After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Bigfoot: Hunt for the Truth

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Does Bigfoot really walk among us? Today we start a three-part mini-series exploring the very real histories of Bigfoot and the Yeti.We begin with Bigfoot and the 1967 home-movie that lit the spark. Maddy & Anthony are joined by the one-and-only Dan Schreiber - host of podcast 'We Can Be Weirdos' and of co-host of 'No Such Thing As A Fish'. There can be no better guide into the world of weirdness.Edited and Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Wendy's has a new breakfast deal. Mix and match two items of your choice for only $4. Breakfast wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small seasoned potatoes or small hot coffee. Choose two for $4 at Wendy's. Available for a limited time at participating Wendy's in Canada. Taxes extra. Hello and welcome to After Dark.

I'm Maddy. And I'm Anthony. We are heading into the undergrowth, the mountainous regions of the world, in search of Bigfoot. How come undergrowth is such a weird word? Undergrowth. Anthony's resistant to this already. Take us into the story that you're going to tell.

Guys, it's 1967 and Roger Patterson was a young man living in Washington State looking for something to do. He remembered the odd reports in newspapers about giant footprints in the forests and he thought, I'm going to find this thing. This could be my ticket out. So Roger Paterson and his friend Bob Gimlin got a couple of horses and a pickup truck as you do. They drove the pickup as far as they could into the forest, loaded up the horses and carried

on deeper into the wild. At some point they were riding along beside a creek with a rocky sandy beach on either side. As they went round a bend their horses started going crazy. When they looked across at the other side of the creek they could see why. There's this big fat hairy ape thing and it's looking at them. The horses rear up and Patterson almost falls but he gets hold of himself and grabs his camera. As he hits the ground, he's recording, running towards the thing with the camera whirring. He creates what is known as the Patterson-Gimlin film.

It's shaky, but you can see this thing look up and see Patterson running towards it and turn away rather casually towards the woods. Except for a moment, when it turns to look back, you get this money shot. You'll know it even without knowing that you know it. Bigfoot looking over its shoulder at the here to help us version of Bigfoot we all know and love. Now, here to help us track down Bigfoot is an amazing guest today. We have Dan Shriver.

He is a QI elf. He's an author. He's a fact finder. And he's one quarter of the globally successful podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish. When he's not delivering his four favourite facts from the last seven days, I've always wanted to say that, you can find him in front of the the cryptid factor and now a new

show called We Can Be Weirdos where he discusses everything. I think it's fair to say from cursed mummies to eBay disasters Dan, is that a fair summary? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, nothing's off limits. Weirdness is everywhere. Yeah, and one thing that I love that you do on your show which I think is very much fitting with the episodes

that we're going to do on Bigfoot is your batshit list where you get people to select things that they might believe in or that they have superstitions about. And then you kind of go through those. And I feel like that's very much the energy that we're going to need to bring to the Bigfoot story. A batshit list is very much,

when we were talking about doing these episodes, I was like, okay, so technically, you know, we're a dark history podcast and we look at myths. And I was like, Bigfoot, okay, uh sure let's do an episode on bigfoot and then they were like no actually we think we should do three episodes on bigfoot and i was like hold on three episodes on bigfoot i don't understand there's been let's say heated debate let's say you're not very heated just like i i've been like wait are you skeptic am i on a skeptic show i'm out of here guys i'm constantly the skeptic in these things but like i don't know

for me it's like it brings me to this place where i find that history goes a little bit if that makes sense where i'm a little bit like what am i talking about here what what actually is this grounded in so we can talk about it as historians you're far better on this than i look i disagree and i will say up front i do not believe in bigfoot however that's not what she said off air it's my bedroom i have just bigfoot yeah yeah yeah totally uh no for me it's a history of the 20th century in particular it's a history of colonialism it's a history of colonialism. It's a history of technology. You know, we're dealing with like video cameras, photographs. It's a history of

