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Now. I know what your reporting. I got a strain of going on here. Something just killing my dog. Something killed your dog, my dog. We're flying to or over the trade. I don't know how it did it? Okay, dam and I'm really confused. Also, I thought my dog coming over the fen, and they would have did when you hit the growler. I entertaining cards And although I thought it was my dog coming over the fen, what are you reporting? We gotta some one or something
crawling around out here? Did you see what it was? I here looking up new the window now, and I don't need anything. I don't want to go out right? Great, ready, Hello, get somebody out here. Let's goin on outa's thought up a bit about second four nine. I don't know he's out. Yeah, I'm brooking right, heady. Her folks want to welcome my guests back to the show. It is friend of the show, Jeff Harding from Pineland Research. Welcome to the show. Jeff,
Hey, Brian, thank you. I am glad to have you man. So let's get right into it. Some people have heard you on the show before. Gosh, I think we were talking just a few minutes ago. It's probably two years ago. You came on and shared your encounter for the first time. Let's start there. Let's there's a lot we're gonna talk about today, but let's start there with your encounter. So refreshing everybody's memory about where you were, what you were doing, and what happened during your first
encounter with one of these things. Well, I was back in nineteen eighty seven. I was eighteen years old, just graduating from high school, had joined the army, but hadn't left yet. Had a couple of months I was going to leave midsummer to go to basic training. And I grew up the son of a hunting and fishing guide and spent an awful lot of time in the outdoors, hunting big game and really getting to fish a lot of different parts of the northern part of the country, and then quite a bit
in Canada. And a friend of mine, whose dad had a similar occupation as mine, was getting ready to go on a trip with his family. His dad, a couple uncles, a bunch of cousins, his little brother, and they invited me to come with them, and I agreed, and during this ten day outing up in northern Manitoba and a very remote part of the Churchill River system on Granville Lake. It's a large lake that's covered in islands, but I mean it's really remote. There's no cabins on this lake.
It's a primitive camp that these three Inuit brothers run primarily for guiding hunters. But they had known these brothers, had known my friend's dad and invited him to bring his family up, and so I just kind of ended up tagging along on this trip. And me and my friend, who is the same age as me, just graduated, and his little brother, who were fourteen, would go out each day in a sixteen foot long boat and fish, you know, until midday, and come back to this camp, and
then we'd go out in the afternoon and fish a little bit more. And on the fourth day that we were there, we ended up on an island on this lake, a small island. My friend's little brother had to take a leak, and so we pulled up on shore and I had locked up this game trail. It was quite elevated for such a small island, a very heavily forced and I ended up having an encounter. And I had never grown up in a family where, you know, he had an uncle that
told these stories around the campfire of seeing a bigfoot. I didn't really have any reference for what bigfoot would be, you know, So it was it was pretty perplexing, not only trying to go through analyzing the experience shortly afterwards, but spending quite a bit of time afterwards for years trying to really get answers that I didn't feel comfortable asking other people. Was in the military for
a number of years, never found an opportunity. I had a security clearance in the military, was worried that if I even talked to somebody about bigfoot, they'd pull that from me. Got out of the military and went to college and never really met anybody in college that had had experiences or felt comfortable
talking to about it. And then started a career where I worked in real estate and real estate development and had a lot of partners that I worked with, investors, that they were my living I mean, that's how I made my money, and I just I felt like if there was the risk versus reward was pretty high if one of them was to decide not to do business with me for some reason. And so I spent a lot, awful lot of time thinking about it, but not really being able to talk to other
people who had had similar experiences. Never found people who had had similar experiences.
