Speaker 1: Big Food and Beyond.
Speaker 2: With Cliff and Bobo.
Speaker 1: These guys are your favorites. So light Chase, Subscribe and
Speaker 1: raid it five, stay and range, just go on yesterday
Speaker 1: and listening, oh watching limb always keep its watching.
Speaker 3: And now you're hosts Cliff Barrickman and James Bubo Fay.
Speaker 3: Hey Cliff, Hey Bobo.
Speaker 2: How you doing today?
Speaker 3: Good Man? Good? How's going to you?
Speaker 1: It's going all right. It's been an adventurous week to
Speaker 1: say the least.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeh, I had four nights out and it was
Speaker 3: totally dead in kyos and stuff like that. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's beautiful and all that, but anyways, it hits the
Speaker 3: bread of the Chase today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll have to talk about bigfoot stuff later. We
Speaker 1: have something a little bit more pressing on the desk today.
Speaker 3: Yeah. We got a guy I first came a Wherever
Speaker 3: a couple of years ago or whatever, maybe it was
Speaker 3: a year ago, and he was on Joe Rogan and
Speaker 3: then he actually was on Animal Planet after we left
Speaker 3: Forrest Galante and has got extinct or alive it which
Speaker 3: basically deals with cryptids because cryptois always just has been undiscovered.
Speaker 3: It could be something that was known to exist but
Speaker 3: hasn't been seen thought to be extinct for a long
Speaker 3: time that it's rediscovered, so that could be a cryptos
Speaker 3: species too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're kind of called them a Lazaruth species I think,
Speaker 1: you know, after the biblical story.
Speaker 3: Yep. So anyways, without further ado, this is Forrest Galante.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hey, gentlemen, how are you good? Thanks for us
Speaker 2: Absolutely great, the thrilled to have you on.
Speaker 1: By the way, Like I love talking to adventures and
Speaker 1: people are doing more or less the same thing that
Speaker 1: Bobo and I are trying to do, but a little
Speaker 1: bit different because you're actually succeeding.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so far it's been good.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I'm a wildlife biologist by trade and a
Speaker 4: tracker and a rare species expert, and I do I
Speaker 4: one of the things I target primarily is lazarus tax on,
Speaker 4: which are animals that have theoretically been declared extinct wrongfully,
Speaker 4: and so you know, I like to try and challenge
Speaker 4: that notion and have done so, you know, many times,
Speaker 4: but eight times successfully now.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it's been it's been great.
Speaker 3: What were your biggest ones? That a leopard and what else?
Speaker 4: I'd say the biggest one ever, So we have eight
Speaker 4: total rediscoveries now, which is it's amazing. You know, it's
Speaker 4: seven more than any single organization or person has ever
Speaker 4: done before in history. So we're really proud of it,
Speaker 4: especially when we came from a stance of when we
Speaker 4: started being like, I don't know if we'll ever find anything.
Speaker 4: You know, Extinct doesn't mean hiding in a bush, it
Speaker 4: doesn't mean around the next corner. Extinct means eradicated, gone forever.
Speaker 4: So we were we certainly weren't as expectant to be
Speaker 4: as successful as we were. But to answer your question,
Speaker 4: my biggest discovery I think was actually the Fernandina tortoise
Speaker 4: now tortoises in the Galopagos. You know, they're the icon
Speaker 4: of conservation. Lonesome George was the poster child of conservation,
Speaker 4: and he died in twenty fourteen, twenty twelve, something like that,
Speaker 4: and since then there really hasn't been a poster child
Speaker 4: for conservation. Well, in you know, two thousand and eighteen,
Speaker 4: I discovered the Fernandina Island tortoise and animal only ever seen,
Speaker 4: only ever reported once in history one hundred and fourteen
Speaker 4: years prior by the California Academy of Sciences, never seen since,
Speaker 4: never recorded, never documented, and we found that creature and Fern,
Speaker 4: as we affectionately named her, is the rarest animal on earth,
Speaker 4: you know, arguably no offense rarer than Bigfoot, because she
Speaker 4: is the only one. There's only one of them as
Speaker 4: far as we know, and it's the one that we found.
Speaker 4: So that was that was really big for me and
Speaker 4: big for the field of conservation in general.
Speaker 1: Now, is it this one was hiding in plain sight?
Speaker 1: That does it look the same as the other species
Speaker 1: on the island or like, was it just differentiated by
Speaker 1: its DNA or how was that the same?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 4: No, not at all that you know that I almost
Speaker 4: I don't really dive into that arena, you know, of
Speaker 4: speciation by genetics, because I'm not a geneticist.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm a field biologist.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 4: The island of Fernandina is the second most active volcano
Speaker 4: in the world. It's a standalone island that has no
Speaker 4: other species of tortoise. So, for those that don't know,
Speaker 4: every single island in the Glopagos has its own species
Speaker 4: of tortoise, some have a couple, but Fernandina the newest
Speaker 4: island in the Galopagos due to its age was not
Speaker 4: known to have any tortoises except for this one that
Speaker 4: was discovered one hundred and fourteen years prior by the
Speaker 4: California Academy of Sciences. A lot of people, you know,
Speaker 4: and to tie it into what you guys do, a
Speaker 4: lot of people said, it's not real, it's a hoak.
Speaker 4: There was never a Fernandina tortoise to begin with, even
Speaker 4: though there was a you know, there was a specimen
Speaker 4: sitting in the California Academy of Sciences, we.
Speaker 2: Never hear that for us, No, I'm sure never.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And so you know, I knew about that specimen.
Speaker 2: I've seen that specimen.
Speaker 4: I've worked with a couple people that work in in
Speaker 4: the turtle and tortoise industry as biologists and done about
Speaker 4: two and a half years of research, and then launched
Speaker 4: the expedition to Fernandino, which in itself was a massive
Speaker 4: ordeal and undertaking just to get the permits in paperwork.
Speaker 4: And yeah, she wasn't hiding in plain sight. She was
Speaker 4: hiding in a deep bush. But the only species that
Speaker 4: it could be, you know, there's no other species on
Speaker 4: the island. So as soon as we found her, we
Speaker 4: knew exactly what we were looking at, now.
Speaker 1: Did you take her back or did you just leave
Speaker 1: her on the island, take a few samples from her
Speaker 1: or anything?
Speaker 4: Or as I was saying earlier, the Fernandina Fernandina Island
Speaker 4: is a second most active volcano in the world, so
Speaker 4: it's a very volatile environment. Fern was stuck in a
Speaker 4: small pocket of vegetation that was surrounded by impenetrable lava flow.
Speaker 4: I mean it took us something like seven eight hours
Speaker 4: in like one hundred and twenty degree heat just to
Speaker 4: get to where she was crossing this lava flow. No quadruped,
Speaker 4: no four legged animal on Earth could cover these lava flows.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's just impossible. It's like walking on shards
Speaker 4: of glass. So when we got there and found her,
Speaker 4: she was super molnar, super dehydrated, and she was the
Speaker 4: only one. So it was a little bit of like
Speaker 4: a maral and ethical dilemma because we're like, we should
Speaker 4: leave her, it's the right thing to do, but at
Speaker 4: the same time, leaving her would almost certainly result in
Speaker 4: losing her again, you know, not knowing where.
