SO EP: 676 Dr. Jeff Meldrum

Just a few short years later, I found myself standing beside him on stage sharing that moment with Jeff Cliff Barrockman, and Michael Freeman at a conference in Idaho. It was surreal the same man I'd admired for years was now a colleague, a friend, and a mentorstime I saw Jeff was back at the end of July at the Smoky Mountain big Foot Conference in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. We had just finished setting up our booths and Jeff was sitting quietly

off to the side. I carried over the plaster casts of footprints from our property, hoping to get his take on them, as I always valued his eye for detail. We sat and talked for a while about his upcoming retirement, about life, and about the things that still fascinated him most. He joked about trying to convince his wife Lauren, that he needed more space at home to store his ever growing collection of casts, since he'd be losing that massive

lab space at the University. I remember laughing, but I also remember feeling that something was different. Jeff still had that kindness in his eyes, that thoughtfulness in his words, but there was a quiet heaviness there too. Still, as always, he was giving with his time, generous with his spirit. I had no idea that it would be the life last time I'd ever see him. Since his passing, I've watched as countless people have paid tribute to him, students, colleagues,

fellow researchers, and fans from all around the world. I didn't rush to do the same, because, to be honest, I needed time, time to sit with the loss, time to process what Jeff meant to me personally and what he meant to this community. So tonight I want to honor him in the most fitting way I can think of, by going back to where it all began. What you're about to hear is our very first conversation, fully remastered from that original Sasquatch Odyssey interview we recorded back in

March of twenty twenty one. This is my way of saying thank you, Jeff for your kindness, for your brilliance, and for the legacy you've left behind in the study of Sasquatch and in the hearts of all of us who were lucky enough to know you. Welcome to the show, Doctor.

was always fascinated in all things prehistoric. Went through the dinosaur phase, was fascinated with the questions of human evolution even at that age, cave in and so forth. This just seemed to embody all the mysteries prehistoric man and all that wrapped into one package long story shorts. We were there for one of the showings. My dad took myself and my younger brother, and I know the rest.

Just one thing fell into another. I guess the other thing that really the course was The next year in sixth grade was a unit on primates, and because of an open minded, excellent to sixth grade teacher when someone equipped that Bickfoot would be a primate, rather than just dismiss it as myth or fable, she had us evaluate it based on how it was described by suppose that

eyewitnesses films. We determined that it seemed to have those characteristics that we were enumerating to define primates, so she included it on a litany of examples of primates that we were going to Then, in turn, Doo reports on it. I, by the quick draw action of my hand shooting up,

got picked to do Sasquatch along with another classmate. It turns out that our librarian was the niece of John Green, and had herself quite an extensive little file with the newspaper clippings and magazine articles and a brand's banking new copy of John Green's On the Track of the Sasquatch. That was my introduction early on was Roger Patterson's book, followed by John Greens On the Track of the Sasquatch.

And then shortly thereafter I got hold of a copy of Ivan Sanderson's A Bomb Snowman Legend comes a live boy once the fire was lit. Then I went after it with a lot of gusto and started my own collection of clippings. I was always scouring through other books that mentioned things about the Yetti and Bigfoot. Of course,

I found out there was another Bigfoot in Idaho. Once I moved to Idah, we shortly thereafter moved to Boise found out about the renegade Indian by the name of Bigfoot who was shot by Star Wilkerson down in the Awahi Desert. It was a kind of all encompassing obsession with the subject matter.

He was just so impressed by the subtleties of anatomy that were evident in that either pathological or traumatized individual that he felt it tipped the scale definitely decidedly for him by involved in as an academic. It started just a little bit before my first real big exposure to

footprints and casts myself. I was capped to help with the evaluation of a piece of video footage that was shot down in the California Redwoods and the Jededi Smith National Forest, and this became known as the Playmate video. It was shot by a documentary crew with a guest hostess who had been the Playmate of the Year on a previous occasion. It unfortunately got a lot of insinuation and so forth the comic relief if you will, as

a result of that. But it was an interesting piece of video footage to kind of peak my curiosity, because when I was recruited to analyze it, I thought, all this would be a fun exercise to identify the zipper. The more I scrutinized it, less I felt I could see any kind of red flag that it was not the real deal. And there were some really striking parallels and convergences, in fact in the shape confirmation of the body form with Patty from the Patterson Gimlin film specifically,

and so that had set the wheels in motion. It was just an interesting cascade of coincidences that there are such things. On the return from that, we actually went and visited the site in northern California and did all kinds of on the site forensic measurement and analysis in concert with the reviewing and analysis of the film. The fellow I was working with, the late Richard Greenwell, formerly

