Speaker 1: Big Food and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. These guys,
Speaker 1: are you fav It's so like saying subscribe and rade it.
Speaker 2: I'm stuck and me.
Speaker 1: The greatest go on yesterday and listening watching him always
Speaker 1: keep it's watching.
Speaker 2: And now you're hosts Cliff Barrickman and James Bubo Fay.
Speaker 3: Hey Bobs, how you doing today?
Speaker 2: Man? I'm just excited about the guests we got coming
Speaker 2: on to day.
Speaker 3: I know this is gonna be a good one. This
Speaker 3: because this is this guy. Man. I've had the pleasure
Speaker 3: of meeting Chester several times now. I don't know, I
Speaker 3: don't think I know him well enough. We haven't interacted
Speaker 3: enough to say like we're friends when we hang out,
Speaker 3: but like, he's great. I love the guy. Every time
Speaker 3: I talk to him, I learned some cool stuff. But
Speaker 3: the thing here with me which makes me excited about
Speaker 3: having Chester on is that I've heard about Chester for
Speaker 3: years and years and years and years long before I
Speaker 3: met him. You know, he is kind of this this
Speaker 3: like this mainstay in cryptozoology in general, and it is
Speaker 3: absolutely a pleasure to be able to have him on. Finally,
Speaker 3: I don't know why we didn't think of it this sooner. Honestly,
Speaker 3: he's a naturalist.
Speaker 4: I mean he wrote for like hunting magazines, outdoor magazines.
Speaker 4: He's like a real naturalist. He knows what he's talking about,
Speaker 4: Like he really knows how it avery down in Texas.
Speaker 2: Where he's from. I mean, yeah, he's good dudes.
Speaker 4: Smart, he's you know, he's got good ethics, good morals
Speaker 4: and smart you know, just so he knows what he's doing,
Speaker 4: he knows what he's looking at, and he can explain it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So with that, I think we should just bring him on. Man,
Speaker 3: ladies and gentlemen, meet Chester more longtime cryptosologists and all
Speaker 3: around rad dude finally making his appearance on Bigfoot and Beyond. Chester,
Speaker 3: Thanks so much for coming on the show with us.
Speaker 5: Greetings from the mosquito infested swamps of southeast Texas. It's
Speaker 5: an honor and privilege and beyond with you guys, all right, you.
Speaker 3: Know, honor and privilege is all ours, my friend. Thank
Speaker 3: you so much for making some time for us, And.
Speaker 5: I'd be fun to talk with you guys much less
Speaker 5: get out there and you know, be able to communicate
Speaker 5: with the people listening to the program and all of
Speaker 5: our shared collective love all things wild and mysterious.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, so.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean you you are like this renaissance man of
Speaker 3: cryptozoology because you know, there's a few other people in
Speaker 3: the field that kind of represent what you do, but
Speaker 3: in a different way. Like I'd say Lauren Coleman is
Speaker 3: probably up there because he has such a huge, varied
Speaker 3: interest in various critters all over the world. You know,
Speaker 3: Ken Gerhart comes to mind because he's a generalist Texas. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: And you are one of these because you have your
Speaker 3: fingers in everything pretty much. I mean, Bigfoot is just
Speaker 3: one little sliver of the pie that you serve yourself
Speaker 3: every single day. Is there anything that you're not interested in?
Speaker 3: I don't know, man, you know, it's just I love nature.
Speaker 5: I mean I think I came out of the womb
Speaker 5: nature fanatic, grew up hunting and fishing and learning about
Speaker 5: conservation and watching what mutual O'maha's Wild.
Speaker 6: Kingdom is Jacques Cousta Specials.
Speaker 5: And you know, at that time, the Patterson Gimlin stuff
Speaker 5: was everywhere in the seventies on shows, and saw our
Speaker 5: Argacy magazine, and then I saw the legend of Boggie
Speaker 5: Creek when I was six, and that kind of just
Speaker 5: set the idea that there are mysteries in nature. And then,
Speaker 5: of course, growing up in the South, you can't help
Speaker 5: but hear about black panthers and giant catfish below dams
Speaker 5: and all kinds of stuff, and pursuing a wildlife journalism
Speaker 5: career which I've been blessed to be doing since I
Speaker 5: was nineteen, writing about you know, quote unquote mainstream wildlife stuff.
Speaker 5: To me, like looking into the mysteries was just a
Speaker 5: natural thing because you go to a hunting camp, these
Speaker 5: topics pop up and it's just a natural extension what
Speaker 5: I do. And I'm so dang curious, guys.
Speaker 3: I think that's one of the commonalities of all bigfooters
Speaker 3: for the most part, is that we have this undying
Speaker 3: curiosity about this thing, you know, and sometimes it's focused
Speaker 3: on one animal. Sometimes it's like you you're a generalist
Speaker 3: all sorts of unknown mysteries, because to engage in nature
Speaker 3: is really literally to engage in the mystery.
Speaker 6: No doubt about it.
Speaker 3: So do you remember your first cryptid hunt? So to speak?
Speaker 3: I know, I know that I don't want to only
Speaker 3: focus on cryptids in this conversation of course, but you know,
Speaker 3: our audience is largely bigfooters and all that sort of stuff,
Speaker 3: so we'll start there. Yeah, there's lots of normal animals around,
Speaker 3: but like, and I'm sure a lot of these other
Speaker 3: cryptids are normal animals as well. But do you remember
Speaker 3: the first time that you took a cryptid seriously enough
Speaker 3: to actually mount some sort of expedition. It doesn't have
Speaker 3: to be professional level or anything to go look for
Speaker 3: evidence or perhaps sighting of those animals.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, it's something that's been proven to sort
Speaker 5: of be back out in the wild, and that is
Speaker 5: the red wolf here in southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana,
Speaker 5: to cleared extinct in the wild in nineteen eighty only
Speaker 5: lived in zoos in a little population they restocked from
Speaker 5: fourteen animals they captured over in like North Carolina.
Speaker 6: But people kept seeing them.
Speaker 5: And my first ever published story was an investigation I
Speaker 5: did of a red wolf siding.
Speaker 6: And I saw myself.
Speaker 5: I saw, and I wrote Texas Parks and Wildlife when
Speaker 5: I was a junior in high school about this sighting,
Speaker 5: and a very kind biologist normally they blow you off
Speaker 5: about stuff like that people but said there are probably
Speaker 5: animals still with some red wolf DNA. The problem was
Speaker 5: hybridizing with coyotes. And the first thing I ever did
Speaker 5: like that was red wolves. And then I got to
Speaker 5: break the story in twenty eighteen when they found there
Speaker 5: was red wolf DNA still existing here. So that was
Speaker 5: like coming full circle on that one.
Speaker 2: We heard the red wolves when we were in Louisiana.
Speaker 2: That's what they told us they were.
Speaker 6: They're definitely still wolf.
Speaker 5: The funny thing is they call them now, some of
Speaker 5: the biologists call them non coyote canids. And I remember
Speaker 5: running a picture of when I got on a trail
Speaker 5: cam in a newspaper when I wrote for newspapers and
Speaker 5: running and they said, oh, it's a biologist's emails that
Speaker 5: possibly there's no way that's a red wolf. It's got
Speaker 5: to be a coyote because it has coyote blood in it.
Speaker 5: And my reply was, if it can't be a red
Speaker 5: wolf because it has coyote blood, how could it be
Speaker 5: a coyode?
Speaker 6: He has red wolf blood.
Speaker 5: And that's kind of the struggle you always have with
Speaker 5: some of the official while well, that was the first
Speaker 5: thing that would be on the mysterious side of that,
Speaker 5: and then like in nineteen ninety nine, my cousins had
Speaker 5: an encounter with something they thought was a mountain lion
Speaker 5: in East Texas, giving this crazy vocalization and scared him
Speaker 5: to death. And I went out in the woods with them,
Speaker 5: and that was probably the first thing that I could
Speaker 5: do to be tied into Bigfoot.
Speaker 3: How So, so.
