Sasquatch Chronicles - SC EP:856 Alaskan Killer Bigfoot

Episode Date: May 22, 2022

Jeff Davis has a BS in Anthropology and an MA in Archaeology. He lived in England for nearly a year, while working on his Master's Degree on the Vikings in Greenland. He also worked for several years as a field archaeologist in the Pacific Northwest. Jeff spent many years in the U.S. military, serving in Italy, South Korea, Japan, Bosnia and Afghanistan in a number of positions, ranging from Infantryman to military historian, to putting on puppet shows at orphanages. Jeff has written several books on military history, ghosts, mythology, and archaeology. His best selling books were Weird Washington and Weird Oregon. Topics To Be Covered: Kennewick Man The Solutrean Hypothesis (Origins of the Clovis People) Alaskan Killer Bigfoot Paisley Cave Weird Oregon: Your Travel Guide to Oregon's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets Weird Washington: Your Travel Guide to Washington's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets   https://www.ghostsandcritters.com/main.html

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. 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 of what I saw were bears. What's going on, what are you reporting? Get somebody out here. What's going on now, sir? That's son of a bitch is about six foot nine, I don't know. Do you see a bouncer? Yes, I'm looking right here. Uh-uh.

My name is Maximus Decimus Meridus. Commander of the Armors of the North General of the Felix Legions, and you are listening to Sasquatch Chronicles. Welcome to the show, everyone. Thanks for being here tonight. Got a great show plan for you. We're going to be chatting with Jeff Davis. And Jeff has a very impressive resume.

He's a veteran of the U.S. military. He has a bachelor's degree in anthropology, a master's degree in anthropology, a master's degree in archaeology. He's written several bestselling books, including Weird Washington and Weird Oregon. And I can't wait to get us take on this Alaskan killer Bigfoot. And what actually happened to that little village out there in Alaska? 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 Jeff to the show. Jeff, thanks for coming on. Hello, Wes. It is a great pleasure for me to be here as well.

Yeah, I can't wait to dive into some of these topics. I know we're going to talk about the Kennewickman, the Paisley Caves in Oregon, and some of these other topics. And I really would like your opinion on a lot of this stuff. What I'd like to do is start with the Alaskan killer Bigfoot and this creature known as the Nantanac by the locals. And I guess Nantanak kind of roughly translates as giant hairy thing. But 70 years ago, all these villagers fleed this area and said it was because of this hairy giant thing killing everyone. if you would kind of give us a background on the Alaskan killer Bigfoot and what took place in that village? Sure. I will try and summarize, but this is actually a story of events going back centuries. And so if I start getting a little bit tongue-tied, just redirect me.

But that piece of land is on the Kenai Peninsula. not too far. If you get a big map of Alaska from Codiac Islands, that's one of the big landmarks. And it turns out, archaeologically speaking, that Native peoples had been living there for periods of time, like years, maybe even decades. And then they abandoned their village site, and then time would go by and they would come back. what happened 70 years ago seems, as far as

as far as we can tell right now, it seems to be this weird pattern. European explorers showed up. Spaniards as well as as well as English explorers showed up in the late 1700s and they both performed what we're called possession ceremonies

on or very near the site, but portlock. And those possession ceremonies really, this was international law at the time, and it's sort of international law now. For instance, arriving in a strange new place and laying claim on it for your nation or your people, I recommend your listeners look up who owns the moon, because there's only been one group of people who actually land on the moon. Anyway, so the Spaniards and the English lay possession to the land, and part of this ceremony involved. notifying the local people, they're now subjects of the king of Spain or the king of England, and taking readings and usually building some kind of Karen or rocks or something that's recognizable from a distance.

And boom, by international law of the days, this is your land. And when the Spaniards did their possession ceremony, the next day or the same day, several sailors got sick and died and modern historians say or suggest that it was scurvy but it's really a series of coincidences that over time people have arrived on the site and died and I move forward now to about the year 1900 and this is the exploitation of Alaskan fisheries.

So there was on that site, a fishing community grew up along with a cannery. And the canary operations expanded at one point at his height. There were 100 seasonal workers at the canary and living in temporary and permanent housing. And during the 1940s, people started disappearing. Canary workers or employees or even travelers, hunters would arrive. ride to go hunting up into the mountains just outside of the town site and over two dozen of them disappeared. Some of their bodies were found pretty much savaged, I'd use that word, but they washed up

in the lagoon in the little bay. That's the site of portlock. And people talked about seeing a giant hairy figure more than 10 feet high. and as a matter of fact, one hunter was attacked and he wasn't killed. He was savaged by this big critter and his dogs chased off the critter and the people found him. And he lived long enough to describe his attacker as this giant hairy. I use the word critter, anthropologists, we start getting really hedgy and what's a man, what's an animal. and what's maybe something in between.