the International Cryptology Society. Richard handed me a little book about Bigfoot of the in the Blues, namely the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon and southeastern Washington. That was written by Vance Orchard. That was the second stepping stone, because that focused on the exploits of Paul Freeman, West Summerlind Vance Orchards, and Bill Lowry and other characters in that

area surrounding Walla, Washington. It was in the course of actually writing a review of that book for Richard Greenwell for his journal, that I came into direct contact with Paul Freeman in West Summerland and these other principal personalities in this book. Was there on an occasion had the opportunity to see some of Freeman in Summerland's casts firsthand. Freeman happened to have found some footprints that very morning.

This is too coincidental for to the odds, but I thought, what we got to lose, Let's go out and take a look at least, and so we did. And man, here was this long line of extremely fresh tracks that had been laid down in the hours of the previous night or early morning, thirty five forty five clear footprints

in the mud. It just really bowled me over. As a backdrop, my academic profession is teaching human gross anatomy, but my research focuses on the evolution of human bipedalism, especially those adaptations of the lower extremity, particularly the foot With that the analysis of fossil footprints and contemporary human and non human primate footprints in order to carry out comparative anatomical analyzes of those specimens. I know footprints. I think I'm in the position to scrutinize these and know

what I'm looking at. It was sobering because these were very compelling pieces of evidence. I'll leave it there at some time for some more questions.

just acknowledging. Noting that presence, Doctor Krantz went to great lengths to consult with other latent fingerprint examiners, students of dramaticglyphics in anthropology, and so forth, and published a couple

of papers that quite interesting. I had mentioned this because some of the footprints that I had received from Paul Freeman and West Summerlin showed evidence of dramatoglyphics above and beyond the ones that Grover had drawn attention to, and I'd mentioned this in the documentary that aired, and a latent fingerprint examiner in Texas, officer Jimmy chilcut took note

and sat up in his chair. He was not only a very skilled fingerprint expert and analyst, but he was also very interested in the distribution of distinguishing characteristics of different ethnic groups of human populations. To better appreciate that very and understand it, he had taken it on himself to start studying up on actually collecting an extensive collection of non human primate traumatoglyphics. He would go and make

arrangements to go into the zoos. For example, when the primates were undergoing their annual veterinary examinations and were anesthetized, he would come in and while they were still asleep, he would fingerprint their hands and feet. Had quite a collection. He contacted me. Eventually came up from Texas to Idaho and spent a couple of days in my lab. I just turned him loose at first and let him find his way without biasing him by pointing any particular things out.

And pretty soon he calls me into the lab and he has all the most pertinent examples laid out on the benchtop from the collection. We started to go through them, and it was really quite interesting to have his perspective on them. Now, it's been a little bit of a mixed bag because a couple of the specimens had features

that were similar to dramaticglyphics. But I think we're all convinced now are artifacts of the casting process under certain conditions, particularly if it's very hot and dry, the soils are powdery, like the dusting logging roads from northern California there back in the sixties, when a couple of these specimens, that

attention has been drawn to by chillcut were made. If you pour plaster that has been mixed in hot water or warm water, if your two liter bottles been sitting out in the sun or whatever, it tends to set up very abruptly. It kicks, they call that when it sets up well. Especially then on top of that, when it hits the very dry, powdery substrate, it wicks water away very quickly, and that causes the plaster to kick, so you can get some of these weird features. It's

like people I've probably seen something very similar. If they make pancakes on a good hot grip and you pour that batter, it cooks very rapidly. But the batter that you continue pouring flows over the top of that cooked edge and makes another cooked hedge and another, and you flip the pancake and it has these concentric rings around the outside. Everyone's seen this at some time or another. That's the same principle in a way, the same effect,

but a different principle. The principle here is the water sucked out and the plaster kicks, and then the more fluid plaster flows over and hits that substrate that dust and kicks again. Point being, there are some examples that

are simply artifact. But to dismiss all of them as artifact, I think is missing the boat is throwing the baby out the bath water, because we have some very interesting ones that were poured under the opposite conditions, very wet saturated cold soils that were wet clay shoulders of a road right underneath a melting snow bank. So the ridge detail there is very real.

