Sasquatch Chronicles - SC EP:663 I Thought that is NOT a Bear

Episode Date: June 14, 2020

Bob Strain is a retired firefighter/paramedic with a lifelong interest in the outdoors. When he was 18 years old, he had a daytime visual sighting while hunting in remote Idaho. Many years later, this experience, along with others, led him to pursue this mystery and become involved in investigating to the extent he is today.

It looked like somebody was bent over and had their head in the window of the deer blind. It either heard me or smelt me, and he pulled his head out of the tent and stood straight up. That shocked me. They don't make people that big. The way it moved, almost as if it was gliding across the beach. I've never seen anything moved like that in my life. What's... They were screaming at each other in gibberish.

It sounded like a language and they were chuntering away back and forwards, back and forwards, back and forwards. I know what a bear looks like and there is no way on this planet, but what I saw were bears. What's going on, 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. I don't know. Do you see a pounce, sir?

Yes, I'm looking right here. Uh-oh. This is Denise from Texas, and you're listening to our favorite West and Saskwatch Chronicle. We, along with my cousin, decided to go on a week-long hunting trip expedition, as we were, up in Idaho. I got back in there and up on the ridge, and I guess I was young. I was the first one over and had secured myself a nice little vantage point behind the outcropping rocks. Something black come out of the tree line over where I thought my dad was supposed to be coming out. We were all in Blaze Orange.

And I'm thinking, man, that's got to be a bear. Had my rifle scope on it. Almost pulled the trigger and it stood up on two legs. And swung around and it had the long arms. And I'm thinking, that is not a bear. Welcome to the show, everyone. Thanks for being here tonight. Got a great show planned for you tonight.

We're going to be talking to Bob's train. And I've always wanted to interview Bob. He is the husband of Kathy Strain. You guys might remember her from episode 655. And I met Bob years ago at Beachfoot. And Bob's just one of the nicest guys on the planet. I can't imagine anyone saying any bad about him. And I've always been curious about his encounters

and how he got from seeing Sasquatch to being with the North the American WoodApe Conservancy Group where they're actively trying to collect a specimen. And I'm kind of excited to talk to Bob. I want to hear about Tag 7 too as well, where they tagged a Sasquatch and tracked it for several months. Should be a great show tonight. 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.

Let's jump into it tonight. I want to welcome Bob to the show. Bob, thanks for coming on. Oh, sure. My pleasure, Wes. Good to talk to you. Yeah, the pleasure's mine. And thank you again for being here, Bob.

It's great to talk with you. I've always wanted to interview you about your encounters. And I know we met years ago at Beachfoot. And I always said, God, I'd love to hear the sky's encounters. And now I have a chance. before we get into the North American WoodApe Conservancy Group that you're a part of and the Tag 7 that I'm really curious about, can we kind of start from the beginning? Tell us about the first time you ever ran into a Sasquatch.

If you would, just kind of start from the beginning. Tell us what you were doing and kind of walk us into what happened. Well, okay, sure, glad to. You know, it was a long time ago. I graduated high school and I grew up in Texas and I graduated in 1975 and my dad lived out in California and we were both big hunters and, you know, deer and bear and stuff like that. We, along with my cousin, decided to go on a week-long hunting trip expedition as we were up in Idaho. And so I flew to Reno. My dad picked me up, and we all caravan up to north of Chalas, Idaho, which is right near the Montana border.

And it was on the east slope or east side of what was then called the Salmon River Wilderness Area. Now they renamed this, River of No Return Wilderness, which is a happily named, they'll tell you. Yeah. And, yeah, I had a couple of weird things. And we, like I said, there was a big group of us, and we were had hunted here and there and it was probably about a third day in. And we decided to do some kind of like a little modified deer drive where we saw this long canyon.

There was a road in a creek and this long canyon perpendicular to it with two opposing open mountain sides facing each other. So we decided to go up and send a couple of guys over. one ridge and come up and come over the top and a couple of guys over the other and maybe somebody would spook something out and flush something out. And I got back in there and up on the ridge and I guess I was young. I was the first one over and had secured myself a nice little vanish point behind the outcropping of rocks and was looking at the opposing hillside, mountainside, which was estimated about 400 yards, but it was unobstructed, you know, just open air between

me in that area and it was open like a talus slope of inner had trees on top and along one side and rocky outcroppings and trees here and there and I saw this something black come out of the the tree line over where I thought my dad was supposed to be coming out. We were all in blaze orange and vests and hats and stuff. And I saw this coming out and it looked like a bear. It was on all fours.

And so I'm training my rifle scope. I got a pretty good look at it, but it was on all fours, but it would stop and turn around the look behind it. And I'm thinking, oh, is this a mama with cubs? And so, you know, I was going to, yeah, shoot that. And we kept doing that all the way to the other outcropping of trees. And then no cubs came across. So I'm thinking, okay.

And then I didn't see it for a couple of minutes. and it emerged on the other side of the trees and went just, you know, just straight across that, that tallus slope, which is really difficult to traverse. And it was on all fours. And then it turned. It started going straight up the hills.

Again, it was on all fours. It was huge and it was black. And I'm thinking, man, that's got to be a bear. And had my rifle scope on it, had the crosshairs on it. And I'm thinking, it's about 200 yards down to the bottom. And if I shoot it, it's just going to tumble down a couple hundred yards. It can be real tough to recover.

But there was a flat spot right where it was headed for. And I thought, well, I'll wait until it gets to that flat spot. And then maybe it'll drop there, hopefully, and be a lot easier to retrieve. And I'm just, I'm getting my range, and I'm just about ready to pull the trigger. and it gets to that flat spot and almost pulled the trigger and it stood up on two legs and swung around and it had long arms. And I'm thinking, that is not a bear. I didn't know what it was. Like I said, I was from Texas and I never really followed Bigfoot or anything like that.

I had heard of it, of course. But it wasn't anything that was in my mind. And I thought, man, God, that that's a guy. That's a human in black, covered in black. He's going to get killed out here. Who is that? And I watched it then just walk straight across the hillside and for the tree line on the other side,

which must have been at least 100 yards away. So, and it had that, what people describe now is the same type of walk that Patty had as like a cross-country ski or leaning forward and swinging the arms. It had no backpack, had no rifle. I couldn't see a hat. It was black from head to toe.

I'm thinking, man, God. I mean, it kind of made me bad. I thought it was just some idiot out there, you know, in all black. And I just felt like cranking off a couple rounds over its head just to wake it up. And, you know, that would ruin the day of something. So I didn't do that. Sat there another 10 or 15 minutes, and I see something way over to the right. It was tiny.

It was orange. And I'm thinking, God, what is that? butterfly right in front of me. I looked in on it and it was my dad. And it came out essentially the same place that this thing had come out. And dad was wearing the orange vest. But dad was tiny compared to this. Like half the size. And I thought, man, my brain just sort of, you know, how it kind of gives you one of those. What? Anyway, I talked to him on the radio. We had radios. And I said, God, Dad, who's over there there with you? He goes, son, there's nobody but me. I said, God, there's some huge dude dressed in black right above you, you know, be on the lookout for him. Dad, he's huge. And he goes, son, I'll see anybody.

