Ep. 296 - Marc Myrsell Returns!

a mixed bag there. One of the I'm not sure what made the edit on the TV or what's going to make the edit. When they released the Wilamite News.

But they actually asked me, do I think bigfoots are responsible or at least one of the one of the reporters asked me, and I said, no, of course not, of course not, and just kind of tried to ground the articles a little bit, you know, by just saying bigfooting is going outside and looking around for an animal, just like you're bird watching or you're going to look for deer or something like that. It's it's like hunting or skiing or any other outdoor pursuit. You leave your

you step out your door. It's very dangerous business sipping out your door.

being prepared in some sort of way. So we're going to try to address that a little bit because a couple of our members have reached out to us and suggested that we do episodes about what we bring and why we bring it out bigfooting, and you know, safety and survival is a big part of that in a lot of ways. So we're gonna try to address some of this in the upcoming episodes of Bigfoot and Beyond

here and also just just we're whatever it's worth. I mean, there's nothing you can say when somebody that you love dies, of course, but you know, over here Big Thing and Beyond, we are thinking of the families because realistically, that could be anyone of our families with just a little bit

going wrong at any given time. Because I was talking to Nico about this, and of course Nico trains people in survival skills, and he's a train tracker and all that sort of stuff, and Nico is saying, like, you know, even if you're completely prepared, it only makes the survival situation easier and doesn't guarantee the outcome. Right, the woods are no joke. There's a bottom line, So our thoughts

are with them. I me know that we're thinking of those families because that could be our family if we're not careful.

to add tragedy to tragedy. By the way, I caught on the news this morning that while the search and rescue team was out dealing with this or another case, but I think it was actually this one, someone broke into their compound and stole two of their supply trailers. From the search and rescue.

a crime having real life and death consequences. So to if, just in case people are listening and you're the one who stole that stuff, you're a jackass, feel free to return it. Yeah.

have so much to say to each other. We'll be doing a members episode after this as well, where our members have actually contributed questions specifically for you, so we'll be dealing with that later. But why don't we start before we get into the sighting, because I want to talk about that in the projects that we haven't seen much of yet, the Thompson Flat stuff and all that jazz. But twenty twenty four was a huge ear for Ape

Canyon in lots of ways. I mean, not only was it the centennial, the one hundred year anniversary of the events, but new discoveries were made, new contacts were made, We have views that we've never seen before. Do you want to tell us what twenty twenty four looked like for the Epe Canyon project.

It's always something new. If you think that you have come to conclusions and that this research project is done, you're kind of making a mistake. You always have to leave the door open for something new. So sometimes in the Ape Canyon project, I think, yeah, it's kind of coming down to the bitter end and there's not that much more, and then suddenly, out of the blue, completely unexpected,

there's something new that shows up. So twenty four was a massive year for Ape Canyon and it really opened up literally literally opened up a lot on the project. Early on, oh, I think it was late twenty three,

early twenty four. I was messing around the Devil's Magic they called the Internet on Facebook, and someone had a page about Mount Saint Helens before the eruption in nineteen eighty and someone had contributed pictures of the fire lookout up on top of Mount Saint Helens being built in nineteen twenty four, and there are a couple of photos of these rangers, and I look at the description and

it's like, holy smokes. The two guys and the photos are Bill Welch and Jim Huffman, the two rangers who were pretty important characters in the entire eight Canyon story. There were important characters in the incident. Bill Welch was the head ranger at sparent Lake and Jim Huffman was the ranger down down south in the next district. They're at the Lewis River. So I reached out to the Facebook administrator and he put me on contact with the

woman who contributed these photos. Well, it turns out that the women who contributed the photos were Bill Welch's great grand niece. It was her grandfather's brother, and so I reached out to her and she knew the entire Ape Canyon story and she was like, oh, well, I have some neat stuff in my family photo album and I'll share it with you. And she sent me digitized copies basically just like a photograph of the individual photos. And these were amazing, amazing photos that had never been seen

