SC EP:1194 The Journey

Interactive Transcript

spk_0 It looked like somebody was bent over and had their head in the window of the deer blind

spk_0 and it either heard me or smelled me and he pulled his head out of the tent and stood

spk_0 straight up and that shocked me.

spk_0 They don't make people that big.

spk_0 The way it moved almost as if it was gliding across the beach.

spk_0 I've never seen anything moves like that in my life.

spk_0 They were screaming at each other in gibberish.

spk_0 It sounded like a language and they were chuntering away back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

spk_0 I know what a bear looks like and there is no way on this planet but what I saw was bears.

spk_0 I'm in one way or putting it.

spk_0 He's as quiet as you better.

spk_0 Can I see him?

spk_0 Hello?

spk_0 Get somebody out here.

spk_0 What's going on now sir?

spk_0 It's a son of a bitch.

spk_0 It's about six foot nine.

spk_0 I don't know.

spk_0 Easy and now sir?

spk_0 Yes, I'm looking right at you.

spk_0 This is Mr. Rogers from Phoenix, Arizona and the only podcast we listen to in my neighborhood is Sasquatch Chronicles.

spk_0 Welcome to the show everyone.

spk_0 Thanks for being here tonight.

spk_0 I got a great show planned for you.

spk_0 I will be speaking with John.

spk_0 John is a working professional, highly educated.

spk_0 He was comfortable and is daily routine of meetings and deadlines.

spk_0 But as a child, he had this incident that happened to him in the dense woods near this cabin.

spk_0 And many years later, he heard a recording of the exact same thing he heard as a child.

spk_0 It was the Ohio Howl heard on a TV show.

spk_0 The Howl heard on a TV show.

spk_0 Remembering the event that happened to him when he was young kind of shattered his world view and his mind kind of flooded with questions.

spk_0 So he started going out with people to find out if Sasquatch was real or not.

spk_0 Tonight, John shares his journey over many decades of looking for answers and his exploration and some of the different things that have happened to him.

spk_0 And again, we're going this is stretching over decades.

spk_0 But I asked him to kind of come on and share these events.

spk_0 If you've had an encounter and you'd like to be on the show, shoot me an email.

spk_0 My email address is west at SasquatchCronicles.com

spk_0 And if you get a chance, check out SasquatchCronicles.com.

spk_0 You can become a member and get additional shows.

spk_0 Let's jump into it tonight.

spk_0 I want to welcome John to the show.

spk_0 John, thanks for coming on.

spk_0 It's my pleasure, west. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you.

spk_0 Yeah, and you had this incident happen to you when you were very young.

spk_0 And it kind of stuck with you throughout your whole life.

spk_0 If you would kind of start from the very beginning and block me into this,

spk_0 because I know we're going to span over decades and I'll try as little as possible to interject.

spk_0 But if you would start from the very beginning.

spk_0 Well, the first experience that I think was Sasquatch related for me was probably

spk_0 in 1976 or 1977.

spk_0 And it was in Ontario.

spk_0 So the story is that, you know, my father, you know, I grew up in Toronto.

spk_0 And my father loved to go fishing up at Lake Superior.

spk_0 It's about an eight hour drive out of Toronto all the way up to an area called Batchewana Bay.

spk_0 So when my dad would go fishing, my mother and I, and sometimes my brothers,

spk_0 we would stay behind at this cabin at an old motel that's long gone now.

spk_0 But some of the structures are still there. It was called the Black Forest Motel.

spk_0 And it was a pretty scenic area and it had a couple of really big marshes in the back.

spk_0 And so now, you know, typically we go in the spring.

spk_0 And my dad would go fishing for a steelhead trout and rainbow trout at that time.

spk_0 And you know, my, my brothers, my mom, we'd go on these old logging roads and go hiking back into the bush.

spk_0 And you know, we'd find bear tracks, moose tracks, all kinds of things.

spk_0 If we were lucky, we got to see a moose at a distance.

spk_0 Well, we'd find all kinds of birds like Tom again.

spk_0 We used to call them roughed grouse.

spk_0 I don't know if people still call them that up there.

spk_0 And, you know, and we'd, I was really into bird watching and stuff like that as a kid.

spk_0 I was crazy about owls and I was always trying to find owls and catching frogs and stuff that we used to do.

spk_0 So one night, one time I was up there with just me and my mom and my dad.

spk_0 I think both my brothers were, I think going to university at that time, I'm the youngest of three.

spk_0 So we were up at the cabin.

spk_0 My dad had just come back from fishing and my mom was getting ready to prepare something for us.

spk_0 And I said I wanted to go out to the big marsh, which was probably a little less than a quarter mile away.

spk_0 And to go kind of listen to the spring peepers.

spk_0 And if you're familiar with Northern Ontario, I know the spring peepers kind of all over Ohio and other places.

spk_0 But in those gigantic marshes, it's almost a deafening chorus of frogs.

spk_0 And I used to do things that were, I don't know, I retrospect.

spk_0 I think maybe even daring.

spk_0 I used to go buy these, these kind of these pits that were dug out to make landfill for the highway.

spk_0 And I'd go in the bush and I'd lie down in the ground and cover myself with leaves.

spk_0 Just so my face was the only thing that was sticking out and I would observe wildlife.

spk_0 And I actually one time saw a wolf that way.

spk_0 And then I realized I'm only 12.

spk_0 This probably isn't safe.

spk_0 So after seeing the wolf, I took off just to make sure, you know, nothing, nothing bad happened.

spk_0 But I would do stuff like that.

spk_0 So I was out in this forest.

spk_0 Well, to be clear, I was walking down this road behind a motel to a bridge.

spk_0 And the bridge is right alongside this rather large beaver dam that was there.

spk_0 And some, I'm just listening to this giant chorus on this marsh and of frogs.

spk_0 And the sun goes down.

spk_0 It starts to get dark.

spk_0 And I'm looking for, you know, birds, birds of the evening.

spk_0 You know, owls, herons, bitterns, storks, stuff like that.

spk_0 And then suddenly at the back half of the swamp, all the frogs stop.

spk_0 And so I thought, oh, there's probably going to be a moose coming in.

spk_0 Because you know, when the moose comes in that part of the swamp, the frogs all go quiet.

spk_0 And I've seen that before.

spk_0 But this time, no moose.

spk_0 At least there's nothing I could see.

spk_0 You know, it's when that twilight stage, when the forest is kind of gray,

spk_0 and everything sort of blends together.

spk_0 And way back from the back of the marsh, I hear two really loud,

spk_0 bellowing screams is the best way I can describe them.

spk_0 There was a recording on the internet somewhere that sounded a lot like it.

spk_0 But it was kind of like started low and then went up to like a,

spk_0 and it got really like definitely loud.

spk_0 And it would die down and then it happened again.

spk_0 And by the second time, I was thoroughly freaked out.

spk_0 And in the dark, I ran back to the cabin.

spk_0 And by the time I was running down the road, it was so dark,

spk_0 I could barely see my hand in front of my face.

spk_0 So I was I was pretty frightened at that time.

spk_0 And my mother, decades later, still remembered me bursting into the cabin.

spk_0 Apparently, you could see the whites of my eyes all around.

spk_0 Very wide eyed, quite frightened.

spk_0 And I told her something is screaming in the forest.

spk_0 So she remembered that decades later.

spk_0 So I never knew what to, what to think of that.

spk_0 And decades go by.

spk_0 About maybe 15 to 20 years, I think, kind of go by.

spk_0 I go through, I went to school in university in Europe.

spk_0 I came back to Canada and I was, for about a year,

spk_0 I was living in a place called Kitchener Waterloo area of Ontario.

spk_0 And I just married my wife and, you know, and we were sitting down watching TV.

spk_0 And then we watched this program about Bigfoot.

spk_0 And there was a, it was a, I don't remember the name of the program,

spk_0 but the story went that there was a detective of sorts or a policeman of sorts on the native,

spk_0 one of the Native American reservations in Alberta.

spk_0 And he had received a report.

spk_0 I guess over the radio, I think, that there was an angry Sasquatch on a hill,

spk_0 kind of above the rez, or where the, where the trailers and homes were.

spk_0 And it was throwing oil drums down the hill.

spk_0 I don't know if you've ever heard of that story.

spk_0 I remember, I mean, my memory's a little foggy on some of the details.

spk_0 But I remember the guy said something to the effect of when he got to the site.

spk_0 The Sasquatch had stopped throwing the oil drums.

spk_0 It had gone into the forest, but it was still bellowing and screaming.

spk_0 And he had just come from a deposition and he had a tape recorder with him in a microphone.

spk_0 And so he turned it on and recorded it.

spk_0 And the screams that he recorded struck me.

spk_0 It sounded, it's, I suddenly remembered what I'd heard at the lake superior.

spk_0 And that got me questioning.

spk_0 I heard that and I thought, dang, you know, was that what I heard at Lake Superior?

spk_0 And, you know, and then after that, I kind of just, it was still a mystery to me.

