Sasquatch Chronicles - SC EP:529 The Beasts of Britain

Episode Date: March 31, 2019

Andy McGrath, is a Cryptozoology 'Enthusiast' with over 25 years of research and obsession about the unknown creatures living right under our noses, here on this tiny island in the North Atlantic. From a wildlife point of view, the accepted fauna of The British Isles were discovered and catalogued in their finite and immoveable state in the 19th century. Nothing has really been added to this list or considered worthy since and the continual reports of Water Monsters, Bigfoot, Mystery Big Cats and UFC's (Unidentified Flying Cryptids) are largely ignored or used as newspaper fillers to entertain us. Andy's focus is on current research and recent sightings, pictures, videos and eyewitness accounts of the many cryptids of the British Isles. Although vast advancements in science and technology have brought great discoveries in other lesser known parts of the world, our island lies largely underexplored and overlooked. At night, outside of the busy cities and next to the unlit lakes and lonely mountains it is an island in darkness, where nobody ventures into the woods anymore and the pervading paradigm scares all but the most foolhardy scientists away from any serious investigation of the many yet to be discovered – Beasts Of Britain Author of Beasts of Britain, Speaker and field investigator, he is also currently working on his own TV series under the same name: Beasts of Britain and his new podcast: Beastly Theories, featuring low key interviews with researchers around the world, whilst also continuing his passion for writing about cryptids and out of place animals in other parts of the world. His new Beasts of Britain map(featuring the beautiful art of Brett Manning) is now also available to purchase online. The second edition of Beasts of Britain will be released in February 2019, featuring new artwork, photos, chapters and expeditions; and his new title: 'Beasts of North America', is planned for release in December 2019.   Check Out Beasts of Britain On Paperback

Black thing go from left to right, and I thought, I'm going to die out here and no one's ever going to know. I couldn't believe what my eyeballs was showing me. I'll never forget how evil the eyes were. It was horrible. I mean, I've never seen nothing that evil. It ran towards me at a rate that I can't even explain, turned and stared at me. And this look of, I just want to kill you. I want to say it was human, but it wasn't.

He was yelling at me to grab a gun, grab a gun. I was like, for what? He said, just grab a gun. And there's footprints all the way to the door of my house. It had went inside my garage all the way to the door. 911, what are you reporting? Get somebody out here. What's going on now, sir? That son of a bitch is about six foot, nine, I don't know.

Do you see him now, sir? Yes, I'm looking right at him. You're listening to Sasquatch Chronicles. Check us out online at Sasquatch Chronicles.com. If you've had an encounter, email me. My email address is Wes at Sasquatch Chronicles.com. Welcome to the show, everyone. Thanks for being here tonight.

Get a great show plan for you tonight. Is Sasquatch in the UK? We'll find out tonight when we talk to Andy McGrath. He's the author of Beasts of Britain. If you get a chance to go to Amazon and check it out, A Beast of Britain, Andy's been looking into reports. And he brought us tonight reports of dogmen, Sasquatch, all the stuff he's gotten from the UK. Should be a fascinating night.

If you've had an encounter and you'd like to be on the show, shoot me an email. My email address is Wes at Sasquatch Chronicles.com. And if you get a chance to check out Sasquatch Chronicles.com, you can become a member and get additional shows. Before we get to Andy, I want to jump to Chad, and Chad actually had a pretty recent encounter in Arkansas. Chad is actually current military. Didn't really believe in Bigfoot. Had some friends that asked him to go out with them, and they had a lot of strange things happen that night. Chad, welcome to the show.

Thanks for coming on. Hey, what's going on, Wes? Oh, not a whole lot, man. I appreciate you being here, and I know your encounter took place in Arkansas. a couple years back. If you would, would you start from the beginning? Kind of tell us what you were doing and walk us into what happened if you would.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So went home on leave back in 2015. I was stationed in Georgia and my native to Arkansas and went home on leave back around May of 2015 to go visit my family during my brother's high school graduation. And my brother reached out to me. He's like, hey, man, we're going up to these. a mountain with a group of guys and they're bigfoot hunters.

And I was like, wait, what? Come on. He was like, yeah, hey, yeah, man. Like, it's legit. I was like, all right, whatever. I've got nothing going on. So I got with you and hang out with you. And so I didn't have a vehicle because I flew in. So I persuaded my dad.

Like, hey, can I take your truck? He's like, yeah, yeah, go for it. Just, you know, keep it clean. Be careful. I just bought it. I was like, yeah, yeah, no worries. So we follow these two other. other guys up this mountain and it took about let's see about four hours just to get up the mountain

it was like goat trails going up this mountain in this truck and we got to the very top of this mountain and this isn't like the foothills of the Ozarks I'm not sure how familiar you are west with Arkansas not much out there you've got like the swamps down south you have the northeast near Oklahoma the Ozarks up near Missouri and then the west is more like rice fields and flats by the Mississippi River. So we're more up in the northwest part of the state and the photos of the Ozarks. So we get up on this mountain and it's like a plateau looking area. It's pretty flat. And they're like, yeah, we're going to make camp here. I was like, yeah, it looks good. So we start pitching tents and get everything set up. And while I'm pitching a tent, I happen to look and there's like a goat

trail, kind of a trail that kind of veers back off. And it's about maybe 25, 50 yards for me. And it kind of cuts back to the left down this hill. And I just happened to look up and I saw something kind of hunched over crossing the road about 25, 50 yards in front of me. And it kind of caught me off guard, but it, I mean, it moved so natural. Like, I wouldn't even know how to describe it. The way it moved. It just looked like it belonged there, the way I tell people.

And when it, I guess it saw me look at it and it kind of went faster down the hill. But I wasn't able to see like any facial features. But I did see for sure two legs and two arms and kind of a curved back. Height wise, probably six and a half to seven feet bent over. And coloration, the best way to describe it is almost like the color of a like cotton tail rabbit. kind of some brown and gray and some black underlying fur underneath it. And the sun was definitely shining off of it. So there's no shadows or anything.

So I brought us to their attention. I was like, hey, hey, I just seen something. They're like, no way. Like, you're brand new to this, Chad. Like, you've never did this before. I've got no clue what I'm looking for. I was like, no, no, guys, I'm being for real. Like, I just seen something across the road.

It was like, all right, well, let's go check it out. So we walk up to the side. I'm like, yeah, it crossed right. there was any tracks or anything and they're like well it must have went back down into this valley so we we kind of went down the hill and into this valley there's a bunch of gourds and pumpkins that had been tossed in this valley and whatever it was it was gone I was like well that's it's pretty interesting and they're like you sure it wasn't a deer like no it's too tall to be a deer they're like a bear I was like no it wasn't walking like a bear it was walking way too fast to be a black bear

So you're sure like it was bipedal. I was like, yeah, I'm telling you, it was bipedal, hunched forward like he was carrying something. And the guy who was leading the camping trip, he's a pretty well-known researcher in the state of Arkansas. I won't use his name or anything just for privacy. He's a pretty well-known researcher in Arkansas, is him and his son.

And the gentleman said, you know, maybe he was carrying these gourds and pumpkins when we came across it. and startled it, and it crossed the road, dropped what is carrying and took off. So later that night, about this time, I think the siding probably occurred around like noon, 1 o'clock, and a few hours had passed, and we had built the fire. We were cooking some like hot dogs and some different meats and stuff on open fire. And the sun became the set, and they were like, all right, you know, it's time for bed. and I was pretty tired because traveling, you know, home on leave.

I've been flying a pretty long day. So decided to go rack out in the tent. And I heard them talking after I fell asleep. I woke up to people talking. They were talking about something down in the valley. And I got out of the tent. I was like, hey, like, what's going on? They're like, well, you know, we heard some wood knocks.

I was like, what's a wood knock? And like, oh, you know, it's a way they communicate. They beat on trees. They're either communicating or warding something off. I was like, wait, what? And they're like, yeah, if you listen, you can hear it, like, take place under this valley. And we were high enough up on this mountain that you can look down into the valley. And you could see lights that there are cars come in or other campers.

And there's nothing out there. I'd tell you, like, we're like the only people out there. And so sure enough, like 30 minutes pass and you hear, you know, clock, clock, clock, just three, like really hard knocks. and it was probably, it sounded maybe like a mile off, two miles off. And I was like, well, do y'all have like guns or anything? And they're like, no, we don't bring guns, you know. And like, well, how big is this creature? And they're like, you know, they range from six feet to eight feet to some encounters being 12 feet.

And like, how much are they weigh? And they're like, you know, they start spitting off all these statistics. And I was like, and you don't bring guns with y'all? They're like, no, we're not too worried about it. I was like, well, hold up, hold up. You know, this is getting kind of crazy. So then they begin to call. The guy leading the group, the guy that's a pretty well-known researcher,

he begins to do like a series of whoops and like howls. And so he does his call, about 30 seconds to a minute goes by, and something calls back. And it's like a low, like, whir. I was like, what in the world was that? Like, I look at my brother. I was like, dude, like, what was that? He's like, man, that's it.

That's what I'm talking about. I'm like, you know, it could be a bear, it could be an elk. Like, no, no, listen to it again. I'm thinking coyote, you know, there's a series of animals that live in those arcs. Nothing I've ever heard. I'm a pretty avid outdoorsman. Nothing even compared to what that sounded like. I've never heard it before.

