Attacked By Bigfoot! (Remastered)

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the show. As you know, last week we passed our five hundredth episode on the show, so I started looking back into the archives and wanted to remaster some of the interviews that I've done the show, and I went back to episode forty five that originally aired in July of twenty twenty one. It is Jeff Harding from Pine

Island Research. He came on and shared one of the most amazing experiences I'd ever heard, and then we had a fantastic conversation about some of his techniques that he uses while he's doing his research and some of the results that he had gotten. So what you're about to hear is the remastered version where I've went in and improved the IDEO. I've taken out all the unnecessary bits, and what you're left with is one fantastic encounter story

and one amazing interview. We're definitely gonna have to get Jeff back on for another round and talk about what kind of research he's doing and what's going on in his research area here in twenty twenty four. But for now, I know you guys are ready to get into it. Jeff's on the line, he's ready to go. All it's left for you to do is sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. All right, folks, I want to welcome Jeff to the show. Jeff comes to us from South Dakota.

He had an encounter up in Manitoba, Canada with a big foot some years ago. Welcome to the show.

to be leaving until the end of July. That last week and May and one of my good friends high school invited me to go with him and his younger brother who was fourteen, his dad, two of his uncles, and several of his cousins who were all in their upper twenties, so we were the youngest on the group. Where this happened was on Granville Lake as part of

the Churchill Reservoir System. It's about one hundred and ten miles north of Flinthlon Flynt Swan's right on that Saskatchewan Manitoba border, so we were twenty twenty five miles east on the Manitoba side of the border. We drove up there. It was a long guy from where we lived. It was a couple of days just driving to get there. The last sixty seventy mile was like diving on a tank trail. It was really remote where we went. We knew these guides up there that Paul's dad had worked

with before. There were three guides that were native to the area. They lived at this place here, so they were hunting guides on fishing guides. We had sixteen foot aluminum boats with twenty twenty five horse tiller motors. We were going to be up there fishing for eight days. The first few days, me and Paul, my buddy, and his younger brother, the three of us since we had

all grew up in the outdoors. Our parents are cup boat with us being on our own in the outdoor, so the three of us were in a boat by ourselves. The first three days. We'd go out and fish in the morning and they come back mid afternoon for a little while, and we'd go out in the evening before supper. While we were fishing. On that fourth day, Paul's brother had to take a leak, and he's one of these guys that can't go out of a boat. So we

pulled up on the shore of this little island. It was probably about I would say, maybe thirty acres in size, heavily wooded. It was a rise. There's a gravelly beach around the edge that we were on. The beach is about twenty creet wide to the edge of the tree line. We pulled the boat up on the shore and I walked over to what appeared to be a game trail. It was about maybe four or five foot wide, and it had rained that morning off and on. It was

pretty cool out the first week in June. It was cold up there, especially in the mornings, and then by the afternoon would be seventy degrees. But I'm looking up at this game trail and it rose steeply. When you looked up with the birch pine and poppers, it was like a corridor that you could see about fifteen twenty feet. Because of that dense cover, you couldn't see it further. It was intriguing to me because I grew up hunting. Most of my hunting was elk and deer and things

like that. But I'd been deep in the back country with my dad and other hunting guides before, so I really was afraid to walk up the trail. I guess I started walking up. It was steek. I'd say it was like a thirty degree incline. Just with tennis shoes on, it was hard to walk up, slipping on this greasy, high, neatly mud packed down the trail. I told those guys, I was gonna walk up here quick. I'd be right back. I walked up, probably about twenty yards up this thing.

It took me a little bit of time to get up it, because you'd walk five feet, slide a foot or two back, and then get your footing again. While I was walking up, I heard a really loud, cracking snap, and I really wasn't sure what carved that. It was still, we had no wind at all out to that day. The water was smooth as glass, and I thought, because I figured there's got to be a bear here, and I didn't want to walk up on a bear that time of year that may have come. So I just

stood still, and it came from my web side. I'm looking into the trees, and I'm confident that I'm going to see movement of what made this sound because it was closed. It felt like this thick pop and crack sound was close to me, within thirty yards probably. I'm looking to the left and stood there for almost two bold that scanning waiting to see a black bear. I turned my back and looked down the trail at the beach.

I can't see the beach. I'd to only see about ten to fifteen yards through this heavily forested trail, and because of stuff overhanging in the incline, you just can't see forward that bar. So I'm looking down the decline at the beach and I can't see the edge of that gravel. I was looking downward, and as I turned back up the trail, I'm staring at the knees of something standing right in front of me, like fifteen feet

in front of me. What was standing in front of me was in elevation, was probably three foot higher in elevation than I was. Because of the rise of the trail. I've seen the knees and it looked like I was looking at maybe the lower area of a black bear

that's standing on its hind leggies. I just about freaked out, but I thought so still, And as I looked up at the waist level, I seen two huge hands cradling underneath holding about a five to six foot section of birch tree trunk that had about a six inch diameter to it. So it wasn't light, and on one end there was a giant like a five gallon bucket size the root system with dirt. As I'm looking up for it's like standing under a basketball rim trying to look

straight up at it right. And as I rise up and look, as soon as I seen its face, was making eye contact with it. It took this birch tree that it was holding at its waist level and through it. The only way I can describe it is if you were to bounce past a basketball to me, how you're not winding your hand behind your body, You're just from your chest forward or you're waist forward pushing the ball later.

