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 are stories in the world of sasquatch research that
Speaker 1: you hear once and they stay with you. Not because
Speaker 1: they're the most dramatic, not because they involve screaming witnesses
Speaker 1: or footprints the size of snowshovels, but because they're told
Speaker 1: by the kind of person who doesn't need you to
Speaker 1: believe them, the kind of person who's already made their
Speaker 1: peace with what they saw and simply wants to put
Speaker 1: it on the record, the kind of person who will
Speaker 1: swear to it legally formally in front of a notary
Speaker 1: public and sign their name to it and let the
Speaker 1: world decide what to do with it. William Rowe was
Speaker 1: that kind of person. Now, I want to be straight
Speaker 1: with you before we go any further. I wasn't there
Speaker 1: on Michael Mountain in October of nineteen fifty five. I
Speaker 1: wasn't crouched behind that bush watching something that shouldn't exist
Speaker 1: eat the leaves off a wild cherry tree. I'm going
Speaker 1: to tell you this story the way I believe William
Speaker 1: Rowe experienced it, drawing from his own sworn affidavit, from
Speaker 1: the research of John Green and I Van Sanderson and
Speaker 1: others who documented this case carefully in the years that followed,
Speaker 1: and from nearly four decades of my own time spent
Speaker 1: in this field talking to people who've had encounters that
Speaker 1: changed their lives. Every detail I give you is grounded
Speaker 1: in what we know. I'm not going to make things up,
Speaker 1: because with this case I don't have to. The truth
Speaker 1: is more than enough. This is one of the most
Speaker 1: important sasquatch sighting reports in recorded history. It predates the
Speaker 1: Patterson Gimlin film by twelve years. It predates the Jerry
Speaker 1: crue Bluff Creek footprint discovery by three years, and unlike
Speaker 1: a lot of the early accounts that circulated in newspapers
Speaker 1: and around campfires, this one came with something extraordinary attached
Speaker 1: to it, a sworn legal affidavit signed by the witness himself,
Speaker 1: making it one of the first formally documented close range
Speaker 1: sasquatch encounters in North American history. The year was nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five. British Columbia was a different world. The highways
Speaker 1: being carved through the mountains of Western Canada were opening
Speaker 1: up terrain that had been largely inaccessible to the average
Speaker 1: person for generations. The wilderness up there wasn't just big,
Speaker 1: it was immense in a way that's almost impossible to
Speaker 1: communicate to someone who hasn't stood inside it. Mountains that
Speaker 1: go on and on, valleys so deep the sunlight only
Speaker 1: hits the bottom for a few hours a day. Forests
Speaker 1: so dense you can walk thirty feet off a trail
Speaker 1: and feel completely swallowed. It was and still is the
Speaker 1: kind of country where the idea that something large and
Speaker 1: unknown could be living quietly in the shadows isn't just plausible,
Speaker 1: it almost makes sense. William Rowe had spent most of
Speaker 1: his adult life working in country like that. He wasn't
Speaker 1: a man prone to imagination or superstition. He was a
Speaker 1: highway worker, a trapper, a hunter, a man who'd spent
Speaker 1: more nights in the bush than most people spend indoors,
Speaker 1: and who knew the difference between what belonged in a
Speaker 1: forest and what didn't. He'd heard stories about the Sasquatch
Speaker 1: the way everybody up there had heard stories. He didn't
Speaker 1: give them much weight. He had a worldview built on
Speaker 1: observation and evidence, and as far as he was concerned,
Speaker 1: there wasn't any evidence. And then came October of nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five and Micah Mountain, and everything changed. What follows
Speaker 1: is the story of William rose encounter, told as close
Speaker 1: to his own experience as the historical record allows. Close
Speaker 1: your eyes if you want, picture a big, quiet man
Speaker 1: with a rifle on his back, climbing alone through the
Speaker 1: spruce and fur of a British Columbia mountain side, with
Speaker 1: no idea that the next hour of his life was
Speaker 1: going to rewrite everything he thought he knew. Let's go
Speaker 1: up that mountain together. But first, one more thing about
Speaker 1: what this kind of account does in the broader world.
Speaker 1: There's a tendency in popular culture to treat sasquatch encounters
Speaker 1: as entertainment, as fodder for television shows and campfire stories
Speaker 1: and internet arguments. And I underst stand that the subject
Speaker 1: sits at the edge of the acceptable, and anything that
Speaker 1: sits at the edge of the acceptable gets handled by
Speaker 1: culture in particular ways. It gets mocked, or it gets sensationalized,
Speaker 1: or it gets turned into content that's more interested in
Speaker 1: generating feelings than in getting at truth. I've spent four
Speaker 1: decades watching that happen, and I've spent four decades trying
Speaker 1: to be something different, trying to take the account seriously,
Speaker 1: trying to honor the witnesses who came forward at real
Speaker 1: personal cost, who told the truth about what they saw,
Speaker 1: even when the world wasn't going to thank them for it.
Speaker 1: William Rowe is the model for that kind of witness
Speaker 1: What he did, the care he brought to his observation,
Speaker 1: the patience he showed in sitting with the experience before
Speaker 1: going public, the formal seriousness of the affidavit. All of
Speaker 1: it points toward a man who understood that what he'd
Speaker 1: seen mattered beyond himself, and who felt an obligation to
Speaker 1: the truth that was stronger than his desire for an easy,
Speaker 1: uncomplicated life. He didn't make it up, he didn't embellish it,
Speaker 1: he didn't sensationalize it. He put it on the record,
Speaker 1: plain and clear, and then he stepped back and let
Speaker 1: it be whatever it was going to be. We owe
Speaker 1: him the same respect, We owe him the careful attention
Speaker 1: he gave to what he saw. Before we can understand
Speaker 1: what William Row saw on Michael Mountain, we need to
Speaker 1: understand who William Rowe was, because the witness is always
Speaker 1: part of the evidence. When you're evaluating any encounter report,
Speaker 1: one of the first questions you have to ask is
Speaker 1: who is this person? What's their background? Do they have
Speaker 1: anything to gain from making this up? Are they the
Speaker 1: kind of person who gets rattled by shadows in the woods.
Speaker 1: With William Row, those questions are easy to answer. Roe
Speaker 1: was a big, plain spoken, working class man from Alberta, Canada.
Speaker 1: He'd lived the kind of life that builds a particular
Speaker 1: sort of character, the sort that doesn't embellish and doesn't
Speaker 1: dramatize because the work itself is dramatic enough without any help.
Speaker 1: He was employed as a road worker during the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, contributing to the massive highway construction projects that
Speaker 1: were transforming Western Canada's interior during that period. Before that,
Speaker 1: he'd spent years trapping and hunting throughout the Canadian wilderness.
Speaker 1: This wasn't a hobby for him, it was how he lived.
Speaker 1: He knew animals the way a carpenter knows would by
Speaker 1: their grain, by the way they behave under pressure, by
Speaker 1: the signs they leave behind. He was a family man
Speaker 1: with a reputation in his community as a straightforward, trustworthy individual.
Speaker 1: When he eventually decided to go on the record about
Speaker 1: what he saw on Michah Mountain, the people who knew
Speaker 1: him weren't surprised that he came forward. They were surprised
Speaker 1: by what he was coming forward about, but not by
Speaker 1: the fact that he did it in a serious, formal,
Speaker 1: no nonsense way. That was just who he was. He
Speaker 1: stood roughly five feet ten inches tall himself, which is
Speaker 1: relevant when you understand what he estimated about the creature
Speaker 1: he encountered. He knew how to judge scale and distance.
Speaker 1: He was accustomed to sizing up animals in the field,
Speaker 1: making quick, accurate assessments of weight and height and behavior,
Speaker 1: because out in the back country, those assessments could mean
Speaker 1: the difference between a good day and a very bad one.
Speaker 1: When William Rowe told you something was six feet tall
Speaker 1: and three hundred pounds, he wasn't guessing wildly. He was
Speaker 1: doing what he always did, observing carefully and reporting accurately.
Speaker 1: By the time he sat down to formalize his account,
Speaker 1: he'd had nearly two years to think about what he'd seen.
Speaker 1: He hadn't rushed to tell anybody. He'd sat with it,
Speaker 1: turned it over, examined it from every angle he could
Speaker 1: think of, tried to find an explanation that made sense
Speaker 1: within the world he knew, and he couldn't. So in
Speaker 1: August of nineteen fifty seven, he walked into a notary's
Speaker 1: office in Edmonton, Alberta, and he swore a legal affidavit
Speaker 1: about what had happened to him on that mountain in
Speaker 1: October of nineteen fifty five. That affidavit would eventually make
Speaker 1: its way to John Green, the pioneering British Columbia journalist
Speaker 1: and sasquatch researcher who spent decades collecting and verifying encounter reports.
