Blurry Creatures - EP: 119 The Mothman with Seth Breedlove

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Popularized by ‘The Mothman Prophesies’, we go straight to the source of this shadowy cryptid. Seth Breedlove from Small Town Monsters joins us to talk about the origins of the Mothman phenomenon. Seth dives headlong into Bigfoot, the wide world of cryptozoology, and filmmaking—specifically his film ‘The Mothman Legacy’. contact: [e-mail] blurrycreatures.com Socials instagram.com/blurrycreatures facebook.com/blurrycreatures twitter.com/blurrycreatures Music Kyle Monroe: tinytaperoom.com Aaron Green: https://www.instagram.com/aaronkgreen/ Mastering: ironwingstudios.com Outro Song: TimeCop1983: timecop1983.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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our earth is so different from what we can imagine. Joy to join. The Smithsonian, if they found out about a large skeleton somewhere, was to go get it. I'm going to assume at least one person is right, because if one person's right, it bust the paradigm. It all goes back to the fallen chair. And the problem with the modern day church,

they have a very truncated view of the supernatural. This backdrop that's just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Hermon event. And this guy defects from the kingdom. That's a big deal. Welcome to the show, Seth Brelove from Small Town Monsters. You guys are an independent film company that covers cryptic creatures, fringe topics.

You release many films. I purchased a lot of those films over the years about Bigfoot, UFOs, Dogman, Mothman. So we're glad to have you on the show. I want to get into Mothman, but one thing we have this sort of this tradition on our show is asking every guest. what are your thoughts on Bigfoot? Are you allowed to, as a film producer, are you allowed to tell us your actual thoughts on Bigfoot,

or do you have to keep it sort of ambiguous to keep the mystery going? Yeah, no, I mean, I for sure think Bigfoot is our interdimensional space brother from a galactic mother. No, I, yeah, I mean, I was always like, it's weird because my origin story for, for all of this is just that I find I was really bored because of my job and I just like got into it. I didn't get into it because of like a sighting or anything like that.

So yeah, I took this weird path where I was like really into it and I believed 100% pretty much anything anyone told me. And then I became like wildly skeptical for a while to where I was maybe like 20, 30% there was a big foot. And then I went to this place called Area X in Oklahoma and had something throw rocks at me and scream at me in the middle of the night. and I shot video of this weird eye shine on a hill. And now I'm like probably more like 85, 90% they're real. So that's pretty much where I'm at with big. Yeah. Has it evolved over the years?

Have you like, have you, you know, now once you kind of get into that camp, okay, this things exist, is there like, does it get weirder or does it get more animal-like? Or do you, do you wake up some days? No, I mean, I 100% am in the, in the, this is an undiscovered ape camp. And that's just because what I experienced was so animal-like. And it just seemed like something natural in its natural world existing. And it was weird because after we had all the stuff happened to us while we were in Oklahoma that happened, my conversations about Bigfoot that literally the next day were completely different from how they were on like the drive down to Oklahoma.

It had gone from like joking around about people hoaxing and all this kind of stuff to like, you know, do they have family units? how are they living in here, all this kind of stuff. It just totally changed the way I talked about it. I still have fun. I mean, I made MoMo after that trip, so clearly I can still have fun with the topic. But yeah, I just think my outlook on it changed in that respect, just like wondering how they exist and like how they live

and what life might be like if they're real. Yeah, and it's great you guys are making films because Luke and I always joke about how when you get into the fringe topics, there's not a lot of good quality. productions out there about these topics. You know, you have to surf through hundreds of Bigfoot documentaries to find one that stands out and you guys have produced a lot of great stuff. So you were, you were working kind of a job you didn't like and then you got into this topic and then that

kind of led you to want to start your own production company, basically? Is that kind of how... I mean, at the time I was as a freelance job, I was writing for newspapers, freelance reporting. And I was really enjoying that, but I didn't pay the bills. So my full-time job was medical billing. And medical billing was like the most horrifically boring job I've never had in my life. And you pretty much just sat there and did data entry and listened to podcasts because, you know, I mean, you turn your brain off and you just pretty much, you're on autopilot for the entire day. And so I had plenty of time to like listen to podcasts and stuff like that. So that was kind of what really drove me further into these subjects that I'd been just sort of mildly amused by for a while.

and so I started listening to podcasts and that's, I mean, it was, it was a weird transition because I went from mild interest into like, you know, using my free time at my job to look up newspaper archival reports about Bigfoot in Ohio from like the 1800s. And then someone at a Bigfoot conference contacted me because I'd been posting them online. They were like, hey, would you do this for me? And I was like, sure. So I would send him the articles and he would post them on their Facebook event page. And then that grew into like me wanting to write a book about it, Bigfoot cases around the country called Smalltown Monsters. And that was in 2013, I put together this book proposal called Small Town Monsters

and sent it out to a bunch of publishers. And it was rejected by everyone. And then in 2014, I ran into these guys that had cameras. And we decided we were going to take one of the cases that I had all. already sort of done a lot of the preliminary research for called Minerva Monster and turned that into the first movie we made. And then I mean, it was like right now, we just finished. I just literally like two hours ago posted the directors cut of Beast of Whitehall,

which was our second movie. And we just posted that like free on YouTube. And that was weird because I was going through it and I was looking at the movie and it was reminding me of the weird path we've taken from like project to project. and there's never a point where we're very stable like as far as like will we be able to do this much longer you never really know but it's funny because like you put out a movie like Minerva Monster or Beast of Weigh Hall

and they made back then we made just enough money to like keep you know we'd make enough money to where we could take that money and flip it into the next project yeah yeah you know what I mean that was what we did starting out and and we did that all the way into 2017 so the first basically like three years of STM's life were we were on life support from project to project until mothman came out and then mothman came out and that kind of gave us enough enough of an influx of cash to keep going for a year without having to be panic-stricken the entire time yeah i mean i understand that i played music for about a decade and we toured

full-time for about seven years and i understand that whole thing you keep rolling the dough into the next thing and hopefully your next record takes off but you just have to kind of build up that digital archive and hopefully it's it's funny you'd say that because like that's i've heard from other people when i talk to other friends that make movies they're like you don't you don't make movies like you don't run a production but people don't build production companies out of nothing and then actually manage to make it their living it just doesn't happen um outside of hollywood the way we did and so what i always hear from my friends who are musicians is that what we do is way more comparable to an indie band than it is to to a film production company because we're just

always creating new stuff and you're always building on what you already have and and you're re-releasing stuff and we're just like you never stop i don't talk to my filmmaker friends and find that what we do is in any way comparable to what they do we're doing something completely different that seems to resemble the indie music model more yeah and i know that model well it's it's a tough model. It's literally, you know, hand to mouth. And then we had several friends just, they had that one hit song and then they were huge. I mean, there were days I was backstage with guys and the next couple years later, they're at the Grammys. It's a really weird. It's just a, you're pretty much broke until you're not. And in between, you're just struggling

the whole time. So I know what you guys are going through, but you're not, it sounds like you're your production company. You're building a brand. You're building movies. You're building something. You're not just getting hired to go out and film for other people. You're doing your own thing. And I love that. Yeah, I mean, we've, yeah, we've turned down the offers at this point, just because I don't, well, for one thing that we, we had a manager for a while and that was, she wanted to get us in at like, do you want me to get you guys in a history channel to like create a documenter? And that's kind of like a nightmare to me. Like, um, and I've, I've got friends that are Hollywood directors and they seem miserable. And I just don't like, I don't really, I,

If I want to be miserable, I'll go back to medical billing and be able to see my kid at night. And, you know, if I'm going to go back that route, so. Sometimes it feels like when you get that phone bill, it's like the crash site document. You can't read it. There's a bunch of numbers, random fees, vague language, stuff's blacked out. You're like, what am I actually paying for? I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. I like to be simple.

