Speaker 1: Big Food and Beyond.
Speaker 2: With Cliff and Bobo. These guys are your favorites, so
Speaker 2: like say subscribe and rade it.
Speaker 3: I'm star and me.
Speaker 2: Righteous on yesterday and listening, oh watching always keep its watching.
Speaker 2: And now your hosts Cliff Berrickman and James Bobo Fay Bobo.
Speaker 2: How are you doing today?
Speaker 4: Excellent? Sir? How about you? Cliff?
Speaker 2: I am doing very well. Thank you. Anything exciting going
Speaker 2: on we should know about her? You just want to
Speaker 2: jump right into it because I just kind of want
Speaker 2: to jump right into it because of our guests today.
Speaker 5: No, I know who we got on today, and I
Speaker 5: got nothing to say until he says something, because he's
Speaker 5: going to enlighten us in the audience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nothing that we have to say is going to
Speaker 2: add to our conversation. So let's just jump right into it.
Speaker 2: So I've had the pleasure of meeting this gentleman before
Speaker 2: I actually met him at Beach Foot and the kind
Speaker 2: of a West Coast event that Todd and Diane Nice
Speaker 2: put on for a number of years. And I listened
Speaker 2: to this guy speak and I was blown away because
Speaker 2: not only is this guy like a legitimate academic with
Speaker 2: an interest in Sasquatches and you know those that combination
Speaker 2: right there is amazing. But he's a historical figure as
Speaker 2: well for old timers. And then that when I say
Speaker 2: old timers, you know, I feel old, but I know
Speaker 2: I'm not an old timer. The old timers are the
Speaker 2: four horsemen, you know, Burn and Grain and Krantz, you know,
Speaker 2: hind in those guys. But for the next generation, I
Speaker 2: call it generation, the second generation, you know, but really
Speaker 2: it's the it's the nineteen eighties, in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 2: and that's kind of this this this area, it's like
Speaker 2: the dark ages of Bigfoot, because not a lot of
Speaker 2: information comes out. Not a lot of people seem to
Speaker 2: be super active. He had stuff from Krantz, you know,
Speaker 2: the dramatic glyphics, he had the Blue Mountain activity that
Speaker 2: was going on there. But really, you know, the other
Speaker 2: people are kind of low profile. That's the Joe B. Lart,
Speaker 2: that's the Cliff Olson's, that's the Richard Greenwells from the
Speaker 2: International Society of Cryptozoology. And that's why I was stoked
Speaker 2: to hear our guests speak, because this gentleman that we
Speaker 2: have on here today, Angelo Capparella, he was involved with
Speaker 2: doctor Greenwell on his expeditions to northern California and southern
Speaker 2: Oregon and all of that. A historical figure in cryptozoology
Speaker 2: is with us today. So he's an ornithologist at Illinois
Speaker 2: State University. And listeners, please welcome in Bobo as well.
Speaker 2: Please welcome Angelo Caperella. Angelo, thank you so much for
Speaker 2: joining us today.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much for the invitation to be on
Speaker 3: your podcast. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2: We are thrilled whenever we can have a legitimate academic
Speaker 2: on the program. And so why don't we start with
Speaker 2: that very briefly, like why don't you tell us what
Speaker 2: your job is? And we promise not to tell anybody
Speaker 2: because we know how like you know, college professors are
Speaker 2: treated if they're under big interested in Bigfoot. But luckily
Speaker 2: no one listens to this. Your word will not reach out.
Speaker 6: Okay, well, actually, by ja now is getting used to retirement.
Speaker 6: After thirty one years as a zoologist at Illinois State University,
Speaker 6: I finally decided to retire let a new, younger generation
Speaker 6: come in. And this was after getting very involved in
Speaker 6: conservation biology and fostering our collections of birds and mammals,
Speaker 6: doing a whole host of things educating graduate students. I
Speaker 6: still have an affiliation at the University of Illinois State,
Speaker 6: but my retirement effectively, I would say, occur in June,
Speaker 6: and so I'm just sort of adjusting things. Getting used
Speaker 6: of the COVID kind of threw a ringer into some
Speaker 6: of my plans at least for now, as it has
Speaker 6: for so many but basically continuing doing projects in affiliation
Speaker 6: with university, but now have a little more flexibility. And
Speaker 6: thankfully all you educators out there can under appreciate this.
Speaker 6: Thankfully don't have to teach under the COVID issue that
Speaker 6: causes so much difficulty for both teachers and students.
Speaker 2: I can't even imagine. And I was an elementary school
Speaker 2: teacher for fourteen years and just to think that, like
Speaker 2: what teachers are going through now just to educate their students,
Speaker 2: you know, and just teaching is hard enough, but this,
Speaker 2: I mean, teachers deserve medals, you know, they certainly deserve raises,
Speaker 2: but they absolutely deserve medals for what they're going through now,
Speaker 2: as do the students. I might end.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was challenging.
Speaker 6: My last semester teaching was last spring of twenty nineteen,
Speaker 6: and we had to pivot right in the middle of
Speaker 6: the semester to all remote teaching, which was quite a
Speaker 6: struggle for everyone since it had to happen so quickly.
Speaker 6: But I got through it, So I guess that's good
Speaker 6: and now I can concentrate well on other things.
Speaker 5: So with googling all that, Now are your students to
Speaker 5: do like goo you? Are they aware of your big
Speaker 5: foot interest? Were you like real quiet at school about it?
Speaker 4: Or did you was it known just not a real
Speaker 4: big deal? How'd that work?
Speaker 6: More of the latter, I would say. In fact, they
Speaker 6: even had a couple of students, an undergraduate and a
Speaker 6: graduate student kind of helped me as we sort of
Speaker 6: were using analyzing for vocalizations a lot of the SD
Speaker 6: cards that the NAWAC was providing and picking a look
Speaker 6: making spectrograms of vocalizations and things like that.
Speaker 3: They were helping me with that project and that was
Speaker 3: a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: So how did you get into the Bigfoot thing? Because
Speaker 2: I mean, you're a bird guy. I guess your initial
Speaker 2: your main interest interest being in an ornithologist would be
Speaker 2: you know, birds in general. Was the interest always there
Speaker 2: as it is with so many of us, like from
Speaker 2: when you were a little boy, or did it arise
Speaker 2: because something happened to you or when you were around,
Speaker 2: or tell us little bit about your history with the subject.
Speaker 6: In zoology, my initialive interest was not actually herpetology, So
Speaker 6: I grew up herping in North Carolina.
Speaker 2: Which of course study of reptiles, reptiles.
Speaker 6: And amphibians, reptiles and amphibians, herptiles, herpetology, reptiles and amphibians,
Speaker 6: And it was only a little later that. In fact,
Speaker 6: it wasn't until undergraduate at University of North Carolina that
Speaker 6: I got into birds. And as a verneber zoologist, I
Speaker 6: was pretty much interested knowns, including mammals, so I considered
Speaker 6: myself pretty general, although over time I gradually specialized more
Speaker 6: and more in ornithology. As I continued through my academic career,
Speaker 6: getting my master's at Texas Tech and then my doctor
Speaker 6: at Louisiana State University, that shifted me more to birds,
Speaker 6: and particularly neotropical birds, birds of South America. So I
Speaker 6: was on a lot of expeditions during my graduate years
Speaker 6: and after looking for new species of birds with museums
Speaker 6: down in South America. But in terms of cryptozoology, I
Speaker 6: was interested as a teenager. I can trace that back
Speaker 6: to getting on the Track of Unknown Animals by Bernard
Speaker 6: hu Humans, and of course I'm in Sanderson's works and
Speaker 6: John Green's work, So it wasn't just a sasquatch that
Speaker 6: I was interested as all of cryptozoology, which sasquatch gave
Speaker 6: me the most opportunity to do some field work in
Speaker 6: the nineties with Richard Greenwell.
Speaker 4: That's all my head.
Speaker 5: My next getting Stu as you're talking about the books,
Speaker 5: you got my head a done real fast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sounds familiar.
Speaker 2: You're building Bobo's neck muscles. Excellent. You became interested in
Speaker 2: cryptosology in general to all of the various animals that
Speaker 2: might be out there, on Bigfoot being one of those.
Speaker 2: But you how did you make a connection to Greenwell?
Speaker 3: When he started the International Society of Cryptozoology. I found
Speaker 3: out about it right when it started.
Speaker 6: So I was one of the early members and visited
Speaker 6: me in New York City when I was at the
Speaker 6: American zoom Ansal History as a postdoc, and invited me
Speaker 6: in the nineteen nineties to come on the board of directors.
Speaker 6: So I was elected to the board of directors, served
Speaker 6: on the is International Society for Cryptology Board of Directors
Speaker 6: from nineteen ninety three to two thousand and five.
Speaker 3: And I actually even.
Speaker 6: Before that, he had me on an editorial board starting
Speaker 6: in nineteen eighty eight for the journal Cryptozoology, and I
Speaker 6: would hear with you relevant article for the journal and
Speaker 6: got to talk to him quite a bit and became
Speaker 6: really good friends. And then when I read within the
Speaker 6: journal his field report for his expedition one of the
Speaker 6: maybe it was his second expedition I don't recall exactly
Speaker 6: through the Siskew Wilderness of the Sixth River National Forest
Speaker 6: in northern California. It was one that Jeff Belger was
Speaker 6: on and along with a couple other people, including his son,
Speaker 6: Richard's son, And when I read all of the activities
Speaker 6: they had and talked to him more about it, I said, Richard,
Speaker 6: you got to get me in on this that you're
Speaker 6: following the same philosophy that we followed at LSU to
Speaker 6: discover new birds in South America.
Speaker 3: That is, you.
