Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: There's a story in the world of Sasquatch research that,
Speaker 1: depending on who you ask, is either the single greatest
Speaker 1: account of long term human bigfoot interaction ever recorded, or
Speaker 1: one of the most elaborate fabrications the community has ever seen.
Speaker 1: There really isn't much middle ground on this one, and
Speaker 1: I think that's exactly what makes it worth telling. I've
Speaker 1: been researching sasquatch encounters for close to forty years now.
Speaker 1: I've interviewed nearly one thousand people about their experiences. I've
Speaker 1: heard everything from fleeting glimpses on backcountry highways to terrifying
Speaker 1: nighttime encounters that left grown men shaking in their boots.
Speaker 1: But every now and then a story comes along that
Speaker 1: doesn't fit neatly into any category. A story so sprawling,
Speaker 1: so detailed, so deeply woven into the fabric of one
Speaker 1: family's life over multiple generations, that it demands your attention,
Speaker 1: whether you believe it or not, this is that story.
Speaker 1: It takes place in rural Tenant See, on a modest
Speaker 1: family farm that sits at the edge of thick forested land.
Speaker 1: It spans more than half a century. It involves a
Speaker 1: grandfather's secret act of mercy toward an injured creature that
Speaker 1: wasn't supposed to exist. It involves a little girl who
Speaker 1: literally ran into that creature one afternoon and had her
Speaker 1: entire world turned upside down. It involves a family that
Speaker 1: allegedly lived alongside a clan of sasquatch for decades, feeding them,
Speaker 1: learning their ways, even picking up fragments of their language,
Speaker 1: all while keeping the whole thing locked away from the
Speaker 1: outside world because they knew they absolutely knew that nobody
Speaker 1: would ever believe them. And the thing is, when the
Speaker 1: story finally did come out, they were right. Most people
Speaker 1: didn't believe them. But here's what I'll say before we
Speaker 1: get into this. I've always believed that every story deserves
Speaker 1: to be heard on its own terms before it gets judged.
Speaker 1: I've sat across from hundreds of witnesses over the years,
Speaker 1: and I've learned something important. The truth doesn't always come
Speaker 1: wrapped in a neat little package with a bow on top.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's messy, sometimes it's contradictory. Sometimes the people telling
Speaker 1: you what they saw can barely hold it together because
Speaker 1: they know how crazy it sounds. So tonight I'm going
Speaker 1: to lay this story out for you the way it
Speaker 1: was told. I'm going to walk you through the claims,
Speaker 1: the characters, the encounters, the evidence that was presented, and
Speaker 1: the controversy that nearly tore the Bigfoot research community apart,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to let you decide for yourself what
Speaker 1: you make of it. This is the story of Janis Carter,
Speaker 1: the Carter Farm, a Sasquatch named Fox, and fifty years
Speaker 1: of what one woman says was coexistence between her family
Speaker 1: and a species that science says doesn't exist. Now, before
Speaker 1: we dive in, let me set the stage a little bit.
Speaker 1: I've covered habituation stories before on this show. I've talked
Speaker 1: to people who claim ongoing interactions with sasquatch on their properties,
Speaker 1: people who leave out food, who hear vocalizations at night,
Speaker 1: who find gifts and signs of visitation. Those stories, while remarkable,
Speaker 1: tend to unfold over months or years. What makes the
Speaker 1: Carter story different, what makes it truly unique in the
Speaker 1: annals of bigfoot research, is the sheer time frame we're
Speaker 1: talking about. This isn't a story that spans a summer
Speaker 1: or a decade. This is a story that allegedly spans
Speaker 1: three human generations and encompasses the entire life span of
Speaker 1: the Sasquatch at its center, from infancy to old age
Speaker 1: to death. If it's true, it represents the longest and
Speaker 1: most intimate account of human sasquatch interaction ever documented. If
Speaker 1: it isn't true, it represents one of the most ambitious
Speaker 1: and detailed fabrications in the history of cryptozoology. Either way,
Speaker 1: it's a story that demands your full attention. I also
Speaker 1: want to note something about the way I'm going to
Speaker 1: tell this story. I've read extensively about this case. I've
Speaker 1: gone through the available evidence, the criticisms, the investigations, and
Speaker 1: the counter arguments, and I've come to the conclusion that
Speaker 1: the most honest thing I can do is present the
Speaker 1: story as comprehensively as I can and let you, the listener,
Speaker 1: make your own call. I'm not going to tell you
Speaker 1: what to believe. That's not my job. My job is
Speaker 1: to give you the information and the context. You need
Speaker 1: to think about it critically and come to your own conclusions.
Speaker 1: To understand the Janis Carter story, you've got to start
Speaker 1: long before Janis was even born. You've got to go
Speaker 1: back to nineteen forty seven to a man named Robert Carter.
Speaker 1: Senor Robert Carter was, by all accounts, a rugged and
Speaker 1: capable man of the land. He was a farmer a
Speaker 1: Tennessee and through and through the kind of man who
Speaker 1: got up before dawn and didn't stop working until the
Speaker 1: sun told him it was time. He and his wife, Lilia,
Speaker 1: had settled onto a piece of property in Monroe County,
Speaker 1: in the southeastern corner of Tennessee, not far from the
Speaker 1: small town of Madisonville. It was farmland, sure, but the
Speaker 1: kind of farmland that bumps right up against serious wilderness.
Speaker 1: The Appalachian foothills, dense old growth, timber hollers, and ravines
Speaker 1: that hadn't seen human footprints in years. The kind of
Speaker 1: country where you could step off your back porch and
Speaker 1: disappear into another world within fifty yards.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: According to the story, as Janis would later tell it,
Speaker 1: sometime around nineteen forty seven, not long after the Carters
Speaker 1: had moved on to the property, Robert Senior was out
Speaker 1: working his land when he came across something that would
Speaker 1: change everything. Deep in the woods, in one of those
Speaker 1: tangled ravines that cut through the property, he found a
Speaker 1: young creature pinned beneath a fallen tree. It wasn't a bear, cub,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a dog. It wasn't anything Robert Carter had
Speaker 1: ever seen in his life. It was small, maybe forty
Speaker 1: pounds or so, and it was covered in hair. But
Speaker 1: its face, its hands, its eyes, they weren't the features
Speaker 1: of any animal that belonged in those woods. This was
Speaker 1: something else, entirely, something that looked back at him with
Speaker 1: an intelligence he couldn't explain. Something that was hurt, terrified,
Speaker 1: and completely helpless. Now here's where the story takes its
Speaker 1: first crucial turn, because a lot of men finding something
Speaker 1: like that in the woods would have walked away. Some
Speaker 1: might have gone for a gun. Some would have convinced
Speaker 1: themselves they were seeing things and never spoken of it again.
Speaker 1: But Robert Carter Senior wasn't that kind of man. According
Speaker 1: to Janis, her grandfather was guided by a simple philosophy
Speaker 1: that defined his entire life. You help what's hurting, no
Speaker 1: matter what it is.
Speaker 2: So he did.
Speaker 1: Robert managed to free the young creature from beneath the
Speaker 1: fallen tree. It was injured, possibly had broken bones, and
Speaker 1: it was in bad shape. He carefully brought it back
Speaker 1: to his barn, his shed, and he set about nursing
Speaker 1: it back to health. He fed it, he tended to
Speaker 1: its injuries, he kept it warm and sheltered. And he
Speaker 1: did all of this in secret, because even in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty seven, even in rural Tennessee, where folks had a
Speaker 1: healthy respect for the strange things that lived in those mountains,
Speaker 1: Robert Carter knew that what he'd found was something that
Speaker 1: would bring him nothing but trouble if the wrong people
Speaker 1: found out. His wife, Lilia knew. She had to know,
Speaker 1: because you can't hide something like that from the woman
Speaker 1: you share a roof with. And eventually his son, Robert
Speaker 1: Carter Junior, found out too. But beyond that tight family
Speaker 1: circle and maybe one or two of their closest neighbors,
Speaker 1: Robert kept the creature's existence locked down tight. Now here's
Speaker 1: the part that really sets this story apart from just
Speaker 1: about anything else in the Sasquatch literature. The young creature
Speaker 1: didn't stay in the barn. According to Janis. At some point,
Speaker 1: after it had recovered enough to move around, its parents
Speaker 1: came for it. The adult Sasquatch, the ones who'd presumably
Speaker 1: been searching for their missing child, found their way to
Speaker 1: the Carter barn and broke it out. But that wasn't
Speaker 1: the end of the story. That was just the beginning.
Speaker 1: Because the young Sasquatch came back. Whether it was because
Speaker 1: of the bond that had formed during those weeks of recovery,
Speaker 1: or because it had imprinted on Robert Carter the way
Speaker 1: young animals sometimes imprint on the humans who raise them,
Speaker 1: or for reasons that nobody will ever fully understand, that
Speaker 1: young creature kept returning to the Carter property again and
Speaker 1: again and again, and Robert Carter, true to his nature,
Speaker 1: kept feeding it, kept looking out for it, kept building
Speaker 1: a relationship with a being that, as far as the
Speaker 1: rest of the world was concerned, simply did not exist.
Speaker 1: They named him Fox. Why Fox? That's a detail that
Speaker 1: doesn't get talked about much, but it matters. The name
Speaker 1: apparently came from the creature's coloring, a reddish brown hue
Speaker 1: to his hair that reminded Robert of the red foxes
Speaker 1: that were common in that part of Tennessee. It was
Speaker 1: a simple, practical name, the kind of name a farmer
Speaker 1: would give to something, not a scientific designation, not something
Speaker 1: grand or mythological.
Speaker 2: Just fox.
Speaker 1: And here's something else that's worth sitting with for a minute.