And it got so bad, the fear got so bad and the number of disappearances got so bad. Literally overnight in 1950s, the next, everybody left one morning because overnight there had been howls and yells and rocks and logs were thrown down into the town site itself. And so the lamb was abandoned very soon after that. And people did come back for kind of a look-see. However, 70 years later, the people who were year-round residents moved to a nearby place called Namwalak, and they're native people, and the tribal corporation still owns the site of portlock. So they decided to see whether or not it would be feasible and safe to move back to portlock. Yeah, that's really fascinating.

about the possession ceremony. And almost, you know, I have to correct me if I'm wrong, but it almost sounds like a way to curse a land. Like if someone else comes in to your land, they're going to have trouble. I mean, that's kind of what I get from the whole possession ceremony. And, you know, I know many years later,

there was this account of this hairy giant killing everyone. And, you know, kind of mass hysteria, everyone up and left. You know, it's strange. to me, because it's not really an area that you would, A, take the time to go and settle, but B, up and leave, because it's kind of out in the middle of nowhere. You know what I mean? Yes, you raised several good points. It is unusual to, it's not unusual to find a place with resources. Why in 1900, they established a cannery there as the fish runs were there. The unusual part is, yes, you guys left. And there's no explanation in the archaeological record for that.

And there's always been a tradition among the native peoples going up the west coast of North America, even Washington State, Oregon, up British Columbia to the Kenai Peninsula about. I will use the Chinookan jargon word skukum, which is a powerful supernatural being. that can include what we call Sasquatch, but there are many other supernatural beings that fall into the category of Skukum. And in the 1850s, there was a newspaper article

that aired in a San Francisco newspaper, if I'm remembering my history, right, that talks about these giant critters coming down the Kenai Peninsula out of the hills and capturing humans and eating them. Yeah, you're right. There's definitely a long, history of the natives talking about hairy giants coming down and eating people. And when you

really get into, I don't even know if I call it folklore or mythology, because I kind of think they're right about a lot of things they say. I don't know that I'd put it in a category of myth. But there seems to be different entities that they discuss. I know when you get up towards Mount St. Helens, a lot of the local, the Shahelish tribe and some of the other tribes in the area talk about cannibalistic giants. And if you ask them, are you talking about Sasquatch? They'll tell you no, it's something very different. But even up north in Canada, and I know we use the term down here in the states of the Bukwas, the First Nations people would talk about, I'm going to use a term entity, but it's very similar to a Sasquatch, just a little bit smaller, and it's a

trickster. And it's meant to cause you harm. So there's a long history. So there's a long history. of hairy giants or hairy beings causing harm to mankind throughout Native American folklore? Yeah, you're absolutely right. And let's face it, oftentimes these days, modern American audiences are almost acculturated to expect something like Harry and the Hendersons with a sweet, lovable, gigantic, you know, teddy bearer, an e-war. walk on super steroids. And in native lore, that's not always the case. There were, as you pointed out, there are large, there are some of these large, hairy people in the forest, and they're very small ones.

And the small ones along some of the Canadian coast would carry these magical sticks, and they would take the sticks and they would hit trees with them and knock the trees over. in some cases purposely killing human beings. And some of them had the power with their voices to not just make birdsong, but to actually hypnotize people and lure them away from their houses or their hunting camps. Yeah, it's very strange. When you look at modern day reports of people running into Sasquatch, the behavior is very similar to the buckwass, which is quote unquote a spirit.

people report, you know, these creatures banging sticks together, banging rocks together, calling people's names to kind of draw them out to the forest. These Sasquatches will also do bird calls, much like the buckwass and some of these other quote-unquote entities. And when you look across the board at what the First Nation, the Native Americans were talking about, it kind of sounds like the same thing. I mean, if the buckwass is spiritual and it's not really a flesh and blood type creature, why is it doing the same thing Sasquatch does if Sasquatch is a flesh and blood creature?

It's very odd to me when you look at the behavior and the patterns from the past to today. You know what I mean? Yes, I do. And this gets to some background, excuse me, about, mythology. Again, anthropologists might well approach this and say, well, this is simply natural to all cultures that they want to explain the unexplainable. But then again, when you look at almost every single kind of myth, going to European myths of like Greek mythology, there's usually some kernel of truth that underlying.

all of this. And when I was working on my master's thesis on the Vikings, these ancient Norse sagas, in some cases, some cases they've been proven to be pretty correct, even to descriptions of houses and things like that, that archaeologically they dig them up and find out that, yes, indeed, the description matches. Yeah, and that's why I think it's important sometimes to look into the past to find out what in the world's going on today. A very simple example of this is, you know, a thousand years ago, people would talk about these fairies, and these fairies would fly around in flying machines and kidnap people and eventually release them.