That's how it shook this birch trunk at me and hit it downward so that it hit me at waste level. I'll tell you what. It launched me completely off of my beat. I flew backwards, landed on my back. Now this branch is diagonally cross, my chest is under my right arm, and my west legs wrapped around and I'm sliding down this mud trail. As I'm looking back up, I could see its legs still. I watched it jump up and down twice as I'm falling down this trail.

I could feel the ground, the percussion of these two stumps on the ground. The only way I could describe it was if I walked up behind you and patted you on your back. I could feel the ground that way. As I was sliding down, I could feel it. It never screamed or made any noise as I slip down. I ended up at the edge of the gravel at Obomba's Hill. I had twisted my left ankle pretty badly. When I scurried up to my feet, I couldn't put my weight on my left foot. I'm yelling at Paul

and his brother getting the boat, getting the boat. They start panicking because I think they had heard the snap too. I think they thought that I was attacked by a bear. Jamie ran to the boat at fourteen years old. He's just in a panic mode and he gets in the boat and Paul grabs the nose of the boat and pushes it out into the water. I'm walking backwards across this gravel beach. I don't want to take my eyes off that game trail. I really felt like what I had just seen, if I turned my back to it

can come flying out and tackle me. I walked backwards, just limping on my leg I get to the water about a foot and half. He flopped myself over the gun well of the boat. I'm sitting in the middle seat. Jamie's back there trying to get this outboard and started, and it's not starting. Paul had been driving the boat for three days. Jamie never operated an outboard motor in his life. I don't know if he didn't pump up the ball or used the joke. He's pulled this thing

fifty times and it's not starting. He's probably got it flooded. At this point, Paul's freaking out. Jamie is frantically looking back at the motor. I'm sitting there looking at the game trailer because I can't take my eyes off it, but my body I can't say what I want to say. Maybe that's shock or the adrenaline dump of what happened. I just kept looking at my mouth taking and open, trying to process what I'd just seen. When I got back on the beach, I'm standing there immediately trying to

justify what had just happened. Some people that grew up with that reference of hearing stories or having relatives at head encounters. Maybe in that position, they'd look at this and say, Wow, I just saw a big fleet. But I didn't have that. I didn't have that history. So I'm going through a checklist of what I know. It wasn't. I'm telling myself it wasn't a black bear. It was the brown bear. It wasn't a motion. The more I can't come up with an explanation, the more I started

to panic. Finally, Paul had told Jamie. He said, you're not going to get that thing started. Let me get in the boat. I started yelling at Paul, just get in the boat, Just get in the boat. So Paul jumps in the boat and switches spots as Jamie and he starts pulling it. He's not having much luck. I looked down the shoreline from us, about seventy to eighty yards away. I see a black bear come running out of the tree line. It runs down onto the beach.

It's not even looking at us. It's walking our direction once it gets to the beach, but it's not looking at us. This thing's going to look up and see us here and stop and go the other way. But it just would not take its eyes off this tree line. It's walking towards us with its head ninety degrees rest, staring at the tree line like something had startled it and scared it out of this tree line. That's when I realized maybe this thing was getting by the same thing.

And it kept walking in our direction, and finally it looks up and sees us, and when it sees us, it starts picking up its pace. It just was odd some of this said. When I comment on this, it's in retrospect. It's not what I was thinking at the moment. In retrospect, I feel like this bear saw us and felt relieved, but it was making its way towards us. And Paul Junger brother was literally crying. He had tears in his eyes. He was freaking out, kept saying what happened,

what happened, what happened. I felt like, until we're out of here here, I didn't feel safe. The boat's only twenty feet on the edge of the beach. We're not blowing anywhere. There's no wind that we can't get a motor started. Now that we got this bear getting closer, so I told Jamie, I said, we had caught some northern four or five pound northern pike that morning that we had on a stringer. I told Jami, I should

get world fish off the string or hurry up. Jamie grabbed the stringer and got a fish off, threw it up on the shore. Enough bear walked right up. He's only twenty five feet from the front of our boat. That's probably two years old, and it reaches down. That's why I realized it's missing. It's right paw. It's not a recent injury. It looks like maybe it was caught in a trap at some point. Right at the wrist.

It grabs this fairsh pinches it against its wrist, lifts it up and bites the head off and stairs back. Looked at the trees as it chomps his head three or four times and swallows it. It drops that finish and takes off in a sprint. I didn't even know bear could move that sass back in the direction that it came from, like it was getting out of it. Paul gets his motor started. I should get out of here. We got to get out of here, because whatever made the bear runaway was what had thrown this log at

me on this trail. I just knew that it was still here, so we backed the boat up reversed just backing away from the island. We back out till we're about eighty two one hundred yards out. As we're watching the shore, we watched this thing through the log. We watched the big foot walk right out onto the beach and probably three strides that covered the treeline to the water's edge. When I say it bent over and picked up a stish, I don't mean like me or you would.

If I was to pick something like that up, I'd pop down on one knee almost to grab it, and then you get yourself up. This thing just tilted its shoulders at forty five degrees and lowered itself down like an elevator, grabbed it in its right hand, and just stood straight back up and held it right in front of its chest. It's just staring at us for ten seconds, just staring at the boat. Even though we were eighty two hundred yards away. It was mostly cloudy, It wasn't

direct sunlight anywhere. There wasn't glare you can see the Claire's day. Especially after just watching this bear for three minutes, we knew that we weren't looking at a bear. It stared at us after about ten fifteen seconds, turned around with a fish and walked right back into the tree. The whole time that this thing, from the moment it walked out from the trees on the beach through a moment I walked away. Paul and Jamie are just yelling, what is that? What is that? What is that? I

just felt like I was frozen in shock. I never said a word. I'm just watching, Holy crap, this is what through the logger. I didn't just imagine that I was attacked by them. It was about nine nine and a half foot tall. It wasn't standing on the beach.