Speaker 2: The species was, she could have very easily died.
Speaker 4: So we grabbed her and we took her to the
Speaker 4: Fosto Lorrena breeding facility on Santa Cruz Island, the main
Speaker 4: island in the Galapagos, the same exact facility that housed
Speaker 4: Lonesome George put her there, and she didn't leave her
Speaker 4: water bowl for seven days. She was so dehydrated that
Speaker 4: when she saw water, she just like, you know, I
Speaker 4: don't mean to anthropomorphize these creatures, but she lit up
Speaker 4: and she like darted in tortoise speed over to the
Speaker 4: water dish and didn't leave it for seven days. So
Speaker 4: we absolutely made the right decision. It sparked multiple return trips,
Speaker 4: of which none have so far yielded another tortoise. But
Speaker 4: you know, we've released millions of dollars of funding and
Speaker 4: all kinds of great stuff due to the discovery.
Speaker 1: Wow, so the world population, the world's known population of
Speaker 1: these tortoises right now.
Speaker 2: Is one is one the girl that we found for
Speaker 2: in my goodness, Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm more excited about the stuff that you're doing in
Speaker 3: Australia because, like us, Cliff and I are both into
Speaker 3: the thigh lest scene and we were down there, we
Speaker 3: were looking for the AOI and I was really say
Speaker 3: about your statist, say, well, I don't know if it's yours,
Speaker 3: but I think you were talking about it. The university
Speaker 3: down there in Australia has twenty five hundred game counc
Speaker 3: are putting on a real strategic powterern not just randomly placed,
Speaker 3: but like geometrically lined up to cover everything multiple times.
Speaker 3: And I hope that think gets a yawi on it.
Speaker 4: I'm not familiar with Yowie's. What's a yowie Australian Bigfoot?
Speaker 4: Oh that would make sense, gotcha. Yeah, so I kind
Speaker 4: of speak much on that. I know very little about
Speaker 4: bigfoot specifically, but yeah, So the university in Cans, Australia,
Speaker 4: they have this large systematic approach to monitoring wildlife and
Speaker 4: far North Queensland, and like you said, they have this
Speaker 4: massive grid pattern of these trail cameras covering huge space
Speaker 4: spaces and they are checkerboarded in the sense of diverse
Speaker 4: habitats and moving them from one one zone to another,
Speaker 4: so you know, so to speak, anything that moves in
Speaker 4: that region will be captured on these camps. And one
Speaker 4: of the things that Queenstown University and researchers and myself
Speaker 4: are hoping is that it could be you know, there's
Speaker 4: the potential for it to be a Thilocene. It's an
Speaker 4: extremely remote part of Australia where we know these animals
Speaker 4: occurred less than four thousand years ago, So if the
Speaker 4: dingos haven't taken over, they could still be there.
Speaker 3: As I say, is that their biggest enemy, the dingo?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's a it's a variety of things.
Speaker 4: But long story short, the Thiocene used to range from
Speaker 4: Papua New Guinea all the way to Tasmania. When people
Speaker 4: first settled Australia, they brought with them canids dingoes. So
Speaker 4: a lot of people think dingos are from Australia.
Speaker 2: They're not.
Speaker 4: Dingos came to Australia four thousand years ago with the
Speaker 4: first humans. Those dogs out competed them. Now, dingoes are
Speaker 4: in Papua New Guinea, they are in Australia, but they
Speaker 4: are not in Tasmania. So the last stronghold for the
Speaker 4: Thilocene was Tasmania, you know, which we successfully eradicated them
Speaker 4: from by placing a bounty on their head. But in Australia,
Speaker 4: in the mainland, where we brought dingos four thousand years ago,
Speaker 4: they were out competed by the dingoes. Now, the reason
Speaker 4: that I think Australia is so fascinating. One, there's lots
Speaker 4: of sightings and other things like that. But two is
Speaker 4: dingos are they're a planes animal. They don't like certain habitat,
Speaker 4: not to say that they won't traverse through it. And
Speaker 4: they're they're a far better competitor than a Thilocene. But
Speaker 4: they could easily avoid niche habitats within far North Queensland
Speaker 4: Queensland that Thilocene would prefer to occupy. So in spaces
Speaker 4: where thiloceine and habitats where thylosine and dingo would overlap,
Speaker 4: dingo will win every time. But in certain spaces where
Speaker 4: Dingo would choose not to occupy based on the ecology
Speaker 4: of the environment, Thilocene could continue to thrive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a marsupial. Were they pack animals? I don't
Speaker 1: even know.
Speaker 4: No, as far as we know about their social dynamic,
Speaker 4: they were not a pack animal.
Speaker 2: There are.
Speaker 4: They are marsupial carnivore, the largest marsupial carnivore that ever existed.
Speaker 4: They had small social structures, so you know, a few
Speaker 4: of them at a time, but not certainly not a
Speaker 4: pack that would be the wrong to monology.
Speaker 1: Now, if you're involved in a study of the violus
Speaker 1: scene and trying to quote unquote rediscover them, I guess
Speaker 1: you've certainly seen your fair share of photographs or purported
Speaker 1: photographs or small videos of these things out in the wild,
Speaker 1: which I'm assuming probably sparks some interest into this project, like, Hey,
Speaker 1: these might be real. I'm curious, because I'm faced with
Speaker 1: this quite a bit. What do you do, as a
Speaker 1: legitimate scientist instead of like a citizen scientist like myself?
Speaker 1: What do you do to try to determine the authenticity
Speaker 1: of photographs or videos of these rare, possibly extinct or
Speaker 1: not even supposedly real species? Like what do you need
Speaker 1: to do to kind of convince yourself? Like this is
Speaker 1: a maybe, it's.
Speaker 2: A good question.
Speaker 4: You know, we have a very systematic approach to wildlife
Speaker 4: that we take, which is, you know, I have these
Speaker 4: spreadsheets that they're spreadsheets on spreadsheets.
Speaker 2: They're absolutely awful.
Speaker 4: Where we you know, plug in every single sighting and
Speaker 4: every single report and put in coordinates or approximate locations
Speaker 4: and then we map at all. You know, So in
Speaker 4: the case of the thyloscene, right, Okay, this report popped
Speaker 4: up here, and this report popped up here, and this
Speaker 4: report popped up here. And then when you look at
Speaker 4: when you put all those into a map, you're like, oh,
Speaker 4: it turns out those are only you know, I'm making
Speaker 4: all this up, but three miles apart from each other
Speaker 4: that could be the same animal. So you start to
Speaker 4: get these sighting clusters right, and that's when you can
Speaker 4: launch a full scale investigation. Now the difficult the difficulty
Speaker 4: that comes to me and my team is the fact
Speaker 4: that which of those sightings are you going to log
Speaker 4: and you have to determine credibility based on those sightings
Speaker 4: word of mouth. You know, we very rarely consider film
Speaker 4: and photograph. You know, there was a famous photograph of
Speaker 4: a super mangy fox running around Victoria, a video pardon me,
Speaker 4: of the super mangy fox running around Victoria, Southern Australia
Speaker 4: that everybody was calling a Thilocene, And you know, every
Speaker 4: Yahoo in the world would go on YouTube and say
Speaker 4: that's definitely a Thilocene where anybody with even a remote
Speaker 4: amount of wildlife experience or biological knowledge can look at
Speaker 4: and go look at it and go that's a mangie fox.