But when I turned you know, when I was approaching fifty years old, which is about four years ago, I do a lot of guiding yet guiding hunters, and I have a network of almost a hundred guides that I worked with around the country in Canada, and I had a conversation with a couple of them who have had I wouldn't say encounters like mine, but certainly have had things happen in remote areas that they couldn't come up with a natural
explanation to and ended up in northern Minnesota, where my lake home is. I got close to Doug Hicheck and shared with him what had happened, and he's the one who really got me involved in the research of it. I had wanted to go out and try to do some things differently than other people
were doing trying to get answers. And I thought that I had a good plan, and then you purge that plan against somebody like Doug and you realize there's a few holes in it. And just we spent months and months really going over what my research plan was going to be in how I wanted to approach should and he was a big help with that. Well, it's one
of the things I see on the show often. It happens with people who have encounters, and you had a very close up, what I would consider to be a very traumatic experience with one of these things, and that tends to push people even further in the other direction. But for you, I think it's pushed you to want to find out more answers and find out what these things are and do the research. So I certainly want to get into that. Let's talk a little bit about what was your approach going into the
research. Was it to have another experience, was it to document evidence,
was it to get photographs or videos? What was your approach to it, and when Doug started poking holes in your plan, what did it ultimately look like for you once you went out and started the research well, I had originally looked at what everybody else is doing, and I had kind of arrived at the conclusion that, you know, since the Patterson Gimlin film, the ball is left kind of on the five yard line and it hasn't gained any
field positions since. I mean, last thing I wanted to do was go out and start repeating the same things over and over that didn't seem to be making any headway. So I felt that if we're looking at this from a flesh and blood standpoint, its weakest link would likely be its curiosity. If you could figure out a way to not appear to be a threat. You didn't go out there trying to you know, carrying cameras or anything like that, or trying to bang on trees or speak a language that you don't know
how to speak. I didn't want to do anything that it would consider to be threatening in nature. I just wanted to try to collect or let's say, I wanted to try to promote interaction with items that would be left that could collect DNA, whether it was hair or skin, oil samples, fingerprints, things like that, you know, like, for instance, I rid
and I started thinking about camera apps and things like that. But through my conversations with Doug, I mean, it really made me realize that, you know, there's a lot of opinions and hypothesis out there on what Bigfoot is capable of and what it isn't capable of, but there's really no facts that we're operating on. And so can it sense an I R flash? Can it sense a UV coding on a camera lens? Does that reflect from a
ways away with a UV vision spectrum? Can it sense battery presence? I mean, in the end, me and Doug kind of arrived to who knows. Nobody knows these answers. Everybody talks about some of them even talk about it pretty matter of fact, Lee like, they can tell this, they can sense that. I don't know that they can do any of that. And we kind of felt like if we let's not bring anything into the field that we aren't sure of what it's capable of detecting them what it isn't you
know? And so that was kind of the m O. As I had been looking at a certain area at the time, I wouldn't talk about it. Now I've talked about it about where it was. It was on the southwest corner of the Pine Island Forest in northern Minnesota on the Clearwater River that flows south out of Clearwater Lake. It's just south of the Red Lake Indian Reservation. And would kayak eight and a half miles from the launch point up
the Clearwater River to a clearing and then leave items there. I'd kayak in on a Thursday and leave items, and I'd kayak back out, and then the next day on Friday, I had kayak in and collect them and kayak back out and wait a week and do it again. And it's kind of designed so that I don't know if anything there habit tates there, but you
would become part of a routine, so to speak. Maybe they habitate twenty miles away, but if they knew every Thursday these things are being left and every Friday they're being picked up, maybe you could become part of a routine for this. And the way that I arrived at using that clearing was when everything was froze over. I was snow wheeling up into that area looking at different clearings and had mapped out about six or seven different clearings all along the
Clearwater River. I had picked that area vaguely overall because in the last eighteen months, there had been three sightings by a place called Debs, Minnesota. Very I don't even know if you'd call it a town. It's like an intersection, right, but Debs, Minnesota kind of became locally famous there. I mean, there was three or four different properties all within a three mile
area where these counters had been coming in from. And I didn't know if it was a place where they habituated her, if they were just crossing through that area or what. But it was located kind of between the Itasca State Forest and the Pine Islands State Forest and the Red Lake Indian Reservation bordered it, and it just it kind of seemed like this perfect storm of a river
flowing through it. It was very remote. There really wasn't any read even in the height of tourist seasons, so to speak, that nobody would really be there. There weren't hiking trails going through it. And so I had came up with this idea that I would go into these areas and bring a rubber ball. It was as simple as that. I brought in a rubber
ball that you'd buy at Walmart for a buck ninety nine. It was about fifteen inches round and I would go out to these clearings and I would kick it, and I'd run after it and pick it up and laugh at it. And i'd throw it and run after it and pick it up and laugh at it. And I'd do that for about forty five minutes, and I would leave it in the And this is this is a very heavily forested area.