outside of her family. It was just amazing photos. As an example, we had before this, we only had one photo, one known photo that was published in The Oregonian of the cabin in nineteen twenty four, and I'd been looking for the original and may have been destroyed, but it's just a grainy newspaper photo. It helped a lot in the project of finding the cabin site, but it was

still just kind of a funky, grainy photo. Well man, these Sandy Moyer photos were so clear and so amazing that actually I sent them to photographer friends just on the off chance because it almost looked like AI generated. They were so crystal clear, just to plug the North American Bigfoot Center. You can see them on display at the NABC right now. They were so good. I thought they were AI generated, but no, my photographer friends said, no, this is the real deal. So we ended up with

these tremendous, amazing photos of Fred and Leroy. These photos were taken about a week after the attack when Fred Beck and Leroy Smith went up to the cabin site with reporters with Bill Welch and Jim Huffman, and that's when the photo so we know exactly when those photos were taken, and it was just tremendous. The photos are

just amazing. The other thing that literally opened up is that you and I Cliff went up on the ninety ninth anniversary and twenty twenty three, went up on the mountain and hung out for two or three days, and we were supposed to be joined by three fellows who I call the Mitchell Brothers. Actually two of them are brothers and one is a cousin. It's Jake, Jared and

Brayden Mitchell. They were going to join us, but there's a mishap and they couldn't join us, and they ended up going back up there after we came off the mountain about two or three weeks later. I had given them rough directions as best directions as I could to get to the cabin site, which I don't give out, but it's their family story. So I was like, Okay, here's how you get to the cabin. Well, these guys

are young, and they're incredibly energetic. You know, people think I'm nuts for what I do, you know, up at eight Canyon, but you should see these guys. These guys are like leave being down the rock face like Gazelle's like antelope and I'm gonna flow down. Wow, geez, you know, they're just amazingly energetic. Well, they after they did it three times and they couldn't find the cabin site on the third try, they finally, in one weekend, they got

to the they got to the cabin and figured it out. Okay, this is that. Well they just went a little bit further. Jake went down and Brandon and Jared are at the top at the cabin site watching him, and they accidentally kicked down just this little pubbly rock and they watched this rock just skid her right past Jake into this little trough in the rock, and that rock just was

just pointing and leading him right to the mine. And they were able to find the mine on that trip, which you and I, Cliff have been down there, and you know, we were like within just feet just a few feet of the mine entrance. But you can really see the Mind entrance unless you're like right on top of it, unless you're basically standing right in front of it. So that was a that was just a tremendous discovery

that you know, it's just the gift that keeps on giving. Really, there's all this new information coming out all the time. So getting getting the Mind has opened up new leads, have not not caving leads or underground leads, but have opened up new leads to pursue regarding gold and essays and and that kind of thing for the whole tip of the whole story together.

the whole phenomenon, so they're really not interested. Well they are interested in Bigfoot, but they're mainly interested in their family history and for them, for the Mitchells to find it, the great grandsons of Leroy Perry Smith, that's just fantastic. It's their story.

And I don't know what you have. You know in your bonnet about cabins that are attacked by sasquatches, but you had this whole project in southern Oregon with Bobo, so you guys can talk about that but during that adventure you actually had an observation of a sasquat or two sasquatches. So fill us in on, you know, set up the story there to what were you guys doing down there? When can we expect to see the project? And what happened? What did you observe?

county in Oregon. We're about sixty miles from the California border and over the course of golly Man probably about forty years or so down in this very very limited small area in and around this area called Thompson Flat, which is on the south fork of that Sixes River, there were multiple sightings and encounters with a sasquatch like creature creatures starting around eighteen seventy five eighteen seventy six, and these have and quite often going into the nineteen

teens and early nineteen twenties. And some of these encounters were not pleasant. It wasn't just like a fleeting, a fleeting silhouette going across the road. Some of them were incredibly aggressive. The reason why humans were down there to have these encounters is that this was a gold mining area.