Speaker 5: I go out there with him the next night, and
Speaker 5: my one cousin's, you know, like a live wire man.
Speaker 5: He's always you know, he's real keyed up, and the
Speaker 5: other guys.
Speaker 6: Very calm, and the calm one.
Speaker 5: I shine this light down in this creek bottom and
Speaker 5: I'm about to say I think there's a deer down there.
Speaker 5: I saw like eyes shining. And he just takes a
Speaker 5: Ruger ten twenty two of the thirty round clip and
Speaker 5: just fires it, and he's going crazy, and I'm like, dude,
Speaker 5: what are you doing. He goes after what we heard
Speaker 5: last night, I know, a human's eyes don't glow. Everything
Speaker 5: else is getting shot and I'm like, he had all
Speaker 5: encounter with something, and then did.
Speaker 2: I don't make any noise he shot out? Did he
Speaker 2: hit anything?
Speaker 5: He was just going crazy. It was like his Ramble moment.
Speaker 5: He was genuinely freaked out because of the vocalization. But
Speaker 5: dial this back to me.
Speaker 6: That was nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 5: Let's go back to nineteen eighty four when I was
Speaker 5: like ten, Me and my dad and my uncle and
Speaker 5: aunt were rabbit hunting on the same property and this
Speaker 5: thing growled at us for like five minutes. And my uncle,
Speaker 5: who was a marine sixty eight sixty nine of my dad,
Speaker 5: both vets, both armed with twelve ages, got out of
Speaker 5: dodge and I remember asking Daddy what was that. He goes,
Speaker 5: Uncle Bill's bulls must have been hung up in the fence,
Speaker 5: and I said, let's go help it, and I'm trying
Speaker 5: to grill my dad, and then he said it must
Speaker 5: be a bear, because sometimes bears would come back into
Speaker 5: East Texas from Louisiana. And then me and him later
Speaker 5: on had the same kind of vocalization. And the closest
Speaker 5: thing I can tell you this is the Sierra Sounds,
Speaker 5: very close to some of the Sierra Sounds stuff, and
Speaker 5: that's basically what my cousins heard. And then that kind
Speaker 5: of went into some early research that I did out
Speaker 5: there in.
Speaker 6: Newton County, Texas and stuff like that.
Speaker 5: So it just kind of started talking to people, they
Speaker 5: started talking about footprints, they started talking about sightings and stuff.
Speaker 6: So that all kind of began right there with that report.
Speaker 3: Very interesting, so is that that location has a long
Speaker 3: history of encounters as well.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 6: What we heard, I don't know.
Speaker 5: I can't say what I heard because I didn't see
Speaker 5: it making the vocalization, but some of the sounds on
Speaker 5: the Sierra sounds were that noise there, not the chatter
Speaker 5: stuff here, but like the guttural stuff, it was definitely
Speaker 5: the same kind of tone. And when I played them
Speaker 5: later on, they said that's what they heard as well,
Speaker 5: and that was just an area that's had a, you know,
Speaker 5: as I come to find out, a ton.
Speaker 6: Of activity over the years.
Speaker 5: But you know, bigfoot is a word used at the time,
Speaker 5: mainly in the Pacific Northwest. And you said bigfoot to people.
Speaker 5: They kind of looked at you, and I said, you
Speaker 5: ever see anything weird? And I remember a guy saying,
Speaker 5: I don't know about no bigfoot, but one of my
Speaker 5: buddies saw a booger down by being river, and so
Speaker 5: what did this booger look like?
Speaker 6: Well, he had some coyotes had become up to his garbage.
Speaker 5: Can at night, and he went out there for the
Speaker 5: twenty two and one night to shoot the coyotes, and
Speaker 5: this thing stand up about seven foot tall behind the
Speaker 5: garbage can.
Speaker 6: It runs off down toward the river. Because that was
Speaker 6: a booger, so you know.
Speaker 5: Then, of course the media Bigfoot's now known to be
Speaker 5: all around the country reports of them, so sometimes and
Speaker 5: back in the day, it was almost like just ask
Speaker 5: people if you see anything strange that kind of.
Speaker 2: Stuff, Yeah, especially not on the Pasidic the northwest.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if you're on the Pacific Northwest, saying hear anything weird?
Speaker 4: Did you ever see anything weird? Do you ever hear
Speaker 4: you know, like that comes off a lot better than
Speaker 4: have you seen Bigfoot?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, And people talk, So that was that was
Speaker 5: an interesting learning curve for me, just talking to people
Speaker 5: and saying, hey, see anything strange, anything weird, anything unusual,
Speaker 5: And a lot of times they would have her story
Speaker 5: and it was often pretty compelling stuff.
Speaker 3: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo.
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Speaker 3: Now, is that how you get most of the leads
Speaker 3: on various things to follow up on? Is just talking
Speaker 3: to people? Or do you do you look for like
Speaker 3: printed accounts or how do you go about choosing either
Speaker 3: it could be a big foot thing or could be
Speaker 3: you know, ivory build woodpecker. It doesn't matter, Like how
Speaker 3: do you get the leads? Or is there so such
Speaker 3: a variety of ways that you can't even narrow one down.
Speaker 5: It's a great question, Like I really don't do sasquatch
Speaker 5: researcher anymore. My only sasquatch stuff I do anymore is
Speaker 5: taking kids facing special challenges on like terminal illness, on expeditions.
Speaker 6: That's kind of my sasquatch stuff I do now.
Speaker 5: But the other stuff, and going back to when I
Speaker 5: first started, was I would often just put something out
Speaker 5: in the media. You know, that would be my starting
Speaker 5: point because you know, if I have a chance to
Speaker 5: be published in front of one hundred thousand people or
Speaker 5: whatever and say, hey, you know any reports of X,
Speaker 5: Y and Z or whatever, that would help. Now you
Speaker 5: do that, you get a lot of game camera photos
Speaker 5: and videos, which is wonderful. I've been doing a lot
Speaker 5: of that with cat stuff lately. And I would also
Speaker 5: look at a lot of stuff. Used to go back
Speaker 5: to the library a lot and look at old books
Speaker 5: and look at old microfilm and stuff like that, and
Speaker 5: just try to find historic database of like you know,
Speaker 5: in patterns. I'm a journalist, so I look for patterns.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: I would see, like, you know, there's this weird report
Speaker 5: over here, there's this history of these large cats being
Speaker 5: seen a certain air that not supposed to be. That's
Speaker 5: usually a pretty good spot to go into. And then
Speaker 5: you start interviewing people. I really like the one on
Speaker 5: one part of sitting down with someone and interviewing them,
Speaker 5: you know, that really helps a lot. And so it's
Speaker 5: you know, it's all the above pretty much. But now
Speaker 5: a lot of the stuff comes to me, so I
Speaker 5: get more stuff than I can handle sometimes to look into,
Speaker 5: you know, because people know I do this stuff, and
Speaker 5: I'm in a lot of different publications and podcasts, so
Speaker 5: I get a lot of just reports of different stuff
Speaker 5: sent to me, which is great.
Speaker 3: What's your favorite thing to look into?
Speaker 5: At this point, I'm really into the cat stuff, like
Speaker 5: because of some kind of discoveries that I've made in
Speaker 5: this regard. You know, the black panther phenomenon in America
Speaker 5: is really intriguing. And what's interesting about it, of course,
Speaker 5: you know the black cat people see in a television
Speaker 5: show or a zoo, or either melanistic jaguars or melanistic
Speaker 5: leopards or usually leopards, And of course jaguars are native
Speaker 5: originally to the US, but you know, there's very few
Speaker 5: that come across the border. But people see these black
Speaker 5: cats everywhere, and that's an interesting one. But also people
Speaker 5: about five years ago, I would get reports people thinking
Speaker 5: they saw oslots and servals and margays and stuff like
Speaker 5: in Oklahoma and Arkansas and places like that, and it
Speaker 5: really opened up sort of Pandor's box to like what
Speaker 5: was really going on out there in this cat industry
Speaker 5: because I kind of discovered a few things that like
Speaker 5: made perfect sense, but it was hard to get to
Speaker 5: that point that makes any sense, you know.