So a few minutes passed by about maybe 10, 50 minutes, and they do it again. And it responds back with another, roh. and this time it's closer. And another 30 minutes passes by. They do it again, and it calls back. And this time it's even closer. By this time, it's maybe what sounds like half a mile away. And so they proceeded to do it one more time,

and it calls back. And this time it's probably maybe less than a quarter of a mile. And this plateau we were kind of set up camp on. It went down to that valley I was telling you about, or that we found the pumpkins. And there's a pretty steep drop off, like anywhere from, you know, a 60 foot drop to kind of a 30 foot drop,

pretty steep. So it would be really hard for a deer or a bear to, you know, like maneuver through that, let alone a human. So they call again, and this time, it means like right up on us. And you can start hearing branches just crack, crack. You know, sounds like something's stepping

in the underbrush to foil. and you can hear it stomping around and it's like right upon us and it sounds like it's climbing up this pretty steep embankment and it's obviously pitch black at night and we don't have flashlights or anything shining down there but it sounds like you can hear it breathing just and it stops and it seemed like man like the longest 10 to 15 seconds my life of just quietness and it was almost like it knew like we were there and it stopped breathing, it stopped moving. And it was like, I don't know if the wind shifted or if it could see us or knew like we weren't what he thought it was. And it just takes off running, just takes off running down this really steep embankment.

And I mean, you can hear it just crash, crash, crash, crash. And just be really going to town on these trees, just snapping branches, taking off. we didn't hear anything the rest of the night. And the group I was with, they pretty much agreed. They're like, yeah, whatever that was, if it was a big foot, it's not coming back. And I was like, yeah, that was pretty scary. That's not cool. So we decided to go back to bed and me and my brother go back to our tent.

And the guy leading the group, his son, they go back to their tent. about an hour or two passes. About this time, it's probably maybe 2 a.m. in the morning, and it becomes a thunderstorm. And this is in the summer, May of 2015. So the ground itself is pretty dry. So the water accumulates really fast, and a flash flood is pretty common in these areas. So it becomes this really, really big thunderstorm. And, I mean, the rain's coming down hard.

the wind's blowing there's thunder there's lightning and i'm in a tent and all i can think about is whatever that was is probably outside right now and you know i wake up to the lightning and um in my mind i'm thinking like i'm just waiting on that lightning to crack get that silhouette or whatever that was you know against this tent and the tent's moving back and forth because the wind and the rain and it rains so much that the tent that the tent we were in, the water started coming into the tent from all the rain coming off the mountain. And the tent stakes we had pitched, we're starting to get pretty loose from all the water.

So I told my brother, I was like, hey, man, let's go out of the tent. It's about to, like, flood. There's a good chance we could get pushed off the edge of this plateau. So we go to our truck and decided to sleep in the truck. I kind of lean the seat back and he leans his seat back on the passenger side. And another hour passes. It's probably about this time, 3, 4 a.m.

And I've gotten maybe an hour and a half of sleep. And I wake up to little pebbles, like rocks, not really like big rocks, but, I mean, significant it made a sound being flicked at the truck. You hear tink, tink, tink. And I'm just thinking, like, man, this thing's about to send a boulder through this truck. or whatever this is doing, like, my dad's going to kill me when I bring this truck back and it's got like dents all in it and the shattered windshield.

So I'm thinking, you know, maybe it's the group we're with. Maybe they're trying to get my attention. So I'll look up the window. They're still in their tent. I don't see anything. It proceeds to happen again. Tink. And this went on for about 30 minutes. And it stopped.

I remember going back to sleep. And then I woke up right around sunrise. around 6 a.m. And I was ready to get off that mountain, I'd tell you. Like, if it went in a storm that night, I'd have probably got off that mountain. But it being that dark, that wet. I didn't want to take the truck down the mountain and risk driving off a cliff or something. So we woke up the next morning, and I noticed a pretty significant, like, hand,

it looked like a handprint, but like a smudge going across the driver's window down the front door of the truck. and it wasn't for me, it wasn't for my brother. I'm thinking like whatever that was that visited us that night, I think it came up to the truck. It had really, really like nasty, muddy, dirty handprint all over the truck. We were going off the mountain, so the next morning, it's probably like 7 a.m. We got all our stuff together, us and the group go down the mountain, and we get maybe 100, 200, 200 yards from our camps,

was and there were tracks everywhere like a lot of tracks and the group I was with they went up going back later that week and they casted a bunch of them ever since that moment West I've just been hooked you know all it takes is that that one good moment

and you realize like hey this thing's real yeah you had a hell of the night man because you didn't really believe in Bigfoot prior to this did you? I didn't like I heard stories growing up in Arkansas you know like Boggy Creek growing up You know, the elderly people tell you like, yeah, stay out the woods. You know, the woodbrookers will get you.

But you think it's just probably like wives tales, you know, you don't really consider it too much. Yeah. I mean, before that, like, I had no knowledge of what that was or what it could be, you know? Yeah. Well, take a gun with you. I mean, just because these guys don't, doesn't mean, you know what I mean? You can run into a lot more than just big, foot out there. And sometimes they're not the happy, friendly, you know, sometimes when they show up,

they're pissed, especially when you're calling them, you're banging on trees. A lot of times when they show up, they're not happy when they show up. Yeah. It's almost like, hey, I've been, like, you know, deceived. Yeah. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. It's a lot like that. Have you gone back to that area? I haven't. No, I haven't. I've tried several times, and just part of me, I don't know, I think maybe that was like my one freebie, you know? And listening to your show, like I've heard of other, you know, people's encounters. And I just, I consider myself very fortunate because that could have went a lot worse than what it did, you know? Yeah, I think a lot of times when you're in a group, they seem to be more cautious.

And that's my opinion. But they seem to be more cautious, a little bit less apt to come in and really cause a fight, you know, when there's more than one people, more than one person. And your brother was with you? Yeah. So my brother, he's going to college to be a zoologist, trying to major in like primatology. So study of primates. And we were talking and he kind of got involved with his group.

And he's like, yeah, man, like, this is real. And I want to be one of the first like primatologists to really discover this and, you know, dedicate my life to it. What do you think that they are, Chad? What do you think Saskatch is? So based off my research, Wes, take it for a grain of salt, you know. From what I understand, from what I've heard, I think they're a variant of gigantic epithelous. That's my honest opinion.

I think at one time when the land bridge connected Asia and North America, these group of primates crossed this land bridge into the North American continent. I think over time, they've adapted to whatever surrounding. they're in because west if you you look at like the pacific variant the guys over in y'all's you know side of the the country um a lot of people have very similar accounts of them being a lot bigger and certain color variations where you call like down south to where i'm from you know arkansas georgia florida louisiana you have more of the what they call the woodbigger like the skunkake variant and then you have the the east coast up near north carolina you know, up toward Maine and Maryland,

they seem to be very like smaller bodied. A lot of people I've talked to here in North Carolina claim they're about six and a half feet. A seven footer is like a pretty good size mill. And then more toward the central area of the U.S., you have like the grassman kind of variations. So I think just like any other mammal, as they kind of progressed over time,

they adapted to their area. And I always tell people, it's like kind of like deer. You know, you have white-tailed deer, mule deer, black-tailed deer, sick-deer, coos deer. They all kind of, you know, adapt to the area they're in, but they all come from the common origin of deer, right? I think it's the same with Sasquatch. At one time, they were giganticus, and as animals adapt and evolve, you know, they progress and change. So that's my honest opinion on what I believe they are.

Yeah, you know, well, it's an interesting take. You could be right. Definitely could be right. They act a lot like primates, don't they? They do, yeah. A lot like gorillas. So, I mean, I understand when people say that because guerrillas will throw things at you. They'll bluff charge you.

They'll, they're very curious. They'll come in and see what you're doing. And, you know, I can see why you go that route. Do you have any plans on going back, even though you haven't been back? So honestly, I think maybe eventually, I mean, I'm sitting in the whole military thing. so it's kind of hard. I don't get to go home very often. But when I do, it's very like time crunch.

So I think one day I'll definitely go back. Just because that area they're in, I think they're going to stay there because it's a very secluded area, middle of nowhere up in the Ozarks. So I don't think they're going anywhere soon. So I definitely think maybe one day I'll get back up there and check it out.

But I'll definitely go with a group of people definitely bring some firearms with me when I do go. Yeah, it's always good as a precautionary. You know what I mean? Plus, you could even run into some crazy guy out there. Your gun would be nice to have, you know. Those Arkansas people are crazy. Well, I got an audience in Arkansas.

I won't go that far. But, yeah, you'll have to keep me up to date. Will you let me know if you end up going back. I'd love to know what happens. And it's a terrifying night, man, especially when you don't really believe it it's quite the eye-opener, isn't it? And, you know, I'm luckily in the military,

I'm in the position where I get to meet people like I was telling you other night from all around the world, all walks of life. And they all have the same stories as it blows my mind. You know, I was in Southeast Asia last year and I got to talk to a group of Philippines, Filipino Marines,

and they all had similar stories of a smaller creature, you know, that they lived in the Philippines. And pretty interesting, pretty interesting group of people I was talking to. And definitely like an eye opener. Like, wow, you know, there's definitely something going on when you got people from all around the world and all over the U.S. coming up with stories. Yeah, it is. You know, it's in China. It's in Russia.

Andy McGrath coming up here shortly. And, I mean, they're in the U.K. They seem to be everywhere. You know, I talked to a guy one time from Vietnam. And I was telling about the different types and, you know, kind of what we have here. And he was like, big deal. We've had that over here for forever. And he started talking about what they have over there.

