If you've spent any time listening to Bigfoot podcasts, it's all but certain you know about tonight's guest. I say that because he's been hosting Bigfoot podcasts for almost as long as any of them have been around. Of course, I'm talking about Matt Knapp. Matt, thanks so much for coming on, glad to be here, Thanks for having me. Well, it's great having you. I'm just glad, being the busy man that you are, you're willing to come on and talk with me tonight. Oh yeah. Between the two
of us, I think we go NonStop all the times. We're pretty fortunate to be able to do this finally, Oh definitely. Yeah. Like I told you behind the scenes, I've been wanting to have you on the show for years now, so I'm tickled pink to finally be able to have you on. But having said that, before you accepted the fact that sasquatch were really out there, Matt, you were a card hearing believer in ghosts another
supernatural phenomena. How was it that you believed in the existence of entities you couldn't touch, but refused to believe in ones that you could actually touch. You know, I've always been a pretty skeptical person, believe it or not, which is funny considering, you know, the line of work I'm in, so to speak. But I've always been the type of person that I really need to see something myself to fully, you know, go all in
on it. And growing up, I had lots of paranormal experiences in the house that I lived in, and really just in general, Oklahoma can be kind of a weird place and it's not uncommon or run across somebody that's experienced something. So I actually grew up having those paranormal experiences and everything, and whenever it came to Bigfoot, it really interested me. It really grabbed my
attention. And then whenever I discovered that people were actively going out and looking for it, including people in my own state, it really blew my mind. I was fortunate to be introduced and meet a lot of really great people right out the gate, a lot of experienced people who had been in the Bigfoot world for years and years, and they told some amazing stories and I got to know those people on a personal level, became friends with them.
Some are even extended family I would consider that. So it was hard for me not to believe them. I mean, they were so genuine with their stories, and like I said, they became friends. So then it's not just hearing a stranger tell you a story, it's a friend telling you. And I still just remained on the fence. I wanted to believe them, but I had to see for myself, and I started going out with them,
and yeah, I had my world change forever. I had a sighting, had an encounter with these people out in the field, saw it with my own two eyes, and the rest is history. Yeah, for someone who wants to learn the ropes when it comes to Sasquatch, I can't think of a better group of people than the ones that you got hitched with. I've got tons of questions for you, Map, but before I start throwing the match, you please tell us a complete story behind your first bigfoot sighting.
Sure it was in Sulfur, Oklahoma, in the Chickasaw National Recreation Area, which is I believe Oklahoma's only actual national park. There might be one other, but I'm pretty sure that's the only one, or at least it was at the time. This area is sitting right on the southern border of Sulfur. I mean, you're right in the town of Sulfur itself, and you drive directly into the park from the town and it has a long history of bigfoot sidings and reports. Lots of tourists flocked to the area during the
summer months. There's a large amount of medicinal springs there. That's kind of what the park is famous for, its natural springs, and people have been going to this set of springs since the eighteen hundreds. I believe it was Native American land prior to that, and I want to say the Chickasaw tribe sold it. I'm trying to remember the year. It slips around, but they sold it to the United States government for a national park. That was
the agreement. Yeah, So we were having kind of an informal outing there. It was just more of a meet and greet with a lot of people, but we were going to go looking around and everything. And we had gone out the previous night and I had experienced for the first time rock throwing, just some tiny pebbles being thrown on the hood of the car that I was actually leaning against at the time. I watched one of the pebbles hit the hood of the car and bounce up and actually hit me in the stomach
and fall back down on the hood of the car. That was pretty convincing. You know, I'm standing there staring into the woods. They're just on the other side of the vehicle, and I'm like thinking to myself, you know, well, what can throw a rock through the trees. I mean, it can't be a raccoon, it can't be a squirrel. And over the course of the night, we actually could see rocks flying over our heads and landing into the creek, splashing into the creek behind us. It was
a really amazing thing. But that second night, we were in the parking lot of a nature center that's ran by the park rangers there. It's just kind of a rock building that tourists can go to and buy postcards and look at some different animals on display. You know, nothing like a zoo or anything like that, but they have a few live animals, like some rattlesnakes
and stuff. And this parking lot has some trash cans sitting in a center medium of it, and big Foot has been seen digging in those trash cans, so we thought that would be a good spot to go. And one of the people there had a gin three night vision scope at the time, and now back then, this is two thousand and two, if you had a GIN three night scope, that was similar to having like top of the
line flear today. I mean, everybody wanted a chance to take Gin three night vision out into the field, and we were fortunate enough that one of our members had one. The party that I was with was kind of spread out all over the place, and I had hung back with this other guy that had the night vision scope. There was a couple other people there, I believed myself him and two ladies at the time, and he was kind of standing off at the edge of the parking lot by the tree line.