And these clearings were, you know, roughly the size of half of a football field to a whole football field, kind of just areas where there was an open area. And I always operated under the idea that something's watching me and watching me interact with this thing, this ball, and I'd leave it, and i'd go back the next day and pick it up and see if it had been moved. And I did this over and over and over, and finally the sixth clearing that I was in, this ball got moved
like eighty five yards. And came to the conclusion that it had a bear moved it or something, you know. Put it. First of all, this this is really a soft rubber ball. I mean, a bear press
down with it with its fall would puncture it. And if it had been moved five or ten yards, I probably wouldn't be able to look at that as realistic data, because I mean a deer could nuzzle it and move it five or ten yards, but when it was moved all the way across the clearing, it felt like something picked this thing up and moved it or kicked it or something. It wasn't just a small interaction with it, you know, by a wild animal. So and I didn't think it was likely that
it was a human. I mean, all these times I've been kayaking in it's there, I never saw another human on that river. It's not to say they wouldn't be there, but I just it just wasn't heavily traveled, pretty remote. So once up Ball got moved, I kind of had an idea of where I wanted to use, which clearing I wanted to use to try to start doing these things, and we would leave different things in that
clearing in hopes of creating that carry. When I left it had a twenty four hour window, it just looked like this guy came in and was having fun with something or interacting with something, and he was so stupid that he'd forget to take it out with him and leave it there. And eventually we started getting things moved and started getting skin oil smudges on stuff. The ball.
We started putting velcro tabs on and collecting hair samples in and you know, they were seven to ten inch long, translucent hair samples that just didn't seem like they would be bare or deer. And over thirty seven weeks we collected I think it was twenty one hair samples and thirteen skin oil samples or smudges. And those were all on different items. Some of them were little baby food jars. I would leave pieces of candy, that bit o honey candy, you know, I bought a gigantic pack of it, and the
little just the little pieces that were wrapped in that wax paper. I would unwrap those and leave them there, and you know, they'd be gone. And I asked, I told Dungas, what do you think's eating them? And he says, well, jeez, it could be bears, could be squirrels, could be anything, he says, put it in a baby food jar and screw the lid on. And this is you know, I'd already had them being taken like three or four times. So put it in a
baby food jar. And when I went back the next time, the baby food jar had been opened and it was gone, so you know, it was just interesting all the different things that would get interacted with. Doug was heavily into bear research and felt that if bears could see any UV vision spectrum, which he suspected they could, like cariboo and a few other animals that sciences documented as being able to do that, that different colors might appear different
to them. You know, to us, maybe we described the most vivid colors being yellow or red, maybe to them it's blue or purple. You know, it's just it's different in a different UV vision spectrum. And it seemed like blue was a color that he saw getting interacted with in these bare studies. He was the first one to record beare birth in a den, you know, and he had these camera traps set up in bare dens and he was finding all kinds of blue garbage in the blue bottle caps, blue
Jasani water bottles chewed up. I mean, for some reason, they really keyed on that color, and so we just decided, let's kind of make that a theme and some of the things that we're leaving, Like I took a game camera painted the entire thing fluorescent blue other than the black velcro strap on it, and I never took it out there and hooked it up to a tree or anything. I took the batteries out of it so it wouldn't
be powered up, it wouldn't have any signal. I painted over that lens so that there was no UV reflection of the camera lens if there was a coating on it, and brought it out there and left it just laying on the ground and went back and it had been moved like six fifteen to twenty yards from where I left it lane. Now that's not saying something couldn't have you picked it up and just in its mouth and dropped it. But you know, there's a lot of things that we were leaving that I was leaving
that you could say on its own being moved. Maybe a bear could have done it, you know, But when you started looking at the collective of everything that was getting one time, that camera wasn't just moved. I came back in twenty five thirty yards away, it's hanging from a tree branch by the strap, just hanging there. Something picked it up and hung it off of that brand And you know, it was just little interactions like that that
made me think This isn't normal bare behavior. This doesn't seem to be something that deer would do. So, yeah, it was interesting. I write a lot about that in the book on some of the things that I experienced kayaking into the area. Both things that are that seem to have, you know, some some support that there, that bigfoot is there. But a lot of the things I experienced were natural things too, like interaction with a
lynx in that area. It was kayaking up before the sun came up one morning, and a lynx was standing right on the edge of the river and just let out the most moaning scream. It's the most horrible thing I've ever heard. And you know, when you're by yourself in a kayak at five thirty in the morning, I mean you levitate about five feet out of it
when you hear that. So you were having all these things going on, and I'm writing down notes as you're talking, and one of the first things that comes to mind, I guess for most people is I know the reason you were doing what you were doing, But once you started getting some kind of activity, most people go to, why didn't you just take a camera and pointed in the general direction of what was picking these things up and moving
them, because that's one of the things that I've experienced here on the property with possible gifting and things like that. I want to get into. But that's the first thing people ask me. Why didn't you have a camera? Well, because most people told me, don't put a camera. If it's a gifting situation, they're not going to take it. Or again those definitives right, Well, if there's a camera, we know they're not gonna take it. Well, nobody knows anything really, so I guess that's the question