And the first encounter, first encounter in eighteen seventy five was with the prospector and Tom said that he was picked up by this hairy individual by the scraff in the back, and it happened so quickly he couldn't get a really good look at it. But Tom was throttled and thrown down this hillside and knocked unconscious. His friends came up a few days later, found him alive and

nursed him back to health. Well when Tom he did find gold on that trip, and the word got out and the whole area became known as the gold Rush of Southwest Oregon, and there were many many people who went up there to work on gold mines. At first they were just doing load claims tunneling into the side of the river, and then later they found out it

was a little bit easier to do plaster locations. So at one point in the eighteen eighties there were about forty people who lived in small tents and cabins up around Thompson Flat on the river. And they were working their own individual claims, but then they would come together in it's sort of a communal kind of setting and share food and share stories and that kind of thing. Well, one at a time, over the period of about eighteen months, four miners showed up dead, and it was a kind

of thing of like, oh, well, where's John. He should be by now, And they go up to his claim and they find John dead. Each each of these four individuals either had their heads bashed in or their bodies beaten to just throttle and to a pulp. Well, people got scared and they started vacating the area quite quickly. There was only one fellow named Mike Madigan who was living up there at his cabin and his claim. His cabin is actually still standing and it's actually in very

very good shape. He had had a previous encounter where he's he was. He had a gold he had a golden mine. But he was sort of like the village huntsman, and he would go out and hunt and bring back food and and trade it for supplies and everything. And he was out with his dogs one day and there was this large creature. The interesting thing about Thompson Flat are the are these encounters keep describing this individual as

not this monster ten foot tall, bigfoot like character. It's like six or seven feet tall kid, just routinely, over and over again described as being yellow or blonde in hair color. One of Madigan's dogs takes after it, and the creature picks up the dog, throbbles it and throws

it down the hillside. Madigan starts shooting at the individual, and the second dog takes off to to the to the bigfoot, and the bigfoot picks it up, and Madigan shots going into this creature seemingly to be a seeming completely unaffected, and so Madigan gets out of there.

He you know, it wasn't You're right, it wasn't just some guy out there wandering with his out there with his dogs with a baby gun. He really knew what he was doing, right.

The creature didn't care. So Madigan, you know, got back later on when this area called Butcher Golds, right next to right next to Thompson Flat. Everyone's gone and Madigan's up there by himself. He hasn't come back into town for a couple of weeks. So his friend Ramsey goes up there looking for him, goes up to his cabin, he's not there. Goes up up the hill up towards his claim and there's this odd sort of pile of rocks that seemed to be not naturally placed there, and

he pulls the rocks away and there's Madigan dead. Ramsey recognized him by his gun and his knife. He wasn't he wasn't completely decomposed, but he had been there for a while oddly enough, seemingly to be buried in sort of this fashion who laid on the ground and covered

with rocks. So there were still some people going up there for gold claims in the eighteen nineties late eighteen nineties there was a fellow who had a couple of claims up there named Harrison, and he had had a friend, a family friend, and another family friend helping him work on the claim. They had built a cabin at Thompson Flat and it was the Harrison cabin. And in nineteen oh four, the couple of the guys were in there at night and something had come and started beating the cabin.

You know, it's really shaking it and beating it. They go through the door and they see this individual right there in front, in front of the door. They take shots at it again. The creature goes back into the tree line and ends up throwing rocks back at them. Just a few days later, one of the same individuals, of the same humans, along with two of Harrison's sons were in the cabin and the cabin gets attacked again. And at this point they were ready and they just

start coming out of there shooting at this creature. At that point, there may have been I have to go back and look at it. There may have been more than one individual attacking the cabin. There were stories in they gave us clues about this cabin because they talked about opening the door, and the door faced a certain apple tree where this creature or creatures were coming and where they had exited. And so naturally, a cabin in the woods being attacked by sasquatch gold shooting these creatures

seemingly to no effect. I was like, well, that's right up my alley. That's a crazy thing is that this was these had all the ear markings of Abe Canyon, but it occurred twenty years before Abe Canyon, hundreds of miles away in Oregon, And so I started three researching it to death. Given the fact that these encounters took place over the period of like thirty or forty years, it's going to take me a long long time to sift through all of this information. There's a lot more

document research to do. I feel there's a lot more field research to do as well to look for field evidence. But anyway, that's that's how that's That was the basic story that really grabbed me. And then one day the phone rings and it's ring ring ring, and it's like Mark, dude, it's Bobo. Hey, I want to make a I want to make a documentary on Thompson Flat. And that's basically why we were up there work working on working on the Thompson Flat Monster project.

