Speaker 1: Big Food and Beyond.
Speaker 2: With Cliff and Bobo.
Speaker 3: These guys are your favorites, so like to subscribe and
Speaker 3: rade it.
Speaker 2: I'm stuck s meat.
Speaker 3: Just on USh today and listening, oh watching, always keep
Speaker 3: its watching.
Speaker 2: And now you're hosts Cliff Berrickman and James Bubo Fay.
Speaker 3: Greetings, Bobo. What's happening Man?
Speaker 4: Oh not much, just down south sweating a little bit.
Speaker 3: What are you doing down there?
Speaker 4: I'll just hang up my mom for a few days.
Speaker 3: Please send her my love. She's adorable. I love her
Speaker 3: so much. Give her a big hug for Cliff if
Speaker 3: you could.
Speaker 5: Please will?
Speaker 4: She loves her Cliffy too, who.
Speaker 3: Doesn't Just everyone on Facebook? But besides that good everybody
Speaker 3: likes Cliff people.
Speaker 4: And some real people in person, non digital people.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, like, well real people not bots, because I
Speaker 3: remember forty sixty percent of all online accounts are robots.
Speaker 3: So I feel I love it when people get into
Speaker 3: like philosophical or political arguments with robots. Anybody argues online
Speaker 3: you got to kind of wonder about their metal stability.
Speaker 3: But so no, a lot a lot of big foot
Speaker 3: stuff happening, so cal I imagine, how are you gonna
Speaker 3: be down there a couple more days, A couple more days.
Speaker 6: Cool yeah, I create a flu home just now. She
Speaker 6: was down here for like three days.
Speaker 5: Cool well.
Speaker 3: I was supposed to go to the Blues last week.
Speaker 3: It didn't work out. My car's in the shop, actually
Speaker 3: still in the shop right now. I'm hoping to get
Speaker 3: it back today because this weekend I have plans to
Speaker 3: go up to the Olympic Peninsula. Derek and those guys
Speaker 3: up at the Olympic Project they invited me up to
Speaker 3: go hang out for a few days. But if I
Speaker 3: can get my car back today, I may leave as
Speaker 3: soon as tomorrow and go out there and hit a
Speaker 3: few of my favorite spots solo until I go meet
Speaker 3: up with everybody, and then I got to come back
Speaker 3: on Monday, I think. So I'll be out in the
Speaker 3: woods for the next four or five days. If I
Speaker 3: get my car back, we will see. We have a
Speaker 3: guest today, maybe we should bring him on. And that's
Speaker 3: his second appearance, I believe.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Third, So where have I been?
Speaker 2: Fourth? Fourth?
Speaker 3: Oh my god? No, no kidding, who you're You're You're
Speaker 3: gonna rival Lyle Blackburn soon. For the number of appearances
Speaker 3: on the on the shows, here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Mike can't count himself amongst the prolific Texans.
Speaker 3: Now, nice, Yes, we must love our Texans for some reason. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so we have Mike Mays on today's of course, he's
Speaker 3: he wrote Valley the Apes, you know, the search for
Speaker 3: SaaS quationnary X or whatever. The second byline of that is,
Speaker 3: he's written The Shadow Cats Black Panthers in North America.
Speaker 3: He does a Texas Bigfoot Hunter blog, and he's just
Speaker 3: an all around cool guy and he's out in the
Speaker 3: field of lots. We thought we'd have Mike back on. Mike,
Speaker 3: thanks so much for coming back on with us for
Speaker 3: who knows how many times to Bigfoot and beyond. We
Speaker 3: appreciate you.
Speaker 5: Well, call it three and a half. One time I
Speaker 5: was on with Darryl Collier had had to split the glory,
Speaker 5: so we'll call it three.
Speaker 4: You were carrying the load on that one. We'll give
Speaker 4: you credit for four.
Speaker 5: I appreciate that.
Speaker 3: Well, Nice Sice. What would have you been up too lately?
Speaker 3: Anything good going on in the field. I kind of
Speaker 3: hope there is. Well, I myself have not been out
Speaker 3: this summer. I have been locked up trying to finish
Speaker 3: two different book projects.
Speaker 5: I was successful with one, and I'm about ninety percent
Speaker 5: done with the other. I just decided it was time
Speaker 5: to put my head down and actually finish these things.
Speaker 5: Both of them are multi year efforts for various reasons.
Speaker 5: And then this was also the summer. My wife is
Speaker 5: a high school counselor and she just retired, so she's
Speaker 5: had all kinds of retirement parties and celebrations and things
Speaker 5: like that that I feel like I should be around for.
Speaker 5: So I haven't actually gotten out in the field yet
Speaker 5: this summer. I have managed to go on a couple
Speaker 5: of speaking engagement kind of things, but as far as
Speaker 5: the field goes here goes here in Texas, it's been
Speaker 5: pretty quiet on my end.
Speaker 3: Well, summer's kind of gross in Texas, isn't it n
Speaker 3: as high and humid and kind of nassy out there
Speaker 3: and the thickets. I mean, did you do anything this
Speaker 3: past winter or spring?
Speaker 5: Well, I think the last real big trip I did
Speaker 5: was was actually at the very startup last summer when
Speaker 5: Darryl and I went out to New Mexico. I've done
Speaker 5: some some more local things. I've I've you know, hiked
Speaker 5: through the Sam Houston National Forest a couple times in
Speaker 5: the fall and there's a small window of time where
Speaker 5: the weather is tolerable and the deer hunters aren't out.
Speaker 5: Nothing much happened. We I did get to go into
Speaker 5: aria X with Darryl and and Matt and a couple
Speaker 5: other guys came and joined us. Matt. That was That
Speaker 5: was last summer as well, if I'm remembering correctly. And
Speaker 5: it was fairly quiet there too. So as far as
Speaker 5: any active field experiences for the last few months, not
Speaker 5: much as has been going on, even when I did
Speaker 5: manage to get out. And yes, it's it's pretty gross
Speaker 5: here right now, but it's a it's down a lot,
Speaker 5: it's it's a chilly ninety nine today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're not selling Texas to me, very hard man. Well,
Speaker 3: you know, it's a little bit like, you know, Montana.
Speaker 3: It's easy to sell Montana in the summer. It's harder
Speaker 3: to sell Montana in.
Speaker 5: You know, January and February, and Texas is kind of
Speaker 5: the reverse of that. Come fall, come November, December, January,
Speaker 5: Texas is an easy sell, but summer summer can be rough.
Speaker 3: So it sounds like your heads mostly and in your
Speaker 3: books right now, and your noses on the grindstone trying
Speaker 3: to get these things done. Are either of these cryptid
Speaker 3: related in some sort of way.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: The one that's ninety percent done is a book that
Speaker 5: I'm calling Secondhand Monsters. It's about lesser known, less publicized
Speaker 5: cryptids and mythological creatures and legends and folklore and such
Speaker 5: from not only North America but all around the world.
Speaker 5: I broke North America into regions and did five creatures
Speaker 5: legends from each of those regions, and then I've got
Speaker 5: going to have five each from each of the other
Speaker 5: continents minus Antarctica. And again, the whole idea was to
Speaker 5: kind of highlight some of the stuff that most people
Speaker 5: aren't going to be familiar with. You know, the people
Speaker 5: like myself who are big cryptozoology nerds are going to
Speaker 5: have heard of some of them. But I've made real
Speaker 5: efforts to try.