for you. Did that ever cross your mind? Did you and Doug talk about possibly once you were getting some activity, putting a camera up to maybe catch up shot of something that was moving these things. Stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see. We'll be right back after these messages. It was. It's really designed to end in that with that being the case, I mean, if I could keep coming in there alone, developing a trust to
where I never from where I would pull my kayak up. When I arrived at this clearing, I had to hike about three quarters of a mile through the woods to get back to where the clearing was. You know, it was mostly dark when I would arrive early in the mornings. Sometimes I would start a little bit later and show up just after. You know, i'd kayak most of the way. It was about an hour and a half two hours to kayak up that far, and you know, i'd start in the
dark. Sometimes it'd be light by the time I get there, just dependent on how early I got to the launch site. But walking that three quarters of a mile with no flashlight when it was dark was really kind of a surreal experience. I mean, the one thing that me and Doug had talked about was conditioning my self not to respond if I heard a tree knock or a vocalization or something like. I didn't want to stand there scanning the tree
line making this thing feel like, oh it sees me. I wanted it rather to say I don't get why he didn't hear that, and maybe it would knock again, or maybe it would step it up, you know. And so that was one of the reasons why I never took a flashlight. My cell phone and my flaircy five always stayed in the kayak when I left the kayak and walked back to the area. Never any of the things we
left were battery operated or had he gave off any signal. But the whole thing was designed so that if this kept interacting, and things kept getting moved or getting picked up, then it would end. At the very end of it, you know, that first or second week in November, I would go in and bring a ball that was basically not the rubber ball that it
had been interacting or moving. That would be a foam ball that had four lipstick size cameras in it with a lithium battery pack in it, and then we'd plastic coat the ball set it down out there so that if it was to walk across into that clearing after I left and walk up to that ball, at some point it may stop and say it sense there's a battery presence
or there's something weird about this, but it would be too late. It would already be on camera, you know, And so it was kind of designed to be this ultimate betrayal, so to speak, that it would you know, we never really were a threat the whole time, but in the end it would be designed that cameras and audio recorders and all that would be out there. But there was a pretty weird ending to the whole thing,
to where and people will learn why it didn't. We I was success asshole and collecting items in which we could put into samples that we could put into the lab. But I was not successful with the camera part of the end of that project because there had been It's really a peculiar thing that happened to that clearing the week before I went in to leave those and I write about it in the book. I talk about it in when I share the encounters. But when I was walking back to clearing, I could smell when I
thought smelled like ammonia. It smelled like your lawn after Kimlon comes in sprays, you know. And I got back into clearing. That clearing was about eighty five to ninety yards long and about seventy yards wide. It was kind of an oval shape or an egg shape, and there was grass, prairie grass in it that was, you know, three foot tall two foot tall, and there was some cedar scrubs here and never for them. All part it was open. But I walked around the whole edge that clearing, it
smelled like that all over, like the whole thing had been sprayed. And that just seemed peculiar to me because I on my way back out of there. I stopped at two of the other clearings that I had done the ball test and prior, and I didn't smell anything there. I could see where if they all smelt like that, maybe the DNR or somebody came in and sprayed those just for noxious weeds or whatever. But I mean, I didn't
notice that anywhere else. But that smell made me believe that nothing was going to happen after that, And nothing did happen after that in any of the For two more weeks, I kept going in there and there was no more interaction. So it's just kind of a question mark of what the heck happened there. You know, it seems very odd that the DNR would go to that link to go somewhere out in the middle of nowhere to spray a field for whatever reason. It just doesn't make anything to me. You mentioned the
samples a couple of times. Is that something that's still in the process of being dealt with. Do you think there's some Bible samples that you guys are maybe looking to get tested. What's the deal with the samples? Well, I've got I've got the hair samples and the skin oil samples are are testable, they're they're they're ready to be tested. I don't know if that's something that will do with LMS two or if that's something where I'm going to have
them tested with the samples I collect in this upcoming project. There's the difference being I've got a partnership with two different universities in this upcoming project so far. I'm trying to make it three, but two of them so far, and it's designed the way that I really felt would be the most protective way to keep the integrity of something like that intact. That's that both of these universities would be testing samples independent from each other. They don't even know who
each other are. I've never I've met with one, I've met with the other. I've never had meetings with everybody in the same room. I don't want there to be a biased angle at it. I don't I want whatever one lab comes up with results to stand on its own and be compared to
the results that come up in another lab. And I think, you know, just looking back at some of the other DNA efforts that there have been, I think we can learn from those mistakes, you know, And so that's kind of I think the perfect storm of how to do it, but I would be really interested in finding out what those labs test these samples at two. And the problem with testing a hair samples once you test it in
one lab, you aren't going to test it again after that. So you know, I'm a little bit up in the air as far as whether or not it happens with the upcoming samples and the partnerships that the nice thing about the project that I'm going to be doing this is done with scientists that are connected to the labs that they have no there is no bias involved here.