And a lot of times after they release them, these people had a hard time to, they remember bits and pieces of what happened to them. You know, when you look at that and then replace fairies with aliens and flying machines with UFOs, all of a sudden, all of these historical accounts and this quote-unquote folklore sounds like modern-day abduction reports. So sometimes it's good to look into the past to try and find answers for what we're doing today. You know what I mean? Yeah, I agree. And actually, did you read Carl Sagan's book on, uh,

on the enduring power of mythology, because that's one of the cases he mentions, is that 19th century, the belief in fairies, performing that kind of kidnapping, functioning, and now the modern belief in UFOs. So you and Carl Sagan are on the same sheet of music. I haven't read that. I'll definitely have to check it out.

I'm sure Carl Sagan is much more intelligent, more articulate than my mush mouth, but I'll definitely check the book out. Going back to this hunter that was attacked, the one that got away with the Alaskan killer Bigfoot, and what happened out there. Did he go into any more details about what he saw and what happened to him regarding this hairy giant that attacked him?

The reference that I was able to find about this one particular hunter was newspaper articles. And so he didn't live long. enough to make a formal statement to law enforcement and of course this thing gets summarized by the newspaper account and he did not go into a great amount of detail but he was not the only person kind of I would say mysteriously killed there was another gentleman who was a he was out cutting trees and he was killed by a blow from a heavy object that they believe was part of his logging

equipment either on a chain or a boom or something like that. And since he was alone, they were figuring there's no way he could have done that to himself. A third person who had disappeared and was never found, there was a chromium mine that was operating at the time and one of the miners disappeared. And so it's like if inferring more who was killed and what they were up to rather than that than a direct statement. So here you've got loggers out in the woods. You've got a miner on his off day who disappears walking in the mountains. And you've got a hunter. He was getting ready to go out hunting. His dogs were out there with him. And so he was essentially attacked just getting ready to go into the mountains. So it's more of an inference that whoever, whatever the killer was, was after people who were, were one alone and two in or very close to the woods and mountains. Yeah, that's definitely an interesting point.

I definitely need to do more research. I do believe when it comes to Sasquatch, these creatures, and we can go with critters, too, I'm okay with that. I do believe that they have killed people in the past. I do believe that they've harmed people in the past. No doubt in my mind that absolutely has gone on. on. What do you think actually happened out there with that village? Do you think it was more of kind of mass hysteria and panic and everyone left? I mean, what do you think actually went on out there? That's a great question. And of course, on the show, and my part of the show and my

research, it's still up in the air. It still needs to be investigated, which is one of the reasons why I've gone out and approached you and other people to get the word out about the show so that we can get the funding and the permission to go back and continue. I agree with you. The abandonment of the town site was definitely mass hysteria. As I think I said, the night before, essentially everybody left except the postmaster. He was, as a government employee, he couldn't leave, so he had to wait for permission to leave. But there was, there were yelling and cries and rocks and logs or tree limbs being thrown against houses. And even before then, the cannery workers demanded armed guards filtering people in and out so that no strangers or no critter got in the canary.

with them. So yeah, definitely mass hysteria at the end. Honestly, I don't know that I would blame them at that point because having a mysterious killer perhaps in your midst or just in the woodline is a pretty, pretty frightening thing. Yeah, you know, I feel really bad. I haven't seen the Alaskan killer Bigfoot. I've actually heard nothing but good things about the show. I've known people who've been on the show, and it seems to be pretty much very, very positive when it comes to it. How would someone, for the audience out there, how would they go and watch the Alaskan Killer Bigfoot? Right now, Alaskan Killer Bigfoot is on Discovery Plus, so that's a pay-for platform. But very soon, I'm not sure, sometime in June, I hope early June, it is migrating over to

the travel channel. The first season, there are eight episodes, and so people should be able to see it with a discovery, or excuse me, travel channel usually has like a paranormal weekend. Hopefully soon they'll be able to watch it.

And this is not just filmmaking. There are a lot of loose threads because a lot of stuff happened to the guys out there. Yeah, like I said, I definitely need to check it out. I want to talk for a moment about the Kennewick man. And I know it's kind of you and I are in Washington State. And the Kennewick man has always fascinated me. And one could argue it's probably

the most important human skeleton ever found in North America. Basically, what happened is in the mid-90s. Two college students in Kennewick, Washington stumbled upon human skull when they were kind of near the Columbia River, they call the cops, and the cops end up, they take the school and they do carbon dating, and I believe it came out that the skull was over 9,000 years old. Would you give us a little bit of a background on this Kennewick Man and why we should care about it today? Sure. I was at the time when they found Kennewickman, I was a field archaeologist working for the Forest Service.