spk_0 I didn't really give it too much more thought.

spk_0 I was going about life, you know, getting into getting a job in the United States and things like that.

spk_0 And all the paperwork that went along with it and the visas and everything else that was part of that.

spk_0 So somewhere, and I don't remember when that episode came out.

spk_0 It was in the lake.

spk_0 Or when I saw it was probably the late 90s, I'm thinking.

spk_0 So anyways, so I, you know, get a job in the United States in 1995 and Cleveland, Ohio.

spk_0 One of the jobs that I subsequently had was in one of the state hospitals in the, in some county, which is just in, but kind of in between Akron and Cleveland.

spk_0 And it's right next to the Kaihoga National Forest.

spk_0 It's right on the grounds, actually.

spk_0 So I got a job there and it was a very scenic area around the hospital.

spk_0 You could walk around.

spk_0 So on some of my lunches, I would go walking around in the grounds and at one time, I can't help but think this was around 2000 when I just started working there.

spk_0 I was walking down by a creek called Sagamore Creek.

spk_0 And it came across a really large footprint.

spk_0 It looked about 16 inches in the mud and it was deep and it had toes.

spk_0 And I, I remember looking at it and going, that cannot be that here.

spk_0 What, you know, I was confused.

spk_0 I was, you know, just be fuddled by this thing.

spk_0 I was looking at it and going, no, big foot here.

spk_0 No.

spk_0 And I, and I, I met, played a mental trick on myself, so to speak, and just dismissed it outright saying it's not possible.

spk_0 Some, some big tall guy was walking out here barefoot and left that footprint.

spk_0 And I didn't find any others.

spk_0 It was kind of just crossing the path.

spk_0 And it was in a very deep, scrubby area that's actually quite hard to walk through.

spk_0 And, you know, when I was going down there, I'm always looking for fossils and clam shells and evidence of wildlife.

spk_0 And things like that.

spk_0 So, so that happened.

spk_0 And then later on, I want to say 2001.

spk_0 I have to, I should go back and check with my wife on this.

spk_0 But I went camping with a friend of mine who now lives in Seattle.

spk_0 And he was originally from there with him and his wife and his 18 month old son.

spk_0 And so this I think had to be the summer of 2001 or 2002.

spk_0 But I think 2001.

spk_0 Anybody who's been to Beaver Creek State Park in Ohio, it's it's right along the Pennsylvania border.

spk_0 And it's a stone throw from the Ohio Howell recording, which was I think in Wellesleyville.

spk_0 And that was recorded in 1995.

spk_0 I believe.

spk_0 And so I didn't know anything about that scream.

spk_0 I didn't I hadn't made any done any internet searches.

spk_0 I didn't made any efforts to talk to anybody relating to Bigfoot in any way at that time.

spk_0 But so I remember it was July.

spk_0 I remember we had gotten there just after a rain.

spk_0 But things were still dry enough to make a campfire.

spk_0 And the air was perfectly still.

spk_0 There was absolutely no wind whatsoever.

spk_0 The campsite was pretty full.

spk_0 There were some people in the camp next to us who were drinking.

spk_0 And making noise of until quite late and we were kind of annoyed with them.

spk_0 But you know, that was the first night.

spk_0 And I've also been a practitioner of martial arts might practically my entire life.

spk_0 And so I brought a wooden staff with me just to go practice with.

spk_0 And while everyone was sitting around the campfire, I went into this grove of pine trees.

spk_0 I think they're red red, red pines around the campsite.

spk_0 And I went into there, you know, and just started twirling my staff and whacking the trees with it.

spk_0 And I had no notion of, you know, Sasquatch is communicating with wood knocks and things of that nature.

spk_0 So unbeknownst to me, I'm doing these wood knocks.

spk_0 I'm going to whack, whack in the trees, you know, trying different techniques, you know, different techniques.

spk_0 And I'm going to do some postures and, you know, just doing martial arts solo, just free form.

spk_0 And then this incredibly foul odor hits me.

spk_0 And it's really, it's so foul and so pungent, it was like a punch in the face is how I would describe it.

spk_0 And you know, my wife and I have talked about it over and over again.

spk_0 Because as soon as I smelled it, she walked over to me and she goes, do you smell that disgusting odor?

spk_0 And they look at her and they go, yeah, what on earth is that?

spk_0 I've never smelled anything like it before.

spk_0 And so she thinks it was like, you know, so she grew up in China.

spk_0 And she says it was like kind of like those open toilets that they used to have out in the country in China, where there's a hole.

spk_0 And there's a lot of, you know, stale waste down there.

spk_0 And it smelled kind of like that.

spk_0 But really, really pungent.

spk_0 And so we were sure what to think of it.

spk_0 I knew that sometimes there's trees that give off certain types of smells at night.

spk_0 They're pretty pungent trees.

spk_0 And I thought, is there a plant out here that's doing that, you know, turns out no.

spk_0 We couldn't find a tree anywhere near us that was giving off that odor.

spk_0 And the odor would have been there a lot longer, but it wasn't there the whole time that we were there.

spk_0 So it was weird.

spk_0 So eventually we all turn in.

spk_0 I remember that people in the camp next to us were carrying on till about two o'clock in the morning and keeping us awake.

spk_0 So we were kind of annoyed by them, but you know, we weren't going to go pick with them or, you know, they were just having fun.

spk_0 We weren't going to, you know, talk to them about the noise.

spk_0 We just settled in.

spk_0 And somewhere around two o'clock to 30 a.m.

spk_0 And there's no wind whatsoever.

spk_0 We hear a gigantic limb.

spk_0 Break off of a tree.

spk_0 And you can hear it swoosh through the air and land and hit the ground with an enormous thud.

spk_0 Probably what sounded like, I don't know, 15, 20 feet from us.

spk_0 And I remember the people in the other camp.

spk_0 I could hear them talking.

spk_0 They're going, holy crap.

spk_0 What was that?

spk_0 You know, kind of thing.

spk_0 And I thought, that's strange.

spk_0 There's no wind.

spk_0 And I mean, I have seen trees break on their own, out in the woods when there's no wind.

spk_0 So I didn't think it was super strange.

spk_0 But, but we did notice it.

spk_0 And what was strange about it, though, was the, the woosh sound of the of the limb as if it had been thrown or something.

spk_0 Like it was flying through the air kind of sound instead of just dropping on site and hitting the ground.

spk_0 So that, that put a hush in the local campers.

spk_0 And then after that, everything went quiet for a while.

spk_0 The whole, nothing else happened after that that I could tell.

spk_0 And the whole next day, we go hiking up and down Beaver Creek, we visit, you know, Gretchen's lock and the old sawmill and all that kind of stuff.

spk_0 So supposedly, or so I'm told and I've read somewhere that that particular park is supposed to be one of Ohio's most haunted places.

spk_0 And these ghost hunters go there all the time.

spk_0 And some of the other big footers that I talked to subsequently told me that the ghost hunters get freaked out when ghosts with red eyes throw pine cones at them.

spk_0 I thought those kind of humors.

spk_0 But so the next night, you know, we were doing camp again.

spk_0 Pretty sure it was a Saturday night with the intent of going back on Sunday.

spk_0 Nothing, nothing's really going on.

spk_0 We're sitting around the campfire, etc, etc. And that's fine.

spk_0 And then we go to bed somewhere around 1130.

spk_0 The people who were drinking the night before were gone. The camp was quieter.

spk_0 And their boy starts to have some kind of medical issue.

spk_0 We turns out he had, you know, a gastrointestinal issue.

spk_0 And he starts crying and yelling.

spk_0 Like really loud. And he's keeping other people in the camping area awake.

spk_0 And the owls are responding and then a group of coyotes responded.

spk_0 And then there's an equestrian farm just right next to the where the camp is.

spk_0 You can hear horses neighing and moving around as if something was agitating them down there.

spk_0 And I didn't really take note of that until after what happened.

spk_0 So I go to my friend and I say, hey, you know, once you just take your boy home, it's not a big drive back to Cleveland.

spk_0 I'll pack up your tent for you in the morning.

spk_0 And we'll deliver it to you.

spk_0 So don't worry about just leave everything here.

spk_0 Just go so they pack up the kid at a 12 30 a.m. or so.

spk_0 They're gone.

spk_0 So my wife and I are lying down in the tent and then she taps me on the shoulder.

spk_0 Not too long after that.

spk_0 I maybe an hour.

spk_0 Maybe a little bit more.

spk_0 Not sure because you know, it was quite a few years ago.

spk_0 And she says, hey, something's coming.

spk_0 And so I picked my attention.

spk_0 I grabbed my machete.

spk_0 I think, okay, that's not good.

spk_0 And I thought, should I get up and unzip the fly of the tent and step outside and confront whatever it is.

spk_0 And then we thought, no, let's pretend we're asleep.

spk_0 So we say nothing and we're just lying there listening.