So that was weird. We went back and, of course, looked on a map and there, we didn't see any vehicles around, no other access roads or anything like that. So we just, we couldn't figure it out. Of course, there was eight or ten of us hunting. So we went on about our hunt. And then, and the odd thing, a couple of days later, now, I'll tell you, I never put all this together until I met my wife. She's a smart one of the group of the pair of us. And it has snowed, and then we hunted close to camping. So the next day, we headed out before dawn and going up this little two-track road.

And I had about a foot of snow on it, and we're going real slow. And just beyond the reach of our headlights looks like a big, burned out black stump on the right side of the road. Now the hillside went up on the right and it went steeply down on the left, but it was on the right side of the road. As we got closer, headlights still hadn't got to it, but it was kind of reflecting. And the stump appeared to get shorter and a lot wider. And then what looked like I've described as an oil slick moving across the road really slow. At one point, you could just see the white disappear in front of it. And then at one point, it stretched out over the entire width of the two-track road.

And then you can see the white slowly appear behind it as it went off to the left. Just about the time our headlights hit that, it hit a branch full of snow on the side, and all the snow came down. So we stopped there and we couldn't. It was freezing cold. We got one, talked one guy who was sitting in the right front shotgun to get out and go over the, hillside with a flashlight and see what he could see. And he kind of scurried down there a little bit and came back in a big hurry and go, oh, let's go.

Let's go. Get out of here. And he didn't want to talk about it. Now, we went up to the top of the mountain and hunted that day and we got back to the vehicle. You know, my dad told me the first one's back. We thought there was these giant bear tracks around, well, they were giant tracks around that circled our vehicle. And I'm going, Dad, look at this.

I said, these tracks, what made that? And he goes, it must be a bear. I mean, they were huge, and they had five toes. And so that afternoon, we drove back down to the spot, the thing had crossed the road. And we were asking the guy who got out, said, man, what did you see down there? And he goes, well, all I can figure out, it was a guy, hunter on horseback. He said, what? He said, yeah.

And he was riding away. And he had the hood pulled up on. He was wearing a fur coat with a hood pulled up. He'll go, no, wait a minute. That was not what we saw across the road. And how do you know it was on horseback? He said, well, I had to be on horseback to be that big. And it was hiding behind the tree.

And then it turned, and it went away. And it was so big. It was a hunter on horseback wearing a fair coat with a hood pulled up. Okay? Okay, pal. Whatever you say. And that was in 75. And I didn't come to the realization really what it was until about 2002.

I joined the Bigfoot forums just because I finally learned how to use the Internet back then and started talking to people and people were going, dude, that was a Bigfoot. I'm going, what? This is like 32 years later, 37 years later, whatever it is. And so it finally answered that question in my life. And I know that that's all it could have been. That's all that it could have been. That was the only sightings that I think that I had.

I had other odd experiences, you know, where I've seen my dad and I saw three sets of glowing red eyes just outside our fire circle. And they were really tall in the next. Dad said there were probably raccoons in a tree, and the next morning I looked over there, and that's a, we pulled in late at night in our camper and look over there. There's a meadow, and there's no trees right there where that was. And was that while you were hunting, Bob? Yeah. Okay.

Well, we, this was in California. Actually, the red eyes. It was not far from where I live now. We went up a month before hunting season to build some blinds. and so that the deer could become accustomed to our ground blinds or our tree stands. And we pulled in late at night and went out working all day the next day, came back, had a big fire. We saw those red eyes. First one set and two sets and third set was lower to the ground and way off to the right.

And you'd shine a flashlight at it and they would kind of like get smaller than they'd disappear. here. We didn't go out there and look. You know, we really weren't. I mean, there's wildlife everywhere. It didn't concern us. And we got back in the camper. It was a cab over. Camper, you know, one of those that slides into the back of the truck. He and I was sitting there and he's making some sandwiches for dinner. And something smacked the side of that camper so hard. It knocked stuff off the shelves.

And it just, and it hit the rearview mirror on the floor. front of that old truck and that mirror just went, and just wham! We thought the what end? And we jumped out and we ran around the truck with our pistols and flashlights. There is nothing. It is dead quiet out there. We see nothing that could have smacked the side of that camper.

We know what it was. Maybe thought it was a giant tree or something. Nothing. And just as we're getting into the back of the camper, just over the little drop off right in front of us, come this ungodly scream like a woman being murdered. And it kind of ended up, I mean, it was, I'd heard screams like that before,

but this was just a loud scream several seconds. And then back where we saw the red eyes, it was an answering one. We thought, man, and then I had trouble sleeping that night. I'd sound like something walking around the camper all night long. I didn't know what it was. Never, like Bigfoot wasn't, you know, a part of my vocabulary. So I don't know. Those are a couple of the strange incidents that happened before I even got into what we call big footing. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing them. I mean, it's fascinating accounts. What do you make of that behavior of them slapping and then you go out there and you look and then they scream at you from a distance? Do you think, I mean, what's your take on that sort of behavior? Because you hear that a lot, Bob. I mean, I have way.

is on the show where they'll come up, hit the side of the house. And you guys have experienced that down there with the North American WoodApe Conservancy. I mean, rocks being thrown. What do you think that is? Do you think it's attention, or do you think it's more of a

trying to scare you out of there? Well, a little bit of both. I think that, number one, it's great fun for them, I think. but it's probably some kind they're not happy. They're wanting to shake you up.

And also, if you think about it, they don't have cable and HBO. I mean, something like us shows up out there. We're worth watching. And when we go inside, the fun is over. And so I don't know whether they're eliciting a response. It's an aggressive behavior display, which I didn't. really take it so much as that as it is just sort of a, you know, tag you're it kind of thing or, you know, just, hey, come out and play. Because if they want, you know,

aggressive dominant displays, I mean, they have ways, I mean, they've pushed over giant trees and they make a lot of racket. This is just something that I think is great fun to do. And as far as the screaming goes, you know, talk to some audiologists. about this and people that are in the primate vocalizations. And some of the times those vocalizations aren't necessarily, you know, they don't do it on purpose. In other words, it's involuntary. It's as an emotional response. You know, I mean, chimpanzees have been shown that, you know, they give a treat,

and the rest of the troop is over there behind them. and they don't want everybody over there coming their good stuff, and they'll start to squeal with excitement, and they'll put their own hand over their own mouth to muffle their own squeals of delight. So I don't know that it's necessarily a, you know, they do it on purpose. It's not saying that there aren't times that they don't do it intentionally,

but I get what you're saying, kind of like it's not meant for you. It wasn't meant for you necessarily. Just kind of an opinion, of course. Yeah. Yeah, of course. It's like when you give a three-year-old a birthday present, they squeal. You know, they're happy.

