Ep. 276 - Q&A - August, 2024

You know, at the end of Paul Freeman's career out in the Blues, he wouldn't cast the stuff unless it was beautiful. He's like, oh, these aren't good enough to cast. Remember he told Meldrum that the five points trackway that Meldrum looked at in ninety six. In February, he said those weren't good enough to cast, and Meldrem said, yeah, I could see dramatically fix fading in them in the light, and yeah, he casts I think six r eight of them in a row, and those blue Meldrum socks off. But yeah,

Freeman was saying, yeah, they aren't very good. I'm not going to cast him. Of course, now I can see where he finally arrived at that because frankly, storage is an issue. But luckily I have that giant outbuilding. You know, it's practically an airplane hangar, you know, I.

now because we're not ready to frame. We're still milling the wood and then of course the mill has to draw, the wood has to dry, you know, and we're stacking it and of course, you know, squeeze it and all

that stuff. But you know this this winter though, this is the plan, like late fall, early winter, we're going to start framing up the inside of that building there and make a make a place, a secure place that's you know, somewhat climate controlled for the casts and and all my manufacturing stuff and all that jazz, so to.

And you know, it's not like all this guy's going to die and we're going to get it. It's like no, like that. There's another person who's going to donate and help us out with another collection. So yeah, there's a lot of big things happen and that I'm looking forward to being able to talk about a little bit more freely in the next few months, so we'll see what happens.

make room for things. It's been terrible here. I'd to install a new dishwasher, so that took a couple hours yesterday. It's just been nuts. It's just been absolutely nuts here. We're doing a I think I mentioned it with Prut on last week's episode. We're doing a shared exhibit with the Columbia River Gorge Discovery Center and Museum out there in the Dowels. There's a really cool museum out there in the dows and they're going to be showing a

lot of our exhibits. So I'm kind of been scrambling to get all that stuff up and running and ready for them by the by earlish middle of next week.

the museum on August twenty seconds. So I don't know if theyre I haven't seen a flyer or anything like that for that yet, but when I do, I'll be sure to share it with our members and all that other stuff and just put it on maybe I'll put

it on Facebook or something. But it's just kind of a teaser thing is going to run till the end of the year and hopefully drive traffic to the Aren't My Museum, but also on kind of a bigger picture sort of level, hopefully it'll kind of open people's eyes that there is good evidence for sasquatches being real animals. Of course. And you know, a lot of people go to that museum and it's like a really nice facility. It's it's totally legit, man, totally legit, and so we're

real happy to be working with them. They're really nice people over there, and they've been very, very encouraging. They've even hosted other exhibits in the past, like when Chris Murphy was touring with mostly Renate to Hint and Stuff I Think and all that stuff eventually ended up in Lauren Coleman's museum out there in Maine. Right, Well, we got a job to do here, Bobs. You want to jump into this thing.

And of course we also do a member episode every single week, including a member's Q and A. We actually do member Q and as almost every single member episode. So what you get if you want to be a member of Bigfoot and Beyond is five dollars a month.

And for that five dollars a month, you get an extra hour of content from us every single week, and Matt Pru participates a lot more in those, which is always great because he had a lot of insights and he's certainly one of the most well spoken and intelligent people in the field. But also you get this very episode, the regular episode that you're listening to right now, completely add free. What we're going to ask for five bucks a month. That's like a dollar twenty five or something

a week for all that yummy goodness. You'd be a fool not to in my opinion anyway. But here we go, So Bigfoot and Beyond Q and A episode right now, and if you want to submit your own question to us, you can do so in two ways. You can either send us an email or you can leave a voicemail, and both those options are available at Bigfoot and Beyond

podcast dot com. Go there, hit the contact button and just follow the links and maybe you can hear your voice on the air, like this first question right here.