Speaker 6: Select a site and you just sit there and you
Speaker 6: work it, and you work it for weeks, if not
Speaker 6: months in the case of grow and you get to
Speaker 6: know it well. You don't just go trapsing all over
Speaker 6: the place you really become part of the forest and
Speaker 6: get to know that area.
Speaker 3: And he had selected this area, which was centered.
Speaker 6: On Elkhole in the Siske Wilderness, based on past research
Speaker 6: that he had done, as potentially a really excellent place
Speaker 6: to have a long term field project to try to
Speaker 6: get evidence of Sasquatch. And as I say, after I
Speaker 6: found out about the successes they were starting to have
Speaker 6: with encounters, I asked, Hey, I'd love to be on
Speaker 6: some expeditions up there. And I was on three of
Speaker 6: three of them. I wasn't able to go on all
Speaker 6: of them nineteen ninety eight, nineteen ninety nine, and the
Speaker 6: final one two thousand and five, which was just before
Speaker 6: his tragic passing.
Speaker 5: I was so bun I missed those because I was
Speaker 5: I was around in that area when you guys were
Speaker 5: out there, and I knew about you guys been out
Speaker 5: there one time, but I knew Melgium, but not that well.
Speaker 5: And I was like, man, I was wishing I could
Speaker 5: get a gig like Holland bags for you guys or
Speaker 5: doing whatever.
Speaker 6: That's certainly how we got into some of these areas.
Speaker 6: Although to get into el Whole we actually well, actually
Speaker 6: one year he told me he ridded lam as. She
Speaker 6: said he would never do again, said they were very unreliable.
Speaker 6: But in subsequent years we did horses and mules, rented
Speaker 6: those and got into alcohol, which was a really hard
Speaker 6: place to get into, but a great place to work.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Siski Wilderness area in general has just a
Speaker 2: reputation of being one of the gnarliest areas in North America.
Speaker 2: There are stories of the wildlife firefighters being dropped off
Speaker 2: and having to be rescued out of there. It is
Speaker 2: some of the densest, thickest, nastiest off trail areas you
Speaker 2: could possibly go, with tons of bears, tons of animals,
Speaker 2: and just treacherous terrain. Perfect for sasquatches in every way
Speaker 2: you can imagine, and for the historically oriented bigfooters listening.
Speaker 2: Not far at all from Bluff Creek.
Speaker 6: Yes, In fact, in nineteen ninety eight that's when we
Speaker 6: actually did do Bluff Creek. We hired orders to take
Speaker 6: us down and we spent about a month in Bluff Creek,
Speaker 6: and that was my first trip with him.
Speaker 3: He decided to.
Speaker 6: Switch from the sisk Wilderness Bluff Creek, but then after
Speaker 6: we had nothing.
Speaker 3: I don't have to Bluff Creek.
Speaker 6: We went back to the wilderness, and that was in
Speaker 6: nineteen ninety nine. But though it was a very useful
Speaker 6: comparative study to have done Bluff Creek, and it was
Speaker 6: fun just because he took me down to the Patterson site,
Speaker 6: which I would have never been able to find on
Speaker 6: my own. And it was just kind of neat historically
Speaker 6: to see that side, although it had changed tremendously. As
Speaker 6: those of you who've visited sets.
Speaker 2: Now this is this is so funny because I mean,
Speaker 2: Bluff Creek is essentially Bobo's home stomping grounds, and I've
Speaker 2: been working the Bluff Creek area since nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 2: So we were all there at the same time, just
Speaker 2: we happened to miss each other. Like I think any
Speaker 2: one of us could have been that weird, suspicious guy
Speaker 2: on the road going the opposite direction in that car.
Speaker 2: You know, some of us are more suspicious than others, perhaps,
Speaker 2: but still, like, it's so interesting that we were all
Speaker 2: there at the same time more or less. Certainly we
Speaker 2: must have overlapped at some point.
Speaker 3: Probably so.
Speaker 6: And actually we were filmed by a film crew for
Speaker 6: a TV show. We were like a set, but within
Speaker 6: one of those many many different TV shows at the.
Speaker 3: Time that would deal with crypti problems.
Speaker 6: One of the ways that Richard tried to find these
Speaker 6: expeditions was to invite camera crews from different kinds of shows.
Speaker 6: One year even had it from a Japanese TV series
Speaker 6: to kind of helped underwrite it so that we could
Speaker 6: go down to these areas. And at least for the
Speaker 6: nineteen ninety eight one, we did have a film crew
Speaker 6: there briefly. They then left and then we did most
Speaker 6: of our work after that. But that's on a TV
Speaker 6: documentary somewhere. I forget now what TV show was on,
Speaker 6: but you can see us coming out of the Bluff
Speaker 6: Creek Quildness after about a month, looking pretty disheveled.
Speaker 3: Particularly since we ran out of food while we were there.
Speaker 6: Planning got better after that, and so I partly try
Speaker 6: to find where that TV show was that has that
Speaker 6: segment of us.
Speaker 3: I know we were profile along with the Seilacant and
Speaker 3: something else.
Speaker 2: Well that would be that'd be very seem to look into.
Speaker 2: So I know Greenwell did expeditions to the Sixes River area,
Speaker 2: which is in southern Oregon. You weren't on any of
Speaker 2: those trips. It sounds like no, I.
Speaker 3: Wasn't on any of those. All of mine were in
Speaker 3: northern California.
Speaker 2: Okay, so Six Rivers National Forests.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 2: What are some of the highlights or some of the
Speaker 2: adventures that you can share with us from those expeditions.
Speaker 6: Well, there were certainly many. The nineteen ninety nine one
Speaker 6: was a lot of fun. Basically he was still refining
Speaker 6: a lot of his techniques, so some of the techniques
Speaker 6: and teaching them to be as well. I mean, one
Speaker 6: of the techniques was broadcasting. His son was a real
Speaker 6: electronic whiz and put together an incredible broadcast system. So
Speaker 6: we were actually alcohol is at the up at the
Speaker 6: headwaters of bill And Creek. Billan Creek is one of
Speaker 6: those areas that you can't walk down because it's just
Speaker 6: too much, too much brush, too dangerous. People do get
Speaker 6: stranded there, as you mentioned, But he had the philosophy
Speaker 6: was that it's very hard to walk up on a sasquatch.
Speaker 6: So we want to interest them in us. We want
Speaker 6: to be the bait. We want to engage their curiosity.
Speaker 6: That was his philosophy. Bring them to us. That's the
Speaker 6: only way this is going to make any sense. Because
Speaker 6: there's no way you could just stumble across that without
Speaker 6: your can't as well known and do.
Speaker 3: Any kind of long term study.
Speaker 6: So we wanted to engage them in being curious about us,
Speaker 6: and that was his philosophy. He did a lot of
Speaker 6: different things to try to enhance their curiosity and he
Speaker 6: was very good. Richard was at finagling high tech equipment
Speaker 6: on loan because again we had really no budget other
Speaker 6: than our own personal finances, and he would get the
Speaker 6: high end cameras, thermal cameras, the impetuers, I mean, our
Speaker 6: source of stuff, seismic sensors. He was he could talk
Speaker 6: anybody into giving him anything. It was amazing in his
Speaker 6: impeccable British accent. I think that helped a lot. His
Speaker 6: British accent really really helped in his interactions with people.
Speaker 6: But he was very verbally adept at engaging people, very extroverted,
Speaker 6: very very friendly, and could get anybody talking to him,
Speaker 6: which was really neat. And we had all sorts of interesting,
Speaker 6: you know, sounds and things like that.
Speaker 3: I remember the nineteen ninety nine was.
Speaker 6: The year that I became convinced that we needed to
Speaker 6: have better recorders because we kept missing sounds, you know,
Speaker 6: we had. It was one of those deals where we
Speaker 6: had the recorder ready to turn on, and of course
Speaker 6: by the time you turn it on.
Speaker 3: The sound isn't happening anymore.
Speaker 6: That was incredibly frustrating, and so for the two thousand
Speaker 6: and five we actually bought a couple of digital recorders
Speaker 6: that we made sure we're going twenty four to seven.
Speaker 6: Of course, out we have these autonomous recording units that
Speaker 6: you can get that will go for months continuously without
Speaker 6: your having to change batteries or SD cards. But at
Speaker 6: the time it was challenging because again, you just never
Speaker 6: knew when a vocalization would happen, and it was very
Speaker 6: frustrating to miss those.
Speaker 2: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back after these messages. Boba, are you
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Speaker 4: Angel What birds have you heard them imitate?
Speaker 5: Because I've heard of new owls and it sounds like
Speaker 5: a finch and a few others.
Speaker 4: What have you heard crows? And what have you heard?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 6: The one that blew me away actually happened when I
Speaker 6: started working with the Nawac and the Wachitaw.
Speaker 3: Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma.
Speaker 6: One of the recordings I had that blew me away
Speaker 6: as an ornithologist is a perfect redent rendition of a
Speaker 6: common cuckoo, which is what the cuckoo clock sound is.
Speaker 3: And it was weird.
Speaker 6: We were in camp and hearing this thing, and I'm thinking,
Speaker 6: what on earth? There's no way a common cuckoo would
Speaker 6: be a vagrant from Europe in the mountains of the
Speaker 6: southeast Oklahoma. I'm not even sure if they were recorded
Speaker 6: from North America, and so it would be either from
Speaker 6: Alaska or from northeast Canada. So that's one bird that
Speaker 6: was weird and The only thing I can ascribe that
Speaker 6: too is I know that over the years they have
Speaker 6: broadcast all sorts of assimblies of calls or the NAWAC,
Speaker 6: and I can only assume that somebody at some point
Speaker 6: during all the field work there must have broadcast a
Speaker 6: cuckoo sound and that was a perfect rendition of a
Speaker 6: common cuckoo. I have that on as a recording and
Speaker 6: you couldn't tell it from So that's a bird that
Speaker 6: freaks me out in the most now, And of course
Speaker 6: it stood out to an ornithologist because we knew it
Speaker 6: wasn't a bird that could be there. Whereas if they're
Speaker 6: imitating other birds that could be there or are there,
Speaker 6: it gets a little bit trickier to ascertain whether you're
Speaker 6: dealing with demoicry or the real thing.
