3: what is that? What is that? What is that? I
Speaker 3: just felt like I was frozen in shock. I never
Speaker 3: said a word. I'm just watching, Holy crap, this is
Speaker 3: what through the logger. I didn't just imagine that I
Speaker 3: was attacked by them. It was about nine nine and
Speaker 3: a half foot tall. It wasn't standing on the beach.
Speaker 3: It was going to open, so I couldn't really gauge
Speaker 3: its height by much, but I could tell that it
Speaker 3: was extremely tall, and by what I was standing in
Speaker 3: front of on the trail, even considering the incline and
Speaker 3: it was on above me, it was pulled something that
Speaker 3: when I looked up and seated and look as soon
Speaker 3: as I saw it space. I got to see its
Speaker 3: space for about half a second before through that log
Speaker 3: and hit me at waist level. We sat in the
Speaker 3: boat and kept backing away further and further. Paul said,
Speaker 3: is that what was on the trail that made the
Speaker 3: sound That's when I told them what happened. This thing
Speaker 3: threw a log at me, hit me in the hip.
Speaker 3: My ankle twisted, and as I'm telling them that, I'm thinking,
Speaker 3: my ankle really doesn't hurt right now. I took my
Speaker 3: shoe off, pulled my sock off, was looking at it.
Speaker 3: I didn't really have any pain in my ankle at all.
Speaker 3: This thing hurt so bad I couldn't put half my
Speaker 3: weight on it. I had trouble pulling myself over the
Speaker 3: edge of the boat because of how much it was hurting.
Speaker 3: I told him what happened. I told him how I'd
Speaker 3: injured my ankle. Paul said, I knew your ankle was
Speaker 3: hurt because you couldn't walk. He said, I kept thinking
Speaker 3: you were going to fall over. I was whold the
Speaker 3: front of the boat, yelling. Yet you grew up, and
Speaker 3: he said, I couldn't figure out why you weren't moving back,
Speaker 3: and I could tell you were limping and you were
Speaker 3: walking backwards and sideways. I said, I twisted my ankle
Speaker 3: when I fell down. As we're in the boat, we're
Speaker 3: talking about what had happened, what we just saw. We
Speaker 3: all came to the conclusion that we had seen a
Speaker 3: bigfoot just after I had went through the whole verbal
Speaker 3: checklist with them again, I know that wasn't a bear.
Speaker 3: I know what wasn't standing in front of me. When
Speaker 3: it walked on the beach. It was confirmation that I
Speaker 3: didn't imagine this thing. I saw it from ten fifteen
Speaker 3: feet away. So at this point, Jamie is tears in
Speaker 3: his eyes, out loud. He's whimpering and crying. He's scared,
Speaker 3: really scared, even though we're not in any danger in
Speaker 3: the boat. He just could not get over what we'd
Speaker 3: just seen, what had happened. My friend Paul all through
Speaker 3: high school, he was happy to lucky. He had a
Speaker 3: joke for everything. He's always laughing at them for him
Speaker 3: to just be quiet. He just doesn't know what to say.
Speaker 3: The whole time is just I can't believe this. I
Speaker 3: can't believe this is happening. I can't believe we just
Speaker 3: saw that. So we started talking about let's go back.
Speaker 3: We were quite a ways away from this guide camp. Understand,
Speaker 3: this is so remote. We haven't seen another boat all day.
Speaker 3: Even in the three days, we hadn't seen another boat
Speaker 3: other than the guys we met from his family that
Speaker 3: went with us. So I said, let's go back to
Speaker 3: the guide camp. Paul said, we got to figure out
Speaker 3: what we're doing to tell everybody. I said, we're just
Speaker 3: going to go tell your dad. He said, no, they're
Speaker 3: not going to believe us, Jeff. They're just going to
Speaker 3: back like we're all in fine. I said, is the
Speaker 3: son of a hunting guide? Myself? I felt if my
Speaker 3: dad was here, maybe I could tell him about what happened.
Speaker 3: But the more we fat in the boat, the more
Speaker 3: it decurred to me that I don't know, it seems
Speaker 3: like a good idea up front, but how long would
Speaker 3: I have to live for him to look at me
Speaker 3: and just wonder if I'm crazy? You know? And I
Speaker 3: just couldn't figure out how he would look at me
Speaker 3: and give me the same credibility even as his son.
Speaker 3: I started to get where Paul was coming from, where
Speaker 3: he was feeling like everybody's I ma in front of him.
Speaker 3: All of his older cousins are going to look at
Speaker 3: us think we're idiots. So when we eventually got back
Speaker 3: to the dock, actually we stopped and we fished for
Speaker 3: another hour or two. We were just trying to put
Speaker 3: off having to go back and be around somebody that
Speaker 3: we felt like we'd have to tell it to. As
Speaker 3: we were fishing for a couple hours, we came to
Speaker 3: an agreement, the three of us that we were just
Speaker 3: gonna not tell me. But when we went back, understanding
Speaker 3: we're the youngest of the party. Every day midday when
Speaker 3: we'd go back, we're the ones that are jumping out
Speaker 3: of the boat telling the war stories about we caught this,
Speaker 3: we caught that we did. We get out of the
Speaker 3: boat and we're standing on the dock and we're just quiet,
Speaker 3: and everybody else is talking about they did that morning.
Speaker 3: I'm a pretty talkative guy. I didn't say a word
Speaker 3: for the ten minutes we stood there around everybody. These
Speaker 3: three guides were out there too. As everybody walked away
Speaker 3: from the dock, one of the guides was staring at me.
Speaker 3: I didn't really know him that well. I'd met him
Speaker 3: and had little conversations with them while we were there
Speaker 3: for the first few days. But he walked up to
Speaker 3: me and said, are you okay. It just seemed like
Speaker 3: a strange question because I didn't feel like I was
Speaker 3: giving off any vibe that I was injured or heard
Speaker 3: or anything, and I said, why do you ask me?
Speaker 3: He says, you just seem like you're stressed out or
Speaker 3: and shocked right now. So I told him something happened
Speaker 3: to us this morning, and I'm still trying to process
Speaker 3: this in my head. And he goes, did you see
Speaker 3: something that you're having a hard time with or did
Speaker 3: you witness something I did on a game trail on
Speaker 3: a little aisle and we were way up on the
Speaker 3: north end of the lake. I didn't tell him what happened.
Speaker 3: I just said I had experience out there that I'm
Speaker 3: having a hard time figuring out. He said, I would
Speaker 3: like to show you something. He walks me over by
Speaker 3: this boat house, like a shed that looked like it
Speaker 3: was about one hundred years old. Behind this thing, there's
Speaker 3: a sixteen foot aluminum boat lying upside down in the
Speaker 3: dirt with a tarp over it. He pulls the tarp
Speaker 3: off and the whole starboard side of this thing is
Speaker 3: caved in. The whole side of the boat looks like
Speaker 3: you hit it with a car. I said, what happened there?