And at the edge of the parking lot there there was about a fifteen foot area kind of grass that they kept cut back and everything before the tree line started and then it was just thick woods. And he called me over to him and he said, hey, look through this and tell me what you
see. And I pull the night vision scope up and he kind of directs me where to look, and I see, eyeshine, these two bright glowing eyes in the night vision and I'm looking and I'm trying to focus in on it and figure out exactly what I'm looking at you know, my mind's going through the roll of ducks. Is this a deer? Is it a bear. I've never heard of bear in Oklahoma, but maybe we have some down here. I'm not really familiar with this area. And I'm looking and I
noticed that surrounding the eyes that are looking at me is a face. Not an animal, but an actual face. And I can see from about the middle of the forehead down to just below the bottom lip. It's in between these two branches. The face was covered in hair, like just a human man if that you grow your facial hair out, you know, and don't shave. It had that sort of hair pattern on the cheeks and the beard line and everything. But one of the distinct things about it that really stood
out to me was the brow ridge. It was very thick in the middle and kind of tapered off towards the sides. Not like drawings or movie depictions of Bigfoot. It wasn't like a separated brow ridge. It was all one solid piece, and the hairline actually started where our eyebrows would start. There wasn't a visible forehead bare of skin, you know, It was just all hair covered, and the hair pattern kind of grew back over the top of
the head. From what I could tell, I couldn't see if it was a conical shaped head or a rounded head, but it had the appearance of if you remember the old Universal Monsters Wolfman Lawn Cheney's wolf Man. The hair pattern was similar to that kind of afro wish, not what I was expecting a bigfoot to look like. So this whole time, like, I'm taking this all in, trying to see as much detail as possible, but I'm still just confused us as to what I'm even looking at. The eyes were
larger than a human. Like I said, they were reflecting the ambient line. I guess in the night vision. They're extremely bright. They're kind of almond shaped. I didn't see any ears or anything. The jaw line was very prominent and very broad. It was actually the bottom of the jaw stuck out wider than the temples on the sides of the head. The nose bridge was very thin and kind of scooped, and then there was a squatty, flat nose slightly upturned, not so much as like a primate like an ape,
but not facing downward like a human completely. The nostrils were really broad, looking compared to a human. The top lip was very thin, thinner than the bottom lip. And one of the main features that just really grabbed my attention was it looked like it had an underbiked like the bottom jaw stuck out farther than what it should have. It seemed the hair on the face was thinner, and then it just gradually got thicker and thicker and flowed into
a beard. And that's really all I could see. Well, I pulled down the night vision scope because at this point, I'm kind of freaking out a little. I can't believe I'm actually seeing this. I know that we're not like nobody knew we were going here, nobody could have gone there and hoaxed it or anything. Everybody was accounted for, and it's just blowing my mind. And I pulled the night vision scope down and I look at the guy and I was like, oh my god, that's a face. Is
that one of them? And I pulled the night vision scope back up to look at it some more, and he's saying, I saw a face too, That's what I was seeing. And whenever I look back to where the face had been, it's gone. And the spot where I had seen the face between the two branches. The bottom branch was now closer to the top branch, so I think it had been like holding the branch down or something
a little bit, and was like peeking through the branches at us. And then whenever I looked away, it took the opportunity and let go of the branch and took off. But I never heard anything running off through the woods or anything else. But that night. Previous to that, we had heard
some things walking around in the woods. We had smelled a weird musky skunk type smell in the area a couple of times, and we had done not myself, but other people I had with had actually done some vocalizations trying to draw these things in. So whenever you put all those pieces together, and I mean I know where a fact what I saw, the picture is still ingrained in my mind to this day, and it's been over twenty years. And that was it. There was no turning back after that. Yeah,
that's an understatement. Look how deep you are into all this now? Oh yeah, yeah, still just as passionate about it as I was back then. Well that's pretty evident, No, I believe you in the dictionary mad Next to the words skeptical. There shouldn't be any words. There should just be a picture of you. And with that in mind, what do you think was really throwing those stones at you before you saw that sasquatch through the fleer or did you already believe in their existence before that? You know,
at that point, I wasn't totally on board with the idea. I didn't really know if I could believe these people are not it felt like I could, and like I said, they all seem very down to earth and very genuine. They were older people, they weren't young people, and typically it's your younger people that make up stories. Not always the case. Obviously,
We're definitely in a field where older people makeup stories too. But I've been raised by my great grandparents actually, and they were country folks, and so I related to these people very easily. It was easy for me to talk to them. It was easy for me to shut my mouth and just listen and absorb their knowledge and everything. But I had only known them for maybe about a year or so at that point, so I didn't really know what to think. You know, I wasn't just going to take their word for
it. So whenever the rock throwing started. I mean, that whole weekend, even if I hadn't had the sighting, was still very impactful. And with the rock throwing, I mean, there's a few possibilities, you know, maybe a squirrel dropped one from overhead in the trees, or maybe a bird flew over and dropped it. You know, crows and things like that will sometimes pick up shining rocks and everything, But this was just continuous, and I knew from the trajectory of that rock hitting the hood of the car.
