Big Food and Beyond with Cliff and Bubo. These gays a favorites, so like say subscribe and read it five star and greatest on USh Today listening watching Relim always keep its watching. And now your host's Cliff Barrickman and James Bubo Fay. Well, okay, without much further to do, let's welcome our guests, doctor John barn Chock. He's written, actually, he's written written a couple books, quite a few books actually, but this the book we're
talking about today, is called Grasping Sasquatch Prepping for Scientific Field Research. It is an updated reprint of his previous book that probably a lot of you have out there, called Psychological Horizons and Scientific Bigfoot Research. But this is the new version and he's publishing it through Hangar one Press, which is Doug Hide's
great publishing company out there. So when this comes out, the new version, there's going to be links, there's gonna be QR codes, there's gonna be all sorts of doodads and bells and whistles embedded in the book to further enhance your reading experience of it. So, without anything else to say, here's the author of Grasping Sasquatch prepping for the scientific field research Doctor John barn Chock. Doctor John, thanks so much for coming on Bigfoot and Beyond with
Cliff and the Bobes. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm honored to be here and really excited about talking with you guys about this book. Thanks for coming. Yeah, I really appreciate the invite. Very good. Now, don John, I don't I don't think I've ever met you. I certainly don't know you, but I don't. As far as meeting people, I have a hard time with that one too, because I meet
hard too many people to remember. But it seems to me like you've been in the game for quite a long time, this bigfoot thing, and yet you're still swimming around in it. So where did their journey in the Bigfoot land begin? So? I I reached a point in my life where I was kind of cleaning house and decided I wanted to get back to things that I enjoyed and that were a priority for me, and so I started living
in North Georgia, where I do. I started looking for places to fish because I grew up trout fishing as a kid, and I just started going on the internet for trout fishing maps, and I came across this map of the United States with circles in a lot of the states, and I thought, oh, that must be the you know, the number of streams that that fish there or whatever. And I clicked on that circle and lo and behold it was the BFRO expedition page. And so you know, that's the
first time I had encountered that. So I checked that out, and I got on Laurie Wade's one of her last one of her last well, I think it was her last expedition for the year. I don't know how many, about eight years ago, and I've been doing it ever since. I counted up the hours actually actually in the woods, not setting up camp, not traveling to the side anything like just when we leave base camp and go out and start looking, and I've got over three hundred hours of just looking
in the woods through expeditions with Lorie Wade and Charlie Raymond. I feel like a lot of the people in both those groups have been my mentors. And so I actually started getting into bigfoot kind of because I was looking for fishing maps and figured, well, if I can fish and look for bigfoot, you know, I'm killing two birds with one stone, and that's all the better. Absolutely, I'm an advocate of killing as many birds as possible.
But you know, it's funny. Fishing is kind of the gateway drug to big footing in a lot of ways, not only because a lot of fishermen trout fishermen specifically, or salmon and fishing. You know, it gets you out in that right kind of habitat, walk in the streams, and you know, these people stumble across footprints occasionally, these people stumble upon some unseen entity tossing rocks into the river in front of them and scaring their fish away
and all that sort of stuff. And even for me growing up in southern California, down in Long Beach, California, I worked in fishing tackle stores most of my life until I became a teacher, you know, so that's basically from sixteen to about twenty six years of age, I was working in
fishing tackle stores. And it struck me a few years after I started bigfooting how similar the two things were and my reasons for doing both, because at the end of the day, I mean, I do like eating fish, don't get me wrong, but that's not the primary driving force behind my addiction to fishing, or my previous addiction to fishing. I've kind of kicked that habit a little bit. I do love it, but I can't call myself
addicted anymore like I certainly could at one time. But for me, even a saltwater fishermen, I really liked the idea of seeing something that is usually hidden, because fish, in my for my dollar, are the most beautiful, you know, if I guess family of animals, you know this type of animal in general, fish are just amazing and beautiful, and they have iridescent colors that can't be seen anywhere else really, and their their their habits
are unseen. And I kind of see a lot of this similar fascination with bigfoot because I I'd like to see them, I'd like to learn about them. And you know, even even the methodology of getting these things, you know, like in a boat, you put out some chum and then you'd make casts, right like if you're fishing tunas or something by CLT. Patty, So you put out some chum in the water which attracts the fish, and then you cast. And I noticed the same sort of thing happening in
my night investigations with Sasquatch. We make some noises at vocalize or knox or something like that, which is kind of like the chum, and then we make casts, which is basically doing night walks, going out and coming back to camp eventually, very very similar approach in a lot of ways. So it's kind of funny that fishing brought you to the same weird hobby that all
of us share here. Yeah, And in hindsight, I didn't realize this until I started getting into Bigfoot. But for a while I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we'd go fishing up in the Hamis Springs Mountain, and I had one of those experiences where I'd have about a mile or two walk back into this canyon and then this cascading stream, and I'd see some fish in this deep hole, and I'd sneak up on them and I'd get one cast in, and no sooner i got one cast in, a big
stone came splashing down in the middle of this hole, and I'd look around, you know, the stream wasn't about but about five feet wide, couldn't see anybody. I'd climb the rocks down to the next cascading pool and I'd get about one cast in again blush, another big rock would be thrown in and that hole would be destroyed. And that happened to me repeatedly on this one stream, and I always thought it was just some jerk, you know,
kind of following me, trying to destroy my fishing. But when I got back to the trailhead, there were never any cars when I arrived or when I left, and I never saw any other human beings. So I've begun to wonder if that wasn't a bigfoot encounter. Did you know they were there? Did you know that they have in the Arizona Mountains. You know, it doesn't surprise me that they're in the Arizona Mountains the New Mexico Mountains, not at all, because you know there are very squatchy areas there.