Speaker 3: And he says, I was guiding a moose hunter. My
Speaker 3: client had shot a moose on the shore of a
Speaker 3: little island on the north end of the lake. Now
Speaker 3: there's about ten or twelve islands on this lake, Okay,
Speaker 3: He say, I was on an island. It's not like
Speaker 3: a lot of lakes where there's only one or two islands.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of islands. He says. After he shot it,
Speaker 3: we took pictures with it. It was lying where twenty
Speaker 3: thirty feet in the water dead. It was right on
Speaker 3: the edge of the tree line. He had brought the
Speaker 3: client back to the camp, and he went back to
Speaker 3: skin it and quarter it out himself. While he was there,
Speaker 3: he said he had an experience and was attacked the
Speaker 3: skin that's loose, and said, I had one of the
Speaker 3: hind quarters of the bus in the boat, and I
Speaker 3: was working on the other quarters of the boat, and
Speaker 3: this thing ran up and caved in the side of
Speaker 3: the boat. Just started kneeing it with its knees and
Speaker 3: destroyed their boat. The crinkled Reynolds wrap on that side
Speaker 3: and grabbed that hindquarter, threw it over its shoulder and
Speaker 3: walked away. And I said, what did you do? He says.
Speaker 3: I called my other two guides and told them that
Speaker 3: I needed their help. They came out in two separate boats.
Speaker 3: He said he was waiting for them. He said, I
Speaker 3: intended to tell them what happened, but when they got there,
Speaker 3: he told them that a cow moose had charged the
Speaker 3: boat and just caved it in, which typically is what
Speaker 3: a cow moose would do if you shot a non
Speaker 3: legal bull. I would suppose because moose stayed with the
Speaker 3: cow for three years before they leave, those cows are
Speaker 3: very protected. But this was a mature moose's five six
Speaker 3: year old moose that they shot. He said, I don't
Speaker 3: know if they believe me. When they were packing the
Speaker 3: meat into one of their boats, they realized I was
Speaker 3: missing be hindquarter. Eventually they started asking me questions about
Speaker 3: what really happened. I said, did you tell him? And
Speaker 3: he says, I'm going to tell you what He says.
Speaker 3: There isn't going to be much good that's ever going
Speaker 3: to come from sharing what happened if something like this
Speaker 3: happened to you, because even people who are close to you,
Speaker 3: unless they have had an experience, they aren't going to
Speaker 3: get it right. As much as they want to believe you,
Speaker 3: he says, I don't think people can process this. So
Speaker 3: my advice you would be tried to enjoy your next
Speaker 3: four days. I looked down at my shirt and seen
Speaker 3: I had blood on the bottom of my shirt by
Speaker 3: my left hip. He said, are you injured? I said,
Speaker 3: I had trained my ankle really bad, but it doesn't
Speaker 3: hurt anymore. He said, we're bleeding. That's when I looked down.
Speaker 3: I was wearing sweatpants. I pulled them down and could
Speaker 3: see that my left hip was great mouth the size
Speaker 3: of your handprint. It was just straight down my hip
Speaker 3: where this log had hit me. When I lifted up
Speaker 3: my shirt, it looked like Mike Tyson punched me in
Speaker 3: the stomach twice. The left and right sides of my
Speaker 3: abdominal were already turn black and blue. He says, do
Speaker 3: you think something is broken? I said no. He checked
Speaker 3: me out well bit and said, I think you're going
Speaker 3: to be okay. I told him what was standing in
Speaker 3: front of me, threw a log at me and hit me.
Speaker 3: He didn't have a doubt in his mind. I was
Speaker 3: reluctant to tell him that detail. He said, what island
Speaker 3: did this happen on? On the map we had, there
Speaker 3: was a larger island to the east. On the map,
Speaker 3: it said the name of that island? It said Patten Island.
Speaker 3: The little one on this map that we had in
Speaker 3: our boat doesn't have a name, So I just told
Speaker 3: him it was on Patten Island, thinking at least he'd
Speaker 3: understand where we were on the lake. He looked at
Speaker 3: me and said, yeah, my expansion is near there, but
Speaker 3: it was on the island west of Patten Island. That's
Speaker 3: my heart just saw that one, he said, I this
Speaker 3: could be the exact same thing that did this to
Speaker 3: the boat that's in front of me. I never told
Speaker 3: Paul that I had talked to the guide or about
Speaker 3: the conversation I had with the guide. We just tried
Speaker 3: to finish out our next few days of fishing. Eventually
Speaker 3: went home and I went into the Army. I worked
Speaker 3: hard at not trying to come up with more answers,
Speaker 3: just to go dumb to the whole encounter. Paul's family
Speaker 3: owns a business that I go into about once a year.
Speaker 3: I'll pop in there and see Paul. Even to this day,
Speaker 3: I'm fifty three years old. The last few years I've
Speaker 3: seen it, I remember about three years ago I said,
Speaker 3: no one, do you remember that fishing trip that we
Speaker 3: were on in Canada? And he says, yeah, and I says,
Speaker 3: you ever think about that much? And he says, I
Speaker 3: do my best to never think about that. That's when
Speaker 3: I realized he probably never did tell his dad or
Speaker 3: anybody else about it. When I asked him about it.
Speaker 3: His mom was working there, one of his uncles works
Speaker 3: for the business. He was on the other side of
Speaker 3: the business. You can just tell Paul just did not
Speaker 3: want to talk about it. Yeah, I think that happens
Speaker 3: to a lot of people. I think they have those encounters.
Speaker 3: You go one of two ways.
Speaker 1: It either spurs you on to find answers you eventually
Speaker 1: share your story.
Speaker 3: Or there are.
Speaker 1: Probably hundreds, if not thousands of these sidings and encounters
Speaker 1: that happened around the country that we never hear about,
Speaker 1: that people take to their grave because they don't want
Speaker 1: the ridicule factor. I think that it's a very unfortunate
Speaker 1: part of what happens during these encounters.
Speaker 3: Well, it changes you because it changes the way that
Speaker 3: you view the environment you're in. Whether I've got my
Speaker 3: family and we're camping at a campground that's not really
Speaker 3: that remote, when I'm walking down the high trail or
Speaker 3: in a boat looking at a storeline view, you're surrounding differently. Now,
Speaker 3: even when I'm deep in the bad country, if I'm
Speaker 3: el cutting in Wyoming or something like where you're way
Speaker 3: off the grid, you walk around with the sense that
Speaker 3: this environment that I'm in it's different. This isn't something
Speaker 3: I imagine. This isn't something that I've just read about.