Speaker 1: Green recognized immediately that what Row had given him was
Speaker 1: something rare, a detailed, thoughtful, legally sworn account from a
Speaker 1: witness with first hand wilderness experience, and nothing to gain
Speaker 1: from fabrication. He published it. Researchers like Ivan T. Sanderson,
Speaker 1: who was then working on what would become his landmark
Speaker 1: book on wild Men of the World, took notice, and
Speaker 1: the William Row encounter became and remains, one of the
Speaker 1: bedrock cases in serious sasquatch research. But I'm getting ahead
Speaker 1: of myself. Let's go back to where it started. Let's
Speaker 1: go back to the fall of nineteen fifty five and
Speaker 1: a mountain road outside a small town called Tate John
Speaker 1: Cash in the heart of British Columbia. Tet John Cash
Speaker 1: sits in the Rocky Mountain Trench in British Columbia, right
Speaker 1: about where the Fraser River and the upper reaches of
Speaker 1: the North Thompson River come together. If you've never been
Speaker 1: to that part of Canada, imagine what wild country looks
Speaker 1: like in your mind, and then multiply it by about ten.
Speaker 1: The mountains there aren't just tall, they're overwhelming. They press
Speaker 1: in on you from all sides, covered in timber so
Speaker 1: thick that even in the fall, when the deciduous trees
Speaker 1: are losing their leaves, the dark spruce and fir create
Speaker 1: a canopy so dense that whole hillsides stay in shadow
Speaker 1: for most of the day. The fall of nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: five was a quiet one in that part of the world.
Speaker 1: Highway construction was underway in the area, part of the
Speaker 1: ongoing effort to connect the remote interior communities of British
Speaker 1: Columbia to the outside world. William Rowe was part of
Speaker 1: that work. He'd been spending time in the region for
Speaker 1: months by the time October rolled around, and like any
Speaker 1: outdoorsman worth the name, he'd been paying attention to the
Speaker 1: landscape around him. He'd noticed Micha Mountain. He'd been curious
Speaker 1: about it, and one October day, on his own time,
Speaker 1: with his rifle on his back, more out of habit
Speaker 1: than any particular expectation of needing it, he decided to
Speaker 1: climb it. He'd heard the word sasquatch before. Of course,
Speaker 1: everybody up in that part of the world had. The
Speaker 1: indigenous peoples of British Columbia had their own names for
Speaker 1: these creatures, and their own long traditions of acknowledging their existence.
Speaker 1: The set salespeople who lived in the Fraser Valley used
Speaker 1: the word saskets, which is where the English name eventually
Speaker 1: came from. These weren't fringe stories or folk tales for decoration.
Speaker 1: They were serious, matter of fact acknowledgments that something large
Speaker 1: and upright and not quite human shared the wilderness with people.
Speaker 1: But for a man like William Rowe, raised in a
Speaker 1: culture that put its faith in what could be measured
Speaker 1: and categorized, those traditions were something he'd heard about without
Speaker 1: really taking seriously. He wasn't scared of the mountain. He
Speaker 1: wasn't nervous. He was a man who climbed mountains because
Speaker 1: mountains were there, and because the view from up high
Speaker 1: told you things about the country below that you couldn't
Speaker 1: see any other way. He set off in the morning,
Speaker 1: working his way up through the timber, moving with the
Speaker 1: quiet confidence of someone who spent a lifetime reading terrain.
Speaker 1: The mountain was doing what mountains in British Columbia do
Speaker 1: in October, putting on its last show before winter shut
Speaker 1: everything down. The high slopes were already cold, the kind
Speaker 1: of cold that gets into your bones if you stop
Speaker 1: moving for too long. Below the tree line, the undergrowth
Speaker 1: was thick with the rusty reds and burnt oranges of
Speaker 1: dying leaves. The wild berry bushes had mostly given up
Speaker 1: their fruit weeks earlier, but some of the heartier shrubs
Speaker 1: still held their leaves, still offered something worth browsing for
Speaker 1: a hungry animal. He worked his way through the timber
Speaker 1: for a long time, stepping carefully, keeping his breathing steady
Speaker 1: the way experienced back country men do. Not because he
Speaker 1: was hunting, not today, but because quiet was just his
Speaker 1: default in the woods. It was part of the respect
Speaker 1: a man paid to wild country when he was in it.
Speaker 1: He was somewhere near the top of the mountain, moving
Speaker 1: along the edge of a clearing where an old, deserted
Speaker 1: cabin sat, the kind of place you run across sometimes
Speaker 1: in the deep back country of Western Canada, left over
Speaker 1: from some long gone trapper or prospector who'd carved a
Speaker 1: temporary life out of the wilderness before moving on or
Speaker 1: being moved on by harder circumstances. The cabin was derelict,
Speaker 1: its roof caved in part way, its walls, listing nature
Speaker 1: was in the slow process of reclaiming it. It was
Speaker 1: near that old cabin that he first saw something. He
Speaker 1: almost didn't register it right away. His brain did what
Speaker 1: human brains do when they encounter something unexpected. It reached
Speaker 1: for the nearest familiar explanation. He was looking through the
Speaker 1: trees at a shape that was partially obscured by the undergrowth,
Speaker 1: and his first thought, his honest, instinctive, experienced outdoorsman first thought,
Speaker 1: was that he was looking at a grizzly bear. He
Speaker 1: stopped walking. He was still partially hidden by the trees.
Speaker 1: He eased himself down, finding a spot where the brush
Speaker 1: gave him cover, and he looked more carefully. And the
Speaker 1: more carefully he looked, the more certain he became that
Speaker 1: he was not looking at a grizzly bear. Put yourself
Speaker 1: in William Rose's position for a moment. You've spent your
Speaker 1: whole adult life in the wilderness. You know what grizzly
Speaker 1: bears look like from every angle, in every light, in
Speaker 1: every season. You know how they move, how they carry
Speaker 1: their weight, how their heads sit on their shoulders, how
Speaker 1: they go about their business of eating and wandering and
Speaker 1: being grizzly bears. You know this the way you know
Speaker 1: your own hands, and what you're looking at doesn't move
Speaker 1: like a grizzly bear. It doesn't carry its weight like
Speaker 1: a grizzly bear. The proportions are wrong in a way
Speaker 1: that your brain is already processing, even as it's still
Speaker 1: trying to insist on the bear explanation, because the bear
Speaker 1: explanation is the one that makes sense, and your brain
Speaker 1: is loyal to things that make sense. But the proportions
Speaker 1: were wrong. They were deeply, undeniably wrong. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more Back the Woods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. The creature was crouched down at the edge
Speaker 1: of the brush near that old cabin, and it was eating,
Speaker 1: just eating, methodically, quietly, pulling leaves and shoots from a
Speaker 1: wild cherry tree and putting them in its mouth with
Speaker 1: the focused, unhurried attention of an animal that's used to
Speaker 1: having all the time in the world. And even crouched down,
Speaker 1: even folded in on itself, the way it was, it
Speaker 1: was obvious that this thing, when it stood up, was
Speaker 1: going to be tall, very tall. Roe settled himself as
Speaker 1: carefully as he could into the brush. He was somewhere
Speaker 1: around seventy five feet from the creature, close enough to
Speaker 1: see detail, far enough that the wind and the cover
Speaker 1: gave him some protection. He had his rifle with him.
Speaker 1: He wasn't thinking about his rifle yet. He was thinking
Speaker 1: about what he was looking at, turning his full attention
Speaker 1: and his full lifetime of experience on this thing and
Speaker 1: trying to make it fit into a category that already
Speaker 1: existed in his mind. It didn't fit. Nothing he'd ever
Speaker 1: seen or heard about fit. The creature was female. He
Speaker 1: could tell this even from a distance, even through the brush,
Speaker 1: because she had clearly defined breasts visible beneath the dark
Speaker 1: fur that covered her body. That detail registered in his
Speaker 1: mind and stayed there because it was one of the
Speaker 1: things that would make this report so compelling to researchers
Speaker 1: later on, a witness who noted not just the broad strokes,
Speaker 1: but the specific anatomical detail that confirmed the creature's sex.
Speaker 1: Roe wasn't the kind of man to invent that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. He saw it, and he reported it. She
Speaker 1: was enormous, even crouched down. She conveyed a sense of
Speaker 1: mass and presence that was unlike anything he'd encountered in
Speaker 1: the wild. He estimated later, after long reflection, that she
Speaker 1: stood approximately six feet tall, six feet, which I want
Speaker 1: you to keep in mind, was taller than most men
Speaker 1: of that era. And she was built in a way
Speaker 1: that made her look even bigger than that measurements suggests,
Speaker 1: because she was wide, not fat, not at all, but
Speaker 1: wide and deep and powerful in a way that spoke
Speaker 1: of a musculature built up over years of serious physical
Speaker 1: existence in serious physical terrain. He'd put her weight at
Speaker 1: around three hundred pounds. Some researchers have suggested that's actually
Speaker 1: a conservative estimate, given the dimensions he described, but it
Speaker 1: was his number and he stood by it. Her shoulders
Speaker 1: were enormous. He described them as roughly three feet wide.
Speaker 1: Her arms were long, noticeably strikingly longer than a human
Speaker 1: being's arms, hanging down so that when she moved them
Speaker 1: while eating, her hands nearly reached her knees. Her hands
Speaker 1: themselves were like a human's hands in general shape, but
Speaker 1: the fingers were shorter and thicker, and the palms were broader.