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taste and a large serving size that lasts. Deliciously popped, perfectly salted. Skinny Pop, popular for a reason. Shop Skinny Pop now. Anyway, we just kind of do our own thing. And we've never done, I try to do like commercial work for a little while, like shooting commercials for local businesses and like weddings and that kind of stuff in it. it was that also seemed nightmarish. So, oh yeah. Just do our own thing.

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned a little bit about Mothman, kind of being the sort of the breakout for your guys' production company. Can you talk, is that like your favorite cryptid? Is that the thing you're, it's kind of your ammo?

Like everyone, every band's got like their hit song or their hit record and they kind of, you know, is that sort of what put you guys on the map, so to speak? I mean, I guess it's not, it's definitely not my favorite cryptic.

I still think Bigfoot is like where my interest. always go back. I just always go back to Bigfoot. Mothman is the one that we put out in 2017 that kind of like changed things for us. So yeah, in 2017 when we put out Mothman, it was coming off of this string of movies that just made enough for us to survive. I was still working a part-time job at that point and my wife was working full time. But in 2017, we had our son. So he was born in April and Mothman came out in June. she was on maternity leave when it came out. And it was like the most surreal thing because we were filming invasion on Chestnut Ridge

when it came out. We started filming invasion on a Friday morning and it came out on Thursday night at like 1159. And so by the time we had driven from Ohio to Pennsylvania to do invasion, Mothman was already charting, which at that point we hadn't really seen. And it was in the top, it was in like the top 60 in horror new releases.

I'm like, whoa, this is that's that's pretty cool then we did our filmmaking i mean that movie was invasion was so insane we were just shooting interview after interview and we didn't get a break until that afternoon and we got into this rental house we were in somewhere around the chestnut ridge this ancient farmhouse and we sat down at the table and i pulled up the charts and it was charting at like 20 overall not genre like it was the 20th best-selling movie on amazon i was like what the So we started refreshing every hour and just watching it like slowly climbing the charts. And by Saturday morning, it was the number six best selling movie on Amazon.

And it was above Logan, which I thought was really cool because I really enjoyed Logan. And it was just wild to watch because it was like, I mean, it was outpacing. It eventually outpaced Rogue One, you know, just because it made, Rogue One had been out for like two months at that point. But it still was cool to see it climb above it. you know I mean and at that point we we made enough money that we were able to my wife was able to quit her job and focus on this and being a mom and I was able to to just focus on filmmaking full time it wasn't it didn't you hear these like crazy indie success stories where people make like a million dollars over it wasn't anything like that but it was enough money where we could last where we we knew we

could you know survive and the Kickstarter did well that year I think it made like 40,000 or something so we were, you know, we were doing well enough that we could keep it going independently. You could get the tour bus. Yeah. You didn't, you weren't touring in the van anymore, right? Yeah. I mean, we're not to the, it's funny to say that we are, we legitimately in the last like two weeks started looking at like campers.

Just because, yeah, like an RV or like a travel trailer or something, just because I'm looking at how much we spend on travel costs. I'm like, man, we'd save a lot of money if we could figure out a cheap like RV alternative. Hey, I had three RVs in our career. We never really got to the tour bus because tour bus was $1,000 a day. And we were like, okay, well, we can get pretty dang close to a tour bus and spend $200 a day. Let's just do that. You can save $800 a day.

But yeah, when you get to the House of Blues, that's when you start getting the tour bus. But yeah, that's awesome, man. You guys were able to kind of get up the charts. And I know that feeling when you're like, you see, you're working on this project for years on in. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, dang, it's starting to, like, I'm not. pushing this thing, it's pushing itself. And it's a cool feeling. That's a good, that is a great way to put it too, because that is exactly what it's like.

There does come that point where you're kind of like, okay, I don't have to, I'm not, I'm not driving this. But I realized, it's funny, I realized that pretty early on with Amazon, because I, it doesn't matter how much advertising we do, how much money someone sinks into, how much of our money, someone like a distributor sinks into marketing. it doesn't really have an effect on something like Amazon, like the big platforms. You don't see it having an effect.

That stuff is all going to be organic. So your movie is either going to succeed or die based on people finding it and having an interest in the subject or the poster or whatever thing is for having those views. And it's almost impossible to predict what will hit and what won't hit.

I guess that's what I find. I know that. I know that feeling. So our last guest, had on the show talked about this lady. He has a fossil museum and we've been talking a lot about the ancient giants and a lot of weird stuff on our show. But this lady hits this moth man with her car twice, he says. And she, you know, he's like, dude, I have this museum and people just come in and tell me this crazy stories. And he, and so this lady hits this moth man, flies off the side of the road. And then she goes over there to try to see if it's okay. And this other

guy, and like, I think it was a truck was like, dude, lady, get away from that thing. And she said it had smelled like sulfur. Smelled terrible. And it had these crazy bug eyes. And it got up and it kind of shook off and then flew in a circle and then flew away. And we were like, man, this is the time to talk about Mothman on her show because. And I remember seeing one of your guys's documentary. I watched your first Mothman documentary.

Is that like a pretty accurate description of Mothman? What do you? I don't even know where to go. Is the smelling like sulfur and the bug eyes? like that's just totally different than Bigfoot. This is like next level Bigfoot stuff. You know what I mean? Yeah,

I mean, that's the thing about Mothman that I think is so weird is that the descriptions don't align. And so you might get characteristics that do here and there. You know, in the 60s, there were a lot of those reports of seeing it. And I guess even up to present day of when it flies,

it doesn't flap its wings. It just takes off straight up in the sky, right? Like there were a lot of reports that were like that. There's a story in the Mothman legacy by a lady who said that she talked to a witness who claimed that when it walked, when what she saw walking walked, its legs bent inward, like backward, almost like it was jointed, you know, like a bug. And there are other reports like that. Like when this thing walks, it's like it's never walked before when you see it.

