Somewhere in the Skies - Alien Abductions and the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp
Episode Date: March 29, 2021On episode 206 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan joins a group of podcast hosts and researchers for a roundtable of epic proportions. Derek Hayes of the Monsters Among Us podcast and Shannon LeGro of In...to the Fray Radio invited a group of panelists to discuss the controversial topic of alien abductions. Then, noted cryptid hunter, Lyle Blackburn educates the group on the slithery cryptid known as the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp. Panelists featured: Micah Hanks of the Micah Hanks Program and The Seven Ages Audio Journal, Rob Morphy of the Cryptonaut Podcast, Lyle Blackburn - Bigfoot and cryptid researcher, Shannon LeGro of Into the Fray Radio, and Derek Hayes of the Monsters Among Us Podcast. Watch the full video interview of this episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3eYxfSs Monsters Among Us : http://www.monstersamonguspodcast.com/ Into the Fray Radio: https://intothefrayradio.com/ Micah Hanks Program: https://micahhanks.com/podcast/ Cryptonaut Podcast: https://cryptonautpodcast.com/ Lyle Blackburn: http://www.lyleblackburn.com/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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This is somewhere in the skies with Ryan Sprague.
Hey guys, Ryan Sprag here, and it's time again to thank our new Patreon subscribers.
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And now let's get to this week's special panel discussion.
Early during the first lockdowns, a group of diverse voices in the podcasting and television worlds got together to talk all about alien abductions and a lesser-known crypted creature.
Curated and hosted by Derek Hayes of The Monsters Among Us podcast and Shannon Ligrowe, host of Into the Fray Radio,
I had the amazing opportunity to join our other panelists, which included Micahanks of the Micahanks Programme.
and creator of the debrief media news site.
Rob Morphy, co-host of the highly popular Cryptonaut podcast,
and our resident cryptozoologist and monster hunter, Lyle Blackburn.
Lyle walks us through the lesser-known and terrifying stories
of the Lizard Man of Scape or Swamp.
And then we go deep into the very controversial topic of alien abductions.
My special thanks to Derek and Shannon for letting me share this awesome discussion with all of you, and I hope you enjoy.
I am Shannon Legrow of Into the Fray, and along with Derek Hayes of Monsters Among Us, we created this paranormal podcast ellipse, and this is the third and final edition.
And on this round, we have an amazing panel to cover not only alien abductions, but the Lizard Man of Scape or Swamp.
So, sorry, that's my bird in the background.
Holy God.
So I want to just go through really quickly and introduce everybody.
I'm sure most of our listeners, our watchers know who these panelists are, but I want to go down the line.
And I want to start with Mr. Micah, Hanks.
And he is, of course, he's an author.
He is a podcaster of a plethora of podcasts.
We don't even have time to mention all those, right, Micah?
So, you know, you guys can find him weekly on the Myka.
Micah, thanks. Program. Welcome, good sir. Well, good to be here. Yeah. And, you know, in the hallowed halls of this digital realm that now everybody's occupying, strange times, but I guess stranger times for us, since we all kind of keep it pretty strange anyway, huh? Oh, we like keeping it real strange around these parts. Yes, we do. Next up is Rob Morphy. He is part of the triple threat over at the Cryptonod podcast. And Matt, I just say, Rob, and I hazard to say, I think I know where your art came from.
your logo for Cryptonaut is maybe one of the most bad to the bone and original logos I've ever seen.
So Rob Morphy of Cryptonaut, welcome.
Thank you very much.
It's an honor to be here among all of my esteemed colleagues, and I'm really glad to participate.
And yes, yes, we love our pop culture icons over at Cryptonaut, and we embrace them almost as much as the paranormal.
So thank you for having us.
Absolutely.
And, of course, who better to have on, if you?
if we were talking the Lizard Man, then Lyle Blackburn himself, he literally, boom, there he goes.
Look at that.
He's roughen right there.
Yeah, Lyle literally wrote a book on the Lizard Man of Bishopville.
And that is what we were covering in the second half of this live stream, author and researcher, Lyle Blackburn.
Welcome.
Thanks for having me.
And last but not least, anyone familiar with ITF knows the last lovely gentleman there.
and he won't know how fitting this is,
but I had this already written out
before this evening started.
You know him from somewhere in the skies.
I call him Riloh.
You may know him as Plabman,
or you can just call him Ryan Sprague,
but is Ryan Sprague of Somewhere in the Skies podcast.
Welcome.
Thank you so much.
I swear this wasn't on purpose.
We didn't plan this.
We didn't plan it.
It was the first thing I found on the ground.