Speaker 1: These weren't delicate hands. These were hands built for serious work,
Speaker 1: for climbing, for pulling, for gripping things that needed to
Speaker 1: be gripped firmly. She had a short, thick neck that
Speaker 1: supported a large head. The head was interesting, distinctly interesting,
Speaker 1: because it sat in a particular relationship to the shoulders
Speaker 1: that was different from a human being's. There wasn't much
Speaker 1: visible neck to speak of. The head seemed to rise
Speaker 1: almost directly from the massive shoulders, giving her a powerful,
Speaker 1: slightly hunched appearance, even when she was moving with what
Speaker 1: seemed like natural grace and ease. Her face and Roe
Speaker 1: would get a very good look at her face, better
Speaker 1: than he expected or perhaps wanted, was wide and flat.
Speaker 1: Her nose was broad and flat as well, much flatter
Speaker 1: than a human nose. Her forehead was high and wide,
Speaker 1: her brow ridges prominent, but not grotesquely so. Her lips
Speaker 1: were full. Her ears, what he could see of them
Speaker 1: through the hair, were small, smaller than a human's ears,
Speaker 1: or at least proportionally smaller given the size of her head.
Speaker 1: Her eyes were dark brown and large, and they held
Speaker 1: a quality that would stay with him for the rest
Speaker 1: of life. But we'll get to that. Her body was
Speaker 1: covered entirely in dark brown hair, not black. Dark brown,
Speaker 1: the color of good soil. And deep timber country. The
Speaker 1: hair was thick, but not especially long on most of
Speaker 1: her body, roughly an inch or so, but it had
Speaker 1: a particular quality to it, silver tipped at the ends,
Speaker 1: so that when the light caught it a certain way,
Speaker 1: there was almost a sheen to her, an iridescent quality,
Speaker 1: like the fur of a silver phase coyote or a
Speaker 1: dark phased black bear that spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: in the sun. On the back of her head and
Speaker 1: around her neck and shoulders, the hair was a bit longer,
Speaker 1: almost suggesting a mane or a rough and on her
Speaker 1: head itself, the hair was longer, still falling around her
Speaker 1: face in a way that, combined with the wideness of
Speaker 1: her features and the steadiness of her gaze, would later
Speaker 1: lead Roe to use the word that surprised even him
Speaker 1: when he put it in his affidavit, human like. He'd
Speaker 1: say later that she looked not huge human exactly, but
Speaker 1: human like in a way that went beyond anything he'd expected,
Speaker 1: in a way that was deeply unsettling, in a way
Speaker 1: that cut through his careful, experienced outdoorsman composure and reached
Speaker 1: something more fundamental. For several minutes, and I want you
Speaker 1: to appreciate what several minutes means in a situation like this,
Speaker 1: how long and strange and electric those minutes would have been.
Speaker 1: William Rode just watched. She didn't know he was there,
Speaker 1: or if she knew, she gave no sign of it.
Speaker 1: She was focused entirely on her eating, moving along the
Speaker 1: cherry tree with deliberate attention, selecting which leaves and shoots
Speaker 1: to take, pulling them free with those big, thick fingered hands,
Speaker 1: chewing them with unhurried efficiency. She wasn't frantic or nervous.
Speaker 1: She wasn't watching the tree line or testing the wind.
Speaker 1: She was an animal at ease in her own country,
Speaker 1: doing what animals do when they're safe, taking care of
Speaker 1: the basic business of staying alive. But watching her do this,
Speaker 1: watching her eat, was what made the human like quality
Speaker 1: so jarring, because she didn't eat like a bear. She
Speaker 1: didn't eat like any animal Roe had ever observed. She
Speaker 1: ate like a person would eat if that person were
Speaker 1: enormous and covered in silver tipped brown fur and had
Speaker 1: been born and raised in the deep timber of the
Speaker 1: British Columbia Mountains. She reached out and selected her food.
Speaker 1: She brought it to her mouth. She chewed it thoughtfully.
Speaker 1: There was a purposefulness to it, an intentionality that sat
Speaker 1: somewhere in the space between animal and something more complicated.
Speaker 1: She walked on two legs. She stood upright. Let me
Speaker 1: make sure that lands the way it needs to. This
Speaker 1: creature's default, natural, comfortable mode of locomotion was bipedal. She
Speaker 1: wasn't rearing up the way a bear does when it
Speaker 1: wants to get a better look at something or make
Speaker 1: itself look threatening. She wasn't knuckling along on her hands
Speaker 1: like a great ape. She was walking on her two feet, upright,
Speaker 1: and essentially the same posture that William Rowe used to
Speaker 1: walk around when she moved along the cherry tree to
Speaker 1: find the next good cluster of leaves. She walked, just walked,
Speaker 1: and the walk was something Roe paid close attention to
Speaker 1: it because it was one of those details that a
Speaker 1: hunter and trapper notices automatically, the gait, the foot placement,
Speaker 1: the relationship between the swing of the arms and the
Speaker 1: movement of the legs. She walked heel to toe, flat footed,
Speaker 1: in a way that was clearly comfortable and natural for her.
Speaker 1: Her arms swung at her sides. She moved with a
Speaker 1: kind of rolling, fluid ease that covered ground without wasted effort.
Speaker 1: She wasn't clumsy, she wasn't lumbering. She was, in her way, graceful,
Speaker 1: the kind of grace that comes from a body that's
Speaker 1: perfectly adapted to its environment and has never needed to
Speaker 1: be anything other than what it is. Roe crouched there
Speaker 1: in his brush cover and watched and tried to figure
Speaker 1: out what to do with what he was seeing. He
Speaker 1: was a hunter. He had his rifle. The thought crossed
Speaker 1: his mind. He was honest enough to admit this later,
Speaker 1: that if he shot this creature, if he brought it
Speaker 1: back down the mountain, he'd have proof, physical, undeniable proof.
Speaker 1: The scientific world would have to deal with it. The
Speaker 1: arguments would be over. He raised his rifle, he looked
Speaker 1: through the sight at her, and he put the rifle down.
Speaker 1: He couldn't do it. And the reason he couldn't do it,
Speaker 1: the reason he articulated clearly in his affidavit, is the
Speaker 1: same reason that would haunt the Sasquatch research community for decades.
Speaker 1: The reason it echoes through every serious discussion of what
Speaker 1: these creatures might be and where they fall on whatever
Speaker 1: spectrum connects the animal world to the human one. He
Speaker 1: couldn't shoot her because she looked too human. When he
Speaker 1: put the rifle up and looked at her through the sight,
Speaker 1: what he saw was something that he couldn't categorize as
Speaker 1: just an animal. Something about her, the upright posture, the
Speaker 1: deliberate hands, the quality of attention she brought to what
Speaker 1: she was doing. The face made the act of pulling
Speaker 1: the trigger feel wrong in a way he couldn't argue
Speaker 1: himself out of I've talked to researchers over the years
Speaker 1: who've had similar moments of hesitation described to them by
Speaker 1: other witnesses, other hunters who had the opportunity to shoot
Speaker 1: a sasquatch and didn't. It's a consistent thread in the
Speaker 1: encounter literature, this sudden, instinctive, almost visceral reluctance that has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with fear of missing or fear of
Speaker 1: the creature, and everything to do with a deep animal
Speaker 1: recognition of something that occupies a category that sits uncomfortably
Speaker 1: close to us. William Row lowered his rifle and kept watching.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets truly extraordinary. Here's the moment that
Speaker 1: separates this account from one thousand other wildlife misidentification stories.
Speaker 1: The moment that no bear, no misidentified animal, no trick
Speaker 1: of the light, and the imagination could explain away, she
Speaker 1: stopped eating. She'd been working her way along the cherry tree,
Speaker 1: pulling leaves, chewing, moving with that easy, deliberate grace, and
Speaker 1: then she stopped. Not suddenly, not with the startled frieze
Speaker 1: of an animal that's caught a scent or heard a sound.
Speaker 1: She stopped in the way a person stops when they
Speaker 1: become gradually aware of something, when the background information that
Speaker 1: they'd been half processing finally assembles itself into conscious recognition.
Speaker 1: She'd been aware of him, maybe not fully, not immediately,
Speaker 1: but somewhere in the background of her attention. The information
Speaker 1: had been accumulating, the faint sound of his breathing, the
Speaker 1: minimal sound of his movement when he'd settled into position,
Speaker 1: some scent that had drifted on a shifting air current.
Speaker 1: Whatever it was, it had been working on her, and
Speaker 1: now it had finished working. She stood up to her
Speaker 1: full height. William Rowe was a man of about five
Speaker 1: feet ten inches, and she was taller than him, not
Speaker 1: dramatically taller, not by a ridiculous margin, but clearly undeniably taller.
Speaker 1: Standing at her full height, she was six feet of
Speaker 1: muscle and dark fur and size in a way that
Speaker 1: should have been terrifying, but wasn't, or at least wasn't.
Speaker 1: Primarily what it primarily was was astonishing. And then she
Speaker 1: turned and looked directly at him, not in his general direction,
Speaker 1: not toward the brush where he was concealed, at him,
Speaker 1: at his face, with those dark brown eyes, large and deep.
Speaker 1: She looked at William Rowe with a directness and a
Speaker 1: clarity that he would spend the rest of his life
Speaker 1: trying to describe. This is the moment in his affidavit
Speaker 1: that gets quoted most often. This is the moment that
Speaker 1: researchers always come back to because of what Roe said
Speaker 1: about her face when she turned and looked at him.
