Haunted Cosmos - Bigfoot (Part I)

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, Brian and Ben continue Season Two by beginning our introductory series on Bigfoot! It is a phenomenon that has captured the imagination and fears of man for all of history. In Part I we ask, is there such a thing as an as yet undiscovered species of animal called Bigfoot?Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!This episode of Haunted Cosmos is sponsored by our friends at The Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, great project hosted by Matt Whitman.  Visit them at www.thetmbh.com online.This episode is also sponsored by Private Family Banking Partners. Email them at:  [e-mail] — For a free book go to: www.protectyourmoneynow.net—or if you want to make an appointment to talk to a wealth advisor click on the calendar link here: https://calendly.com/familybankingnow/30min.This episode is also sponsored by Bible Discovery Television. Check them out at their website here.This episode is also sponsored by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee.Visit their website here to purchase your first bag! Share Coffee. Serve Humbly. Live faithfully. Support the show

This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Right Response Ministries, 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, Bible Discovery TV, private family banking, Squirrely Joe's Coffee, and our supporters at patreon.com. Did you know that patrons get early access to ad-free main episodes, as well as an exclusive weekly show, The Dusty Tome? Support the show today and get these benefits and more. And now on with the show. Winters in the Sierra Nevada Mountains are some of the most brutal in the world.

Being exposed to the elements and cold conditions here is a nearly guaranteed death sentence for all but the most seasoned Bushmen. But while winters and the sierras are brutal, the fall season is remarkably beautiful, a perfect setting for the backcountry hunter. North of Yosemite Valley lies a stretch of wilderness so picturesque and lively, so teeming with game within a paradise of alpine meadow, that any hunter who gets the chance to stalk prey here would be considered a bona fide fool

if he were to turn down the opportunity. How much more a native resident of the land? Most of the families who have lived here long have passed down secret hunting spots through generations of experience in these mountains. Ron Moorhead came from a family like that. He spent his childhood roaming the mountains in woods, hunting and also hearing the backwoods equivalent of old fisherman's tales.

Stories of massive elk, reindeer, even bears and moose, the itch to hunt caught him young and never left him. Like most young men, he was hungry to build credibility with the fraternity of local huntsmen. And so naturally, every fall would find him putting together a good gang of guys to hunt the most legendary secret spots the Sierra's had to offer. In 1971, he hit the mother load, getting access to a remote camp that came with the promise of trophy mounts for his living room walls. And by the way, when I say remote, I really mean it. This spot, I'll call it the bunker, sat at an altitude of 8,500 feet, fully two miles as the crow flies from the nearest road, and eight miles from the nearest trail. Not trailhead, mind you, the nearest trail. The bunker was indeed in the middle of nowhere, which is right where Ron wanted to be. His first trip to the

bunker began normally enough. In fact, it remained normal, except for the utter lack of trophy game, until a few days in. The twilight with a biting cold, the damp socks hanging beside the crackling fire from the heavy and wet early autumn snowfall, all of the mundanities of high country camp life went on until a moment. Everything was injected with an abrupt wrongness by a peculiar sound. It wasn't loud. It wasn't even that jarring, just the opposite. And that's why it was so terrifying. This was a softer sound. Uncanny, almost human, but just not quite. Imagine a life-sized puppet attached to strings you can't see that's walking in an ill-lit room. It's that type of uncanny. So close to familiar, but so out of place, so almost manlike. Yet its closeness extends its

difference. This was not a human sound. It was a shouting and howling and growling and whistling from A mockingbird, a parrot, a something that was pretending to be human. At least that's what Ron thought. Quickly dousing the fire, he hurried in to a little wooden hut that he and many hunters before him had built on the site, what they called the bunkers party piece. He shut the makeshift door and sat in the darkness, eagerly awaiting the dawn light and dreading what might be out there,

what may reach into that little piece of security he was so desperately counting on. If you've ever spent much time outdoors, you know that night, The nights in the wild country can pass very slow, but this night drew out like a blade. Though it seemed that whatever was out there didn't intend to escalate to violence, the noises just continued. After hours of this, Ron finally drifted off to sleep to the strange soundtrack outside. He awoke with a start and a nasty ache in his neck. This didn't bother him that much though. He was far too relieved to care.

He had escaped what he was convinced was a terrible danger. But his plight wasn't over. The next night replayed the fearful events of the previous evening. In fact, the whole trip was marked by the occasional reappearance of the strange and terrifying sounds. Eventually, he grew a bit more brave. Make no mistake, he was terrified by the owner of the strange sounds, whatever it was, but he wasn't so paralyzed with the fear anymore.

But after returning home and thinking back on the experience, Ron began to wonder if he might be going mad, or at least just be mistaken, hearing things that weren't at all there. maybe a trick of the wind in the mountains and the trees, something anyone who's spent time in the wilderness is probably familiar with. So he decided to ask some of his buddies to go up to the bunker with him for a hunting trip. They obliged, and upon arriving at the site, they unloaded their heavy packs in the now locally popular wooden bunker. Night fell on the group of friends,

hanging around the fire and doing what friends do on a beautiful night in the Sierra's. The air is so crisp, it seemed as if you could snap it like a cracker. When lo and behold, the noises began again. Ron wasn't crazy. No, not even close. If anything, his familiarity with the sounds made the astonished reactions of his friends all the more unsettling.

What was making the sounds? The group of men still couldn't tell. They couldn't see anything. But the sounds continued as before. Ron knew that he would need more help to get to the bottom of the mystery. There's something in the nature of man that longs to name the unknown.

thing. After all, God did give Adam the job of naming the animals. Heck, Adam even named the other half of mankind, woman. And so it stands that when there's something elusive stalking the wild places, he longs to know what it is, to name it, to classify it, to know it. And when that something is perceived as a potential threat, for whatever reason, the urgency to know and subdue and name only seems to grow. After all, do men regale their friends with the story of how they caught that little brook trout, or is it the story of the nine-foot bull shark they caught on their friend's boat that gets worn out at the parties? To help search out the mysterious Sierra Sounds, Ron enlisted the help of his friend Al Berry. Al wasn't really a local, and he wasn't too into hunting, so why did Ron think

he was the key? Well, Al was a journalist, and he had something none of the other men had there in the early 70s, camera and recording equipment. Al agreed to take his equipment out to the remote campsite and try their luck. Remember, this was in the time before iPhones and voice memo recordings were in your pocket all the time. It was near the end of October in 1972 after the first snowfall of the year, much like Ron's first visit to the area. They didn't have to wait long for the sounds to come. One of the best concerts yet occurred on that trip, and Al recorded the entire thing. It was a high-energy performance. And at this point, Ron was so accustomed to the strangeness of it all that he actually started whistling back at whatever this thing or

things were, hoping to keep the conversation going for the recorder. Al, meanwhile, was petrified. This is the part where the recording equipment is supposed to fail or when the suspicious men in black suits ought to show up and confiscate the tapes, right? Nope. Al successfully recorded the sounds. Lots of them. And at this point, you may be thinking that this means the mystery has probably been solved. With all the techniques of modern forensic audiology in our disposal, surely we could figure out what animal or phenomena those men encountered deep in the Ceras on that October night. You'd be wrong. The sounds have proven an enigma, even into the modern day. They've been analyzed and tested and scrutinized time and time again by dozens of experts across many fields,

and yet the fullness of their secret remains a mystery. We have them ready to play for you now. They're not too loud, nor are they unsafe for young years. But listen closely and ask yourself, what am I hearing? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Sierra Sounds. Bring for a night view. Five years after their recording,

Ron and Al finally found someone to send the sounds to for analysis. Dr. Arlen-Kurlin was not a linguistics expert, nor was he a philologist, primatologist, zoologist. He wasn't even a cryptozoologist, none of that. Dr. Curlin was an expert in signal processing. He didn't care how uncanny the noises sounded. He didn't care initially even about whether or not it was human. All he cared about was performing basic signal processing on the file. What Dr. Curlin found was astounding. First things first, the recording has been confirmed as fully authentic, unedited, not pre-recorded or re-recorded, not slowed down or sped up. It was fully legit.

A single recording that by all counts had been taken at the time and in the conditions described by Barry and Moorhead and on the equipment they purportedly used. Compared to normal speech patterns in terms of signal data, the Sierra sounds clearly mirrored human-like vocalization in speech patterns. The cadence of speech at times is especially compelling. They found that the vocal range displayed was far broader than that of the average man, going both higher in pitch and lower than 95% of the human race. There was one specific sound, the growl they called it, that stuck out as particularly strange.

Not only did it fall outside of the 95% percentile range, it also fell completely outside of the range of the lower limit for a human male voice. The deepest base in the world was no match for whatever made this growling sound. It's estimated that two to four things or creatures were making these noises. These creatures' vocalization patterns did not match any known vocalization for any living thing in the world, and they still don't today. It was estimated that if whatever made these noises were organic, they would have to be bipeds that stood no less than 6 foot 4 inches, but were more likely closer to 8 feet tall.

You may wonder why they honed in to animal and human comparisons with these noises so quickly. Well, first of all, they didn't. Not until some major analysis had already been done, but one major reason for the bent towards a human comparison for these noises was what Barry and Moorhead reportedly found the morning after this recording took place. As they scouted the area around the bunker, to their horror and surprise, three sets of massive footprints that perfectly resembled the footprints of a human. There's an area in central California right

next to the Toole River called Painted Rock. The rock in question is a large boulder depicting what the native Yucut's tribesmen call the family. Estimated to be between 500 and 1,000 years old, the most prominent feature on the painting is a beastly and hairy-looking giant of a man. It's just one of hundreds of similar petroglyphs and legends spread across the entire North American continent, all of them dating back centuries, and all of them focused around the prominent idea that the native Indians were not alone in the lands they settled. According to nearly every major tribe, there lurked dark watchers in the wilderness, incredibly large, who would stalk the local camps at night.

Spanish explorers in the 16th century agreed with reports, with many firsthand accounts of similar experiences in their travels across the continent. Near the beginning of the 18th century, a Jesuit priest, staying with the Nechese people in what is now Mississippi, reported hairy giants who would scream loudly in the forest before stealing the people's livestock. Reverend Alkena Walker, a Protestant missionary to the natives in Spokane, Washington wrote in 1840, about giants who lived among the nearby mountains, often stealing salmon from the fishermen's nets. These cautionary tales continued on. Even President Teddy Roosevelt wrote in his 1893 book, The Wilderness Hunter, about a local mountain man telling him that a foul-smelling bipedal creature

once stalked him and his hunting buddy. According to the man whose name was Bowman, the creature became gradually more hostile until it attacked them, breaking his friend's neck and killing him. It would seem that the legend of Bigfoot, Sasquatch, the guerrilla man, has permeated the North American conscience, with a mix of curiosity and fear since the first people set foot on this part of the world. But what are we to make of it? Is there something to these strange stories? Is there a race of elusive, man-like creatures hiding somewhere in the remote regions of the world, the wild places where people rarely venture? Over the next two episodes of Haunted Cosmos, you may find your inner skeptic compelled, or at least curious, at the tales we have to tell. Welcome, everyone, to a long-awaited episode of Haunted Cosmos.