spk_0 So on the picnic table, kind of right near our tent, we had a box full of foodstuffs and, you know, frying pans and things like that.

spk_0 And I thought to myself, oh, stupid raccoons, you know, they go after that stuff.

spk_0 Well, we hear something walk out of the forest side, not the, you know, with the camp, there's a road that accesses the camp.

spk_0 And then behind the camp, there's a forest and there's a cliff over there.

spk_0 It's a pretty steep.

spk_0 It's a good, you know, 40 feet, 35 feet from an old iron mine, I guess, is what I'm told.

spk_0 And, you know, to come from through there is actually quite difficult because full of thorns and brambles.

spk_0 We hear it coming from that side.

spk_0 And then you can hear it touch the box.

spk_0 I say it because I, in retrospect, I'm really not thinking this is a person anymore.

spk_0 But at the time, I thought it was a person.

spk_0 It's touching the box and just kind of running its hand on the cardboard.

spk_0 So I thought to myself, oh, this thing's not trying to be very discreet this person.

spk_0 And then it walks to the head of our tent, which was facing my friend's tent, which was turned sideways two hours.

spk_0 And underneath their tent was a big tarp that stuck out from the bottom of the tent with a bunch of little toys on it, like little construction trucks and stuff like that.

spk_0 And we hear this thing pick up the tarp and touch it and move it.

spk_0 And it's making a big, loud crackling noise of the tarp.

spk_0 So I thought, no, that's really strange because that's really not discreet at all.

spk_0 And, you know, I'm getting kind of eager at this point to see what's going on.

spk_0 But this thought kept nagging at me like, what if it's somebody and they have a gun and I'm just sitting here with my machete.

spk_0 They'll have the jump on me. This is not safe.

spk_0 So we decided to just let them poke around.

spk_0 And then they kind of poke around the tent a little bit.

spk_0 And then they go off to this pine tree back towards the forest side again.

spk_0 And then the thing takes a leak.

spk_0 You can hear it urinating by the tree, which I thought was very strange.

spk_0 I thought, like, who on earth does that just, but I didn't hear any zippers or anything like that.

spk_0 I just hear something a bit of breathing and some urinating.

spk_0 And I thought, wow, that's really weird.

spk_0 And then it takes off back into the forest again.

spk_0 And so my wife and I thought that was very strange.

spk_0 We thought even for a human being, that's very strange behavior.

spk_0 The following morning when we went out to the tent, the tarp that had the toys on it,

spk_0 the corner of it was neatly folded over in a triangle, which was very strange.

spk_0 And then, so we didn't know what to think of that.

spk_0 We packed up the tent. I took it back to my friend.

spk_0 And so he unpacked it on the lawn next to his building where he lived to dry it out in the sun.

spk_0 And he found a ball of pine pitch, like rolled up into a ball with little broken needles and stuff into it,

spk_0 but rolled up into a ball stuck to his tent.

spk_0 As if somebody had taken pine pitch, rolled it in their hands and tossed it at the tent.

spk_0 And he found that.

spk_0 I don't know how long he kept it, but I know he had that.

spk_0 So after that, we thought that was very strange as well.

spk_0 Sometime after that in the news, and I don't remember exactly how far afterward,

spk_0 I read some kind of news item.

spk_0 I was reading local news.

spk_0 There was some kind of a story about a Sasquatch scene crossing a road near Beaver Creek State Park,

spk_0 probably just 10 miles from where we were.

spk_0 And that got me thinking.

spk_0 I thought that's really weird.

spk_0 So I was mulling that over and I started looking into Bigfoot on the internet.

spk_0 And back then, the internet didn't have as much information.

spk_0 And there was probably fewer hoaxes back then as well, I'm guessing.

spk_0 So at some point around 2005, maybe six, I reached out to the BFR-O.

spk_0 I called them. I saw they have an office.

spk_0 I think it was in California and I called them.

spk_0 And I got a call back from Matt Moneymaker.

spk_0 And he had somebody else with him at the time and they were on speaker phone, I remember.

spk_0 And I told him what they said we heard that you had, because I had left him a voice mail.

spk_0 They said we heard that you had an incident at Beaver Creek State Park.

spk_0 Matt told me he'd been in Ohio.

spk_0 He saw something similar or similar experience at the Berlin reservoir,

spk_0 which is really close to where I live and very close, reasonably close to where I worked.

spk_0 And that struck me as, wow, that's interesting that they come so close to major civil, quote unquote, civilized areas.

spk_0 And he said to me, well, you know, we're going to be doing a trip out there to investigate Bigfoot activity.

spk_0 And you're welcome to join us.

spk_0 So I joined them in 2006 and in 2007.

spk_0 In 2006 was when I got kind of introduced to this idea of doing wood knocks and of, you know, doing whoop noises and hiking around in the forest at night to see if you could elicit activity.

spk_0 We talked about, you know, sound broadcasting and things like that.

spk_0 I think that's when I met Cliff Barichman. I think he was either at that one or the one in 2007. I'd have to look back.

spk_0 But I met some of the local bigfooters as well, some of whom I'm still in contact with us to this day.

spk_0 And so, you know, I remember when I went out on this experience, I said to myself, I feel like a complete idiot.

spk_0 This can't be real. I'm on some kind of wild goose chase.

spk_0 There's no way, you know, these things exist. But after listening to stories from a number of people that were quite sounding quite sincere.

spk_0 I started to reconsider my position on that. And in 2007, during that episode when we went out, I think it was in April.

spk_0 Yeah, it was in April. That's when the East Central Ohio Bigfoot chatter was recorded.

spk_0 What happened on the first night there, we broke up into separate parties.

spk_0 And my party was with a good friend of mine who's an author.

spk_0 And he was interested in writing potentially some material on Sasquatch. And he brought along his son.

spk_0 And so it was him, myself and his son, James, came along with us.

spk_0 And so we were hiking the upper Vandagran Trail. And the lower Vandagran Trail follows the Beaver Creek itself and we were up on this ridge.

spk_0 And we were sitting at this on this gigantic block of limestone. I remember our sandstone that was still warm from the sun.

spk_0 And I was there with my typical martial arts stickwhacking on trees again.

spk_0 And we were just talking about, I don't know, a whole bunch of things. And after it got dark somewhere around 930, maybe 10.

spk_0 We got the radio saying, OK, we're all going to go hiking. So we start walking down this trail down to rendezvous with another party walking the lower Vandagran Trail.

spk_0 So we're hiking. And my friend Rick says to me, he goes, hey, something just crossed the trail behind me.

spk_0 And I thought he's playing tricks with me is what I thought I thought that's not we're 10 minutes down the trail and already something is happening.

spk_0 So I didn't give it much credence. So we keep walking, moving on and we get down to the bottom of the trail where we're supposed to rendezvous. We're almost at that point.

spk_0 And we see some deer in the bush. And instead of bounding away like deer normally do, they're sculpting. They're hanging their heads down and they're moving really, really quietly in the underbrush.

spk_0 And they just gently moved away from us. I thought most the time when I encountered deer even at night, unless they're really used to humans, they bound away. And you see their little, you know, their white fluffy tails as they as they bound away from you.

spk_0 And I didn't see anything like that. They just slowly walk slunk away from us. And I thought that that was a bit weird for deer behavior. But, you know, again, not making much of a mental note of that other than just observing it.

spk_0 So we get to the bottom of the trail where supposed to be at the rendezvous point. And just as we're about to like we're literally 20 feet from the trail junction.

spk_0 We hear this incredible sound of something right behind us. And it was in rapid succession. And I thought it was very powerful and loud. And I kind of felt it in my body.

spk_0 And we all looked at each other and thought what on earth was that? And you know, I thought it was something pounding its foot really rapidly into the ground. But later, I couldn't help thinking this was chest pounding.

spk_0 And we were we were a little bit freaked at this point.

spk_0 And so we get to the junction and we look for the guys who are supposed to rendezvous with us and they didn't even stop.

spk_0 We could see their little headlamps way down the trail. They didn't even stop for us. They just kept on going. So we were a bit chagrined by that. We were kind of like, damn, not what we wanted to be left behind.

spk_0 And then we hear across the creek, something walking in the tall grass. And this is where there's a little abandoned the river in an island. And people who know this area know this little island really, really well.

spk_0 On the opposite, opposite bank, there's an old farm wall made of stones is probably like way over 100 years old.

spk_0 Probably for orchards or some sort of thing where they were moving rocks from the ground. But anyways, we hear one to our left and then we hear one to our right.

spk_0 And then there's something behind us. And then there's the one on the right starts walking into the river and you can really hear that it's by peedal.

spk_0 And I thought, this is really freaky. You know, we're either being stalked by some people who are trying to frighten us or we're dealing with Sasquatch.

spk_0 So we all have flashlights. And so I say to my friends, I said, well, why don't we just go back to back, hold our flashlights to our chest. And when these things get really close to us, we'll just turn them on and we'll be able to see what's coming at us.