I don't come to them writing a check saying I'm looking for evidence of bigfoot, and right away the Water's team, okay, this is if we were to take ten thousand vector collected samples and test them all, and there's every vertebrate mammal in these areas that we're pulling these samples out of our being represented in all of these samples, but we have no sample of a part human,
part unknown primate. If they want to put a thumbs down to the existence of the likelihood of the existence based on what they're seeing these samples, I encourage them to do so. Despite what my experience has been in my life. I'm not going to stop them from doing that. So finding these labs that will come that look at this and say, you know what this is going on long enough, we want to play a part in putting a thumbs up and thumbs down to this, But we don't want to be pressured
to go either way. We want to follow the data, right. I think when you approach science that way, you'd be surprised at how many universities and stuff would get in line and say we'll be a part of that.
And that's been my experience talking to the two that I have. I mean, these two were related to the study I write at length in the book about a particular study that these that one of these universities was doing with a bio hub with scientists from Sweden, all through two different areas in northern California, testing vertebrate mammals based on collecting the mosquitoes and testing the ones that have had a blood meal off of a blood host in the last twenty four hours.
They would test that and see what was it that it fed on, and then it would test what viruses does that animal have? And they were looking at kind of mosquito bite of mule deer that has a virus, and then later on bite of fox and transfer that virus to that fox. That's what that study was designed to do. But when you look at the techniques they did and the science they applied, you realize this is exactly what we
This can be done. You can collect a thousand mosquitoes in an hour at two am in Saskatchewan, and you can collect them in Washington State, Alaska. You'd want to be places that are very remote, so you're not going to get human samples in these things, but you could test them in three or four different geographical areas and start running all these tests on these samples.
And if you're showing every verte braid mammal out there, from bears to gophers to squirrels and rabbits and everything in between, but you go ten thousand times and we haven't found a bigfoot sample. If they want to say we just don't think it's likely they exist based on that, I'm ok with them saying that. So that's kind of where it's designed to go. I would like to have the samples that I got, the hair samples, which you know,
I'm not positive. These are bigfoot hair samples that I collected. When I look at them under a microscope and when I compare them to other vertebrate mammals in northern Minnesota in that area, I don't see anything that they could be if it's not that or human. But like I say, I never had any human interaction in thirty seven weeks in that research area. So I want to talk a little bit about the sea bum before we move on. Doug has talked about sebum, and we've talked about it on and off the
air before. When you would get these samples off of the objects, I assume most of it came off with the bouncy ball. Were you actually seeing fingerprints that had the sea bum in it or were you just scraping? How are you collecting those samples? Yeah, I posted some pictures on a couple of videos that I did that we'll show on the ball. It look it looks like a print that almost looks like a j that I believe is the
outside edge going down the hand and around the palm. It's it was like if it was laying like let me see it like that on a surface, and it's you you can see where the a finger would bend in each one. You know. The only issues that I had was in the dog days of summer, whenever there be a I always had collected more smears than prints.
And I think the reason for that being is when you pick up a ball like that, I don't know that you cure it in your fingertips out in front of your body, just put it under an arm while you're walking. So when there was a fingerprint, there's so many fine line swipes like a paintbrush looking through that almost like hair's laying against it and pulled off of
it, and you know that which could have originally been a fingerprint. But then all of a sudden it gets an arm pressed against it or something who knows, you know, I'm just speculating on that. But when I would collect it, it was hard to get it off of the ball. I mean you would have to spray it with four or nine scrub it off. I would use bleach to clean it off then and sterilize the ball after that
before I used it again. But this stuff was like half hardened candle wax, like if you dripped hot wax off of a candle when it's almost set up, but not but still a little bit pliable. A thin layer of that is what it seems like. It doesn't seem like oil to speed.
