Ep. 298 - Q&A - January, 2025

I'm gonna have a place to u not not like a tool work bench that'll be like outside in the outbuilding proper, but you know, some sort of like cast work bench where I can do my cast pouring and all that sort of stuff in there. You great lightings for examining the data and then the evidence and stuff. Yeah, it's gonna be great. I've got a lot of cool plans for this really looking forward to getting going. And on top of it all, I might be able to park my car in the garage for the first time

in my adult life. Yeah, because my cast have always taken up the spot, you know, which would be great because I don't know if I talked about this in the podcast, but my car leaks like crazy. It's insane and this, you know, I happen to live at the Pacific Northwest where it rains all the time, so my car is just perpetually wet on the inside, which is kind of a bum out.

to the episode. I live in Weatherford, Texas, and I've personally witnessed the squirrels around here, hunting, chasing down, killing, and eating from the head down to the body large what I call tree squirrels. It's not often seen and unknown if it's a territorial thing, are actually a diet for them. I last saw this behavior in twenty fifteen, a year before my youngest was born. Love the show, keep up the good work. One of my faves to listen to Bigfoot and Beyond Forever. So thank you John

for sending that in. I thought, that's that's got to be a pretty wild thing to see.

these questions. Because usually I aim for ten and doing an hour long podcast, we have to spend only so much time on so many, but with the smaller number we can spend a little bit more time. But we can start with the voicemail here that has a question for you and a comment for Bobo, And so if Bobo joins, I'll just play in the comment portion and he can respond to it. But this is a perennial

question that we get often. We did address it once with help from a special guest on a members episode, but it'd be good to address on the main show here.

answer to this because it drives me insane. And Bobo, I'm watching season seven right now, and your facial expressions when Bobcat was doing the scream when he was on an episode was hysterical. I have to pause because I'm laughing so hard.

So I think the official I think the correct maybe not official, because you know who's the authority here on this sort of thing, But I think that the correct way would be bigfoot. Plural of bigfoot is probably bigfoot, but I don't I purposefully don't do that because one of the worst of misunderstandings about sasquatches is that Bigfoot is one individual and he has been seen from Florida to British Columbia for hundreds of years. And of course

that's ridiculous. But you know, picture yourself as a civilian, you know, someone who knows nothing about sasquatches and bigfoots, and like that kind of thing is not important to you, and you've never given it two thoughts. You just think of Bigfoot as this sort of cartoonish character depicted by the media, because that's what the media feeds the public. Unfortunately about the subject. You would think that, oh, well,

Bigfoot's ridiculous. All Bigfoot researchers are ridiculous because there's no way that one animal could be living for hundreds and hundreds of years all over the continent. That doesn't make any sense, like a Paul Bunyan sort of thing, you know what I mean. So in order to help dispel that myth, that ridiculous model of what is going on

with the big foot phenomenon, I purposefully say bigfoots. I don't say big feet, of course, because that would pluralize the appendage the foot, the foot itself, foot feet, So I say bigfoots, and of course sasquatches. That's much easier. I prefer sasquatches. Actually, that took big foots, so that's where that's where I'm coming from. So the proper is probably bigfoot or there are you know, this family group has three big foot in it, or this family group

has three sasquatch in it. But I say sasquatches and I say big foots in order to help get rid of that ridiculous notion that there's only one creature and his name is bigfoot. So God, I hope that helped answer some of that question. That's why I prefer sasquatches. John Green always stylized the plural as sasquatches with an ees at the end of it. So I think if John Green formalized it, then that's good enough for me.

we had a great behind the scenes with Bobcat. I kind of got off on the wrong foot with him, but we ended up the advities that what it's all said and done. He's a great dude. He's hilarious, he's funny. He's funny, like I just I hated his whole Police Academy character, that whole like that whole thing, like I couldn't stand it. He was like my least favorite comic. And then I found out what a study was. I

was like, man, this guy's he's a badass. And as far as Nick m Nick Roth thing, he ended up sending a new contract for something else and he went like he was fully busy, and then he had a new baby and the timing wasn't good. It didn't work out. I don't know, maybe in the future maybe I don't know, it's they're kind of that'd be kind of it could work. It could definitely work.

They put on the god helmet, that's what they called it, where they put earphones on that pumpy white noise or you know, random radio signals or whatever, and they covered their eyes. They basically shut down all of their senses so they couldn't observe the sasquatch because they wanted paranormal stuff to happen. And I was just so just like what you had, probably had a real sasquatch right there, and you covered your eyes and ears to And of course when I saw them, Greg and Dan are my friends.