I mean, I saw it. The car itself was like an old Lincoln, if I remember right, one of those big, old boxy boats, and it was kind of a light blue in color. And so even at night, this rock silhouetted against the hood of the car was easy to see. And it wasn't thrown hard or anything. And I assumed that whatever through it had to have been fairly close, because I saw it hit the
car. It landed on the hood maybe a foot away from me, and bounced up and just hit my stomach and fell right back down on the hood and I picked it up. And I was standing there with somebody else at the time who observed it too, and I was like, did you see that? And he just kind of grinned. Now, this guy's from the area. He had his first sighting years previous to that inside same park, so it wasn't anything big for him. That was an old hat. But
to me, it was just mind blowing. And with all the rocks being thrown and hearing them hit the creek and seeing them in the sky flying over our heads and everything, the only conclusion I came up with is it would have to be either a big foot or a person. It's got to be one or the other. And from that point you have to decide, Okay, well, what are the chances that a person. It's nobody from our group, and I'm not the only one seeing it. Everybody's seen it,
and I'm not the one, you know, freaking out alone. Everybody's really excited about these rocks being thrown, so it didn't seem like anybody with me was in on it. So that would mean somebody else would have to be responsible. So they would have had to have a park like five miles away and walk through the woods in the dark to get to where we were and know where we were inside the wooded area, just to come out there with
a bunch of rocks and start throwing them at us. I mean, I just don't think the odds of that being the case are very good at that point. So, you know, that one just really puzzled me. It left me scratching my head, and it definitely made me think, you know what, there's there's something to this, something's going on. And then that following night, you know, I had that siding through the night vision scope
and that just confirmed everything. For you to go so far in such a short period of time talking about being a skeptic toa next thing, you know, you're being pelted with stones, and later that night you have a full blown siding, your head had to be spinning. Oh yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean the processing of trying to understand and just really comprehend everything. I mean, my mind just started racing with thoughts.
If this is out there, then what else is out there? Well, obviously if I can go out and look for bigfoot coming from Tulse, Oklahoma, then the government has to know about these things. You know, other people have to know about these things. All these people that say that they've seen them, at least some of them have to be telling the truth.
I'm certainly not the one person in the world that's seen one, but the idea that that's what I was out there looking for, and you know, it's confirming all these other stories that I'm hearing from the people that I'm with. It was quite a bit to take from a mental aspect, for sure, But you know, I never let go of the skepticism. I'm still skeptical to this day. I'm very skeptical about people's stories, about their claims, about their reports, about videos, photographs, evidence of any kind.
I still just pay it like I would have any other time back then, is just I let the evidence lead and see where it goes. Has your skepticism ever come back to bite you in the butt due to the fact that you're a podcast host? Oh sure, sure absolutely. For years, part of the podcast approach that I had was just sticking with people that shared the same opinions and beliefs I did at the time, and back then that was strictly flesh and blood. I was under the firm opinion that these things
have no types of paranormal abilities. People who say that are either lying or mistaken, and I just shut the door on it. Now, fast forward a few years, quite a few years, I started thinking about things and I was like, well, you know, I grew up having paranormal experiences. That's basically why I'm here to begin with. In the big Foot world, I've seen things that I can't explain, that have no scientific explanation that
nobody has any reason to believe me. I wouldn't expect anybody to believe me, So why am I shutting the door on other people that are saying things that I just haven't experienced myself. I don't think that's being fair to them, and it's not being fair to the actual research process, the investigation process
trying to answer these questions about this being whatever it is. So I kind of changed my approach and I started opening the door to anybody, regardless of what their story was, and just letting them have a platform to share their experiences and everything. I'm definitely, i would say, more open minded than I used to be. Whenever it comes to those sorts of things. I'm not going to discount it or just credited out the gate because I didn't experience
it. But I still catch myself from time to time putting those skeptical goggles on whenever I'm hearing stuff, you know, and I have a problem personally being kind of reactive to things. I've got a knee jerk reaction sometimes, and I need to back off and take a breather and process things a little bit and look at them again before I just go with my first instincts and evaluation of things. Changing your approach to all this it couldn't have been easy.