It's an emotional response. You know, you see something you like, you go, oh, it's just an emotional response. And that's, you know, only after studying lots of instances of vocalizations and what's going on prior to that, you know, can we really make a, you know, big determination because they vocalize when we're not around. I'm certain of that. I mean, we've put out the recorders out in the field in Area X that run, they're running now. They run, you know, 24-7, 365 days a year. So, you know, we're trying to, it's a massive amount of information and just trying to, you know,

catalog it and quantify it as, you know, right now gathering the information is more important than trying to decipher it. And so we're gathering as much research and data as we possibly can annex, which is, I think, something that a lot of people don't quite understand about our group. In AWAC, it does research and, you know, lots of different, I mean, photographic evidence, hair, you know, DNA tissue of different, times, you know, audio recordings, you know, other types of physical evidence, you know, hair, footprints, that sort of thing. We, you know, we try and collect data on all of it and not just focus, you know, solely on the specimen collection aspect of it. We, you know, we're trying to

trying to cover all of our bases. And it's a big task, but it's kind of fun. Yeah, I hear you. I hear what you're saying. I'm curious going back to you and your dad in that camp or what, did your dad ever talk about it? I mean, was he ever like, what the hell was that? Or did he give you an opinion as far as what was going on?

Well, you know, at the time, he, you know, he initially, when it happened, he said that was probably a deer, got chased by mountain lion. and ran, he was a, you know, Texas boy, and he was just chased by a mountain line and ran right to the side of the truck, you know. So that was his explanation at the time. And I'm not saying that that's not what it was, but we did not find a deer or a dent anywhere on there.

We didn't really look up high for handprints or anything like that. That was, we were looking for tree branches. Later on, he was definitely, he was open to the idea of Bigfoot's, a matter of fact, those two reports that I told you that my first visual in Idaho and that one with the red eyes, they're both on the BFRA website. If anybody, you wanted to look them up, the first one that was in Idaho, Custer County, Idaho, and there's only a few reports there. And Hunter has early morning sighting.

And then the other one actually report that the red eyes, my wife Kathy, before we were married, actually, took that report from my dad. So that's my dad's report on the BFR website. And that's in, I think it says near Herring Creek. It's Tualaumne County, which has got a lot of reports here in Tvalmne County. but as hunters have some kind of weird experience there. Cliff has been up in that area. I turned him on to that area and it's a really potential, great potential. It's right on the edge of the immigrant wilderness.

And if my speculation is correct about where Ron Moorhead obtained the Sierra sounds, as a crow flies from that recording site that he had, And our red eyes is under 10 miles as a crow flies. It's, you know, relatively, relatively close. I don't know the exact location he was at. Can I ask you about the red eyes? Was it reflection or were they glowing? And the reason why I ask that is I hear that a lot from a lot of different witnesses.

And sometimes I've said, you know, was it, it must have been reflection. And they'll come back and say, no, these were glowing. then sometimes you'll ask them, were they glowing? And they'll say, no, it was reflection. I'm just curious in your own experience, was it reflection from the fire or were they glowing? Well, at the time, and that's a long, I mean, I've seen other eyes shine different times. That was the best and the most prolonged. It was over a half an hour time period.

And I tell you, I was fire. fighter. After that, I became a firefighter and a paramedic, and I love fire, and you give me a campfire, and you give me a like a forest full of dead wood, and maybe we got a fire. And that's what I was doing that night. And we had a decent-sized little campfire. My estimation, my impression at the time was that it was reflection off of the campfire. And like say to first it was one set big way up set really far apart like bicycle reflectors which kind of threw me off as a god dad those are those are huge red eyes and um you know and i would step over to the edge beyond you know the fire pit area and that shine my little weak flashlight out that way and you could tell that they kind of got smaller like the head was turning and then they would disappear and did that several times and then I saw the second set off to the side a little lower than eventually the third set way off to the side and much lower to the ground.

I always got the impression that they were reflection. Now, I do know that people have seen reflections with the naked eye or illuminations of some sort without any. any, you know, perceivable light. But it's kind of, I mean, there's got to be some light somewhere. You know, I've had this discussion with Alton Higgins, you know, the chairman, the emeritus of the NAWAC several times, and he's adamant. That thing is not producing its own light.

And then I acquiesce, I mean, I'll compromise and I'll say, okay, until it's proven that they can do that, I guess that's where we've got to go, even though there are, you know, some species of animals on this planet that can do that. We have no evidence that they can do that. But if they're not self-illuminating, then the inside of their eyes are like, if you can imagine the mirrors on the Hubble telescope and reflecting light, back, you know, to help aid in their night vision, you know, collecting and concentrating available light. And then that's what we see. I mean, I can see that because let me tell you

what, these apes, they can see in the dark. I don't know how they do it, but man, they're good at it. It's like a cat. I don't know how they do it, but they do it. Yeah, not only can they see in the dark, you know, a lot of times you'll hear of eyewitnesses that'll have thermals, for instance, the thermals up, and, you know, we assume they can't see the thermal, but they're almost moving around as if you can see them, which is bizarre behavior. It's almost like they don't know that we can't see in the dark. And I say that with, you know, there's a lot of different thermal examples I could throw up, but of where they're tree peaking or where they're doing different things. And almost real skittish and don't realize that we can't see it at night, you know.

Yeah, totally. Totally. I agree with you 100% there. I think one of the best examples of what you're talking about is Michael Green and the thing crawling up to grab the candy bar. And it's like, it's like Joe Commando Ninja crawling behind that. And there is nobody there. You know, Michael is not there.

He set that up to record. And he got out of there. So there were no humans present at that time of that filming. And the thing was acting like it was. And similar behavior that we've noted in X, that they do hide behind trees and peek around in total darkness. And we see that. The only way we see it, you know, maybe catch an eye shine and look at it through a thermal.

And you can see them hiding and peeking. And they've done that a lot. We have a lot of reports of that kind of behavior. at night, but I think you're right that, I mean, but how would they know that we can't do what they can do? I would, I would imagine that they would expect that everything that they can do, we can do. Yeah, I guess that makes sense, Bob. I mean, logically, since that type of behavior makes you wonder if they think that we can see at night like they can see at night, and maybe they assume we can do things that they can do, even though we can't. I think that they see us as

predators. That's my own personal opinion. But I'm kind of curious. So you go, you have these encounters. You go online to the Bigfoot forums in the late 90s, 2000s, and someone says, oh, what you saw is a Bigfoot. Where did you go from there? Did you have more encounters? Or I'm kind of curious from that point to where you join the North American WoodApe Conservancy Group. What kind of happened between then, what did that time frame look like? Well, you know, I did have one other very strange encounter before I even encountered the Bigfoot forums. So a couple of them, they're real, you know, insignificant.

I mean, nothing verifiable. I find tiny little barefoot human-looking footprints in a stream bed where I wouldn't figure any humans to be, you know, certainly not near a road. hear what sounds like people talking out in the willows right nearby to that, you know, kind of sounds of, you know, trees, limb snapping and stuff and behind me when I'm bow hunting. But I had another deer hunting trip to the Trinity Wilderness, Trinity Alps Wilderness area, and we looked back on horseback, rented a hired an outfitter to take us 12 miles back into the Trinity

Alps, dropped us off for nine days, and it came back and picked us up. And one night, me and this other guy went up, and we had rented a mule to be with us and to pack out something, an animal, if we

dropped it in a canyon, to haul the game. And he and I put our camp in boxes and pack boxes and put it on Nancy. And we went up to the far ridge away from everybody else and just me and him and Nancy up there for the night and it was a perfect beautiful spot we we followed the outfitters recommendation about how to take care of Nancy for the night

she was on like a 30-foot lead and tied to her tree in the middle of grassy meadow and that was her that was her thing and she was just like you know barely outside of our of our rope just almost reached our tent um we wanted to keep her close. And as we were going to bed, something let out of scream. And it screamed for almost 10 seconds. And it first started, it was down the hill from it. It sounded like a woman being murdered.