I really really like them a lot. You know, they're wonderful, wonderful people. So when I saw them one of these gigs that we were doing together, I heckled him and said, what are you doing? You could you might have been able to see it or photo are you had cameras there, you had night vision? But no, you covered your eyes and your ears. And they were laughing and they thought it was funny.

you know, we could. Then. I think it was Lee and Jennifer's idea that creepy people our managers because we had the same managers, and I think it was their idea more at first, and I was like, I was like, that could be cool, you know, I was all, you know, then Nick got busy. I was I was like, yeah, maybe it's not the best idea, but people would have liked it. I know that.

employees are covering all the shifts. I'm still at the museum probably three to six days a week for a couple hours. You know, I'm there all the time doing something, dropping by and checking this and that, or you know that kind of thing. So hit and miss at the museum is the best way to catch me, or at a conference where you know I'm going.

that's for TV stuff or something like that. I busted went out. I felt, you know, like with your throat. You guys both song it's like that you push it too far, just like you feel it just that whatever. I don't know how to explain it, but you get that little pain come in like you just know you strange it a little too much.

I did some documentation. Last June, I think it was Shane Corson and I went out together to one of our new locations, and that's not any it's not the Bog, it's not it's not Easter Island or anything. We call it the Outer Rim because it's so far away and it takes a long time to get down there. But but there's a there's some sasquatches there, you know, and

we we we found quite a few tracks. I think we came back with eight tracks in one day, eight prints, eight casts, I should say casts, and one of the trackways came up out of the out of the river valley below and so I went back like a week later with with my employee Dave and his brother, and we documented that trackway and I took all that sort of stuff. But you know, after about twenty thirty tracks, they're all going the same way, like, what are you doing?

So I brought her out. We found it, and then like a week later I brought Melissa out for a date and we went out there and she cast it. That's how we found That's how we found that one. Because the stuff at the outer rim they seem to have been coming out of one river valley going up to a bog area, and in general most of the most of the footprints were kind of tending that direction. Now, of course, when they came up out it the river valley, there was this old abandoned logging road, which is what

we were walking. They walked up and down the road.

They were all over that place, you know, so that it wouldn't make you know, if you took all the directions of every single one of those prints, I'm not sure it would really yield much information because of the way these things forage, near as I can figure, you know, it seems like they go to an area, then they spread out in that area, and then they keep on going the same general direction, you know, So some of the data might just be like not junk data, but

kind of white noise in a way, you know. But in general, I saw the tendency, the trend of the direction of travel of this particular group, and I knew I was finding them up by the swamp, and I knew they were coming out of the river valley below. So I just kind of, you know, connected the dots and I went up and over the ridge that's around this particular swamp, you know, and that's where we found the track, the tracks actually that Melissa and I worked on.

I mean, she casts the print, but we backtrack that thing and it came down off the ridge just like we expected, and we probably found another fifteen or twenty.

five thousand square miles. The average home range of the average adult male black bear in that part of southern Apple Aatcha is roughly sixteen to eighteen square miles. If you take that same sized bear, you know, the average adult male black bear, and you go up somewhere like Pennsylvania, Studies there showed that they have a home range more into like thirty five square miles. And that's still Appalachia,

that's still eastern deciduous forest. But given the density of food resources and how they're distributed, it takes thirty five square miles of that Appalachian forest to provide the same amount of food that only sixteen to eighteen square miles of Southern Appalachia forest provides. And then you can transpose that to like the inner Mountain West, where their ranges are significantly larger because the resources are more distributed. So in places like that they might be anywhere from like

seventy five to one hundred square miles. In the Pacific Northwest, it could be anywhere from fifty to seventy five square miles. We're talking about essentially the same animal requiring vastly different spans of geographic space in order to sustain itself. So it would first depend on like, well, are these sasquatches in southern apple Lata or the Pacific Northwest or the Washitas or the Rockies or whatever the case may be. So there's probably some rough estimate that you could make.