One that, I mean, we're very excited for it. I'm so excited. Are we not? I'm so excited. Guys, we're going to want to encourage you to buckle up. Buckle up. Because today we begin our two-part introductory series on the top of. of the Bigfoot phenomena.

Now, introductory series, what does that mean? Well, we have two main goals for the series. So I'm going to share those with you guys right now, but before I do that, Brian, how are you doing? Ben, I am, we've never been more so back than we are currently so back. But yet in the same, in a very real sense, it's so over. Because I've been telling Brian this morning, I am out of English breakfast tea here at the office. Yeah. And that's two days in a row now.

And I'm just like dreading this headache that I'm about to get in the afternoon. Yeah, I'm so sorry, Ben. I've heard that British people. British so-called people. When they run out of tea, also sometimes, like, they get a little flustered. And so I just want to, I want to say thoughts and prayers. Yeah, thank you. I changed my profile picture on Facebook.

To just a black square. To just for you. For the black, that's black tea. For the black tea that you're not drinking right now. Thank you. Thank you. We may have to cut that out. I don't know.

I don't know how. How edgy our audience is at this point of Hanna Cosmos. I meant to say quickly with no pulse. Yeah, but let me just say that the reason we have never been more so back than we are currently so back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is because Bigfoot. Bigfoot, baby, let's go. I just want you to understand that I love talking about Bigfoot.

Yeah. I love thinking about Bigfoot. foot. Yeah. I love listening. You might have thought listeners that we like just inserted the four minutes and 12 seconds of Sierra sounds. No,

no. We listened to it ourselves. No, we listen to the whole thing. Yeah. Because we like it several times. Also, man, like, maybe we should just play it back right now. The whole four minutes. I keep threatening to play it back.

The whole four times in the episode. Our listeners are like, guys, they're like, please stop. We can go back if we want. You really can go back. But tell us more about what we're trying to do in this series. here, why we're so excited about it? Yeah, so we're really excited about it because this is like one of those topics that everyone thinks about when they think about 40 and stuff or high strangeness.

But one of the other reasons we're excited is because we really have a goal. I don't think I'm speaking out of turn when I reveal this. We really have a goal of doing at least one Bigfoot episode every season. Pretty much every season. Like a deep dive. And so our goals for this series are more 30,000 foot views. So we're not necessarily trying to convince us. anyone of the existence of Bigfoot, especially not in this episode. Instead, what we want to do

is share some of the most compelling physical evidence that has been found and just ask you to consider it. And maybe you'll finish the series thinking like, I don't know, maybe there's something to this. We don't know what it is, but maybe there's something to this. Our second goal, because that first goal is our primary objective, these episodes, like I said, aren't going to dive too deep into the weeds of any single Bigfoot story or myth or piece of evidence. Instead, we want to provide you with a 30,000 foot view of the two main aspects of Bigfoot. That is the physical evidence and then the not so physical, more the supernatural speculation. Or maybe not even physical evidence, but just the idea of Bigfoot

as a physical thing. Yes, yes. As just an animal. And then also the idea of Bigfoot as maybe something that is not a physical thing. Man, that's so well put. So, well put. So this episode is going to be presenting you with stories of compelling evidence, primarily through the lens of, well, what if Bigfoot is just an animal that we've never found before? Yeah.

That's really what we're doing. We're narrowing the scope in this episode. Yeah. That's it. So if you don't hear us talking a lot about spiritual stuff or how, you know, it might relate to some examples in scripture, that's because we're going to do that next time. The world is not just stuff. Don't forget it.

Even while we talk about maybe Bigfoot being stuff. The world's not just stuff, but there is stuff. There is stuff. The world's also not just not stuff. You know what I mean? You know what I'm saying? I think I do. Play it back.

I like half of you, half as well as I do. That was like a Bilbo Baggins party tree moment. So the next episode is going to be focusing on expanding the idea of Bigfoot into the realm of the not-so-physical, looking at the idea that maybe if this thing does exist, it's not just an animal. Right. It's not just a cryptid or some animal that hasn't been discovered yet, but something more. Yeah.

Yeah. But why are we doing it this way? And why talk about Bigfoot at all? Like, what is this actually trying to accomplish? Why is this an important topic to bring up in the grand scheme of things? Yeah. Well, one reason is simply that it is interesting. So true.

Right. We say a lot that, I think we've said this a lot. I say this a lot outside of Honic Cosmos. I can't remember if I've said it here. I know what you're going to say. What? Interesting people are interested people. Interesting people are interested people.

So to me, if you hear about like crazy, I've heard Bigfoot stories from even family members. Yeah. And if you don't go, that's really weird. Like, tell me more about that. You don't start asking forensic questions. Like, well, how much had you had to drink? How much do you weigh? Yeah.

How much? What was the eye color? of the Bigfoot. If you're not interested in that, I'm like, well, I'm confused because that's one of the most interesting things I've ever heard. And also just, in terms of interesting, mysterious phenomena, this is really one of the most well-studied and sort of, like, well-known, high strangeness or just weird, fringe thing. So there's no way we're going to have a podcast like the Honod Cosmos and just not do Bigfoot. Right. It's one of the most scrutinized myths. We'll just call it a myth. It's one of the most scrutinized myths or ideas out there.

But it also has some of the most eyewitness reports and even evidence and stuff. So we'd be fools not to go through it. And also, you know, you just find that this subject of wild ape man folklore or manlike creatures or giant manlike hairy creatures, human animal, like different variations of this folkloric theme can be found. almost anywhere people are found. Yeah. And so it's just an interesting avenue of folklore, like you said, actually, there's lots of highways and byways in this folklore. So we're going to be looking at it quite a bit over the seasons. And we just wanted to set out some 30,000-foot view, like, here's the lay of the landscape

and just let people in on some of the, who maybe haven't looked at it very deeply to be interested with us. Yeah. And really a last reason is if you find that you're not interested in this for whatever reason, which I think I doubt most of our listeners would say they're not interested in. What are you doing? Like if you're stuck around this long, there's no way. There's like one guy. He's just like a real step.

I don't know about this. I've been taking notes on every episode. And now I'm going to send in a sternly worded letter, which we will not read. I might read it. Actually, we will totally. I'll read it, but then I'll just delete. I'm just kidding. You can send in your letters, guys.

It's okay. But look, whether that describes you or not, the fact is more and more people are interested in Bigfoot. I mean, people from all walks of life. And especially with the purpose of this episode to go through Bigfoot as an animal, a lot of like evolutionary people, like young evolutionists are latching on Bigfoot and being like, look, missing link stuff. Okay, well, we're Christians. And so we actually do want to be able to speak to that. Yeah, to warn people, to educate people, and to say, no, this is actually why you're wrong. And you don't have to have an answer for everything in the world.

But if you're already interested in this, I mean, you may as well develop an answer for this specific thing. I mean, you'll hear us later talk about Dr. Meldrum and other folks in this conversation who will talk a lot about Bigfoot as giganticithicus. Yeah. Different potential hominid-related ancestors of homestown. of homo sapiens on the evolutionary tree. And we just think a lot of that's silly. So we're also interested in, especially in the next episode, I think, talking about how some of that thinking actually might play into the phenomena.

Yeah. Oh, man, such a good teaser from behind the scene. Like, I'm just going to say. What a great Easter egg that was. Just get ready. Literal chills. Not actually. I mean literal chills, but no, not in all.

Literal chills. Yes. Now, the reason, too, that we split up the episodes into this, you know, sort of two-parter here is that there's just not, there's no way you can do a single. Even a two-hour Honodic Cosmos, can you cover this in one episode? Yeah, it's still just scratched the surface. For example, one piece of evidence will discuss the PGF, Patterson Gimlin film, in this episode, is the most analogous. video in the history of mankind other than the Zapruder film. And even then, I think that it's like, it's close.

And that's the JFK assassination. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The video. So not only is that true, that film alone, both Ben and I have, I think, multiple times. Multiple times. Listened to a series just analyzing the PGF film that I think is 13 plus hours long. Yes, it's eight parts. It's like at least 13 hours.

It's absurd. That's how deep you can dive on some of these topics. And a lot of that's just the physical stuff. And then you get into the possibility that Bigfoot is not a spirit, that's not a physical entity at all. But he's actually some sort of, he's not an animal that God made, but he's some kind of spiritual thing. I mean, both of these different flavors of the Bigfoot myth have merit.

Yeah. Because even if you think like, okay, there's no way that a physical animal has not been found. But how long did we not know? People wrote about the giant squid For a long, long time. In ancient texts, even, they talk about the giant squid. And science, I don't think,

confirmed the giant squid. Until the 2000s. It was 2004, I believe, when we got the first video of a giant squid. Yeah. So, 2004. And none of them had washed up on shore. Yeah, or they were disputed when they did

because, you know, these, what's the globsters? The globsters, yeah. They're often decomposed and difficult to identify. And before everyone's like, oh, well, that's the ocean. Yeah. Like you said in episode one, season one, that we know very, which is so true. We were so right when we said that. We'll do more on that too.

Very little of the ocean has been explored, and that's true. And a lot of the earth, the land, has been explored. And that's also true. But that doesn't actually, that doesn't then make the possibility of finding a new big creature. Yeah. Impossible. It would be absurd to think. It would be actually like the height of arrogance to think that.

In remote places like the rainforests, there was even debate about the existence of certain types of guerrillas. Yeah. That had been documented by missionaries and explorers, because Africa was just a place where you'd go and die if you try to explore it, the rainforests. And now they've, you know, multiple species of gorilla confirmed. And also new species literally every day are closed.

classified in remote wilderness areas and some of these areas that have been understudied. So, yeah, in the Congo, there's, uh, there's supposed to be like this 150 foot long snake or something that's two feet in diameter. I've heard about this. And, and, you know, someone in World War I supposedly took a picture, or maybe it was World War II, like one of the World Wars. And, uh, but we still haven't been able to actually capture one, but that doesn't mean it's not there.

Yeah. And then in the, in the Amazon rainforest, for years, we thought that it was just over. overgrown, that no one could live there, that no one had lived there, except the Aztecs, and they were like kind of sectioned off to one little part. And now using LiDAR, we're finding that the Amazon is peppered with massive ancient civilizations. Massive ruins. So it's just, it's not true to say that just because now we've lived for, you know, however many thousands of years, we should just know everything that's on the land. Even thinking about the technology, we're going to get now into the Sierra Sounds Recap.

