Sasquatch Chronicles - SC EP:43 Beachfoot Interviews

Episode Date: July 29, 2014

Shane Corson, Woody and I sit down and interview Dr. John A. Bindernagel. Dr. Bindernagel is a wildlife biologist who has sought evidence for Bigfoot since 1963. He published a book in 1998 entitled "North America's Great Ape: the Sasquatch." Dr. Bindernagel grew up in Ontario, attended the University of Guelph and received a PhD in Biology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He moved to British Columbia in 1975 largely because the region was a hot spot for Bigfoot sightings. Over the years, he has collected casts of tracks that he believes belongs to Bigfoot. He also claims to have heard the creature near Comox Lake in 1992, comparing its whooping sound to that of a chimpanzee. Bindernagel believes that the Bigfoot phenomena should receive more attention from serious scientists, but has remarked, "The evidence doesn't get scrutinized objectively. We can't bring the evidence to our colleagues because it's perceived as tabloid." We also interview Peter Byrne who has led the life most of us can only dream about. Share his many adventures in India with tiger, elephant, and leopard, and see how a fortuitous championing of a member of the ruling elite of Nepal during a bar brawl prompted Peter to move to Nepal and become a professional hunter there. Move with him to Nepal where he was, for years, the only authorized professional hunter to operate in that country. In the unspoiled wilderness of the White Grass Plains area of Nepal, where there were virtually no roads and the natives did not even know the name of the capital of the country. The final interview was with Rhettman A. Mullis, Jr., PhD-ABD, CAF, MHP (USA), Academic and Field Researcher, Founder and Lead Researcher for "Sasquatch Investigations and Research: Bigfoot and Bigfootology," and Contributing Writer and Editor: Bigfootology.

Three, two, one, zero. When I had come down this hill, I had seen this creature cross the road. They would have ripped my locked door from my truck, extracted me from my vehicle, and there wouldn't have been a damn thing I could have done about it. This thing I got to notice in its eyes. His eyes was real, real evil, real sinister looking. You know, the look it was given me.

7-1-1, what are you reporting? On now, sir. That's a dog of a bitch is about six-foot. Welcome to Bigfoot Hot Spot Hot Spot Radio, Sasquatch Chronicles. I'm your host, Wes, along with my brother Woody, and researcher, author, and friend, Liam Jebbing. Let's start the show. This past weekend, Woody and I attended an informal gathering of Bigfooters,

brought together by Todd Ness in the Oregon Coast Range Mountains. The gathering has become known as Beachfoot over the years. A small affair of good friends coming together to talk about Sasquatch. We arrive on Thursday and run into several notable people. My name is John Vindernal. I'm a professional wildlife biologist. And I thought it would be a good opportunity to sit down with some of these folks and find out what inspired them, what drives them in this topic, and how they got involved in this topic.

And I'm very interested in the Sasquatch or Bigfoot, and especially why it is a scientifically taboo suburb. Shane Corson from Cryptologic Radio, Woody and myself sat down with Dr. John Benner-Nagled. Well, my fascination actually starts with this whole thing about scientific disengagement. Well, not disengagement because scientists have never been engaged. It's not that they've abandoned this subject. It's been closed from the beginning. And the beginning for me was as a third-year university student in biology courses

courses when I raised the subject, 1963, I raised a report from Argosy magazine of the so-called ape man being observed in British Columbia. And I was laughed at. Professor said, oh, no, we can't talk about that, you know, and we went back to moose, dear elk, you know, this was taboo even then. And I thought, my goodness, you know, what was I about 22 years old, still very idealistic, thinking about the scientific ideals of openness, and every subject is worth considering, at least? Apparently not. So, of course, there was very little information in 1963, and then, but then a few years later, John Green's books started coming out, the late 60s, early 70s, and I started reading them. And there was another thing that happened to me right around then.

In 1973, I was working in the Serengeti National Park at the Sarangeti Institute with other international scientists, and I raised the subject of the North American Sasquatch. And there was no laughter, no ridicule, no kidding. Everyone's saying, well, no, John, if I were you, going back to Canada, I'd be looking specifically at food habits, and I think that would be the way to really get you to study this thing in a good way. That was really helpful to me to know that some scientists could take it seriously. But what happened then was that I went back to Canada, and we moved out to BC then, largely so that I could start Sasquot studies.

That was 1975. And, of course, I did not mention it. I had realized that this is a subject that, as a new biologist in British Columbia, one did not raise. And so I quietly studied it on my own. But there was this, I felt strange that here I was studying this interesting large mammal. that my colleague did not want to hear about. And then in 1988, my wife and I found these really great fresh tracks while on a hike with a schoolroom.

So following that, I had this couple of really nice plastered track casks on my desk. And I'm still thinking, why is no one doing anything with this? And I thought, John, you better pick up the pace here, still being quiet about it. Why do you think the scientific community wants nothing to do with it? Well, this question has intrigued me for a long time. Why is it scientifically taboo? And that's what I dealt with in the second book. Because in the first book, I talked about the anatomy, behavior,

and some of the ecology of the Sasquatch, and expected some scientific dialogue and back and forth. And it was simply ignored. It's not that people were down on it or argued about it. They simply dismissed it. And so then I realized, okay, John, you've been discussing the anatomy and behavior of a North American mammal not yet discovered, or not yet, or the way I sometimes put it, whose discovery has not yet been acknowledged by the scientific community. So that got me into the discovery process. And I came to realize, you know, we are making this enormous discovery claim.

And it's not just an unlikely thing that there's this seven-foot tall, 800-pound, upright, large family in North America. It's perceived as a far-fetched claim. And even in the history of medicine, some claims have been dismissed. You know, there's no theoretical basis, or it's too large a leap from where people are now. So, you know, I'm not saying I excuse my scientific colleagues, but I understand that, that's a very large claim, like I say, an enormous claim. And I think some investigators fail to recognize just how enormous the claim is and maybe treat it a little too trivially as a subject of entertainment,

as a weekend warrior sort of activity. So, you know, not that I'm blaming them. I'm always trying to bend over backward to say, this is the responsibility of scientists, relevant scientists, who have ignored it. amateur investigators have filled in that vacuum and most are doing a very good job well-disciplined, very dedicated others less so

like in any group but that's the way it's going so what this will be when the discovery claim is finally acknowledged is a great victory for citizen scientists you know amateur investigators amateur in the sense of like the British sense of amateurs like Darwin was sort of lovers

of science you know not not not amateur in a negative way at all but just It's not credentialed. You know, and credentials, I keep coming back to this. There's the circularity. Credentialed scientists won't touch this thing. Or in general, with a few exceptions. Dr. Bendernagle has written two books.