So, yeah, I thought it would be
appropriate. Thank you. Yeah, thank you guys all for being here. I need to check the live comments
already. So yeah, first up, you know, we're going to run with alien abductions. And of course,
this is such a hot button topic and it can go down so many different rabbit holes. I mean,
I don't know if anybody wants to jump in. I mean, do you have any large thoughts on alien abductions
in and of themselves? Like, what's going on there?
Ryan Sprague, go.
Oh, man.
Pressure's on.
All right.
Yeah, I mean, I deal with abductions probably on a daily basis.
So this is a topic near and dear to my heart.
It does not, however, mean that I 100% buy into it.
I mean, I think there are many things that alien abductions could be attributed to.
But when you are left, as I'm sure Micah can agree, with no other prosaic explanation as to the veracity.
of a witness or the person claiming that this happened, when you're no longer left with an answer,
that's where I really go, huh, there might be something to this. So, yeah, for anyone who knows my
work in the UFO field, I deal specifically with witnesses and experiencers. That's my kind of,
my approach to you follow them is to deal with the people and how these things affect them in the
aftermath of an abduction or a UFO sighting and what role it plays in your life overall.
So when it comes to abductions, it's a tough subject.
It's scary.
It's uncomfortable.
It's controversial.
And it's extremely traumatizing for a lot of people who claim that this has happened to them.
So if there's anything I can say after interviewing hundreds of people who have claimed this,
again, the credibility of the people I've spoken to for every walk of life you can think of, every belief system.
The fact that this many people are claiming this, there's something to be said.
about that. What the phenomenon is, I don't know. I'm still trying to figure that out, as I'm sure
the rest of us will for the rest of our lives. So yeah, that's, I guess, my primary alien abduction.
Yeah, you know, if I might jump in on that too, Ryan, I sure you're interested in that, obviously,
because with the UFO subject, even if you are more of a nuts and bolts person who just
looks at craft reports, you know, unidentified flying objects, which I primarily do, eventually
you're going to get to the designations, you know, the close encounter. You know, the C.E's one, two, and three is
Jay Allen Hineck had, you know, laboriously tried to work out designations for, you know, someone
sees a landed craft or even maybe a craft still in the sky, but one that's close enough that it's,
you know, creating some sort of observable effect on the environment. And then, of course,
eventually people describing that they see the alleged occupants. And so when Ryan says,
we have to kind of be careful, well, I'm paraphrasing, Ryan, don't we put words in
your mouth, but we have to kind of be careful and say, you know, maybe suspend belief and
disbelief and just try to look at what reports, you know, actually describe. There are certainly
some credible cases of abduction, but then again, also UFOs like so many four T in the subjects
are one of those things that we always struggle with the fact that people say that they see things,
they have experiences, and yet where is that physical evidence? Which is interesting because
there's a cryptozoological tie in here too, as my colleague Liao certainly is aware of. You know,
we've got a lot of a rich history in American Indian legends and mythology of abductions with
relation to creatures like Sasquatch and things like that. So from me, I always wonder,
why is the abduction motif actually prevalent throughout a wide range of different fields that fall sort of under Fortiana?
You know, I would agree that it is the broad spectrum elements of this that are at times the most intriguing.
But what fascinates me more than anything else, I think, is the sociological.
aspect. And this is something a little bit that both you, Ryan, and you, Micah, were, you know,
touching onto, which is that whatever it represents, the trauma is real for these individuals.
The experience is real in the perception of a lot of individuals, regardless of whether or not
it is a corporeal phenomenon, or if it is a metaphysical one, or if it is completely psychological.
And you literally have to leave the door open to all of it. You have to have genuine sympathy.
And it's a phenomenon that demands to be studied.
But the thing about it for me is what keeps me kind of on my toes and my skeptic head on is that it's incredibly sloppy science.
The way these abductions take place, I mean, it really seems like not far removed with, say, how a standard human naturalist would put down an elk temporarily, tag them, check the reproductive organs, make sure of it's all with like a benevolent and
tensions, you know, it might scar the animal a little terrified. It wakes up, it runs back to its
herd and it's like, dude, this happened. And it seems like it's that way for us. And I'm thinking
if these creatures really have figured out how to traverse the cosmos in seconds or time itself
or create interdimensional portals, if they are not enslaved to gravity, why is it that like
we see so many stories of like hybrid human gray alien women actively physically seducing men?
I mean, that seems to play into a weird psychological construct that goes much deeper and is not scientific in the least.
So I find it fascinating on the side where I want to be empathetic towards those who are suffering the trauma of having endured this no matter what it may be, but objective in the sense that this seems a lot more bizarre and visceral than a simple scientific experiment.
This is more than just things coming here to see what's going on scientifically, like the way any scientific expedition would.