So we're done with the filming project. And by the way, at that d during that trip we ended up finding the location of the nineteen oh four Harrison cabin as well. It worked out really well, like Bobo said, when we were able to determine the actual cabin, Bobo was like, that almost seems staged because we found it so easily. But we're all done filming. We're kind of breaking up.

The whole plan was was that Rowdy and Bobo and I had more filming to do at a local newspaper office in Myrtle Point, Oregon, and we're all going to drive down and we're going to meet on the highway and where we can get some reception and figure out where we're going to stay that night. So Sam and Gordon, the two production assistants, left. They went back home to northern California around Humboldt, and Kim is like, okay, well, I'm going to take off too. I'll see you guys later.

And Bobo and Rowdy just had to load up the ATVs onto the trailer. So Kim takes off and I say, okay, I'm going to meet you guys down at the highway. And I take off too, and I'm driving and these four service roads are basically one lane roads, maybe a lane and a half, and up ahead. This is in the afternoon in November. Up ahead, I see Kim pulled off to the side and I stop and it's everything okay, and she's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm just checking the map to go and visit a lake where Kim

had had some encounters up there as well. She wanted to revisit the lake and was checking out the map and I'm like, oh, okay, see yeah. So I'm driving and this is a very very wooded area. Some of it had been logged previously, but not a lot because it's just very, very steep and rugged. It's sort of like a mini Rockies. So what I'm saying is is

getting dark. It's about five o'clock at night in November, and the trees are around me, and so I'm driving maybe like twenty five thirty miles an hour, and I have my headlights on, and I have my brights on, and I have drives because I kind of drive like

an old lady. And once in a while behind me, maybe about a mile or two, I can see Kim's headlights behind me, and I round around a curve and in front of me is the road has a slight incline and before it dips down kind of crests on a hill, and it's about two hundred two hundred and

fifty feet in front of me. And the cross section that we're talking about about the road is that down on my left it goes steep steep down into the riverbed of the sixs River flat roadbed, and then off to my rights incredibly steep going back up the hill

to my right. When I round around the corner, up in front of me maybe about two hundred feet is this individual that's moving and when my headlights hit it, it pauses briefly and faces me face on about two hundred feet and my first thought is, you know, who's playing in the middle of the road at night. And it was obviously, you know, it was obviously a bipedal human like character, arms and legs and head and all that. And the split second other thought is like, why is

it wearing a fireman's outfit? Because it was big, bulky, like a firefighter's outfit to actually fight fires. It was bulky arms, bulky legs, big, There was hardly any neck going on, you know, around its neck, and that's why I thought it was somebody wearing a fireman's outfit. Also, the reason why is because it was sort of beige, dirty blonde in color.

They just are hauling it, and they're so incredibly fast. But also their movements were like a movement that I had never seen before. It was, you know, it was just like a normal like a human jogging in a runner's fashion with bent arms, and there was running like that, but it was fast, incredibly fast, jerky movements like it reminded me of of seeing five year old or six year olds on the playground in a fast game of chase. It was that kind of high energy, or like watching

an insect, like a dragonfly take off. It was incredibly incredibly quick, jerky movements I had at this point. I had kept on driving, but I was slowing down. Where they came onto the road, I wasn't exactly sure, But where they exited the road I was. I was certain where they exited because I was within fifty feet of the time. The second individual went up the hill like in a flash. It was short hair, very short hair, not as short as like a like a Docson like

or like soci the dog. It wasn't it wasn't that short, but it was short ish and it was yeah, a yellow, dirty blonde. And they just banned they could cook. They just like jump up the hill. It was amazing. Kathy's screen has a story of her encounter where she described it almost like this big fat bungee cord jump where its just buoying and it went up the hill. And

that's the way they were. These two just flew up the hill practically, and there was no hair around the face, heavy brow and I almost keep going, but just in a split I decided to slam it on the brakes, put the car in park, and I jumped out of the car, and I'm looking up the hill and the only sound is my car engine, and I can hear the river behind me down and down the hill, and looking up the hill in the dark, I'm going to estimate that these guys may have been like seventy five

one hundred feet up the hill. But the thing that totally freaked me out was that I didn't hear anything.