Speaker 1: Think about what Robert Carter was doing in the context
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty seven America. This was two years after
Speaker 1: the end of World War II. The country was rebuilding.
Speaker 1: People in rural Tennessee were focused on survival, on farming,
Speaker 1: on keeping food on the table and a roof over
Speaker 1: their heads. They weren't thinking about undiscovered primates. The word
Speaker 1: bigfoot wouldn't even enter the American vocabulary for another eleven years.
Speaker 1: When Jerry Crewe's discovery of large footprints near Bluff Creek, California,
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty eight made headlines. The Patterson Gimlin film
Speaker 1: was still twenty years away. There was no bigfoot community,
Speaker 1: no Internet forums, no podcasts, no framework for understanding what
Speaker 1: Robert Carter had supposedly found in those woods. He was
Speaker 1: completely alone with this, just a man, his life, his son,
Speaker 1: and a creature that the world didn't have a name
Speaker 1: for yet. Over the years that followed, according to the
Speaker 1: Carter family account, the relationship between Robert Senior and the
Speaker 1: creature they'd named Fox deepened into something that defies easy description.
Speaker 1: This wasn't a pet situation. This wasn't a man keeping
Speaker 1: a wild animal in a cage. This was, if you
Speaker 1: take the story at face value, something more akin to
Speaker 1: an ongoing, evolving relationship between two intelligent beings who'd learned
Speaker 1: to trust each other. Robert would leave food out for Fox,
Speaker 1: not just scraps, but deliberate offerings. He'd put out vegetables
Speaker 1: from the garden, left over meat, whatever he had, and
Speaker 1: Fox would come, sometimes during the day, sometimes at night.
Speaker 1: He'd take the food, and sometimes he'd linger. Over time,
Speaker 1: the lingering got longer, the distance between them got shorter,
Speaker 1: and then something remarkable allegedly started happening communication. According to
Speaker 1: what Janus later told researchers, her grandfather and Fox slowly,
Speaker 1: painstakingly began to bridge the language gap between them. Robert
Speaker 1: taught Fox simple English words, not full sentences, not grammar,
Speaker 1: but basic vocabulary, words for food, words for greetings, simple concepts,
Speaker 1: and in return, Fox shared words from his own language,
Speaker 1: whatever that language was, with Robert. Robert Carter Senior kept
Speaker 1: a notebook he wrote down the words and phrases that
Speaker 1: Fox used, building what amounted to a crude dictionary of
Speaker 1: Sasquatch vocabulary. This notebook would later become one of the
Speaker 1: most controversial and debated pieces of evidence in.
Speaker 2: The entire case.
Speaker 1: When researchers eventually got their hands on it and analyzed
Speaker 1: the words, they discovered something unexpected. Many of the words
Speaker 1: documented in that notebook turned out to be Cheyenne. There
Speaker 1: were also some Cherokee words mixed in. How a Sasquatch
Speaker 1: in Tennessee would be used using Native American linguistic elements
Speaker 1: is a question that opens up a whole other can
Speaker 1: of worms, one that ties into centuries of indigenous oral
Speaker 1: traditions about the wild people of the forests. But we'll
Speaker 1: get to that now. I want to take a moment
Speaker 1: here to talk about what this kind of habituation would
Speaker 1: actually look like, because I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: hear the word and imagine something relatively quick and easy,
Speaker 1: like leaving out a bird feeder and waiting for cardinals
Speaker 1: to show up.
Speaker 2: But if we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Habituating a large, intelligent, naturally reclusive hominid, we're talking about
Speaker 1: something entirely different. Think about it from Fox's perspective for
Speaker 1: a second. Even if we accept that Robert saved his
Speaker 1: life as a youngster, even if we accept that some
Speaker 1: kind of bond formed during that recovery period, Fox still
Speaker 1: had to make a choice. Every single time he returned
Speaker 1: to the Carter property. He had to weigh the risk
Speaker 1: of being near humans against whatever drew him back. And
Speaker 1: each time Robert had to read the situation correctly, had
Speaker 1: to know when to a pro coach and when to
Speaker 1: back off, when to offer food, and when to simply
Speaker 1: be present without pushing one wrong move, one moment of
Speaker 1: fear or aggression from either side, and the whole thing
Speaker 1: could have collapsed. The Russian researcher igor Bertsef, who would
Speaker 1: later visit the Carter farm, drew an interesting parallel to
Speaker 1: the work of Jane Goodall with chimpanzees. Goodall spent years
Speaker 1: earning the trust of the Gambe chimps before they'd allow
Speaker 1: her close enough to observe their natural behavior, and she
Speaker 1: was working with animals whose, intelligence, while remarkable, is generally
Speaker 1: considered well below whatever a sasquatch might possess. If sasquatch
Speaker 1: are even half as intelligent as the Carter story suggests,
Speaker 1: then the habituation process would have been exponentially more complex,
Speaker 1: more fraught with the possibility of miscommunication and misunderstanding. It
Speaker 1: appears that doctor Lewis Leaky had specifically chosen Jane Goodall
Speaker 1: in part because she lacked formal scientific training, which he
Speaker 1: felt gave her an an uncluttered and unbiased perspective. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. The implication was that Robert Carter, sor a
Speaker 1: farmer with no scientific credentials whatsoever, might have been the
Speaker 1: perfect person to establish first contact with a sasquatch, precisely
Speaker 1: because he wasn't approaching it as a scientist. He was
Speaker 1: approaching it as a human being. The point is Robert
Speaker 1: Carter Sor allegedly spent the better part of twenty years
Speaker 1: building this relationship before anyone else in the family outside
Speaker 1: of Lilia and Robert Junior even knew what was happening.
Speaker 1: Twenty years of feeding, visiting, communicating, and learning. Twenty years
Speaker 1: of keeping the biggest secret in the history of Monroe County, Tennessee.
Speaker 1: And Fox wasn't alone.
Speaker 2: Over those years.
Speaker 1: According to the story, Fox grew from that injured, forty
Speaker 1: pound youngster into a full grown male sasquatch of enormous size.
Speaker 2: He found a mate.
Speaker 1: The Carters called her Sheba, and Fox and Sheba had offspring,
Speaker 1: one of them, a male they'd come to call Blackie.
Speaker 1: So now you didn't just have one sasquatch visiting the
Speaker 1: Carter farm. You had a family, a clan, a small
Speaker 1: group of beings living in the deep woods adjacent to
Speaker 1: the Carter property, with Fox serving as the primary link
Speaker 1: between his kind and the one human family that knew
Speaker 1: they existed. This was the world that little Janis Carter
Speaker 1: was about to stumble into. Janis Carter was born around
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five. She was Robert and Lily Carter's granddaughter,
Speaker 1: and like a lot of kids in rural Tennessee, she
Speaker 1: spent her summers and weekends running wild on her grandparents farm,
Speaker 1: climbing trees, chasing chickens, exploring the edges of the woods,
Speaker 1: doing all the things that country kids do when the
Speaker 1: world is big and they're small and every day is
Speaker 1: an adventure. She was about seven years old the first
Speaker 1: time it happened that put us somewhere around nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 1: The way Jana tells it, she was playing on the farm,
Speaker 1: running around without a care in the world, when she
Speaker 1: came around a corner or a tree or some obstacle
Speaker 1: and literally ran straight into something that stopped her dead
Speaker 1: in her tracks. Standing in front of her was Fox.
Speaker 1: By nineteen seventy two, Fox was no longer that forty
Speaker 1: pound infant her grandfather had pulled from beneath a fallen tree.
Speaker 1: He was now approximately twenty eight years old, and he
Speaker 1: was massive. We're talking about a full grown male sasquatch
Speaker 1: in the prime of his life, hair covered, towering, and
Speaker 1: utterly unlike anything a seven year old girl would have.
Speaker 1: Any frame of reference. For Jenis froze absolute terror, the
Speaker 1: kind of fear that locks every muscle in your body
Speaker 1: and steals the air right out of your lungs. She
Speaker 1: couldn't move, couldn't scream, couldn't do anything but stand there
Speaker 1: and stare up at this impossible thing that was staring
Speaker 1: right back down at her. And then her grandfather was there.
Speaker 1: Robert Carter Sr. Came rushing to his granddaughter's so put
Speaker 1: himself between her and Fox and did something that tells
Speaker 1: you everything you need to know about the relationship he'd
Speaker 1: built with this creature over the past quarter century. He
Speaker 1: stared Fox down. He didn't run, he didn't grab a weapon,
Speaker 1: he didn't shout or panic. He locked eyes with this
Speaker 1: massive sasquatch and held his ground, projecting a calm authority
Speaker 1: that came from twenty five years of mutual trust and understanding.
Speaker 1: And Fox backed off. He moved away, melting back into
Speaker 1: the tree line the way these creatures apparently do, and
Speaker 1: the immediate danger passed. But for seven year old Janis,
Speaker 1: nothing would ever be the same. After that encounter, Robert
Speaker 1: Carter Sr. Was faced with a choice he'd been putting
Speaker 1: off for years. His granddaughter had seen Fox. She was
Speaker 1: old enough to follow him around the property, she was
Speaker 1: old enough to ask questions, and she was old enough
Speaker 1: to accidentally put herself in danger if she didn't understand
Speaker 1: what was living in those woods.
Speaker 2: So he told her. He sat her.
Speaker 1: Down and explained, in whatever way you explained such a
Speaker 1: thing to a child, that there were creatures living in
Speaker 1: the forests around the farm, that they'd been there for
Speaker 1: a long time, that he'd been taking care of them,
Speaker 1: feeding them, building a relationship with them, that the one
Speaker 1: she'd run into was named Fox, and that Fox was,
Speaker 1: for lack of a better word, a friend, but also
Speaker 1: that these creatures were wild, they were powerful, they were
Speaker 1: unpredictable in some ways, and she needed to be careful.
Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine what that conversation must have been
Speaker 1: like from a child's perspective. Your grandfather, this man you
Speaker 1: trust more than anyone in the world, telling you that
Speaker 1: monsters are real and they live in your backyard. Except
Speaker 1: they're not exactly monsters. There's something else, something in between.
Speaker 1: From that point forward, Janice began her own journey of
Speaker 1: interaction with Fox and his family, and it would last
Speaker 1: for the next thirty plus years. But I want to
Speaker 1: emphasize something about that initial encounter, because I think it
Speaker 1: is important. Janis was seven, seven years old and she
Speaker 1: ran into something that, by her description, was a massive,
Speaker 1: hair covered hominid standing upright and staring down at her
Speaker 1: with intelligent eyes. Try to put yourself in the shoes
Speaker 1: of a seven year old in rural Tennessee in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen seventies. There is no Internet to search for answers.
Speaker 1: There is no Discovery channel showing documentaries about Bigfoot. The
Speaker 1: Patterson Gimlin film existed by that point, sure, but a
Speaker 1: little girl on a farm in Monroe County probably had
Speaker 1: not seen it. She had no context for what she
Speaker 1: was looking at none. And then her grandfather calmly steps
Speaker 1: in and basically says, Oh, yeah, that's fox.
Speaker 2: He lives here.
Speaker 1: I've been feeding him for twenty five years. Don't worry
Speaker 1: about it. That moment, that conversation must have rearranged every
Speaker 1: assumption Janis had about the world she lived in. One minute,
Speaker 1: You're a normal kid playing on a farm. The next minute,
Speaker 1: everything you thought you knew about what is real and
Speaker 1: what is not has been turned completely inside out. I
Speaker 1: think about this a lot when I interview witnesses by
Speaker 1: the way, that moment of rupture, that instant where the
Speaker 1: world splits into before and after. Most of the people
Speaker 1: I talked to experience it as adults, and even then
Speaker 1: it shakes them to their core. Janis experienced it at seven.
Speaker 1: That has got to leave a mark on the way
Speaker 1: you see the world for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1: What's interesting, though, is that, from Janis's perspective, what followed
Speaker 1: was not a single traumatic event that she ran from.
Speaker 1: It was the beginning of a long, complicated education. Her
Speaker 1: grandfather became her guide, her teacher, her protector. He had
Speaker 1: spent a quarter century learning the rules of engagement with
Speaker 1: these creatures, and now he was passing that knowledge down
Speaker 1: to his granddaughter. In a strange way. It was its
Speaker 1: own kind of family tradition, just not the kind most
Speaker 1: families passed down. The years that followed Janis's first encounter
Speaker 1: with fox were, according to her account, out, a long
Speaker 1: and sometimes terrifying education in what it meant to share
Speaker 1: your world with a species that wasn't supposed to exist.
Speaker 1: Under her grandfather's guidance, Janis slowly began to learn the rules.
Speaker 2: There were always rules.
Speaker 1: Her grandfather had developed them over decades of trial and error,
Speaker 1: and they were non negotiable. You don't approach them aggressively.
Speaker 1: You don't make sudden movements, you don't challenge the dominant male.
Speaker 1: You bring offerings of food and you present them respectfully.
Speaker 1: You let them come to you, and above all, you
Speaker 1: never ever tell anyone outside the family what's happening on
Speaker 1: this property. By the time Janis was eight or nine,
Speaker 1: she'd begun to observe Fox and his family.
Speaker 2: Group more regularly.
Speaker 1: She'd see them at the tree line. She'd catch glimpses
Speaker 1: of Sheba, Fox's mate, moving through the underbrush with her
Speaker 1: young She'd hear their vocalizations at night, sounds that ranged
Speaker 1: from low grunts and rumbles to high pitched screams that
Speaker 1: would send ice through your veins if you didn't know
Speaker 1: what was making them. In nineteen seventy three, approximately a
Speaker 1: year after her first encounter, Janis claims to have observed
Speaker 1: Fox's mate, Sheba, with their children. She also reportedly witnessed
Speaker 1: Fox engage in a physical battle with a stranger Sasquatch,
Speaker 1: an outsider who'd wandered into the territory. According to Janis,
Speaker 1: Fox's young son, Blackie, who was only about three or
Speaker 1: four years old at the time, actually tried to help
Speaker 1: his father in the fight. The image of a toddler
Speaker 1: sized Sasquatch trying to join a territorial battle between two
Speaker 1: massive adults is one of those details that's either horrifying
Speaker 1: or absurd, depending on where you stand on the credibility question.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing about the Carter story. It's packed
Speaker 1: with details, layers upon layers of observation and claimed interaction that,
Speaker 1: taken together, paint a portrait of Sasquatch behavior that's either
Speaker 1: the most comprehensive first hand account ever assembled or one
Speaker 1: of the most elaborate fictional constructions in the history of cryptozoology.
Speaker 1: Let me give you a sense of the scope of
Speaker 1: what Janis claimed to know. She said she could describe
Speaker 1: their physical appearance in exhaustive detail, from the texture and
Speaker 1: color of their hair to the structure of their faces,
Speaker 1: their hands, their feet. She talked about an undercoat of
Speaker 1: finer hair beneath the longer outer coat. She described the
Speaker 1: way they walked, both upright and on all fours, noting
Speaker 1: that they could move with terrifying speed when they dropped
Speaker 1: to four point locomotion She described their eyes, their teeth,
Speaker 1: even details about the male sexual anatomy that most people
Speaker 1: probably didn't want to hear about, but that she included
Speaker 1: because in her mind, she was trying to be thorough.
Speaker 1: She described their diet. They were omnivorous, according to Janis,
Speaker 1: eating everything from wild plants and berries to deer and
Speaker 1: other game animals, including domesticated livestock when the opportunity presented itself.
Speaker 1: She described their hunting methods in vivid detail, claiming to
Speaker 1: have actually accompanied fox on a hunt at one point
Speaker 1: and watched the way these creatures killed their prey, which
Speaker 1: was apparently swift, brutal, and efficient. She described their breeding habits,
Speaker 1: their family structure, the way mothers disciplined their young, the
Speaker 1: way the dominant male maintained order within the group. She
Speaker 1: described what she believed were their burial practices, suggesting that
Speaker 1: they disposed of their dead and specific ways that might
Speaker 1: explain why sasquatch remains are never found. She described their
Speaker 1: social dynamics with the kind of specificity that you'd expect
Speaker 1: from an anthropologist who'd spent years embedded with a remote
Speaker 1: human tribe. The dominant male maintained order, the females were
Speaker 1: subordinate in certain contexts, but fiercely protective of their young.
Speaker 1: There were territorial disputes with outside sasquatch that sometimes turned violent.
Speaker 1: There was play behavior among the juveniles, rough housing and
Speaker 1: games that looked eerily similar to the way human children interact.
Speaker 1: There were emotional displays brief when a member of the
Speaker 1: group was hurt, anger when boundaries were violated, and something
Speaker 1: that Janis described as affection between bonded pairs. She talked
Speaker 1: about how the sasquatch would sometimes enter the Carter home itself. Fox,
Speaker 1: having been habituated to the property since infancy, apparently didn't
Speaker 1: observe the same boundaries that a truly wild animal would.
Speaker 1: He'd come onto the porch, he'd come through the door,
Speaker 1: he'd rummage through the kitchen if the opportunity presented itself.
Speaker 1: And while this might sound almost comical, imagine the reality
Speaker 1: of living with that. Imagine knowing that at any moment,
Speaker 1: day or night, an eight foot tall, hair covered being
Speaker 1: might walk into your living room. The normalcy that the
Speaker 1: Carter family allegedly developed around these incursions is perhaps one
Speaker 1: of the most remarkable claims in the entire story. Janis
Speaker 1: described incidents where the Sasquatch would take things from the property, blankets,
Speaker 1: food from the freezer, tools, whatever caught their entry. She
Speaker 1: described them watching the family from concealed positions in the
Speaker 1: tree line, sometimes for hours at a time. She described
Speaker 1: them making their presence known through vocalizations, wood knocks, and
Speaker 1: the throwing of rocks and sticks, behaviors that are among
Speaker 1: the most commonly reported in Sasquatch and counter literature across
Speaker 1: the entire continent. She described their intelligence, which she said
Speaker 1: was far beyond what most people would expect. These weren't
Speaker 1: dumb animals stumbling through the woods, according to Janis, they
Speaker 1: were thinking, reasoning, communicating beings capable of planning, deception, emotional expression,
Speaker 1: and even humor. And then there was the language. Building
Speaker 1: on her grandfather's work, Janis claimed to have developed a
Speaker 1: functional understanding of the Sasquatch language. She said it was
Speaker 1: a complex system of vocalizations, gestures, and even some spoken
Speaker 1: words that bore resemblance to Native American linguistic patterns. She
Speaker 1: maintained that Fox had learned enough English to communicate basic ideas,
Speaker 1: and that she'd learned enough of his language to reciprocate
Speaker 1: I need to pause here and acknowledge something. For a
Speaker 1: lot of people in the Bigfoot research community, this is
Speaker 1: where the story jumped the shark. It's one thing to
Speaker 1: claim you saw a Sasquatch. It's another thing entirely to
Speaker 1: claim you had conversations with one. The language claims, perhaps
Speaker 1: more than any other element of the Carter story, were
Speaker 1: what drove skeptics absolutely up the wall. And honestly, I
Speaker 1: get it. It's a lot to swallow. But again, I'm
Speaker 1: telling you the story as it was told. You get
Speaker 1: to decide what you believe. Not everything about the Carter
Speaker 1: family's alleged coexistence with the Sasquatch clan was peaceful. In fact,
Speaker 1: some of the most disturbing elements of the story revolve
Speaker 1: around the creature they called Blackie. Blackie was Fox in
Speaker 1: Sheba's offspring, a male who, according to Janice, grew up
Speaker 1: to be fundamentally different in temperament from his father. Where
Speaker 1: Fox had been bbituated to human contact, where he'd learned
Speaker 1: to trust the Carters through decades of positive interaction initiated
Speaker 1: by Robert Senior, Blackie was a different animal entirely. He
Speaker 1: was aggressive, unpredictable, dangerous, Janis described Blackie as a source
Speaker 1: of constant fear and tension. He didn't have the same
Speaker 1: bond with the human family that his father did. He
Speaker 1: was wild in a way that Fox, having been rescued
Speaker 1: and nursed by Robert Carter as an infant, simply wasn't,
Speaker 1: and that wildness manifested in ways that were deeply troubling.