So I think you deserve a lot of credit for doing that. I think that was a wise move. Well, I appreciate that. Oh you're welcome just stating the like it is. How do you think they're able to throw rocks with what could be almost considered to be pure normal accuracy? You know, that's something that I've actually thought about quite a bit, not just the accurates. I mean, I grew up playing in the woods, and you try throwing a rock through the trees. It just doesn't work. You
can't throw stuff through heavy cover. You can't. You know, even growing up around people that hunted and everything, you know, you don't shoot through cover. You don't shoot through brush because even bullets will ricochet off the tree limb. So how does something pick up a rock and throw it through the air and not hit you, but come close enough that you know there is actually This made me think of a situation where I wasn't there, but a
lady I knew that was part of this group, Vicky. They were, I want to say, in Alabama at the time, on an outing, and they are all kind of sitting around this camp fire at base camp. The camp itself, the fire pit and everything was on top of this hill and there's a big steep drop off that goes down to this river, and it's all completely foed and they're all sitting there around the fire, and all of a sudden, this rock about the size of a golf ball comes whizzing
through the air from the drop down by the river. So whatever through the rock was down below their line of sight, and this rock zinged you could hear it coming through the air, she said, and hit the tree right behind her, right above her head and fell to the ground, and she showed me the rock. She took the rock home with her, but it had some serious force and some serious accuracy. I don't have an explanation for
how they do it. I don't even have an explanation. Like I said, the rock that hit the car in front of me was probably about the size of a marble. So how does something you know that. I know they're not born ten feet tall or anything, but typically we envisioned them as a very large creature. And how does something with those large hands like that have the manual dexterity to pick up a tiny pebble like that and throw it
with that kind of accuracy. Everything about these things create more questions than answers. The rock throwing and their accuracy is just another one of those questions that I don't have an answer for. It is really hard to figure out. I don't care how much you practice throwing baseballs, footballs, stones, something with a shape that's not an even shape, that just makes it even more difficult to throw that item accurately. I don't care how much time you spend
practicing throwing those items to be as accurate as possible. There is a limit how accurate you're going to be on a reliable basis. Some people are just born being able to throw balls and objects with a lot of accuracy. Other people aren't. But for sasquatch to be able to cons instantly time and time out through whatever it is they pick up, so accurately. It just it just doesn't make sense at all, not at all. There was actually a
situation where a group of researchers. Now I can't vouch for these people. Again, I wasn't there. This isn't the group of people that I was associated with, But quite a while back, they had a situation where they documented while they were out in the field something throwing these It was grass. It was like tall weeds that had been pulled out of the ground and kind of bundled up, almost nodded, and thrown at them while they were out
there observing. I don't know if they had night vision or if they actually saw something throwing the things, but they had these basically grass knots that were about, you know, the size of a lemon, or so we'll say. And they said that the claim was that these had been thrown at them at night. And I saw pictures of them, and the first thing that
crossed my mind is, you know, grass doesn't weigh anything. How did something throw knotted up grass that far because it would have had to have been out of their range of sight in the dark at least, so fifteen twenty feet. I don't remember exactly how far away they said it was, but it was quite a distance, And I was just thinking about you know, if you go out there and pull a weed out of the ground and throw it as hard as you can, you know it might go five feet or
so. It's most likely you're just going to land at your feet. But if they were telling the truth and their documentation was correct, again, how did these things throw that grass that far? Yeah, it just doesn't make sense at all. You believe there's a good reason behind all the sasquatch activity in the Sulfur erie where you had that first size, Matt, What do
you think that reason is? You know, I think these things are attracted to certain areas for various reasons, but in the Sulfur area specifically, like I was talking about the medicinal springs earlier, these springs, there's a few of them in the park even that have signs displayed that list out all the different minerals that are found in that specific spring and the amounts of the minerals
and everything. And over the years, I've found that Bigfoot seems to hang out areas where there's large amounts of mineral deposits and other minerals constantly being churned up to the surface from underground a lot of times. You know, you find this in springs, You also find it at the base of mountains. You also find it at strip mining pits and things like that. So I
think that it's one of the reasons. I think another reason is there are multiple springs in the area that run constantly year round, so there's multiple water sources there. I think another aspect of it has a lot to do with the tourism. These things were most likely there long before we were, and in this particular area, you've got this park that's protected from outsiders, a huge amount of forests, and then you have tourist season that comes in where
you have just this fluctuation of people coming in. I mean, I believe they have something like during the summer over a million visitors after the whole season is said and done with. And these campers usually come there from out of town, not real familiar with the outdoors, and it provides them an excellent opportunity to people watch, to observe us. I think we're a huge form of entertainment for them. It also provides them a lot of trash opportunities,
free meals, whatever else they do. With the trash. Maybe they're just interested in digging through it and seeing what's there. But there's just so many reports in that park of them digging through trash cans and being seen digging through trash cans. So I think it's just a location where they've gotten used to being around people and seeing people, so they're more brazen and they don't worry about staying concealed as much as they normally would. And then you've got the
water and the minerals and everything along with the free meal opportunity. So I think it's just a collection of a bunch of different reasons in that area. Yeah, for the reasons you laid out, it does make good sense if they would call that home because not only does the place have a lot of resources in the way of food, animals, vegetation, and then it's got
moving water, but it's got those minerals as well. They can't spray deep woods off on their bodies, so that's a huge advantage to people to use that salt from the water to accomplish the same goal. So yeah, thats actually whenever I go camping down there, we would actually drink from some of the springs that were safe to drink out of, and it worked as a natural insect repellent for us that mosquitoes and ticks and stuff would leave us alone.
And I'm sure that would be a great benefit for them as well. You know, yeah, just imagine all that here and you don't get to go home and sit on the couch where there aren't ticks and fleas and other bugs like that. So yeah, it just makes sense they're going to do what they can to solve that problem. Your first sighting shook you up quite a bit, in your opinion, is a more frightening to have a sighting through a fleer or with the naked eye? I think with the naked eye.