Speaker 3: Well, so like, for example, what like what was so
Speaker 3: shocking and that you it took a while for you
Speaker 3: to come up upon.
Speaker 6: Well, I'll give you a prime example.
Speaker 5: You know, I was getting quite a few people saying
Speaker 5: they saw a cat that looked like an oslot. And
Speaker 5: an ocelot is native to the southern portion extreme southern Texas,
Speaker 5: but there's only a handful there, very common in parts
Speaker 5: of Mexico, Belize and stuff like that.
Speaker 6: And people would also use.
Speaker 5: The word servil or some kind of spotting cat with
Speaker 5: a long tail, and there.
Speaker 6: Was a lot of reports.
Speaker 5: Well, four or five years ago, I started getting you know,
Speaker 5: cell phone pictures, which usually aren't that good, but game
Speaker 5: cam photos are. And I got one from San Patricio, Texas,
Speaker 5: and I looked at this particular shot in my first
Speaker 5: thought was, this is about one hundred miles north of
Speaker 5: known oslot range and they're not known to be a
Speaker 5: migratory cat. And I went, man, that looks like an ocelot,
Speaker 5: And then I started cropping and zooming in.
Speaker 6: And went, that's a Bengal cat.
Speaker 3: What a Bengal cat?
Speaker 5: So I have three bingle cats about fifty yards from
Speaker 5: me at our facility here the Kingdom's Wildlife Center. They
Speaker 5: are a registerable domestic cat that were originally hybridized with
Speaker 5: an Asian leopard cat. An Asian leopard cat basically is
Speaker 5: an ocelot from like Oceania, okay, and they're beautiful cats.
Speaker 5: They're about the size of a bobcat or an osalot.
Speaker 5: But they bred them into with a domestic tabby cat
Speaker 5: and they made a domestic hybrid that has a lot
Speaker 5: of different kind of patterns, but a lot of them
Speaker 5: have the pattern like an ocelot or an.
Speaker 6: Asian leopard cat. People wouldn't know the difference they saw them.
Speaker 5: And there are tens of thousands of these in America
Speaker 5: and a lot of them are going feral now and
Speaker 5: they survive really well because they have a little more
Speaker 5: wild ends thincts. I have purity and purity we've had
Speaker 5: for seven years. And she is a little for a Bengal.
Speaker 5: She's small and she's what they call a snow leopard pattern.
Speaker 5: She has basically the ocelot looking pattern, but she's white
Speaker 5: and gray, it has blue eyes, and she can probably
Speaker 5: get her back feet about seven feet in the air.
Speaker 5: I mean very agile animals and people. They look like
Speaker 5: a wildcat. And so these things are getting feral and
Speaker 5: going on out there, and people are seeing a lot
Speaker 5: of stuff there. They're right, that's not normally supposed to
Speaker 5: be there, but they're seeing some of these domestic and
Speaker 5: designer cats done ferrell.
Speaker 3: Is there a name for that? I mean, cryptosology is
Speaker 3: a studied by known animals having discovered Is there a
Speaker 3: name for the study or look at looking at the
Speaker 3: mysteries of animals that are known or domesticated and then escaped.
Speaker 5: Well, you know what, I coined the phrase about twenty
Speaker 5: years ago. I just started using it like my own
Speaker 5: writings and stuff. Known cryptids in other words, it's something
Speaker 5: that we know there. It's just not supposed to be
Speaker 5: where it's at, you know, or you know that kind
Speaker 5: of thing. And this is a prime example, and it's
Speaker 5: integrating into the wild, and there's wild populations. There's also
Speaker 5: one we're starting to see now, and that is the
Speaker 5: savannah cat, which was hybridized with a beautiful cat called
Speaker 5: African serval. And there are some f one hybrids out
Speaker 5: there that are fifty percent served to look almost one
Speaker 5: hundred percent served. They're very harder to singh's the difference,
Speaker 5: and they can. They're very agile, they're pretty tall cats.
Speaker 5: And this stuff is running around the wilds of America everywhere.
Speaker 5: And you know, one of my things, guys, is always
Speaker 5: hated it when someone is very sincere calls a fishing
Speaker 5: game department or calls a game warden or something and
Speaker 5: they give a genuine reporter seeing something like a mountain
Speaker 5: lion and an area not supposed to be and they
Speaker 5: get made fun of, right, And I like to let
Speaker 5: I like to put information out there to let people know, Hey,
Speaker 5: I'm not gonna make funny for what you report. Let's
Speaker 5: look at what's really going on out there. Not everyone
Speaker 5: is a wildlife expert, you know, Yeah, but.
Speaker 3: You you actually know a lot about it, this stuff,
Speaker 3: and you've been around these animals because your employment. You
Speaker 3: have a lot of experience of course over all these years.
Speaker 3: And I think that's one of the biggest hurdle hurdles,
Speaker 3: especially you know, long before say finding Bigfoot or something
Speaker 3: like that, people thought they'd be laughed at for reporting
Speaker 3: a sasquatch sighting, so many of them kind of clammed up.
Speaker 3: And it still happens today, of course, but people who
Speaker 3: see things that are unexpected in places where things should
Speaker 3: not be oftentimes don't share that story. It's kind of
Speaker 3: locally known only. I suppose.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it kind of like, you know, it's like shame
Speaker 5: thing really comes down on people and they don't want
Speaker 5: to share it, or maybe for their professions or whatever's
Speaker 5: going on, you know, And it's like the black panther reports.
Speaker 5: I know, people have been berated for reporting that, and
Speaker 5: that's that's the one that really gets people's attention. There's
Speaker 5: a lot of controversy over it, you know, and that's
Speaker 5: one I think probably has like three to four answers
Speaker 5: for what the phenomenon is.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, every Bobo and I have both seen those,
Speaker 3: and I can say with confidence that the one that
Speaker 3: I saw was a melanistic mountain lion.
Speaker 5: That's really crazy because there's never been one observed, never
Speaker 5: one born in captivity brought to a taxidermis. So that's
Speaker 5: that's a really interesting thing to you know, to be
Speaker 5: part of that phenomenon and that's part of you know,
Speaker 5: my four or five answers is that the possibility of
Speaker 5: melanistic ones.
Speaker 6: Was it a Pacific Northwest?
Speaker 3: No, it's an Illinois actually, yeah. And the reason I
Speaker 3: say with confidence it was a it was a mountain lion.
Speaker 3: And of course yeah, I'm I'm I can say it
Speaker 3: with confidence and still be wrong. By the way, whatever
Speaker 3: that's worth. I don't care about being wrong.
Speaker 6: But uh, still it was.
Speaker 3: I thought it was a German shepherd at first, like
Speaker 3: a one of those dark gray German shepherds. But it
Speaker 3: had a black cap on its tail, like a mountain
Speaker 3: lion does, and it also had black tips on its ears,
Speaker 3: and then I thought it was black. But when I
Speaker 3: saw those those markings, I realized that it was a dark, dark,
Speaker 3: charcoal gray.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and that makes perfect sense.
Speaker 5: Like in captive populations, I've seen some that were almost
Speaker 5: chocolate color, you know, like real chocolate, Like the Jaguar Rundy,
Speaker 5: which is a cat I believe was responsible for some
Speaker 5: of the black panther sightings. They are not really black,
Speaker 5: but they're real dark gray, and if you don't have
Speaker 5: it in the right light, they look solid black. You
Speaker 5: see them in sunlight they kind of look more like
Speaker 5: they're like a slate color gray.
Speaker 3: You know, Oh, maybe that's what I saw then. But
Speaker 3: it was quite large. It was larger than a a
Speaker 3: It was like a big german shepherd.