investigation. It's a history of science and pseudoscience. It's so many things. I think we have to give it the benefit of the doubt. I think that's right. It's sort of the angle that you approach looking at it from. If you decide it's so annoying that something that clearly doesn't exist is constantly fed into the media and people are making announcements and so on. Yeah, of at it from. If you decide, it's so annoying that something that clearly doesn't exist is constantly fed into the media and people are making announcements and so on. Yeah, of course, it's really dull. But if you look at it from the angle of how has it made progression for the rest of the world in technology, as you say, Maddy, all that sort of stuff, it's fascinating. If you look at Loch Ness, a lot of stuff that's used for submarines now, like

deep sea radar and stuff like that, were invented by people who were trying to invent it to look for the Loch Ness monster. You know, it's these unintended consequences of their search that has kind of spilled over into the world of usefulness, I would say. Yes, or legitimacy or whatever. Yeah. And there's not enough to justify it, but there are some that if you're in a quick podcast, you can sort of make it sound more impressive than it is.

I didn't know that about the Loch Ness Monster. And people always say that it's war that advances technology and stuff, but actually it's the hunt for cryptids. It's all the hunt for cryptids. Yeah. Everything. The thriving world. Convince me, guys.

Convince me. Well, I'd like one good example, just like to sort of set the tone of why these things can lead to progress. This is a very different thing. But the EEG machine, I learned this recently from Richard Wiseman. So we obviously use that all the time for brain scans and all that. It's so important in medicine today. So that was invented by a guy called Hans Berger, who was out when he was a young soldier. He was riding on a horse and he fell off the horse. And these other, a horse and a cannon, I think it was, were coming behind him.

And he thought, I'm dead. It's literally behind me. I'm going to get trampled. So he braced for death, knew it was coming. And then there was a silence and he looked up and somehow they'd stopped the horse and he'd survived. So he was like, wow, that was, I should have died. That's insane.

Goes back to wherever he's staying and a telegram arrives for him later that day. And it's from his dad. His dad says, hey, just sending a message over because your sister insisted I do. She had the weirdest feeling this afternoon that you were in serious trouble and you might be, you know, in danger of death. Just checking in, you're OK. And he thought, wow, was my feeling of death so strong that my sister felt it? Did I somehow telepathically get that across to her? So he thought maybe there's something in telepathy. And he spent the rest of his life, well, a large portion of his life, trying to invent a machine that could find telepathy

and accidentally invented the EEG machine as a result of it. So we have that thanks to the search for telepathy. So that kind of stuff, it's sort of, you know, when you look at it through those lenses, you sort of realize that weirdness can be useful however yeah that that is fascinating truly i think when we talk about bigfoot though yeah or or this bigfoot type monster i also see it as a as a form of almost deliberate charlatanism as in i i am deliberately going to try and deceive you with fake proof as opposed to what you just described which is actually this genuine hunt for knowledge and for discovery in this instance now i think that does

exist with bigfoot too i don't think that's right yeah so much hoaxing yeah but the hoax element it feels like we're trying to people are trying to short changes all the time or something and repeatedly over and over and over again and these sight, for me, are a symptom of that. I completely agree with that. And I think there are people out there who deliberately do it. It's a fun project. You know, we'll get on to Gimlin and Patterson in a sec. But that, you know, arguably was a homemade video.

There's a big argument for that in that I don't think Bigfoot exists. But the thing that fascinates me again is it kind of, it's what we find so interesting by looking at history, and we love grouping together the belief systems of people at the time and logging it and seeing how it progressed. And I sometimes find it interesting that we get so bored of our own belief systems because there are thousands, if not millions, of people around the world who maybe do believe in things like ghosts or Bigfoot.

And they are living a different existence to the three of us in this room because their belief system fits that in to the world that they live in. Right. So you get these facts. I put them in. I always call them facts with inverted quotes. Inverted quotes, what are they called? Commas. Inverted commas. Inverted commas. Sure.