Speaker 4: Why are we even pretending. So, you know, fortunately, with
Speaker 4: my background in the wildlife sciences and I actually worked
Speaker 4: with foxes for a couple of years, so with my
Speaker 4: background in that, you know, some of that stuff that
Speaker 4: people send me relentlessly doesn't go further than you know,
Speaker 4: even looking at the title of the link, because I'm
Speaker 4: able to know what it is. And when it comes
Speaker 4: to something like thilacene, I would wager to say I've
Speaker 4: seen every single video and photo of quote unquote thiolacene
Speaker 4: caught on tape there is, and you know, none of
Speaker 4: them are credible.
Speaker 2: None of them.
Speaker 1: Okay, I've seen I thought I've seen a couple that
Speaker 1: look pretty good, but again, I'm not really into it.
Speaker 2: I'm not really studying it or anything.
Speaker 4: There's an interesting one, and I don't have it in
Speaker 4: front of me, but it's it's like this this color
Speaker 4: image of this animal that's like kind of standing up
Speaker 4: on a rock with a green background where you can
Speaker 4: just see a little bit of the coloration, and it's
Speaker 4: you know, like, to me, that photo is interesting, you know,
Speaker 4: I'm not. I would never and this just goes against
Speaker 4: my protocol as a scientist. I would never look at
Speaker 4: it and go, that's a thilasine. You know, it's just
Speaker 4: not how I operate. But that photo is very compelling.
Speaker 4: You know, I can't look at it and go, that's
Speaker 4: a fox. So it's in that gray area right where
Speaker 4: it's like between the two where it's not it's not definitive,
Speaker 4: but it's certainly you can't definitively call it something else,
Speaker 4: So that would be considered, you know, that would be
Speaker 4: something that I would consider logging into our database to
Speaker 4: to be a sighting. And so that's yeah, you know,
Speaker 4: there's there's a lot of imagery out there.
Speaker 2: There's nothing that's definitive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot of maybes and the that's westword.
Speaker 1: You know, our focus tends to live in the maybe
Speaker 1: realm all these photographs and whatever else is. And so
Speaker 1: as far as footprint evidence of Thilocene and whatnot, what
Speaker 1: do you what differentiation do you see between like regular dogs,
Speaker 1: for example, and what a thilocine footprint was would look like?
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, in layman's terms, a thilosine has a kangaroof foot.
Speaker 4: So if you ever considered a kangaroofoot, they've got these long,
Speaker 4: skinny feet that go along the ground versus a dog,
Speaker 4: which has you know, a little paw. Now, Thilocene is
Speaker 4: not exactly like a kangaroo, otherwise it would be indistinguishable.
Speaker 4: But imagine the pad of a dog's foot with the
Speaker 4: back end of a kangaroos. And so you know, when
Speaker 4: I've tracked Dilocene through Tasmania and in Australia, that's what
Speaker 4: I've been looking for. And I'll be one hundred percent
Speaker 4: transparent and telling you I've never seen a track that
Speaker 4: matches that description. Like we we know based on the
Speaker 4: morphology of the animal and the museum specimens exactly what
Speaker 4: a print would look like. But keep in mind some
Speaker 4: of the places I track, you know, it's deciduous forests,
Speaker 4: so there's no there's no dust or mud or anything
Speaker 4: that leaves a track. It's just leaf litter that you
Speaker 4: never see a track in. So you know, certain animals,
Speaker 4: like I've tracked lions in Africa and list goes on
Speaker 4: and on, it's very easy to track them based on
Speaker 4: the habitat. Thylacene typically does not occupy a habitat that
Speaker 4: is conducive to tracking.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, didn't you get attacked by a lion?
Speaker 3: I have?
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I it's it's a very overembellished way of
Speaker 4: putting it, but yeah, the truth is so I grew
Speaker 4: up in Zimbabwe and our neighbors had a game farm,
Speaker 4: and when I was a little kid, I used to
Speaker 4: go over there and play with the lion cubs and
Speaker 4: the rescues and stuff like that. And I uh, one
Speaker 4: time I was playing with some adolescent lions and I
Speaker 4: turned my back to leave the cage, and the lion
Speaker 4: decided he wasn't done playing as I flopped the pillowcase
Speaker 4: full of feathers over my shoulder and shredded up my
Speaker 4: back a little bit.
Speaker 3: Classic.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
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Speaker 1: In your time in Africa, did you hear rumors or
Speaker 1: stories or folklore or anything about about some sort of
Speaker 1: sasquatch like animal out there, like some sort of upright
Speaker 1: bipedal ape animal living in Africa.
Speaker 4: I've heard it all, guys. And what I mean by
Speaker 4: that is Africa is the Dark Continent. And I lived
Speaker 4: in Zimbabwe, which is you know, it's Shauna and Tonga.
Speaker 4: Are the cultures primarily there, and they're there. There is
Speaker 4: not I won't say there is no Western religion because
Speaker 4: that's certainly not true. But the accepted common belief system
Speaker 4: is one of lore and witch doctors. And try try
Speaker 4: Bible culture, you know, sometimes mixed in with some Christianity,
Speaker 4: sometimes not. And I've heard it all, you know, in
Speaker 4: where I grew up, in Zimbabwe, things that are misunderstood
Speaker 4: are articulated as spirituality, and there's a lot of that.
Speaker 4: I've heard of upright bipedal things. I've heard of witch doctors.
Speaker 4: I mean, in one of my episodes, and we're in Zanzibar,
Speaker 4: where we found our first major discovery and extinct leopard species.
Speaker 4: The witch Doctor talks of how shape shifters would use
Speaker 4: leopards to do their evil bidding. Now, this isn't something
Speaker 4: that you know is like a joke or something that
Speaker 4: is shared lightly. This is factual as far as the
Speaker 4: people there are concerned. And so yes, that's a very
Speaker 4: long answer, but the short answer is yes, I'm very
Speaker 4: familiar with bipedal large primate creatures all the way from
Speaker 4: the Congo to where I lived in Zimbabwe being reported
Speaker 4: that do not match any descriptions of any known biological creatures.
Speaker 3: Did you hear any of that from trusted like other
Speaker 3: trackers or like an older experience kind that you looked
Speaker 3: up to, somebody trusted there tell you an account they
Speaker 3: possibly had or.
Speaker 4: Yeah, one d percent. I mean there are people. There
Speaker 4: are gentlemen that I grew up with in Zimbabwe, trackers
Speaker 4: that work. So my family ran a safari business, right
Speaker 4: so they we spent all our time in the bush,
Speaker 4: like all of it. If I wasn't in school, I
Speaker 4: was in the bush. And there are trackers that I
Speaker 4: grew up with, trackers that make me look like an
Speaker 4: absolute clown. I mean, guys that'll look at the dust
Speaker 4: and go you know, there was a fight here. A
Speaker 4: large male lion charged a small impala. The impaula took
Speaker 4: off to the right, the line, the line has circled
Speaker 4: around the left. You know all of this just by
Speaker 4: reading the dust. And those types of trackers who, like
Speaker 4: I said, I mean I literally I kind of hold
Speaker 4: a candle to these types of people, and I'm a
Speaker 4: pretty good tracker and I learned from them.