At the time when it happened to mean, no, I was at that point, I had no Bigfoot never crossed my mind when that was happening. Now you have a PhD in psychology, Am I correct in that? Yeah? I got a PhD in counseling psychology, and my specialties were in neuropsychology
and pain psychology. So I did a lot of psychological assessments, helping neurologists differentiate between the different kinds of dementia, assessing brain damage from traumatic brain injury, and then working with the patient and the family on dealing with the adjustment of a brain injured person in the household in any PTSD or trauma associated with the accident. Now, how does your studies, how did your professional expertise
translate into Bigfoot research? So when I started doing expeditions, I realized that in Lori's group and in Charlie's group, they're doing a lot of scientific using a lot of scientific principles in terms of being systematic and recording notes and making sure we're not stepping on each other with provocations and all that. But I
also also saw areas where things the complete science wasn't being done. And so you know, in psychology, although some people consider us a pseudoscience, but especially in neuropsychology, for example, we use tests different kinds of instruments to determine things like emotions and IQ. And if you think about psychology and you think about emotions and IQ, it's almost a perfect fit for Bigfoot. Because we can't directly touch somebody's intelligence. We can observe that their work product and
said, boy, you know that was done by a genius. But that's the behavioral phenomena or the behavioral manifestation of that intelligence. It's not the intelligence, the raw intelligence itself. Even with EEGs, we can't capture that raw intelligence. We can only measure the phenomena or the behavior associated with it. Similarly, emotions, I mean, because we all experience emotions, it's easy
to forget that we can't feel another person's emotions. Again, we can hear them, we can see them, we can see the pain on people's faces. But again, what we're observing there is we're observing the behavioral and emotional manifestations of an emotion, not the raw emotion or actual emotion itself. So subjects like intelligence and emotions, they're kind of a little bit of an enigma because they can't be directly touched or seen. And it occurred to me that
that's kind of where we're at with Bigfoot. We've gotten really good at being able to see and capture their phenomena, which is the behavioral manifestation of Bigfoot, the footprints, the vocalizations there, you know, tree breaks, I'm sure your listeners are familiar with the variety of signs of bigfoot that are out there, but we're having a hard time direct directly capturing and measuring bigfoot, and so I think psychologic science gives this a way to get some numbers and
actually do some experiments and statistical analysis on these phenomena, so that we can move from just qualitative observations and we can move into the area of doing quantitative analysis on experiments with the phenomena and capture bigfoot statistically and experimentally in that fashion. I know that's a mouthful, but oh no, I smell what you're stepping in, man, I get it. Yeah, it makes a lot
of sense. We need to be I think as a community, the big community really does need to step up because I don't see the science being done. I see little bits of the scientific process being done, but a lot of the science happens after you gather the data. So talking to a witness is one thing, but then what do you do with it. It's not
research until something's done with the data. It's just a bunch of gobblegook, a bunch of numbers, a bunch of data, essentially, and it's piecing through that and making sense out of it and looking for patterns that I think
is the real research part of it. And you're suggesting that since sasquatches are reluctant to be directly observed, and we can use some of these other tests that psychologists have brought up to maybe push the ball a little bit further down the court to that extent, what do you suggest, like what would be a very very simple example that anybody can do. Who's listening to this that
is kind of along the lines of what you're suggesting. Just by way of clarification, I'm not suggesting using existing psychological tests, but I would put it to you that every time you go out into the woods and you do a provocation a tree knock and effect, what you've just done is you've created a test to see if you're going to get a response back to that tree knock, and what kind of response are you going to get? And so I
have this in my book and I covered this in my podcast. You know, a simple tree knock experiment and comparing say, tree knocks to stone clacks. So you go into the woods, get yourself settled. If you can use some time for a baseline just acting naturally and normally, so that you're doing what you normally do and you see if you're getting any any sign or
responses just doing that. But once you've got that baseline study settled, make a tree knock noise and start timing that tree knock and set a time limit on it. If we don't get a tree knock back in or any kind of response back in ten minutes, move on to another provocation. So do your tree knock and then wait if you if you get a tree knock back or some kind of response back, record that the time it took from the time you made the tree knock until you got the response, what the response
is. If you didn't get a response, you've got to record that as well. You can't just record the successes. You got to record the failures. But then after if you get nothing in that ten minutes, then do a stone clack again. Time from the second you start did the stone clack, start timing and see if you get a response. Let's say you get a response from the from the clacking of the stones, but you don't get a response from the tree knock, So you record your response for the clacking
of the stones, and that does it. You don't get any any other activity for the rest, so you move on to another spot. But you don't know if the response you got to the stone clack was a delayed response to the tree knock or was it because of the was it because of the stone clack. So this time, in this place, you do your stone