Speaker 1: He said it was not the face of an ape
Speaker 1: or any animal he'd ever known. He said that the
Speaker 1: expression on that face in that moment was, and I
Speaker 1: want to give you his actual meaning here as carefully
Speaker 1: as I can, more intelligent than an animal's. Not human
Speaker 1: intelligence exactly, but something something that Regis stirred his presence,
Speaker 1: processed it, considered it, and responded to it in a
Speaker 1: way that an animal just doesn't do. She made a sound.
Speaker 1: He described it as a sort of whinny, partly a whimper,
Speaker 1: a sound that was high and peculiar and unlike anything
Speaker 1: he'd heard from any animal, and that had in it.
Speaker 1: He was careful to say this because he knew how
Speaker 1: it sounded, something that was almost communicative, not a growl,
Speaker 1: not a bark or a roar or a challenge sound,
Speaker 1: something more complicated than any of those. And then she
Speaker 1: looked at him, and he looked at her, and for
Speaker 1: what must have been one of the longest and strangest
Speaker 1: stretches of time either of them had ever experienced, that
Speaker 1: was what happened. They were too conscious, being separated by
Speaker 1: about seventy five feet of British Columbia mountain air, looking
Speaker 1: at each other with equal measures of astonishment, and the
Speaker 1: world was very quiet around them. I want to take
Speaker 1: a breath here and stay in this moment with Roe
Speaker 1: for a little, long long because these few seconds, the
Speaker 1: standing up, the turning, the looking, are where the most
Speaker 1: important observations of his account happened. And because Roe was
Speaker 1: a careful observer and an honest reporter, he gave us
Speaker 1: enough detail to reconstruct what those seconds were like with
Speaker 1: real precision. Her body, standing at full height, was proportioned
Speaker 1: in a way that was simultaneously familiar and deeply wrong
Speaker 1: in comparison to the human body he expected. The shoulders
Speaker 1: were extraordinary. Those three feet of width weren't fat or
Speaker 1: even just muscle padding, but actual bone structure, a skeletal
Speaker 1: frame designed on a different scale than anything he'd built
Speaker 1: his understanding of large primates around. The arms that hung
Speaker 1: at her sides were long, genuinely measurably long, and the
Speaker 1: hands at the end of those arms were held with
Speaker 1: a relaxed openness that was itself oddly human. She wasn't
Speaker 1: displaying her hands as a threat or a display. She
Speaker 1: was just standing the way you stand. Her chest was
Speaker 1: broad and deep. He'd noticed the breast before, but standing
Speaker 1: at full height, they were more clearly defined, and he
Speaker 1: noted them again in his affidavit with the straightforward, factual
Speaker 1: tone of someone who simply committed to accuracy. This wasn't
Speaker 1: a young creature, he sensed, not old either, not gray,
Speaker 1: muzzled or stiff jointed, but mature, an adult in the
Speaker 1: middle years of whatever life span these creatures lived. Her
Speaker 1: feet were flat and wide. When she'd been walking, she'd
Speaker 1: place them heel first and rolled through to the toe
Speaker 1: the way a human does, and standing still, she bore
Speaker 1: her weight in a way that was completely upright, completely
Speaker 1: balanced on two feet, with no sign of discomfort or strain.
Speaker 1: This wasn't a temporary posture. This was how she lived.
Speaker 1: Her face at this range, and the brush between them
Speaker 1: was not a total barrier. There were enough gaps in
Speaker 1: the foliage that he could see her clearly. Her face
Speaker 1: was something he'd be turning over in his mind for
Speaker 1: the rest of life. Wide and flat, yes, the nose
Speaker 1: broad and flat. But the eyes, those dark brown eyes,
Speaker 1: held something that resisted the categories he was trying to
Speaker 1: apply to them. They weren't empty. They weren't the flat
Speaker 1: glass eyes of a bear, or even the sharp, calculating
Speaker 1: eyes of a predator that spotted prey. They were something else,
Speaker 1: something that had depth to it. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. He'd
Speaker 1: write in his affidavit that her expression was almost human.
Speaker 1: He'd describe it as the most human like thing about her,
Speaker 1: and he'd write that when she looked at him, it
Speaker 1: didn't feel the way it felt when an animal looked
Speaker 1: at a person. He was a hunter. He knew how
Speaker 1: animals looked at people, either with the blank assessment of
Speaker 1: something deciding whether you were a threat, or with the
Speaker 1: focused intensity of a predator, or with the sideways, skittish
Speaker 1: glance of prey. He knew all those looks. He'd seen
Speaker 1: them a thousand times. What he saw in her face
Speaker 1: didn't match any of them. What he saw in her
Speaker 1: face was something he tried very hard and very honestly
Speaker 1: to put into words, and the words he settled on
Speaker 1: were that she looked back at him with an expression
Speaker 1: that seemed to carry curiosity, not aggression, not fear exactly,
Speaker 1: though there was something in the shift of her posture
Speaker 1: when she first registered him that suggested awareness of being
Speaker 1: in the presence of an unknown but curiosity interest a
Speaker 1: looking at. In those seconds, in that exchange of looks
Speaker 1: between William Rowe and this creature on a British Columbia
Speaker 1: mountain side in October of nineteen fifty five, something happened
Speaker 1: that's very difficult to categorize. Two things looked at each
Speaker 1: other and recognized in the other something worth looking at,
Speaker 1: and that that mutual recognition is the detail that has
Speaker 1: made this account so compelling to researchers for nearly seventy years.
Speaker 1: She didn't charge, she didn't run, She didn't crouch down
Speaker 1: into a defensive posture or make any move toward where
Speaker 1: Roe was concealed. What she did was what a large, confident,
Speaker 1: self possessed creature does when it's decided that the thing
Speaker 1: it's looking at isn't an immediate threat, but isn't something
Speaker 1: at once to spend more time near. She walked away,
Speaker 1: and here again the details matter enormously because Roe watched
Speaker 1: her go with the same careful attention he'd given to
Speaker 1: the arrival and the eating and the standing and looking.
Speaker 1: He watched her walk, and he watched her walk for
Speaker 1: long enough to really study how she moved, and what
Speaker 1: he saw confirmed everything he'd already registered about the way
Speaker 1: she carried herself. She moved into the forest at the
Speaker 1: edge of the clearing with that same rolling, fluid, utterly
Speaker 1: natural gait, heel to toe, arms swinging upright and balanced
Speaker 1: and covering ground with an economy of movement that spoke
Speaker 1: of a body that had been doing this exact thing
Speaker 1: for a long, long time, and exactly this kind of terrain.
Speaker 1: She didn't look back, at least not at first. She
Speaker 1: just moved. The forest at the edge of that clearing
Speaker 1: was not an easy forest to move through quickly. It
Speaker 1: was the kind of dense, layered, tangled British Columbia timber
Speaker 1: where a person has to pick their root carefully, and
Speaker 1: except that the root is going to involve ducking and
Speaker 1: twisting and using their hands as much as their feet,
Speaker 1: she moved through it without any of that. She didn't
Speaker 1: duck branches, she moved under them with the natural ease
Speaker 1: of something built for exactly that kind of cover. She
Speaker 1: didn't slow down at the tangles. She pushed through them
Speaker 1: or passed them with a casual power that required no
Speaker 1: extra effort from her, because it was nothing to her.
Speaker 1: She didn't crash through it either. That's important. There's a
Speaker 1: tendency in popular depictions of bigfoot to imagine these creatures
Speaker 1: as noisy, as something that bulldozes through the forest making
Speaker 1: a huge racket, shaking trees and snapping branches like a
Speaker 1: natural disaster with fur. That's not what Roe described. She
Speaker 1: moved through that dense timber with a quietness that impressed him.
Speaker 1: Not silent, No large creature can be completely silent in
Speaker 1: forest floor debris, but quieter than he'd have expected something
Speaker 1: that big to be much quieter. The sound of her
Speaker 1: passage faded faster than the sound of his own movement
Speaker 1: ever faded when he walked through similar timber. And he
Speaker 1: was a careful, experienced woodsman who spent years practicing quiet
Speaker 1: movement in the back country. Think about what that means.
Speaker 1: Something that weighed in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds,
Speaker 1: standing six feet tall, moving through dense, tangled British Columbia timber,
Speaker 1: and doing it more quietly than an experienced human woodsman
Speaker 1: would have managed. That's not a stumbling accident of biology.
Speaker 1: That's competence. That's a body and a nervous system that
Speaker 1: had been refined over time for exactly this environment, that
Speaker 1: know how to place a foot and shift weight and
Speaker 1: move through undergrowth with minimal disturbance. That's an animal or
Speaker 1: whatever we want to call her, that is genuinely at
Speaker 1: home in a way that no human visitor to that
Speaker 1: landscape truly is. She was disappearing into the forest. The
Speaker 1: shadows were swallowing her the way shadows in dense timber
Speaker 1: do incrementally a piece at a time until there's more
Speaker 1: shadow than creature, and then only shadow at all, And
Speaker 1: at the edge of the tree line, just before the
Speaker 1: forest closed around her entirely, she stopped and looked back.
Speaker 1: This moment gets less attention than the first look, and
Speaker 1: that's a mistake, because it's arguably more revealing than the first.