Both books can be found on Amazon. Back in 1998, he wrote North America's Great Ape, The Sasquatch, and Dr. Bendernagle's newest book, The Discovery of the Sasquatch. Oh, well, thank you for referring to it as a new book. It came out at the end of 2011. I still think of it as a new book. It took seven years, and I'm still sort of recovering from that research and writing process. But that's when I got into this whole idea.

Okay, first of all, I had to review the evidence again, because scientists did not read the first book. So I felt I had to go back and cover some of that ground again. And then I got into this whole idea of scientific resistance to certain discoveries, such as the Sasquatch. and some of these medical discoveries that also encountered resistance. But in the medical discoveries, it was usually a delay of maybe 10 years, sometimes 20 years, between when the discovery was first claimed until it was finally accepted, and of course eventually became sort of just obvious. But in the case of the Sasquatch, we've been going for over a century.

There are, you know, 100-year-old accounts, some of them really quite detailed describing the Sasquatch. And, you know, in addition to, you know, the 40-year-old accounts, And, you know, the first track cast in, gee, 1941, that's over 50 years now. And, you know, we still haven't accepted track cast as evidence for the Sasquatch as a track leaving mammal. And, of course, there's been the problem of hoaxes. And as soon as there's hoax claims, even if they're very poor, poorly substantiated, scientists flee from the subject. They just avoid it because they're not maybe conversant enough with the evidence to say, this is a hoax, this is real. They're afraid of, you know, treating a hoax seriously, and someone's saying, ah, gotcha, you know.

So there's that. Well, you know, scientists are very reputation conscious, very conservative, and mostly this is fine or at least okay. But my feeling with the Sasquatch is that it's not okay because there's so much evidence and so many sincere, I won't call them proponents, but eyewitnesses who have come forward and people have come forward saying, you know, you don't need to know my name. You just need to look at, you know, this track house I made and tell me what you think. The night before, Dr. Bennernagle gave a speech on all of the good evidence that's being collected now. He talked a little bit about collecting a type specimen. I asked Dr. Bennernagle, what would be the impact if someone were to shoot a Sasquatch and bring one in? What impact would that have on the scientific community?

Well, the body would be the type specimen, which is. is what, you know, my scientific clause claim is necessary. They're unwilling to consider or scrutinize the available evidence, which is something that kind of bothers me. I feel we could at least be discussing this evidence without a type specimen. They're insisting on a type specimen. Okay. Say that became available. Okay. Suddenly the Sasquatch goes from uncatalogged, undiscovered, to being discovered. And, well, what interests me then is the questions that will be raised because scientists will seem

surprised and people are going to say why are scientists surprised you know how have they been missing this you know 800 pound large mammal must have been here for a long time if not forever and that'll be interesting and then they'll you know

there'll be questions well where was the scientific dialogue leading up to this you know was it being discussed in the literature and the answer is no no and no you know it's been ignored by the scientific of a community. And suddenly, scientists can no longer ignore it. Well, this is the way I see things unfolding. My interest is in the various scientific disciplines who either could have been scrutinizing this evidence or should have been paying attention to this evidence. Physical

anthropologists, human evolutionists, certainly my colleagues, biologists, zoologist, mammologist, suddenly this mammal is now available for study and it's got to be fitted in, you know, and so, you know, it's obviously a primate and is it more human-like or more ape-like, that'll be, you know, a big, so there'll be a, you know, it'll be a mine field of research, you know, of sort of evidence for research. And it'll be interesting to see how quickly scientists respond, you know, to a type specimen. how they react. I hope I'm still around to see this.

I'll be very curious. What keeps you going? Well, it probably sounds arrogant, but I keep doing this because I feel like, well, should I say I know I'm right? I mean, as scientists, we're called to reserve a certain percentage of skepticism, of doubt, which I do, about 0.1%,

you know, that all this evidence is fake, hoax, or the sightings are misidentified bears or humans in costumes, you know. I guess I have to reserve that small amount, but I mean, after 40 years, you know, especially after a weekend here at this Beachfoot meeting and hearing all these accounts and all these detailed description

and seeing some of these amazing track caps that other people of the tracks that people of cats, I think, oh, my goodness. Because I do second guess myself sometimes. I do say, John, you know, maybe all these scientific gatekeepers who won't let your scientific paper be included at a scientific conference, maybe they're right.

And I don't think so, you know, but it's very affirming to me, necessary for me, to hear other accounts and see all this other evidence. So it keeps me, well, what keeps me going is situations, events like this, when I see, my goodness, people have moved ahead so much further than even I was aware of. That's very, very encouraging to know. I talked to Dr. John Bernardigle about the changing landscape in the Bigfoot community. We've interviewed cops, lawyers, doctors, military personnel, people of profession that have come out and shared their stories with us. 10, 15 years ago, you didn't see a whole

lot of that going on. Now there's groups out there who have the main goal of shooting a Sasquatch, bringing in a type specimen. Well, this is an interesting situation because, you know, I guess I'd call, I'm 73 years old. I graduated in 1966. with my first degree. And I guess I'm what you'd call an old school biologist. And in the old days, one collected a type specimen. It was no big thing. And I was talking to an ornithologist here. You know, they would record bird calls in Peru, and then they'd go and collect the specimen, prepare it and put it in the museum. We did that with mammals. We did it with birds. We did it with amphibians and, you know, it was just the norm. But now we've come to this different age,

you know, and we're dealing with a primate here. And, you know, something very, there's kinship involved, for some people, very, very close, and the idea of actually collect, you know, and it's this catch-22 situation. Scientists are insisting on a type specimen, but see, Grover Krantz took a position. He said, we need to collect one, you know, collect being a euphemism, for shooting one or whatever, euthanizing one, once we have one type specimen, that we get protection for all the rest. He was heavily criticized for that. That's, was not an acceptable position to take. So we're in this dilemma.