clack first. This is called a counterbalance design. You do your stone clack first, make your recording, and then the tree knock second, and then another stone clack and another tree knock, So you're alternating the order of the provocations, and you're recording all this data, all the results or lack of
results, and then that gets reduced down to ones and zeros. Your two independent variables are the stone clack and the tree knock, and you're doing them in a counterbalanced order to allow to control for what comes first and what comes
last. Because in humans, we either respond to the first things we hear or see, or we'd better remember the last things we hear or see, So there are order effects in our own cognition, and so you try to control for those in that experiment by alternating which stimuli, which provocation comes first. Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and beyond with Cliff and Bobo will be right
back after these messages. Cliff, I can't tell you how good it makes me feel to hear you say your comment about very little research, scientific research is being done, because boy I hammered on that so much on my show. Because the next step, as you said, once you get that raw data, once you record the number of results you got to tree knox and what kind compared to a number of results you got to stone clacks and what kind, you can then compare those two results to see if you got more
responses to tree knocks or you've got more responses to stone clacks. But we can already do that, but you can eyeball, well we got we only got fifteen responses to tree knocks, but we got twenty three responses to stone clacks. But you don't know if that's what's called a significant difference. You don't know if that is in fact by significant difference, we're talking about statistically
significant difference that rules out random occurrence and chance influencing those results. And so I think we're we fall down as a community is we don't know how to do the experimental design, and even more importantly, we don't know how to do the statistical analysis as a community. And it's that statistical analysis and experimental
design that brings the science into psychological science. So not only can we say, yeah, twenty three is more than fifteen, but twenty three knocks is significantly more than you would expect given that you've got our twenty three stone clack responses. Is significantly more than you would expect given fifteen three knocks. Is
this making sense, guys? Yeah? I think so. Now now as you're speaking, my wheels are turning, of course, you know, because I'm always looking for ways to better up my game, and I think psychology would be the perfect science to consider this side of things that that is coming into my head here, How does one account for in this in these sorts of experiments, in the simple experiment that you just laid out, how does one account for maybe unknown variables, like, for example, the two that
came into my mind pretty quickly were, how do you know there's a sasquatch with an earshot to even reply? And also how does one account for the mood of the sasquatch at the time, like maybe he's not being social or maybe the sasquatch is observing you, either audibly or visibly, probably audibly, I'm guessing, and they, oh, that not came from those people, are I'm not going to answer that, They're not going to fool me.
How does one account for those sorts of variables in the simple experiment like this or does that just make the experiment not simple any longer. Well, that's a very good question to your first point. You know, obviously, as people who have been out in the field and had I myself have not had a Class A encounter, but I had a couple butt puckering Class B encounters that left no doubt in my mind that we're dealing with something out there.
But you know, over the years of doing expeditions, you become familiar not only with specific areas where they live, specific habituation areas, but I feel like I've also learned, you know, what makes a place squatchy, what makes a camping area, or what makes a particular location squatchy. So you know, I think you're starting in a habituation area for starters, where you
know they live. I'm not sure how to account for the mood, except to say that if you really want to do this experiment right, you need to do it at a variety of locations throughout the United States and throughout the region. And in doing that, the you know, repeating that experiment throughout that area. But in doing that, that begins to randomize or randomly distribute
the mood, if you will, of the bigfoots. Because you're repeating it so often in so many different locations, at least on a theoretical statistical level and experimental design level, that begins to randomize mood. It's kind of like it's being randomly assigned to different locations or times depending on the mood of the
sasquatch. I just want to throw in here, I thought the other element you were going to speak to was human, because you know, one of the things that even when I've heard the only I've only heard one tree knock that was attributed to bigfoot. But even after you hear that, because you didn't see them making that tree knock, there's always you know, do we even know that it was a big foot making that tree knock? How do
we know it wasn't a human making that tree knock? And in this experiment, the tree knock versus the stone clacking, you can account for or factor in, if you will, the influence of humans making those sounds, simply by setting up that same experiment in a in an area that is isolated from bigfoots but thurround it by humans. And you can repeat that same procedure in
your human area as you did in your sasquatch area. And then you can compare the responses that the number of responses you got to stone clackes and tree knocks in the human area compared to the ones in the in the Sasquatch area. And let that tell you and inform you as to is that in fact sasquatch phenomena. So I think psychology gives us away through experimental design to factor out that human influence in a variety of situations or phenomena that we experience.