Speaker 3: In the last few years. I've found some groups on
Speaker 3: Facebook that I've read different encounters. What there's almost the
Speaker 3: whole BFR library reading about encounters. These people that have
Speaker 3: these encounters, they know what they saw. A lot of
Speaker 3: them a little sketchy because they see it come a
Speaker 3: distance or whatever. But these people that have found themselves,
Speaker 3: like I were year, fifteen feet away from something that
Speaker 3: you've never seen before. You can't go out into the
Speaker 3: woods or anywhere without seeing the environment around you so
Speaker 3: much differently.
Speaker 1: Now, Yeah, don't want to go back to your siding.
Speaker 1: Can you describe what the face looked like? Was it
Speaker 1: more human? Was it more ape like? Can you give
Speaker 1: us some description about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, going back to when I was looking down at
Speaker 3: the beach, when I turned around and realize this to
Speaker 3: stand on the trail in front of me. One of
Speaker 3: the things when I look back at this. That was
Speaker 3: really surprising to me was just how stealthy it had
Speaker 3: to have been. I was searching that area, whether it
Speaker 3: was behind a pile of trees or a bunch of
Speaker 3: cedar scrubs, that weren't far off for it to place
Speaker 3: itself on the trail right in front of me. You
Speaker 3: didn't hear a thing. It was just deafening how quiet
Speaker 3: it was. When I looked up the phenei's face, Even
Speaker 3: though it was just for a moment, it was like
Speaker 3: a snapshot that was ingrained there. I can still see it.
Speaker 3: Its skin around its eyes and nose was very dark.
Speaker 3: The hair that was on it was a dark chocolatey colored,
Speaker 3: almost an auburn hue to it. Its nose wasn't really
Speaker 3: flattened out like you would think an ape would be
Speaker 3: with gigantic nostrils. It was upward turned on the bottom.
Speaker 3: It wasn't like tea spoon sized nostrils flaring out. It
Speaker 3: looked like it had human elements to its nose and
Speaker 3: even its eyes. Was interesting because its mouth, the top
Speaker 3: lip was very tight to its teeth. If you were
Speaker 3: the grand really big right now, how tight your lip
Speaker 3: as to your teeth? Top whep looked straight as an arrow,
Speaker 3: but its bottom lip was curved open, sagging down like
Speaker 3: if yaw was half open, and its bottom lip was
Speaker 3: hanging board almost like. I told a research buddy of
Speaker 3: mine that it looked like when a bear is trying
Speaker 3: to wind you. They throw their lip open a little bit,
Speaker 3: like they're trying to scoop air up to their nose.
Speaker 3: Its mouth hung open as it looked at me. It
Speaker 3: didn't have an aggressive look. It didn't look like something
Speaker 3: that would be attacking you. But it definitely didn't appreciate
Speaker 3: that I had made that eye contact with it, because
Speaker 3: I didn't stand there for a moment as I looked
Speaker 3: up its body. As soon as my eyes laying outside
Speaker 3: the bloom, it went off. I don't know why. It
Speaker 3: didn't make vocalizations, and you hear people say, oh, it
Speaker 3: yelled at me, or it whooped at me, or whatever.
Speaker 3: The only audible thing I heard from it was as
Speaker 3: it throw this log, it was like, oh, like that,
Speaker 3: like it was exhaling hard as it just cost this
Speaker 3: log downward at my waist. As far as the characteristics,
Speaker 3: I can remember, and I often remember when it was
Speaker 3: on the beach as it held its arm out to
Speaker 3: its side. When it went down to pick this fish up.
Speaker 3: You can see the hair hang down off its arm.
Speaker 3: It looks like when you see leather coats that have
Speaker 3: fringe that hang off of them from the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 3: Its hair just hung down. It had been eight inches
Speaker 3: or longer, just as it draped off of its arm.
Speaker 3: But there was one area where it looked madded There
Speaker 3: were areas on its legs that looked madded down. Their
Speaker 3: hair didn't look it was a flowing look to it.
Speaker 3: The only thing I can think is it was so
Speaker 3: wet and it had been raining. Maybe parts of its
Speaker 3: fur was wet matted down because of that.
Speaker 1: Could you give any estimation on the weight of this thing?
Speaker 1: Because that's one of the things that when I talked
Speaker 1: to people that have had pretty decent close up encounters,
Speaker 1: that's one of the things that they say is you
Speaker 1: just can't fathom something nine feet tall or eight and
Speaker 1: a half nine feet tall. It is huge, but you
Speaker 1: just can't describe the girth. Do you have any idea
Speaker 1: on how much this thing might have weighed.
Speaker 3: What really bothers me is that I didn't look at
Speaker 3: its feet when I turned around and was looking at
Speaker 3: eye level. I seen it right at the knees. Of course,
Speaker 3: my reaction or that would be to want to look
Speaker 3: up and see what it is, not look down and
Speaker 3: see what the treat looked like. As I seen that
Speaker 3: knee level. When I looked up, what I can remember
Speaker 3: vividly is that its fies were like the diameter of
Speaker 3: a five gallon bucket. Its thighs were so frea conveyed.
Speaker 3: That's the first thing that when I started checking off
Speaker 3: was it? This? Was it that? As I'm like sliding
Speaker 3: down the trail and on the beach, I just knew
Speaker 3: immediately that because the girth of it, by this thing
Speaker 3: was gigantic, its fr was bigger than my waist. As
Speaker 3: I looked upward, the width it is that it's hit
Speaker 3: all the way through as the midsection all the way
Speaker 3: to its shoulders. There is no hour glass to it,
Speaker 3: just like extremely wide. As I'm looking up its body
Speaker 3: mastimation for weight. I'm not a big brown bear hunter.
Speaker 3: I haven't shot an eight or nine foot to Drizzly
Speaker 3: or Ben in front of one and said, oh, I
Speaker 3: know that weighs nine hundred pounds or eleven hundred pounds
Speaker 3: I don't really have a lot to draw off of that,
Speaker 3: but I can tell you that because of its side
Speaker 3: that you told me that the thing was over a
Speaker 3: thousand pounds. If that was over another i'd bet older. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's one of the things that it has always fascinated me,
Speaker 1: is the weight and.
Speaker 3: The mass of these things.
Speaker 1: I talked to Ken Walker from the Big Four documentary
Speaker 1: last night, and Ken was talking about doing his estimation
Speaker 1: of weight and height from the Patterson Gimlin film. He
Speaker 1: was talking about how large Patty was in the and
Speaker 1: she's twenty eight inches wide at the waist. He literally
Speaker 1: was on the phone with me last night measuring himself.
Speaker 1: He's fifteen inches wide, so she's huge. Yeah, he estimated
Speaker 1: the weight at more like twelve to fourteen hundred pounds
Speaker 1: because of that and the muscle mass. I always like
Speaker 1: to ask that question. Your encounter is fascinating because as
Speaker 1: many encounter stories as I've taken, I've never talked to
Speaker 1: anybody who's had such an aggressive encounter where you were
Speaker 1: actually injured. This thing literally threw something at you and
Speaker 1: hit you from ten to fifteen feet away. In retrospect,
Speaker 1: I know it's obviously speculation do you think it was
Speaker 1: the eye contact that you made that pissed this thing
Speaker 1: off to the point where it threw this log or
Speaker 1: do you think it was more of a reactionary thing.