You know, so it's bizarre. I mean, even Australia, they seem to be everywhere, some form of type of them. You know, I mean, it may not be the Patterson Gimlin running around, but some form of type. You know what I mean? Yeah. So, you know, I always ask people, how many species of ape do we know? And they'd be like, oh, you know, gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans, and if you include bonobos. But I'll ask him, like, how many species of antelope do we have?

Oh, there's hundreds. Okay, how many species of rodents do we have? Oh, there's hundreds. So why is there only three species that we know of apes? And I tell people, you know, look at the fossil record. You know, at one time there were, you know, several hundreds of groups of large primates running around. And, you know, I honestly think what, what, we're finding could be a remnant of those, you know, species. And a lot of people ask me, well,

you know, why are they so secluded? Why are people going to keep them, you know, away from other people? And, you know, I think I listened to your show, it's been a few weeks ago, I was just in one of your episodes, and the logging industry, you know, it would be crucial to the logging industry if we ever discovered a species of, you know, living in our national forest. It, I think, the logging industry is like a billion dollar, $200 industry every year. Just imagine like how much money they would lose if we discover an ape living in the forest. Definitely have a good point. Well, be safe out there and I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your encounter, man.

Thank you again. I appreciate it. Look forward to talking to you, Wes. Well, I want to welcome Andy McGrath to the show. He's the author of Beast of Britain. And he also hosts a podcast I didn't know about. So if you're out there looking for another podcast, it's called Beastly Thories. That's right.

Is it on iTunes, Andy? It is on iTunes. Podbean is the host, and you can find it on iTunes as well. I got you. Beasley theories, and definitely check out his book, Bees of Britain. Andy, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. Very, very happy to be here. Yeah, I'm really happy to have you here. You know, I was telling you before we went on the air about Claire's account. It was episode 515. I shouldn't be alive. And she's from the UK. She had an encounter here in California. And I'd made the comment throughout the show. I said, well, what did you think you ran into? Because you guys don't really have Sasquatch in the UK, do you? And I said, I really haven't looked into it, but I don't know if you guys have it there or not. And it was one of those moments where you put your foot in your mouth. Literally the next day, I think every Bigfoot researcher in the UK emailed me and gave me what for. And I was like, sorry, guys, I just haven't looked into it. Who cares what I think anyway? There's nothing like being told off online by a bunch of British people.

Most polite telling off your litigation. It was. It was, yeah. What got you interested in looking into this? I mean, being from the UK, and a caveat to that, you know, I talked to Deborah Hatzwell and I asked her to send me encounters from the UK. And I was a little taken back by the amount of encounters are going on there. But what got you into it, Andy?

For me, I was kind of late to the British Bigfoot Party. I got into, obviously, cryptosology as a young teen. I'm 43 now, almost. So as a young teen, they got into Loch Ness Monster and things like that. You know, the Paddy, the Patterson Gimlin footage, all of those regular sit-ins, the In Search of Program, Arthur C. Clark, the whole thing. And I collected sightings. And whenever there was something in the newspaper around the world and in the UK,

I'd collect the clipping or I'd make an email note of what had been seen and investigated. And I've been working in the centre of London in private healthcare for 10 years since 2009 now. But what happened in 2016 is I actually kind of had this. My wife calls it my midlife crisis or my 40 fever. I just got really bored. I wanted to do something different. And she said, you know, what about these monsters? they're into.

Why didn't you write something about that? So I said, okay, I'll look into it. And I'd already been challenged by an American friend before this to prove that there were more cryptids in the UK than just messy and things like that. So I had another gauntlet outstanding too. So Lake Monaster's was my thing and I started looking to that and other things like unidentified flying cryptids. And I came upon the British Bigfoot.

I'd only ever heard of two or three sightings, one of which, was accompanied by a photograph in 2015. And, you know, I was thinking, it's a tramp, it's a crazy person out of the woods. This doesn't sound right. And I had caught the finding Bigfoot British episode before, and I thought they were ridiculous to come here. And yet, you know, here we are with these sightings.

I got in touch with Neil Young, who featured in that program, and Deborah Hatswell and others. And I started to find all of these really, really interesting sightings, which to my mind as a Sasquatch fan for so long, all of the descriptions matched the behavior, the appearance of the North American Sasquatch really well. And there was another facet to it that was very interesting, which was that the people in the UK, they didn't have big foot on the brain. So when they described them, they say it was like a giant chimpanzee on two legs,

or like a huge orangutan with a flat face standing up, seven feet tall. And it was a I thought, this is fascinating. You know, they don't have Bigfoot on the brain. It's not a hugely popular phenomenon here. And these people are reaching into their mental library of images and animals they know to try to describe something unknown. And this is better than somebody said, I saw Bigfoot, because they never say that word. And it just started from there. And the sightings, as you see from somebody like Deborah Hatzwell has been going for 40 years now.

And she's also a witness of this animal from the early 80s. sightings are in the hundreds, and they're descriptive and they're mundane. And what's important about them being mundane is they're not elaborate. These are general sightings, but people have got no interest in the subject. We just saw something they can't explain. Yeah, I noticed that too when Deborah sent me some of the encounters and I was going through them and listening to the eyewitnesses, they don't say Bigfoot and they don't say Sasquatch. They'll say Wild Man or Caveman.

I heard caveman a lot. Caveman. Gorilla. Gorilla. Two legs. Yeah. Arangetangetang, chimpanzees, same thing. Are you guys, when you collect these reports, are you noticing, like here in the United States, we have, it seems like in different areas, people describe them different ways.

Are you noticing a lot of that in England as far as? Then I have been asked about that question before. That's a little more difficult in the UK. because of the lack of Bigfoot of their brain, the descriptions I don't think are exactly matching the creatures. They're just the best attempt to describing them. Some, the colour seem to vary from black to that mousy, blonde colour that you get with lots of grey strips of hair and, you know, running throughout the, I say fur,

but running throughout its coat, which is a common feature. Even the orangutan-like orangey brown colour, the oberan. That's very noticeable. But the coloured variation seems to be what's most different about them. Most of them, where faces are described, a flat face is described. So something that looks almost like a ape, almost like a human, but has a separation of nose and mouth. It doesn't have a muzzle, which again is a classic Sasquatch description. So I wouldn't say there were different types.

If there are, we don't know about them. We don't have enough information. Yeah, one of the questions that always comes up or one of the arguments that always comes up from a lot of people in America regarding Sasquatch in the UK, which I find hilarious because it's the same people have never been to the UK. We'll make this argument. But they'll say there's not enough land in the UK for that. Or there's not enough cover for them. And I always say, well, we have them in Arizona. We have them in Nevada.

That's a desert. I mean, there's not a lot of cover out there either. But what do you say to someone who says, there's just not enough land in the UK for these things to be roaming around? Well, this was a big question at the beginning. Now, I live just on the outskirts of London. So somebody like me would assume that the entire country is peopleed and over-inhabited. And I looked into this.

And I wrote a little blog about it called What's with the Habitude? I wanted to find out. and what the situation was you're okay. So what I found was an assessment that was taken in 2012, and it was called the UK National Ecosystem Assessment. So it's a government assessment of the land. And what they were just surprised to discover was that only 6.8 of the UK's 6.8% of the UK's could actually be classified as urban.

And that included rural development and roads. So this was quite amazing. If you know what the makeup of the UK is, you have England, which is the most populated nation, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. Now, in England, what they should have found is 10.6% of England has urban sprawl covering it. 1.9% of Scotland has urban sprawl, 3.6% of Northern Ireland and 4.1% of Wales. So that's a whopping 93% of the UK that isn't actually urban. It's just, it's unused land. And we do have a lot of farmland, but hardly any of that is used for crop growing.

Most of it is wild grazing for sheep and cattle and things like that. So we've got 33.337 million sheep, thereabouts. Most of them graze wild, 4,000 wild boar, 63,000 breeding pairs of Canada geese, and you get an extra 192,000 in the winter. and now we have 37.5 million rabbits in the country. So it's just, and it's, you know, it's overflowing with wild deer and invasive deer species as well. So the amount of food in the country and all of the rivers and coast with shellfish and really well-stocked trout and salmon rivers too. It's, and hardly any large land predetition.

This is a really healthy environment. One point I want to add to that very quickly is that British people were not off the path kind of hikers. We've got very few wild campers. So mostly we stick to the paths. We don't go wandering off into the wilderness. And so I think there's a lot of space for something like this to quietly survive. Yeah, I didn't know that. I didn't know there was that much open land in the UK.

A lot. Yeah, a lot. And there is a history of it there, too. That's the other thing. The Wood Wows, the Green Man, the Green Man might be more legend, but, you know, legends come from somewhere. And so there is kind of a long history of a wild man in the U.K., you know, especially in Scotland. They taught, you know, I have a lot of listeners in Scotland. And when I first got into this, I was like, why so many people from Scotland listening? And then, but there is a long history of it there. Yeah, I was wondering, do you have encounters you want to share with us? Yes. Talking about Scotland, actually, there's a fantastic encounter in Scotland. Now, I was in Loch Ness just in January, and it's very close to that area. There's a place called Straths Bay Forest.

It's part of the old Caledonian Forest. Now, one of the people that follows my page got in touch with me, now he'd been a primate keeper for 37 years. and him and this brother, they used to go and wild camp and do some very sort of basic hunting rabbits and things, but they're a rifle. So there's small arms up in these forests in Scotland that used to be their family holiday every year, so to speak. Now, he had an experience. This is back in, I think it was 2012. I just double-checked the date.

