Ep. 320 - Mike Mayes & Daryl Colyer!

school or trade school or anything like that. As long as you're bettering yourself and reading books, you don't you have to do it in school. You have to just read books and read magazines and read whatever you can educate yourself. And so I want to give a big thumbs up to all the graduates right now because I know this is the time of year but one in particular wrote me a nice letter. A guy named Zach. He's a listener, Zach Powers. He's down in Phloemouth in

Oregon here, and he grew up watching us bobes. He said, he came up, he came to the Bigfoot Museum. He grew up on finding Bigfoot. And of course we're old men now, so all the kids who grew up on finding Bigfoot are now graduating. But anyway, I wanted to give a congratulations to Zach Powers and all the other graduates out there. Keep going, keep going. Never stop learning. Doesn't have to be in school. Just never ever, ever, ever stop learning, and you'll live a very, very fulfilled

life in my opinion. There there had a visitor at the museum this week, the lovely and talented Monique Powell from Save Ferris at SKA Ben in southern California. You remember Mo, don't you?

got pipes, you know, for years, an enormous talent. And then two other things, very very briefly, Number one members, this is only a member thing. Darby or Cut is going to be speaking at the museum. I will be posting something in the member section, and only members of the museum and Bigfoot and beyond are going to be invited. So if you're not a member, maybe you want to become a member. It's a five dollars a month thing. And you get special invites to things like Darby or

cut speaking at the North American Bigfoot Center. And by the way, there will also be a digital sort of streaming version of that you can watch from anywhere in the country if you're a world for that matter, as long as you have internet. So if you want to learn more about that, go to that link that the levely and talented Matt prove It will post below about

becoming a member. But you also get an extra episode every single week, and you also get this very episode you're listening to right now with zero commercials, no commercials at all. So if that's worth five bucks a month for you, check it out. Maybe you want to become a member. It's four extra hours of content, cool stuff that we give to you, like invitations to special events like this and other cool things. And then finally, this coming weekend, I am doing a job in Everett, Washington

at the historic Everett Theater. You may have heard of a little radio show called Coast to Coast AM. It used to be an art bell thing now. George Norri is one of the hosts that does it.

And I'm on the bill. So if you want to come watch a live radio show and I'm going to be one of the guests on there, come on down. I think it's I don't know what time it starts, but we are going to post that in the show notes below, as the lovely and talented Matt Pruitt does every single week for you.

And so I'm doing a book. It's going to be titled I Can Hand Monsters, and it's all about these myths and legends, these lesser known cryptids and animals that are rumored to be out there that people are just not nearly as familiar with once you get outside the Holy Trinity of the Yetti, Bigfoot and the Lockness Monster. Uh, these are not as well known. A lot of them are more regional in nature, but they're just fantastic stories. And going to try to call some attention to those.

Talk about dog Brown, No, that's that's a little too mainstream. I've really tried to target things that I you know, because I'll you know, I'm not the first one to do a book on it.

of thing. I try to offer some possible explanations for a lot of these, Saint John's River Monster, the Grunge road Monster of New Orleans, the melon heads in Connecticut, the Alba Twitch, which is kind of a mini Bigfoot from Pennsylvania, and stuff like that. Just stuff that maybe regionally people are pretty familiar with, but you know, someone in your neck of the woods might not be familiar with a legend or a river or lake monster from Florida or Connecticut or that kind of thing.

episode on each of those books. But this audience for sure should check both of those out. They're both available on Amazon, and I will put the links to those in the show notes.

start looking for black cats. Maybe I'll see a bigfoot.

to tell them that a black panther isn't real. You know, but there's no such species, and the black cats we see on TV and in the movies are melanistic leopards ninety nine percent of the time. Jaguars can also be melanistic like that, and that's really about it as far as cats that might be over here. The only reason we have leopards, of course, is zoos and the exotic

pet trade. But mountain lions are not supposed to have the genetics to be melanistic, and so scientists kind of dismiss that as a possibility.

happened yet. They've all been males, but I'm hopeful that one of them will turn out to be a female.

to six months? I'm going to give me six months go squatching squad, of course, of course, And how much do you think is going to get done during that time. In squatching, you're going to see one in six months, probably not, but in three to six months. What you can see if you're not going to see a sasquatch is thicker, fuller hair regrown from Hymns our sponsor. Hymns not bad for just three to six months.

best thing. It's like it's like reliving your childhood but you but you have all the experience and the wisdom that comes with the older age. And so just I'm having the time of my life, you know. I just I'm fully engaged. I'm never bored. I have I have so many things that keep me busy, you know, in addition to the continued search for the sasquatch to document that as a legitimate species, and I'm engaged in writing papers and doing lectures and playing music and you know,

taking care of my four acre place. And you know, life is great, man.