Speaker 1: The first look, when she turned and found him watching her,
Speaker 1: that was response to surprise, an automatic thing, the way
Speaker 1: any sentient creature turns toward an unexpected presence. But the
Speaker 1: second look, the look back from the edge of the forest,
Speaker 1: that was a choice. She'd already begun to leave. She'd
Speaker 1: already made the decision that this interaction was over, that
Speaker 1: the large, quiet, strange smelling thing in the brush wasn't
Speaker 1: something she wanted to engage with further was going. And
Speaker 1: then she stopped, and she turned and she looked back
Speaker 1: at him one more time. Rose said that second look
Speaker 1: lasted only a moment that she turned and looked back,
Speaker 1: and then turned away again and was gone into the timber,
Speaker 1: absorbed by it, leaving no sign and making no further
Speaker 1: sound that he could hear. He stayed in the brush
Speaker 1: for a long time after she was gone. When William
Speaker 1: Rowe finally felt right about moving, he came out of
Speaker 1: the brush. Slowly. He walked to the place where she'd
Speaker 1: been standing and eating. He looked at the ground the
Speaker 1: way a tracker looks at ground, studying it, reading it.
Speaker 1: He looked at the cherry tree. He looked at the
Speaker 1: path she'd taken into the timber. He examined the ground
Speaker 1: where she'd been standing and walking for whatever signs he
Speaker 1: could find. The details he preserved from this post encounter
Speaker 1: inspection would later contribute to the overall credibility of his account.
Speaker 1: He didn't try to exaggerate or dramatize what he found,
Speaker 1: because he didn't need to. He found what he found,
Speaker 1: and he noted it. The wild cherry tree showed signs
Speaker 1: of having been browsed, leaves and shoots removed in a
Speaker 1: pattern consistent with what he'd watched her doing. The ground
Speaker 1: in the area showed impressions where something large and heavy
Speaker 1: had stood. The undergrowth along the path she'd taken into
Speaker 1: the forest showed the passage of something substantial. He didn't
Speaker 1: find what modern researchers most want from an encounter sighte
Speaker 1: clear measurable photographic footprints and firm substrate. The ground in
Speaker 1: that area, given the time of year and the composition
Speaker 1: of the forest floor, wasn't giving up that kind of evidence.
Speaker 1: But Roe was anexperienced enough outdoorsman to read what was
Speaker 1: there even without a clear print. He stood at the
Speaker 1: edge of the forest where she disappeared, and he looked
Speaker 1: into the timber, and he listened. He heard nothing that
Speaker 1: wasn't the mountain wind in the high spruce, a bird somewhere,
Speaker 1: the normal sounds of a forest going about its business.
Speaker 1: Whatever she was, whatever she'd gone back to, it was
Speaker 1: somewhere in there, and it was keeping itself quiet the
Speaker 1: way it had kept itself quiet for How long? How
Speaker 1: long had something like her been moving through these mountains,
Speaker 1: browsing the wild cherry trees near old abandoned cabins, looking
Speaker 1: back over her shoulder at things that didn't belong in
Speaker 1: her world. He thought about what he'd just witnessed. He
Speaker 1: thought about it the way a practical man thinks about things,
Speaker 1: turning it over, examining it, looking for the angle he'd missed,
Speaker 1: the ordinary explanation he'd overlooked. A bear wearing fur in
Speaker 1: an unusual color. He thought of that while he was
Speaker 1: watching her, and he thought of it again now, and
Speaker 1: the answer was the same as it had been then. No,
Speaker 1: just flat. No. Bears don't stand six feet tall on
Speaker 1: two legs with their weight distributed the way hers had been.
Speaker 1: Bears don't eat with hands that select and grasp and
Speaker 1: carry food to a mouth in the deliberate way she had.
Speaker 1: Bears don't have faces like that. Bears don't look back.
Speaker 1: A person in a suit in nineteen fifty five, in
Speaker 1: the middle of nowhere, on a mountain in British Columbia,
Speaker 1: with no road access to the area, no other human
Speaker 1: being for miles, no something he simply hadn't seen before
Speaker 1: and couldn't identify. He'd been in the wilderness his whole
Speaker 1: adult life. He knew every large animal that lived in
Speaker 1: the rocky mountains of British Columbia. None of them fit.
Speaker 1: He went back down the mountain, He went back to
Speaker 1: his life, his work on the highway, his family, his
Speaker 1: ordinary days, and he didn't say much about what he'd seen,
Speaker 1: not right away, not for almost two years. Nearly two
Speaker 1: years of silence is a significant thing. It's the kind
Speaker 1: of detail that cuts against the idea of a publicity
Speaker 1: seeking hoaxer, because a man who makes up a story
Speaker 1: for attention doesn't sit on it for two years. He
Speaker 1: tells it immediately, he finds an audience, and he works
Speaker 1: the story for whatever it's worth. Road did the oppice.
Speaker 1: He went quiet. He went back to his life, and
Speaker 1: he carried what he'd seen on Micah Mountain the way
Speaker 1: people carry experiences that don't have easy language attached to them, carefully,
Speaker 1: privately turning them over in the dark, sometimes wondering what
Speaker 1: they meant. He talked to his family about it. His daughter,
Speaker 1: in fact, later confirmed that he'd told them the story,
Speaker 1: and she'd been so impressed by what he described that
Speaker 1: she added her own written statement to the affidavit document,
Speaker 1: affirming that he'd told her the same account long before
Speaker 1: he ever made it public. That corroboration matters. It tells
Speaker 1: you that the account wasn't invented for public consumption. It
Speaker 1: was a real experience that had been living in the
Speaker 1: family for years before it ever found its way into
Speaker 1: the historical record. Roe thought about what obligations he had.
Speaker 1: He wasn't a scientist, he wasn't a researcher. He was
Speaker 1: a working man who'd seen something that the scientific world
Speaker 1: didn't officially acknowledge existed, and he had no way to
Speaker 1: know how seriously he'd taken or what the consequences of
Speaker 1: going public might be for his reputation and his livelihood.
Speaker 1: In small communities in rural Canada in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: being known as the man who saw the Sasquatch was
Speaker 1: not necessarily the kind of notoriety you sought out. But
Speaker 1: the thing he'd seen was real. He knew it was real,
Speaker 1: with the same certainty that he knew anything he'd directly
Speaker 1: observed in thirty plus years of outdoor experience was real,
Speaker 1: and leaving it unsaid felt like a different kind of wrong,
Speaker 1: like allowing something true to be suppressed because the truth
Speaker 1: was inconvenient or strange. That wasn't who he was. So
Speaker 1: in August of nineteen fifty seven, he walked into a
Speaker 1: notary public's office in Edmonton, Alberta, and he swore his affidavit.
Speaker 1: The language of the affidavit is remarkable not for its drama,
Speaker 1: but for its lack of it. It's written in the plain, precise,
Speaker 1: unadorned style of a man who is committed to accuracy.
Speaker 1: Above everything else, and who has no interest in making
Speaker 1: himself say more impressive or more dramatic than the facts require.
Speaker 1: He states what he saw, He gives dimensions, He describes behaviors,
Speaker 1: He provides his assessment of the creature's sex, He records
Speaker 1: the sound she made. He describes the second look at
Speaker 1: the edge of the forest, and then he states flatly
Speaker 1: that he did not shoot the creature because she looked
Speaker 1: too human, and that he wishes he had a photograph.
Speaker 1: That's it. That's the document. No dramatic claims, no special pleading,
Speaker 1: no attempt to inflate the significance of the encounter, Just
Speaker 1: a careful, honest account from a careful honest man, sworn
Speaker 1: legally and submitted to the historical record. When John Green
Speaker 1: got hold of the Roe affidavit, he understood immediately that
Speaker 1: he was looking at something exceptional. Green was already, by
Speaker 1: the late nineteen fifties, in the early stages of building
Speaker 1: what would become the most comprehensive database of sasquatch encounter
Speaker 1: reports in the world. He'd been talking to witnesses, traveling
Speaker 1: to sites, comparing accounts, looking for the patterns that would
Speaker 1: either support or undermine the case for a real unknown
Speaker 1: creature living in the forests of North America. What he
Speaker 1: saw in the Row account was the kind of evidence
Speaker 1: that serious researchers dream about. A witness with impeccable outdoor credentials,
Speaker 1: A sighting of significant duration, not a glimpse through the trees,
Speaker 1: not a shadow and a sound, but several minutes of
Speaker 1: close observation in reasonable light, A legally sworn statement made
Speaker 1: with full awareness of the consequences of lying in a
Speaker 1: sworn document. A level of anatomical detail that couldn't plausibly
Speaker 1: have been drawn from prior folklore or popular culture, because
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty five, the popular culture image of bigfoot
Speaker 1: simply didn't exist yet in any detailed form. Green published
Speaker 1: the account in his newspaper. He was working as a
Speaker 1: journalist in Hope, British Columbia at the time, and it
Speaker 1: attracted attention both from within the small community of people
Speaker 1: who were taking the sasquatch question seriously and from a
Speaker 1: broader public that was just beginning to become aware that
Speaker 1: there might be something worth paying attention to in the
Speaker 1: mountains of western North America. Ivan T. Sanderson, the Scottish
Speaker 1: American biologist and naturalist who would publish his landmark book,
Speaker 1: Abominable Snowmen Legend Come to Life in nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: found the Row account to be one of the most
Speaker 1: compelling pieces of evidence in the entire body of sasquatch
Speaker 1: encounter literature. Sanderson was a scientist, a formerly trained zoologist,
Speaker 1: with a rigorous mind and a healthy skepticism about extraordinary claims,
Speaker 1: and the things that impressed him most about the Roe
Speaker 1: account were the same things that continued to impress researchers today.