Yes, 2012. Where he and his brother were actually while camping in this forest and they're going out one morning to hunt some rabbits. and they were creeping along and he'd made his brother stay behind a few steps because he had a really heavy footfall and suddenly he can't hear his brother walking behind him anymore so it looks back to see where he is

and he sees this look on his face he's never seen before eyes and mouth wide open looking straight past him now he looks to where his brother is looking there's a dark, thicker crouching down with its back to him

and it looks like it's eating some berries some blackberries from a bush or something like that from the way its shoulders are hunched over. And he's around five or two, this gentleman. He's not very tall. He's saying that the creature crouched down, look to be about that height. Then it raises its head a little, turns slightly to the side, as if it's listening, stands up, and turns and looks straight at him. He said it must have been about seven to eight feet tall, covered in jet black hair, except for the upper chest and face, and the skin was very dark. He did mention his bottom left actually looked a bit pink, which was quite interesting.

He had a wide nose and large eyes. And he said his features reminded him of an older bonobo chimpanzee. Only the face was much flatter, especially around the mouth. It was going bold on top. And he was terrified. He said he looked at this thing, completely terrified. He dropped his gun down and stared at the creature did. Slowly turned away and walked off into the forest.

He turned back to see that his brother was gone. It left him actually. And run back to the car. And I guess each of us react to a crisis in our own special way in the moment. Who knows who's going to trump up and who's going to run away. But his brother had run away and has not since ever gone back into any forest anyway, refuses to. And this gentleman's a primary keeper. He's got a lot of experience.

He's worked in zoos all over the country, and he's been a consultant for Discovery Channel different people about primates for years and years and years and years. This is his whole life. And he was convinced that what he saw was a primate of some kind. It had to be a primate of some kind, only nothing like he's ever seen before. And it changed his whole life. He became a researcher after that. He really threw himself into it.

But there you go. Another instance of something phenomenal happening to some. somebody ultimately well qualified to describe what they're seeing. Yeah, yeah, it is. You know, and we get those type of reports here in the United States, too. You know, we talked about it being balding. I've heard that on more than one occasion where they appear to be balding. And so he didn't think it was a hybrid or anything like that.

He was pretty convinced it was some sort of primate. That stood out to me about his report, actually. He was convinced that what he was looking at was a primate, only a primate that he had never seen before. Where do you get the bulk of the reports in the UK? I mean, what area, what part of the region do you get the most reports from? I think they're actually very well dispersed around the country. Now, parts of the country are more populated than others.

So similarly to the U.S., we get more reports from areas where there's more people. and that to me I think indicates some sort of neat or balanced dispersion across the country most of the UK is it's the same kind of country

of course you've got mountain ranges and more boggy areas too but it's the same kind of landscape as you go through I would think that the reports down here in the south are the most numerous and also in Scotland

Scotland amazes me because it has so few people around, that the massive reports there really indicates a large presence. And when you go to Scotland, you visit, you see the landscape and how unpeopened it is, how isolated it is. I think that really makes sense that they could survive there very well. But even in this area, in Surrey, there have been reports of one that I actually investigated, personally happened again in 2012, in a place called Box Hill.

Now, it's a beautiful area. You know, it's in the Surrey Hills, area of natural beauty. That's A-O-N-B, that's the designated. And this beautiful hill, that's ascended by this zigzagging road, it's around about miles of countryside, actually has something on it, a little walk called the steps. And these steps, these earthen steps, hemmed in wood, they probably go down for about seven, 800 feet to the bottom.

And there's a little stepping stone sort of river there that you can cross. and enjoy the countryside. Now, some of the locals, they jog it. Some of these crazy people jog it in the summer months. And there was a jogger, 2012. She had been running the steps, and near to the bottom, she sat down to take a rest. Now, if you've been to this area,

it's heavily forested in either side of these steps, and they twist and turn all the way up the hill. So it's very easily to pop out of sight very quickly, either into the surrounding forests and bushes or just to turn the corner and get out of the way. It was still light. That's the description she gave us. She hears somebody coming down the steps behind us.

She's sitting down. She's having a recovery drink. She moves to the side thinking some dog walk her is coming past. Nobody passes her. He waits for about 10, 15 seconds, and it feels uneasy. And so she turns back only to see about 10 meters away, a large, maybe six foot plus tall, ape man, that's how she

described it. Brown and grey fur, heavily muscled with an ape like conical head, but a very flat man-like face and a square large jaw, a jaw that looked too big for its head

staring at her, just looking. So she's in shock, she watches the animal, suddenly it turns away. And as it leaves the scene, she's hit by this stale farm animal-like smell. That's how she described it. Now, of course, we equate that with a saskatch kind of smell.

It was interesting to me that happened afterwards as a kind of, don't follow me kind of key. Before that happened, she'd been running up and down these steps, and she'd heard what she later described as wood knock. She said she did know what they were at the time, but she heard this knocking against wood for several minutes before seeing the creature. So this area, Surrey, Kent, where there's lots of marshes and flats and wildlife to prey upon, it seems to be very, very heavy in sightings.

But the surrounding population, these green areas, is really high. It's very surprising they should be so close. You know, that behavior is fascinating how it would come up and just watcher. And we get a lot of that too, but we also get a lot of aggressive reports. Um, that is fascinating when it walks off, then she gets hit with the smell as opposed to smelling it. You know, it does make you wonder if it's some sort of defense mechanism that they do. You know what I mean? As opposed to them just stinking all the time.

It does seem that way here. Actually, there's a few reports actually talk about the stale smell being, being, uh, observed, to be polite, after the animals left or as it's leaving. Do you have any aggressive reports? I know you'd mentioned a bluff charge, but yeah, tell me about some of the more aggressive reports that you guys have. Okay. Well, I'll start with what that's very close to the sighting, the Box Hill ape sighting, which took place in Dorking Deep D. Now, dorking is the area that Box Hill is in anyway. And this happened in 2016, four years after the Box Hill siting.

And there were two brothers, and there's something. that people are doing here, but they're exploring old railway tunnels and old government sort of buildings and underground sites. And there's tons of caves in the UK, but there's also tons of abandoned tunnels that were used during the war. Now, these particular brothers were investigating an abandoned tunnel and talking deep deep in Surrey late one evening in 2016. They heard a noise inside and they thought it was other explorers.

They just waited outside for them to finish. And then their two dogs started barking quite fiercely And they were greeted by a really loud roar Which was coming from the trees facing the tunnel And I heard something very, very big moving in those trees Breaking and snapping branches Going crazy basically for about 10 minutes Eventually it quietens down

And they're just left there terrified One of the boys wants to run And the other says no I'm not running with this thing chasing me Let's just wait here until it stops and they're just frozen, you know, to the spot, hearing something padding about in the undergrowth, but never, ever seeing it. They came back a few days later, and I only wish they knew more about the subject at the time. They found a footprint. The ASEB was around 20 inches long, and 8 inches wide at the top and 3 inches wide at the bottom.

Now, if they managed to cast that footprint, I'll get a photo, or whatever they could have had at the time, that would be amazing. And that's just one of the examples of bluff charges. There are others. And some have been very, very, I can I put it, very obvious. Now, with the bluff charge, I don't actually think, for the most part, that any harm is intended. There have been cases. Now, there was a case in 1986 in Stowe-Chartley near Stowe-Chartley Castle. people claiming to see a giant chimp.

There were a couple that were driving one evening and driving past the ancient ruins of Charlie Castle and Staffordshire, England. They're forced to break to avoid a huge stack, huge deer, crossing of the road, and it's followed by what looks like a large chimpanzee to them, comes bounding after it, halfway across the road, looks directly at the couple, angrily charges their vehicle, breaking off at the last second. Now, husband panicked, he tries to reverse the car and stalled it,

and leaves them stranded. in the road and for the next 20 seconds this thing just continuously charges their car but doesn't attack it doesn't attack them then bounds off in the direction of the stag and i think there was a classic classic bluff charge um situations with the creature is saying you know you're in my space or in my way you'd better you better get moving but no harm actually comes out of it yeah it is interesting you know the bluff charge i think you're right i tend to agree with you, Andy. I mean, I think when they do that, it's more or less meant for you to move along. You'll see apes do that, or guerrillas do that. They'll charge you. And trust me,

if they get a hold of you, you're in trouble. But at the last second, they'll break off, you know, almost like it's just wanting you to leave. Did he give any great descriptions on what he saw? I mean, beyond it being a monkey or a chimpanzee? No, large chimpanzee is the, It's the only description we have of that one. There was another one in the Ivy Den area in Hakenthorpe, Sheffield from the 1980s as well, where some children were chased by a 67-foot-tall creature with very bright red eyes, which they said ran up the stream about 20 feet away from them. And as they were running away, the creature jumped across the stream,

and one of them fell over, whether the children fell and got up in a panic, only to see that the creature had stopped chasing him, was just watching him a little distance away. So all of the descriptions really, I think it's part of the shock. They mentioned the ape-like appearance or the hairy-like appearance or the hairy, mad-like appearance,

but there's very little descriptive, well, in most cases, especially in these Bluff charge cases, very little descriptive detail. Do you notice the difference between, like, historical accounts and modelled? modern-day reports, or are they pretty much, like here in the United States, if you read something from the 1800s, a report of the Wild Man, and compare it to something today, it really lines up. Do you notice that in the UK? With the woodwows of Europe and Britain, of the Middle Ages especially, the medieval period when people were depicting them on portraits and tapestries, and we still have tons of churches where they're the statues of them all over the churches adorning the churches,

they tend to be mostly depicted as a man that's very large and very hairy, very often carrying a club or a stick of some kind. Now, somebody pointed out to recently that that could just be indicative of the tool they used to make wood knocks, right? But there is a correlation to Hercules and Janus in this big hairy man who carries a club. So that does have a godlike history to it as well. That goes back much further than Europe in fact. So my difficulty with those depictions are, is they are mad-like, but then people had not seen apes in this part of the world at that point. So any description, any depiction of what they were looking at would inevitably have man-like features instead of ape-like

features. It's difficult. There are one or two interpretations which look incredibly ape-like, and they're hundreds and hundreds of years old, but they're fewer number. That's kind of weird they're on churches, don't you think? I mean, if I went to church and they had a big foot up, you know, in the glass, I'd be like, why is there a big foot on the glass? With statues as well. I mean, these are not new churches. These are hundreds and hundreds of years old, eight, nine hundred years old sometimes. really old places. Yeah, it's just interesting.