There's something nastier for lack of a better term.
Just from the, oh, sorry.
Lava, do you have anything that you wanted to add in there?
Well, I mean, it's a subject that I haven't researched heavily.
I mean, I'm more of an observer in that kind of stuff.
And, I mean, I find the alien abduction category truly frightening.
I mean, people, you know, I go in swamps and look for unknown creatures.
and people may or may not think that's spooky to do,
but I think the whole alien abduction stuff.
And so it's nice in some ways that I can sit back and just kind of soak that in
without having to be immersed in the research, you know.
But I'm like any of you guys as far as a balanced view of whether this is a true phenomenon
or whether there's something else to it.
But I find it truly fascinating and truly frightening.
That says a lot if he'd rather be in a swamp looking for critters.
then have to mess with alien abduction.
That really says something.
I'd rather be there than on a craft being, you know,
scrutinized, if you will.
Put it nicely.
Yeah.
That's been a real nice little like that.
Rob, do you happen to have a haunted house?
I mean, I'm not familiar with your actual home,
but somebody said they saw an orb behind you.
So I might want to keep an eye out for that.
It could be.
It could be a really poor housekeeping, which I plead guilty to.
So it could have been floating dust bunny catching the light just right, or it could be grandma.
I'm not going to, I'm not going to.
Yeah.
So a question from Jeremiah Byron of Bigfoot Society.
What's up, Jeremiah?
What do you all make of the mass UFO sightings recently in April across the U.S.?
Yeah, I guess I'll hop in.
Mike.
I can see us both getting ready.
I mean, I probably know just as much as Micah does about these events.
We're talking.
I believe it was Detroit, Michigan, Cleveland, Ohio, Encinitas, California.
We had mass UFO sighties.
Very similar to the Phoenix lights where we're talking these orange orbs,
you know, just in either V formation or a semi-circle formation being seen over these major cities.
Even Tom DeLong, the gentleman we all know now is the UFO guru caught video of this thing.
threw it up on Instagram and then of course people went nuts. Now what they are, I think that's
still being investigated, but I know for at least the Encinitas event, the military did take
responsibility for that being flares just like they did in the Phoenix Lights in 1997.
But as for Detroit, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio, I haven't seen any answers for that one yet,
but it almost speaks to the greater, the bigger picture here of we're all home now.
We're all quarantined.
We're all, you know, we're not doing our daily routines of going to work and looking at our phones every second or driving in our car.
So a lot more people are looking up.
And I think that has a lot to do with this as well.
People are finally looking up again.
They're finally doing things, you know, popping their head out the window to get some fresh air.
and they're seeing UFOs. So I think we're going to see a big uptick in mass UFO sightings as this
quarantine continues. Yeah, there's been an uptick actually over the last several months.
The first interesting report I'd gotten had been, I think, November of last year,
and there'd been a pilot who had written to me and said that he had seen something unlike anything he'd
observed in years of flying. He and his co-pilot both saw this. They said they looked like satellites,
but that they were all in a line moving in the same direction. And that was a clue because it is true
that the SpaceX company has been involved in a internet service,
a satellite internet service program called Starlink.
And this does account for a lot,
maybe even the majority of UFO sightings,
I think that have been coming in recently.
But now, with regard to Cleveland and Detroit,
you know, I'm more than happy to take a skeptical position
on certain UFO reports,
but when I see lazy skepticism, I just get angry.
And there had been a report that tried to explain the Detroit
and the Cleveland sightings as having been SpaceX,
just SpaceX. I love that.
It's kind of like me going to a fruit stand and saying,
give me a fruit.
Well, what would you like, sir?
Would you like a plum or a fruit?
I said, you know.
So let's be a little more specific.
All right.
So it wasn't Starlink, I think,
that was in the videos that we saw from Cleveland and Detroit,
because we see huge masses of orange globs of light moving through the sky.
That in no way resembles the SpaceX satellite rather constellation.
So I'm looking at these videos and I'm saying,
well, just because a lot of people are seeing that doesn't mean everything that everyone is seeing is that.
My own estimate, actually, if I had to offer potential solution, I went to the National UFO, or rather the National UFO Reporting Center,
and there was actually a report log from Detroit that gave a very good description of the lights as they appeared in some of the videos.
They look more to me, at least, like Chinese lanterns.
And this would have actually made sense around the date of April 4th when some of the videos had been made because there were actually,
traditional celebrations of the Queen Ming Festival
that were occurring around that time.
We're part of that tradition, that cultural tradition.
It's beautiful.
They release a lot of lanterns into the sky.
And so that may be what some people were seeing.
I don't know that that would account for all the sightings
throughout the last several months.