Speaker 5: Bird wise, what have you been like perplexed about, like
Speaker 5: what you couldn't for sure say either way it was
Speaker 5: an imitation or an actual bird.
Speaker 6: Well, from my own experience, everything I've heard so far
Speaker 6: in terms of birds that are supposed to be there
Speaker 6: have been those birds. So I haven't heard any imitations
Speaker 6: of native bird species that made me suspicion. So in
Speaker 6: terms of that vocal arena.
Speaker 3: I haven't. I can't really offer more on that score.
Speaker 4: Eight hundred pound owls.
Speaker 6: No, No, all the owls that we hear, and we
Speaker 6: hear a lot i'll sound like the regular owls of
Speaker 6: different species. Yes, but again, the mendicory of that common
Speaker 6: cuckoo was just spot on. And if they're that good,
Speaker 6: and you've sounds like you've had experience with that, if
Speaker 6: they're that good, then it might be tough to tell
Speaker 6: a part without doing a spectrogram, without doing a spectrographic analysis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's something that often I've wondered about. Is I
Speaker 2: do hear a lot of bigfooters say that I've heard
Speaker 2: an owl, but it was eight feet off the ground
Speaker 2: and had to be eight hundred pounds and all this
Speaker 2: other stuff. I say, Well, I don't know. Shouldn't we
Speaker 2: be giving sasquatches more credited being better imitators than that? Like,
Speaker 2: I think that if a sasquatch was doing something, unless
Speaker 2: it was completely out of place, like a bird species
Speaker 2: that doesn't live there, you would have a hard time
Speaker 2: figuring out if it was a big foot mimicking something
Speaker 2: or if it was the actual thing. Just recently, on
Speaker 2: on on on another podcast we were doing with Kathy Strain,
Speaker 2: and I mentioned this every once in a while. I
Speaker 2: mentioned hearing car doors slam in the woods, and for me,
Speaker 2: if I was anywhere else but the woods, I would
Speaker 2: just assume it was a card door slamming. So is
Speaker 2: there any way that one can tell the difference if
Speaker 2: the if the sound is indigenous to the area, you know,
Speaker 2: because obviously card door sounds aren't indigenous to the bottom
Speaker 2: of the Siski Widerness Area or something. But what avenues
Speaker 2: do you think that a researcher could take to kind
Speaker 2: of show that they're not just saying it better microphones.
Speaker 6: I suspect, well, yeah, I suspect if you had a
Speaker 6: good recording and you did a spectrogram gram uh spectrographic
Speaker 6: analysis compared it to known sounds, that you would see
Speaker 6: differences that would start showing up. And you might even
Speaker 6: hear that and experience here who really knew the native
Speaker 6: birds might well be able to detect differences too in
Speaker 6: terms of pitch or some other more subtle aspect that
Speaker 6: might not be evident to a non ornithologist and actually
Speaker 6: member create itself. It's really fascinating because if you look
Speaker 6: about the great apes, they don't mimic, and they particularly
Speaker 6: don't whistle. And the fact that we have whistling vocalizations.
Speaker 6: In fact, that was one I also heard down in
Speaker 6: the watchatas that completely freaked me out. The average a
Speaker 6: person would probably just thought it was some sort of
Speaker 6: nighttime bird, But we had a visitor into camp right
Speaker 6: at dusk that did a series of really fascinating whistles,
Speaker 6: and I told my camp mates at the time that.
Speaker 3: This is no bird. This is clearly no bird.
Speaker 6: And it had come in response to having done some
Speaker 6: broadcasting earlier in the watch Guitas. So one I think
Speaker 6: may if you aren't familiar with your local soundscape, people
Speaker 6: may be overlooking certain vocalizations that are being made by
Speaker 6: these things.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and how many people are really fluent, so
Speaker 2: to speak, at all the different night sounds. I mean,
Speaker 2: Bobo and I spent a lot of time in the
Speaker 2: woods at night, probably more than most, I think it
Speaker 2: might even be fair to say. And I can't even say,
Speaker 2: I can't claim that I'm familiar with the vast majority
Speaker 2: of night sounds. I mean a lot of them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but still I hear whistles and I don't know what's
Speaker 2: making them. It's it's just it's just a difficult it's
Speaker 2: just too much, too much to be able to master
Speaker 2: unless you're a specialist.
Speaker 6: That's true, but all the more reason that we should
Speaker 6: be doing a lot more recording than we do because
Speaker 6: the vocal arena. I know people want to see these things,
Speaker 6: for sure, but I guess maybe coming as an ornithologist,
Speaker 6: I find the vocal aspect really fascinating in terms of
Speaker 6: trying to contextualize it, see if there's regional variations in
Speaker 6: the types of vocalizations and the like, because I think
Speaker 6: that that as with birds, if you've ever talked to
Speaker 6: a birdwatcher, you find a lot more birds by sound
Speaker 6: than by sight, and that may work in this arena
Speaker 6: as well.
Speaker 2: Oh. For sure, not only should we be recording more,
Speaker 2: we should also be collaborating more because other people know
Speaker 2: a lot more than I do, you know, and it's
Speaker 2: a good thing to have people on your team where
Speaker 2: you can ask questions of that just might be able
Speaker 2: to identify those sounds in the dark.
Speaker 3: Yes, and actually it's interesting.
Speaker 6: In nineteen ninety one I wrote a small little paper
Speaker 6: in the journal Cryptozoology called cooperation a Key to progressing cryptozoology.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 6: Yeah, what I advocated is that is that field researchers
Speaker 6: collaborate as much as possible with sympathetic scientists. I've seen
Speaker 6: too much of irritation, understandable irritation with the scientific community
Speaker 6: of doing things and the light, but it had gotten
Speaker 6: to the point where people were just saying.
Speaker 3: Well, the heck with scientists and heck with science.
Speaker 6: You know, we're just going to get rid of that altogether,
Speaker 6: instead of trying to find those sympathetic scientists and trying
Speaker 6: to collaborate because the big SO community is doing a
Speaker 6: lot of that, are doing incredible fieldwork, but to help
Speaker 6: with the analysis, it's good to have academically trained biologists
Speaker 6: as well, and both can comple at each other.
Speaker 5: Oh for sure, because I like guys I've grown that
Speaker 5: grew up hunting around you. I grew up in the
Speaker 5: cliff and I both grew up in the city. I
Speaker 5: went out and the Wizard with my dad and stuff
Speaker 5: like that. But he didn't know what we were hearing.
Speaker 5: But I think a lot of people go, that's all
Speaker 5: you know, that's a mountain liner, that's a bobcat, or
Speaker 5: that's a now or whatever. Or they'll just say, I'm
Speaker 5: not sure what that is. It's but it's not a
Speaker 5: big foot. It's like, well, you you might have been
Speaker 5: told since your dad was told his dad was told
Speaker 5: that that's that's a mountain lion.
Speaker 4: That weird. It's just a weird, stunting mountain line. They've
Speaker 4: may have been hearing.
Speaker 5: Bigfoots all these years and just didn't and they had
Speaker 5: no idea exactly exactly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, learning the soundscape in your area it takes a
Speaker 6: lot of work. And uh, even for me, I really
Speaker 6: know the birds well, but I still don't know all
Speaker 6: the mammals that well, even locally out and many of
Speaker 6: them can make some pretty bird sounds. Fortunately, there's a
Speaker 6: lot of acoustical research being done and you could go
Speaker 6: on places like the McAuley Library at Cornell and learned
Speaker 6: a lot of sounds that are in your area of
Speaker 6: both mammals and birds, and that's a real big help
Speaker 6: in terms of trying to cut through all of that
Speaker 6: and ask if what you actually have recorded or heard
Speaker 6: might be a part of a sasquatch or something unknown.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, we got off on the tangent there
Speaker 2: for a second, and it was a valuable tangent, but
Speaker 2: still I kind of want to hear more about the expeditions.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, both Oma and I are both students of Bigfoot history,
Speaker 2: and you were right there for big junks of it.
Speaker 6: Right again, I was so amazed at what Richard could
Speaker 6: pull together in terms of equipment and other things.
Speaker 3: I mean, the basic techniques are things that.
Speaker 6: Are done today, you know, putting up cameras, although we
Speaker 6: now know how hard it is to get things on
Speaker 6: cameras and thermal imagers and just trying to record with
Speaker 6: really inferior equipment. At the time, the broadcasting was new
Speaker 6: to me. I don't know how commonly that was done
Speaker 6: at this time, but there when he first started doing
Speaker 6: his trips through the wilderness, he had his son put
Speaker 6: together a state of the art broadcasting system that when
Speaker 6: it projected we basically Elkohol looking at the headwiters of
Speaker 6: Dylan Creek.
Speaker 3: You could go to an overlook, a rocky promontory and
Speaker 3: you could.
Speaker 6: Project down into Dylan Creek and I swear you could
Speaker 6: hear at least seven echoes as it echoed down from
Speaker 6: the canyon, trying to bring them up to see us
Speaker 6: and figure out what's going on and trying to induce
Speaker 6: the curiosity response.
Speaker 3: That for me was new to see that being done. Again.