I was on the Giffra Pinchot National Forest and our unit was based out of Carson, Washington, people on the map close to Stevenson. And it was really exciting for us, too, even if Kennewick is another 100 or so miles to the east. Yeah, two guys were trying to sneak into the water follies, which was kind of a water show going on in the Kennewick area. and halfway in, halfway out of the water, they found a human skull. And they immediately contacted authorities. The first archaeologist who looked at the skeleton, which was over 90% complete, which is really unusual, they took a guy named Jim Chatters, Dr. James Chatters, who is a human bone specialist as well as a field archaeologist. and he looked at the skeleton.

A couple of remarkable things were this individual, who's a man, at a certain point, had been stabbed in the hip with a stone spear point. And a part of the spear point was still in his body and bone had grown around it. So he had been stabbed and he survived for some months, maybe even a couple of years before he died. Now, the other thing, when he looked at the skeleton, particularly the skull, anthropologists using a lot of four-syllable words, the morphology, the shape and contour of his skull did not look like what we think of as a traditional Native American features as far as nose, brow ridges, the shape, and contour the eyes, look to him more European. And so his initial theory, working theory, was this may be some 19th century pioneer or fur trapper who encountered native people still using stone tools and he was stabbed and he got a way to die later. But they did. They did the carbon testing.

And they didn't treat his Native American burial because initially didn't think it was. when the carbon dating came back about 9,000 years old, of course, that changed everything. And the way the law is written about Native American graves protection and repatriation, this skeleton was so old, they were not sure if there was any existing tribe today that were actually descendants of him because it's a long time. And so several of the treaty tribes in the Northwest tried laying claim to his bones as their ancestor. And at the same time, there was negativity about genetic testing on the skeleton because they thought it was, they thought it was insulting. And lawsuits ensued.

and there was even a couple of, there was a group called the Osatru who believed that some of the oldest Native Americans came to North America via Europe. And so they also were trying to lay claim to his bones. And eventually they did do genetic testing. Their initial results suggested that Kennewickman was very closely related to the existing populations. Let me back up by closely related, I mean something on the order of like 3 to 5 percent, share genetic heritage to the people in modern peoples in Malaysia. And that was the initial test. And later, as testing techniques got a little more sophisticated and the huge database of existing populations started kind of coming along and increasing the specific. the specific mapping of where modern peoples are,

they did find that Kennewickman is more closely related to people, what we think of now as Native Americans traditionally, and he did seem to have links to the Colville Indian tribe. As a scientist, can I ask you, when it comes to carbon dating, how accurate do you think it is? you know, for them to come back and go, well, this guy's 9,000 years old. In the case of Kennewick, man, I do trust the carbon dating. It's what they call corrected.

So they use a whole series of algorithms with known dates and similar conditions to, sometimes if you've seen or read scientific articles, they will say a certain date, 1,000 years ago plus or minus 150 years. That's part of kind of the wiggle room they give to it could be 1,000. It could be 800 or 850. It could be 1150. So that date is pretty well trusted. And they've actually gone beyond carbon dating with some of the,

some of the techniques that they develop. They can, if conditions are right, determine where somebody was born. worn and grew up based on the minerals in their teeth. To the best of my knowledge, they haven't done that to Kennewickman. As a matter of fact, they probably never will because the federal government surrendered the bones of what we call Kennewickman. They called the ancestor to the tribes, and they buried them in an area where they don't tell anybody.

So the Kennewickman, we know where it's at. Just no one has access to it because of the tribe. Yes. The federal government at a certain level knows where it is. And here's an interesting factoid about graveyards, Native American as well as Euro-American, and that somebody submits a Freedom of Information Act request the government agencies that know the location of burial sites that is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act to stop grave robbing. Oh, I didn't know that. I had no idea you can even get, you know, any information even from a FOIA request. Yeah, yeah. And over the years, I have encountered that kind of thing is in some cases if you are an archaeologist and you come across a care and a pile of rocks kind of out in the middle of nowhere or alongside a trail site, that may well be where 19th century sheep, her. Herders have piled up the rocks for territorial markers, but it could also be a human burial.

You know, this Kennewick man being 9,000 years old, it really, you know, if the carbon dating is accurate, it makes me wonder really how, and you probably can't even answer or even go with this question, but I'm sitting here thinking, I wonder how old the earth really is. You know what I mean? Yeah, and I have some Christian friends and relatives who do believe that the earth was created, I think it's 4004 BC. It was at February 22nd at 2 in the afternoon. I'm not sure when the English clergyman Bishop Usher actually said that, but I try not to upset anybody's religious, tea cart. And so, but getting to the point of not even more

important to me than how old the earth is, how long have people been around on the earth as in modern humans like us or Neanderthals and now we found out that that the human speciation it wasn't just homorectus in Neanderthals and us. It's a homophoresianci.