Yeah. Talk about that. But, you know, I mentioned in the cold open that this, the Sierra Sounds in the 70s is before anybody, like, think about how difficult it was to record anything to audio. You had to have analog tape recording equipment. They didn't have handheld digital recorders even. Early handheld digital recorders in the 90s were terrible. They were very low resolution, easily overdriven. They, you know, very difficult to get a usable recording with them. So you had to be able to take. actual sophisticated equipment out into the wilderness to use and to attempt to even record or capture. So even the area of the cell phone, the smartphone camera, very recent. Yeah. We're talking about, I mean, less than a few decades of the human story has had that sort of capability in everybody's pocket. Yeah. I mean, I don't even think that like a cell phone recorder and camera, I don't

even think it's been a few decades for that. Maybe it's been maybe 20 years when you really think about it. Yeah. Mm-hmm. My first flip phone when I was like 1617, I got a one of those brick phones with it. Well, flippy, flippy, flippy. It had a camera, flippy dippy. So it wasn't a brick phone. Flipping and dipping when a, I don't know, it did stuff. I care. I think it was a flip phone. And the camera was like, like one. You take a picture. And you're like, wow, that was useless. Wow, it's worthless. Thanks, this is worthless. It did nothing.

It was so, so, so lame. So, Ben, let's talk about the Sierra Sounds. I don't think people are properly appreciating the Sierra Sounds. Maybe not. You need to be Sierra Sounds Max. You need to be Sierra Sounds Max. Because if you listen to it again and you start to pick. Should we play it again?

Let's run it back. But you start to pick out, oh, well, that's Ron Moore. head. Yeah, he's calling. Yeah, he's responding. Just so everyone knows, we don't think that was like a big foot right next to the record. Yeah. He'd be like, who, how'd it do there?

Yeah. Wooop, whoo. But the crazy thing is that the things that he's responding to or the things that he responds to, or wait, I just said the same thing. The things that he's responding to or the things that respond to him sound like him almost. Yeah. Like that's what I mean. It's so uncanny.

They're mimicking each other back and forth. Yeah. And it wasn't another. We know that it wasn't another person because the range is too, it's too far out of the normal human range. It's like completely out of even the extreme human range. Yeah. So it's just too far. Absolutely mind-blowing to me.

Yeah. And it points out the first of the major category of evidence for today. And that is the audio evidence. We're also going to look at photo video evidence, footprint evidence, or just general casts. Footprint evidence. And I'm going to make fun of some of it. Footprint evidence is a significant portion of it. I'm going to make fun of it.

And then also eyewitness testimony, which isn't physical evidence, but it's a good segue into the next episode. So we're going to pick the best of those categories in terms of story and also just the high level of evidence that they are. And then leave you guys to think about it. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Like I said, we need to recap the Sierra Sounds. Yeah, we need to talk about this.

I want to start by just quoting from the conclusion section of Dr. Curlin's findings. And he wrote this in a really good book. It's called Manlike Monsters on Trial. You can find it for free online. I'm not going to say it. What? I had such a funny joke. Were you going to say, like, is it about your sister? It was going to get us on top of you, too. Okay. Just know. My friend Stuart Kailer would say, like, is it about your sister? It's so rude. My sister's wonderful. I don't know your sister. So I'm sure she's great. Leave my sister out of this. I'm not Stuart. Yeah, yeah. It's not me.

Not you. All right, so Dr. Curlin says, quote, the results indicate more than one speaker, one or more of which is of larger physical size than an average human adult male. The formant frequencies found were clearly lower than for human data, and their distribution does not indicate

that they were a product of human vocalizations and tape speed alteration. Although a time-varying speed could possibly produce such format distributions, and objective hearing, and the articulation rate do not support that hypothesis. Statistical analysis was applied to groups of vocal tract estimates from different vocalizations, and a significant difference was found between the groups. When compared with the human data, the results indicated that there could possibly be three speakers, one of which is non-human. The average vocal tract length was found to be 20.2 centimeters, and this is significantly longer

than for a normal human male. Extrapolation of average estimators using human proportions gives height estimates between 6-4 and 8-2. So the lowest range of like a human proportion size requirement is 6-4. That's the baby. Yeah, physically. Yeah, 6-4. The largest being 8-foot-2. And then he says later in the study that it's more likely given the distribution and how it.

Yeah, and how it tends towards the lower. pitches that it's taller, like in the seven-foot range. Just so everybody is following and tracking. Formant, a formant is a part of speech. It's the frequency band and maximums that an audiologist or signal processor is looking at to identify speech. So a formant is the frequencies that form the vocalization of a vowel. So when you're saying something like an S or an M, there are certain frequencies that

will indicate that that was made by a person who is speaking, as opposed to, like, you know, you can have static or white noise where you might, especially if someone tells you like, oh, did you hear this word in there, the psychoacoustics, the human brain is an expert at pattern identification. So you can hear things that aren't there, particularly if you've been primed for them. Yeah. So an audiologist or a signal processing expert is applying basically math to look and objectively try to determine whether or not there's actual speech there, or if it's like, no, this is just a trick of the white noise. It's not a real human formant.

And that's why they can calculate, this has been studied pretty extensively. That's how they can calculate this. Well, it physically, a human vocal apparatus takes this length to form that frequency. Yeah. So you just can't unless you have that frequency. So what he's saying is that the formant is not white noise. That's right. But it's also not a human form.

It's not exactly a human. It's like, because you can have other things that can imitate human speech that will make formants that are similar. But if they are formed in frequency bands that are outside of, like, again, it's a, it's a curve. Yeah. So you have like the majority is going to fall and then you have standard deviations like you're saying one way or the other. the lower people that are a true bass or can sing these crazy low notes like if you listen to the dwarfs.

Oh yeah. The only good thing about the Hobbit movies is the Misty Mountains. The Misty Mountain song. Yeah. Those guys are singing really low. Like there are a couple standard deviations on the left side of that.

Yeah. Towards the low end. And you might listen back and think like, well, that doesn't sound that low. Like that doesn't sound like Thor and Oaken Shield singing Misty Mountains. But the thing is, is the volume. Yeah.

It was loud enough. to be captured by the recorder from what's presumably a fairly large distance with all the other white noise going on in the background. And it was still that low. Usually when you increase volume, you're also increasing pitch, right? Well, it's hard to sing loudly low. Yeah. The further away from your range on the low end that you get, your normal range, often the quieter you can sing. So people with like four to six octave ranges, a lot of the time at either edge, it's not that usable.

It doesn't sound that good. And they can't on the low end especially sing it very loud, like they might need a microphone right up, super hot. And they can make the note. They're technically making that note. But you could never hear it through a forest. Yeah. But there are animals that we know that can produce infrasonic frequencies. Yeah.

Frequency below the 20 hertz level that humans can detect. Just like dogs can detect higher. You have a dog whistle that human can't hear. It's too high. There are some animals, like I think Bengal tigers. Yeah. Can produce infarasonic sound. And it's because of the physical makeup of their throat and vocal apparatus.

Hi there, faithful listener. If you've been enjoying the Haunted Cosmos podcast and you'd like to see Ben and I live, then come and meet us in person at the Right Response Ministries Conference, happening March 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. The title of the conference is Blueprints, for Christendom 2.0, 7 Doctrines for Ruling the World. Some of our other speakers include Doug Wilson, Joe Boot, and the host of the conference, our friend Joel Webbin.

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It's on Apple and Spotify, but you can also watch Theology Applied by searching Right Response Ministries on YouTube. Check the links in the description. Brian, studies done throughout the U.S. show that almost one, and five churchgoers. That's 20% of churchgoers. Never read their Bible. It's very sad. And in Canada, it's even more than half. It's no wonder the world is in such a dark place as it is. But our sponsor for today's show, Bible Discovery, wants to fix that and fill a void. From apologetics and theology to archaeology and science, Bible discovery is a family-run ministry that takes you through the entire Bible in one year and encourages you to actively engage God's Word in all

ways to help you discover or perhaps rediscover the reason for your faith. So you can watch the daily TV show or read the monthly guide, which is available in print and digital formats with a donation of any amount. So journey through the Bible at Biblediscoverytv.com. That's Biblediscoverytv.com for all these benefits or check the link in the description. This is why it's so interesting that in these sounds, there are like human-sounding formants that are not... Human.

Yeah. Or we can... And no one can figure it out. No one has been able to say. A lot of people are like, oh, well, that sounds like this animal. That bit sounds like this animal. Right, like a monkey.

Not exactly, but, you know, it sounds akin to it. Yeah. The problem is that it's the same thing, making all of those sounds. And that's what's so bad... That's part of what's so baffling is given the... the other like zoology of the area, the other fauna of the area.

Yeah. There's actually the other fauna in the entire world, but especially for the sierras. Yeah. There's no single animal that is known that is able to produce the entire range of vocalizations that's heard in the Sierra sounds.

Yeah, it's just really bizarre. Really bizarre. And to me, it does sound ape-like. Yeah. I mean, it sounds primate. Just, and I've heard many of these, I mean, Expedition, Bigfoot is another. is a show that's...

Let's talk about that. I do want to say something about shows like that. We're going to talk about it with a Skookum cast as well. You have to always be primed to understand that when a team of investigators is making a television show,

there's a high degree of pressure for them to find something interesting. Yeah. Because otherwise, the production team just spent a huge amount of money. That's why so many of these episodes on these shows, you're like, wow, nothing happened.

But they sounded like... It's just about to happen the whole time. They're going to find the Holy Grail. So you do have to be aware of that. However, I have heard on shows like Expedition, Bigfoot or other Bigfoot hunting shows, similar vocalizations. You can go to, there's a whole website. I can't remember the name of it, where it's like, it's basically Bigfoot vocalization sounds that have been recorded.

That's awesome. And a lot of them sound like primates. Yeah. Yeah. Which is just so weird. What you're saying about those shows is helpful. You do have to realize that. Same with like the Skimwalker Ranch.

Yeah, yeah. But what you also have to realize at the same time is that sometimes they actually do find something. Yeah. They actually do find stuff. And the reason that they don't hype up the thing that they actually found is because it's not as obviously like sexy. Like it's not a massive UFO flying into a stone mesa.

Into the Mesa. Right. But it's like trouble with the magnetic field or trouble with the electrical field that doesn't make any sense. Yeah, those are the really interesting. interesting things to me. But they're not going to really market those things because they're not as obviously entertaining. The same goes for the Bigfoot stuff. Right.

You'll pick up these sounds. And if you're watching the show and are able to kind of sift through what's a little more flashy versus what actually doesn't make any sense, you'll find that actually they do find stuff. Dude, the thermals. The thermal imaging. We got to talk about the thermal. Also, just is that in part two or are we going to talk about? Part two is like pretty deep expedition Bigfoot. Okay, I don't want to get ahead then.

Okay. I don't want to get ahead. Hold your horses. Because there's some thermal stuff. We're going to talk about the shadow too. Oh, yeah. My guy. Cold open the next episode, by the way.