I wonder if it's for documentation. Normally when churches put that up, it's a form of worship. So that's weird that they have the woodwows in their churches. You know what I mean? Do you find that strange or it's just me? Well, I don't know in the way that medieval churches. I mean, there's a mix of religious superstition and religious forewarning in lots of churches. Now, I don't really.

know if they were seen as a bad creature in any way. But they definitely were probably venerated by the pagans, as you see in the depiction of the green man, with God-like status. So, or at least a sacred sacrosan status of some kind. And that period in history during British church history as well was actually as late as that we were swapping over lots of pagan. festivals for Christian festivals, basically transposing the names and the purposes of these festivals onto our own symbolism, you know, Christian symbolism.

So I think it's inclusion is probably to do with stuff that was being talked about or believed about by the local peoples at that time. But again, it's, you know, it's so religiously and supernaturally wrapped up in the myth and the folklore of people. It's hard to really tweeze out the facts and the data from those types of. reports and representations. And if you would, I want to get back to some of the encounters, Andy, and I really appreciate you coming on. I hope people go to Amazon and check out your book, Beast of Britain.

And I hope people check out your podcast, Beastly theories. For the audience, I know we mentioned the Green Man, and I've looked into the Green Man, and sometimes people say, well, it's all nonsense. It's meant to, you know, like Boogie Man type stories. and then you have people who believe in the green man. For the American audience, would you explain what the green man is? Yeah, okay. So the green man, it's got many variations actually,

and it actually features in many cultures, but it's related to a vegetative deity, a forest deity. It is a symbol of rebirth. Now, for the pagans, it would have represented the cycle of growth, each spring and the mythology would have developed independently from them in the traditions of the different cultures in and around Europe too. Its appearance on churches and things like that, as I said, there's a lot of relation and crossover at that particular time, that medieval period between pagan to Christian religion and lots of

things have been superimposed onto the pagan religions. I think its inclusion in our churches is a lot. There's a lot vested in that. A lot of paganism vested in that. It's basically it's a wood deity. I do believe personally that its description comes from witness sightings of these creatures hiding themselves in foliage. Now, I know you've got Deborah Hatzwell on here at some point soon, some of our reports describe at least at first when they meet eyes with these particular woodwows or Bigfoot.

they described looking at the bushes and the bushes look back at me and that's the first thing deborice says about a sighting I was playing at this park with my friend suddenly I locked eyes with the bushes and they were looking at me and then this big creature leaned out and I think I think it really comes from that this elusive and reclusive nature of the creature and over time in our societies in Europe we've inculcated this spiritual meaning of rebirth and perhaps it's a variety of animal, you know, the satyrs and the fawns and all of these precursors to the woodworked had this very sexualized aspect to them, you know, kidnapping maidens and things like that. And I think it's just about that rebirth. As to whether it directly correlates with the British Bigfoot, I couldn't rightly say. But I do think it has some bearing or the modern reports have some bearing of what people once saw back then. I gotcha.

Well, if you would, I know I want to talk to you about Dogman and some of these other strange cryptids, but do you have any more encounters you'd like to share with us? I love encounters, man. I love encounters, too. I mean, there was one idea of actually, now this isn't a definite encounter, but there's a few in this area. You talked about clusters in certain areas. So there's a river that's very close to the River Thames and the area of Kent called the Medway. Now that goes right out there to the coast.

It goes to the English Channel. It's very flat and marshy. There's tons of fish life and shellfish life and, oh gosh, you know, crayfish, crabs, sheep, rabbits, everything around this area. It's really, really unpopulated. It's really flat and off the dark, it is black. You can't see a certain thing. So recently I was called to a friend's farm where they have a few horses in this area. And his wife, now he's kind of into big foot actually, but his wife had been out feeding the horses very early in the morning.

This is at the very end of January, Monday 21st of January this year. It's 8th of the ground is frozen. And at the back of their horse paddock, there is a fence line with some bush-like, trees and dispersed along it and they're about seven feet tall most of them and behind that there's a 30-foot drop to a railway line which used to be used for industry but now is no longer used so she's feeding the horses and she notices that they're not going out to their hay bale they're just their ears are pointed towards the fence and they're looking that way she sees a large figure walking along and the way she interpreted the walk it was that loping kind of bent forward walk

and she's confused who is this at this time in the morning walking along this this really dangerous fence line and it sees her and it ducks behind a bush now she noticed

that the head and shoulders were above the bush it ducked behind before it ducked down the bush was seven feet tall there's head and shoulders above this her dog tore off after the creature

as she went over to have a look it was gone there was nothing there but this area has lots and lots of sightings there's been creatures spotted running along hay bales there was a lady he took me to her house actually who lives in a very arid um isolated to be honest with the part of the medway there and her caravan has been rocked while she's in it and there's always large creatures banging along the the door she's seen something leaning over a minivan i guess which is about probably about five feet high and that was

head and shoulders above this while and it just goes on and on encounter after encounter and these all seem to be within the last seven or eight years it's interesting because the area is its viable habitat apart from the fact that it is very very flat very small forest for cover

which goes against it one of the things I really like about the the Bigfoot encounters in the UK is the description of behaviour. Now, talking about Salford, which is the area near Manchester where Deborah Hadswell had her sighting in the 80s, there's been many other sightings around this area.

On the 6th of July in 2016, a man was golfing. Friends at Elthbair golf course in Worsley, when they noticed something seven feet tall, hairy-shaped chest and an odd-shaped head, hunched over like it was old or injured, and it was making chattering sounds like an ape, swaying from side-as-side,

as if agitated, clapping its hands loudly and moving them like it was using some kind of sign language. The group then hears a loud wailing coming from another part of the trees, and the creature turns and runs away. Really, I mean, astonishing. This is very, very strange behavior. No, there are some strange people in Southford, Manchester. But none that really matched this particular description. And I think that's very, very stark example. And there's one I'd like to leave you with, which is of a wild man noticed that was observed eating in Bristol.

And Bristol's, it's in the west of England, very close to Wales. And that was observed in August of 2013. There was a resident of Bristol. He was walking through Lee Woods, Nature Reserve in Bristol. I used to live in this part of the country. And I've been through this woods many times. And he saw this creature digging in the earth with a twig, which then dug up something. and the creature picked up what if it was and began eating it,

then used another twig to pick its teeth, wove some twigs together, stood up, snapped a large tree branch and leaned it against another tree, and walked off, commented that the creature was six feet tall, old looking with gray skin. It's very, very strange. So, here you have all of the aspects of Sasquatch-like behavior. And I think 2013, this is before we really started talking about stick structures and glyphs

and stick cleans and things like that. Yeah, you know, a lot of times when people, they seem up close, not this last one, but the report before that, people will say they almost like they talk with their hands. There's a lot of almost like sign language. It's not a sign language, but they tend to talk with their hands. That's fascinating. Is there any reports of people getting attacked?

I know those are kind of hard to come by because generally the witness is dead. I mean, people do go missing, you know, out in the wilderness year from time to time. But we've got a pretty good search and rescue here in this country. And it's a small country room. But so it's not like getting, you know, it's not like getting lost in the forest. That there where you are, it's, if you go missing, somebody's going to come looking. I don't know of any actual attacks that have taken place. People have claimed some over the years, but nothing that I've believed, you know.

I think whatever this creature is, it's lived here for a very long time with us. We're not a natural food source, simply because there is so much food, both for an omnivorous creature, which I'm assuming it's an omnivorous creature in this country. It would never really ever have to come near us. And most of the reports that we get, 99.9% as a throwaway figure, seemed to be made by people that accidentally spot them. And I always believe it's just a mistake on the part or curiosity on the part of the creature. And usually for people like myself who got it looking, you know, we never find anything, do we?

Yeah, that's the shame of it. One thing I wanted to ask you was, do you get any weird reports, you know, as far as eyes glowing or just weird, seem to be paranormal incidences related to encounters? There's been some small discussion about the woo and things like. that. Quite honestly, most of the Wu reports I've heard have had a drug-induced component to them. And for that reason alone, I've discounted them simply because what have you claimed to see whilst on ayahuasco or any other hallucinogenic drug? It couldn't be claimed to be real. There have been incidents apparently of people thinking that they've melded in. into the background somehow or they've disappeared but never really

very clear I personally think that this creature has the ability to camouflage itself very well and maybe the interjection of the grays and the browns amidst this this fear that it has helped to do that but I don't think we have any solid woo cases here

yeah and it might be just with the amount of reports I mean I think Deborah's put together what like 500 encounters which is a great you know, it's a great feat, but in the grand scheme of life, there's more encounters in Washington State than there is in the UK, or encounters collected. But, you know, I mean, if there's one encounter in the UK, you know, it doesn't really matter the number. If there's just one, you know, it's pretty amazing that they're there.