It was, there are two or three other kind of human cousins that existed as recently as, say, 20,000 years ago that are no longer present, but their descendants from mixing with modern humans genetically, we can determine that that mixing happened. I took an ancestry DNA test, and I'm about 1.8% Neanderthal, and you probably are too. I might be a little bit more than that. Can I ask you the Solutrian hypothesis, the origins of the Clovis people, and kind of explain it, kind of dumb it down for the audience. My understanding is where kind of this theory comes from is the Solutarian people, I believe, is in France made their way here.

but would you give us a background on this hypothesis and kind of your take on the whole hypothesis? Sure. The accepted wisdom among archaeologists about people coming to North America in prehistoric times as the ice sheets were retreating and dry land was appearing free of the ice. the theory is that these hunter-gatherer types just crossed what we now know is the Bering Strait, which would have been a series of hills and mountains into North America and went all the way down the coast and the interior all the way to the tip of South America.

The alternate theory is and this is not favored among a lot of archaeologists or anthropologists, but they're looking at toolkits. And in North America, about 13,000 or 14,000 years ago, people who were hunting and gathering were armed, a lot of them with a word of called Clovis points or Clovis technology. These very large spear points that were, was called Fluted, which is in the very center of the spear point. they actually knocked out a giant flake to make it easier to put on a spear shaft. And at around the same time in Europe, it was now France and maybe parts of the southern British Isles, which bear in mind, when the ice sheets were there, those were hills.

There was kind of a tundra to grassland in what's now the English Channel. There's a whole tool technology that if you just look at the tools, the technology, that it is very similar to a lot of the other kinds of tools found in Clovis sites in North America. So this theory is or suggests that these salutian people, as the ice sheets were going away, they actually made their way on what was, the English Channel and what had been dry land and through a series of adventures made their way to the east coast of North America

where they became the Clovis people and see the interesting thing about the salutri in technology is it is in Europe for they find these prehistoric sites and it

shows up and then it abruptly disappears. It doesn't transition into a different kind of technology. It just is there and then it's gone and it's replaced by a totally different technology. And they don't have any bones associated with the solutrient technology. There are no burials with bones for them to do testing on. Similarly, in North America, there are not a lot of clobocytes that seem to have human remains. So it's really difficult to do genetic testing on that theory.

Yeah, just a question so that I understand. So the Clovis people would be the Native Americans, and they're basing this on the type of, I don't know, weapon, I guess would be the right word, kind of like the arrowhead you would find as a kid, kind of that fluted point. So the whole theory behind it is that the Clovis people came from the saluted. Solutan people, which is in France. That's kind of the whole hypothesis. Am I right on this? Yes. The theory that the salutrian hypothesis is that it was actually ancient Europeans,

Western Europeans, who made their way to North America, and they became the Native Americans or they intermarried with other existing populations. If they're coming from, say, Newfoundland and, And the Carolinas westward across the Great Plains, they are then meeting people who come from Alaska across the Bering in Washington, Oregon, Canada. And they're moving east to the Midwest as well. I know you didn't come up with the theory, but I want to ask your opinion. You know, when I think of what a Native American looks like and what a European looks like, they're very, very different in, appearance. They looked nothing alike, I guess, in my opinion. Do you think, I mean, to go with

this theory, is it that they came here and there was already someone here and there was kind of marriage and kids and appearance changed over time? I mean, I guess I'm basing it off of what I know Native Americans look like today and what Europeans look like today. You know what I mean? Yeah. When they did a facial reconstruction, Kennewick Man, They didn't put any hair on the facial reconstruction. So it's a bald man with a kind of substantial nose. And the first thing I said when I saw that reconstruction was, oh, my God, that looks like Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the Starship Enterprise. It looked remarkably like Patrick Stewart to me.

But that is that physiology, physiological or the physiognomy. which is the description of the face, is not the same as genetics. That's just the presentation of genetics. And so that is why they had to do the DNA testing on Kennewickman to demonstrate whether or not he was related to European populations or not. And according to the last recorded test, no, he is, his people are still,

in North America, and we know them as modern Native Americans, it does get difficult, legally speaking, and culturally speaking about what do you call politely people who are living in North America 9,000 years ago? One of the, in archaeological terms, in the journals, older generals, they refer them as paleo-Indian, paleo-inian, paleo-meaning old. Do you think there will ever come a day when we'll be able to really examine this Kennewick man? I mean, it sounds like just a bunch of nonsense and politics is really what's preventing anyone from taking a close look at the thing. Do you think there'll come a day when we'll actually be able to further examine the Kennewick Man? I don't think that we'll be able to examine Kennewickman again, unless there's some dramatic change in Native American politics. policy, maybe we'll be able to reorder the data that they've already collected. And as databases for people who have paid for the various DNA testing, people of European