You guys. Is this shadow thing? I love how... That's all I'm going to say. There's like inside the Haunted Cosmos audience, there are two wolves. Okay. And the two wolves are actually different groups. There's one group that listens to us and they're like, yes, you guys are not, you are too hinged.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not going fine. 100% there is a portal on Skinwalker Ranch. Then there's another group that likes to listen to us, but we drive them nuts. Yeah. Because they're like, they think of themselves more as skeptics.

And so they're kind of like, they think of themselves as like smart. They're constantly deep, like debonking what we're doing. Debonking. Debonking it. And it's fine because we do the same thing internally. And you'll hear us like criticize evidence and things like that.

But it is so funny because inside me, both of those wolves exist. Yeah. And when I watch, they are never more yelling at each other. Than Expedition. Bigfoot. Because that show.

Because one of the guys on there, dude, we all know his name. Ronnie. Ronnie. One of the guys on there is the biggest idiot. I love him so much. I cannot stand this guy. He'll walk up to literally

just a fallen tree. Yeah. And he'll be like, and he'll be like, Bigfoot did this. There is no doubt in my mind. He'll be like, this is a tree structure. Tree structure is another piece of physical.

By the way, actually, and I have a tree structure story. Don't let me forget to tell it. It's a personal story. Is it? Yes. I also have a personal eyewitness story. Don't you remember? For my recent John.

I want to hear it. Okay. Wait, or are you going to do Patreon? Oh. Here's what we're going to do. Yeah, except it's so disappointing that it. No, no. No, we're going to hype it.

You got to go full history channel. It's so good. Could it be the Ark of the Covenant? I was. Okay. I found the Holy Grail. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to do.

We're going to do. Patreon, dusty Tom, where Ben and I just each tell our personal Bigfoot, Bigfoot stories. We'll do that at the same time, and then we'll do an AMA. Boom. We'll do a couple questions. It's going to be great. So join the Patreon because Hon. and Cosmonauts on Patreon are the best podcast supporting Two Wolf audience of all time.

They are so good. I don't even know where we are at this point, but let's continue. Here's the thing. We have to move on. Because how long are we in? Let me check. Ben, we're barely in an hour. Are you serious?

I don't think that the show will be an hour. I think we hit record pretty early and bantered for a little bit about... I want you guys to know that we're on page 9 of 21 of the outline. They never complained. So here's... They love it. Let's move on. Sierra sounds really cool.

Listen, I want to talk more about them, but let's move on. Me too. Let's talk about some casts. We have to talk about the cast. There's footprint and casting evidence. Yes. And now even scanning evidence of footprints. Yeah, like LiDAR scans.

With LiDAR scans. Here's the thing. I think that almost every footprint evidence is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. The dumbest thing I've ever seen. So easy to hoax that it's almost meaningless. Yes. But there's one casting story. If it's the skukum. It's the scoom. I walk. Okay. Let's, I'm going to be one wolf in this story. Wait, tell me. Have you heard of the skukum cask? Yes. Okay, you have? Oh, yeah. What do you think about it? What do I think? You think it's bog? Bogue? Elquallow. Okay. Okay, right on. Wallow. Allow me to convince you otherwise. Okay, I'm ready. I'm kidding. I'm actually not convinced, but it is like weird enough to mention. So let's talk about it because it's a, it's a keystone piece of evidence. A lot of people talk about it is. It is. It is. So let's get into it. The Skookum cast. Okay, the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, which is near Mount Adams and Mount Reneer on the western side of Washington State, has always been an area considered a hub of Bigfoot activity and research. And in September of the year 2000, a team of researchers, which by the way, were part of the BFRO, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, which sounds like a team I want to be a part of.

If you're on the BFRO. You are unbiased. You are a person I want to have a drink. Yeah. So the BFRO began an expedition here with the sole goal of collecting some kind of reputable, biological, or otherwise scientific evidence regarding the existence. of Bigfoot. Now, please understand, as much as I just made fun of the BFRO, this isn't just a guy's trip with a little camcorder and some journal entries.

This is actually a fairly well-funded and a stubbornly precise attempt at a genuine scientific expedition. In fact, it had to be, because whether they found anything or not, their study was going to be filmed and aired for the world to see on the now-canceled TV show Animal X. What a name. What a name. They didn't want to be proven fools, okay?

They didn't want to look like idiots by the show, but instead they wanted to show the world how serious and precise they were going to be in their search for the Bigfoot. So they had thermal imaging cameras. They had pheromone lures. They had previously recorded vocalizations of strange forest sounds,

including the Sierra sounds that you heard earlier. And so they began their expedition and days went by with no success. The team was starting to feel understandably discouraged. almost apathetically then, thinking that there's no way this one thing was going to work if everything else had failed, they decided, let's put this bushel of apples over near this muddy patch of road beside Forest Road 3220, which is a slightly used but overall very remote service road within the National Forest area. They had the fruit, it wasn't going to go bad, and they figured that on the off chance it worked,

the mud that was nearby would leave some kind of footprint of whatever it is that came by to eat the fruit. But they got much more than they bargained for. If you ask some, or if you ask others like Brian, they got less than they bargained for. The next morning, the team went to examine the site on their way to some other areas of interest. What they found was actually pretty startling. In the mud next to the apples was the print of what appeared to be the entire lower half of some animal, like the hide of some animal, as if it had laid down in the mud to enjoy the apples.

It was Patty. Just a little siesta. It was Patty. Patterson Gimlin film. Throwback. Throw forward. So they poured pounds and pounds of plaster into this indented mud,

400 pounds worth of plaster, and then they waited. When everything was cured, they immediately took it to be analyzed by anthropologists and wildlife biologists, because they thought they found something pretty slick. One of the anthropologists, Dr. Grover Krantz,

said he believed that the cast was made by a kind of primate, a Sasquatch like a creature. Wait, who is that? Dr. Grover, by the way, Grover Krantz, anthropologists. Doctorate in feminist studies. I'm just kidding. Another anthropologist, Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, with Idaho State University,

studied the cast and found specific details in what researchers agree must be a footprint area, that showed evidence of something called dermatoglyphics, which is finger or toe prints. So when you get arrested as one does and you get your fingers printed, that's dermatoglyphics. Yeah.

And primates don't have fingerprints the way we do, but they do have a very specific pattern. They have their own kind of dermatoglyphics. And this anthropologist said that the dermatoglyphics present in the cast were similar to those of known primates. Now, to be fair, okay, many people are skeptical of this thing.

We'll post a photo in our show notes, and if you look at it, the immediate reason for skepticism will be really clear, and that it just looks like a blob. It looks like literally nothing when you look at it. It looks like a very underwhelming patch of mud. Yeah, exactly. Upon which to project your gigantic Pythicus fantasies.

A roarshack, but it's not even symmetrical, so it doesn't even look cool. But look, okay, look closely. Look closely at the mud. And if you do that, you will see clear lines of a foot, to me at least, a heel, even in Achilles tendon. There's one, like the heel section of the cast, you have to admit, is the one part that's like, oh, that could be kind of interesting.

Okay, you'll see what looks like an arm resting on the ground next to a curled up thigh as if the creature was sleeping or lounging. And if you remain skeptical, which in this case may be a good thing, because all things considered this cast is not entirely compelling. You might see an imprint of a particularly large elk sitting down to eat some apples. Which they do. Which a lot of people do. And there are elk.

And here's the other thing. A lot of people do see that. They pulled hair from the cast. Lots of it. And what was the hair from? It may have been from an elk. I think they say that there was other hair that was unidentified. Yes.

There was other hair. And like, who's to say... It was a big of... Here's my question. It's a bucket of apples. Why couldn't more than one animal go by and get some apples? That's be honest.

Because there were some elk prints around the cast area as well. Yeah. Like, just very obviously, that's an elk. In March of 2001, a guy named Mark Hume, writing from the National Post, said that he recognized

the clear tracks of an elk in the cast and described the imprints left as those, quote, that would match perfectly with an elk's leg. End quote. But before... you think that this is the end of it, okay? I'm not including this just because it's stupid.

Before you think this is the end of it, know that disagreement genuinely remains. The debate genuinely does continue to run hot even after 20 years of looking into it. Scientists from the fields of anthropology and biology cannot come to an agreement with one another regarding what exactly it was that left this print. Partly because while the elk idea is easy and compelling,

it's not obvious. like it's not so obviously there, just like it's not obviously a big footprint. It's not obviously an elk. Add that on to the fact that no other animal is large or larger than an elk is supposed to be native to this region. And you can understand why at least some confusion remains. Brian, what do you think?

Here's my favorite thing. So you look at Dr. Meldrum. Dr. Meldrum is a serious scientist who studies these sorts of things. But I think that what happens, is that human beings are very prone to what's called confirmation bias, which is when we have an idea or a narrative that we've overlaid over a series of, that we believe, essentially. And then when we look at a lot of data points, especially noise, the human mind is always going to try to algorithmically, you know, eliminate the noise and find the signal. Yeah. Right. We're going to try to find patterns. We're going to try to think. But when you have an idea of what the data is going to, to say beforehand, then it's easy sometimes to find in the noise a signal that's a ghost. It's not really there. Yeah.

So a few things. One, I think Meldrum and the related experts, he said things like in his 2006 book, Sasquatch Legend Meets Science, Meldrum said the unanimous consensus was that this could very well be a body imprint of a Sasquatch. another doctor, Dr. Esteban Sarmiento endorsed the cast. He said, in my opinion, the Skookum cast, body cast is that of an upright descendant of giganticithicus. So you hear that kind of certainty, or at least like they put in words like could very well be. Or, you know, it's, in my opinion, it's this.

But a few things. The hair, it's, I think it's ambituary. ambiguous data that could meet multiple explanations and that Occam's Razor. Is that Occam's Razor? Occam's Razor. It's simplest. Yes. Right.

It's probably the most compelling. It's an elk. And then lastly, the dramatic glyphics, there have been, so a retired forensic expert named Jimmy Chilcutt did some and a skeptical investigator. Again, confirmation bias. If you're skeptical, you're also going to infuse your, you're, you're, you're research with skepticism. There's no truly neutral look. Yeah, there's no unbiased. Right. Except God's God, because God knows everything and he's right about everything.

So these guys have said things like Matt Crowley said that a lot of these dramatic glyphs that Maldrum has pointed to. He has many of them. He recreated them in the drying process of the casting agent, that there were artifacts from the casting process itself that can easily be mistaken as dramatic lifts because of the way that this material dries. So there's things like that where I just look at it. And I, to be clear, I'm really hard on the giganticithicus and Bigfoot as just merely unknown animal side, even though some of the sounds and things are compelling, because I believe Bigfoot is real and is a demon.