spk_0 So the sounds keep happening and whatever it is is approaching. And you know, the tension gets really high and we flash on the light. And nothing.

spk_0 The sound stops. There's no activity. We're just illuminating branches and grass. We see absolutely nothing.

spk_0 So we go, okay, let's get out of here. So we go back along the lower vandering trail on the river, because that's where we were.

spk_0 One guy at the front of us and I was at the front and my friend was at the back and we had our flashlights on the whole time.

spk_0 And I said, you know, we were told that if you shine your flashlights, they don't like that. And they'll stay away from you.

spk_0 So we're shining these flashlights all over the all around us in a really paranoid fashion.

spk_0 And as we're going along, we cross this bridal trail and just so happens that our flashlight beams kind of converge to the right of us right where this bridal trail is.

spk_0 And we see way up high off the ground, these two eyes. And I they were kind of greenish blue almost.

spk_0 I'm not entirely sure of a greenish blue. And when the light hit the face and we didn't get a really good look at the face, does it turn to weigh immediately.

spk_0 But what we did see was the eyes got really white and like like almost like surprised turned away to its left and then it took off.

spk_0 And then it didn't bother us anymore after that. We got to the village. We crossed the old iron bridge and we got to the village and then we.

spk_0 We were very unnerved by that experience because it was it we were clearly being stalked and and it was frightening. So that happens.

spk_0 Then the following day we do a day hike. And during the day hike, we're on the other side of the river. We my friends and I thought let's go see, let's go walk where these things were.

spk_0 Let's see if we can find footprints. So we go through all this bush and tall grass and we didn't find any footprints. But what we did find was a deer that had been clearly ripped in two.

spk_0 So the front legs and head were one piece and the hind quarters with this tail and everything else were the second piece.

spk_0 And they were about 40 feet apart from one another. And one of the one of them, the head of this thing had been like picked clean by birds or something.

spk_0 But nothing had really cannibalized it. Like nothing like no coyotes toward apart or anything else. The bones were not scattered. They were intact.

spk_0 And it was sitting there kind of like a Sphinx. It was a very bizarre sight to see this thing like it was.

spk_0 So that was another weird thing and we reported that as well. I remember the next night. I said to the group. I said, I'm not going out on that trail again. That was a bit too frightening for me.

spk_0 I'm going to stick around the camp with you guys. And this is I believe Saturday night. And so, so you know they said, well, we're going to do some call blasting down by these dumpsters, which was pretty much.

spk_0 You know, 50 yards from where we got stocked just a little bit upstream, but on the opposite bank and people had been barbecuing all day long and with their kids playing on this grassy area.

spk_0 So we were we were in a cul-de-sac and there was a big dumpster there.

spk_0 And I had my bionic ear. I had bought this bionic ear at Radio Shack. I still have it. It has a directional microphone and these little headphones and it amplifies dramatically everything you're hearing.

spk_0 So if you hear you can hear your own footsteps, your own breathing, you know, your coat, crinkle, everything.

spk_0 So we're we're there. We're in a picnic table and kind of the humorous part of it is somebody brought out some jack links and we're eating those.

spk_0 And we were just talking in the sun was setting and starting to get dark. And we were supposed to do some call blasting.

spk_0 We started hearing this, this, what sounds like an angry gorilla. Really, you know, grunting at us from the woods right next to the river.

spk_0 And I remember thinking, oh, are they call blasting already? I said, hey, are you guys blasting and they go, no, they're running towards their tape recorders and hitting the record buttons.

spk_0 And that's when the the chatter was recorded. I think there was eight eight of us are so there at the time.

spk_0 And the recording that you hear there is only about the last 30 seconds or so of it had gone on for probably about an additional 30 or more, maybe 40 seconds before they hit the record button.

spk_0 So so then there was this this this noise and then and then I hear one walking and it's you can hear it. I have my microphone and I'm listening to the woods and I hear this bipedal creature walking through the forest and it goes up the very, very steep bank.

spk_0 I think there's a, but it's about a hundred feet, maybe a little bit more almost a cliff, but it's like covered in trees. So it's steep, but it's not like a rock phase.

spk_0 And and it's climbing up there and I can clearly hear it stepping. It goes behind a tree and it's observing us and I could see a faint silhouette.

spk_0 And I could see some very faint reddish orange eye shine poking out from behind the tree and I watch this thing for about 20 minutes and then it just kind of took off after that.

spk_0 So that experience really started to solidify things for me. You know, I thought probably thousands of times, you know, have we been hoaxed.

spk_0 Did somebody do that? Did somebody, you know, broadcast some angry gorilla noises.

spk_0 But I don't think so. And I and then subsequently I was told that those sounds were caught the attention of Ron Morehead or his associates are not entirely sure.

spk_0 And there was an initial suspicion that we had taken some of the Sierra sounds and rebroadcast those and then claimed to have our own bigfoot sounds.

spk_0 And that is actually, I know that that's not true. And then I guess they were subsequently analyzed and compared with the Sierra sounds and found to be distinctive.

spk_0 But there was something about, and I don't know how they do this, but when they have an oscilloscope, you're able to tell kind of the size of the vocal cords.

spk_0 Things like that. There's some data that you can get and also about the sound range. So it turned out to be a completely independent vocalization by a Sasquatch, we think.

spk_0 So that really was kind of a life changing event for me. I, my world started to, started to change on me. And I'm a scientifically trained person.

spk_0 I've studied the sciences my whole life. I'm generally not particularly superstitious in any way. I have my spiritual leanings and so on.

spk_0 But I also don't walk around this world thinking that I know things are that I'm right about everything.

spk_0 And this opened my eyes. And I started to talk a lot about it at home to most of the point of making my spouse sick of me talking of it.

spk_0 So subsequently later in the year, I think it was one or two later, I took some of my martial arts students in the same year, 2001, to the exact same spot.

spk_0 We went camping at the state park. And then we went hiking and we were training in martial arts at this spot. And of course, the method to my madness or the madness to my method was, I don't wonder how these things would react to watching humans doing martial arts.

spk_0 So we were practicing with sticks and ropes and chains and bats and swords and all kinds of things. We were really quite enjoying that. And there was a growth of, you know, when they plant rows of spruce trees and they're in straight lines.

spk_0 And in between the spruce trees, there's all these dead branches and stuff. So we were, we were training there. And I started a creepy feeling that we're being watched.

spk_0 And so what happens is I started loading all the equipment back into my, my CRV at the time. And the guys are going like, are we going back to the camp? Like, why are you loading up all this? I just said, I'm just getting ready a bit at a time so we don't have to waste time after dark. And so we do all that.

spk_0 And then we decided to take a break and we go sit on the very same picnic table that was there when we, when we heard the, the chatter.

spk_0 And we're sitting there looking at the river and across the river, there's a large branch of what looks like an old apple tree, maybe crab apple or something.

spk_0 And we can see something a silhouette of something dark moving under there, but can't make it out. It's just too dark. And then one of the branches shakes kind of violently.

spk_0 I say to the guys that go like, do you think I should try to vocalize that? Do you want me to yell at it? Or they go, yeah, why not? Like what's it going to do? I mean, we don't even know what the hell that is. And so I do a big loud, you know, whoah, but noise like that.

spk_0 And unbeknownst to us, there was something behind us in the pine grove. And it started running towards us. I don't have no idea how fast, but you could clearly hear it running towards us and growling.

spk_0 And it was breaking those little dry twigs off the spruce trees as it was running. And to me, it sounded like a cow running through a forest. It was big.

spk_0 And I got very freaked out by that. And they just ran towards the vehicle, hopped in all the other guys hopped in. We peeled out of there. And then at the end of the road, I turned the vehicle around and chan my high beams down just to see if anything was following us and we could see nothing.

spk_0 And I remember getting nightmares after that. And I was freaked out so much so that I actually couldn't go back in those woods or pretty much any woods by myself for almost a year.

spk_0 I remember driving out there in the middle of winter. I got kind of mad at my own fear. I drove out there in the winter by myself and I forced myself to walk into the woods to get over my fear.

spk_0 And that worked. I was no longer afraid after that. But we did a subsequent camping trip where we met the guy on whose property the Ohio Howell is recorded.

spk_0 And he passed along some footage that he had. I'm not allowed to I was under agreement by the BFRO not to show the footage or try to profit off of it.

spk_0 But it's a very grainy overexposed footage of a Sasquatch sniffing some apple butter on a tree on his property.

spk_0 And you can you can see the creature he had to watch 12 hours of footage just to get these few seconds.

spk_0 A footage of this thing in what you what you see is the thing walks up to a tree.

spk_0 You first you see its hand grabbing the tree and then it pulls itself sort of sort of speak towards the tree. It turns its head and sniff the tree and you can see its ear.

spk_0 You can see the silhouette of its face and you can see the conical shaped head and these enormous enormous neck muscles that go down to the shoulder.

spk_0 And and then it turns its head one more time and walks away quietly with making no sound.