Speaker 1: What is your thoughts on the aggressive behavior.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I had about thirty four years to try to
Speaker 3: analyze that. I have quite often trying to figure out
Speaker 3: what did I do to end up in that position.
Speaker 3: Part of what I come up with, there's some research
Speaker 3: I've been doing out in the field myself now the
Speaker 3: last few years, is that the interesting element to it
Speaker 3: that I think really contributed to its reaction to me
Speaker 3: was that it was on an island. I think that
Speaker 3: really plays a factor here, because I think there's a
Speaker 3: good chance that had that's been the shore of the
Speaker 3: main land, this thing simply would have retreated back into
Speaker 3: the wilderness and never had a compensation. But for whatever reason,
Speaker 3: whether it uses this island as a hunting ground or
Speaker 3: whether it ties to habitate there all the time, it
Speaker 3: not like it had a lot of places it could
Speaker 3: run to. It's a fairly small island, like I say,
Speaker 3: thirty acres. If you wind up, poor guys at fifty
Speaker 3: sixty feet apart and just did a deer drive from
Speaker 3: one end of it to the other. What would it do.
Speaker 3: It couldn't go anywhere. It's going to end up on
Speaker 3: the far and shoreline to whether it's able to swim
Speaker 3: or whatnot. It's going to be vulnerable because of how
Speaker 3: small this island was, So that fight or flight type
Speaker 3: choice that it has to make. I think more often
Speaker 3: than not, Bigfoot will make the flight choice rather than
Speaker 3: the fight choice. If that's a viable option, I believe
Speaker 3: they'll always choose that, not even let you know it
Speaker 3: was there until you leave. If you don't leave, then
Speaker 3: maybe it will audibly try to scare you away. I
Speaker 3: think when it had a choice, that it could audibly
Speaker 3: either try to taste me away that way, or it
Speaker 3: could simply just make it self seen. Right, So it
Speaker 3: stepped out on the trail, and it's hold in this
Speaker 3: log probably felt like I'd run away at that point.
Speaker 3: I didn't. I just stood there and shocked. I think
Speaker 3: when I made eye contact with it, it just instinctively
Speaker 3: threw the log at me. I think that's why it
Speaker 3: was holding the log. I'm going to throw this if
Speaker 3: I have to, because the truth is, when I walked
Speaker 3: up that trail, at any time. It could have just
Speaker 3: swung that log out track me right in the side
Speaker 3: of her head and I wouldn't have seen it coming.
Speaker 3: It didn't do that. It stood in front of me,
Speaker 3: like giving me a chance to retreat before it actually
Speaker 3: threw this log. So I think some of that is
Speaker 3: I don't think I did anything to trigger it or
Speaker 3: piss it off, so to speak, other than just that
Speaker 3: I was there and I wasn't leaving. It felt like
Speaker 3: it didn't have anywhere to retreat too, because the island's
Speaker 3: fairly small.
Speaker 1: I guess that makes sense. That's pure animalistic behavior. If
Speaker 1: you corner an animal and it doesn't feel like it
Speaker 1: has much of a choice other than to fight rather
Speaker 1: than take flight, that's what it's going to do, clearly.
Speaker 1: And I think these things are definitely animals, and I
Speaker 1: think they're definitely apex predators.
Speaker 3: When you look at all the encounters that are either
Speaker 3: low and befro citling like that, You've got let's say
Speaker 3: thirty five hundred encounters that are recorded over the years.
Speaker 3: A percentage of them are Class A encounters, a large
Speaker 3: percentage of them. But yet those are people that were
Speaker 3: whatever they were standing in front of it chose to
Speaker 3: make itself known that it's there, or it was a
Speaker 3: situation like mine where it didn't have any choice what
Speaker 3: to make itself known because of the size of where
Speaker 3: it was, or maybe if it's standing behind a building
Speaker 3: and can't get out from behind that building and you're
Speaker 3: looking across somebody's yard and then you see it run away,
Speaker 3: it didn't have any choice. If it stayed there, it
Speaker 3: was vulnerable. A lot of these encounters are based on
Speaker 3: the fact that it was caught in an area where
Speaker 3: it's going to get seen, or it had no choice
Speaker 3: but to be seen. But when you think about if
Speaker 3: it's main goal is to be elusive and not be seen,
Speaker 3: it's always going to choose to do that. It makes
Speaker 3: you wonder. Out of thirty five hundred encounters, there's got
Speaker 3: to be thirty five thousand encounters or more. Were probably
Speaker 3: over three hundred and fifty thousand times where there's been
Speaker 3: a bigfoot standing by somebody and it chose flight instead
Speaker 3: of fight, and it just backed the way and these
Speaker 3: people never knew it was there. People are hiking in
Speaker 3: the woods all over Canada and the northwest, and now
Speaker 3: for Midwest and the northeast, and everybody's always out in
Speaker 3: the wilderness doing something every weekend. There's millions of people
Speaker 3: out in the woods. Why wouldn't you have sightings every weekend?
Speaker 3: Because nine hundred and ninety nine out of a thousand times,
Speaker 3: Jesus is simply back away. And I'll let you know
Speaker 3: it was even there. It near, you were there, You
Speaker 3: had no fluid, it was there. It sees rare occasions
Speaker 3: where you find yourself, where it finds itself, where it
Speaker 3: doesn't have a choice.
Speaker 1: I know after your sighting you've started to do some research.
Speaker 1: Why don't you talk about what type of research you're
Speaker 1: conducting now? What are some of the things that you're
Speaker 1: doing and finding.
Speaker 3: The business that I have. Once I hit fifty years old,
Speaker 3: I've grown my business to a point where I could
Speaker 3: start stepping back and taking a little bit of time away.
Speaker 3: We had gotten a lake home up in northern Minnesota.
Speaker 3: I've always vacationed up in that area with my family
Speaker 3: ever since I was young. I loved that park Rapids,
Speaker 3: the midge Walker Castlake type area of northern Minnesota. So
Speaker 3: got away come up there and started really being out
Speaker 3: in that atmosphere more out in the woods, seeing a
Speaker 3: lot more bear and being around that even met a
Speaker 3: few people who were into the research of this, and
Speaker 3: that's when I started finding groups on Facebook trying to
Speaker 3: I guess it was a renewed interest in trying to
Speaker 3: learn more about what I had encountered that day. I
Speaker 3: think at fifty years old, it was like, I don't
Speaker 3: give a trap anymore. For a long time, I just
Speaker 3: felt like, man, if people, business clients and stuff. If
Speaker 3: I tried to tell even friends that I hun't with
Speaker 3: or fish with, I can't tell anybody this story, right
Speaker 3: because I can't share this encounter people. They got to
Speaker 3: just they're never gonna look at me the same. But
Speaker 3: aty I just started feeling like, you know what, there's
Speaker 3: got to be hundreds of thousands of people that have
Speaker 3: had some sort of an experience and they're all feeling
Speaker 3: the same way. I feel like I can't tell anybody.