But if I'd go out there on the Friday to pick stuff up, and I would show up mid day in the dog days of summer, and sometimes it would be ninety degrees or warmer when I'd go out there, those were really clear and thin, like maybe the sunshine had kind of smoothed them out and liquefied them a little bit more, whereas the samples earlier in the spring and late in the summer and fall were you could touch them and it was like hard frosting, you know, like a thin micro layer of something on
it. So, I you know, as far as comparing it to a substance other than a very very micro thin layer of candle wax, I don't really know what you would compare it to, because referring to it as as sea bum or skin oil is a little bit deceptive if you're not used to seeing what prime mate skin oil looks like. If you ever go to a zoo and look at a gorilla, they get balls of wax built up in their armpits like the size of a baseball. I mean, it's hard wax,
that's just that secretion of that type of skin oil. So it's a lot different than what humans would have. It's definitely interesting, and I know one of the other things that you address in the book is sort of what's always a topic of conversation on my show and certainly your show and other shows like this. It's just the what's going on in research in general these days? In sasquatchery, right, there's all kinds of ramp a room tomfoolery going
on. Anytime you want to get on and see some of the crazy stuff happening in the community, all you got to do is look online. It happened to me recently. Something popped up after the OCALA conference and David Polites and Jeff Meldrum are arguing on stage over DNA and people are messaging me, hey, did you see this? And I'm you know, I'm not even going to get into that. I find it amusing in some ways, but
a lot of ways it's really not. There's so much there's a whole lot of different thought processes that go on in bigfoot research, and everybody is entitled to their opinion because literally everything about the subject is subjective for the most part, unless you're an anthropologist like Jeff Meldrum, and you can talk specifically about foot morphology and those kind of things. But I know you sort of address that in the book. So can you talk about what people can expect to
see when you start talking about just sasquatchery in general as it stands? Now? Well, I've said on my show for you know, at least a year and a half now that instead of us finding the ninety percent that we agree on as fellow researchers from people who are out in the field, instead we find the ten percent we disagree on and we poison each other with it.
And for some reason that's been the case for a long time. I mean, I have had a chance to talk to different people who have reviewed and interacted in Thomas Steinberg, who was you know, he knew the original four Horsemen, A lot of these old school, original gangsters from the community, right, and all of them had little issues with each other, a
lot of them. Did you know? Thomas had an interesting approach whenever somebody would ask him about, well, what can you tell me about what that person said about something, He'd say, I'm not going to tell you anything about what anybody said, just like if any of them asked me, I'm
never going to tell them what you said. Thomas really had a vision for the division that could surface amongst different people's ideas and opinions, and he felt the best way to play that would be to be the human version of the Continental Hotel in john Wick. You know, this is a safe place, right And it's interesting because he because he did that, he ended people were
very open with him. But they just were able to do that with each other a lot of times, because you know, this mentality that seems to exist. I don't believe that I have to like somebody or be a fan of thirs to be able to learn something from them. And since there's no universities handing out degrees in bigfootology, we're all the students and we're all the
professors. We learn from each other. And with that in mind, you have to focus on that which you agree upon instead of being getting fixated on these little differences that we have with our hypothesis and stuff. But it just seems like that's that's just one of those deals that's this looms in this community and probably always will, you know, Yeah, I definitely agree, and I think that's a very good analogy for Thomas. He's navigated those waters for
decades and decades and done a very good job of it. It just really there's me to go to conferences. Obviously I wasn't at the OCALLA conference, but for people to see what they believe to be these experts in the field arguing amongst themselves about things that just really, in the end of the day, they don't matter. So I really wish that everybody could sort of take a little bit of sampling from what Thomas has been able to do all of
these years. Why can't we just have that mentality in this community? But it's like everything else. I think if you put more than two people in a room, there's always going to be disagreements. Have you addressed? Or
what is your thing? Because I'm working on a show now because this has come up a couple of times for me, is the mental health part of bigfoot and bigfoot encounters in general, right, mass hallucinations and mass hysteria and other things that people attribute to some of the things, like we collect bigfoot encounters on both of our shows, and that's something that's come up recently.