Speaker 2: But there that's all they do is track.
Speaker 4: They they have reported seeing tracks of things like that.
Speaker 4: They've reported seeing things like that, and you know, look,
Speaker 4: I'll be honest with you, guys.
Speaker 2: I'm a biologist.
Speaker 4: I believe in science and fact, and you know, I
Speaker 4: also trust the people. Isaac is one of them, the
Speaker 4: name that comes to my head implicitly, who have told
Speaker 4: me stories of encounters with these animals, and oftentimes they're
Speaker 4: affiliated with witch doctors and shamans.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of more going on about it. Even
Speaker 1: here in the United States. There's this whole movements of
Speaker 1: people who don't seem to understand that like the possible biological,
Speaker 1: biological reality of sasquatches, and they attribute all sorts of
Speaker 1: other things to them turning invisible or you know, the
Speaker 1: mind speak or you know, talking inside their heads, all
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff that just would you know, make your
Speaker 1: head turn around from a scientific perspective, And it's one
Speaker 1: of the interesting things about it. I was going to
Speaker 1: ask you about number one. Are you familiar with Gareth
Speaker 1: Patterson by any chance?
Speaker 2: The author? The author?
Speaker 4: Correct, I'm familiar. I'm familiar with the name. I kind
Speaker 4: of think of any of his books off the top
Speaker 4: of my head.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was the assistant to the like born free
Speaker 1: Lion guy back in the seventies. Now he actually is
Speaker 1: along your line. He actually has rediscovered the population of
Speaker 1: South African elephants. Then, Yeah, they thought that the troop
Speaker 1: had been that troop. Is that what elephants traveling the herd?
Speaker 1: They thought the herd was down to one big matriarch.
Speaker 1: And it turns out and now there's a few dozen
Speaker 1: of these things and he's the guy that figured it out.
Speaker 2: Very cool with Africa.
Speaker 1: Along the way, he's I think he has now seen
Speaker 1: the local flavor of sasquatch they call the o tang
Speaker 1: with his own eyes.
Speaker 2: Probably, I think when he.
Speaker 1: Says six times or something over the last eight four
Speaker 1: times over the last eight years. Anyway, interesting researcher, kind
Speaker 1: of doing the same sort of thing that you're doing
Speaker 1: over there in Africa, South Africa. But I want to
Speaker 1: ask you, what role do the indigenous people and local
Speaker 1: folklore and mythology and stories, what role does that play
Speaker 1: in the discovery or rediscovery of species?
Speaker 4: A huge one lore, local culture. Look, the best scientists
Speaker 4: in the world, the best. The people who understand the
Speaker 4: environment the most are not people like myself who have
Speaker 4: a fancy degree or an education or sitting in an office.
Speaker 4: They're the people that spend the time in the field,
Speaker 4: boots on the ground, whether they're an official scientist or
Speaker 4: someone collecting water from a river. Those people, the people
Speaker 4: who live there, the trackers, like Isaac I mentioned, they're
Speaker 4: the ones that understand the environment. And this is an
Speaker 4: unpopular opinion upon my colleagues, but it's one that I'll
Speaker 4: gladly express. We know nothing compared to them. They're the
Speaker 4: ones that understand every leaf, every blade of grass, you
Speaker 4: know where it comes from, where it's going, et cetera.
Speaker 4: They might not understand large scale population dynamics and global warming,
Speaker 4: but they understand the manusha of that because they're involved
Speaker 4: in it every day. When I, like I was mentioning,
Speaker 4: my first discovery was that of a Zanzibar leopard.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: Zanzibar is an island nation that is shrouded in lore
Speaker 4: and culture, and the witch doctors used to use their
Speaker 4: leopards there to do their evil bidding. And many of
Speaker 4: the witch doctors outright told us that they used to
Speaker 4: have the abilities to transform themselves from shaman into leopard
Speaker 4: and back to do evil bidding at night. And we
Speaker 4: discover at a leopard there. I'm not saying that that
Speaker 4: was a shaman who that night, you know, went where
Speaker 4: wolf and turned into a leopard. But what I am
Speaker 4: saying is without connecting with those witch doctors and speaking
Speaker 4: to them and understanding their beliefs with regards to the
Speaker 4: animal's ongoing existence, where to look, where they might be,
Speaker 4: what they'd killed, et cetera, we probably would have had
Speaker 4: no hope in hell of ever finding one. And the
Speaker 4: same goes on and on. When we were in the Amazon,
Speaker 4: people talked about the the cayman Ambrio Lago trump Alago,
Speaker 4: so like the yellow Cayman with the big nose, I
Speaker 4: probably just butchered the Spanish way of saying it. But
Speaker 4: they kept talking about the cayman with the large the
Speaker 4: yellow cayman with the large nose, and that was it
Speaker 4: wasn't seen as mythology to them, but it was extremely
Speaker 4: rare and kind of unknown as to where it was
Speaker 4: or what it was. And it was crystal clear to
Speaker 4: Western science that that was a species that hadn't been
Speaker 4: seen in forty years. So, you know, it's without communicating
Speaker 4: with the locals and taking their words at least as
Speaker 4: credible with regards to ongoing existence, you've got nothing like
Speaker 4: Otherwise you're just parachuting in. You know, you're taking a
Speaker 4: shot in the dark and leaving. So I would never
Speaker 4: dare to venture on one of these excursions or expeditions
Speaker 4: to try and locate these animals without the help of
Speaker 4: the locals that engage with them on a daily basis.
Speaker 1: And how do you approach the cultures that you're learning
Speaker 1: from with the scientific Western ideas and mind that you
Speaker 1: approach them with, Like, how do you how do you
Speaker 1: approach them and still maintain a level of respect instead
Speaker 1: of just the tendency would be like for the conqueror
Speaker 1: to write that off as mythology, right, But what's the
Speaker 1: balance there? As a scientist when you approach this, how
Speaker 1: do you deal with that?
Speaker 4: You know, it's like there's this whole new thing in
Speaker 4: my field. But it sucks because I hate the terminology
Speaker 4: of like parachuting science and colonial science and all these
Speaker 4: weird words that I don't necessarily agree with with regards
Speaker 4: to when they're applied. But you have to you the
Speaker 4: local resources and the help, and you have to take
Speaker 4: you have to take in all of the information. And
Speaker 4: anybody that just discredits something because another culture believes in it,
Speaker 4: even if it's of the supernatural, is foolish because your
Speaker 4: understanding of supernatural and their understanding of supernatural are two
Speaker 4: very different things.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: For some people in the world, you know, the sky,
Speaker 4: the sky goes dark because I don't even know I'm
Speaker 4: making this up because I'm so dry as a scientist.
Speaker 4: But my point is just you know, for some people,
Speaker 4: the wind blows because because something in the sky made it,
Speaker 4: and for some people it's due to the Coriolis effect. Right,
Speaker 4: It's just a different understanding of different things. It doesn't
Speaker 4: mean the wind doesn't blow. If you get my point,
Speaker 4: you know, my point. My point is that you have
Speaker 4: to you sit on the ground. You can hear the stories.