Now, what about the idea, and I believe this to be true, that that Sasquatches perhaps have some level of local culture. And by by what I what I mean by that is something as simple as this. The ones out there at bumping you know it by bumping that they yell a lot, right, So those ones up there tend to yell a lot. The ones at Bluff Creek almost never yell. Really, I spent a lot of time in Bluff Bobo, even more so than me. I've heard a lot of
knocks there, direct responses whatever I'm doing. But I think in all that time I've I've heard less than a half dozen vocalizations. And we're talking, you know, twenty thirty years of going there on and off, you know, sometimes for two weeks at a time or more. So, I mean,
I attribute those things, and of course this is an assumption. I realize that to some sort of cultural difference, just like I think that another cultural difference would be that the Sasquatches on the ridges near my home in my particular area don't tend to vocalize and tend to be quite slinky, you know, very ninja like, because they're living closer to town, you know, whereas the ones further out in the wilderness areas have less to lose by making
noise or that sort of stuff. I think I believe, at least in that that cultural difference might exist, And of course that in itself deserves an experiment or two, or five or twenty. But being a science in a scientists in psychology, what sort of precautions or elements can you build into an experiment to account for those or or is that just something that might arise out
of the day later and then have to be dealt with. I think you've kind of answered your own question in that you know you're gonna do it location by location, region of the country by region of the country, and in doing so, I think there you may be able to find support for that hypothesis. If you you know, if if in the in the south, you know, you get more tree knocks, then you do stone claques. And I'm not saying this would be the case, but in the Northwest you
get more stone claques, and you see the pattern. You see a pattern consistently of you know, south southeast three noox tree, Noox tree, Knox, but you're seeing stone clack stone clack stone claes or vocalizations, vocalization vocalizations in the north north West. I think that then begins to give you information
about the different ways that those sasquatches in that region respond. And once you can narrow it down to a region, then you begin to study that region closer, and then I think you can get to the level that you're looking to get in terms of the culture or the you know, the traditions within the tribe or whatever the case may be. So I think it would arise from the data. Yeah. Yeah, So I did answer my own which I very often answer my own question if i'd think and talk out loud long
enough. So yeah, yeah, awesome. Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. Will be right back after these messages. Now, John, you mentioned a couple and I'm going to quote you here but puckering class bs. Yes, well, we got to hear about those, which you mind sharing those with this please. I've got two, the first one, and again I've signed non disclosure agreements, so I can't give you this specific location beyond saying this was a location in Tennessee. But I was
part of a group of sixteen. The whole expedition. This was a Lori Waite expedition. The whole expedition had probably about forty people in it. But as you know, no doubt, we break up into smaller groups of three to five. But we were going to hike midway up this mountain to this old cabin, and then we were going to send one group before one direction, another group before another direction, another group of four I think down the
mountain and then one group stay at this cabin. So I got into the group before who was supposed to climb up this deer path to the fire road that's on top of the mountain, or as high as we could go on the ridge on a fire road. And we got out there. We were supposed to head one direction and another group was going to head the opposite direction on this fire road, and we were going to kind of meet in the
middle. Was the plan. Unfortunately, we took a wrong turn. We took a left and started heading up when we were supposed to take a right. But we were headed up there a guy by the name of George Wrigley, who is one of my mentors, I consider one of my mentors. And we're walking up and it had rained hard the previous night, and it was windy this night, but otherwise it was that it was dead silent. All you could here was the leaves rustling in the trees and the water running
off the mountain. And I said, George, you know, you see you told me multiple times that when a bigfoot's in the area, all the other all the other creatures kind of shut down and it gets real quiet. Is this the kind of quiet you're talking about, because I had never experienced
this quiet before. And he said, well, he said, usually when you get this kind of quiet and there's a bigfoot in the area, you get you know, the hair standing up on your head, or you're feeling you're being watched, or that spidey sense, I think is what a lot of people call it. And none of us were getting that. So no, John, I don't think this is it. Long story short. We walked about miles three miles up this road. We didn't see any activity of
wildlife. But we finally got in touch with the people we thought we were going to meet, and they had seen pigs rutting on the fire road. They had seen they had spooked some turkeys, both broosting in the trees and from the ground, and they had saw all kinds of deer. And we didn't see any wildlife, nor did we hear any creature sounds creatures as in
kitmunks or squirrels, you know, no sound in the forest whatsoever. So we start walking back, and on these walks a lot of the members had interest in hypnosis, and so we were talking about hypnosis and how that could influence people's perceptions of bigfoot and George I said something, and George stopped on his heel and we were walking single file. I was about five feet behind
him. Five feet behind me was Brave Heart. I called him Brave Heart from this incident and then Mark Oglebee and God, I can't believe I'm walking on Braveheart's actual name. It'll come to me. So George stops, pivots on his foot to walk the five feet to ask me a question. And in the time it took him to do that, he got the letter J he said. And when he got the jay out, we had a tree push over versus fall. Since we didn't see it, but it was explosive.
It sounded like a bomb went off right on top of us. And then immediately after that it sounded us to god, guys, it sounded like a landslide was coming down on top of us. It sounded like logs and rocks were tumbling from the peak above us down towards us. And you know, when things are running tumbling downhill real fast, oftentimes they'll hit a rock and they'll become airborne and there'll be a silence, and then you can hear
him hit the ground again. And continue tumbling. That's what we were hearing, and it seemed to surround us, and so George and I we we scattered like cockroaches to try and get clear of the landslide. We've got it recorded. It lasted fourteen seconds. Mark Ogilby, who was in the back, he scattered like a cockroach. And Braveheart. I had his name, and I lost it again. Dan Keggley is who I call brave Heart.