Speaker 7: To touch on things that haven't been written extensively about before.
Speaker 7: Even if someone might have heard of this animal, this thing,
Speaker 7: there hasn't been a whole lot written about it. I
Speaker 7: didn't want to just duplicate, you know, someone else's work,
Speaker 7: so it's just a longer effort. It's kind of each chapter,
Speaker 7: each little section is its own little essay or vignette
Speaker 7: about one.
Speaker 5: Of these lesser known legends or animals.
Speaker 3: Well, like what well, I just.
Speaker 5: I've just started one. It has to do with the
Speaker 5: sinking of a one hundred and fifty foot schooner in
Speaker 5: the Bay of Bengal. This may not be right, so
Speaker 5: forgive me if this isn't quite right. Off the top
Speaker 5: of my head, I believe it was eighteen seventy four,
Speaker 5: maybe even a few years earlier than that, by a
Speaker 5: giant squit, you know, a real life cracking attack, and
Speaker 5: it was witnessed by another ship saw it take the
Speaker 5: schooner down, And it's something that you know, most people
Speaker 5: aren't aren't that familiar with the survivors. Oh yeah, there
Speaker 5: were some survivors, and you know there were captains, you know, Sundent,
Speaker 5: Captain KK, captain's logs, and you know it's documented that
Speaker 5: had happened. So that's that's the latest one I just
Speaker 5: started on. I just just finished up. I did a
Speaker 5: chapter on a creature they call the killer of elephants
Speaker 5: in Africa. I've done let's see various lake monsters Lake
Speaker 5: Bacall and Russia just did a chapter on what they
Speaker 5: call the silver swimmers of Lake Bacal, which are ten
Speaker 5: foot long humanoid like what it sounds like swimmers that
Speaker 5: were encountered by Russian Navy divers who were training. Lake
Speaker 5: Bacall for those who don't knows, in Siberia, and it
Speaker 5: is thought to be the oldest lake on the planet
Speaker 5: and also the deepest, so it makes it an ideal
Speaker 5: spot for marine divers to practice at great depth. And
Speaker 5: several men were killed during that incident, not directly by
Speaker 5: the creatures they witnessed, but they freaked out so bad
Speaker 5: that they hurried too fast up from this great depth.
Speaker 5: They all got the bends decompression sickness. And this took
Speaker 5: place during Cold War years and the Russian Navy was
Speaker 5: strapped for cash. Apparently they only had one decompression chamber
Speaker 5: ready to go, so three guys just laid there and
Speaker 5: died in agony after it was all over.
Speaker 4: So you do that really happens. I've read all about that.
Speaker 4: I wasn't sure what that was.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, that's the beauty of it is, you
Speaker 5: know some of these things. I think it's a fact
Speaker 5: that there was some kind of incident, But you know,
Speaker 5: you don't have to look in anything involves a government,
Speaker 5: you don't have to look too much farther than our
Speaker 5: own two. And this whole UAP thing that's going on,
Speaker 5: and we're finding out how much has been hidden from us.
Speaker 5: And I don't think there's any reason to believe that
Speaker 5: the old Soviet Union was any better about letting their
Speaker 5: dirty laundry out than we were. So I think it's
Speaker 5: one of those deals that something happened. Was it exactly
Speaker 5: what the mythology around it has come to describe, I
Speaker 5: don't know, but it's a that's part of the fun
Speaker 5: of the of doing the whole project. Some things are
Speaker 5: are better documented than others.
Speaker 6: But Russian files actually in this guy not got out
Speaker 6: like official files that were real Like it's hard to
Speaker 6: I know you probably don't speak or read Russian.
Speaker 5: But right right, yeah, these were. There was a and
Speaker 5: I make noted that there's a Russian He was a
Speaker 5: scientist with the government who later became a big UAP guy,
Speaker 5: and he has a shaky reputation. He has revealed some
Speaker 5: things that are absolutely true, and some other things, at
Speaker 5: least to this point, no one else seems to be
Speaker 5: able to verify. So it depends on who you talk
Speaker 5: to as to what this guy's reputation is. But you know,
Speaker 5: it's it's a legend. That's the beauty of this kind
Speaker 5: of book. It's about legends and folklore.
Speaker 4: I expected you to sell these things, Mike.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, of all the road trips I'd like
Speaker 5: to make, I'm not sure Siberia is the number one
Speaker 5: spot on my list. So, but you know, all actuality,
Speaker 5: it's the lake. I got to know a little bit
Speaker 5: about it. It's it's it's they call it the cold
Speaker 5: or the Russian Galapagos, because it's just teeming with life.
Speaker 5: And it's not what people think of when they think
Speaker 5: of Siberia. They think of the frozen wasteland where the
Speaker 5: Soviet unions sent their political prisoners to go rotten magulags
Speaker 5: and so forth. And certainly there are spots in Siberia
Speaker 5: like that, and the weather can be very, very harsh,
Speaker 5: but this is a spot with a lot of life,
Speaker 5: and it also has a it's supposed to have some
Speaker 5: kind of lockedness style monster in it as well, and
Speaker 5: it's also a hotbed for UFO stuffs. So the call
Speaker 5: is a is a strange place. I'll just leave it
Speaker 5: at that.
Speaker 3: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back after these messages. So the report's
Speaker 3: back closer to home though, because you know, you don't
Speaker 3: have much of a chance to go to Siberia, as
Speaker 3: you mentioned, but there are things that you can actually
Speaker 3: do something about or maybe visit the locations. What are
Speaker 3: some of the things, and maybe back home in your
Speaker 3: state of Texas that you've been digging into a little
Speaker 3: more deeply, like any more black cat reports popping up
Speaker 3: or something that you've had a chance to go investigate.
Speaker 5: Occasionally, something will pop up mostly and I'm sure you
Speaker 5: guys see a lot of the same emails and instagrams
Speaker 5: and things that I see. You know, some photo pops up,
Speaker 5: you know, Uncle so and so took this on the
Speaker 5: back forty you know in such and such Texas, and
Speaker 5: you'll see that same email in that same photo with
Speaker 5: ten different backstories to it. So you have no idea
Speaker 5: where it really came from. That has happened. I'll get excited,
Speaker 5: I'll see a picture and start reaching out to try
Speaker 5: to get some more details, and then three more people
Speaker 5: will send it in, each saying it was from a
Speaker 5: different location from a friend's game camera that they personally know.
Speaker 5: And it's frustrating because I really believe there's a possibility
Speaker 5: with some of them that the photo might be genuine.
Speaker 5: Now it might have been taken on a game preserve
Speaker 5: somewhere in Africa or Asia or something like that, or
Speaker 5: Big Cat sanctuary, but the pictures often appear like they're genuine,
Speaker 5: but the backs where you can't track any of them
Speaker 5: down because you just don't know which rabbit to chase.
Speaker 5: And that's the frustrating part of it. And I don't
Speaker 5: know why that is so prevalent, but it is. Those
Speaker 5: kinds of experiences, along with these same photos circulate on
Speaker 5: a yearly basis. Or the picture I use for the
Speaker 5: cover of the book. People will send that to me saying, hey,
Speaker 5: look I took this, and I'm like, no, you didn't.