contaminated in a lot of ways. Contaminated may not be the right word, but there's so much noise in the signal that it's hard to, you know, pull out the important bits from my understanding, and I have a very limited understanding of this kind of stuff, but from an understand like you take a sample of the ground, like say a sasquatch or anything, a bear steps in a puddle or something like that, that puddle or that that

piece of dirt has been there forever pretty much. We'll just say forever, although maybe it's only twenty years, maybe it's only fifty years, maybe it's maybe it's a thousand years, but you get the idea, right, And everything in that environment is breathing, so the water drop droplets with the saliva and stuff that all has DNA, everything in there shedding skin and hair and duff and whatever else, and it all settles down kind of uniformly and very thinly

throughout the entire environment. In order to pull out the important stuff, like in our case, what we want to look at is some sort of primate DNA or homini or homin in DNA or something like that. You need to have certain primers, and what a primer does is that it amplifies certain signals. But the thing is about that is that we have no primer for sasquatch. There are bear primers, there are tiger primers, there are there

are you know, elk primers and whatever. So the closer you get to the target species, the better the primer is going to be. We would want a sasquatch primer, but they don't exist. So what we have to do is kind of guess, okay, primate is a pretty big family, because that includes to our sears and all this other stuff. If you use a human primer, then that's going to

amplify the human part of things. And I think that that is part of the reason we keep getting human on the hits, because sasquatches are certainly probably like at least ninety eight percent identical to us in DNA, maybe even ninety nine ninety nine and a half or more identical to us in their DNA. So if you are, you know, amplifying the human part of that, it's going to come out as human, probably almost every time. I suspect that's what's been going on these last five or

eight years of doing these kinds of tests. I don't know. I'm not an expert by any means. I'm a layman at best, lame man at best. But that is my understanding is that this is kind of a noised signal ratio, and the signal we're looking for is so minutely different that the other signals drowned it out. However, there is some hope on the horizon, not only in a couple

of Darby's studies. He's got a whole slew of different things he's doing over there at North Carolina State University, and I for one, completely support all of his efforts. But this past winter, an opportunity arose and of footprints in the snow that were laid down the previous night, and I call Darby about that, and he goes, well, this is a really unique opportunity because the only thing that should have touched that snow in the last twenty

four hours is that animal's foot. And so that situation like that arising during the winter time is of great importance. So I'm kind of looking forward to winner for the first time this year for this reason alone, Because if we can get fresh sasquatch footprints or even like within a few days or a week old, the only reason, there'll be far less contamination so to speak, in that snow print than there would any footprint in the ground.

And so that gives us a very unique opportunity where suddenly it's worth it to do kind of this scattershot sort of approximation e DNA test, whereas against the ground that's time consuming and money consuming and all this other the personnel consuming, it's it's a much much much harder ordeal than if we have something like clean snow that a sasquatch stepped on last night. That would eliminate a

lot of the other DNA in there. And maybe I'm way off on this or certainly smarter people than me listening to this podcast, but that is my understanding from having worked on a couple of projects with the North Carolina folks for this last year or two. So I hope that answers both of your questions, Joe and Paul, as well as Bobo's cool. Happy to be a service. And again I could be wrong. I don't lie, but

I'm very often wrong, so fact check me. You know, ask people who are smarter than me, and you know DNA people and all that other stuff. So there you go. Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. We'll be right back after these messages.

out of these sky islands in the Desert Southwest? Any comments or insight about sasquatch in the sky Islands of the Desert Southwest, Thanks guys by.

would they do that? Certainly it would be during the wintertime because a lot of these, you know, places would have rivers coming out of them, and they just probably go through the arroyos, the dried river beds and whatever else when there's water running through, the kind of like what they do in southern California. I think, what do you think, Bobo?

on the border in New Mexico, Arizona. There's a lot of stuff always going up there, Like people short the squatches down there go up there a lot and I'll eve been up there, I guess twice, and that is such great habitat and I think I think that's a good place to focus to. There's not this huge thick county for US northwest that you can you can see, you can see, and I think jerones would be more viable that they can see further and not not as obscured.