Speaker 1: The anatomical details were consistent in ways that suggested direct
Speaker 1: observation rather than imagination or fabrication. The silver tipped brown hair,
Speaker 1: the flat nose, the wide, flat face with prominent browridge
Speaker 1: but clearly defined facial features. The short neck, the massive
Speaker 1: shoulder width, the long arms with hands that were human
Speaker 1: in basic structure but noticeably different in proportion. The bipedal
Speaker 1: walk with heel to toe foot placement. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: These details hung together in a way that was internally consistent.
Speaker 1: They described a creature that made physiological sense, as a large,
Speaker 1: upright primate rather than a grab bag of random, impressive
Speaker 1: sounding features that didn't cohere as a real organism. The
Speaker 1: behavior was also significant. The creature wasn't displaying threatening behavior.
Speaker 1: She wasn't protecting territory in any aggressive sense. She was eating,
Speaker 1: going about the ordinary business of a large herbivore in autumn,
Speaker 1: building the caloric reserves she'd need for the coming winner.
Speaker 1: The fact that she chose to walk away rather than
Speaker 1: stand her ground or charge when she became aware of
Speaker 1: row was consistent with what researchers would eventually come to
Speaker 1: understand as typical sasquatch behavioral patterns in encounter situations. A
Speaker 1: preference for avoidance over confrontation, a general non aggression toward
Speaker 1: humans that's been noted across hundreds of reported encounters. The
Speaker 1: female sex was particularly interesting to researchers. Most of the
Speaker 1: high profile sasquatch encounters in the literature involve creatures that
Speaker 1: are described as male or of indeterminate sex. A clearly
Speaker 1: female creature observed closely enough that the witness could confirm
Speaker 1: breasts represented a genuinely useful data point for anyone trying
Speaker 1: to understand the population biology of a species that, if
Speaker 1: it exists, must have both sexes in reasonable numbers to
Speaker 1: maintain a viable breeding population, and the moment of hesitation,
Speaker 1: the moment Row raised his rifle and then put it
Speaker 1: down because she looked too human, resonated powerfully with the
Speaker 1: emerging body of close encounter testimony that suggested these creatures
Speaker 1: occupied a cognitive category that made them profoundly difficult to kill,
Speaker 1: not because they were supernaturally powerful or mystically protected, but
Speaker 1: because they presented something to the human observer that short
Speaker 1: circuited the ordinary calculus of hunting, a quality of presence,
Speaker 1: of consciousness, of being, hereness that made the act of
Speaker 1: shooting feel categorically different from shooting an elk or a bear.
Speaker 1: To understand why the Row account matters, you have to
Speaker 1: understand where it sits in the timeline of Sasquatch research.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty five, when the encounter happened, the concept
Speaker 1: of the Sasquatch as a North American phenomenon with a
Speaker 1: serious body of encounter evidence behind it was essentially non
Speaker 1: existent in mainstream culture. There were indigenous traditions going back
Speaker 1: generations that acknowledged these creatures. There were scattered historical accounts
Speaker 1: from the nineteenth century trappers and prospectors and indigenous informants
Speaker 1: who'd reported encounters. There was the famous Albert Osman account,
Speaker 1: a man who claimed a sasquatch had kidnapped him while
Speaker 1: he slept in his camp in nineteen twenty four, but
Speaker 1: Osman wouldn't go on record with his story until nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty seven. The same year Roe was formalizing his account.
Speaker 1: The world was on the cusp of changing in terms
Speaker 1: of Sasquatch awareness. The nineteen fifty eight discovery of enormous
Speaker 1: humanoid footprints by Jerry crwe in Bluff Creek, California was coming.
Speaker 1: The newspaper coverage of those footprints would coin the term
Speaker 1: bigfoot in the American popular consciousness and touch off a
Speaker 1: wave of public interest and investigation that's never really stopped.
Speaker 1: The Patterson Gimlin film of nineteen sixty seven would give
Speaker 1: the world its most famous and most argued over piece
Speaker 1: of potential Sasquatch evidence. All of that was coming, but
Speaker 1: the Row account came before any of it. It stands
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the modern era of Sasquatch research
Speaker 1: as one of the first formally documented, legally sworn close
Speaker 1: encounter reports in the literature, and because it came before
Speaker 1: the explosion of popular culture around Bigfoot, it couldn't have
Speaker 1: been contaminated by media images or popular representations. Roe described
Speaker 1: what he saw, and what he saw alignes in remarkable
Speaker 1: ways with what hundreds of witnesses in the decades following
Speaker 1: him would independently describe. The hair color and the silver
Speaker 1: tipping that Rod described dark brown with silver tips has
Speaker 1: appeared in other encounter reports from the same general region
Speaker 1: of the Canadian Rockies and the Pacific Northwest. The flat,
Speaker 1: wide face, the long arms, the peculiar combination of features
Speaker 1: that reads as simultaneously not human enough and too human enough,
Speaker 1: that sits in the uncanny valley in the most disconcerting
Speaker 1: way possible. The quiet movement through dense timber, the tendency
Speaker 1: to walk away rather than confront, the second look at
Speaker 1: the edge of the forest. All of these things show
Speaker 1: up again in report after report, in the testimonies of
Speaker 1: witnesses who could I didn't have known about William Rose's account,
Speaker 1: in some cases, who'd never heard the name, who simply
Speaker 1: had an experience and reported it as accurately as they could.
Speaker 1: The consistency across independent accounts is one of the strongest
Speaker 1: arguments in the overall case for the existence of a
Speaker 1: real animal, and William Row's account is one of the
Speaker 1: foundational data points in that argument. I've been in this
Speaker 1: field for nearly forty years. I've interviewed close to a
Speaker 1: thousand witnesses. I've been in the woods when something was
Speaker 1: watching from the darkness, and you could feel it the
Speaker 1: way you can feel a change in air pressure before
Speaker 1: a storm. I had my first encounter in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: six in the mountains of North Georgia when I was
Speaker 1: a kid, and it set the course of my life
Speaker 1: in ways i'm still discovering. So when I talk about
Speaker 1: the William Row case, I'm not talking about it from
Speaker 1: the position of an outside observer examining historical documents. I'm
Speaker 1: talking about it from the position of someone who knows
Speaker 1: in a very personal way what it means to see
Speaker 1: something in the woods that changes the frame work through
Speaker 1: which you understand the world. What resonates with me most
Speaker 1: profoundly about William Rowe's account is the decision not to shoot.
Speaker 1: I've thought about that moment a lot over the years,
Speaker 1: especially in conversations with researchers and hunters who've been in
Speaker 1: similar positions, people who had the shot and didn't take it.
Speaker 1: The reason Roe gives is simple and devastating in its implications.
Speaker 1: She looked too human. That's the line. That's the thing
Speaker 1: he couldn't get passed. And whether you believe in the
Speaker 1: existence of sasquatch or not, that line tells you something
Speaker 1: important about what these encounters do to the people who
Speaker 1: have them. They challenge the categories. They sit on the
Speaker 1: boundary between the animal world and something else, and they
Speaker 1: refuse to come down on one side or the other.
Speaker 1: And that refusal is what makes them so compelling and
Speaker 1: so troubling and so important. If William Row had pulled
Speaker 1: that trigger, we'd know a great deal more about what
Speaker 1: these creatures are. We'd have a physical specimen that science
Speaker 1: could study and classify and either fit into the existing
Speaker 1: catalog of known species or establish as something new. The
Speaker 1: mystery would be solved, or at least a chapter of
Speaker 1: it would be closed. And yet I find myself every
Speaker 1: time I think about that moment, understanding why he didn't
Speaker 1: do it, understanding it in my gut, in the same
Speaker 1: place where I understand the wrongness of certain things that
Speaker 1: the rational mind struggles to articulate he made the right choice.
Speaker 1: I believe that with the same conviction I bring to
Speaker 1: this research, that there are things in these mountains that
Speaker 1: exist in a space that demands a certain kind of respect,
Speaker 1: and that pulling a trigger on them would be a
Speaker 1: violation of something that matters, even if you can't name
Speaker 1: it precisely. Let me take you back up to Michael
Speaker 1: Mountain one more time. Let's go back to that clearing
Speaker 1: near the old derelic cabin, and let's think about her
Speaker 1: not as evidence, not as a data point in a
Speaker 1: research database, but as a creature, a living thing with
Speaker 1: her own life, her own range, her own history. She
Speaker 1: was eating wild cherry leaves on an October afternoon. This
Speaker 1: is a detail that has nutritional significance. October is late
Speaker 1: in the foraging season in the British Columbia interior, and
Speaker 1: a large animal that depends on plant material for the
Speaker 1: bulk of its diet would be spending every available hour
Speaker 1: and burning every calorie of energy trying to pack away
Speaker 1: as much nutrition as possible before the winter made foraging
Speaker 1: difficult or impossible. She was doing what she needed to do.