Speaker 5: You No, no, you didn't because you know, and they
Speaker 5: obviously haven't read the book because it's it's on the cover.
Speaker 5: And I don't know.
Speaker 3: Why people do that.
Speaker 5: I do think often the people who send it to
Speaker 5: me are the ones being duped by someone else, but
Speaker 5: that happens all the time. But it's just it's very
Speaker 5: difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff in those instances.
Speaker 2: One thing I was curious about that I don't think
Speaker 2: we touched on the first time that we talked about
Speaker 2: your book Shadowcats, and one of that. We cover a
Speaker 2: lot of classic Sasquatch cases on the show and listeners
Speaker 2: really love that. Obviously, you have things like Ruby Creek
Speaker 2: and eight Kenyon and the William Row account in the
Speaker 2: albert osmind account. I was wondering, are there class cases
Speaker 2: in the Black Panther record. I mean, I know there
Speaker 2: is a historical record, but are there are there certain
Speaker 2: ones that really captured people's attention or that had a
Speaker 2: lot of subsequent information that you could track down big
Speaker 2: historical cases in that realm.
Speaker 5: Well, there's nothing that would rival the interest in those
Speaker 5: Sasquatch related classics that you mentioned. There are instances where
Speaker 5: I felt like there should have been more interests, There
Speaker 5: should have been more attention from some kind of government agency.
Speaker 5: The best example I could think of there was a
Speaker 5: study done up in near Gwelph, Ontario, Canada, and there
Speaker 5: were rumors of mountain lions, you know, being seen and
Speaker 5: spotted by the locals, and of course the game and
Speaker 5: fishing game, folks, I don't know, there's no you know,
Speaker 5: there might be one coming through every now and then,
Speaker 5: but it's just a passer through. It's not that we
Speaker 5: don't have a breeding population. Blah blah blah. So this
Speaker 5: gentleman set out to have to do a study and
Speaker 5: try to get to the bottom of whether or not
Speaker 5: there were breeding populations of mountain lions in this area.
Speaker 5: So a lot of trained observers of wildlife biologists. I
Speaker 5: would equate it to They weren't all professionals, but I
Speaker 5: would equate it to like when the audubn Society does
Speaker 5: a bird count. These are dedicated bird watchers who are
Speaker 5: out every weekend on their own. They know their birds
Speaker 5: and so forth. These were people that were naturalists and
Speaker 5: some of them were professional, but they knew what a
Speaker 5: mountain lion looked like, and they knew what a mountain
Speaker 5: lion didn't look like. And I forget how many accounts
Speaker 5: there were, but there were a significant number of eye
Speaker 5: witness in the field notes of the study where they
Speaker 5: saw quote, black mountain lions end quote. There was one
Speaker 5: game camera picture of a clearly a large, bulky black cat.
Speaker 5: It's featured in the book, and it was featured on
Speaker 5: the front page of the report that was ultimately produced
Speaker 5: from this and it just says in the caption black
Speaker 5: jaguar photographed outside Guelph, Ontario and the date, and then
Speaker 5: that's all that's said about it. Nothing else is said.
Speaker 5: Then they go on, you know, the study was, of
Speaker 5: course to find out if there were mountain lions around.
Speaker 5: They found out, hu, you know, there actually are. They
Speaker 5: did not seem to want to stray outside of what
Speaker 5: the mission statement of the study was about. And this
Speaker 5: this strange, these visuals of these large black, long tailed
Speaker 5: cats that aren't supposed to exist in North America, much
Speaker 5: less a photograph of what the author of the study
Speaker 5: him self labeled as a black jaguar in Canada. It
Speaker 5: was mentioned and then but that was it and there
Speaker 5: was no follow up whatsoever. Oh that's bizarre.
Speaker 2: I guess the big difference maybe would be that since
Speaker 2: we did have jaguars in the southern part of what's
Speaker 2: now the United States for so long, I mean, I
Speaker 2: guess there were still jaguars surviving in Appalachia just until
Speaker 2: the eighteen hundreds, and even in some places supposedly like
Speaker 2: the early nineteen hundreds, that it really wouldn't be as
Speaker 2: strange or unusual to see big cats, and since jaguars
Speaker 2: are melanistic, it wouldn't be as strange as you know,
Speaker 2: apes or mountain devils or wildman or whatever. And so
Speaker 2: maybe it's not that there are no historical quote unquote
Speaker 2: classic cases, just because they were seen as frequently as
Speaker 2: any other normal wildlife on the landscape. And it's only
Speaker 2: now that it seems mysterious that people see black cats,
Speaker 2: maybe within the last half of the twentieth century, early
Speaker 2: part of the twenty first century, that it's quote unquote
Speaker 2: strange or unusual or anomalists.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I've got it now in front of me.
Speaker 5: The study was conducted by a gentleman named Rick Rosotte Rosatte,
Speaker 5: you can look it up. It was a photo in
Speaker 5: question that I've been discussing, was taken outside of Guelph, Ontario,
Speaker 5: in April of twenty ten, and it was identified simply
Speaker 5: as a black jaguar, and not much else was said
Speaker 5: about it in the report itself. It does mention there
Speaker 5: were multiple sightings of black mountain lions or large black cats,
Speaker 5: but that's about as far as it goes back to
Speaker 5: your point, Matt, depending on where you are, you're correct
Speaker 5: in that the black cat phenomenon is not considered anything
Speaker 5: particularly unusual in some places. Back close to where I
Speaker 5: grew up in East Texas, the Piney Woods area of
Speaker 5: East Texas near Big Thicket Country, a black panther was
Speaker 5: nothing that was. It certainly wasn't common. You didn't people
Speaker 5: didn't claim to see them all the time every day
Speaker 5: or anything like that. But it wasn't that unusual either,
Speaker 5: and no one seemed to really bad an eye about
Speaker 5: it whenever one was brought up. And of course they
Speaker 5: get blamed for every weird noise in the woods. Oh
Speaker 5: that's a panther screaming, you know, howling whatever, And that's
Speaker 5: just the way it was. And down in my part
Speaker 5: of the world, if you get ten twelve people in
Speaker 5: a room, somebody in there will say that they've seen one,
Speaker 5: or know somebody has someone in their family who's seen one.
Speaker 5: It's a much more prevalent thing than a sasquatch sighting.
Speaker 6: Is.
Speaker 5: People that will laugh in your face about a bigfoot
Speaker 5: sighting will they'll fight you if you try to tell
Speaker 5: them there's no such thing as a black panther because
Speaker 5: you know, they know what they saw, or my grandpa
Speaker 5: wouldn't lie, you know, the whole range of things. So
Speaker 5: it's in some places it's just embedded in the culture.
Speaker 5: Is just another animal that lives out in the woods,
Speaker 5: and so yeah, it's not considered anything that would be
Speaker 5: a big deal per se. I would think though, as
Speaker 5: far north as Canada and with a scientific study with
Speaker 5: wildlife biologists running it, they should know that, hey, that's
Speaker 5: not supposed to be here and that would warrant further investigation.
Speaker 5: But it just doesn't seem to have done. So I
Speaker 5: guess the parameters of a grant or such you have.
Speaker 5: You know, they're giving you some money to do this,
Speaker 5: but it's to do a specific thing and that thing only,
Speaker 5: and maybe there was no money to follow up on it.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it seems so plausible. We were just
Speaker 2: talking about this on a member's episode recently, so these
Speaker 2: this group, you know, our main listenership hasn't heard this conversation.