spk_0 And later on when I lived in Oregon, I actually mentioned it to Jeff Meldrum and he knew of that footage.

spk_0 He said, oh yeah, the overexposed thermal was not thermal.

spk_0 What's a called again, not ultraviolet.

spk_0 But anyways, it was a heat a heat footage a heat signature footage and he remembered it and so one thing I did was I had the little piece of footage I have enhanced by a guy in Toronto.

spk_0 And I have a skull I bought at a fossil fair. It's not a real skull. It's a cast of the Australopithecus from Boise 1958 Alduvaid.

spk_0 And I froze the frame and I held up the skull to to the frame on my TV set a big TV set.

spk_0 And it's a dead ringer for a Australopithecus in terms of structure.

spk_0 A Australopithecus when you look at it, if you you know it looks prognathed like it's teeth, it's face sticks out at the jaw when the head is tilted back.

spk_0 But if you tilt the head forward, the sagittal crest sticks up in the face starts to look flat.

spk_0 And that's what you see with the patty film is that the head is kind of slightly tilted forward and that changes the appearance of the thing a little bit when you're looking at it.

spk_0 So I started to have this idea that that Sasquatch might be somehow related to Australopithecines or something along those lines or there's another one called Georgia and a few others that I'd seen online that made me think these could be somehow related to Bigfoot.

spk_0 I don't know obviously.

spk_0 So I continued looking into this and I also had some strange experiences by the state hospital.

spk_0 I have photographs of these I would go off for hikes and I didn't believe that there was going to be Sasquatch out there, but I always remembered that footprint.

spk_0 And remember it was February 14th, it was Valentine's Day 2007. We had a huge snowstorm in Cleveland area and it was almost two feet of snow.

spk_0 I remember the following day, can't remember what day of the week that was following day or two or something.

spk_0 I'm hiking, I'm just walking around and there's this trail where people walk their dogs. It's an old road access road to go by the hospital and then goes to this baseball diamond and all this stuff.

spk_0 So I'm walking through the snow and I see these really, really large footprints among the tracks of people and dogs and they're really, really big.

spk_0 I measured them and they were about 17 inches long and about seven inches wide and you can clearly see toes in them and you can see that mid-tarsol ridge where the snow got kind of flipped up.

spk_0 And this is an almost two feet of snow, but I was walking on a trail that was padded down by people so it wasn't as hard for me to walk along there.

spk_0 The distance between each footprint was over four and a half feet and I got really freaked by that. I went back to the hospital and I got one of my friends who works there.

spk_0 I said, hey, because I have a crappy flip phone at the time that couldn't take good pictures. I said, do we have a hospital camera or do you have a camera at your disposal? I got these footprints. I got to, you know, I want to take some pictures of me. He gets curious about that.

spk_0 We take the camera out there and he saw the footprints fresh, but the camera didn't work. I tried to follow the footprints around that time and I looked on Google Earth and I followed them for about 0.6 of a mile before they disappeared by going onto a road and then I completely lost track of them.

spk_0 So the following, I think that was a Friday and then the following weekend it rained, went back on Monday and there were only two footprints left, but one of them was still relatively good.

spk_0 And I took a picture of my foot next to it and it was still 17 inches and you could still see the toes a little bit subsequent to that we I found other footprints. I have pictures of in a hand print from the Kyahoga Valley that were in these little muddy creeks.

spk_0 It was one spot that was really interesting was it was a log going over a small creek and something had crouched down on this log, reached its arms down into the mud and you could see fingertips from both hands scraping the mud as if you would touch something in the smell, your fingers kind of thing.

spk_0 Like you know a kid sticking a hand in a chocolate cake kind of idea, I found that and then I found more footprints and it went under the log, put it one of its hands into the muck and then left.

spk_0 And some distance away like 6 feet away, I found another footprint and I have casts of those footprints and I have the hand print as well.

spk_0 The hand is not particularly big, but the footprint is 13 inches or so.

spk_0 And I thought that's a pretty athletic feat I tried to replicate it myself and I was not quite able to do it. I kind of came close but not quite.

spk_0 And subsequently when Hurricane Ike blew through I had to check the dates on that that was in the fall. I found some more very large footprints again two sets the smaller one the bigger one.

spk_0 And I followed the bigger set of footprints into the woods, not realizing how dangerous that might be at the time.

spk_0 And whatever it was that I was following I think had circled around behind me and I could smell a smell that made me nervous and the footprints disappeared in this grove of Eastern white pines and I decided to bail out of that point.

spk_0 But in addition to that I had also walked up in that area and I can't remember the date when this happened, but I was walking up on the grounds of the state hospital and I wasn't necessarily looking for bigfoot or anything like that.

spk_0 But I remember walking up and I got to this ridge and I had an incredibly powerful feeling of being watched and I was by myself and I actually just hit the deck.

spk_0 I actually jumped down to the ground and crouched because something was staring at me. It was very intense.

spk_0 And I looked back over my right shoulder and you know there's these tall grasses are kind of like you know the grasses in South America you know these pump us type of grasses with these big feathery seeds on them and

spk_0 and clearly something had parted them and then just as I looked over it let it go. And just that was the only thing moving was that.

spk_0 So there was that experience and a variety of others subsequently I moved to Oregon in 2008 in the fall of 2008 I'm not saying everything in chronological order but I went in 2008 I moved to Eugene Oregon for a job and I promptly got in touch with local BFRO investigator.

spk_0 And we went out to this area repeatedly this place near what's it called it was near cottage grove you know where buster kittens film the general was made.

spk_0 Yeah I know that area of Oregon very well.

spk_0 Yeah and so there's a sign there's an exit there called Goshen and you get off there and there's a road that travels east about 15 maybe 20 minutes tops.

spk_0 And there's a small lake there and then this mountain where they they had had a report of somebody who lived out that way a guy who was jogging down a road from his home had seen a sasquatch across the road ahead of him and scared him and he went back home and he reported it.

spk_0 So we started investigating that area and you know we had a couple of nights where we heard things but you know nothing special going on I don't remember exactly how many times we went out now I realize in retrospect I probably should record stuff like this.

spk_0 But one particular night it was very interesting we were we were out there I think it was missing there was one two three four five of us and we parked our cars on this old logging road in a clear cut.

spk_0 And we thought we would use any means possible we were you know pretty amateur at this you know and we got some cologne that had been bought at Walmart it was like some cheap off all men's cologne and we doused a rag with it and stuck it up in this tree.

spk_0 And then we started making noises wood knocks yells and this one on for probably an hour or an hour and a half that we were doing this.

spk_0 And you know nothing was really happening and we were starting to think okay we should probably pack it in you know nothing's going to happen.

spk_0 And I remember the night it was Mother's Day 2009 I think in May it was really really intense bright moonlight and you know as you're familiar in Washington right the Douglas Ferris.

spk_0 And the Redwoods and stuff in this area it's all Douglas Ferris but they're really big trees I mean they're very wide around and at the edge of this cut the trees were really quite illuminated by this intense moonlight which was to our backs.

spk_0 And down along the tree line we saw what looked like I shine and but there's a lot of elk in the area and we were kind of like a not sure what to think of that we we you know kept watching and I went towards the tree line along with one of the individuals and to try and get a better look.

spk_0 And on our way to the tree line we started to smell that smell similar to what I had had in Ohio and we both got nervous and decided to go back to our cars so we started walking back to the cars and then on the way back there was a windfall a big tree route that was sticking up out of the ground was covering grass it pretty old.

spk_0 So I stood up on this thing and I started looking down and scanning the tree line and I see a big black blob turns out later we measured it was 60 60 yards away and it's on all fours clearly and it's swaying back and forth pretty rapidly so I call the guys it come over let's look at this this is really weird what is that one of the guys had binoculars I remember.

spk_0 And so we're all looking at this thing and it goes behind a tree and it comes out again goes behind a tree comes out again we're watching this thing for a good minute.

spk_0 And then at some point it seems to realize that we're all staring at it and it decides to stand up and when it stood up and I should note there was a and I did a drawing of this later very soon after to depict what I what I saw.

spk_0 There was this thing stood up and I couldn't see it from the knees down but we could see pretty much the arms the shoulders and the head and it was enormous and the moonlight was intense enough that you could just barely make out a kind of a sheen of light reflecting off of its shoulders and it was really nicely silhouetted by the trees behind it and clearly brought it back to the ground.

spk_0 And we're broader than two of these trees side by side and we watched it almost in disbelief I remember holding my breath and really forcing my eyes to stay open because I didn't want to close my eyes and then have it gone and and we were watching this thing.

spk_0 And then it kind of sort of seemed to get bored with us or something and then it turned and as it turned to this you see her watch orangutans they look clunky but they're really really graceful and it turned and very gracefully it just walked to its right and you can see the left arm swing and just quietly it just walked off into the woods and that was our sighting that was as close to a class A I think or about as close as I would be.