washes it out. So by the time we actually made some plaster casts, some representative casts, those details had been obliterated. We are no no longer visible. People say, why don't you have repeat appearances where you can identify based on the No. Unfortunately, because they are not extensive, they're very rare. They're not present in a lot of examples. We don't have repeat appearances of individuals that show the same areas

preserving ridge details. So you could look at that spot and see it and be satisfied with it or identified it as the same individual. We can recognize individuals in the basis of morphology. We've got ample, numerous repeat appearances of individuals where a given geographical area, being that there are very few sasquatch, if you find footprints, the odds of those footprints being from one of those very few number of individuals is very high. You're likely to find

footprints of those individuals. Again, that's the case, especially in somewhere like the Blues, where there's been an inordinate number of footprint casts made because of the conditions that prevail the many roads that are undeveloped, that are just simply bladed codes. In the summertime, they're dusty, and those fall and spring their muddy and clayey fine dust turns into

a really nice clay that picks up fine details. We've got lots of examples of repeat appearances of recognizable individuals in that sample from the Blues of Washington.

closely represent or approximate something like an orangutan. When you look at the great apes. Every species of great apes has a different social structure. No two are alike. So the orangutan, rather than say a guerrilla, has a harem. A dominant male guerrilla controls access to a group of females by directly defending his group, whereas an orangutan male

controls access to females in his neighborhood. By controlling the real estate, he broadcasts his presence, his dominance, and essentially, quote unquote defends a territory, or at least advertises his presence in the territory. When the females are receptive, they come looking for him for companionship. That's more likely, I think, and it fits the anecdotal evidence too of visual encounters

and behavior of solitary individuals. We I have also some indirect evidence that points to a large home range, probably on the order of a thousand square miles, which isn't exceptional. There are grizzly bears, for example, a male grizzly bear can easily defend or a patrol an area of that size. So then when you take other clues, like we know that there's quite an alignment with the bioclimatic factors associated with sasquatch reports as well as with black bear distribution.

There's been a paper published that kind of shows that remarkable parallel. So if we use that kind of as a rule of thumb and look at the areas where black bear survive are found, the types of habitat variables they need they're a large omnivore. Sasquatch presumably the large omnivore based on reports of the food items that they take and heat about everything that isn't nailed down, it seems with all that taken together, let's just take Idaho, for example, how many home ranges of a dominant male

could you fit? How many thousand square mile plots would fit in the areas of Idaho that support bear populations. Others such as John Green, was one of the first to point out a remarkable correlation between precipitation levels and sasquatch reports that agrees well with bear as well. Again, you have to have a habitat that's producing enough greens forbes and so forth, as well as fruits and other small mammals, and while not that they can feed upon.

You do that for Idaho, and you come up with about twelve or fifteen plots, just depending on how you slice it. There's a lot of heterogeneity in the topography and in the patchiness of the forest, et cetera. And each of those plots then represents you know, let's just say five for easy maths, five times, let's say fifteen. It is seven five Sasquatch. A lot of people push back to say, oh, that can't be, that's not enough. Let's just double it. Then still at one hundred and fifty.

Then compare that to thirty five thousand black bear in Idaho. When you consider that thirty five thousand versus one hundred and fifty or even three hundred will make it so you can even compare orders of magnitude more easily. You start to realize how rare and how elusive these animals really are, why we don't find bodies and bones, and why encounters are so infrequent, The credible ones, the substantial ones.

We have a proliferation of hopeful accounts of encounter, discoveries of footprints, but the credible, solid, substantial ones are much rarer and fewer between. So if you were to repeat that process across the other states, it's surprising even the state like Washington, half the state is staged for us essentially like Idaho, like southern Idaho, and so until you get to the cascade, so really the area is further restricted in Washington and Oregon. In northern California, go up

to British Columbia. British Columbia has one hundred and ten thousand black bear estimated, So there's a lot more terrain. Then you look at black bear distribution. If you look at a map black bear range across North America, go across the boreal forest down around the Great Lakes, down New England and backside of Appalatia down hook up into the four corners of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma. In that

area there you've got it. Now. Of course back east though, if you start looking at the black bear numbers as well as their distribution, you may have black bear distribution through all those areas I talked about. I'll get it wrong, and some will get me on this because I can't keep them straight. I have to always look them up. But they're some of those southern states. South Carolina that probably has about five thousand black bear, not thirty five thousand,

just five thousand. So that says even though there's some habitat, it's rather restricted and it doesn't support a large population. There's a much larger human population development. There's fewer large tracts of uninterrorrupted, undisturbed habitat. So you put that all together, what you come up with a couple of thousand, several thousand in Western United States and Canada, I would put

it at two or three thousand. Then across Boreal Canada and down into eastern United States, I would put it at maybe another thousand.