But the thing about it is there's so many reports and so many of them don't sound anything alike. And even during the 60s sightings, you know, Tom Yuri, who was a witness who was driving near the T&T area, but he would have been closer to the Ohio River, he saw this giant bird fly overhead. I mean, what he saw basically sounds like a thunderbird. And on the other hand, what the mallets and the scarberry saw sounds way more like what we would think of as mothman, you know, this bug-eyed being, humanoid being with wings. So that's one of the confusing things about it. We've interviewed two people too who, who basically what they're counting saying is like a man. You know, there was a guy Lawrence Gray who in the 60s, at the height

of that 66, 67, Flap woke up and found a man with red eyes standing in his bedroom. And he had wings and he said it was the moth man. It's a strange phenomenon because I think what happens is there's a lot more going on than just one thing and everything kind of gets lumped into the mothman basket right so just throws it into this under this one heading like oh i saw the mothman but there's there's probably a lot more going on than just mothman sightings even when you regionalize it or or condense it down to a place like point pleasant i think there was more going on in 66 than just sightings of the mothman i think there might have been thunderbirds seen i think there was other stuff

stuff going on, maybe some government experiments or something on people psychologically too. I don't know. I've never, I don't get too far into theorizing about it, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were slipping something in the water there because I mean, it'd be the perfect

place to mess with people. You know, you're far enough removed from the larger world that people there don't necessarily run out to, for help. You know, everything is condensed into that little town. So we, we interviewed a guest who went to all the ancient burial mounds in, in North America. There's like 700 of them. And he said that some Indians,

tribes wouldn't settle in places like Virginia because the amount of haunting that goes on by these ancient burial mounts, like, is it locations? Well, see, we just had this whole discussion about that because we apparently can't stay out of West Virginia right now. We just finished this whole on the trail of UFO's Dark Sky, which is based in West Virginia. And it, it, it's basically a big, like, West Virginia UFO history lesson. And we, we had a discussion about that because we hear that all the time, too, except when I talk to actual Native Americans, they're like, what are you talking about? There were tribes there. Like, you know there are tribes there. Chief Cornstock, who is very often tied to the Mothman legacy was in, you know, West Virginia.

So I think what it is, is more than anything, when we were there, we got really into the into the backwoods West Virginia, right? Like the real West Virginia. And the thing about that state is, if you're traveling on horseback or even on foot, I cannot imagine that state central West Virginia, especially being a place that would have been easy to travel through. And we know they were in Virginia itself. So I'm assuming that they just avoided that part of Virginia at that time because of how difficult it would have been to travel through.

It's possible that there were legends and stories that they told one another about that region. But I can't find anything historically to back that up. As cool as it is to be like, look, the Native Americans didn't even travel there because they were terrified of being. murdered by Mothman or whatever. I just can't find anything to to back that up and we know that there were actually Native American tribes. Well, maybe there were

good tribes and bad tribes just like good humans and bad humans of any kinds. There were people who align themselves with. I mean, do you think that some of this stuff is centered around satanic activity? Do you go that far or do you have any belief in that? I mean, I think every are we talking historically or present day? I guess both, right?

Because I mean, the ancient mountains sound like they were the bones like this guy fritz came on our show and he said they were you know he did a whole thing on that they were the in those mounds are the bones of the giants which are the spirits of the giants are demons so if you go that route it sounds satanic like even if you're around them you're you're getting crazy activity in the supernatural so all i know is west virginia is real weird and and it's one of my favorite states and i can't stay out of it like i said because we just keep going back and there's so much interesting stuff that's happened there and and so many small stories still unexplored but it is there's there's just something really

weird about it we were there three weeks ago we stayed in four different locations one of them was wheeling which i learned some weird stuff about the history of wheeling that i had no idea about and i've been going to wheeling since i was a child but apparently like the tribe that lived there that the name that they called it was like Wheel on or Wheelin or something like this. It's going to be in our movie. I just can't remember. I'm just recalling what the guy told me.

But apparently it meant the place of the skull and they would behead people and put their heads on spikes along the river there. The river that comes right along Wheeling. And when the settlers moved in and built the town there, they literally named it Wheeling as like a nod to that. They took the name,

place of the skull and basically made it the name. of the town. Now, as far as like satanic stuff, there's every, every rural community has like their satanic legends. Like I grew up in Bolivar, Ohio. It's like a sister town to Zora. Ohio, Zora was this religious retreat that was founded by the Zorites, which were kind of like Quakers. I mean, they just moved into the area. They owned a mill, or they had this big mill that sat on the river, and the river runs right behind where I grew up. And as a child, I remember hearing screaming back there at night all the time. and the rumor that went around town was that there were satanic activity.

There was all the satanic activity that took place back there. And even in the Mothman legacy, Ashley Wamsley talks about the T&T area being like a hub for satanic activity. I'm sure that's probably true on some scale. I would imagine that kids that are bored or whatever probably go back there and, you know, butcher cats or whatever it is, the bored boys in like small Midwestern towns do. yeah, yeah. But I don't know how much of that is like really

is organized or rooted. I just know that every town we go to has some sort of satanic story. It's like you can't escape Satanism and the masons. Like we can't get away from either of them. Maybe they're the same thing. It's possible. Oh, yeah. I would say more so than it was in the 60s

and not necessarily the people are seeing the mothman, but just it is very present because of the fact that the mothman is the biggest tourist draw in that town, and it's pretty much saved that town from, you know, economic collapse. There's signs everywhere for the mothman. They have these statues. I don't know what they're made of. They're like steel or something.

They're insane. They're super detailed and they ring the town. They go all around the floodwall of the town. and then in the middle of the town, in the town square, rather than having some sort of historical figure, the mothman is like the hub statue in the middle of downtown Point Pleasant. So I think today, if anything, it's more present in their minds than it was even in the 60s. You know, I mean, when the bridge collapsed in 67,

I think they did everything they could just sort of get away from the mothman at that point, not because they connected it to the bridge collapse, just because it was one more thing to draw their attention back to this tragedy that took so many people's lives that they were connected to. People there still balk at connecting the mothman with the silver bridge collapse. And I do too. I don't really connect the two either. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

I would say I had a much easier time of making the mothman legacy and finding witnesses that I did the mothman appointee. I mean, Mothman Legacy, we have eight eyewitness stories in there. And I could have easily had a dozen. I could have easily had 20 probably. My researcher, Heather Mosier, I mean, she was at the point where she basically turned over like a book of research to me when she was done. And it was a lot of it was like witness stories that were recent people who were willing to talk. So it's a pretty, it's a pretty constant thing. What's the Patterson Gimlin of Mothman? Like, is there anything that's even close, nothing?

There's nothing, no. Not even a photo. No, there's a photo of an owl that looks like it's carrying a snake that people like to pass around. It's like, look at this recent photo of the mothman. And then there's a lot of doctored photos online. Like, if you look up photos of the mothman,

you're going to find photos that look legit. But there hasn't really been anything that you can definitively point to and say that's a cool photo of the mothman. Looking for a protein shake that tastes as good as it performs? Meet Rock and Protein Max. Packed with 50 grams of fuel, it'll help you keep up when your day won't slow down. And because it's always creamy and never chalky, every sip tastes great.