Speaker 1: According to the book Fifty Years with Bigfoot, Tennessee Chronicles
Speaker 1: of Coexistence, written by Mary Green and co authored by
Speaker 1: Janis herself, published in two thousand and two, and Janis's
Speaker 1: various accounts, Blackie was responsible for some of the most
Speaker 1: frightening incidents on the Carter property. He'd approach too closely,
Speaker 1: he'd exhibit threatening behavior. There were incidents involving livestock being killed.
Speaker 1: And then there were the claims that went even darker
Speaker 1: than that, allegations.
Speaker 2: Of aggressive sexual behavior.
Speaker 1: Toward human women on the property that were among the
Speaker 1: most controversial and disturbing elements of the entire story. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. I'm not going to dwell on those particular
Speaker 1: claims in graphic detail, because, frankly, this isn't that kind
Speaker 1: of show? But I mentioned them because they were a
Speaker 1: significant part of the book, and they became a lightning
Speaker 1: rod for criticism from both inside and outside the Bigfoot
Speaker 1: research community. For many people, these were the claims that
Speaker 1: crossed the line from extraordinary into unbelievable. For others, they
Speaker 1: pointed to a darker reality about what it might actually
Speaker 1: mean to live in close proximity to large, powerful, semi
Speaker 1: wild hominids, a reality that the sanitized, gentle giant version
Speaker 1: of Bigfoot doesn't account for. Janis herself wasn't spared from
Speaker 1: dangerous encounters. She claims that when she was around fifteen
Speaker 1: years old, Fox charged her while she was riding her horse.
Speaker 1: He knocked her off the animal, and she broke her
Speaker 1: leg in the fall. Whether this was an act of aggression,
Speaker 1: territorial behavior, playfulness taken too far, or something else entirely
Speaker 1: depends on how you interpret the story. But it's a
Speaker 1: reminder that even the sasquatch she considered the most trustworthy,
Speaker 1: the one her grandfather had raised from infancy, was still
Speaker 1: a wild and immensely powerful creature operating by its own
Speaker 1: set of rules. Robert Carter, Junior Janis's father had his
Speaker 1: own complicated relationship with the situation. Unlike his father, who'd
Speaker 1: embraced the role of caretaker and ambassador to the Sasquatch clan,
Speaker 1: Robert Junior wanted nothing to do with him. By the
Speaker 1: time his father passed away, Robert Junior was living in
Speaker 1: a mobile home next to the old farmhouse, but Janis
Speaker 1: claimed he preferred sleeping in a motel in town because
Speaker 1: the Bigfoot had a habit of visiting him late at night.
Speaker 1: Without his father there to manage the relationship, to serve
Speaker 1: as the intermediary who'd spent decades's building trust, Robert Junior
Speaker 1: was simply terrified, and who could blame him. Imagine trying
Speaker 1: to sleep in a trailer on a rural Tennessee farm
Speaker 1: while something eight feet tall and weighing several hundred pounds
Speaker 1: come scratching around your walls in the dark. Without the
Speaker 1: understanding and the carefully maintained protocols that Robert Senior had established,
Speaker 1: every nighttime visit became a potential nightmare. After Robert Carter
Speaker 1: Senior died, the dynamics changed significantly. The old man had
Speaker 1: been the cornerstone of the relationship between the Carter family
Speaker 1: and the Sasquatch clan. He was the one Fox trusted.
Speaker 1: He was the one who understood the boundaries. He was
Speaker 1: the one who could, as Janis put it, controlled the situation.
Speaker 1: With him gone, the relationship became more volatile, more unpredictable,
Speaker 1: and considerably more frightening for the family members who remained
Speaker 1: on the property for decades. The Carter family kept their secret.
Speaker 1: They lived with it, dealt with it, and told almost
Speaker 1: nobody outside their immediate circle. The story of Fox and
Speaker 1: his clan was something you whispered about at the kitchen table,
Speaker 1: not something you shouted from the rooftops. But in two
Speaker 1: thousand and two, that all changed. On January second, two
Speaker 1: thousand and two, a woman named Mary Green received a letter.
Speaker 1: Mary Green, who lived in the Cookville area of Tennessee,
Speaker 1: had created a website she called Tennessee Bigfoot Lady.
Speaker 2: She'd set it up.
Speaker 1: As a repository for citing reports, a place where people
Speaker 1: who'd had encounters with large, hair covered hominids in the
Speaker 1: southern United States could share their stories without fear of ridicule.
Speaker 1: Mary was a serious researcher who'd had her own experiences
Speaker 1: with unexplained activity near her home, including strange figures walking
Speaker 1: past her porch light at night, and somebody or something
Speaker 1: breaking into her basement and cleaning out the freezer. She'd
Speaker 1: written about these experiences in her own book, Bigfoot at
Speaker 1: My Door. The letter she received that January day was
Speaker 1: from Janis Carter Koy. Janice had gotten married and her
Speaker 1: last name was now Coy, but she was the same
Speaker 1: Janis Carter who'd grown up on that farm in Monroe County.
Speaker 1: By her own admission, Janis wasn't computer savvy. She typed
Speaker 1: slowly and hunted and pecked her way through the keyboard,
Speaker 1: but what she lacked in technical skills she made up
Speaker 1: for in substance. Her letter was lengthy, detailed, and described
Speaker 1: a lifetime of experiences with sasquatch on her family's property.
Speaker 1: She'd been inspired to reach out after reading a report
Speaker 1: on Mary's website from another woman in a different state
Speaker 1: who described growing up under similar circumstances with sasquatch living
Speaker 1: near her family's home, using methods similar to those her
Speaker 1: grandfather had employed. Mary Green read the letter with what
Speaker 1: she later described as mixed emotions. Janis came across as
Speaker 1: intelligent and articulate, but the claims were extraordinary. Did she
Speaker 1: actually interact with Bigfoot for most of her life? Did
Speaker 1: her grandfather really tame a Sasquatch?
Speaker 2: Was this for real?
Speaker 1: There was only one way to find out. Mary decided
Speaker 1: to investigate. What followed was an intensive series of interviews,
Speaker 1: farm visits, and research sessions that would eventually produce one
Speaker 1: of the most controversial books in Bigfoot history. Mary traveled
Speaker 1: to the Carter farm. She sat down with Janis for
Speaker 1: hours upon hours of recorded interviews, methodically extracting the story
Speaker 1: of three generations of Carter family interactions with the Sasquatch clan.
Speaker 1: She examined the property, She looked for physical evidence, She
Speaker 1: reviewed the notebook of Sasquatch vocabulary that Robert Carter Senior
Speaker 1: had kept, and she came away believing, at least initially,
Speaker 1: that Janis was telling the truth. Mary had initially wanted
Speaker 1: the book to focus on Robert Carter Senior's decades of
Speaker 1: work with the Sasquatch, to honor the old man's remarkable
Speaker 1: achievement and document his methods, But as the interviews progressed,
Speaker 1: the narrative shifted. It became less about the grandfather, and
Speaker 1: more about Janis's own experiences. Janis had so much to tell,
Speaker 1: so many stories, so many observations, that the book took
Speaker 1: on a life of its own. The result was Fifty
Speaker 1: Years with Bigfoot Tennessee Chronicles of Coexistence, published in two
Speaker 1: thousand and two through a small private press under the
Speaker 1: imprint of Green and Koy Enterprises. The first edition was
Speaker 1: limited to just seventy five copies, making it one of
Speaker 1: the rarest books in Bigfoot literature. Copies that surfaced today
Speaker 1: on eBay and collector markets regularly command prices of five
Speaker 1: hundred dollars or more. They also released an audio CD
Speaker 1: titled Communicating with Bigfoot that same year, featuring alleged vocalizations
Speaker 1: of sasquatch near the Carter Farm and somewhat strangely, recordings
Speaker 1: of Janis reciting over two hundred alleged Bigfoot words.
Speaker 2: The book hit the.