Speaker 1: She was working, She'd been on that mountain or in
Speaker 1: that territory, long enough to know where the cherry trees were,
Speaker 1: long enough to have a sense of the landscape's resources,
Speaker 1: to have a mental map of the terrain that included
Speaker 1: this clearing, this stand of wild cherry, this old human
Speaker 1: structure that she either didn't recognize as such or recognized
Speaker 1: and had long since determined was abandoned and therefore safe.
Speaker 1: She had a territory. She had knowledge of that territory
Speaker 1: that came from years of moving through it, learning it,
Speaker 1: surviving in it. She was alone, as far as Roe
Speaker 1: could see, not solitary in the way of a true loaner.
Speaker 1: Later research would suggest that Sasquatch tend to live in
Speaker 1: small family groups rather than in large congregations or in
Speaker 1: complete isolation. But alone in that clearing, on that afternoon,
Speaker 1: doing what she needed to do in the way that
Speaker 1: felt safe and familiar. And then a human being appeared,
Speaker 1: crouching in the brush, watching her. What did she make
Speaker 1: of him? What did that second look communicate from her
Speaker 1: side of the exchange. Was it pure calculation assessing whether
Speaker 1: this strange, upright, oddly clothed, rifle carrying creature represented a threat.
Speaker 1: Was it curiosity. Was it something closer to recognition, an
Speaker 1: acknowledgment of a kind of kinship, however distant, that goes
Speaker 1: back to a shared branch in the great tree of
Speaker 1: primate life. We can't know, but we can hold the question.
Speaker 1: We can honor the complexity of what that moment contained,
Speaker 1: that long, strange mutual gaze between William Rowe and a
Speaker 1: creature he couldn't name and couldn't categorize, but couldn't bring
Speaker 1: himself to harm. There's something in that exchange that speaks
Speaker 1: to something fundamental about consciousness and recognition and the way
Speaker 1: that living things, even very different living things, can acknowledge
Speaker 1: each other. Across the gap, she walked away. She looked
Speaker 1: back once, and then the forest took her and she
Speaker 1: was gone. She's probably been gone for many years now.
Speaker 1: In the ordinary sense, a creature that was mature in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty five would be long past her natural lifespan
Speaker 1: by any reasonable estimate. But something from her lineage, something
Speaker 1: carrying whatever genetic material and behavioral learning she embodied, is
Speaker 1: almost certainly out there, still moving through those mountains, browsing
Speaker 1: the wild cherry trees in October, carrying a long memory
Speaker 1: of the landscape, and perhaps a long memory of the
Speaker 1: strange encounters with the upright rifle carrying creatures that move
Speaker 1: through the forest from time to time and crouch in
Speaker 1: the brush and watch with their small, strange eyes. It's
Speaker 1: worth spending a moment on what the affidavit itself represents,
Speaker 1: because in a field that's filled with anecdote and rumor
Speaker 1: and secondhand report and frankly, a lot of outright fabrication,
Speaker 1: the affidavit is something different. A sworn affidavit is a
Speaker 1: legal document. It's a formal declaration made under oath before
Speaker 1: a notary or other authorized official, and it carries the
Speaker 1: same legal weight as testimony given in a courtroom. When
Speaker 1: you sign an affidavit, you're not just saying that you
Speaker 1: believe what you're stating. You're saying that what you're stating
Speaker 1: is true, and you're accepting legal consequences if it turns
Speaker 1: out that you've lied. Lying in a sworn affidavit can
Speaker 1: get you charged with perjury. It can destroy your reputation
Speaker 1: in your community. It can have financial and professional consequences
Speaker 1: that follow you for years. William Rose signed his name
Speaker 1: to a sworn legal document attesting to his encounter with
Speaker 1: an unknown creature on Micah Mountain in October of nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five. He did this two years after the encounter,
Speaker 1: having had ample time to think about the decision. He
Speaker 1: did it in front of a notary in Edmonton, Alberta.
Speaker 1: He knew what he was doing, and he chose to
Speaker 1: do it. That's not nothing. That's actually quite a lot
Speaker 1: when you consider it carefully. It's the kind of commitment
Speaker 1: to the truth of one's experience that should command respect
Speaker 1: even from the most hard and skeptic, Because whatever you
Speaker 1: think about the existence of Sasquatch, you have to wrestle
Speaker 1: with what it means that a man with a reputation
Speaker 1: for honesty and practicality, with everything to lose and nothing
Speaker 1: obvious to gain, put his name to this account in
Speaker 1: a formal legal document. John Green recognized this. He said
Speaker 1: more than once that the rou affidavit was one of
Speaker 1: the strongest pieces of eyewitness testimony in the Sasquatch literature,
Speaker 1: not because of the dramatic content of the encounter, but
Speaker 1: because of the manner in which it was reported. Researchers
Speaker 1: who've spent careers evaluating witness credibility in a variety of
Speaker 1: contexts have consistently pointed to the affidavit as a model
Speaker 1: of what serious reporting from a serious witness looks like.
Speaker 1: The document has been in the public record since the
Speaker 1: late nineteen fifties. It's been examined by skeptics looking for
Speaker 1: holes and inconsistencies and finding them difficult to locate. It's
Speaker 1: been analyzed for internal consistency and found to be remarkably coherent.
Speaker 1: The details hang together in a way that's difficult to
Speaker 1: achieve if you're making things up, because invented stories tend
Speaker 1: to have gaps and logical inconsistencies that careful examination reveals.
Speaker 1: The Row affidavit doesn't have those gaps. It's the account
Speaker 1: of a man who saw what he saw and reported
Speaker 1: it as faithfully as he could. Over the decades that
Speaker 1: researchers have been studying the Row account, certain specific details
Speaker 1: have consistently attracted the most attention. Not the dramatic ones,
Speaker 1: not the moments of confrontation and mutual gaze, but the quiet,
Speaker 1: anatomical and behavioral details that a man making up a
Speaker 1: story simply wouldn't think to include, or wouldn't include in
Speaker 1: quite the way Row included them. The Silver Tipping on
Speaker 1: the hair is one of those details. Roe didn't say
Speaker 1: the creature was dark brown. He said it was dark
Speaker 1: brown with silver tips, a very specific observation about the
Speaker 1: quality of individual hair strands that requires close attention to make.
Speaker 1: In the world of mammalogy, silver tipping or grizzling of
Speaker 1: the coat is a known phenomenon in various primate and
Speaker 1: large mammal species, and it often appears in individuals that
Speaker 1: have reached a certain stage of maturity. It's the kind
Speaker 1: of detail that a zoologist might notice and record. It's
Speaker 1: also the kind of detail that a trapper, someone who
Speaker 1: spent years handling fur bearing animals studying the quality and
Speaker 1: coloration of pelts, would naturally attend. To stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: Roe was both In effect, he had the eye of
Speaker 1: someone trained by experience to look carefully at animal coats.
Speaker 1: The heel to toe foot placement is another one. When
Speaker 1: Roe described the creature's walk, he didn't just say she
Speaker 1: walked on two feet. He described the mechanics of it.
Speaker 1: He'll striking the ground first weight, rolling through the foot
Speaker 1: to the toe in a stride pattern. That closely mirrors
Speaker 1: the human gait pattern. This is the kind of detail
Speaker 1: that biomechanics researchers would later point to as significant because
Speaker 1: it's consistent with the analysis of tracks found in subsequent
Speaker 1: decades that show the same weight distribution pattern, and because
Speaker 1: it's different from the flat footed slap of a bear
Speaker 1: walking upright or the tow first impact pattern of great
Speaker 1: apes when they attempt bipedal locomotion. It's a detail that
Speaker 1: suggests either an extraordinarily well informed hoaxer with specialized knowledge
Speaker 1: of primate locomotion, knowledge that simply wasn't in the public
Speaker 1: domain in nineteen fifty five, or a straightforward observation of
Speaker 1: something that actually walked in that particular way. The arm
Speaker 1: length is another Roe noted that the arms hung down
Speaker 1: to approximately knee level, much longer relative to body height
Speaker 1: than human arms. This is a detail that appears consistently
Speaker 1: in sasquatch and counter reports across decades and across different
Speaker 1: witness backgrounds, and it's a detail that corresponds to what
Speaker 1: you'd expect of a primate lineage that diverged from the
Speaker 1: human line at a point when arm length was still
Speaker 1: an adaptive advantage for arboreal or semi arboreal life. Long
Speaker 1: arms in a large bipedal primate would make physiological sense.
Speaker 1: They'd also be one of the first things a careful
Speaker 1: observer would notice, because the contrast with the expected human
Speaker 1: proportions would be striking. And then there's the matter of
Speaker 1: what she was eating. Wild cherry leaves are mildly toxic.