look back at that film. What do you think about the Patterson Gimblin film. Do you think it stood the test of time?

that you have to continually remind yourself. This was shot in nineteen sixty seven, and based on what was conventional wisdom and anthropology in nineteen sixty seven, that creature couldn't exist. There was no accommodation, There was no context or place to allow for the existence of another bipedal hominin. That was counter to the accepted paradigm, the notion that the hominin niche was so particular and specific there could be only one species in it for the old ecological axiom

one niche, one species, and so we were it. We were the principal species in that niche. So now we know that that was hogwash, That was ridiculous, very egocentric even to consider that. Really, we know that the hominin family tree was very bushy, it wasn't very limited and restricted in membership, and that many of those branches on that bushy tree have persisted alongside us until more recently

than anyone would have guessed fifty years ago. The story that I repeat often it is my favorite example of that context was John Napier, who was one of the first to view the film from the scientific community in the Smithsonian. He was impressed enough to write a book

about the subject matter. Although on the topic of them film he came down on the naysayer side, but he had troubled defending that position and justified it ultimately by saying that when he looked at the figure, he said, from the waist up, it looked like an ape, but from the waist down it looks like a human. He said, it's inconceivable that such a hybrid would exist in nature, so it must be false. That book came out in

seventy two. Shortly thereafter, within the few years in the mid to late seventies, more fossils of Austrolopithecus afarensus were discovered, particularly the postcrania, the pelvis, the knee, the ankle, and so forth. It was very clear that they had a lower extremity that showed many of the hallmarks of modern human bipedalism. But in a little, small package. How is it that little package described to the popular press. From

the waist up, it looks just like a chimpanzee. From the waist down, it looks like a short, hairy human. Isn't it curious how nature has combined expect a combination of traits. That was the lynch pin. That was the sticking point for Napier in accepting the credibility of the film.

That was the only thing he could settle on to justify his irrational premise because it was because it was based on a false premise that there could be only one species, and the experts at the time tried to justify their rejection of the film by saying some really funky things, some really silly things about the way the creature walked, if they had hair on its breasts, etc. That were just in twenty twenty hindsight, are embarrassing that

these experts did not understand the most fundamental principles about anatomy and locomotion.

that arena as well. But I think that was just because he was working with a very limited sample, and therefore differences between individuals seemed more start more distinctive than they really were. With three hundred footprint casts instead of a dozen, you can see the continuum of variation amongst the population.

have hoaxers. That leads me into my next question. I know you've seen enough tracks and you've seen enough cast what do you look for and how do you go about proving that a track is in fact from a sasquatch or a hoax.

involved with. Like I said, those are few and far between, but by far the more common distraction that I have to sit through. The chaff thats sit through are just misidentifications. A lot of those are human. There are a lot of people who get caught up and they like to go out to places where modern day humans walk around barefoot in the mud. For whatever reason, it feels nice

and cool, squishing up between your toes or whatever. Even in sometimes inexplicable areas where you might not walk barefoot, there are people who do. And there are some hallmarks of the human foot, namely the arch, the differentiated ball, the proportions of the toepads, the narrow heel breadth to length ratios that are just unmistakable. There are signs of shoe wear that are unmistakable in the compressed toe positions.

Especially the little toe is subject to getting squished in and sometimes turned completely on its side, even when the shoes. Often walking around barefoot and mud still shows up. It's pretty straightforward to point those out. I tell people circumstances taking into account are considered. If it walks like a duck and e quects like a duck, it's a duck. If I can't differentiate this from a human track, I

don't care. If you found it on the moon, it still would be a human footprint based on the criteria. Unless we have juvenile sasquatch, they're going through a phase where they mimic human footprints. I guess we could come the conspiracy to explain that, but I can't envision any natural process by which a sasquatch would go from. And we have little sasquatch feet, baby infants, juveniles, they look

like little broad flat footed displayed toed sasquatch. Why they would go from that to a holy human looking appearance and then broadened back out and flatten the arch again as adults. Just doesn't make any sense to me. So that's the big thing.