Even better, it's lactose-free and has zero added sugar. It's not every day you find a protein shake you actually want to finish. Catch Rock and Protein in the dairy cooler at a store near you. Rock and Protein and Shamrock Farms are registered trademarks of Shamrock Foods Company. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing that it's become a lot more personal. all in it this is sort of the whole point of the mothman legacy movie is like throughout human history we've always connected winged creatures to disaster it's just what we do as human beings apparently like going all the way back to hindu mythology and greek mythology the winged creatures precede disaster it's

just what happens and it is especially present in appalachian culture um even prior to the mothman sightings there were sightings of what they called the bird man um in in point plus which was this, you know, man like bird man who was seen prior to like flooding and things like that. So, you know, when the bridge collapsed, I think it immediately was assumed somehow the mothman had to be responsible for that. And the story goes that, you know, the mothman was seen for 13 months, starting in 1967 and leading up to, or 66 and leading up to December 15, 1967. It was 13 months exactly. except that's not really true because you'd be ignoring the reports from the two years prior to 1966 and you'd be ignoring the fact that settings did not cease after the collapse of the

silver bridge they kept going and they still go on today so it's a stretch to try to connect the mothman to the bridge collapse but i know people really want to uh so yeah i don't want to that for people, but we did interview, like we interviewed the screenwriter of the Mothman Prophecies movie. And I mean, he was like talking about how he was like partially responsible for a lot

of the legend surrounding the Mothman, because when he was writing that movie, he made up mythology connected to the Mothman for the movie and people now have assumed its reality. So they're like, oh, did you know like Mothman was seen at Chernobyl and Mothman was seen prior to 9-11? That's not

true. Like those things didn't happen. They were made up for a fictional movie. So it's kind of coming to a life of its own sort of speak. Yeah. The weird thing about Mothman though is like you can be in a high rise in downtown Chicago. You don't have to be in the middle of the woods and you can look at your window and see this thing, right? So it can, I mean, Bigfoot's kind of, you know, it's stuck to a certain area. You rarely will, you hear about Bigfoot siding that's like close to civilization. These things are coming out of the woods and they're like flying next to buildings, right? I mean, how many urban sightings like downtown or in the middle of a square or it seems like it just does whatever it wants, right? I mean, it does, but I still haven't.

So we're making a movie about that Chicago Mothman. So we already did a movie that sort of delved into Chicago to an extent called Tarr in the skies a couple years ago. But later this year, or probably actually now pushing in the next year, we're going to film the on the trail of the Lake Michigan Mothman. So we'll actually look into some of those Chicago settings. because I feel like I know nothing about that stuff at this point. I just know there's a lot of drama going on between the various investigators, and they all hate each other. And so I've sort of avoided it because I try to avoid all that kind of stuff.

But I'm interested in hearing more about it. But, yeah, I mean, the Mothman sightings take place everywhere. So, you know, 60s to present day, the sightings that occur in West Virginia they can be in the middle of a holler in the middle of nowhere or they can be on a rooftop in downtown Charleston. So it's kind of runs the gamut. There's a ton of sightings that are just people driving, you know, late at night or whatever and they see something.

Then there's the people that we talk to who claim they've seen it in their home. So it kind of runs the gamut of what people are experiencing and where, which is, I guess, makes it kind of creepier than Bigfoot. Yeah. Yeah, Bigfoot doesn't go in your bedroom. Yeah. Well, is Mothman demonic, you know? Is it part of it?

I mean, for sure, some of the stories sound more spiritual or supernatural in nature than like a flesh and blood creature. And honestly, most of the sightings of the Mothman don't sound like some sort of undiscovered species of something. It sounds like something that sort of comes and goes. it pleases, maybe in and out of our reality or something like that. So if you want to, if you want to ascribe demonic to it, it's definitely as likely as any of the other theories we have about it, right?

Because like the theories are, it's either some sort of mutated creature that got into the, the toxic waste that we, yeah, the toxic waste that was filling the, the T&T area back in the 70s and 80s, or it, you know, or it's, it's, it's, it's, it's been conjured into our reality through the demonic, you know, the, the ceremonies that were supposedly taking place in the TNT area. But I don't know, you know, and I'm totally up for theorizing about any of that stuff. I just don't think anyone theory is going to lock the whole thing down. I just think there's a lot more going on than, you know, one or two things. I really think for whatever reason, sightings of winged creatures, they overlap. And I think, and I think, you know,

I think you're dealing with, I think you are dealing with like abnormally large birds and maybe something paranormal and maybe a little bit of misidentification and probably some hoaxing. And it all kind of overlaps and eventually you get a flap that, you know, really captures the public attention like what happened in the 60s or what's happening today with Chicago. Have you had any sort of existential questions as you've gone down these trails and learn more about these creatures that like maybe you need to prepare yourself for attack from these things or spiritually, you know, like... Okay, so, it's interesting.

It's interesting you'd say that because, like, we're in the middle of doing... This isn't related necessarily to the Mothman. Because I've never had that concern with the Mothman. I don't know why that is, but I've just never... It's never come up. But we've just started making these movies about, like, hauntings. And it's a subject I just never have been interested in, right?

But I'm interested in the subject now that we're doing, this stuff, mostly because we made this Mark of the Bellwitch movie, and I just found the entire concept so interesting. That was where I started thinking, this isn't something I necessarily want to like mess around with and then have something follow me home. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is the first time where I'm getting into the arena of like, okay, I think we probably need to tread kind of carefully in some of these places where we're going. And again, it's not really related to the mothman, but some of the other subjects that we're tackling. But, you know, like one of the things about the way we approach this stuff is we try to do it super

objectively. I'm, when we go out, we aren't necessarily out there trying to find mothman anyway. We're pretty much just documenting the stories of the people who claim to have seen it, you know, and townspeople and things like that. So we just did this hauntings thing Friday night. It was my first experience really being out in a place that's supposedly haunted. We were there with like a bunch of ghost hunting. and all this kind of stuff.

And they were like, you know, whipping out their spirit boxes and heading off down into the, into the graveyard. And I was like, I'm good. I'm going to hang up here. Yeah. Have fun.

It's not the answer you were looking for, but that's like pretty much, that's the only topic where I'm really kind of concerned about what I'm messing around with. If they're coming in your rooms, like, you know, I've heard some dog man sightings where they come in people's rooms.

And Bigfoot's different. It seems to like, stay away from people and then it'll come around and watch people like a television show, but then it'll leave, you know, it's not showing up looking at you, whoa, it's in my room, you know, kind of thing. I don't hear any of those stories. But it's just interesting because we interviewed a guy that said, you know, the dog man followed him home and jumped on his roof. And he was a pastor of a church. And he's like, I took some crosses. I anointed him with oil. I prayed over them and I stuck him in the corners of my yard. So it sounds very like, you know,

vampire, you know, you're protecting your, self against the darkness. Yeah. And it's not something to fool around with. I just thought, you know, maybe if you go down these trails, a lot of people just, maybe they don't have belief in anything. And then you start encountering supernatural stuff is probably going to challenge your thoughts about that, right?