There's no education here that's fine bunny rabbits two of them either side of the sentence not one of the three of us could come up with that that's fine

but you know the if you talk the big moment for me that I became really interested in this world was when I discovered a fact about

Bigfoot and it was nothing to do with what I thought was a thing based in truth I thought someone was just taking the piss I was talking to Brian Blessed who as one does as one does we might talk about him later but he really believes in Bigfoot and he does he like he does legit like

he and I were going to go off looking for Bigfoot he planned we planned a whole expedition I would watch that documentary oh we were going to go so you're filming this that you're filming this, right? Because we're watching that, regardless of what I think about Bigfoot. Is the twist that Brian Blessed is Bigfoot? Well, he's often been mistaken for it, and that's an interesting point as well, is that a lot of what is thought to be Bigfoot is actually people,

and yes, he's a Brian Blessed on all his global adventures. There's the famous quote from David Attenborough as well, isn't there there where he talks about the other side of the the theory going back to the sort of the science side of things where he talks about there may be a giant ape that we have yet to discover in some of the most remote parts of the world including the himalayas that there's this sense that these animals might be so advanced that they see us and they hear us coming and they are able to hide and retreat into there.

I'm saying no, sorry. I don't mean to go against Sir David. These are Sir David's words. National treasure. But, no, come on. Not just Sir David. Brian Bletton himself agrees with that opinion. He says that they can smell our aggression.

So when he's looking for Bigfoot, he likes to whistle and skip and sing songs with flowers in his hair. Please, please make this documentary, please. He's the one who told me that when you're being pursued by Bigfoot or possibly a Yeti, that it's easier to escape the female ones if you're running downhill because the females have such long, dangling boobs that before they can chase you, they need to put them over over their shoulders tie them up like a scarf so they don't trip on them and in the time it takes them to do that you can make your escape is this brian's theory this is brian's theory so i thought oh that's interesting so then i met a bigfoot and a yeti believer and i said i heard the funniest

thing the other day about if you're running away and they went yeah the boobs tying them up yeah yeah and this and then every single bigfoot book that i've read that is in there it is a classic fact with the bunny rabbits on either side of the sentence it is that is a thing and i've been i've been telling that fact for i think something like 10 years it was only the other day that i discovered that it's easier this this is one of the greatest joys of my life was discovering this extra bit of fact. It is easier to escape a male Yeti if you're running uphill because they have such long dangling testicles that they smack along the rocks

as they're going up the hill. That is taught to people in Bhutan where they believe in the Yeti and they have a massive national park to protect the Yeti. Dasho Benji, I believe his name was. Yeah, they're legally protected. Yeah, they're a legally protected animal.

They have a big park. There used to be a royal Yeti slash Bigfoot hunter for the king. He also doubled as the basketball coach to the king. No, that's good. He needs to do something with his time. No more questions. And that's what they would tell you. If you're pursued, if it's a woman, run down.

If it's a man, run up. Wow. Yeah. Pendulous running like roaming the hillsides i think we can end it there i think we've said all we can possibly say wow let's go into some of these sightings though because people really do believe you know we're talking about these kind of slightly mad seeming theories but actually people present footage and photographs and evidence physical objects as real proof that these exist yeah so let's talk about the paterson gimlin footage it's from i think 1967 anthony said at the beginning yeah it's the big foot image that we all know even if you've only seen the still rather than the whole i think there's only a few minutes of

footage isn't it but tell us about that dan. So as you already mentioned, these were two guys that were going out on the day to make a film of a Bigfoot because they were in the world of entertainment. Gimlin, amazing character. He's still alive. He's the one who kind of does all of the tours now. So he'll go and show the video and get signed photos and all that sort of stuff. He used be like a stunt driver so he used to go on what were effectively like wooden chariots around the canyons and go nearly off the edge like he was a total badass in what he did and so yeah so they're out there one day and they're looking for maybe they're looking for or they're planning to make a film they capture this footage and it's become the bedrock of this whole belief system ever since i mean the analysis that has happened on this film where new footage has come or new techniques as you said where it's become the bedrock of this whole belief system ever since. I mean, the analysis that has happened on this film