Speaker 4: You can pick and choose what pieces of information are
Speaker 4: useful to an investigation. It doesn't mean you have to
Speaker 4: believe them when they tell you that a spirit blew
Speaker 4: the wind, you know, but you can believe them that
Speaker 4: the wind is blowing because you know that. So it's
Speaker 4: it's picking and choosing and disseminating which information is actually
Speaker 4: relevant to an expedition or a search, over criticizing or
Speaker 4: discrediting because one piece of the story doesn't match our
Speaker 4: scientific understanding.
Speaker 3: Well said, yeah, gotcha.
Speaker 1: So I mean, in your travels throughout the world, or
Speaker 1: do you have any goals of working with primates some
Speaker 1: sort of undiscovered primate species, You know, because we're Boble
Speaker 1: and I are both bigfoot folks, and we're interested in
Speaker 1: all sorts of unknown primates throughout the world, and there
Speaker 1: seems to be just an endless supply of them.
Speaker 2: So are dar any of those on your radar at
Speaker 2: the moment? Well, I mean, I've discovered a lost primate,
Speaker 2: so that was nice. Talks about it? Please tell us men?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I found a primate called the Miller's grizzled
Speaker 4: langyear that hadn't been seen in Borneo in twenty issu year.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, I'm sorry, that's not true.
Speaker 4: Some researchers photographed it eight years prior but hadn't seen
Speaker 4: it since. So you know, that was like that wasn't
Speaker 4: an extinct animal, but it was certainly a lost one,
Speaker 4: and that was a huge moment, you know, finding this
Speaker 4: creature in this tiny pocket of Borneo. But on a
Speaker 4: bigger scale with regards to do I have any interest
Speaker 4: in primates, I have huge interest in primates. There's a
Speaker 4: there's a relatively poorly known region in the Congo, in
Speaker 4: the Democratic Republic of Congo that is held by gorillas
Speaker 4: as in gu gorillas like warfare gorillas, that potentially has
Speaker 4: twice the known population of western Lowland gorilla the species.
Speaker 4: But it's just very, very dangerous to go and engage
Speaker 4: with this piece of bush. But you know, if something
Speaker 4: that I've been working on for a couple of years,
Speaker 4: and this is the first time I've announced it publicly,
Speaker 4: but something I've been working on for a couple of years,
Speaker 4: much like my Columbia expedition where we snuck in under
Speaker 4: the fark rebels noses. You know, I would like to
Speaker 4: go in under the radar into that habitat and walk
Speaker 4: through that one hundred and fifty kilometer stretch of bush
Speaker 4: and see if we can locate that troop of gorillas,
Speaker 4: because it would effectively double our known, our known population
Speaker 4: of lowland gorillas, which wouldn't remove them from the endangered
Speaker 4: species list or anything, but it would certainly increase the
Speaker 4: gene pool, maybe lead to more protections, maybe open up
Speaker 4: that piece of habitat for protection, et cetera. So yeah,
Speaker 4: and that's you know, that's as big footy as they get. Right,
Speaker 4: We're talking about silverback guerrillas like big low land massive
Speaker 4: primates that the whole world doesn't know whether or not,
Speaker 4: like fifty thousand of these animals exists. So I'm really
Speaker 4: not very well versed in the cryptied space, to be
Speaker 4: honest with you, gentlemen. Like I've never searched for bigfoot
Speaker 4: or NeSSI or any of those kind of things. I
Speaker 4: focus very much so on wildlife, you know, like I
Speaker 4: know wildlife in and out, and I study wildlife like
Speaker 4: you should see what my office looks like. It's nothing
Speaker 4: but aquariums and tanks and mounts and yeah, so I
Speaker 4: really just know about animals, like that's kind of my thing.
Speaker 4: I don't know much about the crypted space at all,
Speaker 4: So forgive me when I'm not familiar with these terms.
Speaker 2: Oh it's okay, now, we love it.
Speaker 1: We love it because you know, you're doing like legit
Speaker 1: stuff and we're in the public eyes.
Speaker 2: We're not we think we are. Yeah, I mean they're real.
Speaker 1: Sasquatches are actually out there, don't get me wrong, but
Speaker 1: you know, the public in general thinks that we're pseudoscientists,
Speaker 1: and just because we don't have a credential for.
Speaker 3: If I'm interested in the rank Pandeck.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you've probably heard of the ring Pendeck.
Speaker 4: That's rather I have because I'm friends with Joe Rogan,
Speaker 4: the talk show host or the podcast host, and he's
Speaker 4: he's quite obsessed with them.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I've I've heard.
Speaker 4: The first time I ever heard about them was was
Speaker 4: talking to Joe. And then I spending as much time
Speaker 4: in Indonesia as I have, which is becoming a ridiculous
Speaker 4: amount at this point because there's so much incredible speciation
Speaker 4: over there. I've heard that name many times now.
Speaker 3: Cliff has the biggest footprint collection of the cast of
Speaker 3: those of anybody.
Speaker 1: I funded a project with the local people over there.
Speaker 1: Once Finding Bigfoot, the show that Bobo and I were on,
Speaker 1: we went to Sumatra, and when we left I kind
Speaker 1: of funded a project for a couple of years with
Speaker 1: the locals, saying, hey, if you hear about a sighting,
Speaker 1: why don't you go see.
Speaker 2: If you can go cast a couple of footprints, and
Speaker 2: we got we got some.
Speaker 1: It was it was an interesting project, and you know,
Speaker 1: doctor Meldrum from i University has possession of some of
Speaker 1: the casts.
Speaker 4: And now my understanding of irang Pendeck is it's a
Speaker 4: relatively small humanoid creature, right like two or three feet
Speaker 4: or maybe what three or four foot tall, something like that,
Speaker 4: three to five feet tall, three to five feet description.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's it's I do think they're real, and
Speaker 1: I think that they're probably some sort of terrestrial or
Speaker 1: semi terrestrial orangutan. At the end of the day, the
Speaker 1: part of the world is perfect because obviously there's some
Speaker 1: matron orangutans, there's of course Borneo's right there, and yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think that they're probably the semi terrestrial ranguetans.
Speaker 1: I don't think they're hominins like a lot of other
Speaker 1: people do so, like the whole idea of a relative
Speaker 1: Homo floresiensis or something from down a Floores or the
Speaker 1: new one from the Philippines Homo loose on incests, I
Speaker 1: don't think that the ring pindecks are those because the
Speaker 1: foot structure is different based on the footprint cast evidence.
Speaker 4: I'll tell I'll tell you this not to interject my
Speaker 4: opinion to something I know very little. Please, do you
Speaker 4: know I've traveled seventy something countries now, I've worked with wildlife,
Speaker 4: and I mean, it's it's it's getting ridiculous to the
Speaker 4: point that my family hates me. But there's two places
Speaker 4: in the world that you know, I would consider it
Speaker 4: to be like the Dark Continent, right, like like Africa
Speaker 4: and the sense of I very much so believe in
Speaker 4: a sense and I can go elaborate magic is still
Speaker 4: real in Africa. And Indonesia is another place that I
Speaker 4: feel like that there's a lot still to be understood
Speaker 4: and explored and discovered there. And so you know, having
Speaker 4: gone to Sumatra many times and Borneo as well, in
Speaker 4: that whole region, it wouldn't surprise me to find out.