It was going to open, so I couldn't really gauge its height by much, but I could tell that it was extremely tall, and by what I was standing in front of on the trail, even considering the incline and it was on above me, it was pulled something that when I looked up and seated and look as soon as I saw it space. I got to see its space for about half a second before through that log and hit me at waist level. We sat in the

boat and kept backing away further and further. Paul said, is that what was on the trail that made the sound That's when I told them what happened. This thing threw a log at me, hit me in the hip. My ankle twisted, and as I'm telling them that, I'm thinking, my ankle really doesn't hurt right now. I took my shoe off, pulled my sock off, was looking at it. I didn't really have any pain in my ankle at all. This thing hurt so bad I couldn't put half my

weight on it. I had trouble pulling myself over the edge of the boat because of how much it was hurting. I told him what happened. I told him how I'd injured my ankle. Paul said, I knew your ankle was hurt because you couldn't walk. He said, I kept thinking you were going to fall over. I was whold the front of the boat, yelling. Yet you grew up, and he said, I couldn't figure out why you weren't moving back, and I could tell you were limping and you were

walking backwards and sideways. I said, I twisted my ankle when I fell down. As we're in the boat, we're talking about what had happened, what we just saw. We all came to the conclusion that we had seen a bigfoot just after I had went through the whole verbal checklist with them again, I know that wasn't a bear. I know what wasn't standing in front of me. When it walked on the beach. It was confirmation that I didn't imagine this thing. I saw it from ten fifteen

feet away. So at this point, Jamie is tears in his eyes, out loud. He's whimpering and crying. He's scared, really scared, even though we're not in any danger in the boat. He just could not get over what we'd just seen, what had happened. My friend Paul all through high school, he was happy to lucky. He had a joke for everything. He's always laughing at them for him to just be quiet. He just doesn't know what to say. The whole time is just I can't believe this. I

can't believe this is happening. I can't believe we just saw that. So we started talking about let's go back. We were quite a ways away from this guide camp. Understand, this is so remote. We haven't seen another boat all day. Even in the three days, we hadn't seen another boat other than the guys we met from his family that went with us. So I said, let's go back to the guide camp. Paul said, we got to figure out what we're doing to tell everybody. I said, we're just

going to go tell your dad. He said, no, they're not going to believe us, Jeff. They're just going to back like we're all in fine. I said, is the son of a hunting guide? Myself? I felt if my dad was here, maybe I could tell him about what happened. But the more we fat in the boat, the more it decurred to me that I don't know, it seems like a good idea up front, but how long would I have to live for him to look at me

and just wonder if I'm crazy? You know? And I just couldn't figure out how he would look at me and give me the same credibility even as his son. I started to get where Paul was coming from, where he was feeling like everybody's I ma in front of him. All of his older cousins are going to look at us think we're idiots. So when we eventually got back to the dock, actually we stopped and we fished for another hour or two. We were just trying to put off having to go back and be around somebody that

we felt like we'd have to tell it to. As we were fishing for a couple hours, we came to an agreement, the three of us that we were just gonna not tell me. But when we went back, understanding we're the youngest of the party. Every day midday when we'd go back, we're the ones that are jumping out of the boat telling the war stories about we caught this,

we caught that we did. We get out of the boat and we're standing on the dock and we're just quiet, and everybody else is talking about they did that morning. I'm a pretty talkative guy. I didn't say a word for the ten minutes we stood there around everybody. These three guides were out there too. As everybody walked away from the dock, one of the guides was staring at me. I didn't really know him that well. I'd met him and had little conversations with them while we were there

for the first few days. But he walked up to me and said, are you okay. It just seemed like a strange question because I didn't feel like I was giving off any vibe that I was injured or heard or anything, and I said, why do you ask me? He says, you just seem like you're stressed out or and shocked right now. So I told him something happened to us this morning, and I'm still trying to process

this in my head. And he goes, did you see something that you're having a hard time with or did you witness something I did on a game trail on a little aisle and we were way up on the north end of the lake. I didn't tell him what happened. I just said I had experience out there that I'm having a hard time figuring out. He said, I would like to show you something. He walks me over by this boat house, like a shed that looked like it

was about one hundred years old. Behind this thing, there's a sixteen foot aluminum boat lying upside down in the dirt with a tarp over it. He pulls the tarp off and the whole starboard side of this thing is caved in. The whole side of the boat looks like you hit it with a car. I said, what happened there? And he says, I was guiding a moose hunter. My client had shot a moose on the shore of a little island on the north end of the lake. Now there's about ten or twelve islands on this lake, Okay,