Speaker 3: So that really drove me to want to do the research,
Speaker 3: get into the research and try to figure out stuff.
Speaker 3: So that I just think it's stupid that if somebody
Speaker 3: had an encounter when they're eighteen years old, they got
Speaker 3: to live their whole life carrying that burden around of
Speaker 3: feeling like they need to tell somebody about what happened
Speaker 3: to them, and yet they're fearful of doing it, so
Speaker 3: they don't. It is a big burden. It's really hard
Speaker 3: to do, and I think it's really a lot harder
Speaker 3: for some people than it is for others. Maybe some
Speaker 3: people are good at just I'm going to bury it
Speaker 3: and never think about it again. I just had a
Speaker 3: hard time doing that. My goal was, if I'm going
Speaker 3: to get involved in research, I want to do some
Speaker 3: type of research that advances the science to help blueprint
Speaker 3: what this thing is so that people don't have to
Speaker 3: feel so scared to tell somebody if they hadn't experienced.
Speaker 3: So I met Doug Hichak. He's been on your show.
Speaker 3: He's one of the first people I shared my encounter
Speaker 3: with un sol what happened. He was just there's so
Speaker 3: many different elements that make my encounter different than a
Speaker 3: lot of them that year. About that he was fascinated
Speaker 3: by and he started talking to me about it. There's
Speaker 3: a lot of encounters that are happening here in northern Minnesota.
Speaker 3: Him and his son do a lot of research. So
Speaker 3: we started talking. First of all, I love the kayak
Speaker 3: in the winter, i'd do a lot of snowmobiling. So
Speaker 3: I was snowmobiling in some really remote areas in that
Speaker 3: area of northern Minnesota that I have the lake home at.
Speaker 3: It's a touristy deal where every little town ends up
Speaker 3: having a festival every summer, and there's homes all over
Speaker 3: these lakes that maybe aren't year round homes for people.
Speaker 3: From May through September, it's like spring break in a
Speaker 3: lot of areas. What I was looking for is remote
Speaker 3: areas were even in July, there's not going to be
Speaker 3: anybody here. So I started kayaking some of the more
Speaker 3: remote rivers. A lot of lakes in that area are
Speaker 3: cheened together by rivers. I started kayaking those are started snowmbiling.
Speaker 3: On the last winter, I found what I thought was
Speaker 3: an interesting meadow on a river that was so remote
Speaker 3: it was surrounded by big pine poppers and birch trees.
Speaker 3: I made a list of two or three different areas
Speaker 3: like that that I wanted to go back and try
Speaker 3: what I call some low tech research. I had this
Speaker 3: idea that if you were going to try to research
Speaker 3: this creature, that its biggest vulnerability is its own curiosity.
Speaker 3: I really felt that way. There's things that sometimes it's
Speaker 3: just so curious about it can't help but make itself
Speaker 3: a little bit vulnerable. That's what I was in the
Speaker 3: art with so this spring. It takes me two hours
Speaker 3: to kayak back into some of these areas, but I
Speaker 3: went out in the middle of them. I had a
Speaker 3: big red rubber ball, the kind you buy for two
Speaker 3: bucks at Walmart. I went out into this meadow and
Speaker 3: I was throwing this ball up and down. I'd laugh
Speaker 3: at the ball, I'd kick it and run over and
Speaker 3: pick it up and laugh at it. And I did
Speaker 3: this for about a half an hour. I set the
Speaker 3: ball in the middle in the draft, and I walked
Speaker 3: about three quarters of a mile out of there back
Speaker 3: to the river where my kayak was, and I left.
Speaker 3: I went back the next morning and the ball had
Speaker 3: been moved. I knew that if a bear couldn't move it,
Speaker 3: because it would pop it. And this is just a
Speaker 3: light rubber ball. It was glossy smooth. There was some
Speaker 3: smears on it. It had been moved about sixty seventy
Speaker 3: yards across this meadow. This meadow was about the size
Speaker 3: of a football field, so I thought this was interesting.
Speaker 3: I had done that in a couple if it metals.
Speaker 3: This is the first one on my list that it hit.
Speaker 3: I'd actually got something moving, and I knew it wasn't
Speaker 3: a human. I am so far out in Manila nowhere
Speaker 3: there's I'm five miles from the nearest gravel road, so
Speaker 3: I started concerning that would be the area that I
Speaker 3: wanted to research. The next time I took the ball,
Speaker 3: I had put someone in square of Alcrotamas, about a
Speaker 3: half dozen of them. I went out and played with
Speaker 3: the ball again for about forty five minutes. I left
Speaker 3: it right in the meadow, went back to my kayak,
Speaker 3: and I kayak out of there. Now, the first time
Speaker 3: I showed up on a Thursday, about ten in the
Speaker 3: morning is when I left the ball. I went back
Speaker 3: on a Friday morning at about the same time to
Speaker 3: pick it up. So I'm gonna start doing this every
Speaker 3: Thursday and pick it up every Friday. Because if it
Speaker 3: doesn't live in that area, so to speak, if this
Speaker 3: is an area that hunts and at forges in, maybe
Speaker 3: I could become part of its routine. Like wherever it
Speaker 3: is twenty miles the way ten miles away. Maybe it
Speaker 3: was to get to where every Thursday, hit nose, go
Speaker 3: to that metal that balls. So I started doing that.
Speaker 3: The second time I didn't get moved. I thought about
Speaker 3: not putting out that metals again, but I did. The
Speaker 3: third time I went back had been moved again. I
Speaker 3: was looking at the levelco tabs and I realized that
Speaker 3: I had two hares that were caught in these vehical tabs.
Speaker 3: One of them was about eight inches long and one
Speaker 3: one was about nine and a half inch as long.
Speaker 3: Very silky, very fine, light colored. They seemed to change colors.
Speaker 3: It looked clear in one section of it, and it
Speaker 3: looked a little bit more brown in the section, and
Speaker 3: the blondish looked. It was really weird. I put these
Speaker 3: in a plastic bag. When the ziplock went home, talked
Speaker 3: to Doug Hijacks and I was emailing him. We were
Speaker 3: talking a messenger on Facebook and I told them why
Speaker 3: I fought these hairs put them in a plastic bag.