descent find it very, very easy to figure out where their relatives are because a lot of more modern Europeans are also really into that. But places in Central and South Africa where they don't have very much cash money, while they are curious about their heritage, not a lot of them can actually afford the $100 genetic test. So from those genetic tests, with permission, you say, you can include my genetic code to let everybody else find me. So it's underrepresented in these poorer parts of the world. But we may well find more interesting information from the existing data about Kinnwick Man because remember the very first test results came back suggesting he was related to people from

like Indonesia and now they're now they're saying no or not as much as modern modern Native Americans do you think it's all politics and it's just kind of bad for business if this Kennewick man ends up being from Europe or some other place talking about talking about agendas I'm not sure what's going on everybody's minds, possibly. But also, there's such a long, long history of non-Native peoples just exploiting Native Americans for various purposes that I think this is an instance, too, where they just took a stand and said, you know, everything is going to be done what we think is the right way. because then you set a precedent. It used to be, even the Smithsonian in the late 19th century would send out expeditions, and they would purposely look for Native American burial size and collect the bones.

Yeah, I think everyone's in agreement. The Smithsonian is definitely a villain in our culture. They seem to have their hands in a lot of things. In your book, both of your books, Weird Washington. and Weird Oregon, which can be found on Amazon or can go straight to the publisher, Weird U.S. You write about the Paisley Cave. And the Paisley Cave is found in Oregon, kind of central Oregon, south central, that area. And they found, I guess, human scat.

I guess we'll just go with biological remains. But they found artifacts and they found a lot of other items in this cave. And a lot of the stuff inside the cave was 12,000 to 14,000 years old. And it started really being taken seriously in the 30s, I think, is when they really started studying this cave system. If you would, tell us about it. Yes, Paisley Cave, to me, is really kind of cool. You don't necessarily need a person's bones to determine some genetics from them. And this also goes into how long have humans beings been in North America.

When I was a young college student, the conservative age was about 10,000 years. And now they're pushing that back. So Paisley Cave was used as a rock shelter. And far in the back, that's where the bathroom was. And so people left these deposits. and based on some of the radio carbon dating and other dating techniques, they're thinking people were living in Paisley Cave 13 to 14,000 years ago. So that really pushes the age backward.

And the polite word for this is copper light, because it's dried out and semi-mineralized and fossilized. But you can take these samples and do analysis from them that's not. as not as invasive as doing element analysis from a human tooth because the copper light was dropped in place and abandoned and you can find things like consider this you can tell what somebody ate that one day 14,000 years ago based on the copper light which I which is tremendously fascinating and because this came out of somebody's intestines there is shed human cells as well as if they an animal cells there. So just from the stomach lining. So you can get some kind of genetic information from that if you're careful and you have a large enough sample.

Is there any idea where these people actually came from? No. I haven't seen any published reports about the tool component to the Paisley people. I don't think they were classified as a Clovis. Clovis Toolkit people. That's a great question. I'll have to look that up. Can I ask you, Jeff, you know, as a scientist, an archaeologist, an anthropologist,

you know, we have, with regard to Sasquatch, there's thousands and thousands and thousands of reports of people seeing this creature, not only modern day, but also, you know, in the past, the natives talked about it. Bigfoot didn't start with the Patterson Gambling film. I mean, this was talked about way before then. And yet, we only really have trace evidence. We have hair, footprints, scat. There's not a lot of real evidence to come forward, you know, like a body or bones or a skull, that sort of thing, which is odd because we can find the Kennewick man. We can find, you know, 14,000-year-old poop and other things in this cave. But we can't.

find Sasquatch. Do you find that odd as a scientist that there's not a ton of evidence that this thing is out there? Yes. How's that for a short answer to your question? I think it is unusual and there are there are counterpoints to make to that. One is just how many how many saw squatches are there that you can recover fur from or droppings from or bones from and how much better in the woods than us are they how easy it is for them to hide and if they are if they are non-supernatural if they are biological beings very closely related to humans they probably have some kind of burial custom where they don't just drop dead in our our our like left to

rot there was an anthropologist Grover Krantz who you probably heard of and that was one of his discussion topics was he tried doing a little bit of math and when you've got

apex predator like the like the bear in 10,000 acres of woods how many bears are there? Not very many and consequently

you don't find too many bare skeletons in the woods whereas non-Apex predators, rabbits, deer, all kinds of birds, you find their bones quite frequently. So that was what he was talking about. The counter to that is there are so many