Speaker 6: I don't know how commonly that was being done at
Speaker 6: the time, but for me it was a new technique
Speaker 6: to see and operation. And then the other thing that
Speaker 6: was methodologically was just again just spending good time in
Speaker 6: the camp. He also felt like we also insisted that
Speaker 6: we all dressed in camo but not carry any guns,
Speaker 6: And part of his thinking there was that they would
Speaker 6: be curious is why we looked like hunters but didn't
Speaker 6: fully act like hunters. So that was another aspect of
Speaker 6: what he argued for one year on year, and I
Speaker 6: think that was in nineteen ninety nine. One of the
Speaker 6: craziest this is to show how good he was, he
Speaker 6: actually brought he had gotten hold of a urine sample
Speaker 6: from a menstruating orangutan and deployed that from the promontary
Speaker 6: where we would broadcast tracking it all way to camp.
Speaker 6: I don't think it actually elicited anything, but just the
Speaker 6: idea that he could even come up with something like
Speaker 6: that just always amazed me. Yeah, like who do you
Speaker 6: talk too to get that? And you know, like, yeah,
Speaker 6: I really need this. What do you need, Well, we'll
Speaker 6: get to that later.
Speaker 2: I really need it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he had developed a whole network of contexts, contacts,
Speaker 6: and if you're familiar with the Society and the journal,
Speaker 6: you know that all academic scientists were on both the
Speaker 6: board of directors and editorial boards. So he had really
Speaker 6: been working for a couple of decades to put together
Speaker 6: an academic group of knowledge academics at non institutions where
Speaker 6: the museums or university, to try to elevate, if you will,
Speaker 6: the perception of cryptozoology among everyone, and to also provide
Speaker 6: a peer review system through the Peer of You Journal,
Speaker 6: and a forum for exploring this in a very scientific sense.
Speaker 6: And I think all of that paid off of the
Speaker 6: years he was just incredibly good at networking.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, I was going to go back to me.
Speaker 5: You said they might they'd be confused. But I've seen
Speaker 5: these guys without guns and cameo. I can assure they
Speaker 5: were not, because that was back in the heyday, guys
Speaker 5: growing illegal weed out there. And I actually had two
Speaker 5: buddies that grew in Dylan Creek for twenty years, and
Speaker 5: they would always see a big white male, like head
Speaker 5: to toe white, like a dirty white and they just
Speaker 5: they said, it never got a digressive, it never did
Speaker 5: anything to them, but they would just watch them.
Speaker 3: Wow, well, yeah, that's really funny. Well, we didn't try
Speaker 3: to do that, so he went wrong, I guess.
Speaker 2: So, I guess, so you could have funded your own expeditions.
Speaker 3: Well indeed, for sure. Well two thousand and five was
Speaker 3: really the pinnacle and all, but it was kind of
Speaker 3: a tragic into the pinnacle because he passed away a
Speaker 3: couple of months later from a cancer that came out
Speaker 3: of remission, and nothing ever got written up.
Speaker 6: He had all of the materials and things to be analyzed,
Speaker 6: and I was unable to get those from his heirs
Speaker 6: as far as I know, they're still in storage somewhere.
Speaker 3: But I can tell you a couple of things that
Speaker 3: happened that just really impressed me.
Speaker 6: One was that once we started broadcasting, we had visitations
Speaker 6: every night. Something was happening every night in terms of
Speaker 6: hearing things and seeing the remnants of them behind our
Speaker 6: tents and things like that. I never had a visual,
Speaker 6: but his son and his son's friend Mike, had some visuals.
Speaker 6: At the head of the trail that goes into that
Speaker 6: gets you back to alcohol, as well as his son
Speaker 6: had a visual on the road to the head of
Speaker 6: the trail when he was coming back with some refurbished equipment.
Speaker 6: But one of the most amazing things that happened happened
Speaker 6: to Mike, who was a friend of Darwin Greenwell and
Speaker 6: was on the trip for the first time. So we
Speaker 6: had as our protocol saying that if anything happened at
Speaker 6: the night that woke us up, we would still pretend
Speaker 6: to stay asleep, the idea being that we didn't want
Speaker 6: to try.
Speaker 3: To look on our own or anything.
Speaker 6: So we were forbidden to unzip the tent or do
Speaker 6: anything but stay asleep until morning, with the hope that
Speaker 6: if there was a visitation, you know, there would be
Speaker 6: enhanced the likelihood it would get in front of the
Speaker 6: cameras or whatnot. Well, Mike had the record for composure
Speaker 6: because what happened to him is he apparently he was
Speaker 6: in one of these smaller tents. He was up against
Speaker 6: the brush line, and he had his back against the tent,
Speaker 6: and he said, the next thing he realized is he
Speaker 6: could feel this giant hand pushing in the tent along
Speaker 6: his back, kind of feeling up along his back and
Speaker 6: onto his stomach and then retracting, and he kept his
Speaker 6: composure the entire time, which I'm amazed at, until dawn,
Speaker 6: which was a little bit later. And then he got
Speaker 6: out of the tent. He was pretty shaken by it all.
Speaker 6: He went to have a smoke and something started throwing
Speaker 6: rocks at And when he told us that the next morning,
Speaker 6: we were pretty amazed at that whole experience that he had,
Speaker 6: that the thing actually touched him through the tent.
Speaker 4: He controls bowls even yes, give.
Speaker 2: Him credit for that.
Speaker 3: I mean, he was clearly shaped by it all.
Speaker 6: But he followed the protocol and that was I would
Speaker 6: say the closest if you will encounter that we had.
Speaker 2: Now, did you guys retrieve any physical evidence, either footprints
Speaker 2: or photographs or casts or anything like that or anything
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 6: We did have some footprints, but they were in the
Speaker 6: duff and they were just impossible to cast. It was
Speaker 6: just the soil was just not castable. We did have
Speaker 6: hair samples. One of the things that I brought was
Speaker 6: a DNA sampling kit. I had DNA storage buffer and
Speaker 6: all of that. I had materials, so I could you know,
Speaker 6: wipe down any tweezers, any forceps, so that I could
Speaker 6: just infect them ahead of time and make sure that
Speaker 6: were no contamination. And one night after a visitation, that
Speaker 6: night we found about six hairs with follicles attached that
Speaker 6: were on a part of the broken limb just behind
Speaker 6: our tents where this thing kept hanging out. And discovered
Speaker 6: it first thing in the morning and immediately got out
Speaker 6: my DNA sampling kit, followed clean technique, had gloves, I
Speaker 6: had everything you would need for doing that, put it
Speaker 6: in the DNA storage buffer, and then brought it back
Speaker 6: And that was the one piece of evidence that I
Speaker 6: did convince them to send me before Richard passed away
Speaker 6: the recordings and other things. Unfortunately, like I say, there,
Speaker 6: who knows where? I don't know where where they are
Speaker 6: at this time. But I had these hair samples and
Speaker 6: had them refrigerated, and then here I was stuck with
Speaker 6: the idea what do I do with them? So I
Speaker 6: started inquiring trying to find a lab that would handle them,
Speaker 6: you know, to do some DNA work, because I knew
Speaker 6: they were totally fresh, I knew it had the follicle
Speaker 6: along with the main hairstem. We knew that it had
Speaker 6: to be a sasquatch. The only other possibility was a bear,
Speaker 6: but we had had no bear activity in camp.
Speaker 3: For a while. And finally, finally, finally, I heard about
Speaker 3: the project that the Melba Ketchum and David Polaidi's were
Speaker 3: talking about, I forget the name of the project where
Speaker 3: they were looking for samples, and I sent them my samples,
Speaker 3: all six hair follicles. They passed the pre screening morphologically apparently,
Speaker 3: and then became of that study. But as we all know,
Speaker 3: that whole study sort of evolved into what and I
Speaker 3: regret to this day having sent all of them to
Speaker 3: that study because it just did not work out.
Speaker 2: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back after these messages. Yeah, the lesson
Speaker 2: learned there is give one keep the rest, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Well, I had spent several years trying to find anybody
Speaker 6: who would just take a look at them, and that
Speaker 6: was really frustrating. So when I finally heard what I
Speaker 6: thought was going to be a credible approach, at least
Speaker 6: as it was initially presented, I thought, Okay, you know,
Speaker 6: have at it, because we really need to get these analyzed.
Speaker 6: But unfortunately they're long gone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, never to be seen again. Probably, I'm guessing.
Speaker 6: Never to be seen again, that's true, But that was
Speaker 6: probably some of our best physical evidence that we had
Speaker 6: along with Oh and I think the other thing that
Speaker 6: really impressed me is we had a thermal imaging camera.
Speaker 6: We never could get any thing, as you all know,
Speaker 6: on these night cameras, and as people speculate, these are
Speaker 6: certainly night cameras that had a pretty evident red light
Speaker 6: on them, and so if anything really wanted to avoid them,
Speaker 6: they could certainly see them easily enough. But interestingly enough,
Speaker 6: we had a thermal imaging camera that we kept on
Speaker 6: our little camp table in the center of camp, and
Speaker 6: we put a little draped a little camo over it
Speaker 6: and had it as part of sort of a messy table,
Speaker 6: and it was pointing right at the brushy area where
Speaker 6: the two small tents were behind which we.
Speaker 3: Were having nighttime activity.
Speaker 6: And one night it picked up this huge heat signature
Speaker 6: rising up behind the tents and then going back down.
Speaker 6: And the next night we tried to replicate it with
Speaker 6: their own body heat and we were a pale imitation.
Speaker 6: So this was behind Mike's tent, which later had that
Speaker 6: activity with the thing feeling him up, and that we
Speaker 6: got serendipitously as the one image. I mean, it was impressive,
Speaker 6: the about of heat off of that big thing. We
Speaker 6: couldn't see a clearcut, totally clear cut shape, in part
Speaker 6: because it was behind branches and the tents, but it
Speaker 6: was really shown through.
Speaker 3: It was pretty impressive.