Speaker 3: He says, Dude, you got to put them in a
Speaker 3: paper envelope, store them in paper, not plastic. You gotta
Speaker 3: keep the DNA right on them and so that we
Speaker 3: can test them. So I started carrying envelopes with me,
Speaker 3: rubber gloves. He was telling me about some other things
Speaker 3: that he had been having success with peanut butter jars,
Speaker 3: and I said, okay, so I should put a jar
Speaker 3: of peanut butter out there and just leave it there.
Speaker 3: And he said yeah. I said, with the lid off,
Speaker 3: and he says, no, these things love to unscrew lids
Speaker 3: and screw them back on. I was like, what he does,
Speaker 3: trust me, just try it. So the third trip out,
Speaker 3: I put the ball out with the jar of peanut butter,
Speaker 3: with the lid screwed on. Went back the next morning
Speaker 3: on a Friday morning, the ball had been't move the
Speaker 3: peanut butter jars laying there, the lids off of it,
Speaker 3: the lid wasn't screwed back on it. But this jar
Speaker 3: was empty. It looked like you had just made the
Speaker 3: jar an hour ago. It was so clean. There wasn't
Speaker 3: any peanut butter residue. It like you ran it through
Speaker 3: a dishwashing. I was really excited. I did a whole
Speaker 3: two hour trip kayaking out of there, bringing the ball
Speaker 3: home and an empty peanut butter jar jar. I get home,
Speaker 3: I called Doug and I said the jar was empty,
Speaker 3: and he says, it looked like it went through a dishwasher.
Speaker 3: I'm like, how did you know that? He said, that's
Speaker 3: what ours look like when we find them. If they
Speaker 3: get open, they're usually clean. I thought, yeah, that's exactly
Speaker 3: what happened. So when I started talking to Doug about
Speaker 3: this research, I said, look, I don't want to try
Speaker 3: to photograph it. I don't want to try to trail camera.
Speaker 3: I just think that's a low success, high tech strategy
Speaker 3: that just doesn't produce. Whether it's senses ir, whether it's
Speaker 3: sensor's motion detections, I don't know. You look at how
Speaker 3: many game cams are out there, and we just don't
Speaker 3: get real good footage. So I said, I don't want
Speaker 3: to bring technology in this. He started preaching them me
Speaker 3: and mentoring me on what hasn't worked. That kind of
Speaker 3: guided my vision for this research. If I hasn't keep
Speaker 3: doing this that I want to focus not on what
Speaker 3: works but it doesn't work, try to eliminate those elements.
Speaker 3: Because you can go out in an area and scream
Speaker 3: or whoop and get a whoop back, let's say, and
Speaker 3: that's cool. It's a great experience, right, But I feel
Speaker 3: like I've already had a great experience it doesn't really
Speaker 3: advance the science. The only thing that's going to advance
Speaker 3: the science is DNA. We've got to do something to
Speaker 3: get DNA. If I'm going to leverage this things curiosity
Speaker 3: to try to collect DNA, I've got to make it
Speaker 3: appear that I'm visiting this area, I'm leaving things. I'm
Speaker 3: giving it a twenty four hour window to explore whatever
Speaker 3: I leave on its own terms. It feels like it's
Speaker 3: in control and it knows that I'm going to come
Speaker 3: back in twenty four hours, because that's the routine I'm setting.
Speaker 3: I don't look at the tree line, I don't call
Speaker 3: out to it. I just picked the stuff up and wait.
Speaker 3: The next week, on Thursday, I go put stuff out.
Speaker 3: And now each week I've been integrating a new element
Speaker 3: into what I leave. I've been doing this for a
Speaker 3: total of fifteen weeks. Now. There's only four times that
Speaker 3: the ball hasn't been moved or something that I leave
Speaker 3: hasn't been moved. So I know I've become part of this.
Speaker 3: Whether it's one, whether it's a group of them, I
Speaker 3: know I'm part of its routine. But I've had some
Speaker 3: crazy stuff happen over this time. So I guess as
Speaker 3: I'm talking to Doug. One of the interesting things that happened.
Speaker 3: He started talking about when he was studying bears. He
Speaker 3: was the first one the video bears giving birth and hibernating,
Speaker 3: and so he had planted all these cameras in a
Speaker 3: hibernation dam and things like that. He said, it's scientifically
Speaker 3: proven that caribou see in ub vision. He said, I
Speaker 3: feel like bears do too. As I've had the reactions
Speaker 3: to UV, fluorescent colors really different. They seem to prefer
Speaker 3: fluorescent blue. If there's something in our research that's blue,
Speaker 3: it moves it, it destroys it, it chews on it.
Speaker 3: It sees that so much easier. Now, what's funny is
Speaker 3: my business it involves UV and black white technology. So
Speaker 3: I told you, guys, said, actually I'm the UV expert.
Speaker 3: You what I told them what my business was and
Speaker 3: how we worked with this in my experience with it.
Speaker 3: He said, what's your chances of this happening? That you
Speaker 3: know about this technology? And I just have this theory
Speaker 3: that maybe if bars and UV, maybe Bigfoot season UV.
Speaker 3: I said, What you don't understand is when you say UV,
Speaker 3: what you're talking about isn't just fluorescent colors. Every game
Speaker 3: camera that's made that that has a hard, durable plastic
Speaker 3: that's made to resist being chewed on or damage has
Speaker 3: a UV element in that coating on the plastic that
Speaker 3: makes it that durable. The acurlic resin that they use
Speaker 3: in those plastics to make them hard has a UV
Speaker 3: element to it. Every camera lens that's ever been made,
Speaker 3: whether it's a game camera or a professional video camera,
Speaker 3: has a UV coding on the lens. You got to
Speaker 3: imagine this, Brian. If you can see in your v
Speaker 3: when you look out in a tree line and there's
Speaker 3: a game camera that'll trut's say, one hundred yards away,
Speaker 3: that lens is going to stand out to you as
Speaker 3: if it was flor ess and orange and me and
Speaker 3: you were looking at it. It's just going to have
Speaker 3: a vivid surface to it. It could be that the
Speaker 3: plastic of a peanut butter, John or the lenses in
Speaker 3: the eyeglasses that you wear might be giving off a
Speaker 3: UV look to it. I think he was onto something
Speaker 3: with that, so I started incorporating that into the things
Speaker 3: that I leave out there. What I started doing is
Speaker 3: I take a game camera painted the whole thing fluorescent blue.
Speaker 3: I don't put batteries in it and power it up.
Speaker 3: I just leave it lay out there in the field,
Speaker 3: not too far away from the ball, just on the ground.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to get used to that blue color and
Speaker 3: seeing a game camera and not being afraid of it.