south there in Mahabians, so the hardcore desert. That's the same case, the same case here over in Arizona, New Mexico. But up on top of these mountains, where these mountains are capturing the moisture from the clouds and raining, there's a lot of lush growth, you know, a lot of undergrowth, a lot of trees, a lot of animals. You go down the slope, and then of course you start going into the desert, and where are most of the animals. They're very often found in transition zones where one biome

turns into another biome. In this case, forests got turning into desert or something, or chaparral or whatever. That's where a lot of animals are found. Because when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. The desert has its own resources, its own food items, its own animals, its own plants, and the forested areas have the same thing. So where these two areas connect, where they collide, so to speak, you have the best of both worlds. You have a much wider variety of plant and animal life

to feed upon. It's just a better habitat in a lot of ways. That's why hunters always work. These transitions are not always, but very often worth the transition zones because that's where the animals are. Because the animals don't want a wider variety of food. The sky islands are fantastic locations where whatever movement there is within the species season the season can be mostly vertical and meet all of their needs and have a very wide diet.

is cool, I think, I think winter time. Well, you know, you and I have both talked on this podcast about doing footprint investigations in the Mahabi river bed, you know, between the hatch Apee and the southern California Mountains, and those were always in December and January, so it makes a little bit of sense. Yeah, So there you go. Matthew I don't know if that answers your question, but it seems like it does. I hope it does at least, so thanks so much for listening. I appreciate it.

off and then it noticed. Remember that, I don't believe there's an ir beam coming out of your cameras anyway. It's a passive ir thing where the text movement in front of it, so there is no light coming out of a camera. And you can test this by using night vision and looking at your camera in the dark, because night vision sees infrared and I've never noticed that, so I'm pretty sure it doesn't do that. But yeah, there might be some sort of sound coming out of it,

but can bears detect it? Absolutely smell. That's why that's why they sell these metal bear containers, well not bear containers, camera containers for bears. You know. These these basically armor for your game cameras made at a metal that you can attach the trees to stop the bears from chewing up your game cameras because they smell it. And you can tell that they can smell it because they come

up and eat it and sniff it. And I've got a lot of pretty close pictures of a bears sniff in my camera and luckily none of them have tried to eat it so far. But they literally sell armor for your game cameras to stop the bears from eating them, so you don't lose expensive equipment out of the woods. I don't think that's the case with sasquatches, And just by looking at the two species, you can probably guess why.

The bears, just like dog and deer and other animals like that that have a very good sense of smell, haven elongated snout, and that is to increase the surface area where the smell nerves are located to give them a better sense of smell, where sasquatches and humans and all the other ape species have a flat, relatively flat

face without an elongated nose. So even though the other ape species, including sasquatches, probably have a better sense of smell than human beings, because we've domesticated at ourselves, we all have about the same And it's not that great. It's good, it's good enough to survive, but it's not that great. It has nowhere near that a dog or a bear or anything like that. So can they detect them absolutely through smell? But you know, but it's something

else you said, I think is of interest. You said, I feel there is more bear activity when the game cameras aren't out or are off. I think is what you said. Okay, that's nice, but maybe you should collect some numbers on that, because gut feelings can be very, very misleading. And it's a simple thing, you know, just start to keep a journal, make an Excel sheet or something, and it's like, every time you see one, mark the

date and see if it's on or off. Select a little bit of data, because I think as a Bigfoot community, we're hoping to up the game a little bit and stop depending on our opinions or our feelings and start depending more on data. So I would encourage you that direction, and maybe there's something to it. And when you get the data in, look at the pattern and then ask yourself a question, huh, I wonder if it's the case

that they're noticing it somehow. Then design yourself an experiment on one side of your property, on one side of your thirty acres, turn on the game cameras on the other side, keep them off, do a test thing, and then switch that every couple of months, and then in one little area do this and that. Design an experiment, just to get to the bottom of it. Do some science. We're all capable of this and it's super fun to do. So that's my encouragement for you.

is the most overrated? Thank you and keep it squatchy.