Speaker 4: How made you think it was well?
Speaker 3: Based on the tracks were The tracks we were finding
Speaker 3: were about i'd say ten inches, So we're pretty more
Speaker 3: in a large juvenile size, not an adult. And this
Speaker 3: was consistent with what he had had with when Jeff
Speaker 3: Beldern was with them. We're pretty sure they were getting
Speaker 3: juveniles visiting the camp as opposed to full size adults,
Speaker 3: and so I think that would be somewhat consistent with
Speaker 3: a younger, more curious individual. Yeah.
Speaker 6: One of the things that I thought was pretty neat too,
Speaker 6: is I was a co author with him on two
Speaker 6: presentations in two thousand and four at the fifty seventh
Speaker 6: Annual Meeting of the Northwest Anthropological Conference in Dean, Oregon.
Speaker 6: I actually had the title in front of me. He
Speaker 6: presented along with me as part of Summering those years
Speaker 6: in the Sisky Wilderness, New field evidence in physical finds
Speaker 6: supporting the presence of an unverified primate species in the
Speaker 6: Pacific Northwest, and we were actually on the program, which
Speaker 6: was pretty hard to get on these scientific programs.
Speaker 4: I got to see that well, and as part.
Speaker 6: Of the abstracts that were published did not have I
Speaker 6: don't think he ever sent me the complete flight show.
Speaker 6: I had to go back and see. I've got a
Speaker 6: whole welter. Part of what I've got to dig through
Speaker 6: in retirement is to try to get a lot of
Speaker 6: my old files and computer and everything else kind of
Speaker 6: up to date, because I kind of lost track of things,
Speaker 6: and I have a lot of Greenwell related material, some
Speaker 6: of which I'm sending.
Speaker 3: The Cliff for the museum.
Speaker 6: Had to help me with archiving, and so over time
Speaker 6: I hope maybe I can find that again. The other
Speaker 6: presentation is actually even more amazing by Richard and myself.
Speaker 6: In two thousand and four was at the eighty fourth
Speaker 6: Annual meeting of the American Society of Amalogus. We were
Speaker 6: really lucky because it happened to be held at Humble
Speaker 6: State and we presented there the same basic program to
Speaker 6: the mammalogists there, and just to get on the docket,
Speaker 6: you know, just to be able to get a talk.
Speaker 3: It was packed, Richard Dave.
Speaker 6: The talk was pretty hard to do because professional mammalogists,
Speaker 6: at least publicly, are very sceptical. But what we learned
Speaker 6: was that privately many of them are not, which was
Speaker 6: a very interesting.
Speaker 3: Kind of an indictment academia when you think about it.
Speaker 6: But we had a lot of people tell us privately
Speaker 6: afterwards their own experiences in the light, although publicly they
Speaker 6: would never own up to them. So the fact that
Speaker 6: he was able to present some of the results of
Speaker 6: our of those years of work, some of the years
Speaker 6: didn't involve me, at both that anthropological conference and at
Speaker 6: the American Society of Mynology was.
Speaker 3: Pretty pretty unique.
Speaker 6: I mean, those were pretty bitch marks to have those
Speaker 6: kind of presentations at those kinds of societies.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think didn't dig steck at you guys on
Speaker 5: the here's the professor at Humble.
Speaker 4: I think you guys on the bill there didn't.
Speaker 3: He wasn't him. Oh gosh, I've forgotten the name now.
Speaker 3: Brian Arbagast I believe was his name.
Speaker 6: He's no longer there, but he was sympathetic enough that
Speaker 6: he thought, okay, well, let's just see what you have
Speaker 6: to show. I have to tell and got us on
Speaker 6: the program.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I went to Humboldt State.
Speaker 3: Oh boys, that a beautiful campus.
Speaker 4: It's the prettiest one in the country probably.
Speaker 3: I think you're right about that. I was just really impressed.
Speaker 4: And what year was that there was in the nineties, right,
Speaker 4: two thousand and four? Two thousand.
Speaker 2: Okay, So now you're you're retired, and you're gonna be
Speaker 2: hopefully spending a little bit more time doing some Bigfoot
Speaker 2: field research and you're a member of the newac the
Speaker 2: North American wood A Conservancy. All that's correct, I hope.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's correct. I am retired, I partially.
Speaker 6: I've developed some health problems that have kind of plagued
Speaker 6: me recently, and I'm trying to get some control of
Speaker 6: those so I can I can do some local fieldwork,
Speaker 6: but I can't write at the moment do any a
Speaker 6: little more distant field work. But I'm hoping to get
Speaker 6: that solved so that I can. Plus, also, with all
Speaker 6: this COVID crap, you know, everybody's really been hampered by that.
Speaker 6: But I have been trying to through some other beings.
Speaker 3: I did advise the society, and in fact, I would
Speaker 3: advise anyone if you want to get into the acoustical arena.
Speaker 6: It's a little pricey. The song Meter four from Wildlife
Speaker 6: Acoustics eight hundred some dollars. But these devices, you just
Speaker 6: set them up and they record twenty four to seven
Speaker 6: for depending on what kind of batters you use, a
Speaker 6: month or even three months, and you've suddenly got a
Speaker 6: welter of recordings that can potentially have vocalizations documenting what
Speaker 6: you've heard or even if you aren't there, documenting what
Speaker 6: was being stayed happening at the time. And so I
Speaker 6: encouraged the organization to invest in two of those, and
Speaker 6: they've been ploying those of their camps ever set and
Speaker 6: we've been getting a lot of meat recordings of vocalizations
Speaker 6: through that method. Again and probably coming from my ornithological training,
Speaker 6: but they're using ARU. This is what they called an
Speaker 6: autonomous reporting unit. There are other kind of units out there,
Speaker 6: but this seems to be the kind of the easiest
Speaker 6: to program and to a high, very high quality. They're
Speaker 6: used in field research all the time, including in primatological
Speaker 6: research in the tropics. They're used quite a bit in
Speaker 6: primatological research they're actually even able to through if they
Speaker 6: get enough vocal material, they can actually start picking out
Speaker 6: individuals within these groups of monkeys that they're studying down there.
Speaker 6: So then there's a lot of versatility in terms of
Speaker 6: what we can learn from the vocalizations.
Speaker 3: And again coming from an ordiological background, I'm.
Speaker 6: Very vocalizations are so key in a lot of avian studies,
Speaker 6: less so in terms of mammalogy, except for bats, where
Speaker 6: they're very key.
Speaker 3: But these are being.
Speaker 6: Used more and more in mammalological studies, typically primate studies
Speaker 6: in the tropics. So I think we ought to be
Speaker 6: using this more in our field work if you can
Speaker 6: afford them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's one of the interesting things that came up
Speaker 2: in a previous podcasts that we did with a woman
Speaker 2: named b Mills who is doing a recording project out
Speaker 2: in southeast Ohio and you know, being a cast guy,
Speaker 2: you know my things kind of footprint cast. We're identifying
Speaker 2: the same individual sasquatches from the data set. You know,
Speaker 2: they leave the same they leave their tracks in the
Speaker 2: same area over time, and so B is now starting
Speaker 2: to think that she can recognize the sounds of different sasquatches.
Speaker 2: So she's tracking individuals by their sounds now, which it
Speaker 2: sounds like exactly what you just mentioned here, And there's
Speaker 2: no reason you can't do that, especially if their voices
Speaker 2: are so are are different than one another, just like
Speaker 2: you know, you can hear that. I am not Bobo
Speaker 2: speaking on this podcast, even though you can't see me
Speaker 2: right now. And there's no reason I think that Sasquatches
Speaker 2: wouldn't have different sounds and timbres to their voices as
Speaker 2: well to be able to do.
Speaker 3: This exactly, and age and sex differences as well.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, she actually mentioned she's been hearing what she's
Speaker 2: interpreting as one maturing over four or five years. Yeah,
Speaker 2: even to the point where she kind of speculates I
Speaker 2: might have heard its voice crack you that.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 6: I don't know that much about puberty and sasquashes, But
Speaker 6: that's an interesting cuctivation no.
Speaker 2: One does know, and what an interesting at least hypothesis.
Speaker 2: And it's up to her and kind of build the
Speaker 2: case for it. But how interesting is that? I think
Speaker 2: that's pretty cool.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'd love to know if there's regional variation in
Speaker 6: sasquatch vocalizations too.
Speaker 3: I mean there's a lot of regional variation in birds
Speaker 3: where we.
Speaker 6: Can tell different subspecies part even within the same species
Speaker 6: biological species, and you can find these kind of regional variants.
Speaker 6: And also we find birds if they often will adjust
Speaker 6: their calling to propagate within the type of vegetational surroundings
Speaker 6: that they're found, so that birds in the canopy have
Speaker 6: a different pitch and type.
Speaker 3: Of call than birds in the forest floor. And I'm
Speaker 3: sure there would be variation between the Pacific Northwest and
Speaker 3: the Everglades, so so that would be interesting too. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's so many Again, using birds as kind of a model,
Speaker 3: there's so many things that we could potentially learn if
Speaker 3: we had a good library of vocalizations recorded from different
Speaker 3: areas different times of the year. I'd also like to
Speaker 3: know just seasonally, if there's changes, I mean, you think
Speaker 3: during mating season. I don't know if their mating season
Speaker 3: is year round or if they have a particular peak time.
Speaker 3: And then just in terms.
Speaker 6: Of just general moving about, when are they vocalizing when
Speaker 6: we aren't there. I'm actually kind of more equally interested
Speaker 6: in vocalizations that may be occurring in the area when
Speaker 6: no one is there and when no humans are there
Speaker 6: versus when humans are there. So I mean there's a
Speaker 6: whole welter of information one can get. And the nice
Speaker 6: thing with these SD cards is you can store them
Speaker 6: forever and analyze them over time using different software analysis packages.