And then it went into an angry scream. And it sounded like a lion's roar that pulsated. And it just scared the holy Moses out of both of us. And, you know, we slept with our deer rifles in a tent with us that night, you know, ready to, ready for action. And, and so we went and checked on Nancy and everything seemed to be fine. And she was, like I say, just right there beside us. But once we got back in the tent, about half hour, 45 minutes later, we'd know sooner been in the tent where Nancy started going nuts. And so we get out, we run over there, and she's got the front

leg up in the air picked up, and her knee is swollen. And her, Her eyes are wide, her ears are back, her nostrils are flaring, and she's looking off into the trees. And we've been over there, and we didn't see anything. We didn't hear anything. So poor girl, she obviously got injured somehow. So we untied her and brought her and parked her right outside the entrance to our tent, you know, on a short lead. And she was upset and should have swollen knee and we, you know, took care of it all. We didn't see anything, no dear anything, that entire week.

And every time somebody would go to the bathroom, they're going, man, there's somebody up there in those rocks, you know, it's like sliding rocks down on us. We're like, what is going on? And Bigfoot never came up. It was really weird. So, yeah, it was 2002. Then I encountered the Bigfoot forums. And it was sort of as a, I was just clicking links.

I was following links. And it was just like the ding being I was link surfing and come across the Bigfoot forums and I go, oh, this is weird. Okay, well, I'll start reading this. And within a couple of months I thought, well, maybe

that's, I forgot all about that instance in Idaho and so I kind of posted that on there. And a couple people came back and said, God, you got a follow report of the BFRO. And I said, that's Bigfoot, man. And then I met,

next the following year 2003 uh i met kathy at the will of crete um 2003 in the national bigfoot symposium and uh met her there and um you know actually went out on a expedition with uh she and with her and a couple of other people uh bfro investigators and this group that we had met at the uh symposium there's eight or ten of us and we went up to Tahoe. We're in the area where the Tahoe scream within a mile where the Tahoe scream was recorded. And we had a lot of activity there. And so no sightings, but lots of broken trees and screaming all night long in response to our call blasting. And so from there, I ended up become a part of the BFRO.

and as an investigator, then later on, as what they called a curator. And the pay was the same, though. It was zero. You got a fancy title, though. Yeah, I did. But what it did do is it enabled me to be able to contact a lot of witnesses and get a lot of reports and become really familiar with what other people were seeing. and so I was able to publish some of the reports, of course, that people would file with the BFRO and a lot of really strange behaviors, but things that were similar to what I had experienced.

And so it was really good for me. And, you know, some of the people that I called were surprised to hear from me. It was because their son or their spouse had filed the report, and the old man didn't want anything to do with it. And finally this, several of the people I'd talk to go, look, all right, I'll talk to you once. Don't, but after this, do not ever call me again. And if you believe me, fine. If you don't, I don't care. And he would tell me as a story and it's just like mind blowing.

And they go, that's it. I know it's crazy, but it happened. And if you don't believe me, I don't care. I say, thank you, sir. And so, you know, kind of went on. from there, Kathy and I left the BFRO and after going on a few expeditions, met some, of course, really great people, Bob Gimlin included in 2004, went on a couple of BFRO expeditions with him into Northern California and up into the Olympics and made a lot of, you know, really good friends.

And it wasn't until then Kathy and I were always doing our own thing up here. and Kathy and I got married in 2005, and we were doing a lot of investigation right up here in Twalumney County and had a lot of really compelling evidence that we were collecting. I didn't have any visuals. And, of course, we were friends. Kathy was a speaker in quite a few conferences back then, and she was invited to talk to a couple of... several conferences in Texas that was sponsored by the,

at that time called the TBRC. And so we went back there and met, of course, I had known Alton Higgins and the BFRO, and quite a few of those guys were in the BFRO, Darryl Collier, way back in the day. So we were familiar with them and became good friends with them. And in 2012, when they really started having a lot of activity, well I guess end of 11, 12, right in there.

They asked us to come and visit this area, Area X, and just sort of give them our unbiased assessment of it. And that was our first week. And that was, we weren't even official members of the group at that time that we spent that week, I believe it was Operation Persistence Bravo team that was just mind-blowing week, absolutely incredible. I went in there with like, oh, yeah, this is no problem. I came out of there, it was like, man, I need to drink in a cigarette.

Yeah, I hear. Holy, holy. You don't know what I saw, man. Yeah. It was crazy. It was crazy. So, you know, I tell people, like, A lot of people ask, well, why do you believe in Bigfoot?

You see, I kind of, sometimes I feel like I have people at a disadvantage because I didn't come into this looking to have something proved to me. I came into this going, man, there's something out there and it's scary big. What the hell is it? And the Bigfoot came along and said, it fits everything. It's like, does Bigfoot exist? Yes. Why do you believe?

I don't know because it's big and I saw it. and it scared the crap out of me. I don't know. Yeah, I'm with you on that. Let me ask you, when you were taking these reports with the BFRO, let me back up. When I very first got into this, I would refuse to hear anything strange, anything weird. And my mindset at the time was it must be some great ape that we're chasing. And I know that's the theory that you have. I know it's a theory that most hold down with the North American WoodApe Conservancy Group. And I get that. I completely get that. And you guys could be right. You guys can be 100% right. I always ask people, what do you think Sasquatch is on the show?

And the reason why I ask that is there's no wrong answer because no one really knows until we have a body. And I'm really hopeful that you guys collect a body down there. But, you know, as I've been taking reports of the years, I've become more open to hear what people are saying. And I'll give you an example. When you were taking these reports, did you ever have someone say, oh, and by the way, there's these weird balls of light on my property. I'm also seeing. Or I saw Sasquatch vanish. Now, I know when we have a bunch of cult leaders in the Bigfoot community, and they're like, oh, I'm the chosen one, and Sasquatch shows me and all this other nonsense. So I tend to dismiss that. But when it comes from an eyewitness, and they're telling you something private, and they're very

serious about it. It makes me kind of stop and think what's going on here. And I'm curious, as you were taking these different reports with the BFRO, did you ever have anything like that where someone said, oh, and by the way, there's these weird balls of light on my property, or I saw Sasquatch vanish, or I saw something out of the norm, kind of more, I guess, paranormal as you were taking these different reports, investigating these reports? You know, I think I may have had a one one such report, although I did hear about a lot of them, we were instructed in the BFR road to go ahead and take all the reports, except for the clearly trolls, you know, like, I think I'd hate my grandmother, to take all of this, but not necessarily to divulge every single

detail, but, and in the overall in the BFRO reports, there were, you know, a few reports of glowing or strange lights. And I may have talked to one person that said that there was, oh yeah, I did. It was coming from over the back of the hill.