They're kind of could more than I would ever expect, have those kind of like pecker poles, sort of like densely packed regrowth and real so's so dense that nothing really grows in the understory, which is in stark contrast to the Redwoods, where all sorts of things are growing in the understory. Yeah, a lot of times I'm actually stricten by struck by how unattractive the places where sasquatches have been seen are, you know what I mean.

I mean, I like it, but I think you might be right, you know, Like the Redwoods, I mean, they look amazing, and they certainly look like the stereotypical squatchy area, but as most stereotypes prove to be not true, you know, it's just not necessarily the case. And I think, I mean, I know there's a lot of food and stuff in the redwoods particularly, but I think there's actually less biodiversity in some of those places because of the predominance of certain other plants, you know.

and a lot of stuff happens. It's just that no one really talks about it because there aren't very many researchers in the area. There are some, there are definitely some, and thankfully there are some that document this sort of stuff, but I think southern Indiana was probably the first place that to my mind, although you know you're right about the Massachusetts as well. I think, Thank goodness, John Wilkins his buddies are out there.

back on to talk about this stuff again. But from what I understand, and again I could be wrong, I might be incorrect, So always always fact check me. I'm just telling you the truth as I understand it, slightly more than opinion. Basically, from what I understand a lot of this these rumors are just patently false. Basically, the DNA tests either never happened or it became part of

the storied mythology of Bigfoot that this happened. There are very very very few cases where they seem to be tested at all, and the the data, and even the results weren't necessarily save I know one case involving the nests up there in the Olympic Peninsula, the tests of the and the data of that are buried in a university email where the person who tested is not at that university anymore and has no access to it, so

again virtually lost. There's no way we can get that stuff. Yeah, And a lot of these other DNA tests either didn't happen or started out as like, oh, my friend told me that that, and then I put it out online, and then that got carried away and turned into this this this idea that it was going on, and a very small number of other cases the testing or science was either bad or or the results are behind this wall and the data is not being shared so it

can't be checked. So apparently, the gist of it here, Ronnie, is that almost no tests have ever been done, and in the very small number of cases where it was done, the data and results were either blown out of proportion into rumors or or they just simply aren't traceable. There's no there's almost nothing left to show from these things. I'm sure, I mean, and now I've just spoken to

people about these things. That's what I was told. But I mean, maybe we should have Darby back on, because I think he has very good information on this stuff, because he's the guy on the phone tracking these people down. You know, when somebody says, oh no, I heard it was tested and was human. Okay, well, who'd you hear that from? And then he calls that person who'd you hear it from? Called that person? Who'd you hear it from?

Called that person? And eventually it comes back to like, oh no, no, like the hair sample, they said it was given by a person or some some twist of words or something like that, and it turned out not even to be true. So I was shocked because I was a believer in this mythology as well. And when I say mythology, I don't mean something that's that's a

patent lie. I'm saying the myth. I use mythology in the terms of a story that is carried on and changed a little bit as time goes on and becomes a truth even though it perhaps there's really no truth behind it. That's what I mean by a mythology here. Okay, but apparently that's the case. Like almost no study or sample really has ever been tested, and the very few that have the results are missing the sample is missing or the data is missing, so there's not much else

you can do about it. Functionally speaking, at this point, we're starting from ground zero. So it's on us, it's incumbent upon us now to do a better job than the people who came before us. And make sure that if you if you give a sample to somebody, even North Carolina State University, don't give them every sample. Give them a one or two samples. If you have twenty hairs, give them one or two. Let's see what they can do with it. Because you want to keep those other samples,

no matter who you give them to. You want to keep those other samples for peer of you. Basically give it to somebody else to see if they get the same results. You know, I think that's an important part here. Don't give them everything, give them enough to do what they need to do. And then if you get a fantastic positive result. Well, let's get to test it somewhere else. Let's get a totally independent and someone not involved in any of the stuff involved and tested to see what

they come up with. Because if you did that, like three four, five times in all of these various parties with no dog in the fight, come up with the same result, that is amazing and that's what we're all shooting for. Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. Will be right back after these messages.

use Photoshop for photo analysis and all. So I use the Audition Adobe Addition, which is their sound deal in there. I use that one. But as far as free stuff, Audacity and Sonic Visualizer I think are the go tos. Have you guys heard anything different?