where new footage has come, or new techniques, as you said, where it's kind of like it used to be a very shaky film. Now they've made it still. You can get better high-def AIs being used to sort of like bring up the images a bit more. And I've seen arguments that each time, it's like academic warfare where someone's trying to disprove it and someone's trying to prove it,

and they keep drilling into a newer detail. The one I saw, it was like academic warfare where someone's trying to disprove it and someone's trying to prove it, and they keep drilling into a newer detail. The one I saw, it was like 10 years ago, but it was one of my favorites. It was that the argument came down to the movement of the anal gland of the Bigfoot and whether or not, you know, you can't get a suit that has that kind of anus. They don't make anuses that are detailed. What? Why is all the taxonomic detail of these animals so undignified yeah yeah but my my favorite detail which i learned from uh james harkin who's on my fish podcast i think this is honestly the best

fact i might have ever learned it's that when it got big basically it's the 60s right so they're going town to town showing this footage and sort of trying to turn it into a thing. Gimlin, who is now the person who will sign photos of it and stuff, didn't like it. He didn't like what was going on. And he went back to work on his ranch with his horses and stuff. But Patterson went out on tour with it. And he realized that people were there to see Gimlin and Patterson.

So he brought in someone else to play Gimlin. Oh, my gosh. So isn't that wonderful? While everyone was trying to look at the footage and work out if that was real or not, there was a fake Gimlin. But here's the thing. So we know they fake, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we know that they are not beyond a performance. We know that the commercial aspect... And they have a history in the entertainment industry. Entertainment industry. And so the blueprint here for them selling this story or this account

indefinitely, we know for a fact, as you've just said, involves a forgery of, you know, of an identity. So therefore, and Gimlin today would say, I guess that this is genuine footage that this was what they.

Yeah, he's never, he's never backed down on the footage. I mean, I think that's the, that's an interesting side to it. Gimlin didn't profit from it for a long, long time. He stayed away from it.

He has no interest in it. I don't know what kind of money he makes from it now. Like sure. He's making money off selling photos. It can't be that much. It's only me and a few others buying photos and constantly on eBay, trying to track down. Yeah.

It's a tricky, I don't know. I don't know why it sits so uncomfortably eBay trying to track down. Yeah, it's a tricky. I don't know. I don't know why it sits so uncomfortably with me because who cares? Well, it's no, you're right. It's hoaxing people. It's making them dedicate their lives to something that there's no solid basis. And they're being tricked. People are being conned if that's the case of what's going on.

I think most likely that's what's happening here. I enjoy not calling them out for it, though. Like, personally, I think I look at history and I look at all the wonderful mythologies and things that people believed in. I sort of go with Bigfoot. What is the ultimate damage that this belief is causing? Is it a lot?

Maybe it is a lot to some people. Not in the same way as, say, like psychics and mediums where they tell you that your child is, you know, like that's had a lot of problems in the past and and currently but i can't see the problem i'm sure one of your listeners will say it is hugely problematic there are things yeah but to me it's enjoying child side sorry fireside stories as a kid as an adult for a lot of people and that's is that a bad thing i don't know in all of the prep for this and all the chat that we have had and dan you just said something,

I think maybe even mistakenly, you said something about it being related to childhood. Yeah. And suddenly it made sense to me. In that moment, I was like, ah, there is, there's a nostalgia to this, to returning to something you potentially did believe as a child

or the stories that you're, you know a child or the stories that you're, you know, the fireside stories that you're referencing. And actually there's a comfort in Bigfoot, bizarrely, despite this kind of monstrous appearance. I don't know. I think it depends. I think it depends on the historical context. Thank you very much. We are a history focus. Yes, it must stem from childhood, this sense of wanting the world to be different from how you perceive it, the reality around you and feeling that there's something else, there's something magical that you just can't see

that's working behind the scenes. But if you think about, you know, in 1967 in America, in Washington, where this footage is shot, think about the context of that. There's huge social change. There's the civil rights movement. There's huge social change. There's the civil rights movement. There's the space race. We've talked on episodes before