Speaker 5: Like I said, definitely, if you're anything bigger than German shepherd,
Speaker 5: I mean that's that would definitely be more into like
Speaker 5: you're you know, either like a melanistic cougar or potentially
Speaker 5: a melanistic jaguar. But uh, which is crazy into its
Speaker 5: own thing to talk about that. And but you know,
Speaker 5: a lot of these people are sending photos of Almost
Speaker 5: all the ones I've seen are domestic house cats.
Speaker 4: I saw a black mountain line in northern California, like
Speaker 4: broad daylight just trot across the road, dirt road just
Speaker 4: trotted right right across, and it was I know exactly
Speaker 4: what jaguars and leopards looked like at mountain. I've seen
Speaker 4: tons of mountain lions and do this thing was not
Speaker 4: a jaguar, not it was it was it was a
Speaker 4: mountain lion, just the whole bill to tail everything.
Speaker 5: Well, I'm hoping someone gets one of these on a
Speaker 5: really good trail cam. There's a white one captured on
Speaker 5: trail cam in Brazil and which was amazing have blue eyes.
Speaker 5: And there was white ones born in the zoo in
Speaker 5: Belgium as well, which was really cool. There's a picture
Speaker 5: was floating around for a long time from Costa Rica
Speaker 5: back in the fifties of a really black and white,
Speaker 5: really really dark at least a very dark brown one.
Speaker 5: And so it's interesting, you know, there's all these different
Speaker 5: things and people are seeing something, and I think with
Speaker 5: the black panther thing, I think people are seeing but
Speaker 5: I actually think there's potential for some of these feral
Speaker 5: cat populations to be producing gigantic feral cats, like not
Speaker 5: cougar size, but you know, thirty forty pound cats. There's
Speaker 5: some evidence of that in feral cats in Australia that
Speaker 5: they're getting really big in the wild.
Speaker 2: Well did they found did they find one that was
Speaker 2: like seventy two pounds or something?
Speaker 6: They found some really I don't have the dead in
Speaker 6: front of it.
Speaker 5: They were like they were like hues bigger than a
Speaker 5: lynx size, you know, like.
Speaker 6: Big yeah, yeah, with the big long tail.
Speaker 5: Faral cats and I have a few photos that in
Speaker 5: my collection of black cats from Texas that you look
Speaker 5: at them that is a faral basically a feral cat,
Speaker 5: but there's a way longer tail than normal, and a
Speaker 5: different build and a big, stocky build. I got one
Speaker 5: of my own game camp right in front of a
Speaker 5: little hog trap I had set out.
Speaker 6: Wasn't expecting it.
Speaker 5: But so there's a lot of weird stuff out there,
Speaker 5: And that's why the cat thing is so intriguing to me,
Speaker 5: because there's so many things. And you guys have two
Speaker 5: incredible reports to potentially black mountain lions. And then I
Speaker 5: have a friend of mine who goes exploring caves in
Speaker 5: Texas and before he gets to some of these caves,
Speaker 5: he takes it's on top of the cave and takes
Speaker 5: a rock and throws it in because there's so many
Speaker 5: faral hogs now, he doesn't want to go into a
Speaker 5: tight quarter with a faral hog.
Speaker 6: Right, he threw a rock inside one of these he's.
Speaker 5: And he used to work at a cat sanctuary, and
Speaker 5: this huge black cat caming out, grunting a real guttural
Speaker 5: grunt that a jaguar does when it ran out, and
Speaker 5: it was solid black.
Speaker 6: So there's like stuff like.
Speaker 5: That out there too, So to me, that's always been
Speaker 5: an intriguing one because it seems to be, like you said,
Speaker 5: at Illinois, Cliff, and then Bobo, you had California. I
Speaker 5: got stuff in Texas and Louisiana. So it's kind of
Speaker 5: like everywhere, kind of like the Bigfoot thing, it's everywhere.
Speaker 5: But there's a lot of different answers maybe to what
Speaker 5: people are seeing.
Speaker 3: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo.
Speaker 3: Will be right back after these messages. But you know,
Speaker 3: one of the things that I think I read years
Speaker 3: and years and years ago that you were looking into,
Speaker 3: and I said, Wow, that's really cool, and it's also
Speaker 3: a little scary to me. But then again, I'm kind
Speaker 3: of scared of weird things. Like the giant ape man
Speaker 3: thing doesn't bother me at all, but other things scare
Speaker 3: me for some reason. And one of the things that
Speaker 3: I heard you were doing, and I don't know if
Speaker 3: I've ever spoken to you about this or not, you
Speaker 3: were diving to go look for giant catfish, weren't you.
Speaker 5: Yes, And that has been a that was a fun project.
Speaker 5: It was about a two to three year investigation that
Speaker 5: I conducted. It was from like two thousand and three
Speaker 5: to like two thousand and six somewhere in there. And
Speaker 5: what would happened was, for years I would hear, since
Speaker 5: I was a little kid, here reports of like, you know,
Speaker 5: the divers don't want to go below tolledal Bean damn
Speaker 5: because they were down there working on the dam and
Speaker 5: these catfish the size of a Volkswagen came up and
Speaker 5: they were terrified, and it.
Speaker 6: Was you would hear these all the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's scarce the hell out of me.
Speaker 2: Did you ever hear it firsthand?
Speaker 3: Though?
Speaker 2: For something that actually was a diver.
Speaker 6: There, no, no.
Speaker 5: I asked and I asked and I asked, and I've
Speaker 5: never gotten the first hand report. But what was interesting,
Speaker 5: this is the interesting part, is when I made me
Speaker 5: decide to do it, was the world record catfish was
Speaker 5: caught in two thousand and five in text at Lake
Speaker 5: Texoma on the Texas Oklahoma border. And it was caught
Speaker 5: in the winter, and it was weighed one hundred and
Speaker 5: thirty pounds. It was a blue cat.
Speaker 4: Well, what about the six hundred pounders of Vietnam.
Speaker 5: I'm going to tell you about some one hundred and
Speaker 5: fifty two hundred pounders in Spain in a minute. But
Speaker 5: this was the biggest known catfish in America, and they
Speaker 5: kept it live. They wrapped it in the tarpat in
Speaker 5: the winter, and it stayed alive, and they kept it
Speaker 5: in this aquarium for like two years. I got to
Speaker 5: go dive with it, and I talked them into letting
Speaker 5: me go dive with it and having a photographer on
Speaker 5: the outside and me with my camera on the inside
Speaker 5: to get prospective of what seeing.
Speaker 6: The largest known catfish in America was sitting in front
Speaker 6: of me.
Speaker 3: Now, no, before you go on, I want to try
Speaker 3: to picture this because you said the weight, what'd you say?
Speaker 3: One hundred and pounds, hundred thirty pounds about six feet long. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's why I'm going to get to I like, how
Speaker 3: big is one hundred and thirty pound catfish?
Speaker 5: It was about probably five and a half six feet long,
Speaker 5: was really fat, huge, bigger round catfish. And they gave
Speaker 5: me some rainbow trout and coy in a little bag
Speaker 5: to feed it because the divers were trying to start feeding.
Speaker 5: And I got to eat that catfish to get out
Speaker 5: of my hand twice. Got a great photo and I
Speaker 5: got this idea because when I was down there, I
Speaker 5: was trying to keep a rational perspective as you're sticking
Speaker 5: your hand out like an idiot to feed a six
Speaker 5: foot long catfish, right, and this thing swims up to
Speaker 5: me and gently took it. But looking through my you know,
Speaker 5: my goggles, I'm looking at this fish through the water.
Speaker 5: This thing looked like it weighed three hundred pounds. You know,
Speaker 5: it was monstrous up on top of me. So I thought, well,
Speaker 5: maybe the origin of this could be murky water divers
Speaker 5: se a catfish of this size are bigger, and that
Speaker 5: kind of started story. So what I did is me
Speaker 5: and Ken Gearhart. I got Ken to go with me
Speaker 5: on my friend Zerol Burley on ba Steinhagen Reservoir. We
Speaker 5: weren't able to because this was after nine to eleven
Speaker 5: to get below the damn access, but we got in
Speaker 5: the deep hole north of the damn spillway and I
Speaker 5: took a rope. I wasn't gonna free dives pretty deep,
Speaker 5: and I took a rope and a tether and led
Speaker 5: myself down to the bottom of the water to get
Speaker 5: an idea because it was kind of standard water conditions there,
Speaker 5: and I could see about six inches in front of
Speaker 5: me and only fish I got to see on that
Speaker 5: trip where like white Mass came by me and they
Speaker 5: had to be right by my mask for me to
Speaker 5: see them. But it was an idea of like immersing
Speaker 5: myself in these murky southern reservoirs.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: But the coolest part came is when I went to
Speaker 5: Spain in two thousand and five, me and my wife Lisa.