Speaker 1: Bigfoot community like a bomb. You've got to understand the
Speaker 1: state of Sasquatch research in two thousand and two to
Speaker 1: appreciate what happened next. At that time, the dominant paradigm
Speaker 1: in the Bigfoot community was what you might call the
Speaker 1: damn Dirty ape theory. Most researchers viewed sasquatch as a large,
Speaker 1: undiscovered primate, something akin to a surviving Gigantopithecus or an
Speaker 1: unknown great ape. Smart, sure, but fundamentally an animal, a
Speaker 1: creature you track, studied, and hoped to eventually photograph or
Speaker 1: collect a specimen. Of The Carter story blew all of
Speaker 1: that up. Here was an account that described sasquatch not
Speaker 1: as a dumb ape, but as a highly intelligent, language capable,
Speaker 1: emotionally complex being that could learn English, form multi generational
Speaker 1: bonds with humans, and exhibit behavior that was more human
Speaker 1: than animal. The book covered everything what they eat, how
Speaker 1: they hunt, how they mate, how they raise their young,
Speaker 1: how they communicate, what they look like from head to toe,
Speaker 1: and everything in between. It addressed sasquatch berths, sasquatch burial practice,
Speaker 1: territorial behavior, inner species relationships, and claims about violent and
Speaker 1: sexual behavior that made a lot of people deeply uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: For a community that was struggling to get mainstream science
Speaker 1: to even acknowledge that sasquatch might exist, the Carter story was,
Speaker 1: to put it mildly, a lot it was too much
Speaker 1: for many researchers, who saw it as the kind of
Speaker 1: outlandish claim that made their entire field look ridiculous. The
Speaker 1: backlash was swift and brutal. Janis Carter Cooy was savaged
Speaker 1: online and in Bigfoot research circles. She was called a liar,
Speaker 1: a fraud, a mentally unstable attention seeker, and far worse.
Speaker 1: People who'd never met her, never visited the farm, never
Speaker 1: read the book, dismissed the entire account out of hand.
Speaker 1: The pylon was relentless, and for someone who Janis's supporters
Speaker 1: described as a sensitive and emotional person, someone who'd expressed
Speaker 1: repeated fears during the interview process that nobody would believe her,
Speaker 1: the response was devastating. One of the most common criticisms
Speaker 1: was the lack of physical evidence after fifty years of
Speaker 1: alleged close contact with the clan of Sasquatch. Critics asked,
Speaker 1: where were the photographs, where was the video, Where were
Speaker 1: the clear footprint casts, the hair samples subjected to DNA analysis,
Speaker 1: the undeniable proof that something extraordinary was living on the
Speaker 1: Carter property. The book did include some photographic evidence, but
Speaker 1: it was far from conclusive. There were blurry, distant images
Speaker 1: that supporters identified as Sasquatch and skeptics dismissed as blobs quatches,
Speaker 1: those frustrating ambiguous shapes that could be anything. There was
Speaker 1: a photograph of Sheba allegedly holding a blanket, but it
Speaker 1: was indistinct at best. There were footprint casts, photos of
Speaker 1: scat that was said to be unattributable to any known
Speaker 1: animal in the region, tree structures. There was the language notebook,
Speaker 1: but there was no smoking gun, no clear unambiguous this
Speaker 1: photograph of Fox standing next to the barn, no video
Speaker 1: footage of Janis handing Fox a bushel of corn. Nothing
Speaker 1: that would silence the critics once and for all, and
Speaker 1: the critics were loud. The story encompasses practically every claim
Speaker 1: ever made about Bigfoot, as investigator Jerry Coleman would later note,
Speaker 1: every detail, every behavior, every aspect of sasquatch biology and sociology.
Speaker 1: It was all there in one package. And while supporters
Speaker 1: saw this comprehensiveness as evidence of authentic long term observation,
Speaker 1: critics saw it as a red flag. It was too complete,
Speaker 1: too convenient, as if someone had assembled every piece of
Speaker 1: Bigfoot lore that existed and woven it into a single narrative.
Speaker 1: The controversy surrounding the Carter Farm drew researchers to Monroe
Speaker 1: County like moths to a flame, and the results of
Speaker 1: their investigations did little to settle the debate. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and four, the story attracted international attention when doctor
Speaker 1: Igor Bertsef, a renowned Russian hominologist who'd been studying relic
Speaker 1: hominids for more than forty years, traveled from Moscow to
Speaker 1: Tennessee specifically to investigate the Carter claims. Bertsef was no lightweight.
Speaker 1: He'd been present at the first Moscow showing of the
Speaker 1: famous Patterson Gimlin film back in nineteen sixty seven, and
Speaker 1: had spent his career researching what the Russians call almus,
Speaker 1: their term for wild men. He'd investigated reports across Russia,
Speaker 1: Central Asia, and beyond. Bertzef spent nearly three weeks at
Speaker 1: the Carter Farm. He examined the property, documented tree structures
Speaker 1: and other alleged signs of sasquatch activity, and created a
Speaker 1: photographic recreation of one of Janis's claimed encounters. The recreation
Speaker 1: depicted a scene from March two thousand and four, when
Speaker 1: Janis had allegedly pulled hair from Fox's wrist while offering
Speaker 1: him garlic. Bertsef had his daughter in law, Lydia, created
Speaker 1: an artistic rendering of the scene with corrections from Jim
Speaker 1: to insure accuracy. Bertzef also visited Mary Green's area in
Speaker 1: Overton County, where he and a small team found more
Speaker 1: tree formations that he said matched structures he'd seen associated
Speaker 1: with wild men in Russia. He also claimed that the
Speaker 1: team was pelted with rocks thrown from the trees, a
Speaker 1: phenomenon frequently reported in sasquatch encounter literature, though they never
Speaker 1: caught a glimpse of who was doing the throwing. Bertsef
Speaker 1: came away as a believer. He felt the Carter Farm
Speaker 1: claims were genuine and the story gave further impetus to
Speaker 1: his exploration of the American Bigfoot phenomenon. His endorsement carried
Speaker 1: weight in some circles, particularly among Russian researchers and the
Speaker 1: more open minded segments of the international hominology community, but
Speaker 1: other investigators came away with very different conclusions.
Speaker 2: Jerry D.
Speaker 1: Coleman was a Tennessee based author and cryptozoological investigator who'd
Speaker 1: been active in the field for decades.
Speaker 2: He was also the brother of.
Speaker 1: Renowned crypto Zowalas Lauren Coleman. Jerry undertook what was probably
Speaker 1: the most thorough on the ground investigation of the Carter
Speaker 1: Farm claims, and his findings were damning. Jerry did the
Speaker 1: kind of basic shoe leather investigative work that, in his view,
Speaker 1: nobody else had bothered to do. He went to Monroe County.
Speaker 1: He drove to the farm, which was located south of
Speaker 1: Madisonville off Route four eleven on Reynolds Road. He talked
Speaker 1: to neighbors. He talked to the Monroe County Fire Department.
Speaker 1: He talked to people at the county building. He went
Speaker 1: to the library. He went to the newspaper office. He
Speaker 1: talked to the landowner who'd hunted the property for decades,
Speaker 1: and what he found, or rather what he didn't find,
Speaker 1: raised serious questions. None of the firemen or police officers
Speaker 1: he spoke with had ever heard of or seen a
Speaker 1: bigfoot in the area. Nobody at the County building knew
Speaker 1: anything about decades of sasquatch activity on fifty eight acres
Speaker 1: of easily accessible land. The library staff had never heard
Speaker 1: anything about it. The newspaper office was equally in the dark,
Speaker 1: and perhaps most tellingly, the neighbors, the people who'd lived
Speaker 1: within a quarter mile of the Carter Farm for years
Speaker 1: and decades, had no knowledge of any Sasquatch clan. In fact,
Speaker 1: one person who identified themselves as a neighbor living less
Speaker 1: than a quarter mile from the Carter Farm publicly stated
Speaker 1: they'd lived in the area for thirty nine years and
Speaker 1: had never seen or heard anything to support the Sasquatch claims.
Speaker 1: This individual also noted that Janis was known locally as
Speaker 1: someone who collected animals, and expressed deep skepticism about the
Speaker 1: entire story. Jerry Coleman also raised pointed questions about the geography.
Speaker 1: Critics noted that the area around the Carter Farm was
Speaker 1: characterized as urban farmland, not the kind of deep, inaccessible
Speaker 1: wilderness where a family of large primates could realistically hide
Speaker 1: from detection for half a century. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. This
Speaker 1: wasn't the Pacific Northwest with its millions of acres of
Speaker 1: unbroken forest. This was rural Tennessee, yes, but rural Tennessee
Speaker 1: with roads, neighbors, and human activity all around. One person
Speaker 1: who visited the Carter Farm with Jerry Coleman, during his
Speaker 1: investigation independently corroborated his skepticism. This individual stated bluntly that
Speaker 1: the whole affair seemed to have originated in the mind
Speaker 1: of one person, and.
Speaker 2: That if Bigfoot did exist.
Speaker 1: This area would be the last place you'd expect to
Speaker 1: find them. The terrain simply didn't support the claims. While
Speaker 1: Tennessee absolutely has areas of deep, inaccessible wilderness, the specific
Speaker 1: area around the Carter property in Monroe County was relatively developed,
Speaker 1: with roads, neighboring properties, and regular human traffic all around.
Speaker 1: But defenders of the story pushed back on this point.
Speaker 1: They argued that Sasquatch are masters of evasion and concealment,
Speaker 1: capable of moving through populated areas without being detail. They
Speaker 1: pointed to the countless reports from across North America of
Speaker 1: Sasquatch sidings and surprisingly developed areas near roads, behind subdivisions
Speaker 1: on the edges of small towns. If these creatures are
Speaker 1: as intelligent as many researchers believe, the argument goes, then
Speaker 1: they don't need millions of acres of untouched wilderness to survive.