about alien encounters in the 60s and this idea of the Cold War, I suppose, and sort of fear of the other, fear of people coming in, fear from the sky, fear that there are spies in your landscape, in your community, and that everything is a danger to you in some way. I think Bigfoot in this context actually it is fun but it is also maybe a manifestation of some

of that anxiety as well or an escape from it as in like i know all of this is happening and it's horrendous let's look at this big hairy thing yes no i'm pointing to you i am quite hairy so it does make sense yeah but you know what i mean like it gives you and therefore there's the comfort coming in again i'm not saying it's one right or wrong way to look at it it's just sometimes i need to remember to have fun i think yeah rather than constantly being like well actually i don't get it but there's another sighting right there's another there is yes so three four years three years after the sighting in Washington and the footage is shot, there is a sighting. This time it's in Japan. Is that right, Dan? Oh, yeah, yeah. So this is a story that I was just researching recently.

So 1970, this is when this happened. And it's in a town north of Hiroshima called Saijo. And a man's in a pickup truck and he claims that he has an encounter with an ape-like creature and so many in many locals in the village suddenly all claim that they've been seeing it too they say it's a 1.6 meter tall animal it's got a face like an inverted triangle which is a very interesting face and it's called hibagon and yeah as soon as word around, all media sort of came swarming, wanted to learn more about it. People who encountered it were mainly adults, said that they would find holes in the ground after it left. It would rip up trees, all that sort of stuff.

And this town got really interested in it because of the media and the tourism that was coming in, that they basically announced that they were going to have their own post for an employee to be the official hunter, but also the kind of media relations for this creature. Because, yeah, there was just so much interest coming in, and all the townsfolk were just being doorstopped by journalists. So it was like, rather than going to the individuals and hassling them, let's have someone who gets all the stories reported to them, and then they're able just to pump them out whenever people come in.

So he was in charge of that that and I believe tax services as well because obviously it's a government job. You can't just focus on Bigfoot. What they join up with these things, basketball. Basketball, taxes. Yeah, so basically for a long time this was a job that you could be the official Bigfoot town PR basically representing the stories of the people that were coming in

and then slowly, like all these things, they gradually died down in interest, and that's what happened there. But for a while, Japan had a sort of lesser-known Bigfoot, and obviously being just a bit north of Hiroshima, only a few decades after the bomb, a lot of stories come out about mutant creations off the back of these things.

You know, Loch Ness has a layer of radioactive waste that sits at the bottom of Loch Ness, which was blown over in the winds from Chernobyl. And so there's one thought that what if Loch Ness didn't exist a long time ago, but then existed because the fish have mutated into weird dinosaur-looking monsters. And so I think that's kind of connected with that. I mean, the stories connected with that i mean the the stories

connected with the bomb like godzilla and so on are very representative of how the world created monsters in japan off the back of their horrible decisions and so yeah i think even though this is not directly tied in it can't be it can't be separated i don't think you were saying earlier right that that context yeah reflection of what's going on Yeah and actually when we've spoken about the Loch Ness Monster we looked at the 1930s sightings and there's huge anxiety about sort of monstrous things in

the build up to the Second World War and the rise of Nazism and it's interesting that it has this context I think in this situation as well it's a more positive thing to come out of that area of japan and you know that is known globally for the atomic bombs that there's the output is suddenly okay it's dealing in this idea of mutation and and almost body horror that to come out of it but it's it's taking

control of that narrative and it's sort of flipping it on its triangle-shaped head. Inverted triangle. Yeah, inverted, inverted. I mean, I think most of the stories have nothing to do with the bomb. I just think, as you're saying, you can't escape. You can't separate.