I'm a firm believer that if you're looking through a viewfinder of some kind that, for some reason, that creates a separation psychologically. It's kind of like whether you're looking through a camcorder or looking at your phone as you're trying to video something, or looking through a flair or a night vision scope or
something like that. I think it creates this mental separation where it feels like you're just observing it and you're not actually participating in the event itself, which is totally false, because we know you are whenever it comes to fleaar, even more so because the flair changes the image. You know, you're just seeing the heat signatures, and so it's it again, feels like you're separated. You're just watching something like you're sitting there watching something on TV or something.
I think seeing it with your own two eyes would be far more traumatic, depending on the situation, and have a much greater impact on the individual at the time than viewing it through fleaar or any other kind of device. Of course, seeing with your own two eyes that does give you a lot
more information about what you're looking at. But seeing a sasquatch through a fleer, like you said, that does create a sense of separation, but also there's kind of a lack of information at the same time, and sometimes knowing more is actually better than knowing less. So that's all's kind of unsettled, unsure which way you felt about that. Yeah, it also gives you an opportunity though, to say, well, I think it was, but I'm not sure it looked like one, but I don't think it was, or
it might not have been. So you do have that exit in place if you want to take it. Unless you're a researcher, then of course every time it's a big boot. Isn't it funny though, how many researchers, when they beat the bushes for years upon years, when they finally have that first sighting, the first thing they want to do is just run and get out of there. Yeah, yeah, I think that's just no matter how you plan it out, you know, everything always looks good on paper.
I think Mike Tyson said something along the lines of everybody's got a plan until they get hit in the face. And that's sort of what a big foot sighting does, you know, hit you in the face that it does. These guys, in so many ways looks so similar to us. What do you think it is about seeing them that causes so many eyewitnesses to be so rattled? You know, I don't know. You hear so many varying claims and descriptions. You know, if you go by what I saw through the
night vision scope that night, it looked. Everybody always wants to know, well, what do you think they are? And you're right, they do look like another human, But at the same time they don't look quite human, or at least that one didn't. And then I've heard people talk about seeing them and that if you shaved it and put clothes on it, you
could walk it down Main Street and nobody blink an eye. There's one being seen at a casino in Oklahoma in the parking lot area, and there's a pretty famous casino story with Bigfoot in Oklahoma, and this was the same casino.
But the casino video that everybody hears about is just one event. There's been many sightings in that parking lot and some of the people saw one there for a while that they said looked handsome, if you can imagine that, And that's one I would like to take a look at to see, because I can't fathom the idea of one of these things looking handsome to somebody.
But you know, whenever you're seeing these things and just encountering them in general, even without seeing them, you start to realize that these things are acting a lot like people. I mean, they're very human in their behavior, way more so human acting and appearing than an animal. And I think that
messes with us. You know, as humans, we always have that huge human ego that goes with it. You know, we're at the top of the mountain, we're special we're different than everything else, and then we see something else out there that makes us realize that, like, well, oh wait, you know we're not the only ones. There's something else out here on two lugs that's extremely intelligent and walking up right. But I think it
messes with us and we don't know how to process it. It really does make you wonder how many times people have seen a sasquatch and just mistook it for a person out there in the woods. Yeah, for sure. I mean that would be your first instinct, though, especially a person who's not into Bigfoot or a non believer, and they find themselves in an area where Bigfoot or at say, you know, it's a family camping for the weekend, or you know whatever, maybe it's just somebody going on a nature hike.
If they see one, they're probably just gonna think, oh, well, that's probably just another camper or another hiker, or a homeless person living in the woods. There's some old hermit out here. You're not gonna go to Bigfoot as your first thought unless you get a really good look at it enough to tell that whoa that is definitely not a person. But usually a
witness only gets a glimpse. You know, it's just a leading moment in time where you catch moving out of the corner of your eye and you might turn your head enough to see something disappear into the tree cover or whatever, and a lot of people would just automatically go to a person. You also hear a lot of people go directly to Oh, well, that must be a bear. It was probably just a bear. Well, the problem with that is, you know, bears don't usually walk around on two legs,
not as much as bigfoot does. And bears don't have shoulders, you know, it goes head and slopes straight down to their Torso a bigfoot has very distinct and broad shoulders, very much like a human, completely different shape than a bear. And I think from the time we're born with teddy bears and seeing bears on TV and cartoon bears and everything else, I think humans know
what bears look like. So it really surprises me whenever you see these news articles and you hear reports about people saying, well, it's probably just mistaken bears. They're probably just seeing bears, and I have to question, well, how many people are seeing what they think is a bear, but it's actually a big foot because that's just where their mind automatically goes. Well,
that it's a lot easier just to explain it away that way. A lot of these people, they'll say anything and do anything they can to poo poo the existence of these guys. So that's just a very easy way to explain it all way in my opinion, Oh for sure. For sure, it's
a very frustrating. One of the big reasons that I do what I do with my podcast, and as you know, you do the same thing, you know, providing that platform for people to share their story where people won't call them crazy or try to discredit them or tell them that they're wrong about
what they saw. Yes, a shame has to be that way when you consider the trauma so many of these people go through just by having the experience of seeing something out there that in their minds shouldn't exist, and then when they try to get help and reach out to people and talk about their experience, it's just explained away it was just a beer or your eyes were playing tricks on you, when in fact they clearly saw what they saw. Yes, just to shame, it has to be that way, Yeah, it
really is. I've recently made friends with some people in the UFO world, you know, the online UFO community, and they talk to a lot of experiencers and stuff in that community. And there's a lot of parallels between the Bigfoot world or the crypted world, and the UFO world and the paranormal world. We're actually all part of the same group, if we would realize it.