I interviewed a guy a couple of weeks ago. I was going to actually reach out to you and a couple of other people privately and have a conversation about whether I should even air of the show because it's one of the most out there encounter stories I've ever heard. In a nutshell, this guy claims to have had sex with a bigfoot, a female bigfoot. Right, So I don't know what to do with that, right, I don't know where you go with those kind of encounters. I don't know what you do with
that. At the same time, I feel like it's it's like this eight hundred pound guerrilla in the room that frankly, we really need to talk about. Because there's a couple of sides to the mental health part, Like if you have an encounter, there is PTSD, there's other things that happen, there's other things that go on, and then you have these really fantastical, out there, what seemed to be almost created stories that people tell. But
where's the fine line there in saying that's just too crazy? But this hunter who saw a ten foot big foot come up and grab his pistol out of his lap probably was sleeping in a deer. Stand that makes sense because it's
a hunter versus this happened to somebody else. Do you go into any of that in the book or have you had those conversations with people and there are you on that just in general with some of the issues that we have when we're taking these encounters in some people may have some mental health issues on board. And stay tuned for more Sasquatch Otessey, we'll be right back after these
messages. Yeah. I spend one chapter of the book I interview Leon Thompson and this is based on you know, probably half a dozen multi hour discussions I've had with him on different things involving the PTSD relation and you know, the high dress analysis of what somebody's going through, everything from body language to details to all of that, and there's just so many I think the thing that people miss is that, first of all, every person is different in
their you know, some people don't have a problem standing up and speaking in front of a room of people, and some people freeze up at just thinking about having to do that. So the way that assuming you have one from each of those perspectives that has an encounter the one, the way one of them is going to describe it, and the descriptives they use is obviously going
to be different than the way the other one does. And you know, I think it's important that people understand we're talking about a pretty For me, there's a pretty fine line that I try to exist on in trying to decide what seems to be an encounter that has some validity to it versus one that's been embellished or made up. And I think that you have to find that balance that exists where you have and some of this I felt like this for
a long time. Some of it I've kind of come to recognize after talking to Leon about this stuff. But you've got people who will hear somebody's encounter and because they've never experienced anything like this or they don't subscribe that, they are close minded to being able to wrap their head around that this could have happened to this person. And then there's other people who look at that and say, I want to be open minded, so they'll just whatever that person
tells them. They'll say, Wow, that's that's incredible, like they're just gonna believe it. Right to me, there's a middle ground there. I mean, I don't believe that all one thousand episodes of West Germer's shows Encounters. I don't think that all thousand episodes are real. That has nothing to do with West. I'm just talking about the people who share them. Probably half of them are either embellished or made up, but they certainly aren't all.
You know, When I hear people share their encounters, I don't like hearing people just reading emails. I want to hear it from the source. I love it when I can see their faces, because to me, it's just easier to develop some degree of you know, assigning integrity to the source and how it's being conveyed versus somebody reading those words off of an email. You know, one would be very hard to not just throw into that I don't known category, you know, but there is a degree of PTSD that
exists out there. And the thing that I think is probably most important to acknowledge is that even when somebody comes up to me and shares an encounter that I have a hard time believing actually happened, I can certainly tell by their body language and their emotion that they believe it happened, whether or not I believe it did or not. They've been through something they've been through something traumatic, and nothing's going to benefit for me to call them a lie or stomp
them into the ground on their lack of details or whatever it is. So I try to be respect of that, even if I have an issue with believing it. You know, I always start with the flesh and blood approach when it comes to my research. I look for the most plausible explanation when I'm looking at data to explain what it is from a natural standpoint. And if I can't find the most plausible approach there, then maybe I've got to be open mind enough to consider something else. And I'm willing to do that.
But I don't start there, and I kind of approach encounter from the same way I look for that. Could it be mistaken identity? Could it be misperception? A lot of people they when they explain something their library of reference. Everybody's different, you know, when I hear different hunting guides that I spend time with a network with who literally live half the year in northern
Idaho and Monte Hannah and so far off the grid. They're horseback riding fifteen twenty miles to get into an er because there are no ATV trails to get there, and they spend all that time there, and most of them, when you say have you ever experienced anything that you couldn't find a natural explanation too, they'll tell you no. I mean, it's just these guys who are living out there and they're peripheral is everything around them out there, and
they don't have experiences. So the one thing that I kind of leaned towards is that it's not common to have an experience. It shouldn't be common. These guys aren't living in these environments. It's rare to find somebody who's head one. So when somebody else who says, hey, we're going out this weekend looking for bigfoot, and they come back and say, we found them, here's pictures. That really is a problem for me when I hear encounters
that involve scenarios like that. Yeah, I agree, man, And it's one of those double edged swords for people like me who want to obviously document as many encounters as I possibly can, because I think there's a little bit of something. I say it often there's data and everything people say, whether
they're completely batshit crazy or whether they've completely made it up. I think there's a little bit of something and everything that we can take away as researchers to add to the pile of data, to say yes and no and maybe and then shake out on the end what we get out of it. But we've talked a little bit about where we are. Where do you want to see the research and bigfoot go. That's a big question for me, is moving that ball down the field off the five yard line? What are your ideas
on how to get there? And where would you like to see bigfoot research over the next twelve months or two or three years down the road. I think probably the two things I focus on the most is that one, we've got to figure out a new approach, or at least not be afraid to try things that you don't hear people trying. I think repeating the same thing over and over that doesn't seem to be productive is perhaps a waste of energy now. But I say this understanding that a lot of people are out there
just trying to have an experience. They aren't really trying to move the ball, and I'm fine with that. I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that we could probably go out there at three in the morning, and if we did it every weekend for a year and input ourselves in high value target type areas and we start wood knocking. We might eventually hear a wood knock back or a vocalization, and that would be something we'd tell stories about forever. I mean, it would be a great experience. It's not going
to move that ball. And so you know a lot of people say we're going to go out looking and this and that. My question is, what are you trying to achieve that is going to have any type of dynamic difference on whether or not the ball can be moved. And there's a lot of opinions out there, Brian, There's a lot of people tell you there isn't a video good enough. You could go out right now and recreate what PG did. You're not going to move the ball. You could go out and
do a lot of things. To me, I don't believe in this analogy that you have to have a body in order to prove it. Right now, if you could get multiple labs to analyze DNA samples collected from multiple areas, not just one, but multiple areas that all start showing or at least a couple start showing a genomic sequence involving part human DNA part unknown primate, but they match. The DNA from Saskatchewan is matching that DNA from Washington State.