spk_0 And then we went to get to actually visualizing one directly and you know I got home at three o'clock in the morning told my wife and she just didn't want to believe me so so I was pretty much really hooked after that we went about a week later maybe 10 days later because it was hard to get our schedules together me and one of the investigators.

spk_0 And so we did a laser measure and it was 63 yards and at the spot where it was I stood when I saw the picture of me standing where it stood that freaked me out really badly and I started to have second thoughts about following these things around in the woods because my head I'm 58 and my head was at its elbow.

spk_0 So this thing was a good three and a half four feet taller than me it was a really big so we did a calculation roughly it had to be approximately nine and a half feet tall and there were some weathered footprints left behind they were indistinct but they were 19 inches long.

spk_0 So that really scared the living crap out of me I did subsequently go back to that area a couple of times with friends and found some tree tops ripped ripped off and thrown on the road and stuff like that but never any evidence again in that area that was that was you know clear cut to me like that but that that thing really gave me a lot of second thoughts about what I was doing.

spk_0 But you know I had sort of this belief that all these things are pretty benign you know nobody there's no there's only old stories about them you know attacking people and killing them and I thought if it's not that aggressive I can go out there and investigate this but seeing that really gave me some serious pause.

spk_0 Anyways so sometime goes by let's see that was 2009 this would have been I left Oregon at the end of 2011 so I'm thinking either 2010 or early 2011 I got invited to an investigation with some BF Hero guys at a place called bumping lake in Washington but I went up to that place several times but on this particular occasion I got invited to be a fun guy.

spk_0 And in each time, by the way, I did find evidence of various degrees of quality, including footprints

spk_0 that there were squatches in the area.

spk_0 But in this particular expedition, this was the first time I went with my same friend whose kid had attracted the Sasquatch in Ohio.

spk_0 He's now living in West Seattle.

spk_0 So I went up to join him in Tacoma and we drove through Kaius Pass and down the American Valley and into bumping lake.

spk_0 And we went to this camp and on the drive in, we come across a pickup truck and these guys stop and they want to talk to us.

spk_0 So I think we wanted directions or something.

spk_0 And they go, what do you guys do? And it was so we're going on a big foot hunt and they all burst out laughing.

spk_0 The guy in the back seat though, we talked to him. He said he's a journalist.

spk_0 And so we say, hey, did you guys encounter anything stranger unusual while you were there?

spk_0 And the sun was setting at this time and they go, no, no, no.

spk_0 Oh, yeah, there was something and they said, well, what was it?

spk_0 And they said, well, you know, we were fishing and this disgusting odor got so bad that we packed in our stuff and left.

spk_0 So we took that as a sign that, hmm, okay, this is good. Good for us.

spk_0 So we went down there and I remember people were hanging out orangutan, pheromone chips and really disgusting smelling things like that.

spk_0 And we broke up into teams again and somebody gave us a flair night vision.

spk_0 And my friend and I, we hiked up and down the logging roads for probably two to four hours and heard and saw absolutely nothing.

spk_0 And then one of the ladies on the trip from one of the other groups through the thermal head seen us ask watch and it was doing the same behavior that we saw an organ was swaying back and forth and then going into the trees and coming out and looking a little agitated and she had tears under eyes.

spk_0 She was so ecstatic at what she had seen. I was, I was envious of that.

spk_0 But so we go back to the tent and it's like almost two o'clock in the morning and we quickly pass out and fall asleep.

spk_0 And I get woken out of my sleep at somewhere around 3 30 a.m. I remember because I went a glowing watch, a glow in the dark watch.

spk_0 Down by the lake, something had screamed a big loud, bellowing scream and I thought, wow, you know, I better stay awake and I tried my darn to stay awake and I just couldn't.

spk_0 I passed out and fell asleep and sometime about 15 minutes later, I heard another scream and it woke me up as well, but this one was much closer.

spk_0 And my buddy, he's just sleeping through the whole thing. He's not even waking up at all by this.

spk_0 And this this time I'm going like, oh my god, this thing is getting close and we were separated from everybody else.

spk_0 We were a good distance from all the other tents because all the campsites were taken and we found a little niche where we put our camp.

spk_0 And we didn't have a fire or anything just a tent.

spk_0 So I hear that and I said, oh, I better stay awake and I'm trying to stay awake.

spk_0 And again, I fell asleep and I snore.

spk_0 So I wake up realizing I just been snoring and there's enough ambient light coming through the tent that right in front of my face, there's a hand pushing on the tent material.

spk_0 I was kind of well, there wasn't anybody to talk to because my buddy was sleeping on the other side of the tent.

spk_0 This is not a very big tent.

spk_0 I'm just kind of freaking out and this thing seemed to be trying to touch where the snoring was coming from through the tent.

spk_0 So I withdraw my head from the tent because it's very close to the material.

spk_0 I withdraw and I was like, what the hell is that?

spk_0 I'm thinking, you know, bears and elk pushing its nose into my tent or something.

spk_0 And I don't think I'll do that.

spk_0 Bears, you can really hear them.

spk_0 Plus they make special, I've heard bears up close and they don't sound this thing didn't make any noise like that.

spk_0 And then it starts running its hands over the tent like swishing back and forth like swish, swish, swish two, three times like that.

spk_0 That's really, really weird.

spk_0 And there was a Coleman logo written into embossed in the material right above my left side and it starts touching that playing with that.

spk_0 And I thought you freaking, sorry, I hit the tent material go on the tent and it hits back on the tent and then it walks off.

spk_0 I can hear it walking off into the bush to the left of me.

spk_0 I was speechless.

spk_0 In the meantime, I was trying to kick my buddy like kick and like wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up.

spk_0 Sorry, it's more wake up wake up wake up and he didn't wake up to the whole thing.

spk_0 I kicked him like three times and he was still just grunting and snoring and I couldn't believe he slept through all that.

spk_0 So as soon as the thing walked away, I unzipped the fly and then I looked with the thermal.

spk_0 It was long gone as soon as it was daylight, the beginnings of daylight about 6 a.m. or so.

spk_0 I got out of the tent and I immediately started scouting the area found no footprints whatsoever.

spk_0 But I walked off in the direction that it went and turns out there's a little ridge up there.

spk_0 And then I walked along the ridge and I found a bunch of pine trees kind of all pulled into a grouping of sorts.

spk_0 They were kind of woven together if you will these.

spk_0 I don't know if they're balsam furs or they were small cedars or something and they were all like woven together and it was just made a kind of a shelter.

spk_0 And I went inside of the shelter of there was nothing around.

spk_0 And from inside that little shelter and I wasn't super little I mean it fit me.

spk_0 It could fit another person.

spk_0 You could pretty much see all the camps from there because it was high up off the ground and above some of the smaller again to the trees up there.

spk_0 Not that tall because they're pretty high elevation and you can see quite a few of the tents and camps from there.

spk_0 And I don't remember the names of the old guys who were camping there who had more a lot more experience and so me and my friend we walked up to one of their camps and we asked him I said, hey, do you think anybody here would have been trying to hoax us by swishing their hands in our tent and poking at our tent in the middle of the night.

spk_0 And they go, honestly, don't want to get shot.

spk_0 So yeah, we're all armed here.

spk_0 We say, I don't have guns.

spk_0 I'm thinking of getting one now, but back then I was really not an owning a gun and they said, no, no, no, if you do that kind of stuff to people out here in Washington, there's a good chance you'll get shot.

spk_0 So don't ever think of hoaxing anybody that way.

spk_0 And so what kind of activity do you get?

spk_0 So well, we found footprints and see sometimes you'll hear them.

spk_0 The throne pine cones at you.

spk_0 They said that they hear them chuckle kind of a laugh.

spk_0 They hear them sneeze.

spk_0 They told us stuff like that.

spk_0 So that was another defining experience for me was to have that happen.

spk_0 And then, you know, on the drive out, we we packed up another CRV.

spk_0 We packed up all our stuff and we're driving out not the way we came in, but further down the same road, which is supposed to go back to the main road.

spk_0 And the road was blocked off three trees and small ones had been pushed over and completely blocked the road.

spk_0 And we had to do like a 16 point turn because it was so narrow to be able to turn the vehicle around and go back out the way we came.

spk_0 I went back subsequently to that place the following year with a couple of friends.

spk_0 And we found some interesting tree structures like what some people call a pinwheel, some X's.

spk_0 And we went up to there's a plate is a lake.

spk_0 So there's a hike.

spk_0 We did a whole long hike and I remember my daughter was.

spk_0 Gosh, she was about.

spk_0 Oh, she about six, maybe seven.

spk_0 And we hiked all the way up to this lake from from the bumping lake campsites.

spk_0 We went as far as the road would take us.

spk_0 And then we did this big long hike and all along the hike, I'm doing wood knocks just because I'm in the habit of doing that now to announce to this in my belief.

spk_0 I'm announcing to them that I am here and you know where I am.

spk_0 Just to out of almost as a courtesy to any local sask watch that we are humans and we are on your territory is my thinking on it.