Another interesting thing about the mammalian caloric intake needs is that it doesn't scale linearly with size, so it's not a one to one relationship. Now that's true within a given species. So for example, if you had a species of monkey with a wide variety of size range, one individual weighing one hundred pounds would need less space than two individuals weighing fifty pounds to feed itself versus to feed themselves. So there's a whole lot of factors you

have to take in here. So with Sasquatches, you could say, well, they're roughly three to four times the mass of a black bear. Does that mean they need roughly three to four times the home range? Probably not, because again it doesn't scale linearly, so it really just depends. I mean, the ten mile radius is a pretty large area if you're talking about square mileage. I think if you're looking at something like seventy to eighty square miles, that's only I think like a four point five or four point

six mile radius from a center point. So it really just depends, and I don't think any of us know. All we could say is that they're probably pretty large. I do think seventy to eighty square miles would be on the small end, and that would be in places

like southern Appalachia or the Washutaw's extremely rich environments. You could call that a liberal estimate, And the reason I would say it's liberal rather than conservative is because the smaller the home range, the more ranges can fit in a given area, so the larger the population could be.

So that's a pretty liberal gas because you could fit a lot of Sasquatches into southern Apalachia if each individual of a given age and sex and size only needs seventy to eighty square miles, but who knows, because that will also differ radically between the sexes. Going back to black bears in Appalachia, the males need sixteen to eighteen square miles, the females need four to six square miles.

Siberian tigers, the males usually cover somewhere around fifteen hundred square kilometers and the females cover about four hundred square kilometers.

animals are there and which animals are consistently there. Because again, our areas, you know, like I've got three or four areas that I'm working, and I don't think there's a lot of overlap in the sasquatches in there, you know, which is interesting to me because I'm trying to nail down how big their range is and with their social structure. That's those are the questions that I find interesting. So that's what I'm working on. And you got to You've

got to look for the footprints. You got to cast them because you're going to see patterns in them and you can start piecing together. Are these the same individuals? Is this a family group? That kind of thing. It's not easy to do. It takes a lot of time and a lot of dedication and a lot of consistency. I go. I mean I say it all the time. I go every single week. You know, this week I don't even have time to go because I'm building that thing in the barn I was talking about earlier in

this episode. So on Thursday when I when I go, I have to wake up a couple hours before daylight to get out there because I you know, my buddy who's helping me build this thing out out in the barn is going to be over atten noon. So I got to get out there and get back by noon, so that the consistency has to be there. You know, in my opinion, if you really want to find tracks,

you got it. You got to get out there. And if you want to learn about their territory range, you have to look at the footprints, because how do you know which ones are there? Citing reports don't tell you very much. They tell you that the animals are present, but you got to get footprints, because we can't just go ahead and look at a sasquatch and say, oh, that's the same one I saw last week. But you can do that with footprints. You can do that with

footprints once you start getting familiar with them. And maybe it's not one hundred percent, you know, but then I talk about it all the time. In our spot Easter Island, we very often find, very often find a twelve inch which I now I know is eleven and a half because I got a couple of cli prints, but a twelve inch individual and a fourteen inch individual, and we almost and by the way, the fourteen is also a thirteen and a half in reality, because again we got

a clearer print now. But we're usually sixty seventy percent of the time find those two animals associated with each other, Like maybe we'll find the twelve inch and then a couple hundred yards down the same road, we'll find the fourteen like that kind of stuff, sometimes even right together. Over at the outer rim that I was mentioning earlier, we have another fourteen, and we have an eight eight or nine inch footprint somewhere in there, so it's almost

certainly a different animal. And of course the big males almost nothing. We almost never find their footprints, which is really interesting. I have found what I considered to be the male at East t Island. I found it this past fall. It's about fifteen fifteen and a half inches.

Could there be more than one fourteen inch? Absolutely there absolutely could, But for now there's enough data to kind of hobble together a rough hypothesis that is the same female and the same juvenile wandering around together, and until there's a reason to think otherwise. You know, I think that's a reasonable gas, which is all I'm trying to do at this point. But now that you have an area of interest, keep going back, and my God, start looking for footprints.

it to you or not. This guy that in Tennessee that goes around or is Kentucky and he goes and he looks around for mind shafts and films and he's just like this YouTube guy. That's what he likes to do. And he's little empire on it, you know, and it's kind of cool. It's kind of the same sort of thing I would love to do in the woods if I was wandering around. But he's out there alone doing the thing, or presumably he's out there alone. I mean,

his other videos seem to be alone. So he's out there poking around and and he's looking inside this this barred up mind shaft. You know, Oh, this would be kind of cool and blah blah blah. And behind them is a noise and it's it's either a sasquatch or a human. There's it sounds like a person, like ah, something like that. And you know, I put it out for the members of the NABC there and then they listen to it and and they're chiming in. You know,

that's a person, that's not a person. That's definitely a sasquatch. That's definitely a person, and that's a bird. And you know, everybody's opinion that everybody enjoys, you know, kind of chiming in like that. It's astonishing, you know, because I think it's fair to say that all of us here, at least on on on the podcast here, all of us

have heard sasquatches vocalized kind of a lot. I mean, kind of I'd be hard to put a number on it, but you know, even at like, you know, I heard I've heard them many many times outside of finding Bigfoot and finding Bigfoot, that was basically the whole show is trying to hear them vocalize, and we were successful, you know, like half the time maybe or something like that.

a very similar you know, vocal apparatus. Yeah, they because and I think that you know, with Bobo, Matt and I are doing all that kind of stuff, you know, howling and screaming and doing our thing out there, it gives the impression that that's the only sounds they make.