And, you know, I had to go through looking at phases of the moon, time of day, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it was a full moon that night. And that's basically where it rose. So it's like you can't count, you

didn't see a globe, he just saw a light. It was probably rising full moon beyond the mountainside. But I have heard people tell me that they have seen lights, you know, that they have woken up and they felt like they were illuminated. And I've heard people say that they have seen green lights off in the distance. And not people that are members of the NAWAC, but other people that have. I have talked to in person, you know, and yeah, I mean, I guess they were in conjunction with Bigfoot reports, but, but, I mean, I don't know what to make of that. I mean, I don't know. I do know

that we were in Skooka Meadows with a group of friends, and we're there for a few days, and there was, somebody had done, a couple of guys had done a nightwalk through the meadow down this road and came back reporting these little glowing lights. And so Cliff Barrettman was there. And, you know, Cliff, God bless him. I mean, he'd like,

you know, leave lunch sitting on the table to go investigate something. And he jumped up and goes, let's go. So we all went down there. And no fooling. That guy was right. There was little lights illuminating.

from an unexplainable source until I found one on a little bush about three feet high, and I got down there on my hands and knees and waited for it to do it again, and it was a firefly. But it was red, and most of them that I've seen in Texas, you know, were like white. And so Kat had to check it out with what do you call a bug person entomologist or whatever from that national forest and said, oh yeah, no, it's a various species of, you know, firefly that they have there, and that's how they attract their mates. So, you know, it's really hard to say what these lights are, but fireflies don't all have the same color,

and they don't all have the little same duration of illumination. So, you know, you've got to kind of, I mean, when you're observing these things, you write it all down. I think one of the problems overall that people make, in this reporting is that they'll make conclusions and it's like rather than report observations they go well Bigfoot was talking to me because because he like flashed you know I saw a light it's like okay well let's step back tell me what you saw I saw a light okay what did you hear well I heard nothing okay so How does Bigfoot was talking to you because you saw a light? Where does that come from? That comes from their interpretation of that and them drawing a conclusion.

And I see a lot of witnesses trying to do that. That's kind of what I think the human mind tries to do is to put something in the box that they can, that the mind feels comfortable with. And, you know, it's what is that? Oh, that's why when I saw, you know, this big ape across the mountainside from me in Idaho, stood up on two legs, immediately, I go, that's a dude. That's a dude. And it felt comfortable to me. Yeah, I understand what you're saying, Bob. I mean, sometimes things can be explained away, and you can't explain different things that people tell you. I think a lot of times you can't explain different things. And that wasn't really the type of light I was talking about, kind of more of

the balls of light, what people call or, I guess in World War II, they called them. foo fighters, pilots were seeing them. And people seem to be seeing them in the forest. And I've seen them, and I have no explanation for what I saw. I'm not saying it's Bigfoot related, didn't even have a Bigfoot encounter when I saw the lights. I just saw this weird ball of light floating in the forest. And I'll respectfully disagree. I think most of the eyewitnesses I've talked to, when they talk about their encounter on their property, they'll also mention these weird balls of light, but it's more like a footnote, more like, oh, and by the way, I'm also seeing this, and I don't know what this is. But I completely get where you're coming from.

Let me ask you, so you guys go, you and Kathy go to Area X in Oklahoma, and I know Kathy talked a little bit about a sighting she had. Did you ever see Sasquatch, or did you ever have an encounter when you were there in Area X beyond rock throwing and vocals? Well, that first week, yeah, we had a, of course, the citing of the two that, you know, there were clearly apes. And I call them apes because everything that I've seen their behavior indicates to me that they're an ape. Like I say, Kathy told the story. We had been, you know, sitting there. Well, actually, it had happened.

over the period unfolded over about an hour in the late afternoon. And this place we were at at the time had multiple cabins. And there's no electricity or anything like that down there. These are primitive cabins. And with metal roofs, and they're kind of spread out. And we would hear rock hit or banging on one cabin, and we'd go over there. And then we'd hear rock banging on the other cabin on the far side. Let's say we're situated in the middle.

And that's one side to the other end, back and forth. And we did that several times. And we had glimpses of movement up in the trees. It was right at the base of a very steep hillside. And not a cliff, but a hillside. And we'd densely brushed in. And we'd catch glimpses of stuff like that up there. So going back and forth, and Kathy's staying there.

in the middle watching all of this and listening and looking out for stuff during that time. I don't think she really mentioned this to you. And this is really weird. And I mean, I've talked about this before. And this is the truth. This is just the way that it unfolded. We heard a bang. We all went down there.

We had done this for, you know, like say an hour or so. and there was another bang, the guys, there was five of us there, and the three guys went down to the far one to go check it out again, and Kathy said, hang here for a second. I saw right over there in that group of trees and bushes, I saw a limb just snapped back up like it was pulled down. Go over there and look in there. So I went over there, and there was a fallen tree that was sticking out into the trail.

You had to walk around this old dead log, and it crossed like a little tiny little shallow ravine, like a little drainage ravine. I don't know what it was. It was just a depression in the ground there in the middle of all this brush. And I'm right up next to the log and I'm looking. I can see the hillside on the other side. And I'm looking, scanning.

I go, man, man, I don't see anything. I thought, well, maybe I'll walk over there. And I was going to hop up on this log, you know, like Daniel Boone style. And, you know, use this as a bridge to get through the other side. And I thought, man, I don't know. I don't want to, like, fall off this log and down and do this, you know, hurt myself or, you know, get bit by a snake or something. And I can see it right there. So I contemplated it when I did.

I kind of glanced down. I'm still looking up, but I glanced down real quick. And it looks like a couple of other, you know, you know, stumps or logs laying down there in that, you know, dark logs down there in that little ravine. And this was like the sun was starting to set and it was in the shadows and it was kind of dark in there. So I didn't put my flashlight down. I thought, well, I didn't put my foot here, then step on that log. Forget it. So I came back and said, you know, there's nothing over here.

I didn't see anything. And came back and we're puzzled about it. So the whole event. So finally it quieted down. And we went and sat down to take a little bit of a breather. and they're sitting there and Kathy is looking back at the same area where this brush was

and then she hops up and just takes off running in that direction where are you going? She goes there's two of them. They're right there and she's running at a flat run at them and I look up in time and I see two upright, you know, dark colored figures

you know, ape looking at the same color hit the toe and one was out front. and one was behind and they're walking like they were going to like come around behind us on the shed that was off to the side of the property to get closer or something. I guess. I don't know. And when she comes running, the one in front stops. It turns around and takes a step and rams, bams crashes right into the one behind it.

It's kind of like the three stooges that bounce off each other. They step back. And then the turn and the one out front turn and one. ran up the hill just like a flash. I mean, it was a blur of this at least 45 degree inclined, maybe steeper. It was rough covered with green bar and it was gone. And just a split second after that one, the other one, which was a little smaller in size, went up and grabbed onto a fallen tree that was probably went up there and looked at it.