They insist on a type specimen, but we're not to collect one. Most of my colleagues are unwilling to examine the existing evidence, some of which I think is pretty conclusive. Usually I have a plaster cast with me here, and I, this is hard evidence, you know. A bit of a joke. But it is. You know, it treated as physical evidence.

Jeff Melvin would say, no, it's actually trace evidence in the sense that it's a trance. trace or track left by the animal, but so many people misinterpret trace as minor. It's not minor at all. For me, it's the main phone. You know, as I showed last night, I'm working with remote cameras. Now, I want to get a system in place that in case someone says to me, hey, I've had a Sasquatch coming onto my land here for, you know, a year or something like that.

You should come out here because they come every year in November or something. And then I would have a photographing system in place for monitoring that sort of thing. And that's what I'm working on. So maybe I'm naive, but I think that could happen, you know, and I know that people, in some areas, I'm not hearing that here. People are having, you know, now there's people with three and four sightings in a relatively young lifetime. Gee, about 20 years ago, if someone had two or three sightings, oh, people were very skeptical.

No, no, no. Very unlikely you'd ever have more than one sighting in your lifetime. Well, that's changed, significant. I got one on a picture on a game camp, I'm going to send it to Shane. I should send it to you, too. Oh. Lady sent it to me, and what are you in?

Oh. What do you guys think this is? And it's walking away. It looks like the Patterson film. It looks like it's walking away. Oh, my goodness. It's still clip, but it's a stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's good. You can see all the cap muscles and all the back muscles. And then the sun's coming in from different angles of the tree, and you can see it glisten off of the, I mean, it would have been almost impossible to Photoshop. Yeah, yeah. Almost impossible to Photoshop. Yeah.

You can see the light hitting, like, a certain part of its back, and then you can see it. You can see it hit in its butt, it's hit in its legs. And the sun's coming in, and you can really get it good. Wow. You see, I think in that way things are changing, you know, what my scientific has colleagues. Now, Jeff Melden, who is much more in academia than I am, he says, no, we do have a lot of colleagues out there. They're simply being quiet.

You know, they're simply waiting. They're not saying yes, no. They're simply being, they're kind of, they have an undisclosed interest, you know, almost a closet interest. And he's finding some of his colleagues more outgoing, more open. I haven't found that in British Columbia, but then we seem to be super conservative compared to American, but maybe that's a cultural thing. But, yeah, I think now a film like the Patterson Gimlin film,

if that would happen again, whoa, I think that would really change things. Oh, gee, here it is a game. It would increase the credibility of the first one, which is so commonly been dismissed as a hoax. I mean, this is an objection of some of my colleagues with all these game cams out. How come no Sasquatch? Well, Sasquatches are, we're talking primates here, very intelligent.

And as I said before, it's a needle and haste that a lot of times. That's right. People think, oh, thousands of game cams out, well, what area are we covering? You know, a small, small, small percentage of that. Yeah. The night before Dr. Benernigle gave a presentation and shared with the group his videos and his pictures from his game cams and plot watchers. The fascinating part about looking at his still images and his video

was that every wild animal out there was more than aware of his game camps. Yeah, even the elk you showed in that game cam video last night. Even the elk knew the camera was there. Yes, yes, yes, an elk was known to be real bright. Yes, yes, yes, it didn't necessarily avoid it, but it was certainly curious about it. And there maybe some discomfort. He definitely knew it was there. Yeah, he definitely knew it was there.

Yeah, you know, it looked, came right up to the camera, looked directly at it. Yeah, I thought that was... Yeah, you did a little sniff dust. It was kind of funny because, you know, we talked to a lot of people on the shows about that, and they say the same thing about cool game cams. They probably avoid them. They know, they're there. Yeah.

You know, of course, there's no way to prove it. No. You know, obviously if an elk knows it there, there's something with a little higher intelligence than it. Yeah, not only knows it's there, but decide I'm going to go around the back of the D or whatever, or I'm going to rip the thing off, I don't know. Yeah, I really enjoyed that presentation you gave last. That was awesome. That was really good. Yeah. Well, thank you.

Well, that other camera, I see, I'm quite keen on that. I would put onto that by William Branjin, the Pall Watcher. Just time-lapse, photography, from high on a tree, just clicking away. Kind of like the bear you should come down. Yeah, exactly. No detection involved. There's no interaction between the, you know, it'll click away there all week and there'll be nothing, you know. And then, yeah, maybe a bear, maybe a bird will fly by and it get, stop it, yeah.

And I think that was kind of good, too. So, I mean, I haven't done a whole lot of, you know, put cameras out in game trails, but one thing that kind of stuck with me last night, you showed, like with that bear, you had a camera coming where the bear came in. And then the way it was camera placement was really cute, too. Yeah, back to back. Because you just covered about 300 yards with two cameras. That's right.

And you've got, you had full detail of something coming in, and you saw, I mean, it was only for a split second. You didn't see where it was out, and you saw it leaving going on the elevation. So, I think a lot of people that, it clicked with me, it was like, well, you know, smart in the way the camera you set the cameras up. That was one of the learning things for me, working with cameras. Yeah. It's another tool, you know, and people are using drones now. But for a drone, you really need an area where you're pretty sure there's something there.

And we've only got about 20 minutes of battery power or something. Hope to see you next year. Yeah. Yeah, well, I'll write up my notes. I think, gee, I can't afford not to come. You know, that's what I thought. But yesterday, my goodness, I wouldn't like to have missed. I would hate to have missed it.

I wouldn't have known what I was missing, of course. But, I mean, what it was. That could even be worse, though, not knowing. Yeah, but what a shot in the art. Well, I'm already thinking of people who should have been here. You know, the guys I'm working with up there, the investigators, and also, of course, my scientific colleagues, who can say, okay, I don't really accept that interpretation.