Speaker 2: But we were just talking about a video essay that
Speaker 2: was done by I think it was Luke Caverns, and
Speaker 2: I'll post a link to that in the show. Not
Speaker 2: it's been talking about the survival of the American jaguar,
Speaker 2: which was historically referred to as the American tiger t
Speaker 2: y g R. And so there's a lot of these
Speaker 2: old references, but that you know, you see jaguars reflected
Speaker 2: in all sorts of expedition logs and correspondences and media
Speaker 2: articles going back from the you know, seventeen hundreds clear
Speaker 2: through to the early nineteen hundreds. And I know that
Speaker 2: some of those jaguars, I think some of the later
Speaker 2: ones even collected, were up in Ohio. And you think, well,
Speaker 2: just on the other side of the lake there, on
Speaker 2: the other side of Lake Erie is Ontario there and
Speaker 2: looks like gelf is just a bit west of Toronto,
Speaker 2: So it doesn't seem too far fetched. But it's just
Speaker 2: kind of amazing to me that at least with Sasquattry,
Speaker 2: there's been a number of efforts. Now they might have
Speaker 2: been mostly amateur or volunteer efforts from the Pacific Northwest
Speaker 2: Expeditions to Peter Burns Bigfoot Information Center, to the BFRO,
Speaker 2: the NAWAC, the Olympic Project on, and has there ever
Speaker 2: been a real effort to try to go after or
Speaker 2: intentionally encounter, photograph document black panthers in North America that
Speaker 2: you're aware of.
Speaker 5: Not that I'm aware of. No, And you know, this
Speaker 5: can kind of go back to, you know, the frustration
Speaker 5: I had trying to get those black hairs that were
Speaker 5: sent into me. Gentlemen in Central Texas contacted me through
Speaker 5: my blog years ago saying that he hit a large
Speaker 5: black cat with his vehicle traveling on a farm to
Speaker 5: market highway in Central Texas, and long story short, he
Speaker 5: banged up his car pretty good and embedded on the
Speaker 5: grill and on the bumper were these black hairs. And
Speaker 5: he asked me if I would like him to collect
Speaker 5: them and send him in to me. And of course absolutely.
Speaker 5: Once I had him in my possession, couldn't find anybody
Speaker 5: to look at him. Nobody would. And I didn't just
Speaker 5: take the guy's word for it. Had a friend at
Speaker 5: that time in the Nawac whose hobby was looking at
Speaker 5: things under a microscope, and he was he was familiar
Speaker 5: with hair morphology of pretty much every animal, every mammal
Speaker 5: in North America, and he had a guide to look
Speaker 5: at and so forth. And he he looked at them,
Speaker 5: he could not identify them. He said it wasn't bear,
Speaker 5: it wasn't coyote or wolf, it wasn't feral hog, it
Speaker 5: wasn't a dog. And he actually said the closest thing
Speaker 5: he said it was not exact, but the closest thing
Speaker 5: he could match it up to was a was a leopard.
Speaker 5: And well, no, those were sent in to old Darby,
Speaker 5: and I'm waiting to hear back from those. You know.
Speaker 5: I know most people associate Darby or Cut's efforts with
Speaker 5: sasquatch evidence, but he was actually collecting evidence for all
Speaker 5: kinds of you know, anything unusual and possibly new or
Speaker 5: different out of place, and so he was happy to
Speaker 5: get those. But it took nearly a decade from the
Speaker 5: time I received them until Darby's study came along. Before that,
Speaker 5: I sent I contacted pretty much every biology department at
Speaker 5: every college, every university in the state of Texas, and
Speaker 5: I got two replies. One was I won't say the
Speaker 5: name of the school, but basically it was just a
Speaker 5: lecture telling me that I was wasting my time in
Speaker 5: his time and there was no such thing. And I said, well,
Speaker 5: how do you know there's no such thing? He said,
Speaker 5: because there's no evidence. I said, well, I think maybe
Speaker 5: I have evidence. He said, well, your evidence is invalid.
Speaker 5: I said, well, why do you say that? He says,
Speaker 5: because there's no such thing. And so it was this circuitous,
Speaker 5: frustrating argument with this guy just couldn't and wouldn't even
Speaker 5: be open minded enough to look at it. I wouldn't
Speaker 5: ask anybody to do DNA testing. I just said, can
Speaker 5: you look at the US under a microscope? Maybe we
Speaker 5: can eliminate it is something common, you know, right away,
Speaker 5: and nobody was willing to do it.
Speaker 3: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
Speaker 3: Will be right back after these messages.
Speaker 5: The other university was in southeast Texas, and the gentleman
Speaker 5: I talked to was the head of the department. He
Speaker 5: was initially quite enthusiastic about it. And this was in
Speaker 5: the years. I forget which hurricane it was. I don't
Speaker 5: remember if it was Rita or which hurricane it was,
Speaker 5: but had blown through done a lot of damage and
Speaker 5: it really taken down a lot of trees and vegetation.
Speaker 5: And he was out near Annawac, Texas, which is south
Speaker 5: of Beaumont, but kind of between Beaumont and Houston, very
Speaker 5: marshy along the coast and he told me, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: I saw one myself, and you know outside that, you know,
Speaker 5: close to Annawak after the hurricane, and you know this,
Speaker 5: this is the head of the department talking to me.
Speaker 5: And he was, yeah, yeah, you know. Let me tell you,
Speaker 5: he says, now, he was mainly a herb guy. He said,
Speaker 5: let me talk to my mammal guy and we'll get
Speaker 5: back with you. I was like, all right, And a
Speaker 5: week went by, two weeks went by, I never heard
Speaker 5: from so I gave him another call. I didn't want
Speaker 5: to bother him, bug him, but at the same time,
Speaker 5: I wanted to get somebody to look at this stuff.
Speaker 5: And when I got him the second time, his whole
Speaker 5: tone was different, and he said, no, they're not interested.
Speaker 5: There's no such thing as black panthers. I might be
Speaker 5: on speculation, but I figured what happened is he went
Speaker 5: to his mammal specialist and that guy gave him a
Speaker 5: hard time about it and kind of gave him the
Speaker 5: usual lecture that reserved for people like me. And I
Speaker 5: don't know if he was embarrassed or what, but he's like, no,
Speaker 5: we don't wan anything to do with it. And so
Speaker 5: they sat in my Night's Dan drawer at my house
Speaker 5: for nearly ten years until Darby orcut Study came around.
Speaker 5: But they are in his hands now and I'm hopeful. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I got like faith in Darby.
Speaker 3: I speak to him fairly often, and he's very close
Speaker 3: lipped about a lot of different things. But I know
Speaker 3: that there is movement. And I've spoken to a couple
Speaker 3: of people in the last two months voicing frustration or
Speaker 3: impatience really is what it is with the whole thing.
Speaker 3: How come we haven't heard anything then and whatever else?
Speaker 3: And they can nitpick and invent issues and stuff with it.