spk_0 And we were doing this hike and and as we're hiking back out, you know, nothing happened on the hike.

spk_0 I have all the photographs and stuff on the hike back out.

spk_0 We're getting to the point where we're about to cross the river.

spk_0 And there's a big log and you know, proud of my kid she managed to cross the log all by herself without losing her balance and cross over the river and everybody and me and this other friend of mine who I knew from Eugene Oregon was with me.

spk_0 And as we were heading towards the river, we were in the back watching our families because you know you always stay in the back for security.

spk_0 And we hear a big loud wood knock behind us.

spk_0 And he clearly heard it and he says, oh, he says you're right.

spk_0 Something is back there.

spk_0 There is something in the woods.

spk_0 And so we let the families go a little bit ahead where the last ones to cross the river as we get to the other side, a gigantic rock gets thrown from pretty high up.

spk_0 There's a kind of a small cliff a budding up against the river and this big rock hits the water just as low.

spk_0 Right 30, 40 feet from us and we looked at each other and thought, okay, there's something behind us.

spk_0 We never saw anything, but that was yet another experience.

spk_0 Finally, somewhere in between 2010, 11, me and my wife would go hiking up the McKenzie River in Oregon to this place called Blue Pool.

spk_0 It's a very beautiful place. The pool is cobalt blue.

spk_0 It's really gorgeous. People go swimming there and basically a lava flow blocked off the McKenzie River.

spk_0 I think from Mount Bachelor or something and the river goes underneath the lava flowing and wells up there. It's really beautiful.

spk_0 So if you hike past this thing, there's a couple of waterfalls. There's Kusa Falls and another waterfall.

spk_0 This was in the spring and as my typical mode, I'm whacking on trees every few minutes.

spk_0 I would hear occasional thuds coming from the woods, but I really wasn't sure if those were actually true wood knocks or some other noise.

spk_0 You really couldn't tell, but you could hear a kind of coming from the forest.

spk_0 We get up to these waterfalls and how in the bush, especially with volcanic rock, you get these pools left over that are iced over.

spk_0 That's where the frogs are in the spring, but it's still icy.

spk_0 At that time, my kid was really into ballet on ice and she's doing her Disney thing and playing around with her mother on this ice.

spk_0 I'm on the road and I'm just watching them and taking a picture or two.

spk_0 Behind them, about 50 feet in the woods, we hear this big branch break, this branch just crack.

spk_0 Of course, that got my attention.

spk_0 I started angling in trying to figure out what made that noise.

spk_0 I could see a vertical silhouette behind these trees that looked light brown with some sun on it.

spk_0 I remember it started walking off to my right towards the highway along the Mackenzie River.

spk_0 I keep thinking it's highway 26. I can't quite remember.

spk_0 There's a bunch of hot springs and stuff up there.

spk_0 This thing is walking in that direction.

spk_0 I run in the same direction trying to get another view of it.

spk_0 I try to get ahead of it, which retrospective realize is stupid, but I ran as fast as I could to get ahead of it.

spk_0 When I got there, there was absolutely nothing going on.

spk_0 I couldn't see anything. It was dead dead.

spk_0 Then I realized, I left my family unattended.

spk_0 That was dumb. I ran back to my family and then we walked out of there together.

spk_0 That was another experience where I believe what I saw was probably a Sasquatch, but I don't know for sure.

spk_0 There have been subsequent experiences when I came back to Ohio here.

spk_0 Again, training martial arts along the Kayahoga River down in the Kayahoga Valley.

spk_0 One night in November, we were training on this hill.

spk_0 A lot of kids go up there to smoke pot and stuff.

spk_0 You find all kinds of bongs and paraphernalia up there.

spk_0 I was up there training with my guys.

spk_0 We just hear this incredible howl.

spk_0 Just loud.

spk_0 It's scared us so bad that we walked out of there.

spk_0 We started training next to our cars, but we got very, very nervous with that.

spk_0 That sums up most of my experience.

spk_0 In between these experiences, I found the occasional footprint.

spk_0 I still investigate to this day mostly by myself, but I'm very cautious.

spk_0 I don't get aggressive like I used to.

spk_0 I still find anecdotal evidence, but I haven't had anything that compares with those experiences since then.

spk_0 I really appreciate you going through the timeline, John, because I know it's kind of hard to cram decades and decades of you looking into what you heard us a little boy.

spk_0 Essentially, and looking for this thing, realizing that noise was what you heard as a kid, and now you're going to look for it,

spk_0 being a professional in your line of work.

spk_0 How did it affect your life searching for this thing?

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 It's hard to explain, but it was like something opened up, either in my personality, my mind,

spk_0 in some fashion, and I started to look at the environment around me very, very differently.

spk_0 Again, I'm still a very scientific person, but I'm very open-minded when I listen to people now.

spk_0 I mean, I used to be something of a cynic for a long time.

spk_0 I'm no longer cynical.

spk_0 When I talk to people, I give them credence first.

spk_0 I realize that people lie or that they embellish or that they make mistakes.

spk_0 I make mistakes, too.

spk_0 There's probably things in my narrative that I'm not remembering accurately and things like that.

spk_0 But the highlights generally are accurate as I narrated them.

spk_0 But I became obsessed with Bigfoot.

spk_0 Some people say I still am, but I became kind of obsessed about Sasquatch.

spk_0 I just can't go in the woods without thinking of it.

spk_0 It's impossible for me.

spk_0 It's almost impossible for me to talk about it.

spk_0 I collect a lot of fossils, too.

spk_0 Whenever I'm around a rock outcrop, I'll go stick my nose into the rock outcrop and look for fossils.

spk_0 It's that kind of thing.

spk_0 I've talked to many, many people since then, sometimes as part of an expedition.

spk_0 But at other times, just colloquial.

spk_0 I remember I bought Meldrum's book at a bookstore when Borders books still existed in Eugene, Oregon.

spk_0 I did meet Dr. Meldrum there and I met Bob Gimlin there as well.

spk_0 I spoke with him, too.

spk_0 I also met the gentleman who did the crypto linguist.

spk_0 I listened to a lot of people and it was really funny.

spk_0 One of the ladies I worked with in Eugene, Oregon.

spk_0 There's a lot of hippy type folks that worked there.

spk_0 They're pretty cool.

spk_0 They really opened mine didn't very philosophical.

spk_0 One of the ladies there lived there forever.

spk_0 She says to me, yeah, nobody believes it, but everybody's got a story.

spk_0 It was true.

spk_0 When I bought the book at the bookstore, this big tall gentleman, clearly a guy who lived down the country,

spk_0 very serious kind of countenance.

spk_0 If you put a cowboy suit on Amida, come right out of the Wild West, Tachia.

spk_0 A really nice man came up to me and he points at that book and he goes, you believe that?

spk_0 I said, well, yeah.

spk_0 He says, well, I got a story for you.

spk_0 He proceeded to tell me about some incidents that had happened around London, Oregon.

spk_0 He mentioned how a relative of his had seen one while hanging out laundry on a wire back year many decades ago, I guess.

spk_0 He said, well, why don't you go ahead and submit a report.

spk_0 We'd love to hear your story and put it out on the BFR website.

spk_0 Because I was still talking to them a fair bit.

spk_0 He goes, no, no, I said, I'm not going to do that.

spk_0 I'm just happy to tell you and leave it at that.

spk_0 That was it.

spk_0 But I've run into quite a few people and it's amazing to me how reticent they are to tell anybody what they've experienced.

spk_0 And what I've also noticed is that because I talk about it freely because I'm used to doing that now, I wasn't at first,

spk_0 but I'm so used to talking about it that people think I'm making up stories and that I'm lying because I'm just talking about it as if it's normal.

spk_0 But to me, it is normal now.

spk_0 But my worldview has dramatically changed on a couple of nights I've seen UFOs as well.

spk_0 I'm looking for big foot and I'd see a UFO, but not necessarily an association with a Sasquatch, but I'd see UFOs.

spk_0 And I'm not saying they're necessarily occupied by aliens, but I mean, they're definitely strange things in the sky.

spk_0 And with all the information that's coming down now, you know, I do believe it's quite possible that there may be evidence that is getting covered or misinterpreted.

spk_0 You hear enough stories about that kind of stuff that really make you wonder.

spk_0 I do admit, though, that I'm troubled by the whole notion of dogman, but man, those stories are pretty compelling and pretty scary at that.

spk_0 So I hope I never run into one of those, but I'm really trying hard to stay open minded about that one.

spk_0 And I mean no disrespect to people who've seen one when I say that because I think they also realize how hard it can be for someone who's not familiar with this material.

spk_0 To wrap their minds around it.

spk_0 The first time you hear it, when I first heard that Sasquatch had a language, I think I offended the guy who did the research because, you know, he I approached him and asked him a question.

spk_0 I don't remember what exactly I asked him, but I clearly had the skeptical sort of tone about me and he seemed kind of offended by it, but in retrospect, I mean, you know, this was the first time hearing this, but when I heard his analysis and I subsequently listened to it again,

spk_0 I had to conclude that he's probably right.