I didn't hear any brush, I didn't hear any crunching, I didn't hear anything at all, and my brain flight or fight figured out that whatever I had seen was probably standing there looking at me, and all of this heat started raising up my neck and my ears started getting really hot, and I was getting I was getting very very disturbed and wigged out, not only by their movements and what they saw, but I was just assuming that they were up there, like back right there in

the dark, checking me out too. So Kim Kim comes up by that point, and I was like, something across the road, something across the road, and Kim gets all excited and stuff, and Kim Kim is great. She's really new to like big footing at the time and very enthusiastic and everything is bigfoot right, and she's like, oh my god, and I tell her the whole story and everything. Bobo at that point had come in and parked behind Kim and I go up and you're like, Bobo, You're like, so,

what is there an accident? I'm like, uh no, was there a flat tire? No, something cross the road? And you were like you saw a squatch And I like, hold up a couple of fingers and I'm like I saw two, and you're like, holy crap, and go back and go to Rowdy's car right behind you and Rowdy and you're like, tell Rowdy. It's like, yeah, I squatched us cross the road. And Rowdy was like, you know who saw it, Kim, and you were like, no, dude, it was Mark and it was Mark.

saw it at the same time. The three of us, Bobo and Kim and I were standing on the edge of gravel and Rowdy's up there with his camera and it's really really right light, and he's scanning this rock, and right at the top of the rock, Rowdy's light hits it, and we all see it at the same time. At the top of the rock. There's like detritus and moss and plants and stuff at the at the top of this sort of cliff, this small little cliff, and

we all saw it at the same time. Where there was about a four or five inch fresh scrape right at the top, right where these two individuals left and went up the hill. And uh, it was if something was trying to gain a handhold or a foothold, and the moss or plants slipped and it was just this brand new, fresh scrape.

and a half. Maybe it was six feet taller. So and we scrambled up that hill a little bit where they had gone up the hill, which was not easy to do, and found a few impressions. Nothing really castable or anything like that, because it was like really really steep, but it looked as if something had been up there,

and you know there was. There was the one thing about that area, because it's so steep, somebody individual can be very very close to you when you're on the road and like within seventy five one hundred feet, but you wouldn't know it. And it can there. You can we were up there, you could like have this perfect view of humans on the road looking down, but the humans would never know it. There was a strange thing that happened to us during that trip where something did

cross the road where we heard it. We heard the footsteps crossing the gravel. This was about a night or two before. In the middle of the night, some of us heard this big sort of behind us, this big brush rush. Something had took taken off headed up the hill in the brush. And so we went back again

on that on that incident. We went back the next day and I had climbed up to where all it was kind of figured where we heard that noise in the brush, and I found this bench, this small little bench where I could stand and I could I was looking at everybody right down on the road. It was like this perfect vantage point to take to take a look at us. So anyway, it's incredibly steep, steep, rugged territory out there, for sure.

the lake is at the bottom in this valley. On one side of the lake is have a little bit of a ridge and on this on the other side

of the lake is another ridge. And it was almost like there is something, some things down there messing with us, because on one ridge we could hear a knock and we all run down the road and we listen and we listen, and then from the other ridge we could hear this whoop and we all run over there, and it was almost like they're just having fun watching us back and running back and forth, running back and forth on the on the road.

to film us, We're trying to film big fast. I was always the point when we were in the field that like at night was not filming us getting our reactions, but it was us trying to actually get something on film our best chance. So yeah, that unfortunately, Yah that's one of the scenes that the audio just did not

come out very well, but it was. It was pretty amazing to be And Larry was there that night, Larry, the guy that passed away, Larry was there also, and he was I mean, this guy's Larry was seventy year old, just a stud. I mean, he was the fittest guy there for sure.