Speaker 3: And I kept telling him, you know, even if they
Speaker 3: had a positive full genome today sasquatches are real, we
Speaker 3: wouldn't hear anything about it for two or three years
Speaker 3: until the whole thing's published. And they don't have a
Speaker 3: full genome right now. But there are interesting samples, and
Speaker 3: a lot of samples have been identified, but they have
Speaker 3: not been released yet because the easily identifiable ones are
Speaker 3: they are the ones that are not sasquatches. So, and
Speaker 3: of course, think about the media and social media and
Speaker 3: all that kind of stuff. If they start releasing negative hits,
Speaker 3: then that's everybody that's all everybody's gonna hear about it.
Speaker 3: But turn into another doctor Brian Sykes situation where where
Speaker 3: he announces a bunch of things that are not yet
Speaker 3: he's and therefore yetties don't exist. So Darby knows what
Speaker 3: he's doing. Everybody out there needs to have a little
Speaker 3: bit of patience. I think, Yeah, And it's hard.
Speaker 5: We live and you know, we're the kind of people
Speaker 5: that you know, stand in front of a microwave and
Speaker 5: yell hurry, you know, when we're heating something up for
Speaker 5: twenty five to thirty seconds. And yeah, we are instant
Speaker 5: gratification type people in this society that we're in now.
Speaker 5: So it's hard. I appreciate, you know, how how disciplined
Speaker 5: he's being, and how tight lippt he's been, and certainly
Speaker 5: from what little I can tell from the outside, and
Speaker 5: seems like like he and his team are going about
Speaker 5: things the right way.
Speaker 3: So I have high hopes for it.
Speaker 5: But but we'll see it. You know. At least I
Speaker 5: finally had somebody, you know, willing to take a look
Speaker 5: at him. That's all I really ever wanted.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's not just one person either, that's another
Speaker 3: big misconception. People have told me Darby's not even a scientist.
Speaker 3: You can't be trusted at these samples. Now he's not
Speaker 3: a scientist, You're absolutely correct. He is the guy that
Speaker 3: gets scientists to talk to one another who normally wouldn't
Speaker 3: speak to another. He has I think, I don't think
Speaker 3: I'm an exaggerator exaggerating at all when I say I
Speaker 3: believe he has at least a dozen or more scientists
Speaker 3: that are actually working very closely with him. So yeah,
Speaker 3: and I could be wrong abou the number. I don't
Speaker 3: really know. Again, but I was exciting. You know, he's
Speaker 3: certainly kind of managing the whole thing.
Speaker 5: I kind of equate him to a general manager of
Speaker 5: a sports franchise. You know, he collects the talent, puts
Speaker 5: it together, and then lets them do their thing. And
Speaker 5: he's not the coach, he's not the player, but he's
Speaker 5: overseeing the whole thing and making sure all the everybody
Speaker 5: that needs to talk to one another is and that
Speaker 5: left hand knows what the right hand's doing. And and
Speaker 5: again he seems to have accumulated a team of people
Speaker 5: that know what they're doing. So very hopeful, and now
Speaker 5: I would like it to go faster. Like everybody else,
Speaker 5: I would love to hear something. But in some ways,
Speaker 5: I think, and maybe I'm making myself feel better. I
Speaker 5: think the longer it goes, the better sign it might be. Yeah,
Speaker 5: hundred percent. So, And it's been it's been a little
Speaker 5: over two years now since I sent those in, And
Speaker 5: I do check in with him from time to time,
Speaker 5: and like you said, he's very closed live. He'll just
Speaker 5: tell me, yes, things are things are moving along, and
Speaker 5: you know, that's about all he'll say, you know, And
Speaker 5: I understand, but I get why people are a little
Speaker 5: impatient too. It's, you know, people aren't familiar with the
Speaker 5: processes and the steps and the need to be able
Speaker 5: to duplicate results and things like that, and just it
Speaker 5: takes time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, nothing like this has ever been done nothing, you know,
Speaker 3: all the other reports that you've about DNA and all
Speaker 3: that stuff never been done before. He's doing it the
Speaker 3: right way, which takes a long time.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I think along the lines of evidence, because
Speaker 2: I will have a link to your book Shadow Cats
Speaker 2: and the show notes there. So the photo that you
Speaker 2: reference that's on the cover, anybody can go see that.
Speaker 2: Just click the link and the show notes today Amazon listing.
Speaker 2: It's right there. Your book has a lot of super
Speaker 2: cool photo evidence. But since we reference that photo in particular,
Speaker 2: do you want to tell everybody the story behind that photo?
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's a photo. This is one of the
Speaker 5: pictures that goes round and round and comes with, you know,
Speaker 5: eighteen backstories. And it's somewhat controversial to a lot of
Speaker 5: people who claim that it's it's just a big house cat,
Speaker 5: and I don't know, you know, it's I look at that,
Speaker 5: I don't see housecat. I see a lot of pictures
Speaker 5: where I do think, okay, that is a housecat.
Speaker 3: This photo.
Speaker 5: I was able to track down the family that took it.
Speaker 5: It was from Iberia Parish, Louisiana, and they were having
Speaker 5: a kind of a family I don't know if it
Speaker 5: was a formal family reunion, but there was kind of
Speaker 5: a family to get together and a bunch they were
Speaker 5: outside and they were eating and they're probably out playing
Speaker 5: washers and all kinds of stuff out there and the
Speaker 5: lookout walking across the pasture the field, there is this big, old, long,
Speaker 5: long tailed black cat and they snapped this picture. Now,
Speaker 5: the Louisiana Fishing Game folks came out because they called them,
Speaker 5: and they came out and they did some sort of recreation,
Speaker 5: and they told the family that it was it was
Speaker 5: the size of a house cat. They were mistaken. It
Speaker 5: wasn't as big as they thought. And to be fair,
Speaker 5: perspective is something that's always difficult to ascertain when you
Speaker 5: talk to witnesses, and what was the animal seen really
Speaker 5: truly really big or was it closer than you thought
Speaker 5: it was, was it really small or was it just
Speaker 5: farther away than you thought it was? You know that
Speaker 5: kind of thing. And if there's no landmarks, you know,
Speaker 5: you're out in the middle of a pasture. It's hard
Speaker 5: to nail down exactly where this thing was. Maybe, but
Speaker 5: they told the family that it was just the size
Speaker 5: of the house cat. They had nothing to worry about.
Speaker 3: I tracked down the lady.
Speaker 5: Who took the picture and spoke to her, and she
Speaker 5: got all worked up. I'm sure obviously not for the
Speaker 5: first time. She got just hopping mad again talking about it.
Speaker 5: She says, I don't care what they say, and everybody
Speaker 5: in my family will tell you the same thing. That
Speaker 5: was a big animal, that was not a house cat,
Speaker 5: you know, So you when people say, oh, that's been
Speaker 5: you know, that's been proven to be not a hoax,
Speaker 5: but it's just a house cat, you know, that's been debunked.
Speaker 5: That photo. I guess in a way, they're telling the
Speaker 5: truth because that is the official explanation that came out.
Speaker 5: But when I talked to the lady who took the picture,
Speaker 5: she was adamant, I mean adamant. And there was another
Speaker 5: person in the background, you know, just you know, yeah, yeah, amen, yeah,
Speaker 5: tell him, tell him, tell him about this, you know.
Speaker 5: And I mean so they were very very believable, credible,
Speaker 5: and it's a striking image, and so that was why
Speaker 5: I chose to use it. They gave me permission to
Speaker 5: use it.