Yeah, for sure, because I'm, I mean, a lot of the guys on my crew even are like, you know, they come from, from, I hate the word religion, honestly, man. I tend to go more like, I mean, I grew up Baptist. So like I'm an old school. I grew up Baptist too. Really? Yeah.

So I grew up in an old school Baptist family. So like, but but like Mark Mattsky who writes a lot of, co-writes a lot of more movies and stuff. Um, he's a Lutheran minister. So like we're,

you know, like it's a, we all have very specific beliefs about this stuff. But, um, you know, I don't think I'm scared of anything either. I don't think I'm afraid of this stuff.

I just know what I, what I, how I, I, I know the boundaries I don't want to go beyond. So I'm not really, if I'm making a movie about people who claim to have witnessed this stuff, it's one thing. It's another if I'm out there trying to actively find it for myself.

And so when it comes to Bigfoot, I'm cool with like going out trying to find Bigfoot. And I'm cool with that to an extent with Mothman because I do think there's a flesh and blood component to this that is probably very mundane. But some of these topics you do got to be probably aware of, like weary of when you're, when you're looking into it. Yeah. Real. there's one. There is one story. And I'm not saying I don't believe the stories I'm,

I've covered. I'm saying in a lot of these cases, I kind of already am aware of what I'm getting into. So I kind of know, like the Minerva Monster case, I believe something was there. And I, and I believed it from kind of from the beginning because of reading the police reports and hearing what the police thought and that they believed it as well. So you know what you're getting into the one that I got into where I expected it to be probably something where I could come up with my own

conclusions that would debunk it was the Flatwoods monster and that's the one where I was like there's no way this thing's real and then you go and you interview the witnesses and what they're describing is not at all what the legend is you know the legend of the Flatwoods Monster is that it was this 13 foot tall creature with a green mist

surrounding it that killed dogs and people and all this other stuff and what the witnesses described is a large robotic, metallic, rocket-like thing that they encountered on top of a hill that could hover. And I'm like, man, that could be anything. You could have been, you know, you're at the height of the Cold War. It could have been a experimental rocket. It could have been, you know, I think there was, I think they, I believe the story of the Flatwoods monster because what we consider to be the Flatwoods monster is not necessarily what the actual witnesses described seeing. And when you hear it from their mouths, it becomes very believable.

And I think that's also the movie where I realized, like, the importance of hearing things directly from the witnesses is. Because otherwise, you're, you know, you're really basing your opinions on the stuff off of years of these secondhand accounts and people kind of adding their own details to the stories. And they become something else entirely in the retelling. Yeah, it's like you have to get really good to trust in your gut. and like figuring out if this is like good information and bad information so how do you go about doing that how do you sort through all this information and know you're on the good stuff and fake stuff and hoaxing and this and that is there like a system you guys sit down and debate no just no i mean all gut just sounds legit well like the thing is i i find it impossible to believe that anyone can

really know 100% either way if someone's lying or telling the truth because people can be really convincing liars. And a lot of the people you talk to about these things, I don't even know that they're lying. In some cases, they might have a mental condition. In other cases, they might have convinced themselves something happened. And so it becomes really difficult to tell them apart. I know of the movies we've made, there's only been two times where I knew someone was straight up lying. And in one of the cases, I didn't know until after the movie was out, and someone explained why.

And in the other case, we cut the woman out of the movie. So there's only been two times where I felt like I was taken for a ride. You know, you talk about listening to podcasts and getting into this subject when you were doing your previous job of billing. And I started fixing up houses in Nashville. And that's when I started listening to these podcasts about Bigfoot. And it just got to a point where I'm like, there's no way that the thousands podcasts I've listened to, everyone was lying.

Like, there's, even if half of these stories are true, they're describing this thing. And you have to kind of, it's a matter of ratios sometimes. Like, it just can't statistically all be lies, right? Yeah. Because it's really hard to convince half the population. They just think all this information is just bogus, fake. But the good thing is, I don't feel like my job is to convince anyone of anything. Sure.

And so, like, end of the day. our job is really just to catalog the experiences, put them in a movie, and then let the audience make up their own mind. And the coolest thing for me has been hearing from so many skeptics and people who don't even tolerate typical paranormal TV who really enjoy our stuff because of the approach, which is basically just like,

here's a bunch of stories, make up your mind as to whether or not they're real. Yeah. I don't feel it's like my mission to, invent people of the paranormal as a factual reality. You know, like I, I want to document these stories. I want witnesses to be taken seriously because I don't think they're all crazy. And I want people to understand that this stuff is super fascinating. You don't have to believe it's real. Like, don't tell me Bigfoot and Mothman aren't cool. Like, you have to be an idiot if you don't see the

value in the stuff. I mean, do you get so wild out there to think that like Bigfoot, Mothman, they're all kind of know of each other. Like is it like, you know, you have all these creatures just out in the woods and there's like a whole other world, a whole other life where, you know, like the Avengers of cryptids.

I mean, I think the thing is like I think a lot of this stuff is interconnected. I set Bigfoot apart from that. You know, just because again, when I, the difference between Bigfoot stories and Mothman stories

is night and day to me. It's just, when you talk to witnesses, the witness experience on a on a Bigfoot report versus something like a dog man is, it's totally different to me. It just there's a, there's a believable like biological reality to Bigfoot that you don't get from a lot of these other reports. And that makes me think either either the other stuff doesn't exist or it's coming from somewhere. else. It's something else. It's like either spiritual or supernatural, whatever you want to call it.

So you think Dogman's in the spiritual category? You know, I didn't until we made Bray Road. And then Bray Road, the Bray Road beast really got me thinking in another direction because of all the like a cult activity that was taking place around the time. And the way whatever that thing is kills,

there's like some really strange kill, like animal kills connected to Dogman that, that, remind me more of like cattle abduction, you know, surgical precision kind of stuff. And that's a weird aspect to the dogman sightings that I haven't heard explored anywhere.

And it makes me think there's probably more to it than just like a, I mean, honestly, I never bought into the biological dog man as like an undiscovered species to begin with because that it's honestly kind of comical. Sure. If you think about that,

like a seven foot tall dog guy, run around in the woods on tiny hind legs or whatever, it doesn't make any sense. But if it's coming from somewhere else, you know, or there's like a weird demonic or spiritual aspect to that, it kind of changes the game. That was the first movie, too, where I admitted during press that I was like, okay, maybe this is like paranormal, because up to then I didn't even really discuss, like, my opinions on that kind of stuff. But that was, the Barry Road Beast was where I started thinking there might be more to that.

We had a guest who said that he was driving up one of the mounds and then he had a spirit, talked to him and asked him how, he's like, good evening, wasn't it? And then he couldn't get his car off the mound. He kept, the wheel kept jerking. And then he said, and then he said he saw Mothman in the back of his car. Wow, you guys get some crazy Mothman stories. Yeah. Yeah.