washed out. Sometimes it's just an outline from a pile of pine needles that get washed into a ridge and that strikes a somewhat oval looking appearance in a bare spot of dirt and becomes a footprint. And then of course the common animal track that is sometimes mistaken for sasquashed because of its distinctive toepads. Is a bear, the hind foot does have an elongated heel pad usually comes to a taper unless it's a very big bear, and fills out and rounds out as the weight gets pushed

down on that heel bone the calcaneus. So basically in enumerting those things, I've pointed out some of the distinctions. When we talk about a sasquatch footprint, if it's an adult, it's a big, broad, flat footed, flexible mid footed print with large toe relative size of the toes and toepads that tend to be a little more similar in size. Not al was not completely and Grover drew attention to

where there's a little bit of variation in that. But compared to a human where the lateral toes are like little grapes, compared to this big plum of a big toepad, the distinction is quite visible and can be appreciated. There should be a big, broad heel. Sometimes one of the tells of a fake foot is an existing footprint might be extended and flared to make it broader across the forefoot,

but sometimes they inexplicably leave this little narrow heel. It makes it look like a swim fin, and that's obviously very un likely unnatural. It's the big broad heel pad that is one of the principal weight distributors of this massive animal, an animal that say, given patty size that could weigh anywhere from seven hundred eight hundred pounds, a big eight and a half foot in male is going to be twelve hundred pounds the side of a moose.

DNA alone. Now there's more and more debate that we should knowledge the existence of a potential novel species on that basis rather than requiring the lethal collection of a specimen, especially when it's a rare and endangered species, where the impact of the collection of a specimen itself could be catastrophic. That said, to my knowledge, there is no DNA evidence yet, at least not recognized or useful claims to the contrary. Notwithstanding,

I don't think those claims have any merit. The situation I think that we're in is the DNA of the squatch is probably very similar to US. I don't put any stock in the claims of hybridization. I think there have been good reviews written of that data and that evidence that refuted resoundingly. The thing that we're up against is a creature that is probably very closely related to us, and therefore may only differ in a percentage point or

less in the total sequence. As such, to make it short and sweet, this makes the example I think very graspable for your listeners, and that is, imagine you had an advance calendar, and a most an advanced calendar have twenty four windows leading up to Christmas. You open up the little door or a little window pane, and you get the treat right. Well, imagine you had an advanced calendar that had one hundred windows. So of course that one percent difference isn't necessarily going to be behind just

one window. But for the sake of our illustration, we could make thousand windows and spread that one percent into ten different windows. Let's just make it simple. One hundred windows and behind one window is the golden ticket. There's the sequence that has the marker that distinguishes humans from sasquatch. In most of the studies that have been done so far that haven't had other unfortunate complications to cloud their credibility,

they've been rather superficial. Imagine that you have a study with funding that only permits you to open up ten doors, ten of the hundred. So what are the odds that the ten that you open are going to include the one door out of one hundred that as that marker in it? And if you don't find that marker, what's the conclusion you're going to draw Everything you look at will be exactly identical to modern human So we've had

two possibilities presented. It's either contaminated through mishandling, or it has been just misidentified that it's just simply a human hair for example, or whatever. Tissue. The third possibility is what I've just described, that you just haven't tested enough to come to a definitive conclusion one way or the other. So the jury should still be out rather than pronounced that, oh, it's just human. So that's more unfortunately where I think

we're at. So it means we need to have good samples, but we also need to have the wherewithal the funding and someone who's willing to put in the time. I'm an effort because it will become a more involved process to do a genomic test that is exhaustive enough to be sure that you have found those particular markers.

trying to convince. I understand fully that it requires at the very least DNA sequence, a novel sequence, or perhaps at least part of a body or a specimen.

other people. Or maybe they're more genuine or sincere in their efforts. They are laboring under preconceptions or existing paradigms that don't allow for As I alluded to with the Patterson Gimblet film, I've had people say they can't exist, therefore they don't exist, and it doesn't matter what evidence

you think you have. No one and I say that again, no one can defend the idea that they can't exist, that there isn't a context for them, like something like the single species hypothesis that proposes only one species of hominin can exist at a time. That's bocum. Now that can be thrown out, So you can't defend that. So we're left with the second side of that coin, the other side of that coin, which is what's the probability

they do exist? They certainly can, but is the evidence persuasive that they do is the context sufficient for them

both scientifically, theoretically and pragmatically. Under that umbrella comes the questions, the objections about the bodies, about reproducing populations sufficient numbers that a viable population can they elude our search if you're honest with yourself about it, and you're informed about the circumstances and the context, and you acknowledge what evidence we have that points to, for example, our discussion of

the population size. When you think about how rare and elusive even black bear are, relatively speaking, and yet there are hundreds of black bear for everyone's sasquatch. Potentially if my inference, my inference model is anywhere in the ballpark as far as the absolute numbers, and I think that's