Speaker 6: That's like the PG film kind of level for block casts, right, Yeah, well,
Speaker 6: in my mind it kind of is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, But it was featured, you know, on the news
Speaker 5: down there, and I got some attention, and I remember.
Speaker 6: When that came out, and I've seen it pop up,
Speaker 6: you know, for the last thirty years.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's one of the ones that yearly, you know,
Speaker 5: it starts making the rounds again and but you know,
Speaker 5: it'll have a different backstory to it, and it's frustrating,
Speaker 5: but you know, it is what it is. But that's
Speaker 5: the story of that one. And it's, uh, it is
Speaker 5: what it is? What is it? Well exactly, but you know,
Speaker 5: I look at it, it's it just it seems longer
Speaker 5: bodied to me than a argal house cat. And but
Speaker 5: you know, again I could be wrong, but I do
Speaker 5: know that family believes that it was panthers sized. It
Speaker 5: was a big cat, and they convinced me and that
Speaker 5: so we used it for the cover of the book.
Speaker 3: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
Speaker 3: Will be right back after these messages.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, one of the things we talked about
Speaker 2: in that members episode recently we were kind of riffing
Speaker 2: on black cats, was that the jaguar is probably like
Speaker 2: the easiest explanation to reach for, and that maybe because
Speaker 2: they were so hunted and extirpated in so many places
Speaker 2: by humans, that it would be the case that the
Speaker 2: ones that would be harder to see and hunt would
Speaker 2: be the melanistic ones. And could you impose enough pressure
Speaker 2: to only leave a breeding population or primarily a breeding
Speaker 2: population of melanistic ones where that becomes a dominant trait
Speaker 2: and not just a recessive trait but it really made
Speaker 2: me wonder, like what if we got jaguar mating calls.
Speaker 2: It went out in some of these places where sightings
Speaker 2: have happened and blasted those just to see what.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, that's a great idea. It's just you know,
Speaker 5: cats are so mobile and you just take a mountain line.
Speaker 5: For example, a big tom big mail mountain lion you know,
Speaker 5: has a range of I mean it's huge, and so
Speaker 5: that cat might come through once a year, be there
Speaker 5: for a couple of days, and you know it's hard
Speaker 5: to track them down. Really, the only way to you know,
Speaker 5: really effectively hunt hunt these cats is to use dogs.
Speaker 5: And course most places don't have vast areas of public
Speaker 5: access land to run dogs across. You know, your you're
Speaker 5: hopping fences and your you're trespassing left right. You know.
Speaker 5: It's so it's there's all kinds of difficulties in that. Well.
Speaker 2: I mean also you would have that in states where
Speaker 2: mountain lions are a recognized and then b hunting is legal,
Speaker 2: and so you're not going to have that in Georgia
Speaker 2: or North Carolina or South Carolina or Oklahoma, Arkansas.
Speaker 5: You know, it's it's in Texas, it's it's legal to
Speaker 5: to take a mountain lion. It's recognized. You know, we
Speaker 5: do have a recognized breeding population out in the Big
Speaker 5: Ben area far west Texas. Now, anybody that pays attention
Speaker 5: at all will realize that, you know, they're really they're
Speaker 5: seeing at least periodically all over the state. But it's
Speaker 5: considered a non game animal and you don't have to
Speaker 5: have any kind of special tag or anything like. They're
Speaker 5: supposed to have a hunting license, but you know, there's
Speaker 5: no season on them or anything like that, so you
Speaker 5: can take them. Now, the fear with a black one
Speaker 5: would be if it did turn out to be a jaguar,
Speaker 5: that would be considered, you know, an endangered species, and
Speaker 5: you can find yourself in trouble, you know. And that's
Speaker 5: where you run into all these stories where people get
Speaker 5: close mouthed and the philosophy has always been shoot, shovel
Speaker 5: and shut up, you know, and they don't like to
Speaker 5: talk about it. But but you mentioned you touched on
Speaker 5: something with the genetics. What's interesting. One of the questions
Speaker 5: that I get a lot is how come people if
Speaker 5: they are jaguars, why do people never see the more
Speaker 5: commonly rosetted spotted coats. How come they're always black? And
Speaker 5: it's a valid question. Of course. Those casts have been
Speaker 5: seen in Arizona and in New Mexico. Maybe you've heard
Speaker 5: about the Macho be jaguar out in Arizona. They've got
Speaker 5: photographed multiple times and periodically these pictures will come out,
Speaker 5: you know, if they can, If they can cross the
Speaker 5: border up from Mexico into those states, there's no reason
Speaker 5: to think they couldn't make it into Texas as well.
Speaker 5: So just because correct, Yeah, they're all males. Yeah, which
Speaker 5: what'll be really exciting if we ever get a female
Speaker 5: on camera, because the females typically don't go nearly as
Speaker 5: far away from their birthplace. Males will range looking for
Speaker 5: their own territory. But the black, the black coat. What's
Speaker 5: interesting about it is that in jaguars, melanism is a
Speaker 5: dominant trait. In leopards, it's a recessive trait. So there's
Speaker 5: a whole section in the book where I'll go back
Speaker 5: into like ninth grade biology class and we do the
Speaker 5: punnet squares again and just to show that if there
Speaker 5: was a popular, a remnant, relic population of jaguars and
Speaker 5: just say the American South Texas, whatever and one of
Speaker 5: them was black over the course of the years, that
Speaker 5: being a dominant trait. If they were cut off from
Speaker 5: the larger breeding population of Mexico and Central America, then
Speaker 5: eventually these cats would all be black because it's a
Speaker 5: dominant trait, and that could help explain, you know, how
Speaker 5: come we're not seeing the spotted once.
Speaker 2: That's really interesting.
Speaker 4: I just assumed it was a recessive trait.
Speaker 6: But that's really interesting is dominant And yeah, if they're
Speaker 6: up here, that would make sense.
Speaker 4: I never thought of that at all.
Speaker 5: It's a mutation, I guess in the classic sense. But
Speaker 5: you know, people think of mutations as always being you know,
Speaker 5: a bad thing. You know, you hear mutant, you think,
Speaker 5: you know, some kind of freak of nature. I think
Speaker 5: of that kind of thing. But nature won't allow a
Speaker 5: mutation that's deleterious to the species to survive. It's kind
Speaker 5: of like an US human exactly. Yeah, we've removed Darwinism
Speaker 5: from the from our equation. And if you don't believe me,
Speaker 5: just go to any Walmart. But it's kind of like
Speaker 5: an Arctic fox, say up in Alaska, whose coat turns
Speaker 5: white too soon. Now he sticks out like a sore thumb.