It was probably six or eight inches diameter. And it hopped up on that thing and used its, went down on all fours and used its hands to help pull itself up like it was like running up a ladder really fast. And they were amazingly, incredibly fast. So that was the first time. We obviously saw them. And then that night was, you know, there was a lot of activity. Throwing rocks on the roof. They slapped the cabin that night.

And the next morning, we're just, and we're fried. We had all, well, four of us, the five had deciding the fifth guy didn't see it. He didn't get turned around in time. But, but, you know, the guy didn't see it. He goes, Bob, well, come over here. You know, tell me what you were doing over here in these bushes. And I said, yeah, and I'm looking and I don't see anything. And I look down there and I'm thinking about stepping on those logs down in the, down in the crevice.

And I look down there. And those logs that I had thought about putting my foot on, They weren't there. And I went back, how many logs did I tell you? They said, well, you said there were two or three down the little ditch. And they looked down there. They're gone. All I can figure is that those apes were behind that fallen tree and ducked down and let me walk right up on them and almost step on them.

And they were that discipline in hiding and staying still and quiet. that's all that I can figure. And then later on that week, I saw another one, and it was definitely a different one. It was, I call it the color of an Irish setter. I saw it walking across the hillside from the waist up, and then the sun glistened off its hair like an Irish setter. It had a shine to it. And it was brief, but it was huge. So those are the biggest main sidings that I.

had in area X. Yeah, that's an amazing encounter, Bob. There's definitely stuff going on down there in area X. And it's kind of cool to hear your side of that encounter. I know I heard Kathy's side of the encounter in episode 655, but there's a lot more details from what you saw. And I don't want you to feel like you have to defend your theory on it being an ape. I get completely where you're coming from.

I mean, it looks like an ape. A lot of its behaviors are ape. like. I think for me, after being in this for so long, I guess more of a short period of time, something doesn't quite add up for this just to be a North American primate we haven't been able to catch up with. And that's my opinion. And we can disagree on that. And that's supposed to be the fun part of this subject. You know, most people make not fun is disagreeing and listening to other people. You know, regarding the North American WoodApe Conservancy, group that you're a part of. And I actually respect the group, mainly because of the group of people

that are involved with it. And it's one of the few groups, I would say, is actually doing research. You know, I've asked researchers in the past tell me about your research, and you generally don't get anything. But, you know, you guys are actually doing real research down there. And I'm kind of curious about this Tag 7 experiment that you guys did. Tell us about Tag 7. Well, sure. First of all, we wrote up a paper. We have a really nice website at woodape.org. And we wrote a published a paper. There are several papers on there, including the Washington, the Washington, Project Monograph, which chronicles four years of field study. But this was after that was published.

Came up with the idea, and we have a lot of extremely intelligent individuals in the group and people that we don't really publicize who all of our members are. And it's not necessarily because they want to remain anonymous. not what we're into. But we have a wildlife biologist out of Maine. He's currently employed as a wildlife biologist and John Perry. And he had done some work in the field with tracking movements of wildlife. The research that they were doing, I guess at the time, was with turtles.

And they had taken these, which turtles are easy to catch, by the way, compared to wood a, I think they're a lot easier. And they would take these little radio transmitter tags. We call them a tag. It's a little radio transmitter, battery powered. And they would glue them to a turtle shell. And then they could track the movements of the turtle. And if they migrate or where they go to Saturday night, I don't know.

Or whatever turtles do, they would figure it out. But they're tiny, tiny little tags. and they're actually in the paper that we have published on the website, the Tag 7 paper, you can see we put how people can obtain all of this equipment, the model numbers that we use, links are provided to the companies that we get this from, and it's from advanced telemetry systems out of Minnesota. And these tags, like I say, they're radio transmitter tags. They come in all sizes. And the smaller they are, the smaller the battery, the less they weigh, and the shorter the duration of the battery life, unfortunately.

So we had been trying to, you know, discover, of course, everybody here say, well, let's put a GPS transmitter in a, you know, like in a tennis ball. and, you know, they'll grab that. Personally, in my opinion, I don't think, you know, Bigfoot's going to carry around a tennis ball for six months. I just don't think it's going to happen. No, probably. And, yeah, so these things are not, they're not GPS. They are just a radio transmitter.

It admits a radio signal. It's an audible to the ear. You have to have a receiver to pick it up. And so through collaborative efforts of John's inspiration and the great minds of a lot of very skilled woodsmen and biologists that we already had in the group, Martin McClurkin, one of our, at the time was a member of the board of directors, and come up with the idea to, well, John was wondering how we could deploy one of these radio transmitters to, to a wood ape and Mark came up with the inspiration to put one inside of a big burr. Now down in Texas area, things grow bigger and there's a member of the sunflower family that's got a bird.

It's a seed pod is what it is. And it gets, if anybody who has a horse, anywhere, you know, the brush in Texas can tell you what these are. They're cuckle-birds. They call them cuckle-birds. and there can be up to an inch long. And they've got these spiny little spine spines sticking out all the way around. And they get hopelessly entangled

in like horses, tails, and manes and dog fur. And you almost have to cut it out. I mean, they're just so hopelessly tangled in the fur. They thought, well, what if we use one of these to adhere itself to an ape? So through trial and error, he would discover it, Well, he's perfected the method of hollowing out and then sterilizing these seed pods.

So we don't want to transfer noxious weeds. So we would make it incapable of spreading its spawn and then put one of these little radio transmitter tags, super glue it to the inside of this cuckle bear, and then hang it from a string, and hopefully as something walks through there, would stick it to itself. And Mark had seen a wood ape with a big mangy lock of hair, like a Dreglop mats, and up around the shoulder head area,

and he thought, you know, it's likely that one of these birds could get caught in that. And so through a lot of trial and error, through all different types of fur that Mark had, you know, access to. He perfected that gluing this little radio transmitter and has like a little three to four inch little wire antenna hanging off of it inside of Koko Berr.

And then how the radio transmitter activates, it's got a little magnet on the back of it, tiny little magnet. And so you could store them so they don't, you know, you don't run the battery down. Only by removing the magnet does it add. activate the radio transmitter. So I super glued a little hook onto the magnet and onto the cucklebird and the tag.

And we put it on some string traps that Alton Higgins had identified some areas of travel around our site there in X. And when I say a string trap, you just take a sewing thread. And you put it up about seven feet high and you secure it to one tree. and then you take it and you wrap it loosely around the limb or a tree, you know, several feet away. And so the idea, as Matt said, told you, he, you walk, whatever it is, walks through there. And it doesn't necessarily break the thread, but the idea is that it will unravel it from the loose side and drag it one direction. So you know where it's been compromised and their direction of travel.

and Alton had identified several spots, what we call string traps, and identified potential areas to deploy these things. And so they use the same type of method as the string trap to make the little cocoa bird, which is ingenious, the cocoa bird, even more sticky. They use rat trap glue, like Tomcat rat trap, those little flat rat sticky traps. And you scrape out some of that. and you smear it on the cocoa bear, and that sticks to everything.