But, I mean, but there's the guy's plastered cash, you know, and stuff like that. Yeah. I think it's so important to create, well, what's happened here, an atmosphere has been created. where people can speak freely, share experiences. No one's saying... They can build friendships. That too, yeah.

And no one's saying, well, the Sasquatch, if it exists, it seems to look like... There's none of this if it exists of. People here who've seen them. I mean, basically, they have a problem, and this is something I'm quite... You say what keeps me going. I want to affirm the, you know,

you can't quite dine out on a... If you saw a grizzly bear, it's say, oh, right on, you know. People aren't saying, well, where I'm comfortable, they're not saying right on for Sasquatchew. watch, are you sure? I doubt, much of it must have a bear on its hind leg. And there's just some alternative explanation.

Well, thank you, John. It was a pleasure. Oh, thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you, John, so much. Okay, yeah, yeah. That's a pleasure. Thank you for your time.

Oh, well, no, I'm sort of kept them waiting. Sorry to keep you so long. Oh, no, no, no. No one. No, I know. As Shane Corson, Woody and I got up from the interview, I couldn't help but think. Here's a 77-year-old man that has the energy of a 20-year-old.

The night before, I ran into Peter Byrne. Peter Byrne has led a life most of us can only dream about. Oil businessman and adventurer Tom Slick first contacted Peter Byrne and contracted him to search for the Yeti. I told Peter he was huge on YouTube. His response? What's YouTube? My response, Google it.

When I was very young, my dad used to tell me stories about the Yeti, the abominable snowman. So I've always had an interest. And then, after World War II, I found myself living up in North India. So I started going in the Himalayas. Small expeditions, two men, three men. And I did three of those. And through those in 1956, I was contacted by Tom Slick. he said that he wanted to project an expedition, a Yeti expedition, into the Himalaya.

So we met in New Delhi and had some long talks. And in 57 I took the first American Yeti expedition in there. And we spent three years. We came down at Christmas each year. We spent 36 months up there. At the end of 36 months, it was the end of 1959. We came back down to Kathmandu, and there were lots of cables, and the cable from Tom, I said, you've been up there long enough.

I'd like you to come to the States and look for the American Yeti. So we looked at this cable, and we laughed. So I came over to the States in early 60, went to Texas, sat down with Tom, and looked at maps of the Pacific Northwest, which is three times the size of the Nepal Himalaya, the Northwest here vast. So I was intrigued.

So went up to Willow Creek. set up a base there and ran his project for two and a half years until he died in October 62 when it came to an end. That's how I started. That's how I got into it. Starting at the Yeti and then coming into the Bigfoot thing, ran a big project in the 90s for another man, a couple smaller projects. And right now I'm sort of freelancing with a small group out on the coast and we're putting cameras out. It's a very small effort. We have six cameras in an area we moved them here and there. I'm getting the usual thing, photographs

of bear, elk, mountain hall. That's all. I asked Peter about evidence that he had found while searching for the Yeti, and I had to hear the story about the Yeti hand that was taken from the Monk Temple. We found a number of things.

We saw footprints twice. When Tom Slip was with me, we broke up into separate parties, and he found footprints, and I found footprints, and we photographed. those, we made some casts. And then later on, we found this mummified hand in one of the, in a temple there. We got that back to London. There's some scientists there have examined it.

There's no DNA in those days, of course, wasn't heard of. It disappeared then for many, many years. It was found last year by an enterprising young BBC reporter, and it's been DNA'd, and it's a human hand. It's not yet yet yet. It was just the size of my hand, but this nail was very big, was almost hooked on the finger here. Those are the only finds we never saw one. We talked to people who've seen one, mostly older people in those days. Old men, old women, they said they'd seen one. In the time we were there, though, in the Himalayas, 57, 58, 59, those three years, there were no sightings,

and just the two sets of footprints that we found. in early 57. And then since then, make a long story short, I've been out in Nepal every year, the last 34 years, working in wildlife conservation projects. And I always talk to Sherpas. I always talk to Tibetans when I meet them,

you know, anyone seen a Yeti, anyone see anything, nothing, absolutely nothing. Now for maybe 25 years, no sign of any kind. So, no footprints, no sightings. That's amazing about the hand. I didn't know the hand was found. Yes, well, it wasn't the hand.

It was just a finger. I took a finger off the hand. Yeah, I met with the namers there. I was camping there, and there was a group of these custodians, these elderly men, and they were all chatting in Tibetan. And I heard one of them speaking in Nepalese, which I speak. So I went up and said, you know, I hear you speak in Nepalese. And he said, yes, I was a soldier.

the British Army years ago in an Nephleese regiment, a Gorka regiment got talking to him. He said, what are you doing here? I said, looking at the Yeti. He said, well, there's a hand up in the temple there do you want to see it? So I sent communications back to Slick, back to London. They said,

try and get the hand or at least get part of it. So I flew to London, picked up a human hand, flew back, hiked back, took the finger off, disposed yeti hand, and replaced it with this human finger.

I drilled it and wired it and so on. Painted it with iodine to make it look dark brown and black like the other one. It was there until recently. Maybe two years ago, it was stolen. It's been stolen, I'm afraid. So that's the story of the hand. That's amazing. I've never heard that story.

I mean, I knew about the ham, but... We had to get the hand, the finger out of the ball. So we exchanged cables in code. We had to send a runner down to the Indian border at the weather there's a telegraph station, cables and code, back and forth, Tom Slick, and he said, get the finger to Calcutta.

There'll be a man called Stuart at the Grand Hotel in Calcutta a month from now. So I walked down, across the ball, went to Calcutta, go to the hotel, check in, and they said he's up in room 101. So I grew up as Jimmy Stewart,

and it's Vice Gloria, the actor. So I spent a couple of days there, and they took the hand to London. not the hand, the finger. The trouble was getting it out through Indian customs. In those days, customs check you coming in and checking you going out.