reasonable given the other aspects. We can also couch our conversations or our inferences in terms of the bracketing variability evident in the known grade apes, while acknowledging that shouldn't be taken as an entirely limiting bracket because our knowledge of apes is restricted to just a handful of species that are themselves just the tip of the iceberg of the variation that existed through the Miocene into the Plioceine for grade apes, hundreds of species with all types of

locomotive adaptations and dietary variation and habitat preferences, of which these existing species are just relic populations in the tropical refugea even there, as I said earlier about their social structure, every living species of grade ape has a different social structure than the other just about significant. So anyway, when you take all those factors into account, a lot of these objections pale. They melt away in the light of some informed conversation.

agency personnel, fish and wildlife and forest service. Behind the scenes, none of them are really in a position to undertake things on a more pragmatic and visible public basis, but some of them do support the effort into terms of reviewing manuscripts, my online journal, my referee Journal, the RelA Commoid Inquiry. I'm just in the process of reorganizing the editorial board because we've had a couple of passings like doctor bindernegl you mentioned, but also because of competing those

that have been there. We're in our tenth year now, so they've served for a decade. So I'm rearranging, refreshing things, and giving other people a chance to participate in helping with reviews, recruitment, editorials and commentaries they work with. Doctor George Chalier is an honorary member of the editorial Board of the journal and lends his support in that way by association. And of course my book carries the endorsement of doctor Jane Goodall on the cover. She's been supportive

in her own way whenever the opportunity presents itself. Yeah, there are other academics that are quite interesting, and there's a new generation. That's what's exciting is I've had some exams recently of fresh PhDs who expressed their absolute enthusiasm and interest for this subject. But because the old guards the shift of paradigms is a glacial process. Thomas Kuhne actually said, who is the one who coined the term

paradigm shifts? Said, sometimes it takes the entire generation for the old guard to pass, literally die off, in order to clear the way for new ideas to take root and flourish.

track record. A lot of it is simply the luck of the draw as to who the two people who were tapped. So two people, essentially, two people wield the power of whether you can discuss your subject matter at a national meeting or not. There's something wrong with that system. Isn't there absolute, especially when there's no appeals process.

the morning, probably late on the previous night. Literally the hair stood up on the back of my neck. Because it's

an interesting sensation. I've had something similar in an academic context limited to that, but like, for example, the first time when I was a brand new gradu student going out to Long Island to start my graduate program in the American Museum of Natural History was holding their Ancestors exhibit, where they had brought for the first time in many instances, all these original hominin fossils from all over the world,

and they were on exhibit. You set there, look looking through this bulletproof plexiglass case at this skull into these empty orbits, and realized that was a creature alive three million years ago that was on our family tree. It could have been a direct ancestor for all we know that. There's an interesting sensation when that realization. You're not just looking at a rock or an interesting bone, but you're

looking at the fossil of a hominin now extinct. The only other time I had that experience, I think, was when the first time I went panting for gold in the Sacramento Valley in the mountains outside of Sacramento. And when you swirl that around in that little nugget, that little fleck of gold glints in the light, it's uha. It really does bite you.

or no Kiel. Do you have an opinion on some of these groups that are out there to prove the existence by taking a specimen.

mental raffling with my self ethics questions. Plus there was just the pragmatic aspect of if I was really serious about doing this and I had any funding that was channeled through the university. All my protocols and methods in the field had to be approved by Animal Welfare Committee a protocol to shoot a sasquat. If they even overlooked the subject matter, it would not have gotten past muster with the committee. But I came to a change of heart.

At one point I had conversations with doctor Krantz, and I had seen his utterances on the subject and others, not just him. It's a funny story, but literally what happened or where it came to a head, it's not the thing. But I had taken the kids to see the Disney Tarzan movie, and if you're familiar with that movie,

there's two very diametrically opposite characters. There's Clayton, who shoots at everything that's moving, and of course he's motivated purely out of profit and so forth and personal gain where and the opposite was the professor, who was willing in the end to give up his entire career and his whole life in fact, to stay there and study these majestic animals in their natural health habitat. And this little imp was sitting on my shoulder and pose the question, Jeff,

which of these two are you? So I didn't take a lot of soul searching. But it was the nexus point I guess in my own mental struggles, and I turned one hundred and eighty degrees and thought, what is the motivation? Why am I so determined to do this? And I couldn't justify it. And so from that point on, the strategy was to try to get tissue or DNA that we could put this question of recognizing a new species on the basis of DNA to the test.