He say, I was on an island. It's not like a lot of lakes where there's only one or two islands. There's a lot of islands. He says. After he shot it, we took pictures with it. It was lying where twenty thirty feet in the water dead. It was right on the edge of the tree line. He had brought the client back to the camp, and he went back to

skin it and quarter it out himself. While he was there, he said he had an experience and was attacked the skin that's loose, and said, I had one of the hind quarters of the bus in the boat, and I was working on the other quarters of the boat, and this thing ran up and caved in the side of the boat. Just started kneeing it with its knees and destroyed their boat. The crinkled Reynolds wrap on that side and grabbed that hindquarter, threw it over its shoulder and

walked away. And I said, what did you do? He says. I called my other two guides and told them that I needed their help. They came out in two separate boats. He said he was waiting for them. He said, I intended to tell them what happened, but when they got there, he told them that a cow moose had charged the boat and just caved it in, which typically is what a cow moose would do if you shot a non

legal bull. I would suppose because moose stayed with the cow for three years before they leave, those cows are very protected. But this was a mature moose's five six year old moose that they shot. He said, I don't know if they believe me. When they were packing the meat into one of their boats, they realized I was missing be hindquarter. Eventually they started asking me questions about what really happened. I said, did you tell him? And he says, I'm going to tell you what He says.

There isn't going to be much good that's ever going to come from sharing what happened if something like this happened to you, because even people who are close to you, unless they have had an experience, they aren't going to get it right. As much as they want to believe you, he says, I don't think people can process this. So my advice you would be tried to enjoy your next four days. I looked down at my shirt and seen I had blood on the bottom of my shirt by

my left hip. He said, are you injured? I said, I had trained my ankle really bad, but it doesn't hurt anymore. He said, we're bleeding. That's when I looked down. I was wearing sweatpants. I pulled them down and could see that my left hip was great mouth the size of your handprint. It was just straight down my hip where this log had hit me. When I lifted up my shirt, it looked like Mike Tyson punched me in the stomach twice. The left and right sides of my

abdominal were already turn black and blue. He says, do you think something is broken? I said no. He checked me out well bit and said, I think you're going to be okay. I told him what was standing in front of me, threw a log at me and hit me. He didn't have a doubt in his mind. I was reluctant to tell him that detail. He said, what island did this happen on? On the map we had, there was a larger island to the east. On the map, it said the name of that island? It said Patten Island.

The little one on this map that we had in our boat doesn't have a name, So I just told him it was on Patten Island, thinking at least he'd understand where we were on the lake. He looked at me and said, yeah, my expansion is near there, but it was on the island west of Patten Island. That's my heart just saw that one, he said, I this could be the exact same thing that did this to the boat that's in front of me. I never told Paul that I had talked to the guide or about

the conversation I had with the guide. We just tried to finish out our next few days of fishing. Eventually went home and I went into the Army. I worked hard at not trying to come up with more answers, just to go dumb to the whole encounter. Paul's family owns a business that I go into about once a year. I'll pop in there and see Paul. Even to this day,

I'm fifty three years old. The last few years I've seen it, I remember about three years ago I said, no one, do you remember that fishing trip that we were on in Canada? And he says, yeah, and I says, you ever think about that much? And he says, I do my best to never think about that. That's when I realized he probably never did tell his dad or anybody else about it. When I asked him about it. His mom was working there, one of his uncles works for the business. He was on the other side of

the business. You can just tell Paul just did not want to talk about it. Yeah, I think that happens to a lot of people. I think they have those encounters. You go one of two ways.

this environment that I'm in it's different. This isn't something I imagine. This isn't something that I've just read about. In the last few years. I've found some groups on Facebook that I've read different encounters. What there's almost the whole BFR library reading about encounters. These people that have these encounters, they know what they saw. A lot of them a little sketchy because they see it come a

distance or whatever. But these people that have found themselves, like I were year, fifteen feet away from something that you've never seen before. You can't go out into the woods or anywhere without seeing the environment around you so much differently.

it was. When I looked up the phenei's face, Even though it was just for a moment, it was like a snapshot that was ingrained there. I can still see it. Its skin around its eyes and nose was very dark. The hair that was on it was a dark chocolatey colored, almost an auburn hue to it. Its nose wasn't really flattened out like you would think an ape would be with gigantic nostrils. It was upward turned on the bottom.

It wasn't like tea spoon sized nostrils flaring out. It looked like it had human elements to its nose and even its eyes. Was interesting because its mouth, the top lip was very tight to its teeth. If you were the grand really big right now, how tight your lip as to your teeth? Top whep looked straight as an arrow, but its bottom lip was curved open, sagging down like if yaw was half open, and its bottom lip was

hanging board almost like. I told a research buddy of mine that it looked like when a bear is trying to wind you. They throw their lip open a little bit, like they're trying to scoop air up to their nose. Its mouth hung open as it looked at me. It didn't have an aggressive look. It didn't look like something that would be attacking you. But it definitely didn't appreciate that I had made that eye contact with it, because I didn't stand there for a moment as I looked

up its body. As soon as my eyes laying outside the bloom, it went off. I don't know why. It didn't make vocalizations, and you hear people say, oh, it yelled at me, or it whooped at me, or whatever. The only audible thing I heard from it was as it throw this log, it was like, oh, like that, like it was exhaling hard as it just cost this log downward at my waist. As far as the characteristics, I can remember, and I often remember when it was on the beach as it held its arm out to

its side. When it went down to pick this fish up. You can see the hair hang down off its arm. It looks like when you see leather coats that have fringe that hang off of them from the seventies and eighties. Its hair just hung down. It had been eight inches or longer, just as it draped off of its arm. But there was one area where it looked madded There were areas on its legs that looked madded down. Their hair didn't look it was a flowing look to it. The only thing I can think is it was so

wet and it had been raining. Maybe parts of its fur was wet matted down because of that.

was it? This? Was it that? As I'm like sliding down the trail and on the beach, I just knew immediately that because the girth of it, by this thing was gigantic, its fr was bigger than my waist. As I looked upward, the width it is that it's hit all the way through as the midsection all the way to its shoulders. There is no hour glass to it, just like extremely wide. As I'm looking up its body mastimation for weight. I'm not a big brown bear hunter.