Speaker 1: They contain compounds that break down into hydrogen cyanide, but
Speaker 1: large herbivores with appropriate gut flora can process them in
Speaker 1: small quantities, and they do show up in the browsing
Speaker 1: records of deer and elk and black bears, typically in
Speaker 1: situations where other food sources are becoming scarce. The fact
Speaker 1: that a creature of this size and apparent intelligence was
Speaker 1: selectively browsing wild cherry leaves in October, late in the
Speaker 1: foraging season, when high calorie food sources like berries and
Speaker 1: roots were becoming scarce, suggests a behavioral flexibility and a
Speaker 1: knowledge of available food resources that's consistent with a large
Speaker 1: omnivore with an evolved understanding of its own nutritional needs
Speaker 1: and the seasonal patterns of the landscape it inhabits. None
Speaker 1: of these details individually proves anything, but all of them together,
Speaker 1: assembled in a single account from a witness who had
Speaker 1: no particular motive to fabricate and every reason to stay quiet,
Speaker 1: form something that's difficult to dismiss on simple grounds. Taken together,
Speaker 1: they describe a creature that makes sense ecologically, physiologically, behaviorally,
Speaker 1: a creature that fits into the landscape. It was found in,
Speaker 1: a creature that was doing what a creature of that
Speaker 1: type in that place, at that time of year would
Speaker 1: logically be doing. That coherence is what keeps researchers coming
Speaker 1: back to the Row account after all these years. The
Speaker 1: world is full of sasquatch stories that don't cohere, that
Speaker 1: fall apart under examination, that contradict themselves, or strain against
Speaker 1: what we know about how large animals behave in the wild.
Speaker 1: The Row account doesn't do any of those things. It
Speaker 1: holds together under scrutiny the way true things hold together,
Speaker 1: not perfectly, not without questions, but with the fundamental structural
Speaker 1: integrity of a genuine observation reported by a genuinely careful mind.
Speaker 1: Micah Mountain is still there, of course. The British Columbia
Speaker 1: interior hasn't changed in any fundamental way that would make
Speaker 1: it less suitable for a large, elusive, forest dependent primate.
Speaker 1: The timber is still dense, the terrain is still wild
Speaker 1: in a way that exceeds almost anything in the lower
Speaker 1: forty eight States. The wild cherry trees still produced leaves
Speaker 1: and berries in their season. The old deserted cabins that
Speaker 1: dot the back country continue their slow return to the earth.
Speaker 1: The William Rowe encounter has influenced the way researchers approached
Speaker 1: the sasquatch question in ways that are still evident today.
Speaker 1: The emphasis on witnessing behavior, on recording detail about gait
Speaker 1: and hand and facial structure, on noting the sex, an
Speaker 1: apparent age, and apparent emotional state of observed creatures. All
Speaker 1: of this became more systematic in the wake of the
Speaker 1: Roe account, partly because Roe modeled what careful detailed observation
Speaker 1: and reporting looked like. His account influenced how the Patterson
Speaker 1: Gimlin film was analyzed. When it emerged in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1: Researchers who'd read Rose affidavit looked at the creature in
Speaker 1: that film and found consistency in precisely the details that
Speaker 1: Roe had described. The long arms, the wide shoulders, the
Speaker 1: flat footed, bipedal walk, the female sex indicated by visible
Speaker 1: breast tissue, the apparent lack of neck, the dark hair.
Speaker 1: The consistency between a sworn eye witness account from nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five and film footage from nineteen sixty seven shot
Speaker 1: by different people in a different country was striking, and
Speaker 1: it reinforced the sense that multiple independent observers were describing
Speaker 1: the same species of animal, rather than independent inventions or misidentifications.
Speaker 1: The Row encounter has been cited in formal scientific discussions
Speaker 1: of the sasquatch evidence. Anthropologist Grover Krantz, who was one
Speaker 1: of the few credentialed scientists to take the sasquatch question
Speaker 1: seriously during his career, referenced it as part of the
Speaker 1: case for the existence of an unknown North American primate.
Speaker 1: The late doctor Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University, who
Speaker 1: was a friend of mine, whose work on the biomechanics
Speaker 1: of putative sasquatch footprints is among the most rigorous scientific
Speaker 1: engagement with the subject in the literature, has cited the
Speaker 1: Row account in discussions of what a real sasquatch's physical
Speaker 1: characteristics and locomotion patterns would look like. Ordinary people who
Speaker 1: have their own encounters find the Row account validating in
Speaker 1: a particular way. When you've seen something that nobody in
Speaker 1: your life is willing to believe you saw, there's a
Speaker 1: profound comfort in reading the account of someone who saw
Speaker 1: something similar and had the courage to formalize it. Roe
Speaker 1: didn't seek approval, He didn't need anyone to believe him.
Speaker 1: He knew what he'd seen, and he put it on
Speaker 1: the record, and he let the world decide. That, in
Speaker 1: its way, is a model for how all of us
Speaker 1: who carry encounter experiences might think about what we owe
Speaker 1: to the truth of what we've witnessed. October of nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five, Micah Mountain, British Columbia. A quiet afternoon in
Speaker 1: the deep timber, the kind of afternoon that smells like
Speaker 1: cold air and damp earth, and the last of the
Speaker 1: season's growth before winter takes every thing back. A large
Speaker 1: female creature with dark silver tipped hair moves through the
Speaker 1: trees near an old cabin. She finds a wild cherry
Speaker 1: tree she begins to eat, unhurried, competent, utterly at home
Speaker 1: in the landscape that has been her home for her
Speaker 1: entire life. A man named William Row climbs through the
Speaker 1: forest on his own time, driven by the ordinary curiosity
Speaker 1: that sends people up mountains. He settles into cover, He watches.
Speaker 1: He sees something he can't name. He watches for several minutes.
Speaker 1: He raises his rifle. He lowers his rifle. He watches
Speaker 1: some more. She becomes aware of him. She stands. She
Speaker 1: looks at him with dark brown eyes that carries something
Speaker 1: he'll spend the rest of his life trying to adequately describe.
Speaker 1: She makes a sound. She walks away at the edge
Speaker 1: of the forest. She looks back, and then the timber
Speaker 1: takes her, and the mountain is quiet again, and William
Speaker 1: Row is alone in the brush, with the most significant
Speaker 1: experience of his life and no way yet to know
Speaker 1: what to do with it. He'll come down the mountain
Speaker 1: with that experience tucked inside him. He'll carry it for
Speaker 1: two years before he decides that the truth deserves to
Speaker 1: be on record. He'll walk into a notary's office in Edmonton,
Speaker 1: and he'll swear to what he saw, and his sworn
Speaker 1: account will become one of the foundation stones of serious
Speaker 1: sasquatch research cited and studied in referenced for nearly seventy
Speaker 1: years and counting. What was she? What are they? These
Speaker 1: creatures that step in and out of our awareness, like
Speaker 1: they've been doing it since long before we were around
Speaker 1: to notice that question is still open. It'll be open
Speaker 1: for a while yet, maybe for a long time. But
Speaker 1: we keep looking. We keep collecting the accounts of people
Speaker 1: like William Rowe, people who saw what they saw and
Speaker 1: had the decency and the courage to say so plainly.
Speaker 1: We keep going up the mountains because she's still out there,
Speaker 1: some descendant of hers. Each you're carrying, the memory of
Speaker 1: the species in her bones, is moving right now through
Speaker 1: the heavy timber of British Columbia, eating wild cherry leaves
Speaker 1: in October, keeping herself to herself, living her life in
Speaker 1: the spaces that the human world hasn't managed to completely fill.
Speaker 1: And maybe if you're quiet enough and patient enough, and
Speaker 1: you pick the right mountain on the right autumn afternoon,
Speaker 1: maybe she'll step into your clearing and eat from your
Speaker 1: cherry tree and let you look at her, and maybe
Speaker 1: you'll understand the way William Row understood that some things
Speaker 1: can't be shot, and can't be quantified, and can't be
Speaker 1: made to fit neatly into any category. You already have
Speaker 1: some things. Just look at you with dark brown eyes
Speaker 1: and walk back into the forest, and you carry that
Speaker 1: look for the rest of your life. I know what
Speaker 1: that's like. I've said before on this show, and I'll
Speaker 1: keep saying it because it's the truth. I've built everything
Speaker 1: I do around that. My first encounter happened in the
Speaker 1: mountains of North Georgia in nineteen eighty six. I was
Speaker 1: a kid. What I saw change the way I understood
Speaker 1: the world, and not in a scary way, or not
Speaker 1: only in a scary way, in a way that opened
Speaker 1: something up, in a way that made the world bigger
Speaker 1: and stranger and more interesting than it had been before.
Speaker 1: And I've spent the better part of four decades since
Speaker 1: that afternoon trying to understand what I saw, talking to
Speaker 1: people who've had similar experiences, collecting their accounts, checking the
Speaker 1: details against each other, going back into the woods, over
Speaker 1: and over and over again, because the mountains keep calling
Speaker 1: and I keep answering. The William Row case is one
Speaker 1: I come back to regularly, not because it answers the
Speaker 1: big questions it doesn't and nothing yet does, but because
Speaker 1: it reminds me of what good witness testimony looks like.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of what it means to have an
Speaker 1: experience that doesn't fit the world you think you understand,
Speaker 1: and to respond to it with honesty and courage rather
Speaker 1: than denial or sensationalism. It reminds me that the most
Speaker 1: important thing any of us can do, and we encounter
Speaker 1: something extraordinary, is to observe it as carefully as we
Speaker 1: can and report it as accurately as we can, and
Speaker 1: let the truth stand on its own. William Road did that.
Speaker 1: He went up a mountain in October of nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: five and he saw something that the rest of the
Speaker 1: world wasn't ready for. And he came back down and
Speaker 1: he sat with it, and he thought about it, and
Speaker 1: eventually he put it on the legal record, in plain language,
Speaker 1: without dramatics or embellishment, because that's what the truth deserved.
Speaker 1: That's what all of our truths deserve. Until next time,
Speaker 1: keep your eyes on the tree line in