So Gloria put it in her lingerie case and locked it up. So they arrived at London Airport. You get all their baggage, and the laundry case is missing. So they check into the Dorchester Hotel in London and two days later

the concierge calls them and says it's a customs man here with a case for you. So Jimmy says, send them up. So this young custom man comes up to their room with the laundry case and said, Is this yours? And Gloria said, yes, it's mine. Thank you very much. So he sits down, has a cup of tea.

And then he's leaving. And Lord Gloria says, I see it still locked. And he said, British customs official would never open a ladies' laundry case. That's awesome. So that's how we got the finger there. And right now, I don't know who has it right now. Anyway, it was found. And it was recent examined, as you know from it.

Wow, that's an amazing story. I know you've taken thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of reports at this point. What do you think that Sasquatch is? And there's no right or wrong answer. Everyone has it. Oh, no, you know. The answer is I don't know anymore than anybody else.

I like the way it walks, walks up right. Nothing else walks up right. On the face of the earth, as you know, except us. I like the fact that it has whites, the eyes, which we have, nothing else has. So there's possibility of being a hominid, a man that still has his hair. Possibility, but after all these years, we know almost nothing. We don't know what it is. We don't know what it eats. We don't know how it sleeps. We don't have mixed fire. We don't have to make structures.

We know almost nothing. This is my opinion. No, almost nothing. the man who spent his whole life searching for the Yeti and for the Sasquatch. We asked Peter if this mystery will be solved in our lifetime. I hope so. I hope so. Before I pass on, and the answer is the cause of body. Physical remains. And as you know, the Northwest has an incredible disposal system of garbage. The carrion eaters, bears, coyotes, porcupines, crows, crows, ravens. Something dies. Dispheres. It's eaten. pick up the center of it decaying carcass half a mile away easily if the wind is

right. Home in and eat everything. Skull, everything, bone, leg bones, everything. And science demands, that's what science demands, not video footage, not screen, not recording. Science demands, a body on the table. So if you could get that,

or even get something, get a skull. That may happen. Yes, that may happen. I think all three of us probably will agree with you on that. Eventually, it's going down to that physical body lane from Taylor. Yes. I'd surprise there isn't more footage.

Everyone has a camera. And here we have the passing given footage. After all these years, that's all there is. Everything else is blurs and lights and shadows and everything. There isn't one decent still picture that I have seen. Maybe there is some. I've seen nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I've seen no footage. The Olympic project people, or 60 cameras out there over the course of what 5, 6, 7 years now probably, yeah, yeah it's amazing we don't have it, amazing

a lot of inclusive but you know it's really a needle and a stack Oh yeah It's a vast area The whole area is vast And how many are there

And that's so nobody knows People say 10,000 at least 500 2 Nobody knows I and my associate It's a little bit worried

at the decrease in reports, incredible reports, in footprint finds and in sightings. The last one I have, it's January 2007. That's the last credible sighting that I know of. By this, I've met the person, sat down, gone to the site, gone back to the site again, and I believe the guy, I believe that he actually truly did see one.

It's where we have our cameras right now, our little camera effort. but otherwise there's lots of reports but you know are they credible not to me they're not lots of stuff so Peter you mentioned the coast and you don't have to mention your area of but beside that encounter

that you interviewed the witness is because anything special to you as far as researching or it is special in that I don't have a big project I can't spread out I live in Pacific City So I concentrate my efforts

Purely as they are in the general area 50 miles north 50 miles south And I have six sightings Since 19 Over the last 22 or 23 years I have six credible sightings

For the coast Where I've interviewed the people And then one or two old ones Back in the 30s But the people of course are gone Mine is a very It's a personal project very small and I think right now even if I was off money for a big project I don't think

I do it. I don't have the energy I used to have. So we're content with that. Now we use geotime patterns and we put our cameras in places where there's been a credible sighting at the time or the siding the months. So July area X we put our cameras there in August area B so that's what we do. That's the term I use geo time. That's what we work on. follow-up on reports. We hear someone seen one. I have to talk to a woman now. So she saw one 25 years ago near Corbett

in the Columbia River Gorge. I have to meet her next week. I have a chap with her. And the questionnaire, write it all down. And the patterns are interesting. I believe that they relate to food, the need for food, which is the prime need of every creature

on the face of the earth, from a mouse to an old food. We need food because of a safe way. Animals need food. They've got to go looking for it. And these creatures, its descriptions are real. They need a lot of food.

They have to eat every day quite a lot. And that's probably what has them. Wherever they are at any time, it's food, the availability of food in that place. How do you determine if someone's credible or not? You do your best. I have a questionnaire. No, you say, have you seen one before?

This is my 10th sighting. Right there, goodbye. Yeah. I'm with you alone. So, you do your best. You sit down with the person and have a relaxed talk and fill in the questionnaire and then make an assessment. I interviewed a state policeman, 25-year-s service, a great big guy,

and it was thoroughly incredible to me. I heard he had a sighting. It's very secret about it. told his wife, told her brother, was another state police, and he came to me. I called him. He lives in Ben. His name is Harris. So I called him and told him what I was doing.

And he said, I don't want to talk to you. He said, absolutely no comment at all. And I said, well, sir, I'm sorry to bother you. I'm really serious. You know, I don't laugh at this thing. He said, all right, say, call me back in a year. So I called him back a year later, and he just retired. He said, come and see me.

While he was in the state police, he didn't want to talk. about so. He had a good sighting. So it says credibility as best as you can. How do you think things would change if someone shot one tomorrow, brought in the body? How do you think what would change in our, I guess, in our world?

Well, we believe it, of course. And science would believe it. Scientists would say great. Let's see it. Examine it. And then we would know for sure that they are there. That's a few there. There was one there. That could happen.

But it doesn't mean that an army of people are going to descend on the Pacific Northwest and go looking for them and even if they do, they're not going to find. I mean, since World War II, there's 55 planes have crashed in the Pacific Northwest since the beginning of World War II. Twenty have believed to have gone into the sea, leaving about 30 that haven't been found. One was found in Mount Baker. The last few years, been down 30 years. One was found in Idaho.

It's been down 35 years. One was found. It crashed six miles from where I lived, and it was there for a year before they found it. A plane is a huge massive crash metal. It's in one place. It's not moving. It's not going to run away from you.