So I always tell people to be cautious.
If you think that there's a good explanation like SpaceX,
you know,
that doesn't mean it's begun to become the catch-all
for every UFO siding that occurs.
I don't think that was what was happening in early April.
Just to play devil's advocate a little bit,
I've received a lot of submissions over the past month and a half UFO related, and I'd say close to half of them were probably Starlink, or describing something that seemed very similar to Starlink, at least.
So I think some of the numbers me as a result of that as well as anything else that may be going on.
Yeah, no, actually, I agree completely with that.
Starlink is now the new weather balloon. Like, it's a catch-all for everything.
Like if there's a UFO, it's got to be Starlink. So we're probably going to hear a lot more of that. And drones. Drones are the biggest one that we deal with on a daily basis. So yeah, but I think it's really cool. We haven't seen mass UFO settings like this in a long time. So if I can say anything to anyone watching, when you're done watching this, go outside and just look up for a few minutes. That's how you see a UFO.
The wonderful and terrible paradox of when we live now is that we finally have the kind of technology we always dreamed of, like when kids we watch, close encounters with third kind, like everybody has a high-depth camera in their back pocket.
We should be able to get evidence of anything from cryptozoological phenomenon to euthological phenomenon to the drop of a head.
But of course, along simultaneously, the technology to faking these things in the technology where people independently to put things in the air has grown exponentially.
with all of the, you know, the tech that's coming out now.
So the problem is the easier it should be because imagine if we had iPhones during the Phoenix
Light saga.
That could have changed things.
It could have been a paradigm shift in terms of either being aware of hidden black ops technology
or extraterrestrial life.
Instead, we get some shady video and, you know, flare drops stories from a government
and it becomes just something that haunts us.
Nowadays it happens.
It's drones galorts and that.
So it's kind of a tough paradox.
We're the best time ever to actually get evidence as a people, but at the worst time ever
for them to be able to present it in a way that people will believe it without debunkers
being able to jump all over it.
And even if they're pulling things out of the reverse side, if you will, it still goes over.
Another question coming in here from Alex Whitcomb.
He would like to know from the panelists, what are your thoughts on alien abduction, phenom,
and connections to OBEs.
That's interesting.
I've been researching the Avali Abduction from 1974.
It was for a long time considered to be Great Britain's first, at least on the book's abduction.
It was a family.
They were heading home.
They drove into this like thick cloud of like a wall of green fog.
And they ended up on the ship.
There's lots of cool aliens, lots of, I mean, in the pre-gray days when everything was like an esoteric outer limits episode,
So when everything was just seven arms and 12 foot tall green things with one eye, all the stuff I love, but that I digress.
They saw themselves sitting in the car that they had been in as they were removed.
So I think there's something interesting to the thought that these might not be corporeal phenomenon.
If they are happening and they have access to technology, not just a couple hundred years, but a couple thousand or maybe tens of thousand years in advance of us, there is nothing to see.
say that they don't need to actually physically remove you from Earth. They could just take the
essence that is you. Now, then, of course, you would ask, well, then why the heck are you,
you know, performing surgical things? I can't answer that. Maybe, maybe the Egyptians were right
and our corporeal form and our spiritual form are tied together. And if that's the case, we're screwed.
But let's see that where it is for now. But I do think that there is something to the idea that this is
not a psychological phenomenon just in the sense that it is something your mind is constructing,
but that it is a non-physical phenomenon that leaves you with very real memories of something
that you believe actually happen in your body.
I don't know if I believe that's the case for every single alien abduction,
but it's certainly something that bears more research.
Yeah, I will piggyback off of that.
I actually agree with what Rob's saying.
A lot of the stuff I'm looking at right now has to do with consciousness.
You know, can we separate this from the body?
Is this what is on the other side when we leave this, you know, mortal coil, this meat sack we're in?
Is the soul literally something that travels to another body or another plane?
Maybe that is how the quote unquote ETs or whoever are doing these abductions.
Maybe that's why most alien abduction cases seem dreamlike.
Almost every person who comes to me saying they were abducted says,
It felt like a dream, a vivid dream.
Maybe they are separating the consciousness, taking that, doing whatever, and then throwing them back in.
Maybe that's why we don't have a lot of physical evidence.
Now, again, you could argue these implants and this and scars and everything.
But yeah, I think it's fascinating that that's where the research is heading.
This is no longer a little green man kidnapping you onto a craft.
It seems like they're almost invading upon something even more safe.
and that's whatever's inside of us.
So, yeah, I think it's fascinating that they could be connected,
out-of-body and alien abduction for sure.
Mark, they're directed a question to Rob.
Is it hell or is it space?