And I guess it goes back to the question of what is Sasquatch. If you think it's a monkey, well, then, yeah, it makes no sense it would be in the UK. Well, I don't want to say that. Let me back up. I see all the researchers getting their emails ready. No, no, it's fine. I didn't mean it like that. You're right.

It doesn't make any sense. How would it have gone here for a start? Now, a lot of people talk about the doggarland bridge, which they've proved once existed between the UK and Europe as a land bridge. Of course, there's many other terrestrial animals that are here that we have bears and and boar and all kinds of things. And there are other animals that they're here, like badgers and foxes and deer that could not have swam the English Channel, yet they are here.

They've not all been brought across. The one animal we do have that was imported some 2,000 years ago is the rabbit. We never had rabbits until the Romans came. We had hairs, which is very interesting. But point being, animals get here. We know that the habitat is available. And I think the assumption should really be that the possibility of the American Sasquatch living here in the UK is not very high

because that would be acclimatized to that particularly environment. But the possibility of another adaptable, intelligent animal that's always lived here, surviving alongside us almost unknown, I think is feasible. Yeah, and correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of the reports in the UK that I was kind of reviewing they talk about it being six and a half, maybe seven feet tall. I don't know that I read too many that were, it was nine, ten feet tall, you know, like what we get here in the United States. Or are you getting those larger reports? No, very, very few large reports.

Some in the eight-foot range, generally it seems to be between six and a half feet to seven feet, with some, you know, five feet and below reports as well, which could be juveniles or, or could just be a smaller specimen. Now, some people think that what we have here is more similar to the Russian almas than the American Sasquatch. I know, of course, there's lots of debate about what they could be,

but the few footprints, which are ambiguous at best, but the few footprint finds that we have here, they're broad-arched footprints. They're not flat. And that's another interesting aspect to this. We're looking at something that's more like the Almus. And then I think the term wild man seems to fit far better with what we're talking about then than Sasquatch.

I would agree. But of course, we've got the primate keepers report of it being definitely a primate. I would qualify that report, but I would say that in every situation, when you were faced with something that's strange, and unknown, your mind makes up the detail or what's most familiar to you. I was thinking about or interpreting the extraordinary when you remember things like

the Aztecs, seeing the ships of Cortez in the distance, and they imagined them floating mountains. They, and Moctezuma, their ruler, thought Cortez was the god Quetzel-Codal. Because who else could he be? What else could these ships be but mountains? We don't have any other point of reference. And I think the psychological aspect of this is very important.

Yeah, it is. Especially when you see one because there's shock, awe, and fear all at once. Well, you've had that experience, haven't you? Yeah, it is. And it's hard to, that's why I always laugh when people say, well, why didn't you get a picture? It's like, that's a last thing on your mind. It really is. I mean, that couldn't be the furthest thing from your mind when you're in that situation.

And I think it's different. A lot of times you'll see guys take pictures of UFOs. And you're on the ground. You're a little safer. that might come into your mind, but when you're 20 feet away from something 8 feet tall and a thousand pounds, your first thought isn't, hey, let me document this. It just doesn't go through your mind. You know, I might, or go ahead, Andy. Sorry, sorry, because I was so interested in your sighting, and I know the story, but

it was three or it was four. You guys were surrounded, weren't you? Yeah, we saw three, yeah. I think there was more than three, though. And do you think, did they sort of harass the car or did they kind of block your exit? The bigger one blocked our exit out. He wasn't having it. But they didn't really, I mean, one came up to the back of the car and growled, but they didn't like throw rocks to the car or try and tip the car over. I think if we'd have pressed our luck, they would have, especially that big one because he wasn't playing. This is before you became interested in the subject at all, right?

This is what started you. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'd been hunting that. I'd hunted that whole area before. Never saw anything, never heard anything. Like you said before, it's kind of, it seems accidental a lot of times when you have encounters. There's been times where I've gone out with a group and looked for them and we find nothing.

And there's other times where it seems like when you're unprepared for it, they show up, you know, when you're least expecting it. That's strange, isn't it? I wonder if there's something in our body language that that's a visual. This shows that we're off guard, essentially. Now, what's interesting to me about sight things like he had is the psychological aspect. And I'm always thinking about this. So in that moment, while that's happening to you, do you think there was anything that you did that provoked them to come and harass you? Or do you think part of their character is to get you on the way out?

You guys were leaving, right? And suddenly it's like, okay, now's the time. Because it's almost the fleeing animal is the one that gets chased, right? No, we weren't leaving. We were going to drive down. We were arguing at the time. We were going to drive down a basically a game trail road. You know, and it's 2 o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to drive down it because I don't want to get stuck.

And so I think what happened is we blocked their way out. I think they were going down to the water down to the river. and I think we blocked them on their way unintentionally, and I think it pissed him off, that we would stop right there. Wow. It was just a surprise to see you, clearly.

Yeah, it was a surprise for us too. I love that. I love that. I wanted to ask you, when you were in, there might be one day where I might go to the UK and crash your guys's party. You're very welcome. I wanted, yeah, I'd love to. I'd love to visit.

You know, everyone always wants to go to London. I'd love to see London. But if I were to come to the UK, and for the listeners who are there now, where would you go after all the encounters you've heard and you're looking into this? Where would you go to try and find them? I'd have to agree with Claire and say Scotland.

I think Scotland is still the wildest, most unpopulated, most pristine. area of the UK. And to give you an example of this, recently, I was in Loch Ness. There was a sighting late December with a great picture. And I went to Fort Augustus. At the very end of Loch Ness, as you get to the river Oakh, that's the end of the lock. And I was there looking for Fennessey, essentially. Now, I decided I was going to walk the whole area. I'd walked along the Caledonian Canal to the next lock, and I walked up the Altl-McCreech path into the forests. across the great glimway at the top and lockness you have to understand they get about 250,000

visitors a year and yet at night time there's barely a light around the lock it's still pristine the biggest village which i was actually staying in fort augustus has a residential population of 600 people in this massive tourist area and that's one of 31,460 locks which are all surrounded by forests and countryside so it's just a just this amazing place. So you have all the things, you know, food cover water,

as they say, as Bobo used to say, have all of those things available to you. Now, I went for a big hike, and I apologize for anybody to hear me

tell this story a few times recently, I went for a big hike along the old Macriche way, which is about, it's about a four-hour walk, I think. I didn't know it,

but the path was clear and it's mostly uphill up onto the little mountain side there. I've been walking through this thick forest for about two hours and I got to the top I saw the lock

and it's beautiful let's go back down and now along the way there were two trees that were very clearly felled across the path now this is January so there's no tourists

there hardly nobody's doing this walk I thought to myself well look you know there have been high winds in the area recently that's just call it that

but they were pushed down by the root balls at least it looked that way and I start coming down the other side. I'm going down this steep inclination. There's these waterfalls, and I'm very low down to the ground, photographing them.

And suddenly, a corner of my eye, I see what seemed like a figure dashed behind a tree. I hadn't heard a deer, a bird, anything, a rustle, the whole three hours or so I'd been up there at that point. And suddenly I thought of myself, wow. Okay, so you want this situation, and now you've got an hour and a half

thereabouts through forest to get back down to where he started and if this isn't a happy a happy meeting here this is going to be very bad for you do you really want it and it's a frightening thing but I elaborate I digress

but the point was I didn't see anybody in that whole time I was up there in this popular tourist destination Scotland has got it and that's where the people are You know, that's the kind of wilderness that's available there. You go push out even further into the rest of the highlands. And it's just fantastic.

I would spend a year up there if I could. I would. Yeah, I wanted to ask you, and forgive my geography, but what kind of a trip is that from like London to Scotland? Well, you can fly there in about 45 minutes. Oh, really? Or you can take the Scott Flyer from Houston, which will take you about 13 hours on the train.

They have little sleeper compartments in them you can pay for. It's terribly expensive. It's about 250 pounds one way, I think, for the sleeper compartment. Or you can stay up all night in one of their cheap seats at the back. I took the train, actually, this time. I should have taken the plane if I thought of it. about it. But it's a beautiful journey on the way up to. Really, really gorgeous. I definitely would love to see it. I wanted to ask you about Dog Man. You know, we get these reports here in

America and for the longest time I struggled with it because I was like, I don't know, an upright run around dog. And then when you start to talk to eyewitnesses after eyewitness, you know, you're talking to so many people, you find they're describing the same thing, the behavior is the same. Do you guys have any dogman reports in the UK? We do. We do. And to me, this has been a really difficult thing to get used to as well, actually, primarily because it's one of the subjects that makes me realize how people feel when I first talk to them about Bigfoot. Because I suddenly fall into the position of, well, that's kind of outside my scope of what I'm prepared to believe.

Yeah. We have gigantipithecus, proanthropus, you know, osteopithecus, whatever we might attribute to Bigfoot in the fossil record.