Speaker 6: So it's a very, very again underutilized technique that I'd
Speaker 6: love to see where researchers are can afford it try
Speaker 6: to use.
Speaker 2: Now, most researchers, I know, they use old audio recorders
Speaker 2: generally said on MP three setting instead a wave, so
Speaker 2: it takes they can record for longer periods of time,
Speaker 2: and these cost one hundred four hundred bucks or something
Speaker 2: like that. Right now, by and large, that would that
Speaker 2: information be valuable to That's good enough at this point
Speaker 2: for the average Joe researcher.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's kind of like what you deal with burners
Speaker 6: who are getting into burning. You know, you have binoculars
Speaker 6: that span the spectrum from the you know, a decent
Speaker 6: pair of two hundred dollars to kind of have this
Speaker 6: price of a car twenty five hundred dollars or so.
Speaker 6: I mean, you get what you pay for in terms
Speaker 6: of quality, but you still can do good science with these. Again,
Speaker 6: it depends on your budget obviously, but I would encourage
Speaker 6: recording at some level. The main thing that we were
Speaker 6: concerned that we got so frustrated with in the Cisco
Speaker 6: Wilderness was even when we you know, well in two
Speaker 6: thousand and five, we did a better job of being
Speaker 6: able to continuously record, although at that time the technology
Speaker 6: we could afford only allowed us to go twelve hour periods,
Speaker 6: so we had to make sure that we were careful
Speaker 6: and put it as we had two recorders, and so
Speaker 6: once one gave out, we put the ed X wind rolling,
Speaker 6: the other one time to recharge or whatever, put the
Speaker 6: batteries in, all that kind of good stuff, and so
Speaker 6: you know, I mean, my philosophy is anything is better
Speaker 6: than nothing, but you do get what you pay for.
Speaker 3: But I would say, yeah, I mean I would. I
Speaker 3: mentioned in hearing Anything.
Speaker 6: I mean, some of the earlier recordings that NAWAC did,
Speaker 6: and I'm not even sure what kind of recorders they
Speaker 6: used there at the time. It's probably some of these
Speaker 6: smaller digital recorders. They produced some pretty good sounds that
Speaker 6: we were able to get nice spectrograms off. And we've
Speaker 6: been trying to catalog, you know, looking at frequencies and
Speaker 6: things like that.
Speaker 3: The different kind of vocalizations.
Speaker 6: What's happened in the bird world is as people study
Speaker 6: bird species which have a diversity of multification, diversity of vocalizations,
Speaker 6: particularly if you're a song bird of passerine or something
Speaker 6: like that, is that make you try to do a
Speaker 6: catalog of all the different vocalizations and then you try
Speaker 6: to contextualize them behaviorally as to what they're communicating.
Speaker 3: And so I would love to see us get a
Speaker 3: library of.
Speaker 6: Sounds of sasquatch sounds that can then be contextualized to
Speaker 6: try to figure out the extent that we can what
Speaker 6: behaviorally is being communicated.
Speaker 5: So, Angelo, what are the best audio recordings you've heard?
Speaker 5: I'm sure you've heard lots of samples over the years.
Speaker 5: What impresses you the most?
Speaker 6: I must well, anything that obviously is not made by
Speaker 6: native mammal or native bird impresses me the most.
Speaker 3: And I can be very to be honest, I was
Speaker 3: in some.
Speaker 6: Ways more impressed by the whistling that we heard than
Speaker 6: the Ohio Howe rendition that we heard, in part because
Speaker 6: the ability to whistle takes a very different lorangeal structure.
Speaker 6: Only humans among the great apes can whistle in any
Speaker 6: significant way, and I think there may be an orangutan
Speaker 6: or something in a zoo that was trained to whistle.
Speaker 6: But apparently whistling takes a orthology that's really unusual and
Speaker 6: not represented within other great.
Speaker 3: Apes outside of humans.
Speaker 6: And so that actually impressed me a lot, just because
Speaker 6: I knew that vocally. Mechanically, that's harder to do with
Speaker 6: the vocal apparatus than the ohio helm.
Speaker 2: Oh, you know that's interesting. Have I actually have a
Speaker 2: whistle recording that Bobo and I got. We thought we
Speaker 2: had a sasquatch around. It was making noises like they
Speaker 2: tend to, and we Boba and I were doing night
Speaker 2: walks from one camp to another, and we left one
Speaker 2: camp and just a short while after fifteen to twenty minutes,
Speaker 2: or I'd have to check my notes. After we left,
Speaker 2: something came by that camp and did a followed by
Speaker 2: a like a big tree knock right out afterwards, And
Speaker 2: I got it on recorder that I found later, So
Speaker 2: I'll send that to you. I'll give you an email
Speaker 2: of that and you can listen to it and tell
Speaker 2: me if it's a bird that I don't know about,
Speaker 2: because I don't know about all of suff no.
Speaker 3: I love. I'd love to hear that for sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In fact, I hope you don't mind. You're probably gonna
Speaker 2: get a fair number of vocalizations and recordings over the
Speaker 2: next year or two as I get more and more.
Speaker 2: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back after these messages.
Speaker 5: Last year in Massachusetts, we heard an incredible whistling display
Speaker 5: put on by two of them. And they were small ones.
Speaker 5: They were only like human size because I actually saw
Speaker 5: it through my thorn. I saw it through my throne,
Speaker 5: and I thought there were some other guys are with us.
Speaker 5: This was just in like central Massachusetts, and this thing
Speaker 5: started whistling these craziest like notes and the up and
Speaker 5: down and so intricate, but it didn't repeat anything. It
Speaker 5: wasn't like a song or it was just random. And
Speaker 5: they were going back and forth, just putting on like
Speaker 5: like if you're the best whistler in the world, trying
Speaker 5: to show off, is what it was like.
Speaker 4: And I thought, man, these guys are I can't believe
Speaker 4: these guys. These guys are incredible.
Speaker 5: And then they came walking down five minutes later and
Speaker 5: those things took off down into a swamp.
Speaker 3: That's fascinating. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Again, the anatomy that it takes to do whistling, particularly
Speaker 6: complex whistling, is not something that you find in other
Speaker 6: species of great apes.
Speaker 4: So maybe maybe just a juvent.
Speaker 5: Maybe the adolescents are maybe they get so big they
Speaker 5: can't do it as well, or they can, they're more
Speaker 5: limited when they get there. I don't know.
Speaker 3: There could be I know, I'll bet they can still
Speaker 3: whistle if they've got the vocal apparatus that as a juvenile,
Speaker 3: it's probably still there as an adult as well. I mean,
Speaker 3: it may be that Potextually, the jubiles are more likely.
Speaker 3: I have no idea, but I wouldn't see a reason
Speaker 3: why the adults couldn't do it as well.
Speaker 5: The big one, well, I know for sure a big
Speaker 5: one did it because I saw it. But it sounds
Speaker 5: like you know when people put like their forefinger and
Speaker 5: their thumb in their.
Speaker 4: Mouth and do that one super loud. Yes, when humans
Speaker 4: do that. I've heard them do that one.
Speaker 3: Wow. That's fascinating. Yeah. The full repertoire that I hear
Speaker 3: about more and more is just amazing.
Speaker 2: Well, and it makes sense, you know, I think in
Speaker 2: a lot of ways that that that they could replicate
Speaker 2: a lot of the sounds that we do just because
Speaker 2: we're built the same in a lot of ways. We
Speaker 2: don't know about the insides about you know, the functions
Speaker 2: of you know, trachea or whatever else they got going
Speaker 2: on in their in their tubes there, but they're they
Speaker 2: kind of look like us, and it makes sense that
Speaker 2: they can probably make a lot of sounds like us too.
Speaker 6: Well, I have to disagree with you there, it's hard.
Speaker 6: It's hard to see why that vocal capacity should be there.
Speaker 6: I mean, again, if it's not in any other Great
Speaker 6: Eight species, why did it evolve in this one?
Speaker 3: That's a mystery that's a real miss is involved enough
Speaker 3: it involved in us?
Speaker 6: And now maybe yeah, but I mean to me, it's
Speaker 6: a mystery of why. I mean, you never know if
Speaker 6: the any any characters that undergo evolutionary change, all you'll
Speaker 6: have like the primary adaptive function, but then you can
Speaker 6: have secondary capabilities that just kind of happened to arise
Speaker 6: out of having that particular character evolve in that direction,
Speaker 6: so that it wasn't really being selected for that purpose
Speaker 6: functional purpose, but it's a correlate that is then enabled
Speaker 6: it's what they sometimes called it acaptation. And so it's
Speaker 6: difficult to know if why the vocal apparatus evolved within Sasquatches,
Speaker 6: if that's what's going on to explain the whistling, which
Speaker 6: I'm pretty convinced must be why it would go in
Speaker 6: that direction, I'm not quite sure if the palaeo anthropologists
Speaker 6: understand how that what was the selective forces, the selective
Speaker 6: adaptative advantages of having the vocal apparatus change from the
Speaker 6: regenitor grade eight and humans in the direction that it went,
Speaker 6: you know, as a consequence. And then if so, why
Speaker 6: do we not have full speech within the Sasquatches.
Speaker 3: So I don't know, and that in itself is constant
Speaker 3: controversial as to how much potential faux speech? What is that?
Speaker 3: What is that that's going on with so called faux speech.
Speaker 3: I'd love to know more about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've always taken the you know, the Morehead recordings
Speaker 2: and stuff, the Albery recordings from you know, the Sierras,
Speaker 2: the Sierra sounds that as well as first hand accounts
Speaker 2: of witnesses who had heard those things. I've never heard it.