In that case, it really does feel like it, I think, that it has to be linked to that idea of monstrosity. It's interesting that it crops up in japan that we've had it in north america and of course you have the yeti associated with the himalayas that is it a universal idea across human culture to have a larger than us thing out there or are these actually completely different creatures whether they exist or not that are cropping up to mean different things for different people can we put them all in the same bracket i don't know no they're not i mean they're different species like if if you were if you bracketed yeti is the same as bigfoot you'd be you'd be wrong you'd be wrong yeah very

different and then australia has the yaoi and yeah that's like that's it's's the Australian Bigfoot. And it lives out in the desert-y bits. And I think they all have different roles, definitely. I think the Yowie's kind of tied in with Australian culture, with the Aboriginals more so than, say, the Westerners. I think in America, Bigfoot is just like this mysterious dude walking around that various people are trying to hunt all the time. All the stories that come out and they come out weekly and it's this kind of thing of like are they telling the truth or are

they absolutely just hoaxing and trying to get a splash in the media for whatever reason i've read stories of people saying my horse's hair has been braided overnight that was bigfoot and those are the headlines like you know bigfoot braids horsehair my American flag has been eaten by you know yeah Bigfoot who's angry at America and so why is it then because again this is an interesting distinction why is it the you're talking about the Japanese sightings there and the the different legends that are growing up in that area why is it then when I hear more about the American one I go well there's your fake yeah. Do you know what I mean? So there's something about North American Bigfoot specifically, as opposed to Yeti, that is the harder one for me to swallow.

Well, I think as well, because when you say sort of like Japan or Australian Aboriginal myth, it's almost the equivalent of like analyzing old religion versus the new ones that are cropping up. And it's just there's more for us to pick apart with the new ones because we can see them being formed. You know none of the all those old ones in Japan and Australia would largely have wood carvings and drawings for the representation whereas exactly a video means we can go oh hang on a second that's suddenly you've given us too much evidence. Yeah yeah you've shown us too much. And so it suddenly brings out the skeptical side of us. And also, yeah, I think there is just something a bit more pop-cultury

about the Bigfoot movement in America than the feeling of it, the way they talk about it. There's all these, like, it's always in the news where you have, like, you know, $50,000 to anyone who can hunt down a Bigfoot, says local mayor, you know, kind of thing. Found out this thing ages ago that when they were filming Return of the Jedi in the California, North Californian forests, when they were doing the Chewbacca scenes, when Chewbacca went out in costume, he had to be surrounded by guys in high vis jackets.

Yeah, because they were worried hunters were going to see him and go, it's Bigfoot and shoot him. And also that's the scary thing. The culture is kill Bigfoot, whereas everywhere else is a kind of more respectful... One thing that really interests me, I think about Bigfoot in particular, is it seems to attract characters

more than any other cryptid. Let's talk about one of these people, Grover Krantz. Anthony, I think you have a little bit of a story to tell us about this person, and then we're going to get into who he is and what his role with Bigfoot is in the world. Wendy's has a new breakfast deal. Mix and match two items of your choice for only $4. Breakfast wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small seasoned potatoes or small hot coffee. Choose two for $4 at Wendy's.

Available for a limited time at participating Wendy's in Canada. Taxes extra. Catherine of Aragon. Anne Boleyn. Jane Seymour. Anne of Cleves. Catherine Howard. Catherine Parr.

Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this month on Not Just the Tudors I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Well, Maddy, if you want to go and see Grover Krantz,

anthropologist, cryptozoologist and Bigfoot expert, then head to the Smithsonian Museum. There you will find his skeleton in a cabinet. It is on display at his insistence in a loving embrace with another set of bones. The skeleton of a gigantic dog and the love of his life, Clyde. Krantz was married several times, but his relationship as a young man with his Irish wolfhound, Clyde, was the closest relationship he ever had.

Of course, I like Irish wolfhounds. So when Clyde the dog died, Kranz couldn't bring himself to let go. He decided he wanted to keep Clyde's skeleton, something he knew how to do as a skilled taxidermist. But he couldn't bring himself to cut Clyde open to get out the bones. So he decided to bury Clyde in the back garden and let Mother Nature do the work. Good man.

A year or so later, he came back to dig up Clyde. The sun was going down. He was by himself. The first thing he found was Clyde's skull. Oh, no. Grover Krantz sat in the hole in his back garden with his dog's skull in his hand, having a Shakespearean moment.