I would say, or is it somewhere in between,
something we haven't even thought of yet.
The tender tether between hell and space
that you between both spectrums.
Thank you for that, Micah.
No, I'd say I'm going to give both them in on this one.
Hell.
Yeah.
So there it is.
There you go.
Everybody's happy.
And actually, Mary Bitter Sweet has taken it to a place that I knew it was going to go.
You know, she just put alien abductions equal fay abductions.
What are you guys' thoughts on that?
Well, I was merely going to defer to my esteemed colleague, Joshua Cutchin, who is not here with us at the moment, you know.
But, I mean, you know, this idea really kind of at least goes back to the late 1960s and, you know, the Magonia
kind of approach, this almost an ethnological kind of a look at UFOs that seems to kind of grow out of a
frustration with study from 1947 up until the late 60s of the physical tangible reality of
UFOs until now we're starting to say maybe this approach is flawed somehow and we should
look in other places for other evidence. Jacques Valet really, I mean, can essentially be credited
not only for the idea but for driving this rift into euphology by
presenting it, and yet what he presented was very nebulous. He never really said it is this or it is,
you know, or it is this and it isn't that. You know, I mean, it was more a kind of a,
maybe we should be kind of looking at the continuity that this phenomena presents in relation to
things that humans have experienced for, you know, centuries, or really since time immemorial,
which it's less of an answer as it is, I think, sort of a vehicle toward further thinking about
the phenomenon. Now that, a lot of people don't like that, you know, and I always tell people,
you've got to kind of be able to operate on different partitions on the same hard drive, so to speak, you know,
or be able to switch into different programs, you know, on the one hand, I like to look at the physical, tangible, you know, phenomena, you know, of UFOs and try to apply science to what few reports can be whittled down and, you know, survive the rigorous IFO screening.
But then again, I think at times we also need to be aware of the continuities to the earlier varieties of the human experience.
And remember that there would be no uphology or anything else we're discussing here tonight without that human component.
That's inevitably going to be a part of it until AI takes over and does it all for us.
What it says to me that's fascinating about the human condition is just like Micah was saying,
if you want to be a UFO literalist, then what you will say is aliens have been abducting humans since a time and memorial.
But back in the day, we saw them as goblins or fays or elves or whatever you want to be.
and the fairy houses that look like mushrooms, well, that's the UFO.
And if you want to be ennamblores, because like he said, Jacques Valet did not lay out an answer.
He proposed a new way of looking at it.
And so if you want to be more on the other side, the more mystical and paranormal side,
you can be like, know these superterrestrials, these intelligent things that have lived on Earth longer than us.
And they are just as much acclaimed to this place as the rest of us, they are manifesting these things.
And as the 20th century rolls around and we got all excited by astonishing legends and started looking at the sky, we started calling them aliens.
And in a way, both sides are valid.
You could argue it either way.
And like Mike I said, it is exceedingly controversial when it really ought not to be.
What it should be is this is just a way to look at a phenomenon that seems to be ongoing.
And it does not have to be either exclusively extraterrestrial or exclusively Megomia-esque or.
or fairy world-esque. It could be an answer, and I will add this caveat here. My idea of all this
is that there's always an underlying science even if we're not there yet. So if we just plow away
and try to be as objective as possible and study the work, we might not live to see it, but eventually
some branch of science will be like, oh, no, this is how this can happen. And I think it would
behoove us as, you know, paranormal investigators and just people that are enthusiasts to not be so
grounded in by it's not like a sports team you don't have to be so invested in like the extraterrestrial theory or that and i used to be one of those guys i was quite a literalist but the older i get the more i'm thinking like let the information stand as it will and interpret it um to the best of your ability as what it is and then step from there but but it but it really is a complex way of looking at it because there are so many different facets that do seem equally at home and folklore and science fiction this might actually tie
in. Sean Crawford has a question. He wants to know what the significance of owls is with alien abductions.
I thought maybe that might tie into what you guys have been talking about over the past couple minutes here.
Yeah, I'll hop in. I mean, for me, personally as an abduction researcher, um, owls serve as what our mutual
colleague Mike Cleland, I think, would say as a messenger. Owls are often seen before an abduction
experience after. And we're talking literal owls, not the idea.
of a screen memory, which a lot of people say is what this intelligence that abducts what they use,
something that our minds can fathom and perceive that may or may not look like what they actually
look like. And that's what they use to screen themselves to you. That's a whole other can of worms.
But in terms of owls, they are a mystical creature. And, you know, there's so much to that.
So I think it's fascinating. You look at some of the biggest,
abduction cases out there, Whitley Streber being one of them.
I remember seeing owls during an abduction experience.