Yeah. Let me just say it. I just like, look, the cat's out of the bag. Like, let me just... But I think it's really easy to critically analyze some of these things. Yes. And find alternate explanations. So I do not think that the Skukum cast is a Bigfoot.

Okay. I do not think that's true. I would have gone with you. To the Black Gates of the Black Gates. In fact, I still will. If you change your mind right now, I change my mind. I'm not... The reason...

But the reason that I'm bringing it up is because there's enough doubt to where I don't know if I would say like, oh, yeah, it's definitely an elk. I do think that it's an elk. But it's one of those things that causes you to just sit back with a little bit of epistemic humility. Yeah. And say one way or the other, we don't know. We do know that it's something. We know that it's not nothing. We can say that it's probably an elk.

Yeah. But when you're getting overly skeptical, you can start to be too certain in the other direction. Yeah. So just like someone, just like Ronnie, that guy from Expedition Bigfoot, who sees like one twig on the ground, he's like Bigfoot put it there for me. And you're like, okay, you're being insane. He's communicating. But then you can go the other direction and say literally everything is not that. It's not that. Everything is not that. It's always mystery solved. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Immediately like swamp gas explanations. Swamp gas explanations. By the way, I got it a little back. I misread my notes. Jimmy Chilcutt is. is a forensic expert who is pro-dramatim, along with Dr. Maldrum. It's Matt Crowley, who is anti and explains them with the drying agent, just so that I'm clear and not casting aspersions on anybody.

But one of the biggest reasons that I even included this story in the show is to go back to what you're saying, where the human brain is really good at finding patterns because it wants to find patterns. And think of it like this. It's not necessarily, actually it hardly is ever, I think, a malicious attempt to deceive people. But what it's more like is when your friend tells you that if you listen to stairway to heaven backwards, you'll hear the satanic message or whatever. Yeah, exactly. And you listen to it backwards and you're like, oh, I definitely think I hear it, especially when he tells you like right there.

Right there. Psychoacoustics. But if you never had heard that if you listen to it backwards, there's an evil message, you would never hear it. You just would never hear it. Yeah. And in the same way, if you had never heard, oh, it was guys going out to look for Bigfoot, And they took this cast. If you somehow had the opinion that it was some people looking for an elk that took a cast for whatever reason of what they thought was an elk, there'd be enough doubt for you to say, I might not be an elk. You understand what I'm saying? I do. It's just that I think this particular example is so bad.

So definitely an elk. Here's the thing. Again, the television show phenomena is really important to understand because there's, when you go out to make a show, it really does suck if you find whoever. And they were genuinely not finding anything. Yeah, I know that. And then they were like, this saves us. Apples. And now it's like on their website.

They restrict access to study it pretty significantly. So, no, I think that's, I think that's all very good points. What about some, let's talk about maybe some other casts. Okay, there's one other. There's one other cast that I think is a little bit cool. And that's the Bossburg casts. Okay, I'm going to read an excerpt then from Washington, and bigfoot.com, and this recounts the Bosburg cast story.

In November 1969, Colville, Washington resident Joe Rhodes reported large Bigfoot tracks at the Bosburg dump in Stephen County, Washington. Bossburg is an old mining town, which had a maximum population of 800 residents in 1892. Researchers Ivan Marks, Grover Krantz, and Renee Daimden all participated in an extensive search of the area. On December 13, 1969, Marks and D'Neckes, Donovan found photographed and cast some of 1889 Bigfoot tracks in snow and mud near Lake Roosevelt outside Bosburg. Soon after the tracks were found, Roger Patterson and Dennis Jensen also

were on site taking part in the casting and photography of the tracks. Adding to the memorable All-Star team investigating, the Bosberg tracks of 1969 also included a series of tracks which included a consistent deformity to the right foot of the Bigfoot. In these tracks, the left foot measured 17.5 inches long, while the right foot was smaller, with several lumps, as well as oddly shaped toes. The oddly shaped right foot led to the creature and tracks being called cripple foot. The photographs and casts collected near Bosburg have been extensively studied. Anthropologist Dr. John Napier, former curator of primates at the Smithsonian, and anthropologist

Jeff Meldrum, both found no evidence the prints found in November. and January were faked. First of all, appreciation of the nicknaming capabilities of these people. Seriously. Oh, footprints, one of them's crippled. It's the cripple foot. It's the cripple foot. This poor big foot.

It's the legendary cripple. I think that this is like really at the end of the day, the only compelling just footprint casting because that one of them was crippled. Yeah, like someone did really think that through if they hoaxed it. Yeah. Like, I'm going to make... I'm going to make these. This one's going to be a little bit different.

And I don't want to get ahead of myself, but just kind of teasing for part two, if Bigfoot is a spiritual entity of some kind, why crippled? Like, can spiritual entities that embody a corporeal body be crippled? Maybe the Nephlin spirits fight amongst themselves. Maybe they too in the hollow earth. I can't be held responsible for their behavior. Or for that statement, even just that idea. I'm looking up right now the guy who

there was this guy who forever I mean literally years starting in 1948 this one guy hoaxed giant penguin tracks oh yeah it was 10 years yeah I did hear about that

he like on the beach feet yeah with lead yeah and then he made like and they look like velociraptor but they're like penguin feet yeah and people were like freaking out He was committed. He was going to different beaches in the middle of the night. And what a king.

Honestly. One of the best, they were 14-inch-old-old. He would like walk them up out of the water and then walk them eventually back in. Yes. And it was like, yeah, it was like the creature came out of the sea and then went back into the sea. So look, the point is very difficult to fake Bigfoot tracks. That's, again. I think that's our takeaway.

Clearwater, Dunedin. This was right where my wife was born. So really? Yeah. This area. local lore. Oh, wow. This giant,

yeah, it could have been a giant penguin. I mean, why not? Why not? Even though the guy fessed up to it and showed the things that he was using. Yeah, but I mean, still, he could be, that's skeptical, skeptical cope. He could be an effluent. That's how deep.

No, that's why a lot of the cast evidence and footprints, like I get it. Some of it could be real, maybe, but it's also, it's just so easily hoaxed. Yeah. And also some of them, the ones that get me, Ben, are, we talked about this right before we started recording. The footprints where it's like the Bigfoot would have, like, sat down, perfectly pressed his foot down,

carefully lifted it up, moved it back, and did like all of these in a sequence. Yeah. They're just these perfect, and the toes are perfect. And you go, that's a Bigfoot foot. Which, look, if the goal is deception, it's not out of the realm of possibility that a Bigfoot would think, I'm going to do this so that someone finds it. And thinks it's fake. Yeah, and so that it looks fake.

That's cover for his real footprints. He accidentally leaves behinds. Right. They're playing 4D chess. This is insane chess. The squatches, man, they are smart. So look, that pretty well covers the best that could be found on cast evidence, okay? Which says a lot.

A lot. But now we have to move on to the big one. Okay? My personal favorite. This is the film evidence. and there are a lot of different videos out there. What are you going to say? I just want to say before the film evidence.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, late on me. Before the film evidence. And again, I don't think we're going to cover this in the next episode because this is physical evidence. Okay. But the Expedition Bigfoot. Which one? The DNA. Oh, that one was actually crazy.

Ooh. Can you describe it for us? This is what one of the newer technologies that Bigfoot is doing is deploying. The Bigfoot field. the researchers organization, right, is it's like environmental DNA. So you can, you can take a soil sample. You can take from a tree or something. And any animal that's been in that area brushed up against it or like left skin particles even will show up. So you can find often dozens of animals in a soil sample. What's the time frame where it's like you can, isn't it like after a certain

number of days you can't reliably. Yeah, it gets less and less recoverable. And it's much more more reliable the higher the concentration is. So you can get false positives, things like that. But they found Dr. Mayor, who's what, we'll talk more about Dr. Mayor. Dr. Maria Mayor. Yeah, exactly. She's a woman. Yeah, she is a woman. She talks about

a soil sample that they took in a tree structure. Tree structures and other physical evidence nests in tree structures. People will find branches bent together. And again, that Ronnie is like, everything's a tree structure. Literally like, is the tree structure in the room right now. A normal tree? And he's like, that's a tree structure. But you see these huge trees sometimes that are woven, it seems, together.

You'll find nests. The dens are pretty crazy, actually. And primates make nests. So the mountain grows, they make nests that they lay in. And they make a new one every night, so you find a lot of them. So they found a structure like this. They were interested. They were like, something made this, clearly.

Could have been a person. Could have been, they don't know. And they did some environmental DNA. And they found basically human DNA, which you find almost everywhere. Yes. people are just everywhere. They also found primate DNA. They found a fairly high concentrations of pan-troglodyte DNA, which is a species of chimpanzee or something close to it. They found 3,000 reads in this sample of this strain of DNA. And so she says this, she says, finding what

appears to be a very large structure seemingly created with intention and requiring great strength as well as foresight, it's interesting. It's not unheard of for primates to stack sticks or rocks, although for me, the jury is still out as to what that was. There's no guesswork in science. It's great that eDNA, environmental DNA, was collected from the site that may give us the answers we're looking for. And then it was months after that that they got the DNA back.

It was like, oh, there's pan-troglydeat. Yeah. Pan genus DNA, especially, which is chimpanzee genus. So that's another physical And this is in, is this in Kentucky or the Pacific? That was in the Appalachians. Okay. Yeah, that was part of that investigation.

Are chimps in Kentucky? Are chimpanzees in Kentucky? No. I'm depending on you to know this. No, they're not normally. In zoos. There you go. So you just go, that's weird.

Yeah, that is really weird. It could be a false positive, newer technology. I don't know. But it's, like, that's what big of people will now point to and say, it's an animal. It's an unknown primate. Yeah. And we have DNA samples that are primate DNA, not human DNA, and we find them in places they shouldn't be.

Yeah. Interesting. Very interesting. Moving on now. Am I safe to go where we want to go? Ben, I... Where we need to go. We need to go there.

We need to go to the Patterson Gimlin film. We do. The PGF itself. PGF. Here's the thing. There's actually like quite a few videos that I think are pretty crazy. Yeah. And when I say quite a few, I mean like maybe five.

Okay? But the MacDady of the mall, for sure, is the Patterson Gimlin film. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, I want you to actually pause the episode. And go look. And I want you to go look. Because you're going to think, who is this Gibroni telling me that this is convincing? Because when you first see it, you're going to think, oh, no way, this is a guy in a suit. Okay?

Yeah. But it just, but it just, I don't think. I don't think. The other thing, if you want to watch it, you might search state. stabilized PGF film. Yeah, yeah. Because they will take the film. It's pretty shaky and you'll understand why when we tell the story.

But, and then they'll stabilize it so that the subject remains less jot, like by moving the frame. Yeah. With the movement of the camera, it's a post-digital stabilization. But it doesn't add anything. Right. It's not there already. Yes. It's not faking something.