Speaker 5: You know, he's snow white before the snow comes, and
Speaker 5: he's probably not gonna make it. Nature is just not
Speaker 5: gonna let that happen because that is that doesn't help
Speaker 5: the species. It has to at least be it doesn't help,
Speaker 5: but it doesn't hurt either for nature to allow it
Speaker 5: to survive, whatever the mutation may be. So you go
Speaker 5: with leopards, which are African and Asiatic cats, it's a
Speaker 5: recessive trait, but you see far more black leopards in
Speaker 5: Southern Asia than you do in Africa. Darker jungle settings
Speaker 5: in Asia, more grasslands, you know, I think the Serengetti
Speaker 5: plains and things like that in Africa where a black
Speaker 5: cat would stick out more in that yellowish, you know,
Speaker 5: greenish grass, but in the dark jungle they're more of
Speaker 5: them because it's not a disadvantage there, just like the
Speaker 5: jaguarundi small wildcat. Central America, South America, for the most part,
Speaker 5: you'll see black ones more often in the jungles than
Speaker 5: you will in the more open areas because it's just
Speaker 5: a darker environment and so nature doesn't get rid of
Speaker 5: that mutation in those cases. And so you know that's
Speaker 5: so that's kind of the genetic story with the difference
Speaker 5: between the jaguars and the leopards. So's it's possible that
Speaker 5: could explain why only black.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that to me just seems like the most likely
Speaker 2: explanation based on everything we already know, or at least
Speaker 2: I guess maybe for the South or the southeastern United
Speaker 2: States where there once were jaguars and they were heavily hunted,
Speaker 2: and I know those are the reasons they were extirpated.
Speaker 2: I guess, you know, we hunted a lot of their
Speaker 2: food resources, and we did a lot of logging, so
Speaker 2: we hunted them, we hunted their prey, and we removed
Speaker 2: a lot of their.
Speaker 5: Habitat at times.
Speaker 2: But to me, it is totally plausible that whatever you're
Speaker 2: left with, that melanism would become I guess the primary survivors.
Speaker 2: And then to your point, I had no idea about
Speaker 2: that that, Yeah, if you cut off their gene flow
Speaker 2: from the greater population, eventually they'd all become melanistic. Anyway,
Speaker 2: that's really fascinating. It's such an interesting subject. It's amazing
Speaker 2: that more people don't pursue it. I mean, I've never
Speaker 2: pursued it. I would definitely notice if I if I
Speaker 2: gave a cross from while I was squatting.
Speaker 1: But it does seem kind of We joked about this too,
Speaker 1: that you know, you always seem to find something when
Speaker 1: you're not looking for it, and so on members episode,
Speaker 1: i'd said, yeah, I bet if we became black panther
Speaker 1: researchers we'd see sasquatches more often.
Speaker 5: Well, maybe we should try it exactly.
Speaker 2: And you know, there was a number of pictures in
Speaker 2: your book which I would highly recommend. I brought it
Speaker 2: up to so many people because, like you would mention
Speaker 2: not being able to go anywhere without meeting people who
Speaker 2: either have seen one or know someone who's seen one.
Speaker 2: The last trip I took down to Georgia, took my
Speaker 2: dad down to see a lot of his side of
Speaker 2: the family, and the sasquatch thing came up, obviously, But
Speaker 2: then as soon as I brought up the big black
Speaker 2: hat thing, I got so many stories and from people
Speaker 2: who was close friends or relatives had seen them, or
Speaker 2: people who had seen them themselves. And so it does
Speaker 2: seem like, oh, it would be you'd have a lot
Speaker 2: of threads to follow up on and pursue. But it's
Speaker 2: also really interesting that no one is really pursuing it
Speaker 2: as in an organized way, in the same way that
Speaker 2: they have pursued the sasquatch subject. So but anyway, speaking
Speaker 2: of like that physical evidence, I'm sure you've gotten a
Speaker 2: lot of whole lot of photographs. And that's the thing
Speaker 2: I always recommend your book to people. I know the
Speaker 2: book came out a number of years ago now, but
Speaker 2: even in there you include a number of photographs. So
Speaker 2: are there are the ones that really moved you or
Speaker 2: have you gotten some sense the book was published that
Speaker 2: you think, oh man, this might be the real thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I got one just this past week. It wasn't
Speaker 5: actually sent directly to me. And again it's well, there's
Speaker 5: one in the book. It's on the first page of
Speaker 5: anyone who has a book who might be listening, the
Speaker 5: first page of chapter thirteen. It's the chapter about the
Speaker 5: hair samples. Actually, and there's a picture there of big, muscular,
Speaker 5: bulky black cat walking. You know, usually, even with common
Speaker 5: species game camera I don't know what it is, you
Speaker 5: tend to get the butt. You hardly ever get the head.
Speaker 5: I don't know. You know, the camera takes too long
Speaker 5: to activate, so you get the back half of the
Speaker 5: animal or the animals always walking away from the camera.
Speaker 5: It seems like in this case it's walking right up
Speaker 5: to the camera. It's clear as day, and it's it
Speaker 5: is what it is. It's a big, muscular black cat.
Speaker 5: This is no house cat kind of a deal. So
Speaker 5: it's it's the case of that it's a genuine photo
Speaker 5: and it's a spectacular image. But with a little digging,
Speaker 5: you know, despite the fact that goes around year after year.
Speaker 5: It was taken in in Africa. It's it's a it's
Speaker 5: a melanistic leopard on a game preserve in Africa. It
Speaker 5: is a real photograph, but it is not taken in Centerville, Texas.
Speaker 5: Was not taken in East Texas. It was not taken
Speaker 5: by your uncle and on his property. You know. It
Speaker 5: was taken in South Africa. That's the thing, you know.
Speaker 5: So I saw a picture that was similar. It was
Speaker 5: obvious what it was, but I just there's no chain
Speaker 5: of custody is not the right term, but there's no
Speaker 5: logical sequence. It's always a picture. I got this from
Speaker 5: a friend who says that her uncle got it from
Speaker 5: You know, you can't get to the origin of it,
Speaker 5: just hardly ever, and so a lot of these are
Speaker 5: dead ends. Even though the picture might be legitimate, you've
Speaker 5: got no way to follow up on it. And so
Speaker 5: the book, like said, has been out now for several years.
Speaker 5: I'm not getting as much as I used to. Hopefully
Speaker 5: this will help and people will start sending me some
Speaker 5: stuff a little more often again as it comes in.
Speaker 3: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Speaker 3: Bogo will be right back after these messages.
Speaker 5: I think part of it, I got such a crush
Speaker 5: of information and photos. Originally there were bigfoot sites, you know,
Speaker 5: and there were Bigfoot research groups, and there were people
Speaker 5: to take reports and photos and evid but these people
Speaker 5: they had there's no Black Panther research group out there,
Speaker 5: and so these people had just set on their stories
Speaker 5: in some cases for decades, and so there was this
Speaker 5: huge backlog of stories. So I was just just overwhelmed
Speaker 5: at first. Over the years that has slowed down a lot.
Speaker 5: I think a lot of people got their story out,
Speaker 5: but new things do keep coming in, but it's just
Speaker 5: so often it's these second, third, fourth hand reports.
Speaker 2: Well, it's such an interesting subject, and you know, we
Speaker 2: did open up for our membership to let them know
Speaker 2: that you were coming on again and if they had
Speaker 2: any questions. It was really interesting because you know, we
Speaker 2: talked about Valley the Apes loot, so there was a
Speaker 2: lot of Sasquatch related questions, but there were just as many,
Speaker 2: you know, there were a lot of really great black
Speaker 2: panther related questions. So I know we'll hop over to
Speaker 2: that in a bit, but I'm sure people would love
Speaker 2: to hear about where they can find your books, and
Speaker 2: then also your newest release.