spk_0 These things are some kind of hominid, capable of, you know, language and of complex communication.

spk_0 And they clearly have strong emotions. They have strong feelings about us. They know what guns are.

spk_0 You know, I have to say that I feel really, really lucky in my life or blessed in a manner of speaking of having had these experiences, although it's kind of weirdly almost occurs too because, you know, you know, you get thought of as not credible when you say these things to people who seem to be jaded by thinking that humans know everything about the world.

spk_0 And I firmly believe they don't.

spk_0 Yeah, I struggled for many years when it comes to dog man. I was like, you know, people must be mistaken. There's no way.

spk_0 I mean, this sounds like a freaking werewolf people are running into. And I remember the very one of the very first encounters that I think I really aired on the show was from a famous hunter here in the States.

spk_0 And, you know, he was a very no nonsense guy. Very direct on what he said. And he describes seeing one. And this guy had spent like 60 years hunting.

spk_0 I think he was in his 80s. And he described seeing this creature. And as he's describing it, I mean, everything about it sounds canine to me.

spk_0 And I had asked him, well, what do you think it was? And he was like, I have no idea. It was a canine that got up on two legs and took off like a man running.

spk_0 And it ran so quick. I'm not sure that I could have actually shot it. I've talked to so many eyewitnesses over the years, including cops that have run into this dog man.

spk_0 I'm pretty convinced it's out there. What it is, I don't know, but I'm pretty much convinced it's out there.

spk_0 And he kind of alluded to it earlier with regard to what you think Sasquatch is. I know you mentioned the Australopithecus. And Cliff Bergman actually has that same theory.

spk_0 While I disagree with them, he brings up some pretty good points that that's hard to argue. But what do you think that they are? What's your take, John? And what Sasquatch is?

spk_0 Well, so this is, you know, I contemplated that question a lot because I've heard you ask it many times to different people. And it seems to me that people's answers are.

spk_0 I don't mean this in a disparaging way.

spk_0 Are preconditioned by the belief systems that we bring to these encounters. So, you know, when you encounter something like this, you already have your personality has developed you.

spk_0 You have a belief system about the world. And this belief system that we have about the world is the lens through which we interpret this experience.

spk_0 So, you know, some people reference it as an angelic or demonic or somehow or biological, right?

spk_0 The more of this, a lot of the scientific folks, you know, they lean towards it's a biological living creature. I am in that camp. But here's the interesting thing.

spk_0 In my years, I've looked into a lot of, I've investigated a lot of things, including some of the weirder aspects of martial arts and stuff like that. And I've.

spk_0 People seem to think that.

spk_0 Sasquatches can't be just biological creatures because they have supernatural elements to them.

spk_0 But see, I don't describe to that. And the reason I don't is because I think humans also have supernatural or spiritual elements to them.

spk_0 They may not be as developed as these these animals because Sasquatches are wild. They live in the bush.

spk_0 If you spent time living in the bush and I've done this, you know, like I spent two weeks in the forests of Ontario drinking out of streams and living like a dog and smelling like a wolf.

spk_0 I got out of there too. I'll tell you, if there was a human being within 500 yards of you, you smelled them.

spk_0 And you could hear noises and you could start to get really used to the forest and you become create you become kind of athletic.

spk_0 I mean, you get you get strong. I'll living out in the woods, you know, eating grass. You know, the bulbs of roots of leeks and things that grow in the marshy, frogs eat fish.

spk_0 You know, you do all these things. You get kind of wild.

spk_0 And I noticed after doing that that I had a high level of mental energy and physical energy.

spk_0 And I started to feel myself sort of becoming like a wild person. I remember just getting glimpses into it, you know, from that.

spk_0 And I think that people who really, you know, rough it out in the woods could probably relate to that to some degree.

spk_0 Now, if you're starving, that's different. That'll wear you out and you'll you have to get out because you're going to die.

spk_0 If you try to live too long in the bush like that, not to mention the flies and bugs make you miserable.

spk_0 But I've seen some things and heard some things. And you know, and there's a lot of people who investigate ghosts and stuff like that.

spk_0 And you know, I have an open mind now. And I think that we share the same supernatural and spiritual mental capabilities that these things have.

spk_0 So when they emit infrasound, we experience it. We can't emit it ourselves, but we can do other things that Sasquatches can't do.

spk_0 So in my view, it's normal for a biological animal entity to be able to do things and to be so good at stealth as to be able to disappear in the forest and to play tricks on us.

spk_0 Me personally, I think that that's a natural ability. So that does not lead me to differentiate them from other biological animals because biological animals are capable of so much more than what we understand. That's my perspective.

spk_0 Yeah, well, I appreciate your perspective, John, and kind of your insight and thought on the whole thing. And, you know, I appreciate the amount of thought that you put into it.

spk_0 And coming on and sharing decades and decades of events that happened to you and all kind of started when you were a little kid and go back to bumping lake for a moment.

spk_0 I've had so many people contact me who've been run out of that area by these creatures.

spk_0 It doesn't shock me one bit that you had the experiences there or in Ohio.

spk_0 So one last question I want to ask you, you know, the Ohio, how this is something that's always bothered me and I thought I had asked you what your take on it is.

spk_0 And again, I know that you don't know and I don't know, but what's your take on that particular vocalization? You know, if you want to give yourself away as far as where you're at, that would be the how to do.

spk_0 Oh, gosh, I wish I knew. Well, somehow, all these are clearly to intimidate us like the loud screams, like the one I heard in the guy of Hoga Valley.

spk_0 Other people have heard that by the way, I know one guy, I don't think he wants to be named at all, but who has post dramatic stress disorder from being yelled at and chased by one of these things, a stone's throw from where I was.

spk_0 But the Ohio, how my my take on it is just my belief is that it's territorial.

spk_0 Yeah, I guess it could make sense that it would be a territorial thing because I always thought, you know, when you when they do that, it's like, well, now we know exactly where you're at.

spk_0 But it could be more territorial. It could be more of like a get the hell out of here.

spk_0 Possibly, but the other one is interestingly, there was a recording in 2015 in the Kyle Hoga Valley of the same kinds of howls. It's on the BFR website.

spk_0 They're almost identical to the Ohio howl and there's two of them. And that's what we always find in the Kyle Hoga Valley. There's two Sasquatches.

spk_0 They're not there all the time. They migrate in and out. They'll be gone for years. And then suddenly they'll show up again.

spk_0 But you clearly hear one and then you hear another and they're howling to each other. So you may be right that that's just, hey, I'm over here and I'm over here and they're just communicating that way.

spk_0 And by the way, the other thing that has been the big anigma. I know I don't know how much time I have, but the other big anigma for me has been the glowing eyes.

spk_0 And I did see that one time in fog on the other side of the river at Beaver Creek and a bunch of us saw that.

spk_0 That was the time we were there with the guy who had the Ohio howl and his property.

spk_0 And we clearly saw these orange eyes on the other side of the river. They were kind of dull. They weren't, you know, starbursts, but they were clearly glowing and they were reddish orange.

spk_0 And we saw it run up a slope and it kept its eyes on us the whole time it ran up the slope.

spk_0 And I don't have a good biological explanation for that. But I do think it's some kind of like low reflective, a reflective membrane in the eyes that's very specialized and can reflect even low light back.

spk_0 That's my belief, but I, you know, I don't know.

spk_0 Yeah, it could be. I'm not so sure that there is a scientific explanation for half the things that have been reported to me, but I like your idea.

spk_0 And, you know, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and share decades of your life of looking into this and trying to find answers. Really enjoyed chatting with you.

spk_0 Once it's been kind of a highlight for me to be able to do that and listening to your show. Oh my God. So many things I heard that I thought, Oh, yeah, I've experienced that or now I'm actually a little bit frightened of Sasquatch's after hearing some of these harrowing stories that you've listened to. I mean, some of these are just really frightening. So I've got a new respect for this whole thing.

spk_0 I appreciate it, John, and be safe while you're out there. Thank you again for coming on.

spk_0 Well, thank you, Wes. It's been, this has been a real highlight for me to be able to do this. I very much appreciate it.

spk_0 Thanks again, John. And that's it for tonight. Everyone, remember if you've had an encounter, to me an email. My email address is west at saskwatchcoronacles.com.

spk_0 And if you get a chance, check out saskwatchcoronacles.com. You can become a member and get additional shows. Until next time, everyone.

spk_0 Remember this of you too.

spk_0 Remember this of you too. Until your life, close at the sky. On this moonlight. Remember this of you too.

spk_0 And if you get a chance, check out saskwatchcoronacles.com. You can become a member and get additional shows.

spk_0 Remember this of you too. Until your life, close at the sky. On this moonlight.

spk_0 I'm casting, and now I'm going to be straight in the moon

spk_0 I'm going to step away from you

SC EP:1194 The Journey

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