I haven't shot an eight or nine foot to Drizzly or Ben in front of one and said, oh, I know that weighs nine hundred pounds or eleven hundred pounds I don't really have a lot to draw off of that, but I can tell you that because of its side that you told me that the thing was over a thousand pounds. If that was over another i'd bet older. Yeah.

to ask that question. Your encounter is fascinating because as many encounter stories as I've taken, I've never talked to anybody who's had such an aggressive encounter where you were actually injured. This thing literally threw something at you and

hit you from ten to fifteen feet away. In retrospect, I know it's obviously speculation do you think it was the eye contact that you made that pissed this thing off to the point where it threw this log or do you think it was more of a reactionary thing. What is your thoughts on the aggressive behavior.

was that it was on an island. I think that really plays a factor here, because I think there's a good chance that had that's been the shore of the main land, this thing simply would have retreated back into the wilderness and never had a compensation. But for whatever reason, whether it uses this island as a hunting ground or whether it ties to habitate there all the time, it not like it had a lot of places it could run to. It's a fairly small island, like I say,

thirty acres. If you wind up, poor guys at fifty sixty feet apart and just did a deer drive from one end of it to the other. What would it do. It couldn't go anywhere. It's going to end up on the far and shoreline to whether it's able to swim or whatnot. It's going to be vulnerable because of how small this island was, So that fight or flight type choice that it has to make. I think more often than not, Bigfoot will make the flight choice rather than

the fight choice. If that's a viable option, I believe they'll always choose that, not even let you know it was there until you leave. If you don't leave, then maybe it will audibly try to scare you away. I think when it had a choice, that it could audibly either try to taste me away that way, or it could simply just make it self seen. Right, So it stepped out on the trail, and it's hold in this log probably felt like I'd run away at that point.

I didn't. I just stood there and shocked. I think when I made eye contact with it, it just instinctively threw the log at me. I think that's why it was holding the log. I'm going to throw this if I have to, because the truth is, when I walked up that trail, at any time. It could have just swung that log out track me right in the side of her head and I wouldn't have seen it coming. It didn't do that. It stood in front of me, like giving me a chance to retreat before it actually

threw this log. So I think some of that is I don't think I did anything to trigger it or piss it off, so to speak, other than just that I was there and I wasn't leaving. It felt like it didn't have anywhere to retreat too, because the island's fairly small.

percentage of them. But yet those are people that were whatever they were standing in front of it chose to make itself known that it's there, or it was a situation like mine where it didn't have any choice what to make itself known because of the size of where it was, or maybe if it's standing behind a building and can't get out from behind that building and you're looking across somebody's yard and then you see it run away, it didn't have any choice. If it stayed there, it

was vulnerable. A lot of these encounters are based on the fact that it was caught in an area where it's going to get seen, or it had no choice but to be seen. But when you think about if it's main goal is to be elusive and not be seen, it's always going to choose to do that. It makes you wonder. Out of thirty five hundred encounters, there's got

to be thirty five thousand encounters or more. Were probably over three hundred and fifty thousand times where there's been a bigfoot standing by somebody and it chose flight instead of fight, and it just backed the way and these people never knew it was there. People are hiking in the woods all over Canada and the northwest, and now for Midwest and the northeast, and everybody's always out in the wilderness doing something every weekend. There's millions of people

out in the woods. Why wouldn't you have sightings every weekend? Because nine hundred and ninety nine out of a thousand times, Jesus is simply back away. And I'll let you know it was even there. It near, you were there, You had no fluid, it was there. It sees rare occasions where you find yourself, where it finds itself, where it doesn't have a choice.

the midge Walker Castlake type area of northern Minnesota. So got away come up there and started really being out in that atmosphere more out in the woods, seeing a lot more bear and being around that even met a few people who were into the research of this, and that's when I started finding groups on Facebook trying to I guess it was a renewed interest in trying to learn more about what I had encountered that day. I think at fifty years old, it was like, I don't

give a trap anymore. For a long time, I just felt like, man, if people, business clients and stuff. If I tried to tell even friends that I hun't with or fish with, I can't tell anybody this story, right because I can't share this encounter people. They got to just they're never gonna look at me the same. But aty I just started feeling like, you know what, there's got to be hundreds of thousands of people that have had some sort of an experience and they're all feeling

the same way. I feel like I can't tell anybody. So that really drove me to want to do the research, get into the research and try to figure out stuff. So that I just think it's stupid that if somebody had an encounter when they're eighteen years old, they got to live their whole life carrying that burden around of feeling like they need to tell somebody about what happened to them, and yet they're fearful of doing it, so

they don't. It is a big burden. It's really hard to do, and I think it's really a lot harder for some people than it is for others. Maybe some people are good at just I'm going to bury it and never think about it again. I just had a hard time doing that. My goal was, if I'm going to get involved in research, I want to do some type of research that advances the science to help blueprint what this thing is so that people don't have to feel so scared to tell somebody if they hadn't experienced.