Ottoman Empire. So you know, like I said, I stay busy, and back before this, I was working on putting together a lecture. Good times. Man. Just love the like Cliff says, I just love, you know, constantly just enriching my brain and just trying to be the best I can be, you know, spirit, mind and body sort of thing. So yeah, that's the thing.

all sort of perpetual students. One of the things we end up discussing a lot is what are you reading lately? And reading recommendations? And when I was writing the book, I reached out to Mike a whole lot and Daryl a whole lot. You know, Mike obviously having authored books, you know, it's a really great resource for me and help me a lot with guidance and things of that nature. But spend a lot of time with these guys in

the field. They're in Area X and during my seven years with the NAWAC, which they were part of for a lot of years. But we've continued that trend. Thankfully. I had to bow out of a couple of trips recently for helping out with family issues, but the search continues and I try to get out with these guys as much as possible. I've learned so much from them, and we always have a blast out in the field.

I would say, I think we there's equal amounts adventure and learning and laughter, which is my three biggest priorities.

a book, a fiction. I never thought I would write any fiction whatsoever in my life, but I just finished a children's middle graders book. It's a fantasy book, and yeah, it does incorporate the Sasquatch into it pretty prominently. And I've sent that out to a number of publishers and I've had some nibbles and working to get that published, and you know, hopefully somebody will bite on that and take that, and if not, then I will go the self publishing route. But yeah, like I said, I've got

plenty to keep me busy. Mikey and I just had a great trip out to New Mexico, the heat and National Forest, which is every bit as remote as people may have heard. It's just it was. It was wonderful. We saw Mikey. Would we see one person in six seven days at our camp site? Did we see anybody at camp?

ultimately find the siding location. And not that we ever doubted anything the gentleman said, but we were able to corroborate pretty much everything he said to you guys on the show. Found the siding location. Everything was as he said. I think the only thing he might have undersold a little bit is how difficult it was to get to that location where he actually saw the animal. It was. It was quite an an odyssey, to say the least.

It took us, what, Darryl, was it the fourth day we finally found it.

out of my rack. It snapped the rack, and it was not a cheap rack, but it just eventually just beat it to the whole tent collapsed and started bashing against my back windshields. So we had to we had to make a camp away from the site, and then we finally made our way over to it several days later. But I think it may be more difficult now, Mikey, because we found that I think since he went there, since his siding, I think part of the the egress route has been shut down by one of the private

landowners out there. You can't get through those gates. Now you have to go you have to turn Amund and go all the way back out. And so that was that added to the difficulty. But one thing we found Cliff and Bobo is that there are a number of stations around there that have salt licks and molasses barrels. And where he saw this thing is let not even it may be three hundred meters from where he saw this thing. There's a station there of molasses and a

salt lick. And then you go another quarter not even quarter mile, maybe two tenths of a mile, there's another station. Then you go a little bit further there's another station. So there's maybe a half dozen of those stations around there.

very long. She did give us kind of a warning as far as one of the ranchers in the area where which we are pretty sure this is one of the gates that the gentleman when he left the area after seeing this sasquatch, that he went through gates and onto this gentleman's property. And we're a guessing. We feel like we found those gates, but they're now chained up and locked up. But she warned us he was not a guy that you wanted to upset and be caught

out on his property without permission. It was very yellowstone like kind of stuff, you know, And so you know, she gave us some nice heads up on that, and we're pretty sure that he exited those gates and came

out on that property. And we wondered and discussed if maybe there had been some others after hearing the episode that went out that way and maybe repeated his route, and maybe this gentleman, this rancher got tired of people coming to his property and that's why those gates are all chained up now.

at the site. We were about ten miles as the Sasquatch walks from the site. That's just based on circumstances. It's where we had to make our camp. But we, like I said, like we said, we managed to get over there to the site and it's not really much different from where we were. It's a little bit lower in elevation, but the area is extremely dry, and so it sort of works outside the normal areas where we

think that the Sasquatch, you know, might reside. But but there's there are a very few people and it's extremely remote. We did see we did find abundant sign of wadoff. We found black bear scat just down from our camp. We found mountain lion tracks about a half mile from our camp. We found kywity tracks. We saw two Mexican gray wolves. We saw plenty of mule deer. We saw plenty of elk, We saw plenty of pronghorn. We saw jack rabbits, we saw gray squirrels, ground squirrels, tons of

different bird species. So it's really robust in terms of wildlife. But it's you know, it's extremely dry, but all those all those animals seem to seem to do really well there, you know. But it's a wonderful place. I mean it's just in the sky at night where we were eight thousand feet up, it's just the most beautiful sky I've ever seen. We saw the International Space Station go over twice, which is which is really cool that man would have vivid night sky, just beautiful love New Mexico.