And it doesn't, I don't care if it's raining, pouring, 110 degrees, that stuff is sticky. And the hope to aid in its adhesion to the fur and give it time to get entangled. And they deployed seven of those. And, yeah, so the idea is that the, you hang these at an eight-foot height, and the magnet is on a stationary string so that when something breaches this thread,

drags the cuckleber, the magnet is pulled off by another thread, stronger thread, and it activates the tag, and then the animal leaves with the tag intact. Well, we had had it set up for two months before the first tag was activated, and it was activated, and we deployed a, in July of 2015 and it was activated near the end of August. So it was up over a month. And then we followed the tag, which was extremely difficult to do because they don't stay still.

And these tags only over clear terrain, best you can get is five to eight kilometers. And area X is anything but clear terrain. So, you know, the range was much less shorter. And the only way that you can find the tag, the little, it shows up as a beep. You have a little monitor, a little radio receiver, and it's like it just beeps, and it pulses on its little grid as to the strength. And you have to walk along with this linear antenna. You hang, you're holding your hand, and you sweep it back and forth, and you kind of triangulate. And so that was the method that we used to.

to try to track and find the thing. And it worked successfully for 10 months until the battery went dead. So, you know, we have gathered a lot of data on movements. And we had 26 hits, 25 hits over that 10-month period. And it was interesting how initially when it happened, it was, they found it near dark. And the thing had a powerful signal was close by.

and they figured, well, it'll still be around in the morning. And they go out there the next morning, and it's gone. They couldn't find it. We had no idea what happened. We drove around. We had some teams up there for months, scouring the hills, the whole area, did not find it. The only way we found it was in December. We were at our width's end.

And so we had a couple of private pilots in the group, and they put an omnidirectional antenna, mounted it to the bottom of a private airplane. And they flew up there and they did low passes through the entire area and got absolutely nothing. And then they didn't want to give up. So they started doing concentriced circles, started from the, and they just started spiraling outward, more and more. And they finally got a hit. And it was several miles away. And then from there, we were able to track it at 25 more hits and locations throughout that, that the rest.

of that time that the battery was active. And from that, we were able to sort of, you know, using different programs that wildlife research groups used to study and estimate home range for different types of animals, we were able to come up with an idea of not only where it was during different parts of the year, because they were conglomerated in one area in the summer, in the spring, in an area, and the winter, they were in a completely different area, nowhere near where we were. And using those methods, we were able to come up with an effective home range for for Tag 7, whatever it was tagged to, we think it was a wood ape at 110 square kilometers or 42.

42 square miles. And so, you know, we compared that to bear. There had been bear studies in the same area. You know, they're using different methods. They were, you know, nowhere near, like maybe at the most, eight square miles. And we got 42 square miles for our home range. Yeah, it's kind of outside of the box thinking. I like that kind of genius idea, actually.

Let me ask you, what makes you think it was actually attached to a Sasquatch? And then my other question regarding this experiment, did you guys learn anything as far as where it was going, what it was doing? Was there any rhyme or reason behind the pattern of its movement? Well, the first question, what makes us think that it was actually a Sasquatch or ape that it attached to? You know, and in the paper we address all that, all the likely other creatures that are indigenous to the forest and even some that aren't like cows and horses. And we give our rationale there in the paper kind of a little bit more in depth than I can do here. But first of all, the thing that kind of sets it off is height at which it was hung.

and it was hung at a seven foot height. So unless something could stand up and reach that height, which a bear probably could, then unlikely it was anything else. We tried to stick it to feathers to see if it would stick to feathers. And it really doesn't. And they fell off quite quickly. and other types of hair, you know, deer and cougar hair, it just is too short and it just doesn't really adhere. But, you know, so that's the first thing, and that it was nowhere near a tree.

It was hanging out in the middle, like three or four, maybe six feet away from any tree. So it's just kind of suspended out in space there where these tags were, these cuckold bears. So, you know, that's part of it. And then again, what I mentioned about the home range of the bear, and that's why we went into such great lengths on determining not only, of course, comparing them to bear for the home range is an interesting way of comparing it, you know, and how other species are determined their home range. but also then why it isn't, we don't think that it's a very unlikely candidate that it is a bear with that size of home range. In the same area, it's five times as large. So, you know, those are a couple of the main factors. And some of the others are, again, and I was present on this one time that we did track.

were able to get a radio signal hit. And it was clear, we were up on a ridge, and it was clear that the tag was below us and getting further away. Because this is like a linear antenna that you have to aim at it, like a metal detector. And so aiming it downward, we were getting a strong signal. And then it started moving up, and it's moving up. the other mountain side across from us and it's getting weaker. And then you could tell we were aiming straight at the ridge of the mountain side across from us.

And then it got really weak and then it disappeared, assuming that it went down from us, up the other side of the mountain and then cleared that crest and down the other side in a matter of just a few minutes. And that terrain is nothing. I mean, it's nothing that you can make any good time at all. A human would be, you know, really unlikely and any other animals. I mean, I don't know. I personally haven't seen deer booking it, like from one side of the mountain to two mountains over,

just as a straight line. It was like, here we go, we're on a road trip, you know. They just don't behave that way. So, you know, we don't know. Of course, for sure, because we did not get a visual while we had a radio hit. And believe me, we tried. And we sent teams out and tried a pincher movement with two teams on, with the plane overhead and two ground teams, both with radio antennas and receivers,

and they tried chasing that thing and it left them in the dust and it cleared a ridge and it was gone in a matter I mean it, you don't know whether it was playing with them it just stayed away from them. Whatever it was, it wasn't going to get close. So, you know, there's

I guess, you know, I don't know if any other animal can do that sort of thing then I guess that, you know, that... Doesn't really make sense. Yeah. It just didn't to us. And as far as what we learned where they were

and what times of the year, we started looking into that. And we could... All of these clumpings over here within a two-month period and over here in a two-month period and up here in a two-month period. And we started looking at, you know,

what resources are there. And we, you know, began to identify, you know, things that, you know, food resources that might be available in one type of a little minor ecosystem, if you will, because like lots of berry patches over here and down here, there's lots of nuts. And it's a mixed conifer hardwood forest that Area X is located in. and there are not a lot of conifers or pine trees in the area that we're in an X because it is heavily inundated with nut-bearing hardwoods, so hickory nuts and walnuts and, you know, really nut-rich area. And so if you kind of look at what the times of year that the nuts start to drop, that's the time of year that we found all those clumpings in the nut-producing. areas. And in the winter, but at the same time, they, they drop their leaves in the winter, and it's barren, it's open, it's wide open. It's a pleasure being there in the wintertime,

actually, because you can see, you know, you're looking through sticks of, you know, thousands of, you know, tree trunks, but there's no greenery to speak of. And yet over, and that's in the wintertime, in the wintertime where we saw the clumpings is a conifer forest. And, which stays green all year long. And so, of course, there's food resources over there as well. And, you know, I mean, the Native Americans used to do that. You know, they'd say, well, you know, they're migrating. I don't know if you would talk about, you know, walking in a big circle following the resources.