Now they don't. They can sound a lot like indistinguishable from people, and that's just outside of their mimicry that I'm confident that they do, where they can imitate people's voices or chainsaws or car door slamming and all that stuff. They sound so much like people. It's just astonishing sometimes. So although if you did hear Bobo or me or money Maker in the woods and you're say in, I don't know Texas or you know Kentucky, that's not us.

But then I talk to other people say no, they absolutely will kill and eat coyotes, and other people say, well they Some people say that the kyotes are scavenging from the big pitchers. Other people think that the bigfoots are going and stealing deer kills from the coyotes. So there's there's not one train of thought on that, and

like no one, no one knows for sure. But the guy Fred and Alaska with the Subarctic Alaska Sasquatch, he's got like ten or twelve reports people saying they've seen wolves and bigfoots like cooperatively hunting like caribou and moose and stuff like that.

at the same time. But when we had Ken Walker on, he told the story about the two brothers that the trappers that had that massive trapping lease on Crown Land

in Canada. They talked about certain traps being raided. You know, they were trying to catch fur bearing animals, not only because their passion was trapping, but you know certain animals or they have a certain monetary value, and these traps were getting raided consistently, and so they would place out coyote carcasses, according to Ken to sort of be here's something else that you can come raid, you know, rather than breaking our traps and taking these more I guess

precious animals, here's an alternative. And they said that once that started, the coyotes would always be taken. They'd find them partially consumed, as if that was a sought after food resource. And if you've ever been out in the field, I know you guys have, but to the listeners, if you've ever been out in the field and done in Ohio, how if there's coyotes within earshot, they'll respond in seconds.

And so if I was a coyote hunter, I would just go out and how like a sasquatch figure out where the coyotes are and then go in that direction, and so so they wouldn't be hard to find. They might make for an easy meal. You know, there's a lot of them, so they're plentiful. They're ubiquitous across all of North America pretty much, and they're very, very numerous, and so I wonder if that's part of it. It's at least worth thinking about that they prey on those things.

they can move. But everything I was aloso to look how large they are, they would have to utilize any sort of meat. Essentially, I think everything from caterpillars and insects to you know, black bear. If they can get it, and there's a small handful of reports that strongly suggests they hunt black bear, So why not coyotes, you know, And of course I'm a big fan of the idea that sasquatches are also power scavenging, which is a known

hominin strategy. Hominins did that, and of course nowadays other animals do it too, you know, lions do it, and all that sort of stuff with power scavenging is waiting for other animals to do the hard work of killing it and bringing it down, and then you just kind of waltz in and push the little guys away and take what you want and leave the rest of the kill to the people who actually earned it, the animals

that actually earned it. That's power scavenging. So I think sasquatches would definitely do that because being as smart as they are, they will not expend more calories than necessary in order to obtain their own calories.

because of the dentition, they're in that order. But I don't know how often coyotes are making significant kills. I'm sure we could look that up, but it's not like they're making deer kills frequently enough that a sasquatch could rely solely on that versus, you know, if it wants food, it's probably easier to get a coyote than.

the world would be a little more intolerable. Please keep up the good work and always keep it squatchy.

And so this, I think this is something we've all encountered many many times as like, oh, what's the thing solved? You won't have anything to do, like yeah, right, you know, you could just imagine a handful of questions, like how large is their home range? Like we just found out, okay, well you get a rough estimate, Well, how large is their home range in southern apple Achoe? What about central

Apple Acho? What about the rockies, you know, all the places I just mentioned in response to the previous question, how do they form social units? What's their gestation period, what's their developmental period? When do they separate from their parents? These things, they're not going to come easily. We won't have all those answers. I bet we won't even have all those answers in the first three decades of them

being discovered. I mean, we just covered in the last episode, you know, a mysterious quote unquote mysterious new behavior just now being documented in squirrels, you know, the North American squirrel, the most common thing you could encounter out in the wild, and we're still making new discoveries about them. And so imagine the treasure trove, the bottomless well of information that these things could give us. It's really it's unfathomable. We'll never lose that.