people actively looking for for Sasquatch remains or evidence. It is surprising that they haven't really found anything incredible. There was a just, gentleman named Datis Perry, who lived in Schumania County in the 90s, early 2000s, and he had a cigar box, and some of the items in the cigar box included scat, copper lights, and I don't think he ever had them analyzed. I would dearly love to have the money to send those to a lab to look at if there is

any shed genetic material to tell us. I'm very curious on your thoughts about something. I kind of think Grover Krantz's theory was flawed and his hypothesis was very flawed. And I'll tell you why. When Dr. Krantz would talk about the Sasquatch, what he would do is he would talk about it in the only, as if it only existed in the Pacific Northwest. Therefore, most of his arguments would hold up. You know, how many bears do you run into? Why don't we find a bear, a dead bear that died naturally? his arguments would hold up in the Pacific Northwest. The problem with that is what about these reports in Arizona? What about these reports in Nevada? And along the border of the U.S., down towards Mexico, I think his insight on the subject was focused mainly just on the Pacific Northwest. It really is kind of a worldwide phenomenon going on here. In Iran and Pakistan, they call it the Barmanu. It's a half.

man, half beast, and what his appearance, the description, his behavior is spot on with a Sasquatch. Russia, they have the Alma's. Same thing. Everyone's calling it something different, but I think we're all talking about the same thing. In Australia, they have the Yaoies. Over in Asia, they have the Yeti. Even in Vietnam, our veterans came back and were talking about these rock apes they ran into.

And I've talked to some of the vets that have come back. that had encountered these rock apes. And a lot of them said it sounds just very similar to the Sasquatch you're talking about. And they were terrified of them. I guess my point is it seems to be a worldwide phenomenon that no one can catch up with. What are your thoughts on that? Well, this kind of takes us almost in a circle to the discussion at the beginning of our chat. in myth and in traditions, I guess, you know, and I won't say stories because they're more than

just stories and folklore. They're traditions, their beliefs. The question of or the spectrum of if it's not real, then it exists for a social purpose. Myths also are something easy to understand, particularly for kids. They touch on moralistic stories and values, and they reinforce that. On one side, where they explain the unexplainable, what is that noise in the woods? It must be the this. So that's very pragmatic.

But on the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, and yet these, if this is all just made up, how come worldwide the descriptions are so very, very, very. similar. There must be something to it. And that leaves us with the quest like you and me, people listen to your podcast. The quest is still on. Fortunately or unfortunately, we don't have a saucequatch body. What somebody considers, you know, indisputable evidence that it exists. Yeah, it's frustrating to me because, you know, People are seeing this thing even today, and not only in North America, but around the world, and for some weird reason, we can't catch up with them. Going back to kind of the history and the, he used a word, mythology, and folklore,

but, you know, even the Native Americans talk a lot about giants and seeing these red-headed giants, and they have a long history of seeing Sasquatch, and even the Europeans have traditions about these orgs and these giants. Can you talk a little bit about the European traditions and the Native American culture when it comes to some of these cryptids? Yeah. This is, again, how interesting, how similar the details of the traditions spoken of about ogres and giants by Europeans and Native Americans. I think most people of European descent, Jack and the Beanstalk and the Giant, are familiar with some of the details of the character of giants. They oftentimes have a horde, H-O-A-R-D, of gold and jewels that they get by kidnapping and killing people, and they will kidnap people in Jack and the Beanstalk.

The housekeeper is a kidnapped human woman. and going to, speaking more Pacific Northwest, in talking about Alaskan Killer Bigfoot, there are these gigantic people that are human-looking-like that will capture people for various purposes, including eating them. Again, the story from Portlock, where these giants 12, 15 feet tall were coming out of the mountains, the high places, into the lowlands and capturing people, putting them in sacks. And then later eating them, think about the fee, five, foe, I smell the blood of Englishmen, and the whole thing. What is he going to do with Jack?

He's going to grind him up and eat him. And so isn't that interesting that you have these similarities in the very nature of these giant supernatural beings? So it must be something to it again. And in some Native American cultures here in the western part of North America, they believe that the earth has actually gone through a whole series of cataclysmic changes. And the earth may well have been created. And then there is some disruption by the gods or nature. And the earth changes. And when it changes, these supernatural beings change as well.