Speaker 3: I'll go out and it'll be picked up and carried
Speaker 3: five yards and dropped. Something's moved it. I've strapped him
Speaker 3: on trees before, with peanut butter in front of it,
Speaker 3: so that it knew there was a reward. Anytime it
Speaker 3: sees blue now in anything that I leave, it knows
Speaker 3: there's something there that's good. So I'll strap a fluorescent
Speaker 3: blue game camera to a tree. Then what I've started
Speaker 3: doing now is I take little baby food jars that
Speaker 3: the label or ripped off of it. I've got two
Speaker 3: teenage boys, and when they were younger, they had a
Speaker 3: rock tumbler. They would tumble rocks until they looked really
Speaker 3: shiny and pretty. I'd take a rock and put it
Speaker 3: in a baby food jar and screw the lid on
Speaker 3: and leave it out there now in front of these
Speaker 3: blue game cameras that are strapped to trees, but they
Speaker 3: have no batteries in them. They'll go out and they'll
Speaker 3: open up with baby food jar and take it. I've
Speaker 3: had it be where I leave my kayak on the
Speaker 3: shore and when I walk in. This last time I
Speaker 3: was there, I walked into the area, spent forty five
Speaker 3: minutes playing with the ball, leave the ball, put the
Speaker 3: game cameras back out with no batteries, and I'm I've
Speaker 3: tied fluorescent blue flagging tape to one of the trees
Speaker 3: and smeared peanut butter on the trunk of it. I'm
Speaker 3: just trying to make them comfortable with this fluorescent blue color.
Speaker 3: It means there's something good and not something bad. I'm
Speaker 3: never calling out to it. I'm never trying to interact
Speaker 3: with it. There was one time when I was walking
Speaker 3: out of the area about three trips ago, where on
Speaker 3: my path that I walk out of I found a bobber.
Speaker 3: It was a fishing bobber that was that orange and
Speaker 3: it's a plastic one. It's small, but it's like that
Speaker 3: fluorescent sharp truse color on top, that yellowy looking glowy
Speaker 3: color that was like fluorescent orange on the bottom. And
Speaker 3: it was laying right in the past that I walked,
Speaker 3: I picked it up, stuck it in my pocket, put
Speaker 3: the stuff there, and then got my kayaking left. I
Speaker 3: was telling Doug about it, and Doug said, did you
Speaker 3: leave something backwark? And I said, no, dude, they'll get
Speaker 3: offended if you take a gift they leave for you
Speaker 3: and you don't leave one. You know, Doug's been my
Speaker 3: mentor to this, because you know, I was an idiot
Speaker 3: when a kid. I did no experience, right. So now
Speaker 3: I have a little plastic or glass vial. I fill
Speaker 3: them with water and put a little bit of glitter
Speaker 3: in and put a cap on the vial and you
Speaker 3: shake it up. It looks like a little snowflobe. I
Speaker 3: do that with blue glitter. I keep three or four
Speaker 3: of them in my pocket all the time when I'm
Speaker 3: out there. When I see something, I feel like, yeah,
Speaker 3: maybe this is something that left for me. I'll pick
Speaker 3: it up and leave a little violet glitter there. When
Speaker 3: I go back, it's gone, that vial's gone, because last
Speaker 3: time I went in last week, I went in Thursday morning,
Speaker 3: there was two big logs that were laying across the
Speaker 3: three quarter mile trail that I hiked back into this area.
Speaker 3: Once I pulled my kayakup on the beach. The logs
Speaker 3: had been moved off of the trail. One of them
Speaker 3: I had to step over every time. One of them
Speaker 3: was a birch tree that had fallen down across the
Speaker 3: trail and was propped up against another tree, so I
Speaker 3: would walk off the trail and walk around it. Both
Speaker 3: of them had been moved, so they're laying parallel to
Speaker 3: the edge of the trail now, like something was trying
Speaker 3: to make it easier for me to get in there.
Speaker 3: I went in, played with the ball, left the ball hung.
Speaker 3: The game cams put up some flags, they put out
Speaker 3: the peanut. But each week I start adding something different
Speaker 3: than I'm doing. When I walk out, I get to
Speaker 3: my kayak and my paddle. I don't know if you're
Speaker 3: familiar with kayak palles, but my paddle had been Something
Speaker 3: depressed the plunger button and sowed my paddle into two pieces.
Speaker 3: One was leaning against the edge of the kayak with
Speaker 3: the blade down in the gravel. The other end was
Speaker 3: leaning up in the air, and the other section of
Speaker 3: it the blade was down in the floor of the
Speaker 3: kayak and it was leading up against the seat. I'm
Speaker 3: looking at where I pulled up at trying to see
Speaker 3: as a short footprints here or what. I couldn't see
Speaker 3: any footprints, just because it was it's like river rockets.
Speaker 3: It's not fine gravel or something that would depression. But
Speaker 3: I've seen an area on the beach down the down
Speaker 3: river for me a little bit. That's where I'm gonna
Speaker 3: start eaching it now, just to see if that happened. Then. Also,
Speaker 3: my life jacket, I leave it lay unbuckled. When I
Speaker 3: take it off, I leave it lay in the seat.
Speaker 3: My life jacket was laying on the nose of my kayak.
Speaker 3: There's a bungee cord on the front of my cack.
Speaker 3: Something had picked up the life jacket, snap the three
Speaker 3: buckles closed on it, and slid it underneath the bungee
Speaker 3: cord of the kayak. I'm telling you, I don't care
Speaker 3: if it's a Saturday or midnight on a Monday. We
Speaker 3: can sit on that river and you will not see
Speaker 3: somebody come past it. This is so remote that I'm
Speaker 3: not saying there are people that could be out there.
Speaker 3: My goal throughout this research was not to try to
Speaker 3: communicate with it, just go out and do my things.
Speaker 3: In the course of the velcro tabs. I've collected now
Speaker 3: to this date, eleven hair samples over fourteen weeks. A
Speaker 3: lot of times I don't have any. Sometimes I have
Speaker 3: two or three, but I've got eleven total. I've also
Speaker 3: have what Doug refers to as thebum smears. When they
Speaker 3: touch something in their skin, that waxy coat on their skin.
Speaker 3: Just like we have an oil in our skin, they
Speaker 3: have a more thicker waxy substance. It's probably protective of
Speaker 3: their skin, helps protect it when they touch something, or
Speaker 3: if they were to touch it their nose to a
Speaker 3: glass window, it would leave a waxy smudge. I've started
Speaker 3: leaving a ten inch piece of black Plexi glass leaning
Speaker 3: against a tree with the peanut butter under the Plexi glass.
Speaker 3: You're thinking rat will pick the Plexi glass up and
Speaker 3: move it, maybe and leave a fingerprint, because every time
Speaker 3: it touches the ball, if it leaves fingerprints, I can't
Speaker 3: see those fingerprints. What happens is they turn into smears.
Speaker 3: I think it takes the ball and holds it under
Speaker 3: one arm, or it walks around with it, or it's
Speaker 3: kicking it to the ground like it's mimicking what I'm doing.