Dank Keggley. He chose the fight response. He pivoted. He pivoted on his heel and looked up the mountain and went to pull out his cave bar knife, and he was ready to take on whatever was coming down at us. But nothing ever hit the no rocks, no trees, no logs, no small stones. But what did hit us, and what settled over us was a cloud of a loam. If you've ever had if you've ever worked with loam soil, it has that distinct almost a manure smell, but it's
not a manure smell. Looking up the mountain, we could see just that the particles of loam coming down on top of us. I smelled it before I saw it. So we spent thirty forty five minutes trying to debunk that. Couldn't find anything to explain it. So we put two sticks in an x standing vertically where this happened, and we had a couple hundred yards hike to that deer trail that we took up to get to the fire road.
We start well after that. Immediately after that happened, the folks from the cabin called down, called us and said, did you hear that tree three fall? Hell? Yeah, you know, just about happened right on top of us. So we start walking back to that deer trail, and as we're walking back to the deer trail, the guys from the cabin again call us. They say, are you guys on the deer trail or are you guys on the forest road? We're still on the fire We're still on the
forest road, the fire road. Okay, then for out. So we get to the deer trail and we're about midway down the deer trail and the guys from the cabin call us again and said, are you guys on the fire road or are you guys on the deer trail? Why do you keep calling us and asking this? Well, when you guys were on the forest road following behind you, we saw some red lights and now that you're on the deer trail, it looks like there's some red eye shine or red lights
right behind you, and so of course we all pivoted up. We pivoted and looked up the deer trail up the mountain. We didn't see any red lights. So we got to the cabin, which was the Midway base camp, and we're sitting relaxing and all of a sudden, all of a sudden, somebody says, did you see that red light in the woods. No, we start looking and to make a long story short, over a period
of about twenty five twenty to thirty minutes, we didn't keep track. We watched fifteen to twenty what we believe were infant Bigfoot doing that peeping thing where they'd peep out one side of the tree and you could see and I'm going to call it red eye glow rather than eyeshine, because is this there. It was an overcast night, there was no moon, there was no ambient light to shine on these eyes, So I think of this as eye glow. You're saying, fifty to twenty of them you said yes, and there's
an explanation for that. So we watched these peepers for about twenty to twenty five minutes, and that many bobo and we were you know, it was amazing. So I was the oldest in the group, but the other guys, the other guys were in there, I think late thirties, early forties. We were determined to get back up there the next day. We didn't, but a young buck went up there. We told him to look for the X, and he looked for the X, found the X, and
he found a full print. He didn't have a casting kit, never cast it. He runs back down to base camp and get somebody who's an expert in casting. They go back up to that print, full plasticle print. They cast it a print right near where we had put the X, right where we had what we thought was aligned landslide. And as they're waiting for the cast to cure, they decide to look down the downside of the fire road. We had been looking up from where the sounds were coming that night.
We never looked the opposite side down on the fire road. And they look down the downside of the fire road, and I'll be darn if it didn't about eight to ten feet down it leveled off onto a plateau, pretty pretty long and wide plateau, and they say they counted about forty infant bigfoot prints on that plateau, eight feet below the roadbed. How big was How big was the cast? The one that you cast? A big one, it was seventeen and a half inches long and I think seven inches wide.
How big were the small ones? Nobody cast those, okay, whether four inches or seven inches or I didn't see him myself, so I couldn't tell you. But they found another print, but it wasn't castable. Right on the edge of the down drop to that plateau and fifteen feet up the tree there there was a fresh bark tear. So we either experienced. In hindsight, I think what might have happened might have been And again no science here,
this is just experience. But I think when we stopped, it was like we might have stopped right next to the nursery or the playground, and I think we were bluff charged. I don't think it was a landslide because the sound and the power of that that landslide coming down on top of us, it was loud, and if it was a lion slide. Something should have hit the ground, so I think in hindsight we experienced a bluff charge.