But in the UFO field, they actually do have a group of professionals, you know, therapists and doctors who actually talk to and help witnesses deal with their trauma. And trauma is a very big part of all of this. You're seeing something that's not supposed to exist, and because of that, you yourself feel crazy, and everybody around you makes you feel crazy. And I wish there was more compassion from outside the Bigfoot world, within the nonbeliever
sector, and within the community itself. I wish we did have professionals that could talk to some of these witnesses and help them work through some of their issues that they face, you know, from the trauma of having an encounter. I'm glad you brought light to the fact that not only is it a problem with people outside of the community when you have a sighting and reach out for help, but also people inside the community can also be a huge problem.
So it just really is awfully unfortunate. Of all the sightings and encounters you've had, mat which one is most memorable? Oh? Man, it actually wasn't a sighting as funny as that sound. I haven't had just a huge number of sightings or anything. I've had a few glimpses over a large amount of years. But there was one night in particular we were insult again,
and at this point I was pretty far into it. I had been researching for a while at this point, and we had set up camp in our same location that we always did, and we were waiting for other people
to arrive. Over the course of the weekend. It was myself and two other guys that lived there locally, and we turned in probably around oh I want to say it was around one thirty or so at night, and we had three lanterns propane leanards hanging from trees and on a lantern post, and we filled them up with fuel, turned them up and left them on because the people coming in from bound to state, we didn't know what time they were going to get there, and we didn't want them arriving in the dark
because they're gonna have to like set up their tent and all that. Well. I woke up at some point in the middle of the night, and it was one of those times whenever you wake up suddenly and you know that something's going on. You must have woken up to a sound or something, and you don't really know what's going on yet, but you know that you're awake for a reason. It was very sudden, and I thought that the people must have just gotten there or something and maybe shut a car door or
something, and that's why I'm awake. So I'm lame. They're listening. And I hear very soft footsteps on the pea gravel next to my tent. The whole campground where the tent sites are has this real small pea gravel, and you can, you know, hear crunching under your footsteps and something, I mean, I thought it was a person was walking very slowly right next to my tent. I was right there at the tent wall. It was just on the other side of my tent, maybe not even two feet away
from me. And it's walking very quietly, and it's walking from behind my tent down the side to the front of my tent. I had a big eight by twelve tent at the time. Then I heard another set of footsteps coming from the other side of my tent, but in front of the tent. So these two individuals are basically to meet with one another at the front corner of the tent. So I'm laying there listening because I'm just again thinking
it's the people and they're probably just walking around trying to be quiet. I'm still trying to wake up a little bit, and I hear the sound of my car handle snapping back down like somebody had lifted it up and let go of it. My car was parked maybe eight feet away from my tent, very close by, so at that point I'm thinking, oh my god, somebody's out there still in our stuff. So I kind of, like,
you know, sit up. And that's whenever I notice that there was no light, none of the lanterns were on, and I could hear whispering out in front of the tent. I could hear these people whispering. Well, I had a gun with me, just for own personal safety. I wasn't trying to shoot a big foot or anything like that, but I did have a firearm with me. So I got my firearm and I put my boots on as quietly as I could, and I sat there for a second, thinking, like, what am I gonna do? As soon as I hit
that zipper, They're gonna know I'm coming out all this tent. I'm not gonna go out here and fire my gun in the dark, even though I'm armed, I'm kind of scared. I'm not gonna lie. Well, I had this spotlight land on the floor next to me, so I decided to pick up the spotlight. I pointed towards the front of my tent, and I just flashed it a couple of times, just to let them know that somebody's awake. I do that, and I listen, and I don't hear
anything, nobody running off. Nothing. Well I started yelling, not really yelling, but you know, calling out my friend's name, Chad, trying to wake him up to let him know what's going on. Well, the other guy's name is also Chad, and he's a couple tents over. I end up waking him up instead, and I say, hey, meet me out front. He didn't ask any questions, he just said okay. So then I ends up the tent and come spilling out. I've got my spotlight
on, I've got my gun in my hand. I'm doing like the whole you know, shying the spotlight crossed over my arm with the hand holding the gun pointed, looking around. I don't see nothing. There's no movement, there's no sound, there nothing. It's just completely still out there. And I'm just like, what is going on? And I walk over to my car and I shined the spotlight through the window. Everything's just laying there and nothing's disturbed. Doors are still shut. Well. The other Chad says,
what's going on? I said, I heard somebody out here and they tried my car door. He starts shining his splashlight around. We're both walking around nothing, don't see anything, don't hear anything. And he says, are you sure? And I said, yeah, I'm sure. Look all the lanterns are off. So he goes and he starts checking the lanterns and sure enough, all three of them were turned off. They were turned to the off position, and he checked them. They all still have fuel in them.