style stuff. There's ridiculous nonsense for the most part, but that's that's just a lot of fun, you know, the ancient alien kind of nonsense that's on TV and everything that's us fun to think about, but not a whole lot of people really really take it seriously. But they're and outside of those mysteries, it's great that there's so many cool things like the I was just reading this past week about how some real progress has been made

uniting quantum physics and Einsteinian you know, relativistic physics. Like that's great, that's awesome. That's been they've been chasing that for you know, eighty years, one hundred years or something like that. You know, not a physicists, I just like the subject. So there's so much real mystery grounded in science that there's always going to be something to push forward into. I think we lose sight of this. We as a culture, we as a species, lose.

And you know, science is really really good at inventing bubbles and toys, so we think we're all that. But we have such limited understanding of the way things work and how things piece together. We almost know nothing. But we've come so far since like the steam engine, you know, or whatever, whatever the wheel, you know, whatever tool you want to put out in the printing press, whatever the

big milestones are. You know, we've come so far from those in our own very limited scope of time, you know, because we live like seventy eighty years. We're done and we check out and we leave and whatever, and that's a blink of an eye. But we think we've come so far because as a couple of generations to go, we practically know nothing compared to where we're gonna be an eight hundred years or something like that if if our species even survives that long, we're still in our

infancy of understanding the universe. There is no shortage of wonder and beauty in the universe.

to avoid them. In many cases, in other elements, mythological characters are characterized or personified descriptions phenomenological descriptions of nature itself, whether that's natural events. Think about all the personifications of thunder and lightning as a phenomena, for example, being given some agency or being the product of some conscious agent that's exerting its will. I mean, there's no simple explanation for what myth is and where it comes from, because

it applies to such a range of things. But because you know, we're persons, you know, we tend to see other phenomena as personified, and so we we represent those phenomena as characters. And those characters have their own philosophies, they have their own views, they have their own wills, their own perceptions, et cetera. You know, if you think about the nature of the storm, for example, and well,

how do you character what does the storm want? Well, the objective reality would tell you that, like, the storm has no desire and no moral aim. But in order to describe the experience of the storm. In a story, you personify it, so those things happen. There's also mythological characters that are rooted in reality that might have been based on living people, that as time marches on, those people get mythologized and represented as mythological characters even though

they had a rooting in reality. You know, there's characters from the twentieth century that are mythologized that have a whole host of like apocryphal stories about them that people believe that are demonstrably not true. But certain living individuals, you know, are great receptacles for myths, so we're apt to believe such things about them, that they had certain capabilities, or that they accomplished certain things, or whatever the case

may be. And so the societal value is that it provides information across a host of different domains that because it's metaphorical in nature, it's more easily accessible because not only is it metaphorical, but it's delivered in the form of a story, a narrative, and you know narratives, we're we're storytelling creatures. There's a great book by a guy named Jonathan Gottschalk called The Storytelling Animal.

of myths, that teach that whole host of lessons. Like you don't have enough time in one lifespan to learn all these things and figure them out for yourself. You'll die in the process because you'll make too many errors. But if you develop an intimate familiarity with the cannon of myths and the characters within them, then you basically have a guide book, you know, a cultural guidebook for

how to deal with certain situations. Knowing these myths and understanding those character and their motivations and their own sort of like philosophies, provides all that. So the value is limitless when we're talking about that mysterious creatures happen to be one manifestation, whether or not you know, even if such creatures exist in the environment, they get borrowed and used to be a receptacle for the mythological motif. In the same way that the bear has lessons to tell,

or the raven, or the coyote or the tiger. Doesn't mean that the animal is as described by the myth, And it doesn't mean that because it's a myth, that the animal doesn't exist. It's just that you need receptacles to hang these motifs or tropes on, and sasquatches and other mysterious creatures make great receptacles for that, among other things.

it's rotting out again. They replaced the feet a few years ago, but the whole thing has got to be replaced. They're looking for someone a they're looking for someone that might donate a log that's big enough to this, you know, section of a log to carve a new Bigfoot and they're also seeing it. There's anyone that's willing to carve it, and they got real limited budget. They're looking for donations.

People can write it off whatever. But yeah, if they're interested in either donating the piece of wood or carving it, you can contact Bigfoot Cannabis in Willow Creek, California.