So what might well have been a God in the prior incarnation of the world, it is now, it is a, still a strong supernatural being, but is no longer a God. And oftentimes they are tied to the land and they are hostile to human beings in skukums. And so that has a parallel in Western Europe, particularly after the advent of Christianity, when all the old. gods and their sacred groves of trees or their sacred hillsides were abandoned. And then people are now afraid to go there and they whisper about strange things happening there in strange lights and the fairy caves. And some of the stuff you and I talked about earlier. Yeah, one question I want to ask you, you know, when you, the PFI from, I smell the blood of an Englishman. When I hear that, I think.

of more of DNA or genetics? I mean, how do you smell the blood of someone? In the story, Jack's not bleeding. And it makes me wonder, you know, when you go into theology, the Nephilim, even though we don't have really any proof that they were ever real, the story is very consistent, even outside of theology, you start getting into other writings and other histories of different cultures. They talk about these giants. these nethulum that would absolutely eat people. And the reason why they ate people was to get rid of a bloodline. I'm curious, as you looked at all these different cultures and you have these giant stories,

it's strange to me that, you know, they have, again, going back to like Sasquatch, everyone kind of has a different name for these giants. But if you listen to the core story, everyone's kind of saying the same thing. Some of this, I try not to actually develop full conclusion and hypotheses. Mostly, I just kind of stand in wonder and just collect the facts and think about it. See, the true scientific method is not a matter of gathering facts and setting up experiments that support with evidence your theory. the real scientific method is you have a hypothesis and you test it and you purposely look for evidence that shows your theory is not correct or part of it's not correct and then you readjust your theory based on the new evidence and it's a model it's a it's a it's a live model in that you should constantly test these hypotheses so it's more along the lines of I stand and wonder at human beings inventiveness and the way as we have these traditions where word spreads before writing for thousands of years,

some Native American peoples have traditions about floods. These Native American people who were living in eastern Washington in Spokane have a tradition talking about these massive floods that pass through Columbia River. and lo and behold, modern geologists said, yes, as a matter of fact, when the ice ages ended, we had these massive floods. Several of them passed through the Columbia River. So there must have been people around to watch it happen. Yeah, it's so cool for me to have you on the show, Jeff. I mean, I enjoy talking to you off there and on the air, and I have about, you know, 50 other topics we could discuss. But I know we're going to end up doing a part two with regard to.

to what happened in Alaska, the whole Alaskan killer Bigfoot, along with other cast members that were on the show, I want to ask you, and I ask every guest that comes on the show, every eyewitness, and there really is no wrong answer because no one knows. But if someone came up to you and said, hey, Jeff, what is Sasquatch? What would you say to them? I suspect, how's that? I suspect that if saucequatch exists, and there are even stories of saucequatch, I'm sitting here at what's known as the Vancouver Barracks in Vancouver, Washington. And there are stories in the Hudson's Bay Company period of a saucequatch coming down onto the kind of the floodplain where Fort Vancouver was and kidnapping a woman. So I suspect that Sausquatch existed in much greater numbers in the past, and it may not even exist now. I leave that open simply with the massive influx of human beings going up into the mountains and cutting the forests. But if Sausquatch exists in the past, it exists now, I believe it is a primate.

I believe it is related to human beings. A lot of people tout gigantic. In Southeast Asia, they found some bones, mostly jaw bones, of a giant primate. And they think that it was the right size to fit our expectations of a soft squash. So that is what I think. It may not exist now. It may have existed all the way up until like 1900. Or if you happen to be way up in Canada, it may still be up there or parts of Russia.

but it's our cousin. Yeah, and that's a fair answer, Jeff, for sure. I mean, it definitely could be, and it could be closely related to us. I mean, it's like I always say, there's no wrong answer to that question because no one really knows. You know, I kind of glazed over it in the beginning of our conversation, but it's really important to me, and I mean it very sincere because I didn't serve and somebody else went in my stead. Thank you so much for your military service. Well, you're welcome. Most of the time, it was a pleasure.

Sometimes during employment, it's not quite so much. Yeah, I hear you, man. You know, it was a huge pleasure to have you on the show, Jeff. I know we're going to be doing a part two with some of the different cast and eyewitnesses to what happened out there in Alaska with the Alaskan killer Bigfoot. And I really can't wait for part two. And for the audience out there, definitely go and check out Jeff's different books. He has one Weird Washington and the other one Weird Oregon.

And again, you can get them on Amazon or you can go right to the publisher for Weird U.S. Jeff, how would someone contact you? People can find me through my website, which is spelled out all one word, ghosts and critters.com. See, I'm making use of that whole anthropology critters. name. So it's Ghosts and Critters.com.

If they have trouble with that, if you even Google Jeff Davis plus Oregon ghosts, I should pop up. My website should pop up. I've got a lot of content on there.

I have my own line of books on the odd and unusual. And links to email me. Ghosts and Critters.com. I really can't wait for part two.

Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the show. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you. 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. And if you get a chance to check out Sasquatch Chronicles.com, you can become a member and get additional shows.

You know, I don't know how someone goes about acquiring a million alpacas, but if I was Disney, I get on it. I'm Captain Jack Sparrow.