But when people send me something that's so heavily processed, I'm like, man, I can't make an evaluation on this because they all sound fabricated at that point. So I would much rather hear the raw file than something heavily filtered and processed where there's no context. You can't hear the ambient environment, You can't really get any sort of spatial context about how far away something is because it's been amplified to oblivion and all the other sounds filtered out.

It just sounds like a synthesizer. And so I always have to go back to people like, hey, man, send me the raw file if you would, and over half the time I never hear from them again, which I think is a little suspicious.

the audio. I'll listen if you want my opinion on something, But thirty five minutes I'm not going to listen to that. Who would who would?

how do I know knocks? In general? You know, knocks are really hard to tell because I don't know if there is somebody shifting their weight in a chair and knock something on the table or something. I kind of like the video thing for Knox, you know, I saw, I mentioned I saw this great video by this dude from Spain who may or may not be a listener. He was to the museum. I don't remember his name

off the top of my head. It's like either Louise or something like that, robertro or Louise, I don't remember. But anyway, he comes over here, I think every summer because he's a fireman from Bombero in Spain. He comes over and trips around and does bigfoot stuff. He's had a couple of sightings, but he goes amazing places, amazing places. But he showed me this awesome video that he took. It was out in the Olympics somewhere actually nowhere. It was out by Iroley Lake, which is a great spot

out in the Quanault area. I think it was in that general area. Could be wrong, though, but he was. He started videoing on his phone and he said that this was the last like two minutes of this twenty minute encounter that he had. He was knocking and then he got knocks back, and over the next fifteen to twenty minutes, the thing was getting closer and closer, and he would knock and it would knock back. And this is on video, so I saw this. He would knock

twice and it would knock twice. It was like copying him back and forth, and it sounded like it was literally just right over the ledge, you know, he whispered something in his phone, and then everything shut down.

then you have something. But otherwise when people send me knocks, it's like, well, I'm not that interested because anybody can generate a knock. When it comes to whistles, like I can't rule out certain bird species, but the big moaning howls I'm interested in, or you know, other characteristic vocalizations that no other animal can generate. But otherwise the other stuff, I'm like, ah, I'm not that excited about it.

And honestly, eighty seventy eighty percent of all that stuff kind of boils down to that you heard a sound that you find compelling, and you want me to come out to hear it too. And I get that. I totally get it, because I want to share with my friends and people I like as well. I get that, but a sound is not much to go on. And then of course I get this stuff like you got to come to my grandma's hollow because she heard Knox

in ninety four. So well, no, no, I don't have I don't actually have to go there.

you work it. Why do you need me there? I'm nobody special. I can hear it too. You can hear it, you know, I can hear it. You can hear it. Whatever, you go work it and you get the information and you get the data out of there. That's the cool part, you know. Just I'm interested in people think that for whatever reason, that our opinion matters more because we're on TV. Trust me, being on TV does not make your opinion matter, you know what I mean? Yeah, trust me on that one.

There's a lot of nonsense out there and a lot of people who have a very loud megaphone that probably ought not to have any volume on at all. But I understand that people are excited about it because they've watched this on TV. But honestly, at the end of the day, you go do it. It's your spot. The responsibility is on you. And then of course you do get those psychopaths. I say, well, I guess Cliff berwck when doesn't care about it Bigfoot because he's not coming

out to my spot all the way across the country. Well, that's a mentally ill thing to say, you know, like to blame somebody and presume you know what their motivations are because they're not interested in spending one thousand dollars on a weekend. You know, that's ridiculous. So you get all kinds. Most the vast majority of people are just well meaning people who are excited about the thing that they observed or experienced and they want to share it,

and that's totally cool. And then of course there's the other side too that gets a lot darker and weirder too, So we're subject to all of that. Any Bigfoot researcher in the game for a few years or more that has somewhat of a name or a reputation in the community is going to be subjected to all of these and will be some new things too.

convince me before I go. And there a few cases, you know, like not last year, but the year before. I think it was Tom Shay out in Kentucky was telling me that there's a property that has a lot of activity and this and that and stuff and I wanted to go there, and I found a way to go there. I went to Cryptidcon out there in Kentucky, a great job that's every November, like the weekend before Thanksgiving.