I've spoken to many people who've experienced this.
A lot of the literature and television shows and everything out there about abductions have something to do with owls.
Now, is it, you know, a chicken or egg situation or how does that work?
But, yeah, I find owls fascinating.
And if you really want to dive into that, I suggest looking at the work of Mike Clell and who's written three books about owls and UFOs.
but no, I'll pass it over to you, Micah.
Well, I would actually say that you did such a fine job.
You know, again, I will only reiterate Mike Clelland has kind of established himself as the authority on that with his two books in the Messengers series.
You know, Mike and Andrew were wonderful enough to come all the way to Asheville, I think last year before last, and we all had dinner and he left a couple of copies here.
But Mike's been here in the studio, and we've done a couple of episodes about that.
He shared some really interesting experiences.
Now, culturally and folklorically, the only other thing I would add is just that the owl is sort of emblematic of, you know, mystery in that great tradition of Twin Peaks, the owls are not what they seem.
You know, here we have a raptor, here we have a nocturnal creature, a bird of prey, and yet one also that is symbolic throughout cultures and throughout time, you know, for intelligence primarily.
And so it is interesting to me, even if we were to say, let's remove all the possibility that there's an abduction phenomenon.
but people recognize that owl as some motif within it.
Well, why is that so prevalent?
That in itself is interesting,
because it seems to be almost like an archetypal kind of imagery
that is yet again one of these consistencies
that remains throughout cultures and throughout time.
I will add one small thing that's not nearly as erudite
is what Ryan and Micah said.
When it comes to the Flatwoods monster,
not my owl.
That is not an owl.
That is a giant, sweet, robot, alien,
wizard. I don't know what it is, but it's not a dang owl. I just had to say it. I love the
flatwoods. Just really quick, just to close up this subject, I think I asked this very same thing
last time to everybody, but if you guys could finally know that, you know, the whole thing was real,
talking nuts and bolts craft, alien grays, and you get the tall whites over there in the corner,
but you may have to go through some pretty gnarly stuff while on board the craft. You may or may
not remember some of it, but you would have the knowing that it was real. Would you guys be
willing to go through that. Yeah, I'd do it. Let's party. That's my point. Yeah. I mean, if Mike is
going to do it, I'm doing it for sure. I'll go first and tell you what it's like. Okay, fine.
You'd be the team. But as Neil DeGrasse Tyson would say, bring your damn camera to get photos
up. We, for God, sake. If you're going to end up exactly in the same boat as so many other people
with nebulous memories, a corn shoot that might have a little pain in it,
and no way to convince anybody but to look like a damn fool.
I would really need some sort of confirmation of that at least I will have a concise memory.
I wouldn't have to write out a contract.
I need like six caveats before I am going to subject myself and just randomly be laying around
in a road like poor Travis Walton going, oh man, oh man, did I say yes to this?
Why did I say yes to this?
This is horrible.
I feel icky.
I'm going to shower for three days.
I don't know if I would fully commit unless I really knew I was getting something out of it.
Yeah.
You have a great story, though, Rob.
And you'd have all kinds of things to transfer onto the art that you love to do so much.
I mean, you'd probably be doing it in your sleep.
You're like, oh, it's so messed up, you know.
Yeah, exactly.
The whole part where I'm crying through my sketchbook.
Yeah, yeah.
It was appealing to me for some reason.
Just call me old-fashioned.
I like to enjoy the things I enjoy.
Not go through anxiety attacks every time.
So we'll just see.
I guess I'm a maybe.
Oh,
we'll leave you in the gray area.
All right.
Well, let's switch gears.
I mean, we've got, we've got the man himself here who actually wrote the book on the lizard man of Skatebor Swamp.
And Lyle, did you just want to give a quick, you know, snapshot a rundown of, or what's the word they use in the office for Jim?
Anyway, yeah, give one of those for the lizard man over there in Bishopville.
Okay, this was a kind of a rather famous, mostly cryptozoological case that occurred in the summer of 1988 near Bishopville, South Carolina.
And that's in the proximity of a place called Skapor Swamp.
And in the summer of that year, people in the area begin to report seeing some sort of a anthropomorphic creature or entity of some sort.
there in and about Scape War Swamp.
And the locals begin to call it the lizard man.
And the first time it came upon the radar of the police and the press
was when a couple who lived right there on the edge of Scape War Swamp called and said
their car had been vandalized overnight.
And the weird thing about that was is it looked like animals had damaged the car.
So they put in a call to the Lee County Shepard.
sheriff's office and sheriff
Liston Truesdale and some deputies
went down and investigated, looked at the
car and they were
kind of mystified because sure enough, there
was all kinds of animal tracks
and damage to the car
with the tram torn off
and wires torn out of the engine
and all sorts of stuff.