This is all perfectly normal. Why do we do it to ourselves, he asked. Why do we let ourselves fall in love like this when death is sure to come? It was around the same time that he was digging up Clyde in his back garden that Krantz began to believe that these Bigfoot creatures that he had read so much about might be real.

Was he substituting Bigfoot for Clyde? Bigfoot would not let him get too close. With Bigfoot, he could keep it at a distance. Perhaps Bigfoot would let him have a deep, meaningful relationship with a large, furry animal without tearing his heart to pieces. That is an interesting story. That is how I want to be preserved with my two dogs. Oh, my little dog.

Maybe not in the Smithsonian. Somewhere more local like the nhm yeah welcome i do always say about i'd quite like my dog's taxidermied after they've done really yeah my husband's like don't do that i will leave yeah no because they sit either side of me when i write at home and i want them i feel like i won't be able to write ever again if they're not both there listen we are bordering on acceptable creepability already. If you do that, you are going over. I am telling you now, I'm trying to save your reputation here.

Don't get your dog stuffed and put them side by side. Anyway, who is Grover Kranz? Why is he stuffing his dog? And what does that have to do with Bigfoot? Yeah, so he's a big deal in the cryptozoology world because you had all these people and this was in 1969, so it's only a few years after the Gimlin-Patterson thing, where suddenly, like when Ken Arnold reported seeing a flying saucer in 1947, 800 more accountants.

Yeah, suddenly people are reporting stuff. And same with Bigfoot. Everyone's coming forward with a story about something that they've seen. But they're all amateur. They're all people who are just, you know, out there living in their houses and so on. And no one's an academic. Grover Krantz comes along. He's the first academic who properly puts his reputation on the line to say, I think these things are real. He had tenure at Washington State University. Part of his agreement to the tenure was that he would give one Bigfoot lecture a year, which is really nice. And he kind of became a believer when he found a footprint outside of Mining Town, and that was in 1969.

That properly convinced him that Bigfoot was a real thing. And so he spent a lot of his time trying to analyze other future findings going on little expeditions himself. He's got a really interesting interesting like this is a tangent sideline but one of his wives he mentioned he had a few wives one of his wives was the granddaughter of albert einstein yeah and i've always dreamed of being at the dinner table between albert and grover a man of rationalism sitting with this bigfoot believer but it turned out that einstein had already passed away sadly before got the chance to happen yeah it's actually it's you can go into this in another

show one day but there's a whole theory that the granddaughter came up with that she was actually the daughter of albert einstein and from an affair that she had had and she had proof and oh she did that herself yeah yeah yeah it's a wonderfully weird story yes she was a trekkie as well it's just another detail. So he's an interesting character, Grover Krantz. He's the first person who brings the academia into it. And after that, more and more academics kind of started joining the interest of looking for these things. But, of course, you know, the footprint that he found, it wasn't a Bigfoot footprint.

They would later find out that there was, you know, reasons behind. I'm not sure it necessarily was an admitted hoaxax but it certainly wasn't what we thought it was i'm really interested in this issue of legitimacy and sort of validity in terms of scientific investigation and thinking about cryptozoology today is considered something of a pseudoscience but in the 60s and 70s at least of a pseudoscience but in the 60s and 70s at least real scientists real serious scientists were wanting to work in that field or to at least push the boundaries of it there was a kind of a blurring of lines between what we would now think of real science and fake science for maybe want of a better term and that he sort of sits in the middle of that to a certain extent was he interested in this for his whole career was this something that he fought for as being real

yeah it kind of the end of his life yeah it kind of took over it was sort of a i think once you open that genie's bottle you're sort of you're in it particularly if if people start rallying around you and you get interested in right fine I think it's intoxicating I think a lot of people fall into that world by accident and then become ambassadors for it but I think as well in the 60s you know you kind of go well yeah why not why not there be a Bigfoot out there like there's so much I flew I flew back to Australia I'm from Sydney and I flew back to Australia recently and it was the first time where I was sitting in a window seat and I was looking out as we were flying over I think it was Perth I'm not quite sure and