And then when we got back down to that to that midway cabin, I think maybe, I don't know, maybe Mom and Dad took the infants to to spy on the bigfooters. So that was one of my butt puckering class being encounters. The butt puckering part when that landslide sound started. I love the guy pulling the knife to try to fend off the avalanche. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Tennessee, Tennessee's that's where we got the most tree shot outs of it. Where we went from this show every time me what
he we got at least two or three Wow. Yeah. And I was back in a different location in Tennessee here a few months ago and heard some tree pushovers as well. Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo. We'll be right back after these messages. Do we have time for my other buckering experience? Yeah? I hit it, love to hear it. So this was early on in my second year of expeditions with Laurie. She's always kind enough and you know, just an incredible lady. Puts on
an incredible expedition, as does Charlie Raymond. Just give both of those guys a plug. Just awesome. But she brings in, as does Charlie, she brings in guest speakers on most of her exped editions. And the guest speaker she brought it she brought in was Scott Carpenter. May he rest in
peace. So you know, Scott, of course was talking about Niphelum and talking about his experiences with bigfoot and cloaking and things of that nature, and it was fascinating to me, but I still walked away, very skeptical of them cloaking or disappearing right in front of your eyes. So about a month later, fifty minutes from where I live in Rome, Georgia is a wildlife
management area called John's Mountain Wildlife Management Area. So I thought, what the heck, I'm going to take myself in my little mini trailer and my dog and see if I can't find a spot that looks squatchy. So I was successful in finding a spot that looked squatchy. Got there in the daytime. It was it was such that it was right off the road, not deep in at all into the woods. I was probably thirty feet from the road
where I set up my camp. But there were there were ridges on both sides of this campground, and the ridge if you're facing from the road in towards the campground, the ridge on the left had a creak running into the main river just across the street, and these ridges followed went went back probably a mile, and then probably two miles past that was this big untouched mountain. And so during the day, my dog and I looked for sign.
We couldn't find any Prince couldn't find any evidence. So time to cook dinner. And just as we're finishing up dinner, my dog, it was a pit bull mix, was just I had him tied onto a rope, was just lounging on the ground, and all of a sudden, he sat up from laying down, sat on his hindquarters, stuck his nose straight up into the air to the sky, and sat there for three to five minutes,
just like that, sniffing the air. And when his nose came down, he started snarling and growling and barking like he wanted to tear into something, just going off. And I had never seen this dog do this. I couldn't see anything it was dusk. At this point, I couldn't see anything in front of me. His nose, his nose, those was down and looking. It was like he was barking at something in front of us that he was sensing that I couldn't. So I finally got him calm down.
I said, okay, Red, let let let's go check it out. Well, I went and got my headlamp and moved forward to towards the road. And he wouldn't come with me. He crawled under, he crawled under his trailer or trailer. He would not come forward with me. And I'm, you know, for the first time thinking about Scott's Scott's presentation about cloaking, it was like, geez, is my dog seeing or sensing something that's
there that I can't see. So, even though I had my headlamp when I walked forward, I walked forward with my hands out in front of me for that Maybe they do cloak and I want to walk away into one with my So I walked forward with my hands out, didn't bump into anything, got to the road, looked up the road, walked up the road a
little bit, walked down the road, walked back into the camp. So I didn't see a darn thing, so got read my put my rave pit bull out from underneath my trailer and sat down next to the fire, right where we were when he started barking. And we weren't sitting there but thirty seconds to a minute, and I started hearing this bush rattling to my at my two o'cloth and no sooner the bush started rattling. He and this bush was probably I was just there a couple of weekends ago, probably about twenty
yards away from me. This bush starts rattling. My pit bull gets up orients on the bush, puts his nose up into the air again, but this time only holds it up for five seconds. And when he brings his nose down again, he starts into what's like an attack mode, but maybe it's a fear mode, because he wasn't moving forward, but he was growling and snarling and snapping at something in that bush, rattling that bush. And as this is going on for maybe fifteen twenty seconds, all of a sudden,
I hear above his growling and snarling and snapping. I hear that's when mud butt buckered, and I stood up, and the dog's growling and snarling and snapping was going on, as was the growling coming from that bush. And I went out, got to my car. I had a smith and Western forty five military police handgun, got that out and for the first time ever, I chambered around and no sooner that clicking sound from chambering around in
a pistol happened, it got silent. The growling, the growling stopped, My dog settled down, and everything just shut down, like a switch was thrown when I when I cocked that pistol. Yeah, it seems like a gun's cocking and like the first little zip of a zipper just shuts them down, like if you zip your sleeping bag or ten if you get on zip it, or if your chamber around or you know, hit the you know, hit the slide on a shotgun pump something like that. That just seems
like just boom, just dead. And to clarify, I'm not I carry a gun for personal protection, not for bigfoot. My it is all about providing a pathway to scientific proof so we don't have to kill one. So I am of the no kill philosophy. But I wanted to clarify you that given that I talked about talking a gun. Yeah, well, now if that's the goal, can you paraphrase the pathway to discovery without a type specimen?