Speaker 1: They just need to be better at hiding than we
Speaker 1: are at looking. The defenders also noted that rural communities
Speaker 1: in the South have a long tradition of keeping quiet
Speaker 1: about strange things. If your neighbor tells you he saw
Speaker 1: a wild man in the woods behind his barn, you
Speaker 1: don't call the newspaper. You nod, you take note, and
Speaker 1: you keep your mouth shut because you've probably seen something
Speaker 1: yourself that you can't explain, and you know exactly how
Speaker 1: it feels to worry about people thinking you're crazy. The
Speaker 1: fact that Jerry Coleman's canvassing of local officials and residents
Speaker 1: turned up no knowledge of sasquatch activity might say less
Speaker 1: about the reality of the situation and more more about
Speaker 1: the culture of silence that surrounds these kinds of experiences
Speaker 1: in rural America. The questions Jerry raised were fundamental. After
Speaker 1: fifty years of alleged close contact, How could there be
Speaker 1: not one clear photograph. How could an entire county of
Speaker 1: long term residents be completely unaware of a bigfoot family
Speaker 1: living in their midst How could an untrained individual translate
Speaker 1: an unknown language including abstract concepts. How could police, firefighters,
Speaker 1: and neighbors all have missed what was allegedly a regular
Speaker 1: ongoing presence of multiple large primates on a relatively small
Speaker 1: piece of property. Despite the controversy, or perhaps because of it,
Speaker 1: the Janis Carter story caught the attention of mainstream media.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and five, Janus appeared on the National
Speaker 1: Geographic Channel's program Is It Real? In an episode dedicated
Speaker 1: to Bigfoot. She was credited as Janis Carter Bigfoot contact ee,
Speaker 1: and the appearance put her claims in front of a
Speaker 1: national audience for the first time. For Janisi's supporters, this
Speaker 1: was validation.
Speaker 2: Here was one of the.
Speaker 1: Most respected names in documentary television, giving her story a
Speaker 1: platform for her critics. It was something else entirely, another
Speaker 1: example of entertainment media exploiting sensational claims without sufficient critical examination.
Speaker 1: The National Geographic appearance coincided with Bertsef's visit, as the
Speaker 1: Russian researcher met with a television crew from the network
Speaker 1: at the farm to go over the property's history. The
Speaker 1: convergence of international scientific interest and mainstream media attention briefly
Speaker 1: made the Carter Farm the most talked about location in
Speaker 1: all of bigfoot research. The appearance also brought renewed attention
Speaker 1: to the photographic evidence such as it was. The most
Speaker 1: discussed image from the carter case was a photograph purportedly
Speaker 1: showing Sheiba Fox's mate holding or wrapped in a blanket.
Speaker 2: Near the edge of the woods.
Speaker 1: Supporters pointed to this image as evidence of a real creature,
Speaker 1: noting that it had the quality of an old family photograph,
Speaker 1: the kind of casual, unposed snapshot that suggested authenticity. Critics
Speaker 1: countered that the image was ambiguous at best, noting that
Speaker 1: what supporters saw as a hair covered figure could just
Speaker 1: as easily be a blanket draped over a bush, a
Speaker 1: trick of light and shadow, or any number of mundane explanations.
Speaker 1: There was also a photograph described as showing Blackie at
Speaker 1: the tree line, a dark, indistinct form that could be
Speaker 1: anything from a sasquatch to a shadow to a garbage
Speaker 1: bag caught in the branches. This is the eternal frustration
Speaker 1: of sasquatch photography. Even when people claim to have lived
Speaker 1: with these creatures for decades, the best they can produce
Speaker 1: are blurry, distant, maddeningly vague images that prove nothing to
Speaker 1: anyone who isn't already inclined to believe. Mary Green maintained
Speaker 1: more evidence on her Tennessee Bigfoot Lady website, including additional photographs,
Speaker 1: analysis of the scat samples, documentation of tree structures and
Speaker 1: other physical traces, and supporting material from various researchers.
Speaker 2: Who'd visited the property.
Speaker 1: But when Mary passed away in twenty sixteen and the
Speaker 1: website eventually went dark, much of that supplementary evidence became inaccessible,
Speaker 1: leaving a significant gap in the public record of the case.
Speaker 1: But the attention was a double edged sword. Every new
Speaker 1: piece of media exposure brought fresh waves of criticism. Every
Speaker 1: interview gave skeptics new material to pick apart, and within
Speaker 1: the bigfoot research community, the battle lines were firmly drawn.
Speaker 1: You were either with the Carter story or against it,
Speaker 1: and there wasn't much room for nuance. To understand the
Speaker 1: weight of what happened next, you need to understand who
Speaker 1: Mary Green was, not just as a Bigfoot researcher, but
Speaker 1: as a person. Mary Green was born in nineteen forty
Speaker 1: three in Dayton, Ohio. She'd moved to Tennessee with her
Speaker 1: husband John in nineteen sixty three, settling into a small
Speaker 1: all trailer home in an isolated area near Rickman in Overton, County.
Speaker 1: It was there, in that remote corner of Tennessee that
Speaker 1: she had her own experiences with something unexplained, large figures
Speaker 1: walking past her porch light at night, someone breaking into
Speaker 1: the trailer and rummaging around while her husband worked the
Speaker 1: night shift, her daughter spotting a huge, tall, hairy man
Speaker 1: along Little Spring Creek who actually growled when he saw them.
Speaker 1: The family freezer in the basement would sometimes be cleaned out,
Speaker 1: especially of meat, and there'd be an acrid, bitter stench
Speaker 1: left behind. These experiences had transformed Mary from a skeptic
Speaker 1: into a dedicated researcher who spent years documenting encounters across
Speaker 1: Tennessee and the southern United States. She created the Tennessee
Speaker 1: Bigfoot Lady website as a labor of love, a place
Speaker 1: where witnesses could share their stories. She built relationships with
Speaker 1: researchers across the country and internationally. She earned a reputation
Speaker 1: as thorough, passionate and credible. Cliff Barrickman from Finding Bigfoot,
Speaker 1: later described her website as one of the very first
Speaker 1: bigfoot websites he'd ever encountered. She was a pioneer in
Speaker 1: online sasquatch research, and she put all of that credibility
Speaker 1: on the line when she chose to co author the
Speaker 1: Carter Book. Perhaps the most damaging blow to the Carter
Speaker 1: Story's credibility didn't come from skeptics or outside investigators. It
Speaker 1: came from the woman who'd helped bring it to the
Speaker 1: world in the first place. Mary Green and Janis Carter's relationship,
Speaker 1: which had begun so promisingly in two thousand and two,
Speaker 1: deteriorated badly over the years that followed the book's publication,
Speaker 1: and in December of two thousand and seven, Mary Green
Speaker 1: issued a public statement that sent shockwaves through the Bigfoot community.
Speaker 1: In her statement, posted on Lauren Coleman's Crypto Mundo website,
Speaker 1: Mary laid out her specific reasons for disassociating herself from
Speaker 1: Janis Carter. The accusations were serious. Mary stated that she'd
Speaker 1: caught Janis lying to her on motultiple occasions over the
Speaker 1: preceding two years. She alleged that Janis's husband had pawned
Speaker 1: equipment that Mary had provided for their investigation. She claimed
Speaker 1: that Janis had misused funds she'd received from Mary and others,
Speaker 1: telling them her family didn't have enough to eat. Mary
Speaker 1: expressed deep disappointment that the book hadn't turned out as
Speaker 1: she'd originally envisioned. She'd wanted it to be a tribute
Speaker 1: to grandfather Robert Carter Senior's decades of work with the Sasquatch,
Speaker 1: an honoring of his remarkable achievement. Instead, it had become
Speaker 1: centered on Janis's own claims and experiences. In what was
Speaker 1: perhaps the most devastating passage, Mary stated that she believed
Speaker 1: Janis might be mentally troubled and could possibly be a
Speaker 1: pathological liar, though she acknowledged this hadn't been proven. She
Speaker 1: suggested that Janie should submit herself to a psychiatric evaluation.
Speaker 1: She said she didn't wish to see Janis publicly ridiculed,
Speaker 1: but felt that people exhibiting this kind of behavior desperately
Speaker 1: needed professional help. Mary concluded by saying she'd given her
Speaker 1: all to finding the answers and had failed in some
Speaker 1: ways but succeeded in others, and she stated unequivocally that
Speaker 1: Janis had lied to her on several occasions, and that
Speaker 1: as the evidence stacked up, she'd felt compelled to make
Speaker 1: her findings public.
Speaker 2: This was the co author of the book, the.
Speaker 1: Researcher who'd spent years investigating the claims, who'd conducted the interviews,
Speaker 1: who traveled to the farm, who'd believed strongly enough to
Speaker 1: put her name on the cover and her reputation on
Speaker 1: the line, And now she was walking away telling the
Speaker 1: world she felt she'd been duped. For the Carter Story's critics,
Speaker 1: mary Green's statement was the final nail in the coffin
Speaker 1: for its supporters. It was a sad falling out between
Speaker 1: two strong personalities that didn't necessarily invalidate the underlying claims.
Speaker 1: People pointed out that personal conflicts happened in every field
Speaker 1: of research, and that one person's accusation of lying doesn't
Speaker 1: automatically mean everything in a two hundred and fifty five
Speaker 1: pay book is fabricated. But there's no getting around the
Speaker 1: fact that Mary Green's public repudiation of Janis Carter did
Speaker 1: enormous damage to the story's already battered credibility. Mary Green
Speaker 1: herself continued her Bigfoot research in other areas, maintaining the
Speaker 1: Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research Organization website and investigating reports throughout
Speaker 1: Tennessee and the southern United States. Some researchers felt that
Speaker 1: her association with the Carter case had permanently tainted her credibility,
Speaker 1: but others, including star of Finding Bigfoot and personal friend
Speaker 1: of mine Cliff Barrickman, acknowledged her as a serious and
Speaker 1: dedicated investigator whose early website had been one of the
Speaker 1: pioneering resources in online bigfoot research. Mary Green passed away
Speaker 1: on March seventeenth, twenty sixteen. With her death, the Tennessee
Speaker 1: Bigfoot Lady website eventually went dark, and much of the
Speaker 1: supplementary evidence and documentation she'd compiled related to the Carter
Speaker 1: case became inaccessible. If the story of the Carter Farm
Speaker 1: is true, then it's got a poignant and melancholy ending.