Speaker 4: It's not that it wouldn't surprise me. It's a known
Speaker 4: thing that there are primate species that we don't know
Speaker 4: about yet. Now that said, I would reverse the question
Speaker 4: to you guys, and I'd ask you, like, why don't
Speaker 4: we know about these primate species?
Speaker 2: What makes them so elusive?
Speaker 4: You know, if there's a bipedal orangutang running around Indonesia,
Speaker 4: why have we never seen one or killed one? You know, Like,
Speaker 4: I'm sure it's a kind of question you guys get
Speaker 4: all the time, and forgive me for asking it again,
Speaker 4: but that's kind of what always crosses my.
Speaker 1: Mind, is like, why don't we know about it? I
Speaker 1: think it's a couple and I think probably rarity of
Speaker 1: the species says a lot about it. And also, you know,
Speaker 1: the area that they live in, what is it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: crenchy ark.
Speaker 2: Yeah, impenetrable. It's literally impenetrable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's it's just absolutely ridiculous. And that's that's
Speaker 1: one of their main you know, bastions, shall we say.
Speaker 1: And also, I mean I've thought about this for a
Speaker 1: while as well. Indonesia, You're not it's not exactly, it's
Speaker 1: not like the US Man. It's not like a gun country,
Speaker 1: you know, it doesn't seem like that to me. I
Speaker 1: seem said, if you're not in the military, you probably
Speaker 1: don't have a firearm. And at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: that's kind of what it takes to prove a new species,
Speaker 1: which is something that I might ask you about. How
Speaker 1: do you deal with the need of collecting a holotype
Speaker 1: for a totally new and novel species.
Speaker 4: It's very difficult, especially because I am not a hunter
Speaker 4: and I don't want to kill any of these. We
Speaker 4: do fur traps, you know. I we dart stuff and
Speaker 4: take blood. Sometimes camera imagery is enough, you know. In
Speaker 4: the case of the cayman and the tortoise, we literally
Speaker 4: had those animals in our hands. So it's just it's very,
Speaker 4: very tricky.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: When I was in Africa in twenty eighteen, we were
Speaker 4: looking for remnant genetics of the cape lion, and in
Speaker 4: order to do that, I had to get twenty five
Speaker 4: feet away from one with effectively a paintball gun that
Speaker 4: shoots a tranquilizer dart and put it to sleep and
Speaker 4: pull some blood from it, you know, which we caught
Speaker 4: the animal and fortunately I've worked in those environments a lot.
Speaker 4: So nothing bad, nothing went wrong, but you know, tracking
Speaker 4: the largest male lion that you can find in southern
Speaker 4: Africa to put it to sleep, to pull some blood
Speaker 4: for it, to check the blood for remnant genetics is
Speaker 4: it's very challenging, you know, and those things, those things
Speaker 4: come up all the time, and it's one of the reasons.
Speaker 4: And I'll be honest, this field didn't really exist before
Speaker 4: I started focusing on it, you know, not to this
Speaker 4: isn't a humble brag, but like, there were so many
Speaker 4: reasons why this field was too difficult to approach that
Speaker 4: most scientists would never even dare take it on. And
Speaker 4: now we're starting to figure out ways with which to
Speaker 4: do it, like for traps and darting and etcetera, and etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 4: So it's it's very challenging. As a short answer, stay
Speaker 4: tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo
Speaker 4: will be right back after these messages.
Speaker 1: So for people like Bobo and I already our audience
Speaker 1: in general who like think or know that sasquatches are
Speaker 1: in fact real animals, what can you recommend for the
Speaker 1: layman scientists the citizen scientists that wants to make some
Speaker 1: sort of progress towards the eventual, you know, academic recognition
Speaker 1: of the species. What can we do as a as
Speaker 1: a community or a group or as individuals, Like, what
Speaker 1: would you recommend for us.
Speaker 4: With regards to finding a discovery or with regards to
Speaker 4: just being more credible in the sense of.
Speaker 1: Even though for furthering furthering the subject. I'm just going
Speaker 1: to leave it open like that because I'm not a
Speaker 1: gun guy. I'm not going to kill a sasquatch and
Speaker 1: bring it in. That's not just not me, right, So
Speaker 1: what can people like me or people who are gun
Speaker 1: guys actually do.
Speaker 4: I think the answer there is really really quite simple, Like,
Speaker 4: if you want to be taken seriously in the scientific community,
Speaker 4: you have to let me back up one second. And
Speaker 4: this is something that I debate and argue with people.
Speaker 4: By the way, when I first you know, I don't
Speaker 4: know if you guys have ever seen The Lost City
Speaker 4: of zeb It's a movie. It's a wonderful book, Percy,
Speaker 4: it's a real story too. Percy Fitzpatrick gets up in
Speaker 4: front of this like room of guys and stuff. He's
Speaker 4: smoking jackets and he's like I'm going to find the
Speaker 4: lost city, and they're like.
Speaker 2: You're crazy, You're a lunatic.
Speaker 4: You know, when I first got up in front of
Speaker 4: a bunch of colleagues and said I'm going to find
Speaker 4: an extinct animal, I receive the same reaction, Right, you're crazy,
Speaker 4: You're a lunatic, Like you're insane.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: Now fast forward ten fifteen years whatever it's been since
Speaker 4: we started down this journey, and you know, all those
Speaker 4: same people are coming back to me and going as unbelievable,
Speaker 4: You're being nominated for prizes, you know, people, we want
Speaker 4: you to speak at our symposiums, blah blah blah. So
Speaker 4: the only way that I got from the point of
Speaker 4: being called a lunatic to the point of being praised
Speaker 4: for my discoveries is by using scientific methodology to prove
Speaker 4: things right. And so that's what I would advise to
Speaker 4: to the layman, to the citizen scientist, you know, go
Speaker 4: and gather all the data, gather all the research, organize
Speaker 4: it right, write something credible. You know, if you if
Speaker 4: you become and I'm sure you guys are this way already,
Speaker 4: so forgive me if I'm saying anything that's too obvious.
Speaker 4: But if you are obsessive over something the way I
Speaker 4: am over extinct creatures, and you then apply scientific methodology
Speaker 4: to it and lay it all out and you know,
Speaker 4: pinpoint everything. You know, you kind of get the visual
Speaker 4: of the guy, the crazy guy with all the pictures
Speaker 4: on the wall and all the pins and the strings
Speaker 4: leading to one thing. That's what you have to do
Speaker 4: in science, right, It's like, take all these little pieces
Speaker 4: of evidence, try and connect them to one place, then
Speaker 4: go out and prove it. And my opinion with regards
Speaker 4: to proving it is do for traps. Put out camera traps.
Speaker 4: Trail cameras are your best friend in the world. You know,
Speaker 4: you get a clear, clear image on a trail camera
Speaker 4: of a bigfoot and that's that. Like there's nothing anybody
Speaker 4: can do about it, you know, So get for traps,
Speaker 4: get trail cameras. Uh, just just narrow it in.
Speaker 3: There's a couple there's a couple of texts. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's a couple of books written by acadecics PhDs. Once
Speaker 3: doctor Jeff Melger, he is an anthropologist, and then there
Speaker 3: was doctor John binnaugal As a wild apologist. They wrote
Speaker 3: books for guys like you. But it seems almost no one, none,
Speaker 3: none of the actively qualified people they wrote it for.