Lock this monster, maybe that's a plesiosaur of some kind, who knows, we've got stuff we can point fingers at. And all we have to ascertain is whether it still exists or does exist,

but it's, you know, it's around with the dogman, some sort of canine that either has dog legs and walks on it, you know, walks on two of them,

or has a manlike body, with a dog-like head. It seems insane. But what I had to accept here in the UK is that the people making those reports were delivering them in exactly the same way the people who were making Bigfoot reports were. There was the classic mundane details that you can't forget when you've had this traumatic experience. You know, I'm walking down the street. I see the street light is out. That doesn't normally happen. And then this door slams. And then I see this creature, you know, things that are not necessary to the story, but remain because of your shock. We had what I investigated recently.

This was first reported by Linda Godfrey. I found a further report I was really happy about in the area. And it's called the Whirlwolf of Campbellwell. And it was actually first encountered by a man October 9th, 1996. He was en route to see a friend. He took a shortcut through Camberwell Old Cemetery to save time. Now, just to tell you about Camberwell Old Cemetery, It's not in use anymore.

I just have 300,000 bodies buried there. First opened in 1856, I believe. And it has something like 10 acres of a forest within it. It's a wooded kind of place. It's the middle of an area that also has lots of other parks very close by, Cater Park, Wells Park, Crystal Palace Park. There's lots of connecting green highways that something could use to move around.

Anyway, so he's walking through the graveyard. He's cutting through and something he really huge grabs him by the arm, spashes him into the ground. He looks up as he sees a large creature, dark fur, head like a German shepherd dog, looking at him, slobbering and growling, sniffing his body up and down. And then in a second, runs off on its hind legs. And he says that he believes he was spared because he suffers from a disease that dogs can smell. Really?

And his belief is that's why the creature left him alone. And it's that, you know, witness reports, in the witness report, that's such a triggering, that's such a triggering detail. Why would you include that detail? It doesn't matter unless, of course, it really happened to you. Yeah, that's fascinating. Makes you wonder, I wonder what that thing is, man. You know, here in the states, it appears to be physical. but then it does other things that doesn't seem physical.

What other dogman reports do you have? That last one was fascinating. Well, I'll tell you some more now, but just to finish off that last sighting, I also, once I published this sighting, I had, on this one is one, an expedition to this area and photographed the graveyard. Somebody, an Irish lady who lived in the area contacted me to say that her and a friend were walking past the graveyard in 2005. and they could hear some loud growling and they saw a tree being shaken incredibly violently,

like a large tree being shaken. And she thought it was going to be ripped out. It really looked as if it was going to come down and they were terrified and they ran away from the area. That was the same graveyard. Now that's not a sighting, but I don't know of any British animal that can shake a tree,

especially not that way. But moving on to some other sightings. Now, there's one, I think, which is very significant. I've never known what the veracity is, but it does look like an aggressive sighting. People talk about that with these creatures. This was in Poulton Mill. Now, three workmen, they're driving up to storage blocks in this area to get supplies, and they see a seven or eight-foot-tall, upright wolfman jump down from a roof in front of them

and chase their car. They reverse, and they drive off. They never come back. And it's, you know, it's really terrified experience of them. It was also a sighting in Mount Snowden, which is in Wales, where I come from, where a woman claimed to have seen a dog man whilst hiking around Mount Snowden, North Wales. She said it was over six feet tall, standing up. It was a man who looked like a dog.

It leapt over a fence from a standing start and disappeared. I think it's quite, it's quite sick. Now, the most famous one is the werewolf of Hull or the old stinker, as it's referred to. The old stinker? Old stinker, you might have heard of that one. No, no, I haven't. Please go on. Oh, no.

I mean, but it's, again, there's another key little element there. It smells clearly, and that's one of the things we key into here. Now, this particular, we were starting to place in 2016. There were several sightings in the space of a month or so. and a very famous paranormal researcher here, Mike Ovel, he was actually actively searching for the creatures that went along. I think another claim to fame is Alice Cooper was asking around for sightings of the creature during the whole,

you know, during the whole Shemuzel. So it's 2016 and Hull is in East Yorkshire in England. That's where we get the saying, I've been to Harlem back from. And the first sight is made by a local woman. describes it as running on two legs and on all fours, resembling a human and a wolf. Later, a couple say that they see something tall and hairy,

eating a dog, extra drainage channel. They claimed the creature jumped over an eight-foot-high fence with a dead dog in its mouth. And I think the dog was allegedly an elevation dog. I can't actually clarify that detail. Another woman walking her dog spotted something half dog and half human and said her dog, refused to go any further along the path who were walking down as to why that would be a problem.

I don't know. And in August 2016, a woman who was an animal rescue worker was driving through the East Riding Village of Halsham with some friends when they all saw a creature on all fours walking towards the car in two legs. She described it as looking like a big dog, probably bigger than my car, covered in cream and gray colored fur, but with a human face. And I think, that's not all of them, but that's a fair percentage. of detailed sightings. They are less, just like the American stories, they are in far less number than those of Bigfoot.

But they do seem to be animalistic in some way. They do appear to be some kind of animal, at least in behavior. I would agree with you on that. And they are a lot less here than a Sasquatch encounter. Very few people will. And most people who see them don't come forward as far as a Dogman goes, what do you think that Dogman has, Andy?

I'm honestly, I'm completely puzzled by it. Now, I like to make things make sense to me. You know, I hear about people doing their tent types of Sasquatch and Dogman and all different things. I like to imagine that somehow it's another kind of Bigfoot. But with the snout, just as things you might have with different apes and monkeys with different face shapes. But perhaps this is what we're looking at.

But unfortunately, for the most part, apart from the humanoid figure in some instances, what people are describing is something that looks like a very large dog on two legs. I think it's a creature we don't know about, but we do have werewolf sightings going back thousands of years. And that's actually it goes through the entire history of humankind, you know, from anubis to, you know, this pagan like ritual of dressing up as wolves and. committing ritual sacrifices as Caligula used to do, it seems to be entrenched. I often wondered whether the windigo of North America was influenced by that ritual as well in some way. I know it doesn't quite represent that, but this cannibalistic kind of creature, this change, changeling, skin walker, lichen.

It's hard to tell from history, because all of our history is really, really steeped in supernatural, superstitious belief with this thing. I think our immersion into Christianity and our leaving paganism behind is left over this relic. Whatever the animal was in its first incarnation became something like a moral parable of sorts. But there are modern sightings. So what do we do with those? Yeah, it's, you don't know what to do with them. You know, a lot of the dogman reports, like here in America, what you'll find is, I don't know what the right word

to use, kind of a, you almost find a demonic type of behavior. And what I mean by that is this. A lot of reports I've had where people have taken shots at them, you know, have shot guns at them. And then they'll leave, they'll leave the area, and they'll go home.

And then all of a sudden the creatures at home. That's what I mean when I say demonic, you know, like you go to a ghost hunt. And then all of a sudden you go home and the ghost you were at the ghost hunt now is at your home, that's kind of how the dog man is. There's a lot of reports of cops seeing them.

There's one I had on the show where a guy his aunt was telling it. He was a cop in Texas and he had stopped a bunch of Mexican guys and they were screaming in Lobo, Lobo, Lobo, which is Wolf in Spanish. And he looked

over and he said this wolf was on two legs walking towards them like a man. But just looking like a wolf in its entire body, a wolf like legs? Yeah, but upright walking on two legs. But yeah, pretty much like a wolf. And he said bigger than a wolf, but he said the head of a German Shepherd. And I guess he had taken out his pistol and he shot it three times.

And it didn't go down. And so he got in his patrol car and he left. And he was telling his aunt that it's following him. Every time he goes down that road, it's there. It's following him. So he started sounding paranoid. The strange part is the guy wasn't an alcoholic, he wasn't a drug addict, he had spent his whole life just wanting to become a cop. And that was his whole focus.

He wanted to help the public and really make a difference in the world. After this incident, he became an alcoholic and eventually died from alcoholism. Wow. Because he was so terrified that this thing was going to get him. But you'll find that a lot with Dogman reports to where they just tend to show up and they tend to focus on one person. like have an interest in one person. And generally they're pretty aggressive accounts. I mean, they're not.

Yeah, I mean, most of ours seem to be aggressive, but I often wondered if the perceived aggression was more wrapped up with the fear of the creature's appearance. Could be. I think, you know, a lot of times people, when they come across a creature, it is growling, snarling, and it acts like it wants to kill you.

The strange part about dogman is there's a physical aspect to it, and then there's also another side to it. That isn't physical. And I don't know if that's spiritual or what. It's a real puzzler. I mean, with something like this, you've got a history that's largely folkloric and supernatural in the way it's presented to us. But we also have modern reports. And of course, you know, Dogman essentially is just another. name for the werewolf, isn't it? I wrote a little blog. It's a chapter in my book,

it says Dogman rebranding the werewolf, how we've come to rebrand this animal into a less embarrassing way to talk about it. Because when you say, we're definitely talking about the supernatural. As far as our history is concerned, that's what we're talking about. But tales of this type of creature, similarly to Bigfoot, do appear nearly all over the world. so it's either either something it's wrapped up in a religious

by that I mean supernatural context or it's a creature that's been interpreted as such for a long time

when we come to supernatural abilities we have to remember things when the first person who saw I was talking about

this actually first person who saw an octopus camouflaged itself against the rock would have assumed that was some kind of

magical power without the science to understand how it happened. So I always try to think of things from that way. If it acts like an animal and looks like an animal, that's assume it is an animal until we know any better. And I think that's where our own particular worldview comes into real context. You know, I come from quite a Christian background, so I'd have that worldview about it. And yet somebody who's more into the paranormal, has a more of a spiritualist leaning, might think it's a,

benevolent or malevolent, ghostly creature. And then the more scientific among us will say, well, this is a relict of supernatural times when people are just invoking this in their minds out of fear, the frail brain, excuse. Yeah, it could be. There are some strange things that go along, I know, like with Bigfoot and Dogman here in the States to where it kind of leaves you scratching your head. Like, I don't know what to think about that. And then you hear it over and over and over again.

you're just not sure what to make of it. You know, much like Bigfoot, really what is Bigfoot? No one really knows. You know, same thing with Dog Man. No one really knows. Sure as odd, everyone's pretty consistent on what they're saying they saw. And, you know, in the UK, there is, I mean, you guys have it all. Dog Man, Weird Cryptids, Sasquatch, Alien Reports.