And the second part of that question, I guess would be, don't you think that after discovery, if it can be done without a type specimen, they would go get another one. Anyway, I've thought about it the other way around a lot, because I don't think a body is going to suffice. I think we're going to need two or three bodies for verification. And on top of that, then we still don't have those phenomena necessarily scientifically tied to the Bigfoot, and so there's still more work to be done to
scientifically, you know, link Bigfoot to all the these occurrences. Just because we've proven its Bigfoot, that Bigfoot exists, we haven't proven that Bigfoot is causing a lot of these phenomena. So the path for the past sixty years we've been doing empirical observation. And empirical observation is the first step in a
significant scientific discovery. But usually what happens after you do step one in the scientific method, which is empirical observation, you move on to step two, which is developing a hypothesis based on that empirical observation, and then step three
is designing an experiment to test that hypothesis based on that empirical observation. And then step foward is analyzing your data with statistics and you know, presenting it for pre review and beginning the cycle again, reiterating, reiterating the experiment if it comes out positive, other people doing if it comes out positive. But it seems to me that as a community, guys, we have gotten stuck
in this runt of the observation. We're continuing to go out there, spend money on photographic equipment, flear, radar, lidar, and we're still trying to capture Bigfoot with a photograph or with a recording or through their phenomena. But we've got to we know what their phenomena are. We have all kinds of hypotheses, but in our field we call them theories. You know, it seems to me, as a community, in terms of the scientific method
we skip. We've gone from observation to theory, and we skipped hypothesis testing, finding a hypothesis, and then theory testing before we call something a theory. We're going from our empirical observations to what we think Bigfoot is doing, and we begin to call that a theory. So the pathway to using psychologic science to prove Bigfoot scientifically is to use the entire scientific method, but using
experimentation. So you go from your observation to your hypothesis. Your hypothesis is used to generate an experiment, and in that experiment you try to control for human influence, the influences of other possible creatures that could be producing the same phenomena. You include ConTroll variables in your experiment, and and that's where then photography is going to come in and become scientific when it's being used within that
context of an experiment and providing convergent validity. Think about tag X. If they had set up either a recorder or if they had set up a camera where next to that tag and a glimpse or a sound of that least that they tagged, that could be convergent evidence. That could be evidence that says, yes, this was likely a sasquatch we tagged, rather than the uncertainty
that's involved with that. So so you do your you set up, you design your experiment, you deploy your experiment, you analyze your data and then you complete the scientific method. It's just that what psychologic sciences can bring to the research field that isn't going on in the research field right now, because
we're still stuck in this empirical observation kind of rut. It's bringing we're still studying the phenomena, but it's bringing experimental design and statistical analysis, and so now we can get key values to know how likely is this study occurred as a result of random error. We can control and measure human responses to things like pree Knox or pre structures, and we can factor that out of the bigfoot data and see how much Bigfoot date, Bigfoot influence is still left.
We're just not moving forward with this experimentation and the statistical analysis as long as we're just going out there doing observation. Yes, but even if we had strongly indicative results from well designed experiments, don't you think that there would still be a need to go cllect specimens and kill a couple of these things. I would, honestly, I would hope not. Oh, I hope not too. Don't get me wrong, I want to put that out there.
I hope not as well, But we do. I mean the science is also stuck in a kind of Victorian mindset about that, I think, right, right, so, I think you know so my analogy is how many targets? How many arrows do you have to hit the bulls eye with before you can say this is being produced. The first step, of course,
is unidentified species. Okay, how many? How many arrows have to hit the bull's eye before we say that, if we can prove that pre knots are produced by an unidentified species and not human, that tree structures are produced by an unidentified species and not human, if we can prove that. You list the phenomena, the stone clacks, the vocalizations, each one of those represent an arrow that we're trying to hit the bigfoot target on, and if we can hit, if we can get seven or eight or nine of those
arrows in that bull's eye, I think that should be enough. I may be optimistic, but I mean you think about the word intelligence. Nobody questions the validity of intelligence. It's commonly accepted. Again, yet we can't see it. Over over the years, we've been able to prove that unseen intelligence. We've been able to prove those unseen emotions, or you can't directly touch them emotions, and I don't see why I couldn't, couldn't or shouldn't be
the same for bigfoot. And again, the other important thing that I'm including in these designs is convergent validity. You know, going out and just getting a you know, the clearest picture of bigfoot you can isn't going isn't scientific, It's just not scientific. But you get that picture. Within the context of some of the experiments that I'm talking about, you get that picture.