behind me. It really opened up like a new project for me down there, because when we went back the next day in the daytime, Browdie was checking out the aerial photos on his phone and he's like, look, look, look, so if you if you are at the lake and you're sort of headed easterly, you get to that road where we were standing, and you keep on going east headed up the hill, and you end up on this ridge line, this ridge line that runs north and south

with no roads, no nothing, and this ridge line that runs north and south on the north end of the ridge. That's where we were camped and that's where all the Thompson flat Act toy happened. But if you follow that ridge line headed south for about two or three miles or so, bam when it crosses when it crosses the road, that's where I had my sighting with the two individuals. So I'm tending to think that this wooded ridge, which is quite massive and dense and really really rugged, I

think that's their highway. I think that's where they're hanging out up above, you know, looking down. So it really got me going where I'm going to be headed back down there and see if I can plow my way through the woods and hang out there a lot more, because it made what Routy showed me suddenly made a whole heck of a lot of sense, you know.

It's like they were basically shoulder to shoulder pretty much. So because of that behavior, it was almost like the first one was looking out for the second one and ensuring that it was going to join them where they could exit the road together in some sort of social dynamic in a way.

on on all the hard drives. Like we just were like it was just nuts and then it wasn't like like tons of it, but there was like certain key points and then there was other parts where the audio was really bad or like the camera. Well. The big problem too, is that we had guys we had three or four editors working on all different platforms like app like you know, Apple and PC and one guy's using Adobe, the guys using Renaissance, you know, and that seemed to

like cause a lot of a lot of issues. So we had to go back through and then there was partsy missing because I ended up going up there like five times total, you did. Yeah, we're trying to get stuff. We had to reshoot some stuff, and now we got to reshoot more stuff. And that was that was the problem with that whole thing. Was like when those the pandemics hit, like the like all those officers were closed. You couldn't go in, like we needed to shoot stuff.

With the Forest Service because like I went through like a I mean, I was really trying to get this thing together. They wouldn't give any permits because of COVID. Like we're out in the middle of the woods, they're not going to give us permits. And then uh, as people, I'm sure our listeners are well aware, prices on everything went up like double so the budget got eaten up real quick, like uh, you know, just fuel, and I spent over like geese, like thirteen grand on it. Like

with everything said and done, and it's totally salvageable. And there's been a couple of things income generating things I had on in the on the skillet, and there's one that's that's cooking right now and I'm not sure what it's coming through, but I'm hoping not too far into the summer. It's looking more like juneish is as you can get paid out on that hopefully.

today like gives you a good look at it. And it was my first I'm doing stuff like this, so obviously I've made a bunch of mistakes. Goes without saying, but yeah, I mean it's it's we got we got the bones there. I got to say it. It's a lot more difficult to put a film together than it would seem.

go up there anyway. And the area is just gorgeous. I mean, the area is really really beautiful up there at the very top where we're camping and you have to go down into the into the river of the South Fork of the Sixes. This place had never been I know, that area had never been logged because it's just too damn steep. You're going basically straight down for about a mile and a half and with no like switchbacks or anything in this huge area of old growth.

It's just gorgeous out there. It's amazing. And you get down to the bottom and you're you're in You're in living history. You're in living history of the of the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties of these guys with apparently mules or something, took down these massive hunks of metal to deal with the hydraul hydraulogy hydraulics projects for their plaster mines and stuff. There's a couple of old cabins from the eighteen nineties down there. It's it's it's a

gorgeous place. I'm in love with it. I could I could live down there.

and eighteen nineties. And then when these four guys you know, shut up dead and there are a lot of people are having really aggressive encounters with these sasquatchs tearing up their camps and everything. I forget it, you know, it's just like Ape Canyon, like, forget it, We're out of here, and it never took off again. The gold, the gold operation, they just abandoned at all.

yellow blonde. So we're talking about a regional variant, if you will, that's kind of limited to that, to that area that keeps all the reports keep coming back yellow blonde.