It didn't add anything. It's just making it easier to follow. So you can look at the original and then you can look at the stabilized version. Yeah. And they have a lot of videos where it's like it's the original and then immediately thereafter. Yeah. The stabilized. Stabilized.

So, yeah. I'm going to tell the story about the film. It's an amazing story. Want to hear it. So the story of Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin's encounter with a Sasquatch is among the most scrutinized of any eyewitness account, of anything in history, not just Sasquatch encounters. And I really mean that.

These men were not interrogated by police, but they have both recorded multiple retellings of how the events unfolded from their points of view. In these interviews, written records and secondhand retellings have been nipicked to the nth degree for any sign of deception or inconsistency. What follows is their account as they would have you believe it. In the early afternoon of October 20th, 1967, friends Roger Patterson, an aspiring filmmaker and Bigfoot enthusiast, and Bob Gimlin, a bona fide cowboy, were 10 days into their horseback riding trip through the backcountry of California. The closest populated area was the Redwoods National and State Parks, but they were quite far,

from there, tucked away into the forested ridges and rolling foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, exploring the dried up river beds that would be flowing with torrents of water after the brutal winter ran its course. The reason for the trip was twofold. First, the friends wanted to take a trip into the wilderness together as they had done before. They were friends. But the second reason is more relevant for us today. Patterson wanted to film a Bigfoot. He had heard of sightings in the area. He had seen footage of as recent as a couple months before of some supposed Bigfoot footprints that were on some logging roads nearby. Being a Bigfoot enthusiast, he figured that getting some footage of the creature would really help him in marketing and funding his long-term project of producing a Bigfoot documentary for an American audience. So yes, he was very much hoping to find a Sasquatch.

The ultimate success or failure of his trip depended on it. As an aside, some people think that this somehow discredits the film, saying that, well, it must be a hoax because Patterson wanted to find footage of it. But come on, really? Is David Attenborough's hit docu-series Planet Earth a hoax because he wanted to go out and film all the different animals in their natural habitats? No. But I digress.

They continued along a dried-up creek bed or riverbed until between 115 and 140 p.m., they came to an overturned tree with a massive root system at its base. The tree had fallen right at a sharp turn in the creek, creating a wall of root and dirt almost the size of a family living room. They rounded the corner and as they did, they spotted a crow's nest of logs left over from a major flood that had occurred three years earlier. And just behind that rat king of timber, they saw it.

Depending on when you ask the pair, the creature was either standing there slightly crouched over on the opposite bank or was fully bent down on the creek to their left. The memory is still a little bit fuzzy on that point, but becomes crystal clear from here on out, because who could forget what happens next? Estimated by the men to be between six and six and a half feet tall, a hulking and hairy brute of a thing met their eyes and immediately stood to begin moving. The sudden shock of the riders and the creatures sent the horses into a bit of a craze. Patterson spent about 20 seconds struggling.

with his horse before finally getting out of the saddle with his camera. He began to film while running over to the stones, timber, and sand towards the beast. He shouted at Gimlin to cover him with his rifle in case of some kind of attack, but an attack never came. Patterson chased the creature into the woods of the opposite bank and Gimlin followed behind. The creature was never seen again by the pair and the whole encounter lasted just over a minute. Realizing the horses had begun running down the creek in the other direction, apparently startled by the whole ordeal. The men gathered them back up before trying to track the creature a little bit longer, but ultimately they gave up. Not because they didn't want to find the thing again, but because Patterson was too curious. He had to see what he

had captured on his camera. The duo rushed out of the forest and met up with their friend Al Hodgson at his general store in Willow Creek, California. They arrived there at approximately 6.30 p.m. that same day, and after shipping the film and calling the Eureka Times Standard paper, which was the largest paper in the area, to relate their story, they made their way back to camp. They had left the horses there and they needed to search the film site for any other clues. One of the additional pieces of evidence they had already spotted were some footprints in the dirt.

They wanted to further observe these and potentially poor casts. At 5.30 the next morning, as the sound of heavy rain woke the friends up, Gimlin ran to cover the prints with massive pieces of tree bark in the hopes of preserving their integrity. But the storm showed no signs of stopping, so the men packed up camp and made the difficult drive down logging roads onto the state highway and back home. Nine days later, taxidermist Robert Titus went to the site with his sister and brother-in-law. He made plaster casts of the footprints, or what was left of them after the rain, which was more than nothing but less than perfect. Based on the tracks, he attempted to track the movements

of both Patterson and the Beast on a map of the area. the film was developed, neither Patterson nor Gimlin could believe what they were able to capture. This hairy and smelly giant monster was clear as day right there in the film. Unfortunately for them, not everyone was so keen to believe their story. As you might expect, the naysayers were strong then, and they still are today. Many accusations of hoax have been levied against the film. Many men who are confirmed to have known Patterson and who claim to have known Patterson have come forward over the years asserting that they were the guy who was actually wearing that

crazy suit that's so obviously fake in the film. But are those guys telling the truth? And is the suit so obviously fake? After decades of scrutiny, rivaled only by the Zapruder film capturing JFK's assassination, no one has ever been able to prove that the film is fake, that the creature is just a man in a suit, or that Patterson and Gimlin are actually worthy of the skepticism their narrative is met with so often. We know many things, but three of them are especially important here. We know that the film was filmed where the men said it was filmed. We know that the film is authentic. It's not been tampered with, apart from some cleaning and enhancing of images and stabilizing what was already there. It was not edited. Nothing was removed from it nor added to it. And lastly, perhaps most

shockingly, we know that if the film does depict a suit, it would have been a suit whose technology far surpassed that of any known costume design of the time. Ladies and gentlemen, the PGF. The PGF. So we listened to that astonishing legends series. Yeah. And again, it's like 13 hours of PGF material. We will never do as deep of a dive on the PGF as they did.

No, never. But I have listened to it multiple times. Yeah. And going into it, I thought, this is insane. Like, this is not real. Almost everybody has that initial expectation. I was so certain that it was a hoax, that it was somehow faked. And then I get like halfway through the series.

And I start to realize that as they bring up the objections that people were bringing on the film, I was like answering them and being like, no, no, because of this. And I, at that point, I realized. that I was a true believer. That you had become FGF, true believer. And I fully think that it's real. I fully think that the film is authentic. Tell what are your biggest reasons for believing it's real?

Okay, honestly, the biggest thing for me is the suit. So I thought that this is clearly just a guy wearing a suit. The problem is, I mean, there's a bunch of problems with that, but the most compelling ones for me are the scale. Like, it's a big suit. Okay, and it has to have dexterity. because you see in the film that it's moving fingers, that it even has like the jostling of muscular sinews as it steps.

Yeah. There's like movement in the meat of the leg. And the analysis, I think it was Expedition Bigfoot. They did an analysis with modern technology in the spot, using known landmarks to estimate the height of the accuracy to the size the creature was between that six foot, six foot five mark. Yeah. And it's a female Bigfoot.

Yeah, female Bigfoot. because there was supposedly there was breasts. They think that there's obviously... That's what they call it her Patty. Yeah, Patterson Gibson. After Patterson, Gimson. Yeah. And then the movement of the head too, because, you know, Patty, like, looks back.

Yeah. So you have the dexterity, the swinging of the arms. You have the size of the thing. Even the movement of the fingers and the jostling of the muscles as she's stepping. And then, yeah, turning around to look back at the camera. And I'm... I just thought like, oh, well, you can do that with a suit. And you can.

today, you can do all of that with a suit today. And with a suit that costs tens of thousands of dollars. And back then, not only did it cost a lot back then, it was impossible to make back then. It could be done. There was not a suit in existence. Yeah.

There was even a guy. Philo Morris, 2002. He was in North Carolina-based company that is Morris costumes in 2002. He claimed to have made the suit. And then in, I think, let me check my notes here. It was 2004. They did a recreation of the film at October 6th, 2004 at Cal Camp near Rimrock Lake, a location 41 miles west of Yakima.

And... Okay, so not the same place. Not the same place. And they used the suit, a suit supposedly that was like the one, or a similar one, basically. And people, so for example, National Geographic producer Noel Doxter noted the suit used in the recreation was in no way similar to what was depicted in the Patterson Kimmel. Yeah. Yeah. Because the reality is, and Astonishing Legends goes into, they interview costume designers.

Yeah. People have been in the business for decades. Like, I think they interview one of the premier costume designers for physical effects in the industry. Yeah. And the guy's like, we can do it. Yeah, that, like, that to me is the big, because here's the thing. They didn't have spandex yet. Yeah.

They didn't have stretchy fabrics yet. Yeah, they didn't have stretchy. It would have been rigid. Yeah. It would have been inflexible. And you see, like, all of the joints are working. I can't believe I'm arguing in the film. For the big foot video.

What brought us here? Listen, how did we arrive at this stage of our life? In this, I'm a grown man. I have children. I have children. No, but it is one of those things, though, when you look at all of the skeptical explanations, Bob Hieronymus is another guy who claimed he he claimed that he was the guy in it. He was like, he was really short. Yeah, number one. He wasn't

six five. I mean, okay. Come on. So it would have been like one of those movies where like Pacific Rim where this guy is in like the heart of the suit. Yeah. And he's controlling all of it. Yes. He wasn't like that short. But yes. And he also claimed it was a horse hide suit. Yeah. Like he just, which it clearly isn't. If you just actually look at the film. A lot of the things Bob Hieronymus said don't add up. Yeah. And he seemed to be pretty publicity seeking. Yeah.

So look at the, I mean, look at the situation. You have this guy who, because of his history, Roger Patterson's history, his desire to be famous for Bigfoot. Yeah. And then his supposed filming of a Bigfoot. Right. He gets shoved into the public light pretty quick. Yep.

And he's also not shy. Like he's more than willing to. Bob Gimlin, on the other hand, didn't talk about this for a long time. But Roger Patterson was like, dude, I'll talk about this all day. So he goes and he, of course, he's a fisherman. He's embellishing the story whenever he gets a chance. And so there's little like inconsistencies that people are picking out. And all of this means that he's getting a ton of publicity, that the film is getting more popular.