It matches the DNA from wherever. My point is, until you have a body to test, you'll never be able to say these samples are from Bigfoot, but you'll be able to show that a species x so to speak, exists out there, that there is a part human, part unknown primate species that exist that has previously been unmapped, undiscovered, unrecognized, has a specific genomic sequence, and these samples that have been collected in multiple areas,
there's samples that match. At that point, science has to at least acknowledge that something exists it's part human and bipedal out there that they haven't recognized before they're going to call it bigfoot, because until you have a bigfoot, you can't show that that's what it is. But for me, it's I really want to focus on the DNA collection. And you know, kayaking eight and a half miles in, eight and a half miles out and the next day
doing it again. That's thirty five thirty eight miles a week. That's a thousand miles over the course of a thirty some week summer, and there's a lot of work. I mean quite there's a lot of mornings where I was freezing my ass off and I just I don't want to be right now. But when I started reading about this report and how they were using vector collection of DNA and using mosquitoes and capturing mosquitoes to collect that had fed on bloodhost
started opening my mind up a little bit too. Maybe there's a way to do this that hasn't been done before. And when talking to scientists about it to have access to the labs that could do it. When you give them an opportunity to get involved without trying to biasly push them into a corner,
they're excited to get involved in. It has been my experience. So I think, if I'm going to put effort into this, I'd rather go out and take set up mosquito traps in remote locations in three or four different remote locations, partner with a lab to where once those samples are in their hands, it's not me anymore. Whatever they come up with is I'll be okay with, you know, if they say that we haven't found anything that would
support the evidence of a part human by Petal in North America. Then I'll accept that. I mean I won't. I'll still believe differently. I'll agree to disagree. But I don't think there's anything. I don't think the right approach is to try to push him into a corner of the room based on who's writing them a check or you know, this is the project, this is the organization that you're partnering with. Boy, we hope you end up where we want to be. I don't think that works. I definitely agree.
Let's talk about the book. Let's talk about where you're at in that process and when and if the book is out and when people can pick it up. Well, it is out. It just came out last week on Friday. You can find it at Hanger one Publishing dot com, where you can find it on Amazon. It's called The Pine Island Incident. And like I say, it's the first half of the book is really my encounter. A lot of people have heard me share my encounter on your show, Joe
Schneider's show over at Western New York, Bigfoot, Cornell Hannity Show. I've shared it probably half a dozen places. Vic Kundiff's My Bigfoot Sightings is where it probably got the most recent exposure and probably the widest exposure from lately. That's the first half of the book. In the second half, like I say, it covers everything from my past research, kind of the psychology behind
where the community is right now and where research is going. I try to interview people who would know how to dissect that a bit, and I believe lely On Tom is a great person to approach that, how people suffer from not sharing it and the burden that is involved with carrying around an experience and not having anybody to talk to it about. And then where I want to go in research, So the books. Yeah, I think the easiest place to get us Hanger one Publishing dot Com. But you'll find it on Amazon
too. I want to have links to it in both places. You guys, go check out the Pine Island incident. Jeff, It is always an honor to pleasure to have you on. Man, I've had a blast talking to you. Yeah, I appreciate you having me on. They say you don't gotta go home, but you can't stay here. I don't want to be trying to try that chime everything. Call it back, bright baby joy for me to stay right to call it right away. Don't back the US to US to us to use JAS