I don't know that we're going to get them knocking trees. I don't even know that they use knocks or they they use a stick to knock on trees. But we can design experiments so that although we're measuring one variable, we're using other control variables to prevent the influence of certain things and to rule out other things through the experimental design and the statistical analysis. And I think if
we keep hitting that target, it's going to become undeniable. Now, something that might be fuddle that is that the vast majority of bigfoot data is stumbled upon by citizens, by the non bigfooting public. Does that data have value or do you have to have a strictly designed experiment behind it. I think it has value, but we've got to do more with it, at least the statistics. Every statistic course I've ever taken taught me that in ordered,
we're trying to prove causality. We're trying to prove that bigfoot caused that print to be there. We're trying to prove that bigfoot cause that free break, or bigfoot caused that tree structure, or that bigfoot that was bigfoot powling. So we're trying to prove causality. And the only way that you can scientifically prove causality is through experimentation. So at some point we're going to have to
start doing experiments. And again, as I said earlier, even if they have a body, we're still going to have to do experiments to link these phenomena to Bigfoot scientifically. But we can we can take self reports, anecdotal evidence. You know, BFRO, I'm sure you know better than I as a pretty large database, and there are other people out there that have database,
and we can encode those reports. We can assign numbers to certain aspects of those findings and begin to look at commonalities and differences within and between those reports. So that's called descriptive statistics. I don't think. I don't think anyone's even done that much. Taking a big database of reports, assigning numeric values to them so that they can be statistically analyzed, and then look for
the trends. How many are roadside sidings, how many are sightings back in the woods, you know, how many involved whatever, you know, whatever kind of phenomena, And we could numerically reduce all those sightings and statistically analyze them, and that would give us a better description, I think, and a more accurate description than what we rely on now, which is opinion and memory and experience, because those go through our perception, and our perception is
by design biased. We are biased machines because we've got to use our perceptual processing. So the anecdotal evidence can have descriptive statistical value to help us better understand what people are seeing and what people are reporting. But if we want to prove causality, we're either going to have to find one hundred percent correlation
in that descriptive data, or we're going to have to run experiments. Because when something when there's a causal relationship going on, there's one hundred percent correlation in that causal relationship. And the good news is is we already know some answers to causal relationships. We already know that tree knock knocking on a tree doesn't cause a bigfoot to respond with a tree knock sound, or why do
you say that that doesn't make any sense. They do respond to tree knocks, you're right, but they don't respond one hundred percent of the time. Sometimes you make a tree knock and you get a response, other times you don't. And so there's a correlation between a tree not making provoking with a tree dock and getting a response, but there's not a causal relationship between us making a tree dock and getting a response back. And I think a lot
of the bigfoot phenomena are going to be of the same ill. We're going to be able to show a course relation, but it's not going to beyond your percent causality. And that's where you need to get into the experiments.
Certainly, there's a there's piles and piles of data, and of course this is another example where John Green, you know, is ahead of everybody because he did such a statistical analysis with his sixteen or seventeen hundred sidings I think in the late nineteen seventies, with a very rudimentary computer, you know, he did a little bit of this, and again far in front of the rest of the pack, I guess, but the call has not moved much
further down court. So hopefully with the publication of your new book, then more people reading it, maybe bigfooters will up their game and start designing experiments that can be done out in the field. And that's what science is all
about. Develop a hypothesis, develop an experiment to see if you're right or not, and then circle back around, no matter if the answer is yes or no. If you get oh, that does support my hypothesis, I'm going to keep on developing more experiments to see if I can find a situation in which I'm wrong. And of course, if you are wrong right out of the gate, then you have to go revise your hypothesis. That's one
thing I like. I like a lot about things about science, but one thing I particularly like about science is that you're always trying to prove yourself incorrect, because I'm wrong an awful lot, and every time I'm wrong in science is actually a victory. And I love that. I love that. I'll be getting a novel. That's the case. Nice? All right? Well, hey doctor John, where can people find your book, Grasping Sasquash Prepping
for Scientific Field Research. It's going to be released under Hangar one Publishing Doug Hichicks Publishing Company. I'm sure it'll be available on hangar you know. I'm sure it will be multiple ways to obtain the book. Okay. And you also briefly mentioned about a podcast that you did. Where can people listen to that if they want to learn more about what you're saying, but more in depth in that this are one or one hour, you know, interview with
you. So I had a podcast that I just completed about four weeks ago called Grasping Sasquatch Stories and Science, and kind of format would be what I would. I would tell a story, relate it to some kind of encounter, sometimes mine, sometimes other people's, and then we'd relate that to science and how the scientific aspects of it and how in some cases we might design
experiments around it. And that we even discussed how to tell if infrasound is if we're psyching ourselves out or are we responding to the actual infrasound as an example, of another experiment detailed in my book, and so those are also there's those are on YouTube and as well as untold Radio, and they can
be downloaded on all your major podcast channels. Fantastic, and I'm sure the lovely and talented Matt Prue will put those links in the show notes below for all of our listeners to make it nice and easy for people to go check out what you're doing. Yeah, I got one last quick question for what
are your colleagues other psychologists think about your work? Get any feedback. I've never been I've never felt the need to hide my interest in Bigfoot because I was a psychologist, i was already pretty I've always been upfront and unapologetic about it, and so most of them take, you know, as you would
expect with anyone you tell. You know, the whole gamut of response is from laughing at you, to a furious skepticism to a real interest to some believers, and so it you know, it's been the full gamut of stuff. I've certainly never had it held against me for what it's worth. That's good to hear, and I'm glad to hear. You're not a coward. You're out there in front send I believe in this and I'm researching it. What you see is what you get with me, and I'm so I'm pretty
upfront about steph. Thank you John Brenchak, author of Grasping Sasquatch Prepping for Scientific field Research. We really do appreciate your time and your expertise and sharing a little bit about your experience with us, and just good luck with the book. Really excited to have it out. Yeah, John, thank you, Thank you, Bobo, thank you, Matt. I really appreciate this opportunity, and again I'm honored to have it. Thank you very much. All Right, all right, thanks John, that was great. Good look
at the book. Okay, folks, thanks for joining us this week. We appreciate it, y'all checking us out, and until next week, y'all keep it squatchy. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond. If you liked what you heard, please rate and review us on iTunes, subscribe to Bigfoot and Beyond wherever you get your podcasts, and follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Bigfoot and Beyond podcast. You can find us on
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