And dude. I should have been in my movie. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. So our guest this week actually released is Gary Wayne, and he talked a lot about the chimera. Have you, have your thoughts gone back to like, you know, these half, half and half creatures, like, you know, the centaurs, satyrs and all that stuff. Do you think mothband could just be like an insect, an ancient experiment gone wrong? Um, sure. I've, no, I mean, I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about that, but it's, it's just because like my, my thinking when I made legacy was so like honed in on the storytelling aspect of it of like an evolved legend, like an evolved, a story that just evolves over time takes on a new form and whether or not we can give life to that in some way that goes beyond just, you know, metaphysical, but maybe like, is there any way to physically create a mothman just by talking about it over over centuries you know I didn't get too too far beyond that because our problem is we're making like four or five movies at a time yeah yeah yeah so like you're doing pre-pro on like two movies and then you're doing editing on another while you're doing posts on another thing or shooting as I was finishing mothman we were shooting

recreations on bellwitch so it was you you kind of like you pick a lane and that's where you're going to exist with that subject because you're already, your mind's over on the next like two things that are coming down the pipe. So there's so much to get into with the Mothman too that I feel like we've barely scratched the surface with Mothman of Point Pleasant and Taryn Skies and Mothman legacy. In a way, like Dark Sky is a backdoor sequel to both Mothman movies because it deals into injured cold and, you know, some of the Grinning Man stuff and all the Moth Man, the Mothman stories are so connected to Uphology.

Yeah. That apparently I can't stop covering that topic. I feel like Mothman's great because like, you know, if you think about like, you know, the Batman villains, right? Joker's like Bigfoot, you know what I mean? It's just always there. But like Mothman's kind of like a Batman villain that people don't know about. And I think there's some interest there.

It's kind of up and coming. Like it's one of those cryptids that's kind of coming to the surface. We interviewed a guy about, who talked about werewolves, like the Beast of Jevedon, which is like in France. and that was like the 1500s. Is there any ancient sightings of Mothman? How old does these sightings go back to? Or is it just mostly recent?

It depends. And this is what I'm, this is what the movie's kind of about is like putting a new name on an old face. So, so people call it the Mothman, but, you know, the Mothman isn't that dissimilar from,

from like a Banshee. Like a Banshee is, you know, a Scots-Irish death fairy. it precedes disaster. It's got glowing red eyes. And sure, it was typically seen as a woman or a cloaked figure, but people are seeing a dude in their room with wings that tells them, you know,

tragedy is coming. And it's not that off from, far off from what we think of as the mothman. And when you consider the fact that the Scots-Irish are the settlers that really inhabited West Virginia, you know, that's kind of interesting in itself. So there's, there, there was the, now that I'm talking, see, I have to shift gears because I've been so focused on, on, on Bellwidge for the last like month. There's, um, the, Garuda. That's what it is. The, it's like a Hindu death bird, you know, that, that would herald disaster. And that's centuries old. There's all sorts of those stories. So the thing that, the way the movie puts it, the way the Mothman legacy puts it, is, like when you're coming from a culture, and I'm talking referencing, I guess the Scots Irish here, when you're coming from a culture that so much of their folklore revolves around

winged creatures or just dark figures that herald disaster, when a winged creature with red eyes shows up in the 60s in a place that's largely inhabited by descendants of Scotch Irish immigrants, it really wasn't that weird. Like, I don't. at least that's the way I look at it. I don't think it was that weird. I think they had a new name for it and they slapped it on it. And for a lot of the people that would have been around in the 60s, who grew up in the 20s, they were probably like, oh, this is like, this is that bird man that used to fly around, you know, outside of Gallup lists or whatever that people would see before their farm flooded. It's, I don't think, I don't think to people at that time, the moth man was

on the forefront of their minds. Yeah. Well, we've talked to a lot of guests about giants and the Celtics and the giants were here before, long before people were making these stone hinges in America and stuff. So it got pretty interesting. You think the giants, do you have any thoughts about them? Yeah, what's the giant movie coming? Nate and I want to be a part of that. I actually want to do like on the trail of giants because I think the cool thing with that is you would actually have to go and try to find something. Because otherwise you're not making it.

Like there's no movie there unless you're actually. going. You really can't interview them either. There's not too many around. Well, you could. Ouija board. Yeah, or yeah, Shaq maybe. I'm trying to think who else would be.

Yeah. But yeah, if we could get, if we could get, I'd love to do something about that topic because I think it's super interesting. And like I said, I mean, I think giants existed. So. Yeah. So do we. Well, if you listen to our show, that's like what, that's kind of what we've,

I think we're building out the history of like where all these creatures might have come from, you know what I mean? Because I've listened to so much Bigfoot activity, and it just drove me nuts that, like, they just keep doing the same thing. And no one ever actually goes, well, where the hell of this stuff come from? Like, a way, there's got to be a history of this stuff. And you got to go all the way back. And then you start, some guys will talk about the Nephilim. Some guys will talk about the giants. And so we're just trying to build out, build out that argument on our show and then kind of give a framework to how to maybe make sense some of these other creatures.

But there's so many mounds in North America. America's history from our just small time doing this show is that there's a lot of ancient history in America that they've said are Native American that aren't Native American. It predates the Native American. So there's a lot of hauntings around those mounds, and they were building these hinges and stuff. Do you find yourself in those areas when you're hearing stories? Yeah.

I mean, everywhere we're going is, Point Pleasant has that history surrounding it. Wheeling is right next to Moundsville, but Wheeling has their own series of stories. And the thing about those places is their confluence for confluence is for multiple phenomena. So it's not just like, oh, there's tons of hauntings here. It's like, oh, there's hauntings here and there's poltergeist stuff and there's UFO sightings. You've got wing creature sightings in the woods, and you've got a dog man. So you've got a map with hot spots, basically. There's like activity in certain areas.

It's pretty obvious. Like, if you watch, if you follow our stuff, these stories all kind of center around when you get the confluences, like what I'm talking about, like the portal areas or whatever, window areas, whatever you want to call it. Like the Chestnut Ridge has that history. And there's all sorts of stuff like that along the Chestnut Ridge. Um, the point pleasant is considered a hot spot for weirdness that goes far beyond just moth man. It's that, you know, in the 60s, when everyone was seeing moth man, they were also seeing men of black. They were seeing UFOs. The stuff that was going on that John Kiel was writing about was way beyond just UFOs and moth man and men of black though.

I mean, there were people seeing furry moth men running through the, the TNT area that, that had tiny wings that would fly that looked like big, big, big. basically like a big foot with tiny wings. And like all these like weird reports. Dogman, you know, there's possible like dogman tracks found by a guy named Tad Jones during the 66, 667 wave of mothman sightings.