So I met Doug Hichak. He's been on your show. He's one of the first people I shared my encounter with un sol what happened. He was just there's so many different elements that make my encounter different than a lot of them that year. About that he was fascinated by and he started talking to me about it. There's a lot of encounters that are happening here in northern Minnesota. Him and his son do a lot of research. So we started talking. First of all, I love the kayak

in the winter, i'd do a lot of snowmobiling. So I was snowmobiling in some really remote areas in that area of northern Minnesota that I have the lake home at. It's a touristy deal where every little town ends up having a festival every summer, and there's homes all over these lakes that maybe aren't year round homes for people. From May through September, it's like spring break in a lot of areas. What I was looking for is remote areas were even in July, there's not going to be

anybody here. So I started kayaking some of the more remote rivers. A lot of lakes in that area are cheened together by rivers. I started kayaking those are started snowmbiling. On the last winter, I found what I thought was an interesting meadow on a river that was so remote it was surrounded by big pine poppers and birch trees. I made a list of two or three different areas like that that I wanted to go back and try

what I call some low tech research. I had this idea that if you were going to try to research this creature, that its biggest vulnerability is its own curiosity. I really felt that way. There's things that sometimes it's just so curious about it can't help but make itself a little bit vulnerable. That's what I was in the art with so this spring. It takes me two hours to kayak back into some of these areas, but I

went out in the middle of them. I had a big red rubber ball, the kind you buy for two bucks at Walmart. I went out into this meadow and I was throwing this ball up and down. I'd laugh at the ball, I'd kick it and run over and pick it up and laugh at it. And I did this for about a half an hour. I set the ball in the middle in the draft, and I walked about three quarters of a mile out of there back to the river where my kayak was, and I left. I went back the next morning and the ball had

been moved. I knew that if a bear couldn't move it, because it would pop it. And this is just a light rubber ball. It was glossy smooth. There was some smears on it. It had been moved about sixty seventy yards across this meadow. This meadow was about the size of a football field, so I thought this was interesting. I had done that in a couple if it metals. This is the first one on my list that it hit. I'd actually got something moving, and I knew it wasn't

a human. I am so far out in Manila nowhere there's I'm five miles from the nearest gravel road, so I started concerning that would be the area that I wanted to research. The next time I took the ball, I had put someone in square of Alcrotamas, about a half dozen of them. I went out and played with the ball again for about forty five minutes. I left it right in the meadow, went back to my kayak, and I kayak out of there. Now, the first time I showed up on a Thursday, about ten in the

morning is when I left the ball. I went back on a Friday morning at about the same time to pick it up. So I'm gonna start doing this every Thursday and pick it up every Friday. Because if it doesn't live in that area, so to speak, if this is an area that hunts and at forges in, maybe I could become part of its routine. Like wherever it is twenty miles the way ten miles away. Maybe it was to get to where every Thursday, hit nose, go to that metal that balls. So I started doing that.

The second time I didn't get moved. I thought about not putting out that metals again, but I did. The third time I went back had been moved again. I was looking at the levelco tabs and I realized that I had two hares that were caught in these vehical tabs. One of them was about eight inches long and one one was about nine and a half inch as long. Very silky, very fine, light colored. They seemed to change colors.

It looked clear in one section of it, and it looked a little bit more brown in the section, and the blondish looked. It was really weird. I put these in a plastic bag. When the ziplock went home, talked to Doug Hijacks and I was emailing him. We were talking a messenger on Facebook and I told them why I fought these hairs put them in a plastic bag. He says, Dude, you got to put them in a paper envelope, store them in paper, not plastic. You gotta keep the DNA right on them and so that we

can test them. So I started carrying envelopes with me, rubber gloves. He was telling me about some other things that he had been having success with peanut butter jars, and I said, okay, so I should put a jar of peanut butter out there and just leave it there. And he said yeah. I said, with the lid off, and he says, no, these things love to unscrew lids and screw them back on. I was like, what he does,

trust me, just try it. So the third trip out, I put the ball out with the jar of peanut butter, with the lid screwed on. Went back the next morning on a Friday morning, the ball had been't move the peanut butter jars laying there, the lids off of it, the lid wasn't screwed back on it. But this jar was empty. It looked like you had just made the jar an hour ago. It was so clean. There wasn't any peanut butter residue. It like you ran it through

a dishwashing. I was really excited. I did a whole two hour trip kayaking out of there, bringing the ball home and an empty peanut butter jar jar. I get home, I called Doug and I said the jar was empty, and he says, it looked like it went through a dishwasher. I'm like, how did you know that? He said, that's what ours look like when we find them. If they get open, they're usually clean. I thought, yeah, that's exactly

what happened. So when I started talking to Doug about this research, I said, look, I don't want to try to photograph it. I don't want to try to trail camera. I just think that's a low success, high tech strategy that just doesn't produce. Whether it's senses ir, whether it's sensor's motion detections, I don't know. You look at how many game cams are out there, and we just don't get real good footage. So I said, I don't want to bring technology in this. He started preaching them me

and mentoring me on what hasn't worked. That kind of guided my vision for this research. If I hasn't keep doing this that I want to focus not on what works but it doesn't work, try to eliminate those elements. Because you can go out in an area and scream or whoop and get a whoop back, let's say, and that's cool. It's a great experience, right, But I feel like I've already had a great experience it doesn't really advance the science. The only thing that's going to advance