spent a lot. And that's one of the last places you'd expect sasquatches to be because it's kind of rolling planes with sparse trees. But what we found is that most of the sasquatch reports, at least that time of year, they're down there, obviously down the river beds, but they're they're walking over the flat plains at night, going from one ravine to another. And that's when a lot of the people see the Sasquatches on their properties, when they're

walking alone at night going to the next place. But when it came to us finding the sasquatches, and we did, we did. We found that was a yellow Bear reservoir or something like that, I think if I remember right, But that was one of the only places for miles and miles and miles and miles that actually had water

at that time. Of year, So it's kind of like where there's limited resources, well then you know where to focus your efforts at least, So that's a benefit in some ways to habitat like New Back Ago where it's high and dry and super arid and kind of warm. Maybe sometimes it concentrates the resources and therefore concentrates the animals as well.

that are around for the livestock. We discussed whether or not the sasquatch that was there, whether it was actually maybe partaking the molasses type material there or the salt or I'm sure it was helping itself to the water.

But it would also be the perfect ambush spot because any ungulates in the area are going to visit those stations, and they were positioned in such a way that had we wanted to, we could have just kind of gone up the hill a little bit into the brush and sat and watched and seen any thing and everything that came to those stations. And so I don't know about long term survival on that kind of thing, but certainly little sweet treat come down in the evenings to get

or to get water. I think it's very feasible that that could have been going on. We actually years ago, Darryl and I investigated a report in a little outside of a little town called Dawson, Texas. And Daryl, what's the reservoir that's right there the lake?

And the owner came out and spotted a sasquatch crossing the field from the direction of that station, and mentioned that this stuff was disappearing at a higher rate than usual, and kind of theorized that this thing was coming in there and helping itself. And so it's certainly possible that

that was going on. But again also just a perfect ambush spot if for anyone or anything that's hunting mule deer or elk or for that matter, you know, take a take a bit of livestock from time to time, because they're all going to show up there at some point.

people to encounter the sasquatch just to report them. So it may be in each of those areas, it may be a you know, a significant number of the animals there is so remote, there's so few people that actually visit those places that you know, and their creatures are so elusive, that they just may have a population there that this is largely undetected.

and I'm confident they're in southern Mexico as well. I've personally spoken in Spanish to two witnesses who had seen these things down to the jungles. But you hear almost nothing at all from Northern Mexico. And it's maybe it's because of you know, they just don't have the time to look into it, because here in America we're blessed with leisure time. Basically, you know, there's enough we're not you know, scrambling for, you know, to make sure that

our family can eat all the time and stuff. For most of us are have a little bit of leisure time to enjoy ourselves. And that's where the bigfoot thing comes in. And maybe that's not the case in some of those places in rural Mexico. Maybe there they don't care, maybe they don't notice, maybe there's some superstition involved or whatever.

I personally think that a lot of the Sasquatch vocalizations in Mexico and even in southern United States as well, the vocalizations are probably attributed to La Orana, like the crying woman and who goes through the arroyos at night, you know, yelling for her drowned children, you know, crying and screaming. I think a lot of that is cats a various ways, you know, like bobcats and cougars and

whatever else, and sasquatches. I think a lot of the noises are attributed to her, the folkloric, you know, mythological woman. But it's astonishing me that we don't hear more out of Mexico in that sort of way, you know, But I guess no one's really looking, well.

There's the d d, the Mono Grande, the map Bengueri and I'm sure I'm butchering accent and goes on and on.

just reappear in Central and South America. So they're up in there somewhere.

is all eastern deciduous forest. And for those of us that spend a lot of time and places like that, we see the differences between southeast Oklahoma, southern Kentucky, northeast Georgia, but by and large it's the same flora and fauna. Maybe a little bit different geology, but obviously the HeLa Mountains are so very different than what we're all used to.