Speaker 2: I wish I had. Bobo has heard it before, but
Speaker 2: I've never have I've never heard them speak or a
Speaker 2: quote unquote speak back and forth to one another, but
Speaker 2: I've always kind of taken that as an interesting, well,
Speaker 2: certainly an indication that they might be having this faux
Speaker 2: speech or even speech we don't really know, back and
Speaker 2: forth with one another, and that seems to jibell. We'll
Speaker 2: see my model for them as everybody who listens to
Speaker 2: this nose is. I think that they're probably paranthropists and
Speaker 2: not gigantos. I think they're probably paranthropists, some sort of
Speaker 2: robust australopithoscene, and their ability to have some sort of
Speaker 2: speech or proto speech or whatever like that kind of
Speaker 2: falls in line I think with a lot of at
Speaker 2: least what I'm thinking about them at this point.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: Mind you, I don't think that they they're rocket scientists
Speaker 2: or anything like that, but I think they're smarter than
Speaker 2: the average you know, chimp being a hominin like, I
Speaker 2: kind of put them in the hominin line. So would
Speaker 2: I be thinking too out out of bounds if I
Speaker 2: think that speech would be somehow or some sort of
Speaker 2: proto speech might be inherent in the hominin lineage.
Speaker 6: Not being a paleoanthropologist fully conversant with the fossil record,
Speaker 6: I couldn't say, but we do see a lot of
Speaker 6: parallel or convergent evolutionary trends within different lineages of mammals,
Speaker 6: and so I wouldn't in and of itself sway me
Speaker 6: towards paranthropists. I still am more of the Giganto Orangatan
Speaker 6: clade as praising these things in part by geographically it
Speaker 6: makes the most sense to be as well as to me,
Speaker 6: when John Bindernaugele put together his book arguing that it
Speaker 6: is North America's great Ape, it just seemed to me
Speaker 6: like the bulk of the characters that he documented that
Speaker 6: we're being shared with other great apes. You may remember
Speaker 6: he did that comparative study looking at the great apes guerrillas, chimps,
Speaker 6: and o Regatan's a brilliant study where he was saying,
Speaker 6: this has analogous to what's going on in this particular
Speaker 6: great ape or that particular grade ape. To me, convinced
Speaker 6: me that the most parsimonious explanation is that it is
Speaker 6: a great ape and not a homin en. I think
Speaker 6: that's a bigger stretch, but I could see where you know,
Speaker 6: You can certainly pick out some characters that might argue
Speaker 6: for a homin en. It's just that I think those
Speaker 6: are outweighed, to my mind, at least by characters that
Speaker 6: look more a great apeish to be. And also we
Speaker 6: know the power of conversion evolution as well as parallel evolution,
Speaker 6: and so it's very hard to know. I mean, this
Speaker 6: is this is why, and this will be the controversial
Speaker 6: request is we've got to get a specimen. Somehow, We've
Speaker 6: got to get a specimen. I'm speaking as a museum
Speaker 6: scientist and speaking as someone who's worked with documenting new
Speaker 6: species of birds, where until we got the specimen, we
Speaker 6: really didn't know what we were dealing with. Speaking on
Speaker 6: the history of total misidentifications of things of two species
Speaker 6: of mammals, even primates, using just photographs or anything else.
Speaker 3: A specimen is if we don't get that, we're never
Speaker 3: going to get this field advanced further than it is
Speaker 3: today in my mind, at least in terms of scientific acceptability.
Speaker 3: But once we have that specimen, and we just need.
Speaker 6: One that's properly secured and curated and analyzed, then all
Speaker 6: of this incredible wealth of material that you and others
Speaker 6: have collected over the years, from casts through hair to
Speaker 6: scat to vocalizations, all of that will then be available
Speaker 6: retrospectively to go back and have a whole bunch of
Speaker 6: academically trained people take and really work out what this
Speaker 6: all really means.
Speaker 3: That the context of what that specimen revealed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, yeah, Unfortunately. I mean I'm not a hunter.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to be the guy to pull trigger,
Speaker 2: as I said one hundred times, but a specimen is necessary.
Speaker 2: So people out there and I get this all the time,
Speaker 2: like there's working really hard to prove the species, Like, no,
Speaker 2: you're not unless you're buying ammunition and you know you're
Speaker 2: you're really not. You're maybe collecting information, but that's not
Speaker 2: trying to prove the species. And people come back, I
Speaker 2: can't wait till these things are proven and say, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: then I mentioned a dead one. They go, oh, I
Speaker 2: don't want that to happen. Well, you can't have you know,
Speaker 2: you can't have it both ways. Unfortunately, not by the
Speaker 2: rules as written today exactly.
Speaker 3: And it's not just the rules that are written, it's
Speaker 3: the reality. If any of you are familiar with the
Speaker 3: history of taxonomy and systematic biology, you know that that
Speaker 3: you've just got to add specimens, a whole body specimen.
Speaker 3: You even DNA is not the end all be all.
Speaker 3: There's so much you can gain.
Speaker 6: If you've ever seen the monograph that was written with
Speaker 6: the first specimen of the giant panda, I mean, it's
Speaker 6: a thick book. It's just amazing what the comparative An
Speaker 6: Adams was able to term it and figure out. And
Speaker 6: as you know, even the giant panda was controversial as
Speaker 6: to where to put it. Is it a bear or
Speaker 6: is it in the prociona the raccoon family, Even that
Speaker 6: took a while.
Speaker 3: Even having the specimen and so.
Speaker 6: Especialmen just gives you so much more information in terms
Speaker 6: of the physical properties of the organism that you would
Speaker 6: never get from DNA. But I will put in a
Speaker 6: caveat here. Don't go out trying to hot one of
Speaker 6: these things. If you have it first thought through.
Speaker 3: Number one, how the heck are you going to get
Speaker 3: the thing out of the woods? Number two? How are
Speaker 3: you going to preserve it properly so that it can
Speaker 3: be scientifically viable? And number three, how are you going
Speaker 3: to contact appropriate members of the scientific community to make
Speaker 3: sure it's handled properly. You don't want to get a
Speaker 3: fly by night person to take your data and just
Speaker 3: ruin the outcome. We've kind of seen that happen in
Speaker 3: some other arenas, I'm afraid. So you want to have it.
Speaker 6: You want to have a planned as museum collectors around
Speaker 6: the world know, we do it under very plan carefully
Speaker 6: and circumstances. So when we collected these pieces of parative through,
Speaker 6: we knew how to make it into a usable scientific specimen.
Speaker 6: We had liquid nitrogen with us, which was the preservative
Speaker 6: of the time, to keep tissue samples.
Speaker 3: We had recordings that we had made of it, photographs,
Speaker 3: I mean, we had everything that we could document and
Speaker 3: permanently document by bringing that material back and compare it
Speaker 3: to material and the museums of other related species in
Speaker 3: order to document it. So you can't just have anybody
Speaker 3: out there just shooting these things. It has to be
Speaker 3: part of a coordinated thought through careful effort.
Speaker 2: I tend to think that the first dead one will
Speaker 2: probably come from a very very frightened hunter who brings
Speaker 2: down a small one because the deer rifle can probably
Speaker 2: handle it or very luckily placed shot. Essentially, if that
Speaker 2: person happens to be listening right now, What would you
Speaker 2: recommend to them?
Speaker 3: Interesting question Number one. I would recommend you might want
Speaker 3: to get out of there right away, because we don't
Speaker 3: know what kind of.
Speaker 6: Reaction might occur from any surrounding adults, if it was a.
Speaker 3: Young or any relatives that might happen to be there.
Speaker 3: I mean, I would be cautious. One of the plans
Speaker 3: should be how can you get it out as quickly
Speaker 3: as possible and also have backup in case there's a
Speaker 3: hostile response, because while in general I don't think of
Speaker 3: these things as very hostile, and have the being out
Speaker 3: around them that.
Speaker 6: Would be different that eliminate a a you know, a
Speaker 6: hostile response that you might want to be careful about.
Speaker 3: We also don't know what they do with their dad.
Speaker 6: So if you did leave the area with the thing
Speaker 6: body there, would it be there when you got back,
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeh likely not, I agree.
Speaker 6: And so I don't know what to say, you know,
Speaker 6: And then of course people are very fearful of the
Speaker 6: legal ramifications. We think it's probably happened before, right, I mean,
Speaker 6: there's certainly some potentially credible tales of people having shot
Speaker 6: one through fear or fear of what they were seeing, and.
Speaker 3: Then maybe even afraid to tell about it until later.
Speaker 3: So I don't know.
Speaker 6: I'm not told to convince that it would come to
Speaker 6: the four that easily, I think, to be honest, and
Speaker 6: this is what Richard thought, so I have to since
Speaker 6: we're talking about Richard Greenwell. Richard was pretty convinced that
Speaker 6: at some point a semi or train would hit one,
Speaker 6: as happens often with big animals, and he therefore had
Speaker 6: arranged with the University of Arizona folks to be able
Speaker 6: to He actually had a plan where they would airlift
Speaker 6: it to a lab at the University of Arizona through
Speaker 6: the contacts he had there with the forrinsic people, and
Speaker 6: that I think might be more of a situation that
Speaker 6: would be more tenable in a sense. But again, I
Speaker 6: don't know what authority figures would do if they if
Speaker 6: something like that had happened. I mean, my goodness, you
Speaker 6: could go wild in terms of speculating as to whether
Speaker 6: it has happened and things have been covered up for
Speaker 6: whatever reason. I think about the implications of having fully
Speaker 6: established that these creatures exist, the implication for the land
Speaker 6: use for the way we use or abuse our public lands.
Speaker 3: Can I have huge implications. There's going to be huge
Speaker 3: economic implications in terms of conservation. Personally, I think it'll
Speaker 3: be on the good side in terms of preventing a
Speaker 3: lot of the abuse we're doing now in our public lands.