We can't find them. One plane was flying from Anchorage to Boise and had 42 men, 42 young airmen on board. It crashed in BC. It's never been found. One crashed, I think it's 18 years ago, which has a senator,

Senator Hale Boggs, and another, an Alaskan representative, the families are still looking for that plane, and they have a rough idea where it crashed in BC, and they can't find him. So people say, you know,

okay, where were these things hide? Yeah. The Yeti start was amazing. Yeah. I've never heard that. I mean, I kind of knew bits, pieces of the story. I always wondered how you got it out.

Yeah. It's a flight. spying a movie. Yeah, totally spy movie. And Stuart's a great couple. I've been friends for years and years. And then Gloria died, and then he died. Yeah.

A lovely couple. How I met Tom Slick is interesting. I was in the Himalaya. I was in the country of Sycambe, which is up between Nepal and in Bhutan. And it was evening time. We were looking for a place to camp. It was very cold, misty.

And I had three men with me. And we saw this spark of light away. in the distance and I said, what's that? And they said, that's the Darjeeling Himalayan mountaineering school. And they take students up there. So we hiked and hiked and came into this camp, and there was a bunch of sherb was there, and I knew a couple of them. And Tenzing Norgy was there.

Tensing who climbed Everest with Hillary, with Ed Hillary. He was there, and I knew him from four. So he said, what are he doing? I said, look, he was the Yeti. So Tenzing said There was a man in my house A few weeks ago And he's very interested in the Yeti expedition

And he left a piece of paper with my wife So about three weeks later I get back to Darjeetting I go and see Mrs. Tenzing And she has this little piece of paper And on this is written Tom Slick Carol's the National Bank of Commerce

San Antonio, Texas So I wrote to him and said I hear you're looking You're instant the Yeti And that's how our communication starts A little spark of light in the mountains Wow. Yeah.

I can't believe how long you were up looking for that, Yeti. That must have been miserable. No, it was great. It was exciting. It was a great privilege, and we had great people come and join us back and forth. Gerald Russell, brought the first panda back to New York in the 20s with a woman called Ruth's Harkness. People like that. All kinds of people that come up and join us spend the months.

And we lived in caves a lot of the time because you can have a fire in a cave and keep warm. And can have a fire in a tent. The tents were cold and miserable, so we started living in caves. And the Himalaya has no real caves because geologically it's very young range, but there'd be enormous rocks with a big crack in them and caves would be underneath, or there'd be leaning rocks. And that's where we spent a lot of time to get out of the weather. to get out of the weather.

So, yeah. Up in that area, what other life did you guys encounter? Would you guys eat for food and that sort of thing? Well, we used local food. Potatoes grow everywhere. The British introduced potatoes. Potatoes, every share of it grows, lots of potatoes. And then we had a couple of men and runners.

They would run back down 30, 40 miles to lower elevations, pick up chickens, eggs, vegetables, fruit and they're constantly doing that supplying us wild raspberries while strawberries up there and then the animal life is entirely dependent upon the elevation and in the forests there were leopard lots of bear black bear we saw wolves a couple of times jackal which is the equivalent of the coyote here Langer Monk and The grey monkeys, they go up to about 14,000. It's a great big monkeys. It weighs about 50 pounds.

Lower down the brown monkeys. Some deer and wild boar, quite high. And then the animals cause phasing out as you go higher and higher. And eventually up at about 16,000 little rodents called mouse herres, and they live in the rocks. And that's as high as animals go. We see birds higher than that.

that we see crows sometimes. There's a red beet crow. We see them up at 18, 19,000, 20,000. And we were in the 10 to 15,000 foot levels, most of the time. It's where the forest is. Dense forests. We wouldn't believe it. Dens far, rotodendrum forests, ferns, juniper.

And as you get higher, you get into dwarf, dwarf forests, and then you get mace, and then you get lichen, and it fades out at very high, 16, 17,000. There's a sound growth. And the Yeti, and all the reports were in forests, not up in the snow. It was called the snowman. There's nothing up there that I'd like to eat. All the reports we had were in forested areas.

How did you feel about Brian Sykes study saying that that Yeti, or that Yeti or that hair is a bear? I was fascinating. I met him. He came and stayed with me a couple of months ago. And I think he's doing incredible work. So you've got a couple of hairs. He got one from Bhutan, I think, and one from Nepal. And he thus far as it as a prehistoric bear,

prehistoric polar bear maybe, and a present-day bear. So, but not a Yeti, not a primate. So there may be, an unknown as species of bear in Nepal, there may be. And I think there may be some expeditions to look for it. So all we ever saw was black bear. It's a big black bear with a white Vianist's chess. 200 pounds, 250 pounds.

There's another bear in Tibet, there's a blue bear in Tibet. And then you go further north, it's a brown bear. But the common, the two common bears in Nepal, in the jungles, is the sloth bear, a big shaggy creature, and up in the mountains the black bear with a white tree. There's two species of bear there. Quite harmless, animals, quite shy. When was it that you stopped in you with Sasquatch and thought, you know there's something to this?

made you put forth the time and effort into, because there had to have been a moment, because I know you haven't had a sighting, right? No, I'm not at a sighting. So, for you to spend so much time on it, what was it in your mind where you went? You know what? There's something to this.

There's something. Well, you've asked me like two questions there. One, you know, what kept me going, the hope of finding one. That's what kept me going. I'm fascinated, even though I'm fascinated by it. And I still hike, and the camera's out, and I enjoy it. I find it's exciting. The prospect,

of seeing one least things, encountering one. Tom Slicks, a great dream was communication. If you could find one and communicate, but that was his great dream. And that's what keeps me going, really. So,

and I still enjoy it. As far as the Sasquatch goes, what got you, what made you turn on that? Was it just a fascination of finding one? Or there had to be something to make you go, you know what, there's something to do this, I'm going to put my time and effort into this.