Yeah. A lot of the strange, large cats running around. I remember first time someone said that to me, I thought, big deal. We got Cougars of the size of me out here running around. But then I was really starting to look at it. I was like, wow, those are some big cats out there running around. I don't know what that thing is. Like black cats, you get a lot of black cats.

I'm actually working on a concept piece about it at the moment, about the big cats. Now, the reason we have the big cats is very, that's very, very easy, really to ascertain. During the 1970, 76, you could own any big cat or any sort of dangerous animal that you wanted without any preconditions to doing so. And there may or may not have been some incidents. And the UK government brought in something called the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, which meant that you had to register any dangerous animal, keep it in a specific condition and maintain that. It was expensive for some people. And a lot of people, and I've been told directly by some people, that they let them go.

mostly people would collect things like melanistic leopards that was popular because it was all black or pumas or mountain lines and those are the two most commonly reported the black ones the melanistic leopards being the most frequently reported then pumas after that they're the most frequently reported animals

and it's throughout the entire country throughout the entire country and that makes sense because of course they need a large territory tree to hunt so they would breed and spread out and spread out and spread out. Now it's not just from one or two pairs. Lots of people seem to have let them go and there's also one or two cases where people are describing very large cats that seem to look domestic in the way with their pointed ears and things like that and yet they're large like a big cat. You know, maybe not like a leopard

but you know something like two foot high and four foot long. So there's These reports are filmed all of the time. They're photographed. And the people that see them, they're just so regular. I'll tell you about one of them. I won't go into it too much. But there's a place called Rusper, which is near to Surrey, where I live. And there was a horse breeder.

And this was at the end of 2017, about 9.30, I think it's 27th of November. So she and a friend were driving to this farm to pick up their hay consignment for their horses. They had a land rover and a little train. on the back. Now this is a deal where you just pay like a monthly fee. Nobody's at the farm. You go, you pick up your consignment, you drive away. That's how it works. Nobody's there to greet you. And she parks up in the yard. She's got her beams on full, about, I think about 40 feet away. She sees an animal the size of a great dane, but much heavier built, definitely male. She said she saw it close enough to see it was a male. It's around four foot long with a three foot tail,

curved at the end. She said the thickness of its tail was approximately as thick around as her wrist and she thought it could have been it could have been very very heavy-boned

or good-boned, as they say in horse terms, a good-boned animal. Now this animal just looked at them and sauntered, casually, walked towards them as if there was no issue whatsoever and shortly before it got towards them they'd already jumped in the car at this point

headed off into one of the hedgerows and disappeared. At this area, this is about 10 miles from my house. Everywhere, all over the place. And they seem to be surviving in our countryside very well because there's so much to eat and very few predators that there haven't been any attacks on people. No intentional attacks anyway. As far as I know so far, there was a friend of a friend that was attacked in the 90s

in a place called Tintin by a panther. as we label them in a field there. Tintin is sort of between Wales and England in the White Valley. And I have a good authority by a friend of his that he actually was a bit of an idiot and he'd seen it in the field and pulled its tail. And I turned around and swiped him in the face and ran away. And he just had like a long scratch along his face. But it was clearly a defensive injury.

This wasn't an attack. There was another case of a man in Croydon. which is just outside of London. This is very close to London, where a man had heard his cat being attacked in his garden and ran out only to see a very large cat on top of it. And when he tried to save the cat, it pounced on top of him,

gave him a few hits in the face and made off. And he thought it was something like a puma. And that was that. Those are the only two attacks. So you think the large cat is more, it's explainable as opposed to, it's not some weird, crypted out there running around it's no yeah it's not unknown it's but there may be some

cryptid species of them now because there would be limited numbers to interbreed with one another there have been some as I say pantheized cats described but very pointed domestic like he is which to my mind could be a cross between the links or panther I don't know what the biological abilities of these animals are to interbreed one another so I don't want to make an assumption of that. But I think they're an out-of-place animal. I call them Upas. They're out-of-place animals. They're not cryptids. I gotcha. Still terrifying, man.

The Puma's one in the countryside. I mean... Listen, when I'm out there, I'd rather meet a big foot than a big cat, that's for sure. Yeah, I hear you. The other question I want to ask, candy is, you know, over here in the States, we get a lot of people talking about balls of light or seeing balls of light in the forest. Not like, not like UFOs, but actual balls of light. Do you ever get reports of those in the UK?

There are forest lights. I don't personally investigate them, simply because everything that I look into, I try to look into things that are naturalistic, at least appear to be animals of some kind. There are some people who assert that these lights, these albs or these lights are some sort of precursor to Sasquatch visitations or other visitations. I think it's wishful thinking for the most part, just the same as when we're looking out there and you know, you're going to some of these bigfoot pages and all you have is pictures of sticks and rock piles, you know, forever and ever and ever. And that's not to say that there does seem to be some corroborating evidence that they do

make some sort of structures at some point. But if a tree falls in the forest, the old thing is, did Bigfoot push it down or the trees just fall in the forest? Yeah. And every time I'm out there and I'm filming, I'm saying, oh, look at that big X there. Just so you all know, that's a natural formation before we start fighting. I think people do see them. I don't know what the answer is to these forest lights. It does seem to correspond with something we would call Willow the Whisp.

in our folklore. And I wonder if this is where some of the fairy stories come from from time to time. It's, what is it? Willa the Whisp? It's said to be sort of a supernatural atmospheric ghost like a light seen by travelers at night over bogs and swamps and marshes, which to me again seems to indicate it to some sort of natural phenomena, you know, because those are swamps and bogs and marshes. They're very active, aren't they? So maybe some sort of lights can come from that. You might know it's a jackal lantern or a frie's lantern.

It's the same type of thing, basically. But I think it's alleged to be some kind of sprite. Now, in our history, it would lead travelers off into the forest and get them lost in a bog or where you'd sink at time, basically. So they're not supposed to be particularly. good things. But I'm no expert on those, unfortunately. Yeah, that's what the Native Americans will tell you. Don't follow the lights, because

they'll lead you off to your death or lead you off to be lost. But you know, it's hard to say what they are. It's just strange people see them and, you know, it's, what are these things? There's so many weird things going on in this world.

What do you think Sasquatchez, Andy? What's your opinion? I'm completely flesh and blood on this. So I think that the Sasquatch and its variants throughout the world, whether that be the Yeran or the Yeti or the Wadhwaes, the Rangpendik, etc. They're a form of higher primate. Gigantipithecus, I think, is a good, is a good, if the creature looks like, we assume it looks. Remember, we've only got some jawbones and teeth and things like that.

It's the same for the Denisovans and pharanthropas. But if they do look the way that we imagine them to look, I think the fossils we have are good candidates for them. I think they have variations throughout the world. Just in the same way as I would think about bears. Essentially, I have a polar bear, a black bear, brown bear, panda, moon bear, sun bear, whatever. And yet, they are all distinguishable as bears. Whatever shape and form you find them in around the world,

I think it's just a form of very elusive, quite smart. primate that we've yet to discover. I got you. Well, you know, and like I said, I hope you're right. I really do. Oh, me too. And I like that better than, you know, other things that it might be, you know, I'd rather be some sort of animal we haven't been able to catch up with.

Oh, yeah, definitely. You know, and for the audience out there, check out Andy's book, Andrew McGrath. I hope it's okay, I've been calling you Andy. Andy, I go by Andy. I do prefer that. Andrew watches trains and collects license and plays members, and Andy, he's a bit more fun. But check out his book, Beast of Britain on Amazon, and definitely check out his podcast, Beastly theories. Andy, if someone wanted to get a hold of you to talk about what they've seen, how would they do that?

Well, you can go to my website W www.beastsof Britain.com And there's a place there where you can leave a citing. You can also find me at facebook.com forward slash beasts of and I'm always active there. And if anybody even wants to get in touch just to chat about stuff, ask questions

or just shoot the breeze, you'll find that I'll always get back in touch with you. You might have to stop me talking but I will definitely reply to your email. Yeah, perfect. that Beast of Britain, that's such a cool name. But Andy, I appreciate you coming on and sharing. I hope people go out, get the book.

Definitely check out Beastly theories on your podcast player. And thanks for coming on, brother. I really enjoyed talking with you. I had a wonderful time. Thank you. There goes, Andy McGrath. Beast of Britain. And that's it for tonight.

Everyone, remember if you've had an encounter, shoot me an email. My email address is Wes at Sasquatch Chronicles.com. Until next time, everyone. When I wake up in the morning love, and the sunlight hurts my eye, and something without warning love, bears heavy on my mind, I look at you, and the world's all right when they look at you,

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