It's going on this year as well. And while I was there, I just extended my flight a little bit, so I flew out on the organizer's dime and it doesn't cost them anymore. They don't care. I flew out on the organizer's dime. And I went camping with Tom Shaeffer night or two out on this property, and sure enough I cast a print. It was great. I got a great interview from the property owner. I looked around, found a bunch of hairs. They weren't sasquatch hairs, but

they were horse hairs, and some other things. Found some possible footprints, and there was one good enough to actually cast that was made just a few days before. And I know that because the person living there saw the sasquatch that made it, and I asked her where it walked, and that's where we found the footprint. So in those cases, yeah,

it works out really well. But again, I need to be convinced even before I drive five hours to go check something out because five hours translates into a couple hundreds of gas and a lot of time. So yeah, I need to be convinced. And just because you told me that somebody heard knocks down in the hollow back in the eighties doesn't mean I need to go there. It means you need to go there often and get more stuff. Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with

Cliff and Bobo will be right back after these messages. Besides, bringing in other researchers could change the whole scene too, Like if you have one of these long term witness situations, you know, and you bring in a herd of researchers or even a handful, the sasquatches may pick up on it and may act differently. That's the thing. Sure, Yeah, these are you know, these are intelligent. These are intelligent critters basically that interact with their environment and they change

their behaviors based on what they observe. Talk about the the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Yeah, that that kind of applies here in a different sort of way. Obviously, they're not subatomic particles, and it is quantum mechanics has nothing to do with it, actually, But at the same time, if an animal knows it's being observed, it's going to change its behavior. So if a stranger comes on a property, they're probably not going to act like they normally do.

So there's lots of things to keep in mind and situations like this, before you invite anybody out to a location, are you really sure you want to do that? Think it over? Okay, maybe now we go onto the last question here, and this one is from Nathan Johnston. This is a question for Cliff. If Finding Bigfoot only lasted one season, would you still have opened the NABC. I don't know. Probably, well, I don't know because part of the reason I opened the NABC is because my teaching

credential expired while I was on the show. And if you don't know, teachers are required to pay out of their own pocket to go get Masters units and pay for all these courses and stuff to keep their credential updated. You have to do so. I think it was once every five years or something like that. And so at the end of the day, when I was looking at okay, I got to rejoin the workforce after finding Bigfoot? What

am I going to do? I was saying, Okay, Well, it's going to cost four to six thousand bucks for me to get these these units. And then I got to you know, that's going to take a year, so I can't work for a year, and maybe there's another option. And then of course, you know, David Melinda Bakara from the Museum ount in Georgia, or Lauren Coleman and various other people were said, well, you have a lot of bigfoot stuff, why don't you consider doing a Bigfoot museum?

I mean, and so I did, so I did, but I don't know. If I still had my teaching credential when it did go off the air, I suspect I probably would have just gone back into the teaching, you know, workforce. I don't know, But now that I have the museum, I would probably deem that as to be a mistake because I'm having a really good time with the museum. I'm doing better Bigfoot work now than I ever have, including on finding Bigfoot, getting more answers, getting more data,

get more evidence, and just having more fun. So I don't know. I guess I'm glad. I mean, I'm glad for a lot of reasons. It went on for ninety seasons, because I met my wife, you know, two thirds of the way through. But but yeah, I don't know if I would have the I don't think I would have the NABC. I'd probably go back in the teaching workforce.