but it was certainly like the coast of Australia inward and I was looking down and Australia in your mind is just a huge vacant desert in the middle and there's a coast that is mainly but that coast is actually obviously ginormous and you're looking at just so much forest as you're flying over it's so much and as you're flying over it's so much and as you fly over you go well what have we looked everywhere there yeah this one has anyone ever been to this one spot that i'm pointing out through the window right now because that is so far from anywhere and why would you go there and and in america you have these vast areas in in any of these places where people like jane good, you know, are living and they get

those stories, you go, well, why not? Like, it could be career defining. It could be reputation, like it could be forever your legacy. For time immortal, you become slightly immortal by making a discovery if it was there to be discovered. And it's not like people are not in the 60s, uncovering new forms of dinosaurs that they didn't know about, new skeletons, new fossils, all of this kind of thing. So there was an understanding, as there should still be today, that we absolutely have not come across every species that's ever inhabited the Earth.

It's interesting, Dan, that you just mentioned Jane Goodall because she was a believer. She's the ape lady, right? No, so Jane Goodall's one of the great studiers of primates and she absolutely when she does interviews she's never I don't think officially put her sort of finger down on I don't know what analogy I was reaching for there on the hairy foot and said I believe in it but she does appear on very weird shows where she says I am told about tall, big, unidentified people that the locals who spend their entire life in these woods

or in these forests, they know everything. And they're saying, we don't know what that was. So she's going, well, so what is that? And it might be a Bigfoot. And most of these people don't think a Bigfoot is what people think. As I was saying before, Reinhold Messner, who was one of the first people to go, if not the first person to go up Everest without any oxygen, he wrote a whole book about looking for the Yeti. And his whole thing was, well, I think it's

probably a bear. I think it's something. And so when we talk about what Loch Ness monsters and Bigfoot are, cryptids, there also, I think, needs to be a bit of an update on the current thinking about it. A good friend of mine, Steve Faltham, who's got the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous search for the Loch Ness monster. He lives on the banks of Loch Ness in a mobile library home. He's been there, yeah, for over three decades. You talk to him and you would think, oh, he thinks it's a plesiosaur. He thinks it's, no, he thinks it's an out of place animal. He thinks it's a Wells catfish. That's what out of place animal. He thinks it's a Wells catfish. That's what he thinks it is, you know,

or a giant eel, as some people would say. But a lot of people don't think Bigfoot will be this, do we put him in a zoo or the Hilton? Like they don't think it's that animal anymore. They think it's something. That's all it is. It's something. Whereas the American one is where it kind of makes it,

no, it's Bigfoot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He would definitely need a hotel room. Yeah, yeah. And a razor. Yes, exactly. Yeah. I think if there's more than one thing

I've learned in this episode, it is that the power of storytelling, that I very much stand behind anyway, and actually there is an awful lot to be said for that. So if you put Bigfoot in that context, that for me suddenly has emotional meaning to other people, even if it doesn't to me personally. And so therefore it's important. So that's a progress on my behalf. The other thing, this idea of it being something, even if we don't quite know

what that is, and even if that something is not necessarily real, it shows that there's a shift in mindset that we're going maybe to, you talked about cryptozoology earlier and and occupying this middle ground and actually i'm wondering if that middle ground is moving towards different areas at different times in history depending on what our belief systems are given that so this has been this has been a learning day for me guys thank you very much dan for joining us on after dark it's been a really interesting conversation, especially one that I went into initially with my arms folded, just going, oh God. What are we talking about? But actually, there's a lot there.

There's a lot to kind of talk about. If you enjoyed this episode, please find all our other back catalogue of After Dark episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a review and subscribe. It helps other people find the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining us.

Well, thank you for listening to this episode of After Dark. Please follow this show wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can listen to all these podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. And as a special gift, now don't say we never give you anything, you can also get your first three months for £1 a month when you use the code AFTERDARK at checkout.