Speaker 3: I've even read them.
Speaker 4: Interesting, I wonder why that is, do you think because
Speaker 4: there's not enough people interes like why why is that?
Speaker 2: I don't know the answer to that. I'm not familiar
Speaker 2: with them, and I'm in the space.
Speaker 1: It's an unlikely, unlikely subject, unlikely uh special world species
Speaker 1: really in an unlikely place, North America. We kind of
Speaker 1: think that we've got this whole thing, you know, all
Speaker 1: shut her down, like we know what's up here. You're
Speaker 1: not going to surprise us with anything bigger than a shrew, right,
Speaker 1: So I think that's part of it. Doctor Grover Krantz
Speaker 1: often said that like anthropologists would be deeply embarrassed if
Speaker 1: sasquatches were proven to be real, because how could they
Speaker 1: have overlooked such a big thing right in their own backyard,
Speaker 1: et cetera. But now with this idea, and like doctor
Speaker 1: Meldrim's really pushing this forward more than anybody, this idea
Speaker 1: of relati hominoids in general, you know, like that, you know,
Speaker 1: with the various hominin species not dying off until very recently,
Speaker 1: and with Homo sapiens overlapping in the timeline with them,
Speaker 1: with like I think seven or maybe eight that we
Speaker 1: know of different hominins, the idea that like the last
Speaker 1: Homo standing now may not just be us. We may
Speaker 1: be not alone on this planet, especially in these far
Speaker 1: flung places of the planet world China or northern Russia
Speaker 1: in that place, those sort of places, but there might
Speaker 1: even be some in our own backyard. And I think
Speaker 1: it's a really interesting question, even to the point where
Speaker 1: Scientific American put it on the front page of the
Speaker 1: one of their magazines a few years back.
Speaker 2: So fascinating.
Speaker 4: I mean, there is more and more evidence to show that,
Speaker 4: you know, sort of Homo erectus.
Speaker 2: And caveman, if you will.
Speaker 4: And I forgive me, I don't know all the gene
Speaker 4: not my field, but you know, basically, the primitive man
Speaker 4: was here later and later than we realized. That seems
Speaker 4: to be from my very superficial understanding of and correct
Speaker 4: me if I'm wrong. Year after year we're like, oh,
Speaker 4: turns out they were here. You know, first at first
Speaker 4: we thought they were here a million years ago, and
Speaker 4: now we think they're here one hundred thousand years ago.
Speaker 4: And now we think they were here thirty thousand years ago.
Speaker 4: Like it seems to just keep the timeline seems to
Speaker 4: teams seems to keep moving up, which I always do
Speaker 4: find quite interesting.
Speaker 1: And more and more species, Like since you're a fan
Speaker 1: of Indonesia, you know, Homo floresiensis obviously the hobbits and
Speaker 1: the last the one that was published in May of
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, Homo loose on insists from the Philippines, and
Speaker 1: just two weeks ago Lee Berger from in South Africa commented,
Speaker 1: you know, he's the guy that that's excavating the Rising
Speaker 1: Star cave where Homo nalidi was discovered, and that one
Speaker 1: trove of hominin bones actually more than doubled the entirety
Speaker 1: of the hominin data set, just that one cave more
Speaker 1: than doubled it from what I understand. Mixed in with
Speaker 1: the Homo nalidi, which is a whole new species that
Speaker 1: Lee Burger discovered in South Africa in this cave are
Speaker 1: apparently other specimens from an entirely different species they are
Speaker 1: now trying to identify. There might be another Homo Homo
Speaker 1: hominin discovery on the horizon in the near future.
Speaker 4: And I think that's you know, that's my world, not
Speaker 4: humanoid species, but wildlife species in that kind of realm,
Speaker 4: and I think that's fascinating. I think people do want
Speaker 4: to know about that. I think they want to read
Speaker 4: about that. You know, you're asking what citizen scientists can do.
Speaker 4: You know, I don't think you should all put on
Speaker 4: your Indiana Jones boots and get out there and start
Speaker 4: digging around caves. But I think the furthering of that,
Speaker 4: in the furthering of the spread of that information and
Speaker 4: the understanding of that information, will lead to the ability
Speaker 4: for more citizens scientists to be involved. And a perfect
Speaker 4: example that I can give is I did an expedition
Speaker 4: looking for the Ivory built woodpecker, which was a large
Speaker 4: woodpecker species that occurred in the southeast and all the
Speaker 4: way into Cuba. Since then, I have probably received no
Speaker 4: less than seven thousand emails with reported sightings, videos, pictures,
Speaker 4: et cetera. Now most of them are not credible, but regardless,
Speaker 4: it's citizens scientists that are bringing this up, bringing it
Speaker 4: to me to say, hey, I think I saw an
Speaker 4: ivory build woodpecker right now, none of them have proven
Speaker 4: it yet, but all it takes is one right, So
Speaker 4: instead of me being one set of eyes out there
Speaker 4: looking for this woodpecker for three and a half weeks
Speaker 4: like we typically do on an expedition, Now I have
Speaker 4: I'm making these numbers up, but ten thousand people in
Speaker 4: the region out looking for this woodpecker with cameras, and
Speaker 4: all it takes is one person to get lucky once
Speaker 4: if that animal is still there, and a citizen scientist
Speaker 4: has made a much larger impact than you know I
Speaker 4: would ever be capable.
Speaker 2: Of doing in a three week expedition.
Speaker 1: So as far as taking a holotype goes, I have
Speaker 1: a little bit of a moral quandary, and I think
Speaker 1: you probably do too, based on what you said about
Speaker 1: killing something to prove it's real. But for sasquatches, if
Speaker 1: you know, if that eventually comes to a head and
Speaker 1: bigfoots are proven to be real, no matter how it
Speaker 1: is proven to be real, they're gonna they're gonna.
Speaker 2: Go kill them.
Speaker 1: They're gonna go kill several of them to study them.
Speaker 1: There's just really no other way around it, because that's
Speaker 1: the way how science works. But to get to that spot,
Speaker 1: to even get the academics out there trying to hunt
Speaker 1: these things, do you think there's any other way to
Speaker 1: prove a species and to collect a holotype for a
Speaker 1: new novel species never been seen before, because I can
Speaker 1: see how photographs would work for something that we knew
Speaker 1: was reel sixty years ago, you know, But for a
Speaker 1: new novel, unexpected species like the sasquatch. Do you think
Speaker 1: there's any other way to get that job done without
Speaker 1: actually putting a bulletin one man?
Speaker 4: You know, I'd love to sit here and be like,
Speaker 4: absolutely save it. You know, it's the only way. But
Speaker 4: the truth is, the way that our our system is
Speaker 4: set up, there is not you know, there really isn't.
Speaker 4: Now if you if you turned up with a foot
Speaker 4: of one or something like that, sure, right, or a
Speaker 4: leg or an arm, you know that someone hit on
Speaker 4: the car and that's what's left. Sure, But ahead of
Speaker 4: having that specimen, No, the answer is no.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: The way I would handle it if I were targeting
Speaker 4: these things is I wouldn't be out there with a gun.