You know, voices in the sky, strange vibrations in the earth. Keel writes about a, I forget what he calls it, but there was like a zone that he walked into one night accidentally that just immediately,

like the zone of fear, I think that's what he called it. Yeah, yeah. You walk into it and just freak out, like, immediately. And then you'd step out of it and you were fine. Then if you step back in, you were immediately like overcome with terror. And those places are for sure. Like even Adams, where the Bell Witch is, which is right by you guys.

I mean, you go there and there's a long history of strangeness there. And there are mounds in the area. And the sightings go run the gamut. It's not just like Bell Witch. It's weird ghost girls in the schoolhouse. There's spook lights coming across the fields behind the bell cabin. There's sightings of giant birds. There was a sighting of a weird rabbit with a dog's body, you know,

preceding the sightings of the bell witch. So it's, they're like clubs of strangers. Yeah, didn't the ancient Celts call places like that thin places, right? Where you have these, the thinning of the of where the veil is the veil between, yeah, between dimensions or whatever you want. Yeah. That's fascinating. I mean, and I mean, Nate's not uncommon with what we heard from other people, too. It's this stuff with Fritz. It's the stuff that we hear about, you know, with Bigfoot where there's always a lot of people will say there's UFO activity around Bigfoot or there's lights. Like when we talked about the Sierra sounds and these weird lights and orbs and stuff that surround some of these creatures, where you're having multiple types of phenomena and experiences. in a similar place. And I think there's just something fascinated about that, too,

that there's these places. Or, you know, we talk about some, was it Duke saying that there's, there's portals with giants waiting behind portals and all these different things where there literally there ends, there has to be, there's something to it, right? There's, you, you have these places that have more activity or spiritual doors or portals or whatever you may call it. I mean, I find that not only believable, but absolutely fascinating to try to figure that out and what that, what that is, what that looks like and why that happens in certain places it happens. I mean, are they portals? I mean, are these mounds and

these ruins? Are they actual portals? And that's just why things are coming out of there? I have no idea. I just know that when you look into, I don't know, actually, because there's places like Skinwalker Ranch, which I guess are connected to mounds and if not mounds, at least like Native American, you know, like a Native American history. We theorized, it's fun to theorize about that stuff. It's just like how are you supposed to figure it out, you know, in the context, especially in the context of a movie like what we're making. But there's so many of those places around North America and people don't seem to realize like Bridgewater Triangles, one. Yeah. You've got, you know, there's a long history of just strangeness sort of

centered around this one New England area. The Chestnut Ridge is a big one. Chestnut Ridge is weird too because it's basically like a line. It's not, you know, typically these are centered in an area, either like a triangle or a circle. And Chestnut Ridge is just like this straight ridge line that you can run for 72 miles that just has a lot of strange stuff

happening along. Yeah, there's like the, 300 years. The missing 411 is like certain elevations and stuff. It gets real weird like that. You know, someone early on in my music career told me once, like, hey, do you guys have a mission? Does your band have a mission? And I'm like, what?

We're just a band trying to make songs. Like, no, no, no. Like, what are you trying to do? And I was just, like, sitting there going, like, what every band's trying to do? And he kept asking me, like, what are you trying to do? And I'm like, he's like, if you don't figure out what it is you're trying to do, you're never going to know when you get there. And I always thought about that for years after the fact that, like, when we were building our career, we were trying to write records. I think we lacked a mission statement.

What do you think your mission statement is? What do you think ultimately you're five or six years into this? You've been making a lot of movies. Like, what is it you're trying to do? I know you say you kind of keep things a little ambiguous for the audience to kind of conclude what they think. But in your heart, what do you think you're trying to do? What's the ultimate goal here? Well, I come from a family of historians.

My parents were owned at a historical bookstore, and I grew up on the road doing book shows and symposiums and stuff like that. So my, you know, our mission statement has always just been to capture that history in a bottle. People don't take these stories seriously and they disappear. So I made Minerva Monster in 2015. The story happened in 1978. That's not that far removed.

And there were people that were 40, 45 years old that we talked to on the street in downtown Minerva, who had no knowledge of the Minerva Monster story. And it might seem like, who cares? except that story was hugely important to that town when it happened. You know, that story was covered by media from all over the world. And whether people there know it today or not, that story played a part in the history of that town.

So it would be unfortunate if that went away. So when we were first starting out, we stuck to just those small town monster stories. Now, obviously, it's expanding on the trail of and kind of covering phenomena. but at the end of the day the mission is still just to to document these stories that for the most part aren't taken very seriously

and if we can do it in a way that invites a much larger audience that is open that makes it open to people who think some of this stuff is silly that's great because you're you know like I I know that I'm trying to make movies for people who might not be

like paranormal enthusiasts already. If we can act as a gateway for that stuff, that's really, that's the awesome point of this for me. Yeah, I would say we appreciate that. Honestly, I think like the lack of investigative journalism in the sense of not starting and playing backwards with some sort of narrative to prove

or conclusion to prove working backwards, but just laying out, you know, laying out the story and the facts in a way that people can have their own conclusions is really what, really what like news and journalism and investigative journalism is supposed to be like. And I feel like we're missing that in 2020 and this time and it feels everyone has an agenda. So I think it's refreshing to have,

like you're saying, your parents are historians, so not only to catalog the historically, but also just to have a space for people to absorb facts and then make their own conclusions without having some sort of narrative pushed down their throat on what they should, believe, right? Or what, you know, what they're being told to believe. And I think that's huge, man. I think the space for that, I mean, there's not a riper time in my mind for that in this space

just to, yeah, to let people make up their own minds, like to give them an opportunity to see and not only learn about these areas and spaces that, like, I mean, West Virginia is like, might as well be Japan. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I can't remember, I don't know if I've even been there, right? And not only to learn about that, but to have these things put forward so, you know, without, you know, without, without, without, without, without, without, without, like, slanted or, or, or you need to, you need to have this conclusion at the end. I'm, I mean, well, 2020 is, like, giving us all questions, right? Of, like, who controls the narrative?

Who's controlling, right? Like, yeah, fringe information is becoming the closest thing to truth, right? Yeah, no, it's true. Yeah. I think, uh, yeah, I think, like, I think when, when our first, started getting into it. Everything I was trying to watch was either like ghost hunter guys like or or at least that it was either ghost hunting or like that mode of storytelling like guys running through the woods with cameras, you know, looking for like Bigfoot. Like Blair Witts. And that wasn't what

interested me like I was interested in the stories like the eyewitness accounts. And so, you know, like that was that was that was what drew me to it was just like, oh, you know what? Someone should really just go back to documenting witness stories and focus on that. And we're, we started that in 2015 and honestly at that time when we came to bigfoot there was no one doing it and i think it's becoming a little more common today you can find all sorts of like indie docs on on prime now that are that's what they're doing but when we made minerva in 2015 it was like the first of its kind in a while like people people hadn't seen it since like uh mysterious monsters and in search of this is this this this whole thing brings up a question to me like do you

want Bigfoot to be discovered or do you want it to remain a mystery? Because I think in some senses, once it's out and about and they bring a body out of the woods, it's, it's, is it, is it lose something? It's weird because, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm a filmmaker, but I'm also a Bigfoot enthusiast, uh, who feels like I experience some of the reality of what these things are like. I very much want them to be discovered. Um, because, uh, you know, whether you, realize it or not. There are dangers to these things that they exist in our, in our natural world when you're talking about conservancy and a need for conservancy. And I would hesitate to, oh, this is always tough to know how to talk about without someone thinking I'm like Greta.