Speaker 1: According to accounts that emerged around twenty twelve, Fox, the
Speaker 1: sasquatch that Robert Carter Senior had rescued as an injured
Speaker 1: infant back in nineteen forty seven, was getting old, very old.
Speaker 1: Janis had claimed that sasquatch could live to be approximately
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty years. Fox had been roughly seven
Speaker 1: years old when Robert found him, which meant that by
Speaker 1: the early twenty tens he would have been approaching his seventies.
Speaker 1: The accounts described Fox as nearing the end of his life,
Speaker 1: aging and weakening in the way all living things eventually do, and,
Speaker 1: according to a claim attributed to Janis, Fox essentially sent
Speaker 1: for her he wanted to say goodbye. Janis, accompanied by
Speaker 1: her youngest daughter and a woman named Sally Raimi, who'd
Speaker 1: been associated with Melbouketchum's DNA study and had served as
Speaker 1: ketchum spokesperson, traveled to a location in the woods near
Speaker 1: the Carter property where Fox was dying. They visited him
Speaker 1: there in whatever place he chosen to spend his final days.
Speaker 1: They paid their respects, and approximately a week later, Fox died.
Speaker 1: Now I've got to be honest with you about something.
Speaker 1: This part of the story hits me differently than the rest.
Speaker 1: I've spent nearly forty years of my life researching these creatures.
Speaker 1: I've talked to hundreds and hundreds of witnesses, and one
Speaker 1: of the things that comes up again and again in
Speaker 1: the accounts of people who've had long term interaction with
Speaker 1: sasquatch is the emotional bond that forms. These aren't just encounters,
Speaker 1: their relationships, and relationships, by their nature, have endings. If
Speaker 1: Fox was real, if this creature truly lived from roughly
Speaker 1: nineteen forty to approximately twenty twelve. That's a lifespan of
Speaker 1: about seventy two years. Seventy two years of existing in
Speaker 1: the space between the wild world and the human one
Speaker 1: seventy two years of navigating a relationship that started when
Speaker 1: a Tennessee farmer pulled him from beneath a fallen and
Speaker 1: ended with that farmer's granddaughter sitting beside him in the
Speaker 1: woods as he drew his last breaths. That's not just
Speaker 1: a Bigfoot story. That's a life story. And whatever you
Speaker 1: think about the truthfulness of the Carter claims, there's something
Speaker 1: deeply moving about the arc of it. I've sat with
Speaker 1: a lot of people who've described the loss of a
Speaker 1: sasquatch they'd come to know, and I'll tell you the
Speaker 1: grief is real, whether the creatures are real or not.
Speaker 1: In any given case, the emotional experience of the person
Speaker 1: telling the story is always genuine. That grief, that sense
Speaker 1: of loss, It doesn't lie. And Janis in every account
Speaker 1: I've heard her give of Fox's passing, carries that grief
Speaker 1: with her like a weight She's never quite been able
Speaker 1: to set down. The account of Fox's death is regardless
Speaker 1: of whether you believe it one of the most emotionally
Speaker 1: resonant elements of the entire Carter story. Here was a
Speaker 1: creature who'd lived his entire life bridging two worlds. He'd
Speaker 1: been rescued by a human as an infant, had spent
Speaker 1: decades as an ambassador between his kind and one human family,
Speaker 1: and now, at the end of his life, he'd called
Speaker 1: those humans to his side one final time. If it's true,
Speaker 1: it speaks to something profound about the capacity for cross
Speaker 1: species bonding, about loyalty, and about the kind of connection
Speaker 1: that can form between beings who, on the surface couldn't
Speaker 1: be more different. If it isn't true, well then it's
Speaker 1: one heck of a story. Some controversy arose around the
Speaker 1: details of Fox's death. An anonymous account circulated online that
Speaker 1: included additional individuals present at Fox's deathbed, including a biologist
Speaker 1: named John. A person claiming to be Janis pushed back
Speaker 1: hard on this version, insisting that only she, her daughter,
Speaker 1: and Sally Raimi had been present when Fox passed away,
Speaker 1: and calling the expanded account a bold faced lie. The
Speaker 1: fact that even the death of this legendary creature couldn't
Speaker 1: escape controversy tells you every everything you need to know
Speaker 1: about the state of the Carter case. Every detail, every claim,
Speaker 1: every element of the story became a battleground. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: So where does all of this leave us? The Carter
Speaker 1: Farm story is now more than two decades old as
Speaker 1: a matter of public record, and more than seventy five
Speaker 1: years old if you count from Robert Carter Senior's alleged
Speaker 1: first encounter in nineteen forty seven. In that time, it's
Speaker 1: been championed, attacked, dissected, dismissed, resurrected, and argued about in
Speaker 1: ways that few bigfoot cases ever have. Let me lay
Speaker 1: out the arguments on both sides as fairly as I can,
Speaker 1: because I think you deserve to hear them. The case
Speaker 1: against the Carter story is substantial. There's no clear photographic
Speaker 1: or video evidence despite decades of alleged close contact. The
Speaker 1: primary researcher involved ultimately accused the primary witness of being
Speaker 1: a pathological liar on the ground. Investigation by Jerry Coleman
Speaker 1: found that neighbors, law enforcement, county officials, and long term
Speaker 1: residents had no knowledge of sasquatch activity in the area,
Speaker 1: the geographical settings arguably too developed and populated to support
Speaker 1: a hidden population of large primates. Many of the claims,
Speaker 1: particularly around language acquisition and complex social behavior, go far
Speaker 1: beyond what most researchers consider plausible even for an undiscovered
Speaker 1: primate species, and some of the more sensational claims in
Speaker 1: the book stretched credibility to its breaking point. The case
Speaker 1: for the story, while less conventional, isn't without merit. The
Speaker 1: sheer level of detail in Janis's accounts is remarkable. If
Speaker 1: it's fiction, it's extraordinarily well constructed fiction, something that even
Speaker 1: skeptics have acknowledged. A number of the behavioral details that
Speaker 1: Janis described back in two thousand and two, things that
Speaker 1: were considered outlandish at the time, have since been reported
Speaker 1: by other witnesses who came forward independently as the Internet
Speaker 1: made sharing such experiences easier. The concept of sasquatch as
Speaker 1: a more human like being capable of language and complex
Speaker 1: social behavior, once considered fringe, has gained increasing acceptance in
Speaker 1: some segments.
Speaker 2: Of the research community.
Speaker 1: Agor Bertsef, an internationally respected hominologist, came away from a
Speaker 1: three week investigation believing the claims were genuine and the
Speaker 1: questions got to be asked, if this is all a fabrication,
Speaker 1: what was the motivation? Janis didn't become wealthy, she didn't
Speaker 1: achieve lasting fame. The book was a tiny private printing.
Speaker 1: What she did get was years of harassment, ridicule, and
Speaker 1: personal attacks that eventually drove her away from the bigfoot
Speaker 1: community entirely. Lauren Coleman, one of the most prominent cryptozoologists
Speaker 1: in the world and the man who published some of
Speaker 1: the most detailed critical analysis of the Carter case through
Speaker 1: his brother Jerry's field Notes, perhaps captured the dilemma best
Speaker 1: when he deserved that. The story couldn't easily be explained
Speaker 1: by either full acceptance or simple dismissal. As Jerry himself
Speaker 1: wrote in his final assessment, the people involved weren't naive
Speaker 1: or gullible. They were people with wants and wishes who'd
Speaker 1: independently and purposely made their choices. And here's the thing
Speaker 1: that I keep coming back to in my own thinking
Speaker 1: about this case. Janie Carter did eventually appear on my
Speaker 1: show through an interview with a former colleague that I
Speaker 1: posted on Sasquatch Odyssey, and I found her to be
Speaker 1: engaging detailed and consistent in her storytelling. Was she telling
Speaker 1: the truth? I honestly don't know. What I do know
Speaker 1: is that her story, whether it happened exactly as she
Speaker 1: described it or not, touches on questions that are at
Speaker 1: the very heart of what we do in this field.
Speaker 1: What would happen if a human family and a Sasquatch
Speaker 1: family actually had to coexist? What would that look like
Speaker 1: over one generation, let alone three? How would trust be built?
Speaker 1: How would it be broken? What would the children on
Speaker 1: both sides make of each other? How would the relationship
Speaker 1: change as the original architect of that trust, the grandfather
Speaker 1: who started it all, aged and eventually passed away. These
Speaker 1: aren't just interesting questions for Sasquatch researchers. They're fundamentally human
Speaker 1: questions about coexistence, understanding, fear, and the possibility that there
Speaker 1: are things in this world that don't fit our existing categories.
Speaker 1: There's also a strange detail about this case that I
Speaker 1: think gets overlooked in the noise of the controversy. Steve Abney,
Speaker 1: a man who claimed to have lived with Janis Carter
Speaker 1: for fifteen months around two thousand and seven to two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, publicly stated that she'd taken him to
Speaker 1: the farm multiple times and introduced him to her grandfather's neighbors.