Speaker 5: I had signed a deal with Magic Circle Records with
Speaker 5: my good friend Eric Adam, the singer of Man of War,
Speaker 5: and we released the Hunting and Fishing DVD around the World,
Speaker 5: and I got to go speak in Germany at their
Speaker 5: fan convention. And so we went to Spain to the
Speaker 5: Segre River to fish for Wells catfish, which is a
Speaker 5: giant European catfish, in the same stretch of river that
Speaker 5: Jeremy Wade did for river monsters. And I actually talked
Speaker 5: to Jeremy and got a recommendation of where to go
Speaker 5: because I interviewed him. And we both caught six and
Speaker 5: a half seven We both caught seven footers and I
Speaker 5: caught a six footer as well. But my guide, his
Speaker 5: name was Aid. He had his shirt office in the
Speaker 5: summer and on the back he had this big giant
Speaker 5: round scar and I said, what is that from he goes, well,
Speaker 5: I went into the water to get one of the
Speaker 5: catfish for the anglers and a restler to the bank,
Speaker 5: and I slipped and it attacked me. And then he
Speaker 5: looked at me and told me, he goes the divers
Speaker 5: on these reservoirs when they work on the dam going
Speaker 5: a shark cage. Because the wells mess with all of
Speaker 5: their dive, their mask and their BC's and all that stuff.
Speaker 2: I'd be scary as hell.
Speaker 6: Dude.
Speaker 5: That freaked me out, man. And you know those wells,
Speaker 5: we know they get thin feet. The ones we caught
Speaker 5: were seven, the biggest ones, and they weighed about one
Speaker 5: sixty at the time. You said in the winter, those
Speaker 5: fish would have been probably one ninety two hundred, so
Speaker 5: monster fish. And so that was kind of my look
Speaker 5: at the giant catfish phenomenon. You had reports, but never
Speaker 5: the guy who saw as always somebody's uncle's, sister's, cousin's
Speaker 5: former roommate.
Speaker 3: You know, I'll tell you that the thing that scares
Speaker 3: me the most about it because I'm an a chuerus.
Speaker 3: I've always had aquariums since I was a teenager. I
Speaker 3: still do today, and I you know, so I've gone
Speaker 3: through my phases. I like nice, peaceful, mellow fish now,
Speaker 3: but I've always I've had oscars, and I've had peacock bass.
Speaker 3: I've had all sorts of things in my thanks over
Speaker 3: the years. And catfish, the red tailed catfish, for example,
Speaker 3: is a nice specimen. They can swallow things that are
Speaker 3: way too big for any reasonable catfish to swallow. And
Speaker 3: if they can't swallow it, they'll certainly try. And I
Speaker 3: just kept thinking, like someone your size, you know, of
Speaker 3: going down to deal with these, a fish your size
Speaker 3: or a little even smaller would try to eat We'll
Speaker 3: try to engulf you whole. And that's to me just
Speaker 3: seems like a bad way to go.
Speaker 5: Well, I saw the guys scar it looked when that
Speaker 5: guy said that, I mean I could see the scar.
Speaker 5: It was a round catfish from out shaped scar away
Speaker 5: across his back.
Speaker 2: How big?
Speaker 4: Like how many how many interest would you guess about.
Speaker 6: That across the wound?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's probably fifteen sixteen inches across.
Speaker 2: Oh a shark, but yeah, it was big.
Speaker 5: I mean the ones we caught, I got pictures of
Speaker 5: me with the biggest one I caught. They're out there
Speaker 5: online and I mean they're massive, they could swallow. You know,
Speaker 5: there are guys out there that use twenty pound carp
Speaker 5: for bait for these things. You know, they're huge. So
Speaker 5: you got to thinking about, like, you know, I could
Speaker 5: see that happening in Spain and in America. My conclusion
Speaker 5: was that probably just kind of urban legends started with
Speaker 5: people seeing something that was of.
Speaker 6: Record size or something like that.
Speaker 5: I don't think there are any you know, eight hundred
Speaker 5: pounds catfish in America, but there could be some that
Speaker 5: are quite a bit bigger than the world record that
Speaker 5: just never came in. You ran into one of those
Speaker 5: suckers and you know, murky water with a dive mask
Speaker 5: on it fifty feet that would freak you out pretty bad.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and the water has a tendency I've done
Speaker 3: my first share of snorkeling and stuff though with the
Speaker 3: water has a tendency to magnify the size of everything
Speaker 3: in it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it does.
Speaker 5: And so that's why I wanted to go to experiment
Speaker 5: with with the biggest known blue catfish at the time
Speaker 5: in America.
Speaker 6: So that was kind of a fun, little little adventure.
Speaker 5: And you know, the great thing about a lot of
Speaker 5: this it always gets when you do these media projects
Speaker 5: like that, it gets people talking about nature and wildlife
Speaker 5: conservation and stuff.
Speaker 6: That's always been a very important thing to me. You know.
Speaker 3: Wait along those lines, aren't you intimately involved in this
Speaker 3: the Ivory build woodpecker thing.
Speaker 5: I did a lot early on with the Ivory build
Speaker 5: woodpecker search. Our area was very much kind of a
Speaker 5: hotbed of sightings from about two I radius and me
Speaker 5: and we went out a lot. I got to go
Speaker 5: out and Zey Sports Topics in two thousand and two
Speaker 5: did a search and I got to go out with
Speaker 5: them for you know, and their their search for a
Speaker 5: day or two. And the guy who got the footage
Speaker 5: of the ivory bill in Arkansas a few years later,
Speaker 5: David Luno, was the guy I was in the field with. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I spent a day with him in the Pearl River
Speaker 5: Wildlife Management Area. Him and a guy named Martian Lambertink.
Speaker 5: He was a birder from I think the I think Belgium.
Speaker 5: But we had guys around here that were dedicated birders
Speaker 5: who just swore up and down. They would know a
Speaker 5: pylaete woodpecker from an ivory bill. They saw ivory bills
Speaker 5: and so we did quite a bit on it. And
Speaker 5: one of the coolest things was we were out there
Speaker 5: one day in an area they tended to make more
Speaker 5: of a you know, an oval shape, I think it
Speaker 5: was nesting, and they would rip bark off a tree,
Speaker 5: you know, like a rip it off, And there was
Speaker 5: an area they had a lot of that in there,
Speaker 5: and we saw this bird fly and in this dense
Speaker 5: thicket on the Sabine River on the Texas Louisiana border,
Speaker 5: and we heard the tin horn sound that under ivory bill.
Speaker 5: I've never heard that sound since in nature, and we
Speaker 5: heard it and there was me and my dad and
Speaker 5: my friend Patrick Trumble all that same day. So I'm
Speaker 5: pretty sure we had an ivory bill at woodpecker encounter.
Speaker 5: And but what I do on ivory bills now is
Speaker 5: anytime I get a chance to talk about birding, I
Speaker 5: asked for people to submit reports and stuff like that
Speaker 5: kind of log and haven't had much activity on that recently.
Speaker 5: But a few years back there was someone in the
Speaker 5: Big Thicket National Preserve that swore they saw a female
Speaker 5: ivory bill which looks different than the male. The male
Speaker 5: has the red crest, you know, and she's like black
Speaker 5: with a kind of line thing on her.
Speaker 6: Which I thought was interesting.