Speaker 3: I just can't get a clear fingerprint that shows normal
Speaker 3: ridges and things like that. But I'm trying, and every
Speaker 3: time I have any type of a Seabum IQ tippe,
Speaker 3: it put my rubber gloves on Q tippet and put
Speaker 3: it in an envelope. So I've got eleven hair samples
Speaker 3: and seven Sebum swear samples. And my idea was, I'm
Speaker 3: just gonna keep doing this and try to just be
Speaker 3: disciplined enough to just keep trying this low tech, noncommunicative
Speaker 3: from my end research where all I'm doing is just
Speaker 3: collecting from it. It doesn't realize it, but I'm just
Speaker 3: collecting these samples, right. I want to get to a
Speaker 3: point where I have to end it culminates to where
Speaker 3: there will be a high tech ending to it. One
Speaker 3: day when I go out there, I'm gonna put batteries
Speaker 3: and all the game cameras. I'm gonna leave voice recorders
Speaker 3: instead of a red ball. Me and Doug are working
Speaker 3: on designing a ball that has three hundred and sixty
Speaker 3: degree camera embedded into the ball that can remain powered overnight.
Speaker 3: What I'm trying to achieve is, if you look at
Speaker 3: the Patterson Gilan film footage, what's really spectacular about that
Speaker 3: isn't the footage. It's the fact that they combined more
Speaker 3: than one Holy Grail type element to what they discovered
Speaker 3: that day. They had footprints with the footage. Whether it's
Speaker 3: a footprint, whether it's a video footage or a still picture,
Speaker 3: whether it's a vocal recording, or whether it's a DNA sample.
Speaker 3: Those four different things that you could possibly gain from
Speaker 3: an encounter, they had two of them, with footprints and
Speaker 3: film footage. That's what makes that so spectacular. Almost every
Speaker 3: other scientific data that's been collected has only been one
Speaker 3: of those. Right if you're subscribed to the outstanding experienced
Speaker 3: research that he did. He's got what he claimed to
Speaker 3: be the footage and the still pictures combined with footprints
Speaker 3: and things like that. It'd be one thing if at
Speaker 3: the end of the summer I had a catalog of
Speaker 3: eleven hair samples, seven sevum smear samples. We're going to
Speaker 3: go pay to have these analyzed. What the goal is
Speaker 3: not to have a lab analyze it and say it's
Speaker 3: an unknown primate and they just keep looking there. Eventually
Speaker 3: we have to establish a database. It's not something we
Speaker 3: know about, but sample one matches sample to it, and
Speaker 3: sample one and two matches sample seventeen. Eventually we're going
Speaker 3: to establish a collection of DNA as SEMy it's coming
Speaker 3: from the same creature where they match each other. They
Speaker 3: might not match what you consider to be part of
Speaker 3: your library of known primates, but these do match each other.
Speaker 3: I'm not a scientist, I'm not a doctor, I don't
Speaker 3: have a degree, and I'm just a citizen researcher, a
Speaker 3: citizen scientist, as Doug would explain, But he's adamant about
Speaker 3: developing a DNA library that if you could collect ten
Speaker 3: samples from ten different creatures, you would have undeniable proofs
Speaker 3: that you have something there. But it's not just something
Speaker 3: that's not a known primate at that point, you know
Speaker 3: what I mean.
Speaker 1: That's one of the things that I love the most
Speaker 1: about Doug Hihcheck is he thinks outside the box. He
Speaker 1: looks at things from a completely different lens most of
Speaker 1: the time. I think some of the things that you're
Speaker 1: doing are fascinating. I hope you stay in touch with
Speaker 1: us and share some of the things that you guys find.
Speaker 1: One of the guys here in North Carolina recently got
Speaker 1: some hair samples, and I reached out to Doug and
Speaker 1: he put me in contact with somebody that hopefully we're
Speaker 1: going to be able to send those twos. Please stay
Speaker 1: in touch with us any evidence that you guys get
Speaker 1: and any discoveries that you guys make.
Speaker 3: I hope you'll come back on the show and share
Speaker 3: with us for sure. Yeah. Over the weekend here Doug
Speaker 3: was speaking up in Deluze, Minnesota at a conference. Said,
Speaker 3: you don't believe what just happened. He said, I'm standing
Speaker 3: at a booth talking to somebody. First of all, Bran,
Speaker 3: I've never really been into the para normal, the parapsychic
Speaker 3: type part of Bakefoot. I get that there's a lot
Speaker 3: out there, but I've been general minded on the research
Speaker 3: that I'm doing and Doug's doing. But he had this
Speaker 3: lady come up hand him a six inch long, fluffy,
Speaker 3: ruscient blue state colored feathern She said, I don't know why,
Speaker 3: I'm a paranormal expert, and I've felt compelled that I
Speaker 3: need to give this to you and you'll know what
Speaker 3: to do with it. Doug sent me the picture of
Speaker 3: it and told me what had just happened. I said,
Speaker 3: you need to mail that what's great is that Doug
Speaker 3: is a person that he really radamant about people like
Speaker 3: myself or anybody else. She's trying to go out and
Speaker 3: have the experience that he's there for them. If you
Speaker 3: have questions, say what should I do with this, how
Speaker 3: should I react to this? Or this happened to me?
Speaker 3: He wants to get involved. He wants to help you
Speaker 3: get a sample, and he's very approachable. You can find
Speaker 3: him on Facebook, send him a message, he says, that's
Speaker 3: why I have a Facebook account so people can find me.
Speaker 3: Everybody who's trying to do something like this should have
Speaker 3: a mentor and not just go at it like it's
Speaker 3: killing snakes. Should take a balance of process and shrow
Speaker 3: it down and figure out what's the best way to
Speaker 3: get a result considering the environment that I'm doing this,
Speaker 3: and I'm hoping that more people can learn that from
Speaker 3: what I'm doing. I'm not saying I'm doing something right
Speaker 3: or I'm doing it wrong. I know that I'm doing
Speaker 3: it different than most soccer That's awesome.
Speaker 1: I think that you've got one of the best mentors
Speaker 1: in the business.
Speaker 3: Agaichek. He's one of the best.
Speaker 1: He's never failed to answer a text from me or
Speaker 1: a phone call or a Facebook message. He's always been
Speaker 1: there and he's always had great ideas. He'll be the
Speaker 1: first admit I may be wrong, but this is what
Speaker 1: I think about it. We go from there. I can't
Speaker 1: thank you enough for coming on the show and sharing.
Speaker 1: We'll definitely have to have you back.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I look forward to.
Speaker 4: They say you don't gotta go home, but you can't stay.
Speaker 4: I don't want to be world out that try this
Speaker 4: job that chid everything back the joy for me, joy,
Speaker 4: staying right, come right away, side, standstill, start, stays, stays,
Speaker 4: stay inside, stay stay, state still sus the pass, unstate
Speaker 4: plays ands stets pass used past insis