So it naturally would be attractive to a man who has enough connection to Patterson, but not enough to actually like really care about it. him to try and go in and subvert the whole story for his own game. So here's the, like my thinking went this way. When I went into the, to the series on Astonishing Legends, I was like, okay, this is obviously fake. And the reason number one is because Patterson wanted to film a Bigfoot. He wanted to go there and he wanted to find something. And oh, lo and behold, he gets to film it. Like, that's just too convenient. Yeah. But then one of the hosts, I think it was Forrest, had this great line where he was like, okay, listen, I understand that, I understand that,

but just I want someone to tell me what is actually in the film. And once I got that, I was like, oh, okay, that's a good point. Like, at the end of the day, this isn't an eyewitness encounter. This is a film. There's a thing. And it's before digital alteration. Yeah. We know that the film itself is authentic in the sense that it is, it's not made using special

fake effects or film alteration. Everything that's in the film is what was filmed on that day. Even some of the stories like Morris and Hieronymus, they described the suit differently. So supposedly Hieronymus made this $435, or I'm sorry, Morris made this $435 suit. It was a one-piece suit that you zipped into. And then Bob Hieronymus says that there was no metal zipper or anything like that,

and it was a two-piece suit where you put the top on like a T-Peece suit where you put the top on like a t-shirt. So just stuff like that makes you kind of see how something is famous and well analyzed as this film would bring out liars. Yeah. So it's like that those if even if it's fake, I don't think that those people were the ones who did it. No, I'll put it that way. Yeah, I definitely don't think they were the hoaxers. And that begs the question, was Patterson smart enough to pull this off? and was he wealthy enough to pull this off? And I think the answer to both of those is no. Evidence, when you look, like he was broke.

In fact, the camera he shot the footage on, he rented. It was like a $400, $370 camera or something, which is a lot back then. Yeah. Today that's like $2,000. It's like the $4,000. Net worth of Paris or something. So he's, he rents the camera.

And then later he doesn't return it when he's supposed to, do and they issue an arrest warrant for him. Yeah, like, he's broke. He doesn't have a lot of money. He definitely doesn't have money. Like, not only for the supposedly cheap $435 suit, that was like the cheap one, let alone for a suit that would actually approach the stuff that you see in that video. And here's the thing.

Here, two things. One, someone who is flat broke all the time, like for the entirety of their adult life, cannot sustain a family. they're not smart people. A lot of them are not. Okay, like, it's very rare that you find a guy who's a secret genius who literally can't hold down any job. It's very rare that you'd find that.

Maybe it's just prideful. Maybe, okay? But then also the other thing, so Morris said that he made the suit for $435. Yeah. That today would be $3,900, $3,900. And you have costume designers today saying that in order to make a suit that good, it would be tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah. For one suit.

Yeah, like sometimes even six figures to make a costume like that for a movie. Yeah. You're talking about the highest level movie costume design. Yeah, they talked to the, on the AEL, the Sonishing Legend episode, they talked to people who made the suits for Planet of the Apes. Yeah. And it would, yeah, like today it'd probably be cheaper to do CGI. Oh, yeah.

So a lot of the stuff today is just green screen suits. Yeah. Because we've gotten so good at that. Yeah. And so really, that's the thing that did it for me, was like, okay, forget about the character assassination of Patterson. I think that that's like, I think there's something there. But the reason I don't care about it is because they did film a thing.

So just tell me what the thing in the film is and no one can tell you. No one can give you any good answer as to what the thing in the film is, not Hieronymus, not Morris, not any like skeptical expert. No one knows. And so then, you know, once I was like kind of bought in, I was like, okay, so what else? And then I got into Bob Gimlin. Now, Gimlin wasn't the same as Patterson. Gimlin wasn't like a broke, down-on-us-luck crazy guy who had this hairbrained scheme of making a Bigfoot documentary and getting rich. He was a cowboy.

And he was Patterson's buddy. And so they were on this trip together. Yeah. And Gimlin said, and he's taken that, I mean, he'll say this today. I think he's still with us. I can't remember. One of them at least. Patterson died a while ago from cancer.

I think Gimlin is alive. And actually, Patterson, his dying words to Gimlin, according to Gimlin, were, I wish that we had just shot the thing so that people would believe us. Yeah. Like he, because Gimlin had his rifle ready, but he didn't fire because they didn't want to just kill this thing if it was just this innocent creature. And but Patterson was like, I wish we would have just killed a thing. So that, and this is just between he and Gimlin. Yeah. Gimlin spent years not talking about this.

And then finally, he started to come out and go. to like interviews and conferences and stuff like that. Yeah. And his story has never changed. To this day, he says that if it's a hoax, he has no idea how it was pulled off. Because he wasn't involved. Because he wasn't involved in it. And he has no clue how Patterson would ever pull that off.

Yeah. And he fully believes that it was legit. And he believes he saw a Sasquatch that day. And he's more credible than Patterson. Yeah. So I don't know. What about you? What about you?

I think PGF has yet to be debunked. I'll put it that way. I think it's yet to be, to my satisfaction explained how it could have been made. So I am not certain. Yeah. That's just like my conclusion is I'm just not certain. I think it's really interesting and compelling. And the costume thing, again, is the key point.

That's the thing. It's not that people would hoax, like, oh, no one would ever try to hoax that. People hoax crap all the time. People would always try to. Especially, you know, when there's money involved in publicity and fame and all that. but I would do it just to be funny. Yeah, exactly. And I literally just check your text messages from me currently.

Halloween costume. Like so he said, he sent me a costume website. This is moments ago. Let's hoax. While Ben was doing. I'm so down. That last monologue. You know, so to me, it's an open question.

I think go check it out. See what you think. Yeah. Let's talk about it. The thing is, like, I just don't, because there's so much uncertainty, and given the time period, like it's right on the fringe of enough technology

to capture the thing, but not enough to hoax it the way that it would have to be. It was a golden era. I'm like, okay, well, it has to be something biological. Yeah. At the very least that we've never heard of.

And this is an interesting point we haven't mentioned yet. It is no longer possible to have a piece of evidence like the Patterson Gimlin film because no matter how authentic, it looked today, our technology for faking things is so good that no one would ever believe a video today. No matter how good it was, circumstances could all check out. Everything could be

in line in terms of the people involved, the film itself, and it's still no one would ever believe it. Just because digital effects are so good and cheap now that... You can easily do it. Like the TikTok video, the Pentagon release, do you honestly think... that your government wouldn't lie to you about something like that to distract you from something else? Yeah, exactly. You could so easily fake that footage. Even that footage itself, which is really compelling, the amount of skepticism you have to have about anything you are seeing or hearing is so much higher than we know that film was shot on film at that year. Yeah. We know that for certain. We have scans up to 8K and higher of that film. Yeah. Like we know every frame of it.

Like I would, especially, I would so much sooner believe a Bob Gimlin than I would the United States government. Yeah. Like so much quicker. Well, because we, we know for sure that the U.S. government has lied to us about stuff. All the time? Like, it's literally what they do. Yeah, that's their job. So that's why, yeah.

Anyway. Anyway. So that is the best film evidence that we have. Now, there's others. There's one actually really crazy video. Recently. Recently. Yeah.

in Utah of this guy, he's like driving down the highway. Yeah. Right? And he is filming the mountain range next to the interstate in Utah, just beautiful in the wintertime or in the summertime. And he notices this like spec that's kind of moving across the mountain and the snowy portion, which by the way, up at the top of these mountains, it's like 10 plus feet of snow. And last winter when this was filmed.

It was the heaviest winter on record. It was insane. It was insane snowfall. Yeah, we had, you go up in the where they're cutting roads through. even in the summer, early summer, we're talking walls of snow 10 feet high. Plus. Yeah, plus.

On either side of the road to cut through. Yeah. Huge amount of snow. Snowbird got like 800 inches or something. Yeah, it was insane. Like they were digging out ski lifts. Yeah. And ski lifts got snow.

The ski lifts were buried. Anyway, so this guy notices a speck moving up across the snowy bit of the mountain. And he, you know, he's just curious. He zooms in. And the zoom is actually good enough to see that it's, Not like a drone flying in front of the mountain. It's something in the snow. Something walking.

Yes, it's leaving tracks. It's clearly something walking and running through the snow. Yeah. Bi-pedal. And it's bipedal. And it's moving fast. It's crosshilling. And it's big.

A steep section of mountain. Very steep section of mountain. It's far faster than any human could like run. Bears also don't run like this. They run on all fours. I don't know if you know this about bears, but they don't run like people. A bear can stand up next to, and walk even like you can teach it to do that for movies.

But bears don't run across mountains on two legs. As it turns out, bears don't do that. Just a heads up. Like I know you got some city slickers listening. In order for a human to even be on top of the snow like this would have had to have snow shoes on. And you can't move that fast in snow shoes, by the way. You have to walk.

And so I'm not saying that like, oh, this is for sure a big foot. But it's one of those videos that you watch it and you're like, no one can tell me what that is. We don't know what that is. We just don't know. We just don't know. Brian and I are pretty blessed, guys. I mean, we get to make this podcast together for all of you.

And because of that, we get introduced to a lot of really amazing other podcasts. One of those that we've come to know and love is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. That's right, Ben. The 10-minute Bible Hour podcast is hosted by our friend Matt Whitman. In this project, he's got going, it really is awesome. His passion for God's Word has driven him to release an episode every weekday morning. That's insane. You heard us right. Every weekday morning, where he goes through whole books of the Bible in single episode summaries or multiple episode series. And he breaks the Bible down quickly and concisely, keeping the episodes short. I mean, it is called the 10 minute Bible hour and very easy to digest.

The 10 minute Bible hour podcast is a great way to make fun, deep dive Bible study a part of your daily rhythm. And you can find the 10 minute Bible Hour podcast on Apple Podcasts. Spotify, or anywhere else you prefer to get your shows. Or better yet, go to www.v.v.com. That's thetmbh.com, and there's a link in the description for that, by the way, to find all of the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast episodes. While you're there, tell Matt that we said hello. Cheers.

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To set up an appointment and receive a free copy of Chuck's new book, Protect Your Money Now, How to Build Multigenerational Wealth outside of Wall Street, and avoid the coming banking meltdown. Go to the links in the show notes below. Brian, you know how sometimes you wake up in the morning? Yeah, hopefully everybody does that. Sure, maybe. But do you ever feel tired when you wake up?

Well, yeah, Ben, I used to all the. time, but then I started drinking this new drink. It's actually called coffee, and it helps you wake up. No way. There's a drink that does that. Man, I should give it a shot. You definitely need to try this. And when you do, you should buy your coffee from Squirley Joe's coffee. They're a thoroughly Christian company who sends you a great coffee at an affordable price. Plus, they even donate some of their proceeds to Operation Underground Railroad, helping the effort to end child trafficking. Okay, wait. I actually have heard of Squirley Joe's coffee, and they are really great. They make it super easy to order exactly what you want if you go to www.

www.squarelyjo's.com. That's www.squarelyjo's.com and click shop coffee. And first-time buyers can sign up to receive 20% off of their first order. Just go to www.squarelyjo's.com or use the link in the description below. Squirley Joe's coffee, share coffee, serve humbly, live faithfully. And all this footage evidence is a really nice segue into our final piece of evidence. It'll be a bridge for the next episode.

And that's eyewitness testimony. This is always going to be shakier ground for evidence because people can forget stuff, right? But I do think it's a good transition in a part two of the series because it starts to get more into the feeling of the people. Yeah. The sense that they get when they're being encountered allegedly by a Sasquatch.