Yeah, I think it, When we first started in the 60s was meeting people, we said they'd see my eyewitnesses and sitting down with them and interviewing them and believing their stories. Not all of them, of course. Many cases it was imagination, people seeing cows, people seeing bears, people seeing stumps on the side of the road in a driving. But I interviewed not thousands of people. I may be interviewed 150 in the Altiga, that's all, that's all, that's all, that's all, that's all, that's all, that's all credible. And their stories convinced me that there's something there, that all those people, state policemen, deputy sheriffs, engineers, surveyors, lawyers, lawyers, two judges, a doctor, all kinds of people. I'm convinced, saw a man in the first suit or an unknown private.

They did see something. I really believe that. Straight in the audience telling the story. So I believe they saw something. And the possibility of a man that's dress is pretty remote, I think. So I think they really... And that's that background.

The historical background. We had a woman down there who worked for us, an Indian woman. Betty Allen was her name. And she did a lot of digging. I dug up stuff from 40, 50 years ago, 100 years ago. She was a newspaper woman. And that stuff was fascinating. So there is a background, I said. It didn't start. In 1959, didn't start here.

There's lots of stuff from the 30s and 20s way back. That was convincing. Then the footprints we found. It was very convincing to me. And then along came to 67 film, which I think is real. And then since then, more sightings, more interviews. It was an honor. Thank you so much for... Oh, my pleasure. It was an honor to meet you. It was an honor to sit down and talk with you. Thank you. Retnamolus, one of the main speakers this year at Beachfoot.

By day he works as a professor and has a PhD in psychology. I'm Retman Mullis and I live in the Seattle area and I've been doing Bigfoot stuff for 37 years. And I'm here at Beachfoot 2014. He tells us about his fascination with the subject and how it began with his sight. as a child. I was 10 years old. We had just moved from Treasure Island, which is in the San Francisco area, to Wibbe Island.

We've been in a naval air station. My dad was a career Navy. And we did that in 76. And by summer of 77, we were taking a ferry ride from Seattle up to Victoria, which is on Vancouver Island, near where John Bendernego lives. and I was on the back of the ferry on the observation deck on what would be the starboard side considering its direction of movement

and we were sitting, we were crossing through the Admiralty Inlet area which is where the peninsula is here and we're going up this way up the Admiralty Inlet and I was on that observation deck but I don't know 15, 20 other people and I was looking actually out of the other people and I was looking actually towards Port Townsend and, or Port Angeles, and someone says, what's that aware of there? So, of course, instinctively, we all turn to see where this person's pointing,

and in the middle of the wake was this big black man swimming towards Wood the Island. So I would be going east. And there were various comments, and is that a way? whale, no, it can't be a well, it's got arms. And yeah, the arms are pretty plainly visible from when we first saw it. And because as we kept traveling away from me, it was obviously getting smaller as it kept swimming. And of course, in the wake, it was quite white water, it was a lot of white water. But that made him stand out even more because the contrast of him being big and black in the white water.

But someone finally said, I think that's one of them Bigfoot things. I don't know what a Bigfoot is. I pretty much grew up in the desert. So, because before we, we only lived in San Francisco a very short time because my dad being Korea Navy. But we spent most of my life either in, like, Southern California or Arizona and a little bit of Florida when I was younger. So I never had any kind of knowledge of all that. And when he said the word Bigfoot, I'm like, I don't know what that was. And that's why I started reading about it.

Matter of fact, some of the first books I started reading about were John Grub. Marines books. And that just got me started. And it wasn't until after I got out of the Navy, I was living in Utah, that I really took it back up again to really start reading more and learning more. And that's when I started SIR Bigfoot, Sasquatch Investigations and Research, which really didn't do much because in Utah, nobody didn't want to talk about it. Nobody didn't want to do anything about it. So as far as I knew, maybe it wasn't Bigfoot's in Utah. Now we know better. and then it was in 88 that I came back to Washington, and of course that's probably in Bigfoot territory,

and started doing a little more seriously, and by the time we got into the early 90s, I started doing field experiments, and came up with the proximity experiment, which was very successful, and it just kind of progressed from there. SIR Bigfoot, after I went back to school, and I became a research psychologist,

just in a professor, I decided, you know, I'm going to bring the whole science realm into this. And so we switched SIR Bigfoot, which was pretty much really defunct at that point anyway. They just switched it all over to Bigfootology because I wanted to use a name where it was very easily associated all around the world. Because, you know, there's a thousand names for Bigfoot all around the world. But nobody knows what those names are. But everybody knows what the term Bigfoot means. So that's why I didn't use soft squash, or hominology, because most people don't know what the heck hominology is either.

Like, was it play music? You know? Yeah, let's get my banjo out. So anyway, so everybody can identify, whether they like the word or not, they can still identify what it is. And so that's what we did. I mean, the study of the Bigfoot phenomenon, the reason why I say phenomenon,

is not just about the creature itself and what it is and its behavior, but also about the history of it and the psychology about what drives us the community itself, which is why Friday night I was talking about the community as a whole social ramifications of the Bigfoot world because it has transformed all of our lives, hasn't it? That's not.

Have you had any settings since that first one? Okay. In 97 we were we went out to the Tulalip-Illian Reservation in Marysville, which is just north of Everett, Washington. And my research partner at the time was Jerry Holman, who was an old Adak Indian, Inuit and Indian. And he taught me a lot.

Cry frankly, I forgot most of it. But anyway, he taught me a lot, and he was a lot of fun to work with. He was 63 years old, and I was 30, and that boy could outrun me like I was nothing. But he grew up around these things, And his sister was the caretaker of a quarry. They don't use a quarry anymore. I was a caretaker there.

And he was telling me that she had prior reports and them coming up and knocking on her trailer. You know, typical Bigfoot behavior peeking in the windows, that type of thing. And it was a beautiful day like today, sunny, you know, and warm. So my girlfriend at the time and her son, myself and Jerry, we all went down to his sisters and paid her visit. I did my basic interview with her, and she was talking about all the different places

she'd seen them around the quarry. So we decided to take a walk after that, and when we walked out, when you walked out of a trailer, I used to have all this stuff laid out on the Internet so you actually see what I'm talking about. But when we walked out, the first start part we walked through to get to the quarry pond area, was a patch of old growth with the canopy that she had to drive through,

but we were just walking. And as we were walking through it, it wasn't very far, maybe 40, 50, 60 feet, somewhere in that range. And we got about halfway through, and I got that heavy, musky whiff. By now, by that time, I was like, I've smelled that enough, then I'm like, I know what I'm smelling. I'm like, well, this is promising. So, as usual, I went in the wrong direction.