Speaker 5: It's almost like someone would I can see a mistaking
Speaker 5: appiliated at a distance, but a female ivory bill is
Speaker 5: a pretty specific thing to say you saw.
Speaker 6: So we're we're still probing stuff out there as well.
Speaker 2: In that Did you see that.
Speaker 4: A photo out of those photos out of Florida, of
Speaker 4: Florida couple, like maybe a year and a half.
Speaker 6: Ago, Yeah, look pretty interesting to me.
Speaker 2: Man, I thought, look pretty good.
Speaker 5: But I dealt a lot with I was dealing a
Speaker 5: lot with that Zeis Sports Optics team back in the day.
Speaker 5: And then we would do our own stuff up here
Speaker 5: in all these areas because there's a lot of river
Speaker 5: bottoms up here that very few people ever go into.
Speaker 6: And you know, there was even talk that some of
Speaker 6: the I forget.
Speaker 5: Which First Nations tribe used to say they thought that
Speaker 5: the ivory bill traveled, they would move, they wouldn't stay
Speaker 5: in a spot very long, you know, and being some
Speaker 5: of these dense bottom lands, so that makes sense if
Speaker 5: you had a low population, a few of them are
Speaker 5: moving around some of these areas that people would never
Speaker 5: fly under the radar literally, you know, some of.
Speaker 3: The places you've mentioned about the Ivory bill Alshards are
Speaker 3: known Bigfoot locations as well.
Speaker 6: No, dude, Pearl River.
Speaker 5: When I'm there, there was the Bigfoot Hunting Club sign
Speaker 5: on the way in, and it is literally the harlan
Speaker 5: Ford you know, in search of Honey Island Swamp Monster area.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, it's gonna say that's the Honey Island
Speaker 3: Swamp Monster area right right.
Speaker 6: That's what I was in there. I was like, this
Speaker 6: is cool.
Speaker 5: I'm like, because that episode scared the crap out of
Speaker 5: me as a kid, you know, And I was like, dude,
Speaker 5: this is awesome being down in the harlan Ford area.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: That was but a lot of that stuff, and I
Speaker 5: think what we're seeing is that it links up. It's like,
Speaker 5: if you have remote quality habitat for one particular animal
Speaker 5: that may or may not still exist, maybe something we
Speaker 5: don't know exists but also live there, you know.
Speaker 6: So I think there's a link to all this habitat.
Speaker 5: And that's why habitat is so important, especially things like
Speaker 5: river bottoms which are declining because of making reservoirs and
Speaker 5: a lot of this stuff. I think it's really important
Speaker 5: to look at this habitat issue. Because you can't have
Speaker 5: mysteries out there, there's no place for him to live.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but back in two thousand and eight, maybe two
Speaker 3: thousand and six, I started advocating this. That's when I
Speaker 3: had a blog and I was really acting like blogging
Speaker 3: all the time. I was advocating this idea of conservation
Speaker 3: before discovery, about sasquatches and about how anything you do
Speaker 3: to save big patches of land it's going to help sasquatches.
Speaker 3: And since they're unproven species at this point, the only
Speaker 3: thing we can do is protect our habitat. And you
Speaker 3: don't have to believe in Bigfoot to protect amazing, beautiful,
Speaker 3: pristine habitat. I think it's one of the great things
Speaker 3: that environmentalists in general are doing well.
Speaker 5: I get absoluttion for that, brother, because that's I work
Speaker 5: in the main the wildlife world, and whether we're talking
Speaker 5: about you know, waterfowl, or we're talking about a wild
Speaker 5: cheap or whatever, habitat is always something that's that's being
Speaker 5: pressured by development and intrusion and degradation of habitat. I'm
Speaker 5: actually narrating a new Bigfoot series my friend's doing called
Speaker 5: wild Man of the Woods, and the aim of his
Speaker 5: whole series. Paul Paczynski's doing it is to bring the
Speaker 5: habitat thing into people's you know, to make him think
Speaker 5: about it, you know, because these mysteries are out there.
Speaker 6: I mean I can't.
Speaker 5: Remember guys ever driving by a wood lot or a
Speaker 5: river and not wondering what is out there, you know,
Speaker 5: And that's that's what motivates me, you know, other than
Speaker 5: working with kids likely doing wildlife. That motivates me. And
Speaker 5: to think that we're losing it's pretty sad. But the
Speaker 5: good news is there are people. I think people are
Speaker 5: getting a better look. You know, Hey, that those woods
Speaker 5: that used to hunt is now a development, or that
Speaker 5: place that used to hike is now a ste lodge.
Speaker 6: So I think we're getting some positive traction on that.
Speaker 5: And I think you're right whether you believe in Bigfoot
Speaker 5: or not, man, it won't be there if it's a
Speaker 5: parking lot.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 3: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and beyond with Cliff and Bogo.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back after these messages. Bigfooters in general,
Speaker 3: or people are just whether they're researchers, are just aficionados
Speaker 3: of the subject in general, are a force of good. Essentially,
Speaker 3: if we can just start kind of focusing on like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, bigfoots are important. We can't protect them as
Speaker 3: a species, but we can protect where they live, and
Speaker 3: by doing that, we're helping everything else that lives here
Speaker 3: and also frankly ourselves.
Speaker 6: Well you know, and you guys actually tie into this.
Speaker 5: We do a ministry outreach for kids called wild Wishes,
Speaker 5: and we grant wildlife encounters for kids who have a
Speaker 5: critical illness from loss of pan or sibling. Kids in
Speaker 5: Foster we even had the privilege of working we're girls
Speaker 5: that have been through trafficking, and we've granted in almost
Speaker 5: ten years, two hundred and twenty.
Speaker 6: Five of those wishes.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 6: The third wish was a bigfoot expedition. A little boy
Speaker 6: named Jackson, and I took him into the Big Thicket
Speaker 6: National Preserve with his family and some of their friends,
Speaker 6: into an area where I filmed the Animal X episode
Speaker 6: with my friend Natalie Schmidt back in five Yeah, and
Speaker 6: I did that one, you know, And we were out there.
Speaker 5: The kids actually found a mountain lion track, which is
Speaker 5: really rare to find out there, and there's a couple
Speaker 5: of possible vocals by in the distance. But as we
Speaker 5: drove out. I told him, it's a long drive out guy,
Speaker 5: that's late. It was about one o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna stop at three places and do some calling.
Speaker 5: I'd forgotten I was gonna stop at three. I was
Speaker 5: about to leave the exit the area. My dad goes, hey,
Speaker 5: you better stop again. I'm oh. I stopped and pulled
Speaker 5: over and I let her yell out, and this vocalization
Speaker 5: came barreling. It couldn't have been more than thirty or
Speaker 5: forty yards from us. Everybody jump back in the cars
Speaker 5: and it changed other people's paradigm of life. And they're
Speaker 5: just little kid who had lost his brother recently, smiling
Speaker 5: this incredible smile. Well, we became good friends with that family.
Speaker 5: This is where you tie in. But I met you,
Speaker 5: Bobo at the Willow Creek Bigfoot Symposium in three and
Speaker 5: this kid wanted to meet you guys. And the Finding
Speaker 5: Bigfoot producers reached out to me if I want to
Speaker 5: be on an episode, and I didn't at the time,
Speaker 5: but they asked me about the town hall in Lufkin, Texas,
Speaker 5: So I can I bring this kid up there to
Speaker 5: meet the you know, to meet you guys. And we
Speaker 5: pull up and you don't even know how the producers
Speaker 5: are going to live for the word, you know what's
Speaker 5: going to go on. And I said, I told the kid,
Speaker 5: I said, I met Bobo a long time and they
Speaker 5: don't know if you'll remember me or not. We pull
Speaker 5: up to the building and you're out on your phone
Speaker 5: talking to someone. His kid's face lights up, and we
Speaker 5: get out and you hang up the funny go ches
Speaker 5: or more what's up? And took you took him in
Speaker 5: and introduced him to Cliff and Renee and it made
Speaker 5: the kids life. And we've done recent Bigfoot expeditions for kids,
Speaker 5: so that's pretty much my role now, and doing Bigfoot
Speaker 5: stuff is taking kids that have had hell on Earth
Speaker 5: a few times already maybe to go look for something
Speaker 5: fun and fantastic.
