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