You know how that struck you? Did you change your tax in the field, did you try some of the same old tricks, or was it more like where do we go?

piny woods, versus what they're doing in New Mexico. You're raising cattle. In East Texas, you can run between three and five cattle per acre probably and there's plenty for all of them to graze and get nice and fat. In New Mexico you might need two acres per cow. And that's one thing we learned. These ranches out there are vast, but you're going to need much much more land to equal the grays that a cow in East Texas would have. And I think it's similar with the forest,

and not just with the Sasquatch, but any creature. These deciduous forests that are so thick, almost jungle like, and they're so rich in resources. I think it was doctor John Bender Nagel who visited the Big Thicket years ago, and he made the statement that, uh, an animal here would need far a far smaller range than the same species of animal would need in the Pacific Northwest, which is predominantly coniferous forests. And it's kind of the same

way there there in New Mexico. So I think your chances of running into one unless you can identify a specific attraction, as Cliff alluded to earlier, with the water, you know, you got to get they got it. They're going to have to get to water at least a couple of times a day. But everything's the same. You've got the same Western red pines and ponderosa pines and cedars, and you've got this dusty, hilly, rocky landscape and it

just goes on and on forever. The territory is just so vast, whereas in these Texas one's a little One of these animals would be a little more apt well to not move as much, I think, because it wouldn't need to. I would suspect these Western animals have to be on the move a lot, and that's that was going to make them a little harder to bump into, because they're just going to have to be moving in

order to collect the resources they need. Now, you know, black bears are doing fine out there, so there's no reason to think that a sasquatch could not and would not as well. But I do think that makes it a little more difficult out there.

from you know, twelve thirteen, fourteen, fifteen miles. I mean it was very tight, very tight area, which which just as Mikey talked about, it suggests that you know, an animal will have a much smaller territory, you know, a much smaller core area, doesn't have to go as far to forage, to find food, water, you know, And we may have some factors like we have recently discovered about the orangutans that sometimes they may have adapted evolution, may

have natural selection may have helped them to adapt, and maybe they don't. Maybe in New Mexico and in places like that, they don't need to get they don't have to get water so much per se. Maybe they can go maybe they can go days without actually drinking water, actual water. Maybe they get all the moisture they need from their food sources. Maybe they've you know, maybe they've adopted, have adapted that way, and and uh developed that way. Who knows, well.

That's what I'm talking about. But you go to places that are pretty dramatic, you know, pretty extreme, like Death Valley, and you go to the archaeolo look at the archaeology of Death Valley and there are tons of you know, camps and in ways, you know, strategies. I guess that humans adapted to survive in some of the most extreme environments on the planet, and of course sasquatches have advantages

and disadvantages as far as that goes. The disadvantage is, of course they're large size and their hair covering which would retain heat. But you know, in New Mexico you get snow a lot of you it's not exactly the same kind of desert as death Value is. It doesn't probably get to one hundred and ten and stay there for weeks at a time. You know, it's actually a much more mild climate in that sort of way temperature wise, But the food resources are are just it's huge, huge in desert.

But when you look at where they were seen, they were generally seen in dried river beds connecting to better habitats, and also at the base of the mountains, like basically right at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the Mohave Desert down there, that's a transition zone were what you get the benefits of two different biomes, and then the food resources that are present there. And New Mexico is a lot like that almost everywhere you go.

It's kind of a little desert, little mountains sort of thing. And the food resources if you're interested in that, you know, like if you're interested in eating things like snakes and lizards and bugs and all those sort of things, which sasquatches certainly do. It's a cornucopia of food resources that are not available in other sort of more rush environments. And I think that a lot of times humans we're all victims of our own preconceptions. We think that there's

no resources there and it's just not true. I mean, the mesquite plants, the various sage brushes, all these things have some nutritional value at some base level. And with the gut the size of a sasquatch, they're built for utilizing low resource foods. And of course they can catch rattle snakes without probably getting bitten very often, and they and lizards are probably no problem, just another tasty treat for them, you know, we have to look at it

in that sort of way. Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and beyond with Cliff and Bogo. We'll be right back after these messages.

our highs were around seventy eight eighty degrees. Was very very mild in terms of temperature. We were not you know, we were not down on the desert floor. We were up and it was it was very much a Western you know, montane forest, ponderosa pines, alligator, juniper's scrub, oak, post oak. I mean, it was just it was very much a dense forest. Now I didn't have the understory that we're used to in the eastern half of the continent, but it was just a very rich forest, and the

ungulate population is enormous. I mean, I can't tell you how many times how many elk we saw, mule, deer, pronghorn, And as I think all of us on this show today, I think all of us are subscribed to the you know, the the idea that that sasquatch just eat meat. I mean, I know, I know that I hold that, and so

they they definitely have a rich diet there. You know, if I was eight feet tall and I could, you know, run bursts of thirty thirty five forty miles an hour, and you know, I could traverse mountains like nobody's business, then it would be no problem to stay well fed in that area, for sure.