I think he said about a quarter of the fuel was gone. So it had probably been like maybe two hours three hours since we had gone to bed. I'm not even sure of the time. Well, at that point, the other Chad wakes up and he's sitting up and I can see him, like the tent doors open and I can I'm looking at him, and he goes, did you check for tracks? And I'm like, well, no, I didn't check for tracks. You know, why would I check for tracks. It's people. They tried my car handle, he says,
check for tracks. So I'd go over by the side of the tent and I shine the spotlight down there, and vic there was tracks about I don't know, twelve thirteen inches long. You could see all five toes, a clear impression pressed down in the gravel. I don't know what kind of weight it would have taken to leave tracks in this gravel. I mean, walking around, you could see the gravel disturbing anything, but this would clear five toes. You could see where it walked on the side of my tent.
I thought, well, there was another one. I shined my light over there. There's another set of tracks, just like I had heard. And then the tracks went between my tent and the tent next to it. It stepped one time in between the tents and then was off on the other side, this would have been Like I said, my tent was eight by twelve, so it cleared eight feet in one full stride between the two tenths without making any sound or let me now, they just vanished. And that experience,
we actually did call a park ranger. The other Chad got on his phone. He called the park rangers office because before we saw the tracks, you know, I'm thinking people, So he's reporting it. The park ranger comes out. He walks in on foot. He parked his truck at the gate. He walks in on foot with no light or anything. Scared the crap out of us whenever he came up to the tent and he told us, I walked in. There's nobody here, there's no vehicles in the park
or anything. So the only possibility if it was people. They walked seven miles through the woods to get to our campsite and didn't use a flashlight, didn't take anything, they were barefoot, and then they left without making any sound. So that event right there, I mean, I firmly one percent believe it was bigfoot. I believe they somehow knew not only how to turn off the lanterns, but to do so to remain hidden so they didn't cash
shadows or anything and would have the advantage of the darkness. And that blew my mind. That took their intelligence level to a whole new area. Not only that, but the whispering back and forth to one another trying the car handle. It was hard for me to process all that, very hard. I didn't go back out into the woods for three months after that. I know there's hunters who have had crazy, crazy, aggressive encounters that have kept
them out of the woods forever. So I'm not trying to downplay what they went through or anything like that. I'm just saying, as an active researcher who was spending more time in the woods than they were at home at that time, I didn't go back out into the woods for three months because I was just too scared. I didn't understand what I was dealing with at that point. It changed my entire perspective on my research and what I thought about
these creatures. Yeah, it's all too easy to think that they're just normal beings out there that can do what a normal animal can do nothing more. But when you find out the extent of what they really can do, it's awfully unnerving. So I understand what made that experience more frightening than any of the other experiences you've had. The mad I'm kind of lost on that because you've had some pretty frightening ones. Yeah, I think I think it really
just had a lot to do with the lanterns being turned off. I have a hard time with the talking, the whispering back and forth and whenever they do things, anything they do that it's something that we do because I don't understand how they learn it, how they figure it out. Obviously, with the lanterns, they could have observed people turning them off over the years,
and so maybe they learn that. But language, being able to talk, having your own language, whatever it is, that's something that has to be taught. You know, there's rules to language, you know, the meaning of the words, the pronunciation of the words, how you put them together. All of that stuff, and the talking stuff involved with Bigfoot has always really bothered me because of all those factors, it completely puts them on a path. I mean, as humans, we think we know everything, and
I know that we don't. I know that we're not write about everything, but we have a pretty good understanding of a lot of things. And language is one of those things, and language isn't the first thing that pops up in a society. There are steps that you go through before you ever get to the language point as a group, which means if they have reached that
point, then they've already gone through all these other points. So that means there's society and culture and you know, all these other aspects to them to their existence that we don't know anything about at this point. That means if these things are responsible for the limb formations, for instance, that that's not just them twisting a tree or snapping a branch for a territorial marker. That
means these things are using that as a form of communication. It's an intricate language, and there's intricate meanings behind those things that we don't understand yet that we don't have the ability to translate yet. It means that they probably have some sort of religious belief, some sort of spirituality, not just self awareness, but defining themselves as individuals, having names for one another. The list goes on and on, and it would take a person a lot more intelligent
and knowledgeable than myself to explain it all. But all of that just really it made me reassess and rethink everything about them, and that was pretty disturbing. I mean, it's the difference between going out and having a standoff with a bear and living to tell about it, as opposed to going out in the woods and catching a bear talking to another bear. So I guess that's probably my best answer as to why it had that effect on me more so
than anything else. If we knew how far these guys were or are, a lot of us wouldn't even go back into the woods again. Quite possibly. So yeah, I'm sure they don't get nearly enough credit for how advanced they actually are. Like you said, Matt, you host a podcast called Bigfoot Crossroads Radio. What can you tell us about it and how to listen?