Speaker 6: And I never got to tell you that I started.
Speaker 5: Just want to salute you for you guys, for making
Speaker 5: that kid's life.
Speaker 2: Oh man, that's the best part of the show. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I do find even now, actually, after all these years,
Speaker 3: I find that really the only practical use for whatever
Speaker 3: fame we may or may not have is making other
Speaker 3: people smile, honestly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially kids.
Speaker 5: Yep, it's a beautiful thing and I have still the
Speaker 5: picture of you and him on my Instagram somewhere, and
Speaker 5: every once in a while I'll run into him and
Speaker 5: you know, he still talks about all that.
Speaker 6: And we took a family out to.
Speaker 5: The Big Thicket back in September, had some crazy stuff,
Speaker 5: had sticks thrown at us that was kind of cool,
Speaker 5: and some vocals and they they saw some weird stuff
Speaker 5: on thermals and so, you know, it's one of the
Speaker 5: things we're doing. And you know, the Lord has really
Speaker 5: blessed my life to get to work with wildlife, and
Speaker 5: I love kids and I.
Speaker 6: Hate what happens to kids in our culture.
Speaker 5: And you know, not everybody is going to be the
Speaker 5: you know, the quarterback of the head cheerleader, and a
Speaker 5: lot of kids that are the one that aren't don't
Speaker 5: feel like they fit really get into this stuff because
Speaker 5: bigfoots an outsider, you know, and they really draw out
Speaker 5: of this stuff. And those are the kids I'm drawn to.
Speaker 5: And you know, taking kids on these expeditions and stuff
Speaker 5: like that through our through our outreach has been a
Speaker 5: lot of fun. You know, it's been it's just been
Speaker 5: really really cool and a very good positive to do
Speaker 5: for the community.
Speaker 3: You know, Now, don't you have a nonprofit? I mean
Speaker 3: that that's you're you're talking about this right, This is.
Speaker 6: An offshoot of our nonprofit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can get more information on that at Kingdom
Speaker 5: Zoo dot com. We are are we are the Kingdoms
Speaker 5: Zoo Wildlife Center. That's our facility, and we have our
Speaker 5: wild Wishes program and Higher Calling Wildlife outreaches and they
Speaker 5: all tie in together, just different like Higher Calling Wildlife
Speaker 5: does like conservation expeditions for kids with photography, while Wishes
Speaker 5: grants whatever wildlife encounter they want to meet. I mean,
Speaker 5: I've got pictures of the wall here in my office
Speaker 5: of a girl getting to pet a white lion cub
Speaker 5: which was really cool, and a girl getting to go
Speaker 5: in a desert, big orange sheet capture with Texas Parks
Speaker 5: and Wildlife man, And that's that's my heart, man, That's
Speaker 5: that's just so cool to get to see life changing
Speaker 5: through encounters in nature.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, you know I'm not as classy as you,
Speaker 3: so I'm just gonna solicit for on your behalf. Like,
Speaker 3: since you are a nonprofit, people can give you money
Speaker 3: as a tax deductible thing.
Speaker 6: That's deductible. Baby.
Speaker 3: So if you have a couple hundred extra thousand dollars
Speaker 3: laying around in your pocket, and you want a good
Speaker 3: place for it. I know one. I think it's right here, man.
Speaker 3: So I feel free to give lots and lots of
Speaker 3: money to this situation here because it's nonprofit, because it's
Speaker 3: good for you, tax deductible, and it's making a difference
Speaker 3: to the future as well. So you didn't you didn't
Speaker 3: come out to say it, Chester, But that's why I'm here.
Speaker 3: I've got no qualms about saying that. Man. I'll tell
Speaker 3: you what.
Speaker 6: I will give the web address kingdomzoo dot com. There
Speaker 6: you go. But uh oh, what happened there? That's crazy?
Speaker 6: But uh, thank you.
Speaker 5: And you know, like I said, you guys because you
Speaker 5: both got great spirits about you and you're and real
Speaker 5: friendly with people.
Speaker 6: I mean, you never know who you're going to meet
Speaker 6: out there. That's you know, been through something that day.
Speaker 5: And because whatever, you know, whatever celebrity any of us
Speaker 5: might have for being on TV show or writing a
Speaker 5: blog or a podcast, if we can make someone's life better,
Speaker 5: that's always a plus.
Speaker 6: Man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, at the end of the day, that's what it's
Speaker 3: really all about, I think for sure. And doing some
Speaker 3: good for the animals too as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, like I said, man, the thing I'm
Speaker 5: doing with Paul where I want to get conservation word
Speaker 5: out and tying the bigfoot thing because so many people
Speaker 5: are into it and then people click with it. I
Speaker 5: mean they go they know, if they go to some
Speaker 5: spot they had this amazing sighting and then that site's gone,
Speaker 5: it's wiped out, it's you know, whatever, then there's part
Speaker 5: of them it's like lost, you know. And like so
Speaker 5: it's a great way to get people into nature. And
Speaker 5: you know, it's always better outside, guys. And when you're
Speaker 5: talking about going out in the woods to day, I had.
Speaker 5: I was in here doing meetings and stuff all day
Speaker 5: on Zoom and all kinds of stuff and writing all day.
Speaker 5: But I went out right before I saw you guys
Speaker 5: some of my pond next to my house.
Speaker 6: I went fly fishing for thirty minutes.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 6: I had to be outside because that's what it's all about.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: I was going to say I forgot, I keep forgetting
Speaker 4: to bring us up on the podcast. But I went
Speaker 4: up to Bluff Creek for the Patterson Human Film site,
Speaker 4: and the fire on the map went right through that area,
Speaker 4: and then we.
Speaker 2: Heard from a.
Speaker 4: Forest Service official that the film site was gone. And
Speaker 4: then I spoke to some more biologists and foresters and
Speaker 4: fire crew. They were just leaving the Bluff Creek area.
Speaker 4: They're going to lock the gates behind us, like we
Speaker 4: were the last guys out there at that spot. And
Speaker 4: I was talking to the forester and he said that
Speaker 4: the site was saved, that the guy in charge owner
Speaker 4: actually diverted resources to save the film location and it's
Speaker 4: burned within like less than one hundred yards of it
Speaker 4: is burned down.
Speaker 6: Wow, that's incredible, man.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they actually went out of their way and
Speaker 4: shifted bunpower to save the film site.
Speaker 6: Man, that's great. That's incredible, and that's my heart good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was stoked.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely, man. And you know that's the you think
Speaker 6: about that.
Speaker 5: I mean when I start, I never forget me and
Speaker 5: my dad walking down to that spot and I'm like,
Speaker 5: oh my, you know. And I had Bob come to
Speaker 5: speak at my conference that I used to do, the
Speaker 5: Southern Crypto Conference in two thousand and four, and taking
Speaker 5: Bob out to my areas, which was kind of cool.
Speaker 5: But just talking to that guy and having been the
Speaker 5: spot you know, and it was like it connected me
Speaker 5: with something that was amazing. I'm like, that was a
Speaker 5: fundamental thing in my childhood and to think that it
Speaker 5: was saved is a wonderful thing, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, on purpose, Like it wasn't just like a random
Speaker 4: because before when there were fires close up there, they
Speaker 4: never cared like you know, they try to. They Lows Camp,
Speaker 4: you know, the campground out of that that was always
Speaker 4: like the base of their operations in that area, so
Speaker 4: that you know, would get saved just for that alone.
Speaker 4: But they never, like I remember when there was a
Speaker 4: coming down from the north there. I don't know how
Speaker 4: many years ago, but several years ago, and I was
Speaker 4: talking this, you got to save that. You got to
Speaker 4: cut it off right there on that ridge. It's gonna come,
Speaker 4: you know, it's coming down there. And that's a historic site.