Speaker 5: Well, all my stuff you can find it pretty much
Speaker 5: wherever online books are. You might occasionally find a physical
Speaker 5: copy somewhere, but your best bet is Amazon Books, a Million,
Speaker 5: Barnes and Noble, those kinds of the typical places, so
Speaker 5: you can find them there. The latest book that I
Speaker 5: published just a couple of weeks ago, it's a it's
Speaker 5: a children's book and it's fully illustrated. Illustrations are really cool,
Speaker 5: and it's it's a it's called be Where the Pink Gorilla.
Speaker 5: And this is a story I heard as a It
Speaker 5: was kind of a folk tale that went around in
Speaker 5: my little corner of southeast Texas, and as far as
Speaker 5: I knew, that's where that's the only place where this
Speaker 5: story was, and you would hear all kinds of different versions.
Speaker 5: But since then, I've learned that other parts of the country,
Speaker 5: you know, you'll you'll you'll run into this little story.
Speaker 5: And it's just a kid's story. It's not a myth
Speaker 5: or a legend. It's not supposed to be something that's
Speaker 5: real or anything like that. It's just a kind of
Speaker 5: a playfully spooky story that has a happy ending to it.
Speaker 5: It's a it's a children's story all the way, and
Speaker 5: it's just something that all I loved it when I
Speaker 5: was a kid, and this particular version that that we
Speaker 5: kind of crafted, and it's I told my kids this
Speaker 5: story probably twice a week. They requested it from the
Speaker 5: time they were old enough, you know, when I was
Speaker 5: putting them to bed, and almost they'd be and they'd
Speaker 5: be embarrassed to tell you. Almost to high school. And
Speaker 5: now I'm telling that to grand babies, you know. So
Speaker 5: kids just like the story. It's it's just spooky enough
Speaker 5: at the beginning to give them that rush, and then
Speaker 5: of course it's a it's a happy ending at the end.
Speaker 5: But it's it's called Beware the Pink Gorilla, and it's
Speaker 5: beautifully illustrated. It's it's I don't know if the writing's
Speaker 5: any good, but the illustrations are worth the money. I
Speaker 5: was excited to get that. I've been intending to get
Speaker 5: that out for several years now, and I just always
Speaker 5: got distracted and busy with other things. In this summer,
Speaker 5: I just decided I needed to get that book out,
Speaker 5: and I need to get Secondhand Monsters finished, and I
Speaker 5: got the kid's book out, and now I'm about ninety
Speaker 5: percent through with the others, so I'm I don't think
Speaker 5: I'm going to quite make it completely get them both
Speaker 5: done before the summer's over and I go back to work,
Speaker 5: but I'm going to be very, very close.
Speaker 3: Very we add that onto a long list of books
Speaker 3: you've been producing for all this time. That'll be exciting
Speaker 3: to get out. And the children's books also hit big,
Speaker 3: you know, because I think you need to get the
Speaker 3: kids into this sort of thing early, even if you're
Speaker 3: you know, if what is it a pink gorilla?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, if you need.
Speaker 3: To use a pink gorilla as a gateway drug for children,
Speaker 3: absolutely do it.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 5: You know, I agree with you, Cliff I, And this
Speaker 5: is you know, I was in the classroom for almost
Speaker 5: thirty years, and you always I would always run into
Speaker 5: the kids reading. I said, no you don't, Yes I do.
Speaker 5: I said, no, you don't. You just need to read
Speaker 5: about what you like. I said, everybody likes something, right.
Speaker 5: If you're into cars, read books about cars. If you're
Speaker 5: into sports, read books about sports. You know, if you're
Speaker 5: into scary stuff, you know, go check out some Stephen
Speaker 5: kingbooks something. But it's not reading you don't like. Now,
Speaker 5: you may not enjoy reading a history book, I get it, right,
Speaker 5: But you can't just not read. So whatever can get
Speaker 5: kids to be better readers, stronger readers, to not be
Speaker 5: intimidated by reading. Attempting to read something I think is
Speaker 5: a good thing. And and you're right, the earlier you
Speaker 5: can do it, the better. And there's nothing that makes
Speaker 5: me feel better than you know. I got a two
Speaker 5: year old granddaughter. She'll open up a book, she'll be
Speaker 5: holding it upside down, but she's you know, quote reading
Speaker 5: it un quote. You know she's doing her fingers. Now
Speaker 5: it's not John Green yet, you know, she's still likes
Speaker 5: her pictures. But the earlier you can get him go
Speaker 5: on the better. And so if this helps with that
Speaker 5: just a little bit. That's great well, and also not
Speaker 5: just children to adults. A lot of adults like a
Speaker 5: full what is it, some horrifying thing like fifteen to
Speaker 5: twenty percent of Americans are functionally illiterate, or.
Speaker 3: Something to that effect. It was some huge number like that.
Speaker 3: It's awful and it's never too late, you know. One
Speaker 3: of the things that I've taken away from my studies
Speaker 3: of the Blue Mountains so far is that Paul Freeman,
Speaker 3: who is I believe was heavily dyslexic based on the
Speaker 3: writing that I've seen that he's produced. So I've said
Speaker 3: it many times. If he was in my classroom, I
Speaker 3: would have referred him for testing. But Michael Freeman told
Speaker 3: me that later in his life, his dad was actually
Speaker 3: putting a lot of effort into reading because he realized
Speaker 3: how important it was for his Bigfoot studies. Because he
Speaker 3: wasn't super literate. Michael told me, if you ever saw
Speaker 3: his signature, it was almost certainly his wife's signature signing
Speaker 3: for him because he just didn't like to do that stuff.
Speaker 3: He was embarrassed by it. And a lot of adults
Speaker 3: are like that. I have known adults that are functionally
Speaker 3: literate and there's nothing wrong with reading the children's book
Speaker 3: if you're if you have struggle, if you struggle with reading,
Speaker 3: because the practice is the only way forward. So congratulations
Speaker 3: on that. I'm just putting these things out there because
Speaker 3: I know there is some probably closet readers out there
Speaker 3: who are doing the best they can with what they have.
Speaker 5: So well, thank you appreciate that.
Speaker 3: So should we hop over to the member section and
Speaker 3: let the pigeons at them.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, there's a lot of awesome questions that they
Speaker 2: had submitted, so I think it would be a great episode.
Speaker 6: Let's do it, all right, Well, cool, and we're going
Speaker 6: to head over to the Patreon folks for the pigeons
Speaker 6: to get a little private one on want with Mike and.
Speaker 4: The rest of us.
Speaker 6: If you want to join us, that sounds good, just
Speaker 6: follow the link the Patreon five bucks a month and
Speaker 6: you're in cuck couck Coop with the best of us.
Speaker 6: All right, Well, thanks for tuning in, Hit Like hit
Speaker 6: Share thanks to Mike days. Check out those books on
Speaker 6: the links below, and we'll see the pigeons at the
Speaker 6: next stop and the rest of you we'll see you
Speaker 6: all next week. So until then keep it squatchy.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond.
Speaker 3: If you liked what you heard, please rate and review
Speaker 3: us on iTunes, subscribe to Bigfoot and Beyond wherever you
Speaker 3: get your podcasts, and follow us on Facebook and Instagram
Speaker 3: at Bigfoot and Beyond podcast. You can find us on
Speaker 3: Twitter at Bigfoot and Beyond that's an N in the middle,
Speaker 3: and tweet us your thoughts and questions with the hashtag
Speaker 3: Bigfoot and Beyond.