Speaker 1: He signed a non disclosure agreement with Janis regarding certain
Speaker 1: aspects of his time there, and while his subsequent relationship
Speaker 1: with her deteriorated, he initially came forward as a supporter
Speaker 1: of at least some elements of the story. His involvement
Speaker 1: adds yet another layer of complexity to an already tangled
Speaker 1: web of claims and counterclaims. And then there's the matter
Speaker 1: of the audio CD Communicating with Bigfoot, released alongside the
Speaker 1: book in two thousand and two, featured alleged vocalizations recorded
Speaker 1: near the Carter farm. These weren't the dramatic howls and
Speaker 1: screams that make for exciting television. They were quieter, more
Speaker 1: conversational sounds, the kind of subtle vocalizations that witnesses and
Speaker 1: habituation situations frequently describe. The CD also included Janis pronouncing
Speaker 1: over two hundred alleged Bigfoot words from her grandfather's notebook,
Speaker 1: which was either an extraordinary linguistic document or an elaborate performance,
Speaker 1: depending on your perspective. The words themselves, when analyzed, showed
Speaker 1: connections to Cheyenne and Cherokee languages. Now, you can interpret
Speaker 1: that in several ways. You can argue that it supports
Speaker 1: the idea of a real, independently evolved language with roots
Speaker 1: in the linguistic environment of the American continent. You can
Speaker 1: argue that it suggests the notebook was fabricated using fragments
Speaker 1: of real Native American languages. Or you can take a
Speaker 1: more speculative view and wonder whether the connection between Sasquatch
Speaker 1: vocalizations and Indigenous American languages might point to a much
Speaker 1: older and deeper relationship between these beings and the first
Speaker 1: peoples of this land, one that's reflected in centuries of
Speaker 1: Native American oral traditions about the wild people of the forests.
Speaker 1: I'll also say this, the Carter story came out at
Speaker 1: a time when the Bigfoot community wasn't ready for it.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and two, if you suggested that Sasquatch
Speaker 1: could speak, that they had complex family structures, that they
Speaker 1: buried their dead, that they had something approaching culture, you
Speaker 1: were laughed out of the room. The prevailing view was
Speaker 1: that these were animals, pure and simple, big elusive probably
Speaker 1: don't exist animals.
Speaker 2: But the less.
Speaker 1: But look at where the conversations moved in the two
Speaker 1: decades since. Look At how many witnesses have come forward
Speaker 1: describing exactly the kinds of behaviors that Janis was ridiculed
Speaker 1: for reporting. Language, gift giving, habituation, family bonds, territorial behavior,
Speaker 1: complex vocalizations that seemed to carry meaning. The community hasn't
Speaker 1: fully come around to the view of Sasquatch that the
Speaker 1: Carter story presented, But it's a whole lot closer than
Speaker 1: it was in two thousand and two. As one commenter
Speaker 1: on a Sasquatch forum noted, Janis came under heavy criticism
Speaker 1: when the book was published by the powers that be
Speaker 1: in the Bigfoot community at a time when the damn
Speaker 1: Dirty ape theory was in vogue. Things were discussed in
Speaker 1: the book that were new at that time and weren't accepted. However,
Speaker 1: since the proliferation of information on the Internet and the
Speaker 1: growing acceptance of Sasquatch as a more humani commented species,
Speaker 1: a lot of what she discussed has since been witnessed
Speaker 1: by a good number of other people. Was Janis Carter
Speaker 1: ahead of her time or was she just very good
Speaker 1: at telling people what they wanted?
Speaker 2: To hear.
Speaker 1: That's the question, and it's one that may never be
Speaker 1: definitively answered. The Carter Farm's quiet now. The properties changed hands,
Speaker 1: the old house fell into disrepair. Robert Carter Senior's long gone.
Speaker 1: Robert Junior, who never wanted any part of the Sasquatch situation,
Speaker 1: is gone too. Mary Green, the Tennessee Bigfoot lady who
Speaker 1: brought the story to the world, is gone. Jerry Coleman,
Speaker 1: who investigated it with such thoroughness, passed away in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four, and Fox, if he ever existed, is gone
Speaker 1: as well. What remains is the story itself, preserved in
Speaker 1: a rare and expensive book that most people never hold
Speaker 1: in their hands, in YouTube audio books narrated by devoted fans,
Speaker 1: in scattered forum posts and blog entries, in podcast episodes,
Speaker 1: and in the memories of the people who were there.
Speaker 1: The book Fifty Years with Bigfoot Tennessee Chronicles of Coexistence
Speaker 1: has been out of print for years. Janus has reportedly
Speaker 1: expressed interest in getting it reprinted, which would at least
Speaker 1: make the primary source material available to a new generation
Speaker 1: of researchers and enthusiasts who've only heard the story secondhand.
Speaker 1: I think that'd be a good thing, regardless of where
Speaker 1: you fall on the credibility question, because right now, most
Speaker 1: of the people who have strong opinions about the Carter
Speaker 1: Story have never actually read the primary source material. They're
Speaker 1: going off secondhand summaries, forum posts, and podcast discussions. That's
Speaker 1: like forming an opinion about a court case based entirely
Speaker 1: on what people said about it on social media without
Speaker 1: ever reading the actual testimony. If the book were widely
Speaker 1: available again, people could read it for themselves, evaluate the
Speaker 1: claims on their own merits, and come to their own conclusions.
Speaker 2: That's how it should work.
Speaker 1: It's also worth noting that the Carter Stories had a
Speaker 1: lasting impact on the Bigfoot research community that extends far
Speaker 1: bead beyond the debate over its truthfulness. The concept of habituation,
Speaker 1: the idea that sasquatch can be gradually acclimated to human
Speaker 1: presence and that long term relationships between families and sasquatch
Speaker 1: are possible, has become a major area of interest in
Speaker 1: modern research. Researchers like Tom Powell, whose book The Locals
Speaker 1: explored similar themes of Sasquatch human interaction, have noted that
Speaker 1: many people in rural areas quietly maintain ongoing relationships with
Speaker 1: Sasquatch on their properties, leaving out food, establishing trust, and
Speaker 1: gradually building a rapport that sometimes spans years or even decades.
Speaker 1: Whether the Carter story inspired this line of inquiry or
Speaker 1: simply preceded it, there's no denying that it was one
Speaker 1: of the first widely discussed accounts of long term habituation
Speaker 1: in the modern Bigfoot literature. The story also raised important
Speaker 1: questions about how the Bigfoot research community treats witnesses. The
Speaker 1: savagery of the attacks on Janis Carter was by any measure, disproportionate,
Speaker 1: even if you believe she fabricated everything. The level of
Speaker 1: personal vitriol directed at her was something that made a
Speaker 1: lot of people in the community uncomfortable. Janis herself retreated
Speaker 1: from public life for years, driven away by the harassment
Speaker 1: and ridicule. She only began appearing on podcasts and shows
Speaker 1: again around twenty twenty one, nearly two decades after the
Speaker 1: publication of the book, as the community's attitude toward habituation
Speaker 1: claims had softened and the idea of Sasquatch as a
Speaker 1: more human like being had gained wider acceptance. Because here's
Speaker 1: my final thought on this whole saga. In the world
Speaker 1: of sasquatch research, we spend a lot of time arguing
Speaker 1: about evidence, footprints and hair samples and thermal images and
Speaker 1: audio recordings, and that's important work, but sometimes I think
Speaker 1: we lose sight of the fact that this field, at
Speaker 1: its core, is built on human stories.
Speaker 2: It's built on.
Speaker 1: People like Robert Carter, whoever he really was, making choices
Speaker 1: that most people would never make. It's built on little
Speaker 1: girls running into things they can't explain and spending the
Speaker 1: rest of their lives trying to make sense of it.
Speaker 1: It's built on researchers like Mary Green who put everything
Speaker 1: on the line because they believed they'd found something real.
Speaker 1: And yes, it's built on the critics and the skeptics too,
Speaker 1: the Jerry Colemans of the world who do the hard
Speaker 1: work of verification and accountability. The Carter story is messy,
Speaker 1: it's complicated, it doesn't resolve neatly, the evidence is inadequate,
Speaker 1: the principal witness has been accused of fabrication by her
Speaker 1: own co author, and the physical setting doesn't quite match
Speaker 1: the scale of the claims. But it's also a story
Speaker 1: that nobody's been able to fully explain away, not the skeptics,
Speaker 1: not the believers, not anyone, And in my experience, those
Speaker 1: are the stories worth paying attention to, the ones that
Speaker 1: sit in that uncomfortable space between belief and disbelief that
Speaker 1: won't let you rest easy, no matter which side you
Speaker 1: come down on. Whether Robert Carter Senior really pulled an
Speaker 1: injured sasquatch from beneath a fallen tree in nineteen forty seven,
Speaker 1: whether a little girl named Janice really ran into a
Speaker 1: creature called fox on a Tennessee farm in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: whether any of it happened the way it was told.
Speaker 1: I can't say for certain. Nobody can, But I'll tell
Speaker 1: you this much. Out of the nearly one thousand people
Speaker 1: I've talked to about their encounters over the years, out
Speaker 1: of all the stories I've heard, the Carter story's the
Speaker 1: one that sticks with me. Not because I'm sure it's true,
Speaker 1: not because I'm sure it's false, but because it asks
Speaker 1: the biggest possible question this field has to offer. What
Speaker 1: if they're not just out there in the woods hiding
Speaker 1: from us, What if they've been right next to us
Speaker 1: the whole time? And we just didn't know how to look.
Speaker 1: That's the question the Carter story leaves you with, and
Speaker 1: whatever answer you come to, I hope you came to it. Honestly,
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening tonight, folks. As always, i'd love to
Speaker 1: hear what you think about this one. Hit me up
Speaker 1: at the usual places, and until next time, stay safe
Speaker 1: out there. You never know what's watching from the tree line.
Speaker 1: And hey, one last thing. If you've got your own
Speaker 1: habituation story, if you're one of those people who's been
Speaker 1: quietly living alongside something you can't explain, and you've been
Speaker 1: keeping it to yourself because you're afraid of how people
Speaker 1: will react, I want you to know something. You're not alone,
Speaker 1: and your story matters, whether the world's ready to hear
Speaker 1: it or not.
Speaker 2: Did