Speaker 3: But I could see economic interests not wanting this to
Speaker 3: be discovered at all, that this could be a real
Speaker 3: problem for a lot of economic interests out there that
Speaker 3: depend on non sustainable uses of our public lands.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I've always referenced people to doctor Krantz's book when it
Speaker 2: comes to like what do I do if I shoot one? Well,
Speaker 2: you're probably not gonna first of all, like just your
Speaker 2: average Joe Hunter or something, and then you're in the
Speaker 2: museum here, and I would say, well, I get, I get.
Speaker 2: Doctor Krantz said, cut off the biggest piece you can carry,
Speaker 2: get it out, cut off a finger separately, and keep
Speaker 2: it and don't tell anybody where you put it, because
Speaker 2: that'll prove it's yours. Cut out the biggest piece you
Speaker 2: can carry, preferably the head, and bring it to the
Speaker 2: media essentially, so everybody will know it's yours right away.
Speaker 2: I don't do that. I would say I tell people
Speaker 2: call me, I'll get meldrum on it right away. It's
Speaker 2: basically all I can after I verify it, you know,
Speaker 2: after that is out of my hands.
Speaker 3: Well, I certainly did recommend to the NAWAC, and they
Speaker 3: probably thought of it, had already thought of it. Is
Speaker 3: that the very first thing you would want to do,
Speaker 3: if you're doing this in a planned way, is you
Speaker 3: want to have your DNA storage buffer with you, and
Speaker 3: you want to take a tissue sample immediately and put
Speaker 3: it in that buffer number one, so that even if
Speaker 3: you get pummeled by a family of sasquatches later on,
Speaker 3: somebody will find the little cryor to issue sample in
Speaker 3: it that's labeled for two. If you really do think
Speaker 3: you're going to have trouble getting it out because it
Speaker 3: might be an adult male or something, yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: it wouldn't hurt to take a part. And then the
Speaker 3: question is which part.
Speaker 6: And obviously the head would be primo, although an adult
Speaker 6: that might be pretty hard to manage as well. Hand
Speaker 6: and foot would be additional parts to consider as well
Speaker 6: in terms of being really informative definitive pieces. So handfoot
Speaker 6: and hand would be parts that I would argue for
Speaker 6: after taking an initial tissue sample, and to be honest,
Speaker 6: even if you don't have DNA buffaler buffer, just pull
Speaker 6: out a chuck of hair and put it in an
Speaker 6: envelope or wrap it in some paper or do something,
Speaker 6: you know, just to get part of the specimen preserved,
Speaker 6: because especially if you have to head out of there
Speaker 6: right away and you have no way of getting it
Speaker 6: out of there, at least you'll have some remnant of
Speaker 6: what you have shot. So if a hunter does unintentionally
Speaker 6: or through fright or whatever, shoot one, I'd say, yeah,
Speaker 6: take a finger, take more. If you can take a
Speaker 6: clump a hair, at least, you know, stick it in
Speaker 6: your duffel bag or whatever you got I mean, or
Speaker 6: your knapsack or whatever, and then head out of there.
Speaker 6: Because I do think it could potentially be a hazards
Speaker 6: situation if you're by yourself and you're not with others
Speaker 6: have some firepower who could back you up.
Speaker 3: I do think we would need to be cautious under that.
Speaker 6: But yeah, and then you know, I mean, there's certainly
Speaker 6: enough hopefully your self, Cliff, you're a very high profile
Speaker 6: person going through you as an intermediary to get or
Speaker 6: to Jeff elderm or someone. I mean eventually, if it's
Speaker 6: stored properly, it could be analyzed.
Speaker 2: It's a gruesome ways, but that's the only path towards
Speaker 2: species recognition.
Speaker 6: And just think of what it means again, species recognition,
Speaker 6: it means protection. There's a reason why the NAWAC has
Speaker 6: conservancy as a nice part of its name, as they
Speaker 6: recognize I mean, our national forests are just being way abused.
Speaker 6: We have, of course, climate change and other factors that
Speaker 6: are deteriorating. Well, look what happened with the Western wildfires
Speaker 6: taking out some ancient support is in redwoods and the like.
Speaker 6: I mean, there's so much we're doing to this planet
Speaker 6: that's making it less habitable for everything, including humans, that
Speaker 6: we really want to get these things protected. But until
Speaker 6: they're legally recognized, which means that they're recognized by science,
Speaker 6: you're just not going to be able to do that.
Speaker 6: Once we can legally recognize them by having a specimen
Speaker 6: that's accepted, not only do we get all the scientific knowledge,
Speaker 6: but we can finally work towards actually conserving them more
Speaker 6: and more today. For example, the parent that we discovered
Speaker 6: and proved with the specimens after we brought the specimens
Speaker 6: back and demonstrated that it was a new species, a
Speaker 6: new national park was declared and what was going to
Speaker 6: be a timber succession. So there it was worth the
Speaker 6: sacrifice of those individuals to be able to check the
Speaker 6: entire ecosystem and their population in the future.
Speaker 3: But that's the.
Speaker 6: Hard part of conservation today is you've got to prove
Speaker 6: it before people are going to take things out of
Speaker 6: economic production.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In fact, we learned when we film Finding Bigfoot in
Speaker 2: Vietnam that the Vietnamese government has already they already set
Speaker 2: the boundaries for a wild Man preserve once they have
Speaker 2: proven their version of the wild man the terree. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so they've already set aside.
Speaker 4: Land for it in China.
Speaker 2: Oh and in China.
Speaker 3: Right, that's fantastic. I'm very happy to hear that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I hope we can be as visionary here.
Speaker 2: We'll see, well, I think we'll have to be.
Speaker 6: I mean again, once we prove it and demonstrate whatever
Speaker 6: it is, whether it's Haminen or great Ape or whatever
Speaker 6: it is, it'll the public interest and seeing it really
Speaker 6: protected I think will be such that that would really
Speaker 6: be able to be a real win for conservation, not
Speaker 6: just for them, but for everything else, Well, what happened
Speaker 6: with the Ivory build You know, the irebuil winpacker was
Speaker 6: supposed to be discovered in two thousand and four. I
Speaker 6: say supposedly because there's still debate over whether one was
Speaker 6: really filmed or recorded or seen, but it leveraged incredible
Speaker 6: protection of southern swamplands throughout Arkansas particularly, and that was
Speaker 6: with not even totally proving that the birds still survive today.
Speaker 6: So these kind of things are really valuable in conservation.
Speaker 6: I mean, there's a lot of ways we as conservation biologists,
Speaker 6: which is another field that I've sort of shifted to
Speaker 6: as I was at Illinois State University. Is there are
Speaker 6: a lot of ways we justify preserving things, but concepts
Speaker 6: like ecosystems and the like are sometimes hard to get
Speaker 6: across to everyone. But if you have a charismatic megafauna
Speaker 6: to always like that term, a really big animal, that
Speaker 6: is very appealing to people. I mean, it's while the
Speaker 6: World Widlife Fund uses tigers in the like, there's so
Speaker 6: much more public support, dollars and everything else. That then
Speaker 6: is an umbrella to protect everything. And my god, I'm
Speaker 6: just so excited with the prospects of proving that this
Speaker 6: thing exists and then documenting what it's full range is
Speaker 6: that I think it would just leverage not only a
Speaker 6: major advance in primatology, but a major advance in doing
Speaker 6: conservation within North America.
Speaker 2: All right, well, angel with that, I can't think of
Speaker 2: better words. To send our listeners off into their own
Speaker 2: expeditions and try to gather some evidence to bring it
Speaker 2: back and further the science, you know, get the ball
Speaker 2: a little bit further down the field in this big
Speaker 2: football field that we're playing on. So thank you so
Speaker 2: much for joining us. Thank you so much for your
Speaker 2: wisdom that you brought. And it's nice to have another
Speaker 2: academic on the team. So we can't thank you enough
Speaker 2: for spending some time with us.
Speaker 3: My pleasure.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Yeah, thank you, Angela. I appreciate it. And
Speaker 5: I hope to see that at Area X sometime soon.
Speaker 6: That would be a lot of fun. Yeah, as I
Speaker 6: get my health problems under control, That's where I'd.
Speaker 3: Love to go.
Speaker 4: All right, well, good luck with that.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: There we go again, Bobs. Another cool episode, a little
Speaker 2: slice of history. You know, with the Greenwell expeditions, we
Speaker 2: have a little insight into a scientist's mind and what
Speaker 2: that's going to take. Yeah, it's just fantastic. I'm pretty
Speaker 2: stoked we got Angelo.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, hats off to these academics that stick
Speaker 5: their neck out and you know, put it all on
Speaker 5: the line, their reputations and potentially their livelihood to investigate
Speaker 5: this biggest natural mysuy we have in North America or
Speaker 5: the world even.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we're lucky to have them on.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well cool, Cliff, that was great, And so we got
Speaker 5: a few of the Wood eight people coming up here
Speaker 5: in a row. So this is this is great, and
Speaker 5: I want to tell everyone you got it to go to
Speaker 5: wood eight dot org and listen to their podcasts. They're
Speaker 5: I think they're the best. I mean, obviously everyone knows
Speaker 5: Sasquatch chronicles. If you want to hear stories like witnesses
Speaker 5: telling you know, encounters, but if you want to learn
Speaker 5: learn about bigfoot, go to wood dot org and listen
Speaker 5: to those read I mean, they got tons of stuff
Speaker 5: to read it. You can obviously listening to this like podcasts,
Speaker 5: and their podcast is the best. If you enjoyed that,
Speaker 5: tune back in next week. You've got some more coming up.
Speaker 5: Until then, keep it Squatchy.
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