the science is DNA. We've got to do something to get DNA. If I'm going to leverage this things curiosity to try to collect DNA, I've got to make it appear that I'm visiting this area, I'm leaving things. I'm giving it a twenty four hour window to explore whatever I leave on its own terms. It feels like it's in control and it knows that I'm going to come back in twenty four hours, because that's the routine I'm setting. I don't look at the tree line, I don't call

out to it. I just picked the stuff up and wait. The next week, on Thursday, I go put stuff out. And now each week I've been integrating a new element into what I leave. I've been doing this for a total of fifteen weeks. Now. There's only four times that the ball hasn't been moved or something that I leave hasn't been moved. So I know I've become part of this. Whether it's one, whether it's a group of them, I know I'm part of its routine. But I've had some

crazy stuff happen over this time. So I guess as I'm talking to Doug. One of the interesting things that happened. He started talking about when he was studying bears. He was the first one the video bears giving birth and hibernating, and so he had planted all these cameras in a hibernation dam and things like that. He said, it's scientifically proven that caribou see in ub vision. He said, I feel like bears do too. As I've had the reactions

to UV, fluorescent colors really different. They seem to prefer fluorescent blue. If there's something in our research that's blue, it moves it, it destroys it, it chews on it. It sees that so much easier. Now, what's funny is my business it involves UV and black white technology. So I told you, guys, said, actually I'm the UV expert. You what I told them what my business was and how we worked with this in my experience with it. He said, what's your chances of this happening? That you

know about this technology? And I just have this theory that maybe if bars and UV, maybe Bigfoot season UV. I said, What you don't understand is when you say UV, what you're talking about isn't just fluorescent colors. Every game camera that's made that that has a hard, durable plastic that's made to resist being chewed on or damage has a UV element in that coating on the plastic that makes it that durable. The acurlic resin that they use in those plastics to make them hard has a UV

element to it. Every camera lens that's ever been made, whether it's a game camera or a professional video camera, has a UV coding on the lens. You got to imagine this, Brian. If you can see in your v when you look out in a tree line and there's a game camera that'll trut's say, one hundred yards away, that lens is going to stand out to you as if it was flor ess and orange and me and you were looking at it. It's just going to have

a vivid surface to it. It could be that the plastic of a peanut butter, John or the lenses in the eyeglasses that you wear might be giving off a UV look to it. I think he was onto something with that, so I started incorporating that into the things that I leave out there. What I started doing is I take a game camera painted the whole thing fluorescent blue. I don't put batteries in it and power it up. I just leave it lay out there in the field, not too far away from the ball, just on the ground.

I'm trying to get used to that blue color and seeing a game camera and not being afraid of it. I'll go out and it'll be picked up and carried five yards and dropped. Something's moved it. I've strapped him on trees before, with peanut butter in front of it, so that it knew there was a reward. Anytime it sees blue now in anything that I leave, it knows there's something there that's good. So I'll strap a fluorescent

blue game camera to a tree. Then what I've started doing now is I take little baby food jars that the label or ripped off of it. I've got two teenage boys, and when they were younger, they had a rock tumbler. They would tumble rocks until they looked really shiny and pretty. I'd take a rock and put it in a baby food jar and screw the lid on and leave it out there now in front of these blue game cameras that are strapped to trees, but they have no batteries in them. They'll go out and they'll

open up with baby food jar and take it. I've had it be where I leave my kayak on the shore and when I walk in. This last time I was there, I walked into the area, spent forty five minutes playing with the ball, leave the ball, put the game cameras back out with no batteries, and I'm I've tied fluorescent blue flagging tape to one of the trees and smeared peanut butter on the trunk of it. I'm just trying to make them comfortable with this fluorescent blue color.

It means there's something good and not something bad. I'm never calling out to it. I'm never trying to interact with it. There was one time when I was walking out of the area about three trips ago, where on my path that I walk out of I found a bobber. It was a fishing bobber that was that orange and it's a plastic one. It's small, but it's like that fluorescent sharp truse color on top, that yellowy looking glowy

color that was like fluorescent orange on the bottom. And it was laying right in the past that I walked, I picked it up, stuck it in my pocket, put the stuff there, and then got my kayaking left. I was telling Doug about it, and Doug said, did you leave something backwark? And I said, no, dude, they'll get offended if you take a gift they leave for you and you don't leave one. You know, Doug's been my mentor to this, because you know, I was an idiot when a kid. I did no experience, right. So now

I have a little plastic or glass vial. I fill them with water and put a little bit of glitter in and put a cap on the vial and you shake it up. It looks like a little snowflobe. I do that with blue glitter. I keep three or four of them in my pocket all the time when I'm out there. When I see something, I feel like, yeah, maybe this is something that left for me. I'll pick

it up and leave a little violet glitter there. When I go back, it's gone, that vial's gone, because last time I went in last week, I went in Thursday morning, there was two big logs that were laying across the three quarter mile trail that I hiked back into this area. Once I pulled my kayakup on the beach. The logs had been moved off of the trail. One of them