Well, Bigfoot Crossroads is pretty much eyewitnessed based. You know. I have people who have had encounters and experiences on and let them tell their story. It's mostly focused on them, you know. I do ask them a few questions and participate in the conversation. I like to keep it very laid back, very unstructured, and just kind of let the conversation go wherever it
goes. There's no certain amount of time or no number set of questions or anything like that, and I never know what questions I'm going to ask until i'm on there. Sometimes I'll make a few notes, but that's really it. I keep it pretty loose. It did start out as just bigfoot stuff, but because of my own personal experiences and my own interests into all different kinds of unexplained phenomenon, I've started having other people on talk about other things
besides bigfoot. Especially. I have found that a lot of people who have a bigfoot experience have experienced other things as well, and vice versa. Very seldom do you run across someone who's just had a big foot encounter and that's
it. They've never experienced anything else. Now, it does happen, not to say it doesn't, but for some reason, it seems like there's a lot of people out there that once the doors open on one thing, it's open for other things, and you find that they've had all these really fascinating experiences. So I'm kind of expanding out into those areas. But I'm still gonna stick, you know, with bigfoot is the main focus that's never going to go away, and I'm still going to keep it witness oriented and use
that as the Foundation, anybody that wants to listen to it. You can find it on pretty much every major podcast platform out there where you listen to podcasts at You can find it on YouTube, but the easiest thing is probably just to go to Bigfoot Crossroads dot com and you can find links to everything there. It's a great show. Well, I can't sleep at night. That's my go to. If you only knew how many nights, how many hours I've spent listening to your episodes. Yeah, I wouldn't do that if
you didn't do such a great job. I appreciate it, man, I appreciate it. And you're not too shabby yourself, sir. Well, thanks, I try. I try. You used to produce and host a show called Bigfoot Outlaw Radio as well. Those episodes are still available, But how can we listen to those episodes? Well, you know, I ended up archiving all those episodes and people call it a paywall. I call it a
members area. It's on the YouTube channel. I think it's like three dollars a month or something, and that gives you access to the entire archive a big Foot out Law Radio. I did that for a couple of reasons, mostly because the YouTube stuff. I was having problems with copyright strikes. Actually, a company's algorithm was picking up on some of the video loops I used on it, and it was just flagging all my videos and I was going to lose the channel possibly. So I worked it out with the company and
that didn't remain a problem for me or anything. I wasn't doing anything wrong, you know, it was just a computer software glitch problem. But I realized at that point, you know, well that's a little dangerous, and a lot of bought channels were actually stealing the content and uploading it on their
own YouTube channels. I'm sure you've experience into that yourself. So I talked to a Bear, Jim Grant, one of the other members of the Bigfoot Outlaws, and we discussed it and decide that it was probably just better to archive everything and put it where you had to access it through financial means, and that would prevent people from stealing the material and causing problems with the algorithm and give them a nice safe place. Like I said, I've got all
the past episodes up there going back. I've even uploaded some of the old blog talk shows from like two thousand and eight, i think but yeah, that's where you can find them. Just go to the YouTube channel and click on members and it should lead you through it. What I said about Bigfoot Crossroads holds true also for Bigfoot Outlaw. I'm a member of your podcast, and yeah, that's one of my go to us as well. When I'm in bed and can't sleep. Okay, well, let's put on another episode
of Bigfoot out Law and just listen to it. And it's always a great time. If I have a nickel for a time, I've listened to those episodes. I wouldn't be surprised if I've listened to some of them twenty thirty times. Oh wow, Yeah, I mean Baron Coombo were my co hosts on there. They kind of took the spotlight with that show. Two guys that have just, I can't say enough tremendous amounts of knowledge whenever it comes to this subject. And you know a lot of their techniques. I tried
myself on my own in the field and they paid off. So the guys know what they're talking about. I've never ran across anybody that's actually tried some of their techniques correctly at least and had anything but positive results from it.
Those guys got some great stories, years and years and years of experience, and we brought on a lot of great people, you know, the big Foot out Laws, Dan and Vicky and the whole gang over the years, and like I said, we were pretty much like a host knit family for a long long time and had a lot of experiences in just years and years of knowledge and stories to share, and all that stuff is available. Well, like I said, I can't say enough good things about that show either,
because I'm a regular, that's a fact. Well, Matt, I can't thank you enough for coming on and sharing those experiences with us. I really appreciate it. Oh yeah, thanks so much for having me on. Man, it's been a long time coming, and hopefully it won't be the last. Well I hope not. Yeah, I definitely hope to have you back on again. And for anyone listening who wants to be able to check out Matt's channel, Bigfoot Crossroads, and then of course that'll have a link
in it Bigfoot Outlaw. I'm going to put a link to that in the description of tonight's show. But having said that, Matt, thanks again so much and have a great night. That's it for another episode of big Foot Eyewitness Radio with Vic Candiff. If you've had a sasquatch encounter and would like to be a guest on the show, please go to Bigfoot eyewitness dot com and submit a report. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening, have a great night.