Speaker 4: You know, it's like that's that's world history there. You know,
Speaker 4: it's it's a they had no time. They just did
Speaker 4: not care at all, those guys what.
Speaker 5: A historic site it is. Yeah, for sure, I want
Speaker 5: to go there this spring. Actually I haven't been there
Speaker 5: in forever since back then, you know, Bob is such
Speaker 5: a great guy. Actually, the outreach we do. We brought
Speaker 5: a girl up to Craig's conference in Texas Bigfoot conference
Speaker 5: the last time Bob was there, and Bob presented her
Speaker 5: one of the you know, the copies of the tracks
Speaker 5: and he signed for her and I got a picture
Speaker 5: of me and Bob and Emily and her mom right
Speaker 5: there with that Just shows the heart of the good
Speaker 5: people out there in the cryptozoology and bigfoot community. You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, well, what's next for you? I mean, I know,
Speaker 3: I know think you have a steady job and you've
Speaker 3: got this tastic organization that you work with and everything.
Speaker 3: Do you have anything on the horizon that you're really
Speaker 3: looking forward to, like maybe perhaps another expedition or maybe
Speaker 3: somewhary that you're speaking, or some film project that you're
Speaker 3: working on. Besides, I know you mentioned the narration the
Speaker 3: wild Man.
Speaker 5: I think, yeah, I'm doing that. That's wild Man of
Speaker 5: the Woods. It's on YouTube. I'm doing the narration. I'll
Speaker 5: pro'll be helping with some writing coming up. It's really
Speaker 5: fun we're doing.
Speaker 6: We're already planned expeditions for our.
Speaker 5: Outreach next year. We're doing in June Estes Park, Colorado.
Speaker 5: That's our normal one we do we're gonna be going
Speaker 5: to the Smoky Mountains and doing one in October and
Speaker 5: probably doing Southern Florida in late July early August. So
Speaker 5: that's already getting arranging those things going on. And next
Speaker 5: year is our tenth year anniversary of that Wild Wishes program.
Speaker 5: We'll probably cross the two hundred and fifty kid in
Speaker 5: the program Mark And just you know, I got my podcast,
Speaker 5: Dark Outdoors, and we're gonna have season three of that
Speaker 5: coming up in February. And Dark Outdoors raises awareness to
Speaker 5: dangers in the outdoors, ranging from serial killers to traffickers
Speaker 5: to dangerous wildlife and weather conditions. And that's won several
Speaker 5: awards from different press organizations and I'm really excited about
Speaker 5: coming up for season three on that one.
Speaker 2: Oh I gotta check that out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, where could people listen any major podcasting platform, whether
Speaker 5: you listen to Spotify, Amazon, you know, Apple Music, you
Speaker 5: know it's on all of those. And the way I
Speaker 5: do this one is I have to do it and
Speaker 5: see so much research involved in it. I can't just
Speaker 5: put one out every week or two, So we do seasons.
Speaker 5: So it be season three starting in an eight episode
Speaker 5: run in February and The first episode on this was
Speaker 5: about Ted Bundy, and it was the guy Steven Michau
Speaker 5: who set across from interviewed Ted for six months how
Speaker 5: he actually took women into the woods. And a friend
Speaker 5: of mine found a tree carving way off trail mule
Speaker 5: deer hunting in Utah and it said Ted bun nineteen
Speaker 5: seventy four, and that was the year he escaped to
Speaker 5: prison in Utah and went to hear the National Forest.
Speaker 5: So got me to thinking what would happen if you
Speaker 5: went into someone like that? And I kept running into
Speaker 5: I actually had a situation in Trinity Klamath National Forest
Speaker 5: area there in the Emerald Triangle back three when me
Speaker 5: and dad went there for that Bigfoot event and got
Speaker 5: chased off a mountain up there.
Speaker 6: It was crazy.
Speaker 5: So we're trying to raise awareness to that stuff and
Speaker 5: had some pretty compelling shows.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 4: Have you had that California Fishing Game guy's former fishing
Speaker 4: game official that was dealing with the cartails, done like
Speaker 4: just outside the Bay area then up in northern California.
Speaker 5: I actually I've been emailing him back and forth to
Speaker 5: do a show with me.
Speaker 2: He really lays it out there for this area dude.
Speaker 5: I mean, he was telling me some stuff and some
Speaker 5: emails he said, you know, he was on the road
Speaker 5: doing something he's probably gonna end up being on season three.
Speaker 6: Of the show and wild stuff, man. I mean, just
Speaker 6: the level of things are going on.
Speaker 5: Because someone asked me, hey, Chess, what's the most dangerous
Speaker 5: thing in the woods that I don't even think?
Speaker 6: And I said people, yeah, And so that came.
Speaker 5: That turned into a podcast, and it'll be a book
Speaker 5: next year is going to be a book on dark outdoors.
Speaker 5: So that's all coming up in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: My friends, what's the scariest thing that's happened to you
Speaker 2: out in the woods?
Speaker 5: I'll just say that the scariest thing that's happening to
Speaker 5: me out in the woods involve me driving a rental
Speaker 5: car eighty miles an hour down the mountain in the
Speaker 5: middle of the night.
Speaker 3: I don't want to poop on your prey here. But
Speaker 3: let's save that for the member section. I think that
Speaker 3: sounds like a great topic to go into the members.
Speaker 3: Give them a little something special there. Yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 3: let's let's let's let's save it for that one. That
Speaker 3: sounds great.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I'm going to say two Chester's if
Speaker 4: you if you got those making wish whatever your your
Speaker 4: foundation kids, if you ever want to do something at
Speaker 4: Bluff Creek, me and Cliff would definitely be down for
Speaker 4: doing that with you guys.
Speaker 6: Man, that would be mind blowing.
Speaker 5: And that's actually a dream of ours, is to take
Speaker 5: us some kids into that area and that would be incredible.
Speaker 5: So let's collaborate on that and make that happen for
Speaker 5: a couple of special kids.
Speaker 2: Awesome, you guys.
Speaker 6: Are great, man. They're gonna make me cry. I'm a
Speaker 6: big cry baby about kids.
Speaker 3: If I can't make if I can't make one person
Speaker 3: cry a day, I can't sleep all at night.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, yeah, I've heard that before from people, but
Speaker 5: that's usually me though.
Speaker 3: It's usually I cried myself to sleep, honestly, some sort
Speaker 3: of like fetal position thing until and weep myself into slumber.
Speaker 4: So in November section, you're going to tell us your
Speaker 4: scariest encounter driving. That also could tell us you're scariest
Speaker 4: animal encounter crypted or known.
Speaker 6: I'll give you both know only encrypted. How about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we need a bath, so our listeners out there,
Speaker 3: if you want to be a member and hear these
Speaker 3: special content sort of things. All you have to do
Speaker 3: is go to the website. There a big thing to
Speaker 3: be on podcasts and follow the links to membership or
Speaker 3: mister Matt prut our producer, will put the link in
Speaker 3: the show notes below. Chester, thank you so much for
Speaker 3: coming on the show. I'm looking forward to the member
Speaker 3: section conversation and then exploring this topic a little bit further.
Speaker 5: Hey, thank you guys so much, real honor and privilege.
Speaker 5: You guys are awesome and and you know, it's great
Speaker 5: to be able to collaborate and do some great things
Speaker 5: for some kids. And thank you guys for being a
Speaker 5: fun and very informative voice out there and that you're
Speaker 5: doing great work.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thanks for coming on Chester.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's been too long since we've hung out, so man,
Speaker 3: it was good to talk to him for sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah, looking forward to seeing you get in person too.
Speaker 4: Right on Chester, All right, folks, that's Chester more So
Speaker 4: check him out. He's got some good stuff going on.
Speaker 4: He's been in this a long time and knows what
Speaker 4: he's talking about. If you want to hear what we're
Speaker 4: going to have on Beyond Bigfoot Beyond on Patreon front
Speaker 4: numbers right now, but for the rest of y'all, keep
Speaker 4: it squatchy.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond.
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