Speaker 4: I would study their ecology to the best of my ability,
Speaker 4: and then I would create live traps, right. And you know,
Speaker 4: in order to do that, you use use primitive survival guys,
Speaker 4: you use engineers, et cetera, et cetera, which you know
Speaker 4: I've done. I've built these giant crocodile traps and caught
Speaker 4: big crocs and stuff like that. And a croc certainly
Speaker 4: doesn't have the intelligence of a bipedal primate. But you know,
Speaker 4: I think the only way short of killing one is
Speaker 4: to catch one alive and the only and that's probably
Speaker 4: an even harder task than shooting one.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Speaker 1: Bogo will be right back after these messages.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a problematic.
Speaker 1: And I guess that's why Krantz and Green and all
Speaker 1: the early researchers always advocated for killing one, because it's
Speaker 1: quick and clean and done, and it's over and that's
Speaker 1: the end of the day, you know.
Speaker 4: And here's my two cents on something like that, Right,
Speaker 4: a relatively unpopular opinion, probably among my type of followers.
Speaker 4: But if you're gonna ask me, hey, will you go
Speaker 4: kill an orca to save all the orcas? Right? We
Speaker 4: love orcas. Killer whales are beautiful. Nobody wants to see
Speaker 4: an orca killed, myself included. But if you told me that,
Speaker 4: if I was the person that had to kill an
Speaker 4: orca to save all the orcas, I would do it.
Speaker 4: I would hate it, it would be miserable, it would
Speaker 4: be one of the hardest things I'd ever have to do.
Speaker 4: But for the greater good of the species, I would
Speaker 4: absolutely do it. And I feel that way about any species. Now,
Speaker 4: if there's two of them left and you take that approach, well,
Speaker 4: obviously there's a big problem. But you know, if and
Speaker 4: I don't know what you know, your guys estimated populations
Speaker 4: are and everything else. But the point is, if if
Speaker 4: one kill can save a species, it's a worthwhile kill
Speaker 4: for the greater good.
Speaker 3: We figure there's three to ten thousand. Three to ten
Speaker 3: thousand North America's kind of a guess.
Speaker 4: I mean, and if that's the truth, And again I
Speaker 4: don't know what systems are in place, But if there
Speaker 4: were three thousand of them and you killed one of them,
Speaker 4: but killing one of them released funding and conservation and
Speaker 4: habitat preservation, everything else, and that brought the population. Let's
Speaker 4: say they are in jeopardy from three thousand to that
Speaker 4: ten thousand, then that kill is worth it every time. Right,
Speaker 4: And again, this is a terribly unpopular opinion. I'm nervous
Speaker 4: even speaking about it, but it's how I feel.
Speaker 2: It's also reality, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, the reality is a question that being a
Speaker 1: biologist like yourself, who's dealing with rare and a largely
Speaker 1: maybe not well documented species, you know, or it thought
Speaker 1: to be extinct, you have. That's a question that's on
Speaker 1: your desk and you have to deal with it. And
Speaker 1: I think it's a fair position to have, no matter
Speaker 1: what various followers might say. I mean, this is something
Speaker 1: that you have to wrestle with personally, So I think
Speaker 1: it's a.
Speaker 4: And it doesn't matter how much you love them, you
Speaker 4: know that if you want to save them, you got
Speaker 4: to do what it takes.
Speaker 2: Gentlemen, Thanks for having me today. I enjoyed chatting with you.
Speaker 4: Sorry that I expelled so much verbal diarrhea about science,
Speaker 4: but it's what I get excited about.
Speaker 2: It's what we need to do.
Speaker 1: We need to up the game of the Bigfoot community
Speaker 1: in seat of chasing around voices in our heads and
Speaker 1: thinking things are going on that aren't. We sure need
Speaker 1: to start playing by the rules so we can be
Speaker 1: taken seriously. And then this move this subject forward out
Speaker 1: of the realm of ridiculous tinfoil hat wearing weirdos on
Speaker 1: cable news into something that we can talk about relic
Speaker 1: relic species of hominins that possibly existing in North America.
Speaker 2: Sure makes sense to me. Thank you so much for
Speaker 2: coming on. I loved it. Thanks, I appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Take care, have a good one. But I yeah, Force
Speaker 3: was a great guest, you know, I know, try to
Speaker 3: be REALI with the pure science approach, but man, I
Speaker 3: wanted to kind of school him more on the sasquatch,
Speaker 3: you know, like this is why they're real, and get him,
Speaker 3: you know, more enthused on it, more interested.
Speaker 1: Well, it sounds like his plate is full enough. And
Speaker 1: you know, and nobody likes to be convinced of anything,
Speaker 1: whether it's Bigfoot or politics or any Nobody likes to
Speaker 1: have somebody else tell them why they're wrong.
Speaker 2: So it's I think it's better to take a softer hand.
Speaker 3: You know. He was open to it though, I mean,
Speaker 3: he just he just really has not been exposed to
Speaker 3: the information and the evidence.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I was hoping to have him chase and
Speaker 1: go down the Gareth Patterson hole, you know, because I
Speaker 1: think that he would he's aware of him as an author.
Speaker 1: I think he would probably say a lot that he
Speaker 1: has seen them with.
Speaker 3: His own eyes, right right.
Speaker 2: No, But I love that.
Speaker 1: I love the science because if bigfoots are real, there's
Speaker 1: science behind it, no matter what people think it is
Speaker 1: just because i'm you know, the paranormal side.
Speaker 2: It's the onus is on them.
Speaker 1: You know, we know that sasquatches are out there, or
Speaker 1: at least I know the sasquatch, but we know that
Speaker 1: the available evidence points to some sort of horminin or
Speaker 1: at least hominoid, some sort of ape like manlike thing.
Speaker 1: That their structure is exactly the same as all the
Speaker 1: other species are more or less the same as all
Speaker 1: the other species.
Speaker 2: In that group, the hominoid group.
Speaker 1: Their fur is similar, their foot structures identical, the hands
Speaker 1: are strongly resembling. So the paranormal people, the onus is
Speaker 1: on them to show us that they're right, because so
Speaker 1: far the evidence is strongly tilted towards a perfectly normal
Speaker 1: biological species. So I love having biologists on and talking
Speaker 1: about what they are looking into and how they're looking
Speaker 1: into their subjects and maybe taking something away that we
Speaker 1: can apply to the sasquatch.
Speaker 3: Well, I think guys I came aren't aware that There's
Speaker 3: been a lot of people that have applied scientific you know,
Speaker 3: principles and protocols that you know that I got that,
Speaker 3: I've gotten some stuff, you know, like North American what
Speaker 3: a conservancy?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Lots of people have in fact applied scientific method towards this,
Speaker 1: but they haven't gotten very far. So I think he
Speaker 1: would just throw that back, just like he did at
Speaker 1: the Rangutan or the ring Pindeck, things like well why
Speaker 1: is it? Then say why? I give them the reasons.
Speaker 1: I think that a ring p indecks have not been
Speaker 1: proven real, but I don't know at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, and certainly it's a conundrum for the Sasquatch.
Speaker 3: Well, that was a great interview with Forrest. We got
Speaker 3: another one kind up next week, so until that time,
Speaker 3: keep his squad.
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