such a wide variety of things. And I have had a little pet theory for years that while I do believe there are certain areas of the country and the world that would be quote ideal habitat end quote, those are few and far between, and for a species of any kind to survive, there's going to have to be some adaptation, some changes, and some resilience, and I just think, again, my pet theory is that isolation is actually the number one requirement for these animals to not just survive, but

possibly thrive in absence of us is number one. I think. I believe they will adapt, they will find something to eat, and they will survive. And again, anywhere where there's wildlife, like Darryl just alluded to, sasquatch is just another type of wildlife. And if these other species can adapt and make that adjustment, there's no reason to think one of

these animals cannot do so as well. So again, I think the number one component for their survival is just isolation somewhere where they're going to be left alone, not harassed, and they'll figure it out like all these other types of wildlife have.

maintained like ourselves and others. I always refer to it as like akin to the Invisible College, you know from back in the old Enlightenment era days, sort of like a non public network or you know, collaborative group of people operating together. And so you guys have come out with me, and we have more plans for you guys

to come back out to the Southern Apple Actions. I came out to the Washingtons with you guys last summer, and so I just I thought it would be good because a lot of listeners write in and ask, and so yeah, we're still doing a lot of things that just might not always be under the moniker of you know, some acronym or you know, have a show dedicated to

it or something like that. But I'm sure people would be really interested to hear, you know, what's in the pipeline or what else is coming up, or future plans. Like I said, I know we have plans, but you guys are still active there in Texas and elsewhere as well.

And we all we also have a lot of other interests as we said, that keep us also engaged. And but yeah, we were planning to we're planning to head to uh eastern Oklahoma here in the next month, not not anywhere near the old area, but someplace new that

we're very interested in. And and then we've got some things that we're talking about, you know, you know, head over and do some stuff with Maddie in the in the not too distant future, maybe this year, maybe a few months from now, and then we also want to get out west as as I told Cliff and Bobo a little earlier, we're talking about the Mogi on Rim. We would love to head to, uh, you know, northern California,

some areas up there, love to head to Alaska. There's all kinds of places that we would like to go. And Mikey's retirement's on and hopefully, you know, god willing hit retirement is not too far away from for him, and I'm already retired, so we absolutely have the time now. And so yeah, anyway, very cool.

I want to connect researchers across the country. It's you know, certainly the public will be welcome to come in and read and contribute as those opportunities arive. But what are really I'm looking to do is connect researchers to each other. And I'm not looking for anyone to share their secret

honey hoole and coordinates and things like that. But if say someone in the Olympic project stumbles into a strategy that has yielded results on a consistent basis, right, if we do this, this happens seventy five percent of the time we get activity. Well, you know what, maybe that would work in eastern Oklahoma too. Maybe that would work in Maine. Maybe that would work in the Everglades too, depending on whatever it is, maybe that would work in

the Hila Mountains of New Mexico. It's more of a let's share techniques and what works and what hasn't worked, what equipment is worth the investment and what isn't you know, things like that kind of We hope to have a forum set up for those types of discussions and hopefully it will encourage people to share a little more. That was one thing I was working on toward the end of my tenure in AWAC was a little more cooperation with some other groups that were we believe were reputable

and doing good work. And we got some members to come in from those from those organizations and help dual membership with and really quality people. And I think more of that is what we need, and I think we have to prioritize the goal. The conservation of the animal is still number one to me. But to protect it,

we have to prove it's real. And our best chance of proving it to be real is going to have to be a little more cooperation among the people that and it's just a handful of very few people that are actually out there and doing the work, and that's going to be the drive behind the site. It's also going to because like I said, I have other interests, you know, the black panther enigma. We're going to be

have a section for that. And then my number three on my list is the Ivory built woodpecker, which being a swamp rat from southeast Texas. Periodically somebody will come in to say they've seen one down there in the big Thicket country. And I would really not much would throw me more than to try to find something like

that and it's not gone after all. That would be we need to take one of those trips, mikey Oh, I'd love to We need to take one of those trips to go, you know, we'll spend a week ten days out in Ivy Build woodpecker country and.

Let's let's not be quite as secretive and even borderline hostile to each other as some of the groups have been in the past. I think I think we need to figure out some way to work together.