I'm not sure you can call that a migration. I just think that you're just like, you know, you're browsing in a big giant circle. You know, so so we were. able to make some assumptions from that. Can't really say conclusions. You know, definitive, but it's highly likely that they're in the wintertime,

but they're choosing areas that has water and a thick, you know, evergreen forest. But they don't produce the nuts and they don't have the berries. And so we think they're just following the food resources. And if that's, the case, then we can kind of predict

what area they're going to be in at any time of the year. And that was part of our, you know, hope for this type of research. And that, you know, it turned out real well. And we keep trying and these things only

have a shelf life, even though if you don't use them, you know, they're not good for more than a year or so. You know, if you want to save them and not, they don't get deployed. you want to use them the next year, they run out pretty quickly.

They're tiny, you know? Their batteries are like the size of it. It's got to be like a herringade battery. So, you know, they can't hold their juice that long, and they're expensive. You know, they're close to like $200 a piece, and we get seven or nine of them every year. We're totally volunteer, totally self-funded.

You know, 501C3. People donate their time, energy, resources, and anything that goes into that research and getting us there at all, we provide it. So when we're not looking for somebody to sponsor this, we don't answer to anybody. And we also are expecting we don't even want to make any money off of this at all. And this is part of the reason that we do this research, not only to help prove the existence of the species, but also to conserve its habitat and also educational purposes, which is the focus of the Washington Project monograph, that is, to educate the public and things

like this tag 7. We basically give you a blueprint or other researchers out there how to do this. So if somebody wants to try this, you know, here's all the instructions right here. And if anybody wants some further tips, I mean, I'm happy to correspond with them. You know, because our ultimate goal is conservation of the species and its habitat, which is really important. And if I could take just to, I know I'm running here. It's really important to people say, well, why don't you just leave them alone? Oh, they're doing just fine. Well, you can go on a U.S. government website.

It's called Loss of Open Space. And estimates from the U.S. government is that the United States is losing five to six thousand acres of open space per day in the United States. And, yeah, people say, well, that's not much. there's hundreds of millions of open space. Yeah, well, the problem is, is, you know, five or six thousand acres a day adds up pretty fast. And not only that, think about if, let's say, oh, five or six thousand acres in a day, you know, a big deal.

What if that 5,000 acres was 10 acres high and 500 acres wide? You know, that's a huge piece of land. And you develop, you put shopping malls in there or a city or interstate highway or whatever it is. Now you have segmented what potentially, in theory, is a habitat into two habitats, making it difficult for a while left to cross in between. So not only loss of the space, but also fragmentation of available habitat, you know, is, happening as well. And not only that, of course, in southeast Oklahoma, forest products are a big commodity. People still like to use paper for whatever reason. I'm not here to judge, but if you want to use paper, there are companies that will provide you with wood product. It is an agricultural

product to them. And on private forest, thousands, thousands of thousands of acres of hardwood forests have been decimated and the ecosystem has changed from a hardwood forest to a plantation of pine trees now this changes everything as far as the wildlife is concerned there they maybe can use it for a protection shelter in the wintertime but they're not getting a lot of food resources out of their smaller. Chipmunks might, but the bigger animals aren't getting so much out of it. And

so it's that type of eco-system changing that is really threatening a lot of it. That's not loss of open space. It wouldn't be considered loss of open space because it's still trees, but it's transformation

of habitat. And so it If that train continues, then, you know, I mean, who knows, who knows, who knows what? I mean, this, I'm here to tell you as far as I'm convinced that there is a population of whatever you want to call it. We call it the wood ape because it is more ape than it is human from behavior that I've seen. So, and that's a local people go, oh, you just make you feel better to call it. No, that's what the locals call it. You know, they have lots of, you go to different places around, you know, the country.

And, you know, a lot of places have their own little, you know, names for it. And that's what they happen to call it, you know, around there. And it fits. And, you know, mountain devils, mountain monkeys, mountain apes. I mean, there's a million of them. but no i tend to agree with you bob i mean i i'm with you on what you're saying and i think a lot of times when people hear your guys's goal uh with the north american wood ape conservancy group of wanting to kill one or or collect a specimen uh they stop listening at that point and i think

that's a big mistake because you know our environment is changing uh we are losing forest we are losing land. I didn't realize we were losing as much as you were saying with regard to the website, but it doesn't shock me one bit. And, you know, I've heard your wife say, if you're against killing one, you've doomed the species. And I tend to agree with her on that. Assuming it is an ape, let's go with that theory, let me ask you, have ever thought about contacting a primate specialists like a Dr. Anna Nicaris from the UK who's actually found a primate. I realize what she found was on a smaller level, but maybe asked an expert to come in and say, you know, what do you do to bring an ape in? How did you find the primate that you found? Have you considered that at all

as far as bringing an expert you may have? Yeah, it was a matter of fact to answer your question. and we have. We had a few years ago, we had Ian Redmond come and be a speaker at one of our conferences and he wasn't able to make it up into Area X and he is an invitation to

go in there and I've had discussions at Beachfoot as a matter of fact with Dr. Esteban Sarmiento about that and he's given me a lot of tips and I believe he's been invited there as well. Now John Mayansinsky is actually

have been there. And he did extensive field notes on resources of, you know, food resources and plants. And he spent a week in there by himself. So we have, and we've had a naturalist in there. David, I'm going to butcher his last name, so I'm not going to say it, Mijikowski, a naturalist in there. And he had quite a unique experience. And there was Brian Brown, and they heard a wood cracking,

and they ran behind the cabin and looked up the hill. And there was a giant tree. that was kind of leaning out and it was bouncing up and down and it was shaking it was like bam bam bam bam and then finally it cracked and something big came out of the top of that tree and dropped to the ground and ran off and that tree was um they went up and measured it a few days later and it was a black walnut tree and it was 18 inches in diameter at breast height it was a healthy tree that was not ripe that was not right on the inside. And so what we think happened is they were, there was a giant ape up in the, near the top of the tree, way up in the branches anyway. And all we figure is jumping up and

down on it and making the thing, you know, give us some torque and the thing snapped. And, you know, I mean, we get a lot of skeptics that love to make fun of us, you know, but, you know what? I don't care. I don't really see why, though. I mean, I've always been kind of impressed with that group down there. I always thought you guys did cool work and you guys documented everything. Everything's on wood ape.org and everyone's been open. And if you look at the collective group down there, there's a lot of professionals down there, you know, in that.

You know, and I wasn't breaking your balls about the primate question. I was just kind of curious if you guys, I'm sure you've already thought of it, but if you guys had thought about going that route, I think what you guys are doing down there is great. I really hope that you guys do prove it. I told Kathy that it would be the best day of my life if you guys proved it because I could go do something else. But I really wish you guys luck down there, Bob. And I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and share your encounter and share what happened to you. I've always been curious how you kind of got into where you're at now and how kind of how you started. So I really appreciate you taking the time to come on, man. Absolutely. It was a pleasure talking with you, Wes.

You know, feel free to contact me anytime. Thanks again, Bob. And that's it for tonight, everyone. Remember, you've had an encounter to shoot me an email. My email address is west at saskatchwarcherunicles.com. Until next time, everyone.