And with that incredible transition. Yeah. Brian, could you please tell us about the ape canyon incident? I would be honored, Ben. Wonderful. Before the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, the landscape looked very different in the beautiful but daunting region of Oregon. There were multiple gorges and canyons with fairly dramatic and sheer cliff faces,

creating a twisting network of earth that miners descended upon in the early 1900s, the ambitious goal of finding a rich gold vein. It was one of the first of the first of the first of the first of the same. It was one of these small and hopeful groups of miners that experienced one of the craziest encounters with Bigfoot. If it's true, and of course we must say if, it is one of the most insightful Bigfoot accounts that we have. This is a retelling of the story from the website Sasquatch Chronicles.com posted in April of 2015. Could not find the author's name. Fred Beck and a group of four men were gold prospecting in Ape Canyon, Mount St. Helens, Washington, in the Lewis River.

area when they began to notice evidence of visitors around their camp. Some very large human-like footprints were discovered around their cabin, and they'd been hearing noises at night in the area. They claimed to have heard thumping noises that sounded like chest thumping, and one said they heard a strange, high-pitched whistling sound on one ridge above them, only to hear another whistle on the opposite ridge. When Beck and another of the men went down to a nearby spring for water, they caught sight of a large ape-like creature staring at them from behind a large, large, large,

pine tree. It was said to be very dark brown in color and they estimated it to be about seven feet tall. It ducked behind a tree and then poked its head out to watch them again. One of the men raised his rifle and took a shot at the creature and believed he grazed its head, but it ran away and ducked out of sight. Beck claimed to have seen another one as it stood along a canyon wall. He said he shot it in the back and watched it fall into a gorge. The men may have thought the incident was over, but they nonetheless planned to leave the area the next morning just in case. So they hunkered down that night with their rifles at hand. As darkness fell and the men were tucked away inside their cabin, all was quiet.

They were later awakened by an enormous thud against the cabin wall and some chinking from between the logs fell into one of the men's laps. They all grabbed their rifles. A loud rustling was heard outside along with the trampling of large heavy feet. One of the men peered outside from between the logs. He caught sight of what he believed. to be three creatures. But from the sounds they heard, they believed there were many more. The creatures were pounding on the walls and door of the cabin, throwing rocks onto the roof in an

attempt to break it open. And frighteningly, one of the creatures stuck its arm through the hole where the chinking had fallen and attempted to grab an axe without success. Luckily for these men, they had built the cabin sturdily for winter and it had no windows. The creatures were unable to break in. The attack continued throughout the long night with only short intervals of quiet. And the men claimed they shot at them only when they were being attacked, and they stopped shooting when it got quiet, hoping the creatures would soon learn the shooting would stop when the attack stopped. After about five hours of assault, the creatures finally gave up in the early morning hours. At daylight, the men finally went outside only to find a strip of wood torn from between the two logs of the cabin and numerous large footprints all around. They left the area quickly, leaving much of their equipment behind.

Later, the men agreed not to tell the story to anyone, but one of the men leaked the story and the press got wind of it. Then others began hunting around the area for the 8ths. It was called the Great Ape Hunt of 1924. Beck continually swore to the truth of his story. The canyon was named Ape Canyon after this event took place. And unfortunately, this type of event was not a one-off in the area. Many years after the ape canyon incident in 1963, a local scene was a local scene. skier named Jim Carter mysteriously disappeared. The August issue of the Longview Times ran an article

by Marge Davenport titled, quote, ape canyon holds unsolved mystery, end quote. It contains the following account. Carter's complete disappearance is an unsolved mystery to this day, declared Bob Lee, a well-known Portland mountaineer. Dr. Otto Trot, Lee Stark, and I finally came to the conclusion that the apes got him, said Lee seriously. On the way down the mountain, he, Carter, left the other climbers at a landmark called Dog's Head at the 8,000-foot level. He told him he'd ski around to the left and take a picture of the group as they skied down to the timber line. That was the last anyone saw of Carter. The next morning, searchers found a discarded film box at the point where he had taken a picture. From here, Carter evidently took off down

the mountain a wild, death-defying dash, taking chances that no skier of his caliber would take unless something was terribly wrong or he was being pursued. He jumped over two or three large crevasses and evidently was going like the devil. When Carter's tracks reached the precipitous sides of ape canyon, the searchers were amazed to see that Carter had been in such a hurry that he went right down the steep canyon walls, but they did not find him at the bottom. We combed the canyon, one into the other, for five days. Sometimes there were as many as 75 people in the search party.

after two weeks, the search was called off. Wow. Now, the initial Ape Canyon story especially is a really good example of a more typical encounter. People are feeling attacked. People are feeling dread. They're feeling like there's animosity between the two parties here. But the reason that I start with this one, and we're going to end with one final eyewitness encounter, is that this actually isn't just a one-size-fits-all type of feeling to all the events.

Yeah. So as we move into part two of this series, it's going to be really easy for us to just be like, oh, well, all the Bigfoot encounters are always demonic and the evil all the time. Because it's easy to say stuff like that. But I think that that's too easy. I don't think it's precise enough. Because what we'll find is that not everyone is struck with a sense of dread. And I'm going to close out the episode today with two similar stories that show this to be the case.

And these are the accounts of Albert Osman and William Rowe. So we're not going to sign off at the end. Thank you for listening to Hanukkah. Thanks for listening, guys. And we will see you guys in two weeks for part two of our series on Bigfoot. In 1924, the same year as the ape canyon incident, one of the most unsettling and dramatic Bigfoot encounters was reported by a man named Albert Osman.

We're going to leave you with this story tonight. Let it be fodder for the more supernaturally based second part of our series. Albert Osman was a Canadian prospector who, tired, after a long season of very hard but rewarding work, decided to take a vacation near the Toba Inlet in British Columbia, which, if you didn't know, is a province in the country of Canada. There's your geography lesson for the day. This area of the north was becoming notorious for Bigfoot, giant or eight-men sightings, but that is most certainly not why Osmond was headed to this place. In fact, he would consider himself a skeptic. Not the kind of skeptic who is taking a vacation just to disprove Bigfoot

theories, though. Rather, he was the kind of skeptic who thought it was nonsense in a hand-wavy and apathetic sort of way. Bottom line, this man was completely uninterested in Sasquatch, strongly siding with the skeptics who think that it's all made up. This is important groundwork to lay because if we forget this just assumed skepticism of Osman, we run the risk of immediately writing the story off as a hoax. For three mornings in a row, Osmond would wake up each morning and reach the same unnerving conclusion. Some animal or something had come into his camp every night and had been rummaging through his stuff. Whatever it was was stealing any food left out and was unpacking bags looking for other food hidden away. Osmond was sleeping so heavily each night,

he was there to rest after all, that he wasn't being woken up by the sounds. But he decided that all of it was going to end tonight. He was going to feign sleep with his rifle in his hand, and he was going to kill whatever beast had been plundering his stuff. Well, night fell and Osman stayed awake until he didn't. Eventually, sleep overcame him. This night did turn out different, though, as Osman was jarred awake from a deep sleep by something picking him up. He reported later that it felt like being tossed onto horseback, but he ended up knowing, after waking up a little bit more, that whatever had him was actually walking upright. You might wonder why he didn't pose a struggle.

I mean, he had a gun in his hand. Well, for one, he was still tucked into his sleeping bag and knapsack, so he was unable to move that freely. And frankly, he was paralyzed in fear. I don't know if you heard me earlier, but he said that whatever had him was walking upright. He wasn't about to try and get aggressive with whatever this thing was, because it was definitely far stronger and larger than him.

He decided he'd just wait it out. So he settled in for a long and uncomfortable journey of bouncing on the back of this thing as it hiked quickly over ridges, into valleys, and over cold rivers. After some time, all of it came to an end. Osman was dumped onto the ground and was able to kind of unfold himself out of the sleeping bag to finally lay eyes on whatever it was that had taken him. He uncovered his face only to find more questions. There looming over him stood four massive and hairy ape-like creatures. They behaved almost like a family of some kind. There were two bigger grownups, I guess, and two smaller children, I guess.

For six more days, Osman stayed with this family of creatures. He describes it as being held captive. He knew he wasn't allowed to leave. But he wasn't being tortured or anything like that. He was almost just being observed. He said that he was fed a sweet-tasting grass type of substance and was given plenty of water. As they observed him, though, he also did what he could to learn about them. For example, he saw the larger female seeming beast washing and stacking massive leaves that the family could use to line bedding.

According to Osman, they were a surprisingly, quote, normal behaving unit. This is part of why he didn't ever use his firearm on them. They hadn't really done anything to him that would be harmful, and they didn't seem to have any plans on harming him. so instead he bided his time and continued to watch. Finally, one morning, the opportunity presented itself to flee. Osman watch as the biggest creature of the family. He estimates a beast of eight feet tall, rummaged through his napstack until his little box of snuff tobacco fell out.

Curious, the creature picked it up, opened it, and immediately seemed interested in how the tobacco smelled. Thinking it was just normal food, whatever normal food would be to him, he began to eat the entire box all at once. A few minutes later, as you might expect, the creature became violently ill, vomiting all over the place. The rest of the family were either not there

or were now caught up in trying to help what seemed like the father figure of the group. And Ostman didn't need a second invitation. He took off as fast as he could, sprinting through the woods where he thought would be a road. And eventually he did find his way back to civilization, famished, confused, scared, Osmond decided to never tell the story.

He wasn't a believer in all this, and he had seen how some folks had been treated when they hinted at believing in it. He didn't want to become the object of such ridicule, but he never forgot the story. And 30 years after his ordeal, he published his account in a local British-Columbian newspaper, the province. According to him, the only reason he came forward was because so many others in the area had, he was tired of feeling alone. One of these accounts that came out in 1955 was from a man named William Rowe.

He said that he was working near Tettwan Cash in central British Columbia when he decided to climb up Micah Mountain to an old abandoned mine for some exploring on a day off. As he rounded the trail and caught sight of the mine, something else caught his attention. Thinking the mound of hair was a grizzly bear, he crouched down quietly, hoping he'd not been noticed. He pulled out his rifle just in case.

As the animal raised its head and stepped out into an opening in the brush, he saw the shock of his life. It wasn't a bear. It was a hulking, six-foot, 300-pound bipedal thing. It began walking towards him, still not aware of his presence. And then, it must have been his scent. The creature looked up, puzzled at the bear-skinned Rowe, and slowly backed away. Roe shouldered his rifle and found the trigger, but he couldn't bring himself to

pull it. He said it looked far too human. He would never be able to forgive himself. This comes from a sworn affidavit signed by Roe in 1957, which concluded with the following, quote, I hereby declare the above statement to be in every part true to the best of my powers of observation and recollection. Want more haunted cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content as well as exclusive content in regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself. So go to patreon.com slash haunted cosmos and sign up now.