I went to, it would have been, I guess, the south side of the road into the woods, and there was nothing in there. So I turned around and walked across the road, which is, again, not very far, it's just a little singling thing, and dirt road. And I walked in the other side, and it was one of the, and up to that point in time, I saw within 10, 15 feet of walking into the woods was the biggest nesting area I've ever seen in my life. It was enough for like four or five creatures. It was massive.

and it was quite rank and well pressed down. And that was cool. I spent a few minutes in there checking it out, and I came back out and told them what I saw. And I just pointed right to it because now that you know where it's at, you can actually see through the trees from the road where they are. And so that was exciting. And Jerry came back out with me, and we kept walking down.

And you go about another 30, 40, 50 feet, and the road takes a hard turn because there's this garage here. And then next to the garage is this quarry pond. And at the back of the quarry pond was a little more like a marsh. And in the middle of this thing was this nine-foot-tall, blackberry, raspberry, whatever type of bush. You know what I'm talking about. It makes this big, huge dome.

And then on the edge of the quarry pond here was this line of trees, just like a thin line. And then you had the quarry wall out along here, and it tapers down to the forest all through there. And it was forest above the ridge, too, up on the line. Anyway, we get past that outbuilding, and we're just walking along where the quarry pond is. And all of a sudden, Jerry bends down and goes, look at that! Just yells it out, and we all instinctively turn.

And there she is sitting next to this blackberry raspberry bush, whatever it is. I'm not a botan, so I just know it was one of those stickly berry bushes. And she's sitting there, and she looks up, and it was really, really graceful. She had breaths. That's how we knew it was a female. She didn't have any tackle downstairs. So she stood up like it was just effortless and did one turn. And she stepped.

She was behind the barrette. She was just gone that fast. But it was not like she was bolting. She was just Bing, Bing, Bing. It was just like that. Real casual. And Jerry and I at that point ran around the south end of that quarry pond where that tree line was. And got up to where she was.

and the part where she was was not very wide, maybe about maybe 10 feet, if I remember right, between the dry land and the blackberry bush. And you can see where she was sitting because all the reeds were just the lilies were just pressed down because there were lily pads.

And then you can see where she stepped because those lily pads, and they're now black spots, you know, as you walked up. And when we got up to that point where we were at that blackberry bush, we could see, because the outbuilding now is here,

we could see the back of the outbuilding, the blackberry bush, and the tree in the forest here, and we saw her walk right up into the woods right there, which we discovered, I saw the road here, and I said, Jerry, you stay here, and I ran back, got my Jeep, drove around, and met him there, picked him up, and we saw why she went into the woods right there

because there's actually trails that go through there. And there was one trail that was wide enough for me to drive my Jeep on, and so I broke out my sound equipment and we're driving along just, I'm literally just creeping and I had my sound equipment out and it's just an amplified box is how it was with the earphones

and I can hear the snap, crackle, pop and I could hear her breathing like just a freight tray real deep and real methodic and at one point I told Jerry says hold your breath because I can't tell if this is us being overly excited or her

so we both held our breath and it never stopped. Snap, cracker, I go, and we just kept, this went on for, it was over an hour. I don't remember exactly how long anymore, but it was definitely over an hour. And we just slowly kept creeping through this forest. And what I keep telling people today is we lost her, because we stopped hearing the sound when we got to this clear-cut area. We were still in the woods, but you could see through the tree line, like maybe 100 feet away,

it was all clear-cut out. And so we really didn't know we were at that, point in time. And we stayed there and stayed there and we just didn't see anything, couldn't hear anything. And today, if you know that area, it's, that area actually literally is the I-5 corridor and where the clear-cutter area now sits, so Walmart and Cabela's and and a casino. So that's why I keep telling people, if you're, if you know what you're looking for and you're in the right areas, you don't have to go far to see these things because they're all around us.

You know, and I'm not one of these people that believe it's a Bigfoot behind every tree either. I'm the ones that usually gets people mad because I'm going, probably not. You know, let's look at the real stuff. And forget about exaggerating all the silly stuff. Brendan Mullis has been involved in Sasquatch research for many years.

So I thought it was appropriate to ask him, what do you think Bigfoot is? It's alive. It's bipedal. It's hairy, and we learned that from all this study that we did that their hair is, if you see clumps of hair, it's not a bigfoot hair. Bigfoot hair are single strands. So we got a lot of those samples in. I found a clump of hair.

No, well, that's more like sheep. But Bigfoot hair is very human-like in terms of its single strands. It doesn't shed. It has to break off or be pulled off. And so what else do we know? Their genitalia is very similar to ours, and their facial features are very similar to ours. What are they? We have no idea. And as a scientist, I'll never give you a definite, because we still don't have that golden

mirror to tell it. That's why we did the DNA project, so we can determine exactly what they are. So what are they? They have to be closer to humans. Where are they fit in the genus of everything? I have no idea. And as a scientist, I'm not going to tell you. because of that one point of information, this is where Grover and I started, you know, disagreeing was,

I didn't believe they were Jaggedaphythicus at that point. Well, where are they? I don't know. That's how I'm trying to find out, Grover. You know, stop yelling at me. I miss him. He was a lot of fun. Well, thank you right now.

Appreciate it very much. All right. All right. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. It was really pleasure to me, too. Thank you.

It was a pleasure to me, yeah. What was my favorite moment? from Beachfoot 2014. Here's where I'm supposed to say something like hanging out with Bob Gimlin,

meeting Peter Byrne and hanging out with him by the fire talking about different encounters. Hanging out with Ron Moorhead. No, my favorite moment from Beachfoot 2014 was hanging out with

Shane Corson from Cryptologic Radio and my brother Woody. I laughed more on Saturday night than I have in the last two years. Beachfoot 2014 is about good times and good people. Until next time, everyone.

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