And, you know, ultimately
they're like, we don't really know
what to make of this. You know, you live at the
edge of a swamp. Perhaps some
animals were fighting.
or what have you.
And as they were leaving, one of the locals said, well, maybe it was the lizard man.
And Sheriff Trusdale said, what do you mean, lizard man?
And said, well, people have been seeing this creature in and around this area.
And so he, you know, kind of thought, whatever, have these people come talk to me then.
Well, that ended up getting printed in the papers because some newshounds had followed it along.
And once I got in the paper, a couple of weeks later, a man,
brought his son into the sheriff's office, and this young man, Christopher Davis, had quite a story
detail. He told Sheriff Truesdale that a couple of weeks back, he had had a flat tire in the
Skatebor Swamp area at about 2 a.m. while he was coming home from work. He worked at a fast food
place in Vicherville, which is a very small town, and you have to drive through Skateport Swamp,
and, of course, this is not where you want to have a flat tire. But anyway, as he finished up
changing that and putting the jack and the tire back in his car, he sees something coming at him
in the moonlight through this fennel grass that's out there in this field where he was stopped.
And he said it looked first like a human, which is scary enough because you're out there in the
middle of nowhere.
And then as it got closer, he believed that this was some kind of a creature of some sort,
though it was on two legs, bipedal.
you said it looked reptilian. It was either brown or green. It had fingers that had three
hands that had three long fingers with claws. And anyway, of course, he jumps in the car and
starts it up and this thing tries to get in there and attack him. And he manages to speed away
and the thing is running after him down the road and jumps on the top of the car. And anyway,
so he gets home and his dad was there. And after this happened, they didn't know what to say.
you're not going to call the press or the police.
They just kept quiet until that news story came out.
Well, once that came out, other locals in the area began to say they had seen a similar
creature either around that time or even going back a couple of years preceding those incidents.
And then through the rest of the summer of 1988, there was massive press coverage.
I mean, it was like lizard mania.
Dan Rather was on site doing broad.
out of Skate War Swamp, there was newspaper coverage that was picked up by the Associated Press.
It was in all the local newspapers. It was everywhere. The Oprah show was calling Christopher Davis.
Unprecedented sort of a thing. And all the while, Sheriff Truesdale followed the case and was meticulous about documenting this.
Not that he believed there was necessarily a lizard man, but just that it was his duty to follow up.
and he felt like if it's a rogue bear,
if it's somebody playing a prank,
it was his duty to follow up because if he didn't,
people would say,
you know,
you were negligent if somebody got killed or whatever happened.
So there was truckloads of people down there with guns going in the swamp.
And, of course,
like any of these cases,
you know,
rumors that this person or that person was responsible for these sightings
and,
you know,
a plethora of different theories and,
and news stories from just simply covering that to obviously silly ones where they portrayed the
creatures having a tail and a big alligator mouth, Godzilla looking, though that's not what
people reported.
They reported something that was much more a bit practical and haunting in that it was human-like,
but it was covered in scales and it stood upright.
It didn't have a tail.
You know, no special powers.
they just would see it and it would disappear in the swamp.
So, you know, long story short, it was one of those that I was enamored with this case
and just the fact that it was this sort of almost to me like a creature from the Black Lagoon
in modern times that had been pursued by the police and mentioned in many cryptozoology texts,
but nobody had ever really written a comprehensive book.
So during back at a time when I went on a swap tour and went out to Bishop Beal and went to
Skate Boer Swamp, spent some time with Sheriff Truesdale and also partly due to Micah actually
suggesting that perhaps I should write a book on this, all of that kind of came together and resulted
in my book, Lizard Man, the true story of the Bishop Bill Monster.
So in many ways, I approached it much like a cryptozoology case because people are
seeing a perceived physical creature in a swampy environment, a rugged, remote, hard to get to
place. But of course, this type of, when you're dealing with any sort of a reptilian type thing,
you know, it does cross over into that category of extraterrestrial or this theory that
reptilian's subterranean reptilian race lives underground and is it one of those. There's a lot
of ways you can go in trying to run down any explanation for this. But, you know, like most of
my books, I just simply tell the story and the story unto itself is intriguing, no matter what
we conclude it may or may not be.
A lot of question for you. I know you spent a lot of time, obviously, in Boggy Creek. But how
much time did you spend in Bishopville for the Lizard Man?
I spent a week down there. Obviously, yeah, it's with Boggy Creek, I can go there.
just about any time, three and a half hours away.
With that one, I went there and with the intention of writing a book on swamps that had strange things.
So I went there, and luckily I spent time.