But the, you know, I, I 100% understand the fact that there's more forest and supposedly, there's more forest in North America today than there was when we discovered it, right? Then one white dude walked on the shore. Supposedly there's more forested areas today. But that forest is not the native forest. What we're doing is we're basically ripping down the forest and then we're planting these Christmas tree farms. And it's a weird way to approach the whole thing.

And I think there probably is a danger in that to these things that they're real. I don't think the people are out there like hunting and shooting them. And I don't think that would ever become a danger because they seem pretty good it being elusive. But I think there probably is a danger to them just existing naturally. Well, there's a danger to us too, right? What's that? There's a danger to us too, right? Like some people say these things are kidnapping people. Yeah, I don't buy that either. Really? Yeah, I can't if, if, yeah, this is, this will take us into some weird places if we go here because I'm going to, I make enemies really easily when it

comes to Bigfoot, but I think there's a lot of people pushing agendas right now, Bigfoot, where it's like, yeah, Bigfoot's like kidnapping people and beheading them and all that kind of stuff. I think if that was true, we would know they exist. I think if it was really to the point where Bigfoot is murdering hundreds of people per year in the, in the forests of North America, that we would definitively know they exist. And so I don't buy that. I do think that there probably have been instances where Bigfoot killed a person here or there. Like, if there is legitimately an eight foot tall ape wandering around our woods, if someone messes with it or where it perceives that it's being messed with, I could see it killing someone. I just don't think

it's, you know, and it's probably considerably less than like black bear kills. That's just, but that's just my opinion. Well, the Native American stories make me scratch my head about that because they have places called Valley of the Lost Children and stuff like that. Like, yeah, there's tons of tons of those stories. about them coming into camps and taking children. And especially in like, Kathy Strain did a whole book called Giants, Cannabals and Monsters where she compiles a lot of that

native allure relating back to to potential like Bigfoot's. And I, that stuff's really interesting. I just think if it's happening on, on the scale that people want it, there's a weird romanticism to like violence and danger and all that. And I think people really want to be scared. And obviously, I make movies that are sort of entrenched in the horror genre to a degree. So I get it. But I think you got to,

you got to parse that a little bit with a dose of reality. And I just think if it, if it was at the level that a lot of people try to lead us to believe that we would know definitively there's a big foot. Part of me wants to remain a mystery because I think it's just fun. I'm like, I, no, there's definitely that part of me as well. Are you a kill? Are you a kill, Nate? If you're out there and you have a shot, are you taking it down? I don't know, man. I like the mystery of it. I like that we keep talking about it. I feel like if it comes out, then everyone's going to want to, there's going to be overnight. There's going to be a billion Bigfoot podcast. Like, we finally found one. Let's go in. We've got a head start on it. So, I mean, I'm okay. The coming out. What's the future look like for you guys? What are you working on? And where can people, obviously, they can check out your movies on Amazon and everywhere else. But what are some, like, big. big dreams and big goals you guys have well just just stuff we've got coming where we've got uh the market the bell which comes out December 15th um and I'm super excited for people to see that because

it's like a docu drama I would term it's similar to like I don't know what you compare it to it's got a little bit of like legend of buggy creek in it in it in that it's as much a horror movie as it is a documentary it's got a ton of recreations um so that's our next movie we have five titles, six titles coming out next year. A lot of what I'm working on currently is centered around Small Town Monster Squad, which is our

members-only section of our YouTube channel. And what we're doing there is like creating a huge hub of content. I mean, there's like 20 hours worth of content on there right now. And we do these production diaries where you can watch us make stuff. We take,

we pretty much shoot video nonstop behind the scenes. So even though the movies are very centered on, you know, the story at the center of the whatever it is we're working on, the production diaries are all encompassing. So you get to see us work, you know, on the whole project. And there's all sorts of stuff coming to that. And we're doing a lot of live stuff with STM squad as well. We broadcast like a 30-minute part of our night investigation when we were doing the hauntings thing last Friday night. So that's like the big thing for 2021. The Kickstarter launch, is in February and that helps us fund everything we do through the year and we do that every year.

And the big dream, honestly, my big dream project is called 1999 and it's a movie about me growing up in a tiny Midwestern town in Ohio. And it's basically just about getting in fights and hitting on girls and stuff that we all did as kids. What year were you born? I was born in 81. I was 80. 99 is like, what's that? I'm 1980 here. Oh, nice. 82. I was like a little trail here. There we go. 80s kids, man. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I just want to, I kind of like to do something that has nothing to do with paranormal. And I had a, like, I was brought, I didn't go to, I was homeschooled. So like, I grew up in a tiny town. I was homeschooled. I was, I traveled literally every weekend with my family. So my social life didn't begin until I was like 16.

And just like that child. should be documented in some way because it's so weird. Like just for fun, we would go egg cop cars on the weekend. I would like to just make a movie about that. So I'm sure everyone wonders, what if you wake up one day after all these years and there's Mothman sitting in the corner of your bed? What do you do? What do you do?

What do you say? You grab your camera. Do you freak out? Say your prayers. No, you freak out. Yeah, you freak out because if he's there, it's bad news. Like everyone I've talked to who said they saw it in their room. It's not going to end well for anybody.

Yeah. So no mothman in bedroom. All right. Yeah, yeah. Well, I know. I mean, I can't imagine. Yeah. Well, dude, thanks so much for coming on our show. And I'm guessing smalltown monsters.com is. Yeah, that's, yeah, smalltumonsters.com. If you want to watch the movies, they're everywhere right now, like, if you're not interested in paying, like 2BTV has a bunch of them, Amazon Prime, all that kind of stuff. Oh, supporting people. And if you're interested in paying, you can buy DVDs and Blu-rays at small-time Monsters.com, or you can just buy copies on any of the platforms like iTunes and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I'm about to do that.

Yeah. We'll queue up some tonight. We really appreciate it. Great storytelling. And if you ever get a crazy Bigfoot story and, you know, think this could be a great podcast, you know, feel free to send some crazy people our way. Yeah. And Seth, when you make that Giants movie, don't forget. getting eight and I yeah yeah I'll let you know guys we want to we want to

I'll come I'll come hold a boom whatever I got to do I want to be around yeah yeah yeah we'll dig into some mounds and we'll get real weird I'll risk I'll risk my freedom all right oh gosh yeah all right thanks so appreciate it appreciate it we'll let you know when it comes out all right cool all right buddy take care yeah