I had to step over every time. One of them was a birch tree that had fallen down across the trail and was propped up against another tree, so I would walk off the trail and walk around it. Both of them had been moved, so they're laying parallel to the edge of the trail now, like something was trying to make it easier for me to get in there. I went in, played with the ball, left the ball hung. The game cams put up some flags, they put out

the peanut. But each week I start adding something different than I'm doing. When I walk out, I get to my kayak and my paddle. I don't know if you're familiar with kayak palles, but my paddle had been Something depressed the plunger button and sowed my paddle into two pieces. One was leaning against the edge of the kayak with the blade down in the gravel. The other end was leaning up in the air, and the other section of it the blade was down in the floor of the

kayak and it was leading up against the seat. I'm looking at where I pulled up at trying to see as a short footprints here or what. I couldn't see any footprints, just because it was it's like river rockets. It's not fine gravel or something that would depression. But I've seen an area on the beach down the down river for me a little bit. That's where I'm gonna start eaching it now, just to see if that happened. Then. Also,

my life jacket, I leave it lay unbuckled. When I take it off, I leave it lay in the seat. My life jacket was laying on the nose of my kayak. There's a bungee cord on the front of my cack. Something had picked up the life jacket, snap the three buckles closed on it, and slid it underneath the bungee cord of the kayak. I'm telling you, I don't care if it's a Saturday or midnight on a Monday. We can sit on that river and you will not see

somebody come past it. This is so remote that I'm not saying there are people that could be out there. My goal throughout this research was not to try to communicate with it, just go out and do my things. In the course of the velcro tabs. I've collected now to this date, eleven hair samples over fourteen weeks. A lot of times I don't have any. Sometimes I have two or three, but I've got eleven total. I've also

have what Doug refers to as thebum smears. When they touch something in their skin, that waxy coat on their skin. Just like we have an oil in our skin, they have a more thicker waxy substance. It's probably protective of their skin, helps protect it when they touch something, or if they were to touch it their nose to a glass window, it would leave a waxy smudge. I've started leaving a ten inch piece of black Plexi glass leaning against a tree with the peanut butter under the Plexi glass.

You're thinking rat will pick the Plexi glass up and move it, maybe and leave a fingerprint, because every time it touches the ball, if it leaves fingerprints, I can't see those fingerprints. What happens is they turn into smears. I think it takes the ball and holds it under one arm, or it walks around with it, or it's kicking it to the ground like it's mimicking what I'm doing. I just can't get a clear fingerprint that shows normal

ridges and things like that. But I'm trying, and every time I have any type of a Seabum IQ tippe, it put my rubber gloves on Q tippet and put it in an envelope. So I've got eleven hair samples and seven Sebum swear samples. And my idea was, I'm just gonna keep doing this and try to just be disciplined enough to just keep trying this low tech, noncommunicative from my end research where all I'm doing is just collecting from it. It doesn't realize it, but I'm just

collecting these samples, right. I want to get to a point where I have to end it culminates to where there will be a high tech ending to it. One day when I go out there, I'm gonna put batteries and all the game cameras. I'm gonna leave voice recorders instead of a red ball. Me and Doug are working on designing a ball that has three hundred and sixty degree camera embedded into the ball that can remain powered overnight.

What I'm trying to achieve is, if you look at the Patterson Gilan film footage, what's really spectacular about that isn't the footage. It's the fact that they combined more than one Holy Grail type element to what they discovered that day. They had footprints with the footage. Whether it's a footprint, whether it's a video footage or a still picture, whether it's a vocal recording, or whether it's a DNA sample.

Those four different things that you could possibly gain from an encounter, they had two of them, with footprints and film footage. That's what makes that so spectacular. Almost every other scientific data that's been collected has only been one of those. Right if you're subscribed to the outstanding experienced research that he did. He's got what he claimed to be the footage and the still pictures combined with footprints

and things like that. It'd be one thing if at the end of the summer I had a catalog of eleven hair samples, seven sevum smear samples. We're going to go pay to have these analyzed. What the goal is not to have a lab analyze it and say it's an unknown primate and they just keep looking there. Eventually we have to establish a database. It's not something we know about, but sample one matches sample to it, and

sample one and two matches sample seventeen. Eventually we're going to establish a collection of DNA as SEMy it's coming from the same creature where they match each other. They might not match what you consider to be part of your library of known primates, but these do match each other.

I'm not a scientist, I'm not a doctor, I don't have a degree, and I'm just a citizen researcher, a citizen scientist, as Doug would explain, But he's adamant about developing a DNA library that if you could collect ten samples from ten different creatures, you would have undeniable proofs that you have something there. But it's not just something that's not a known primate at that point, you know what I mean.

going to be able to send those twos. Please stay in touch with us any evidence that you guys get and any discoveries that you guys make.

that I'm doing and Doug's doing. But he had this lady come up hand him a six inch long, fluffy, ruscient blue state colored feathern She said, I don't know why, I'm a paranormal expert, and I've felt compelled that I need to give this to you and you'll know what to do with it. Doug sent me the picture of it and told me what had just happened. I said, you need to mail that what's great is that Doug is a person that he really radamant about people like

myself or anybody else. She's trying to go out and have the experience that he's there for them. If you have questions, say what should I do with this, how should I react to this? Or this happened to me? He wants to get involved. He wants to help you get a sample, and he's very approachable. You can find him on Facebook, send him a message, he says, that's why I have a Facebook account so people can find me.

Everybody who's trying to do something like this should have a mentor and not just go at it like it's killing snakes. Should take a balance of process and shrow it down and figure out what's the best way to get a result considering the environment that I'm doing this, and I'm hoping that more people can learn that from what I'm doing. I'm not saying I'm doing something right or I'm doing it wrong. I know that I'm doing it different than most soccer That's awesome.