And the fortunate thing was I was given access to all the police reports, all the photos, everything,
and had Sheriff Truesdale, who was retired at the time, and he's no longer with us.
He literally took me around.
I went to houses where the witnesses, some of the witnesses were.
and were able to interview them.
So it was very concise and quick way to really delve into this subject.
And then, you know, when I came home, I then continued to interview various people or follow-up with all the newspaper accounts to ultimately build the entire story, which is not just in 1988.
It's, you know, there's preceding and post-sightings that continued for several years down there.
I mean, is this the only place that these things are citing?
No, it's certainly kind of the most famous of these, you know, just because of the massive amount of press coverage and things.
And it was concentrated. There was a lot of sightings. But it's not the only siding of a, what we would call lizard man would be a category of cryptid.
There's been sightings in, you know, New Jersey, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi. Just sporadic.
though, I mean, it's nothing like, say, Bigfoot, where you have thousands of sightings.
They're very few and far between, but there certainly are similar ones everywhere.
Lyle, I want to ask you something, too.
You know, again, with kind of, you know, the main focus of your work and increasingly over time, even my own,
although that's kind of been a long-held interest, just, you know, the Sasquatch phenomena broadly in North America
and also relict hominoids around the world.
Is there any way in your mind that the Lizard Man thing is somehow reconcilable?
with hairy bipeds and hominids because a lot of people's argument against something like lizard
man would be that, you know, we haven't seen something a bipedal, humanoid type, you know, lizard-like
creature since maybe the air of the dinosaurs and even those weren't quite like us. What if this was,
you know, something that gave the appearance of scales or something? I mean, what are your thoughts
in that regard being a Bigfoot researcher primarily? Yeah, that was one of, and perhaps my favorite
and most grounded explanation was that, yeah, biologically, we have no precedent for any sort of a reptilian human or a hybrid or a humanoid, and like you say, even the dinosaurs.
Those are, though there's been some theories, and I talk about those in the book, like this dinosauroid, where they theorized if some of those creatures that survived, that they would have eventually walked upright and become more anthropomor.
morphic, you know, but given what we have, I thought that the descriptions of the creature in around a swamp, it could have easily been perhaps a
Sasquatch with either just simply wet, covered in algae, or one that's infected by mange, has some sort of skin
condition, because, you know, the sightings aren't, they're very brief. I mean, you know, people aren't
studying this creature for very long because either it's quickly moving across and disappearing
into the woods or it's frightening in which, you know, one guy just got on his bike and rode off
because it's scary. So within that sort of conditions, it's dark, it's brief, you could easily
see a Sasquatch that's wet and interpret that as it maybe it was scaly or maybe it was green.
So it's weird to explain one cryptid with another cryptid, but I think that's a good theory.
Oh, but you know, you bring up something else really interesting that I got to throw in there.
You know, when we talk about like Mains or something like that, you know, right behind you, Ryan, you've got your Chupacabra poster.
And, you know, with the reports of raccoons, foxes, I've seen a fox in the wild with Mange, and it really throws you off because you don't know at first what you're looking like.
You're used to seeing that red color, you know, the tail, the bushy tail.
but if we can suppose that Sasquatch is a biological reality and it's a hair-covered, you know, a mammal, I mean, it would be equally able to, you know, acquire mange.
So how would a Sasquatch look if it were ridden with Mange or something along those lines?
That's a really interesting point, too.
Absolutely.
I mean, if you saw that, you would, you know, you know, scramble your mind.
What is that?
And you're, you know, you may not say Sasquatch, but you're not going to say bear.
you're just simply going to, and the locals again, you know, that's the name they gave it,
which has a lot of connotations to Lizard Man, but, you know, in all these cases, you know,
the newspaper, they just give it a name and, you know, who knows what it was.
Conversely, as fascinating and I think as valid attacked as it would be to think about, you know,
Harry Homid that, you know, he has some sort of manes or something, because like you say,
the settings are brief, if indeed it is something that is.
is either more reptilian or amphibious, like, say, the fetus lake monster from Canada,
which had the whole nine yards of the big punk rock frill, the actual silver scales.
You definitely, you know, you are a great cryptozoological, you know, investigator and author,
and I know that you have biases there, but I don't presume to know, like,
what your thoughts would be onto as to what could represent these things that seem to be distinctly,
not non-mammalian, just not a classic misidentified Sasquot, something that definitely
seems to have reptilian and or amphibious attribute. Where would you think this would fit in,
in the, I guess, the scale of, you know, Darwinian evolution and cryptozoology?
I think really the only place, perhaps, is if some undocumented unknown dinosaur had survived
miraculously all this time without being seen that again this theory, you know, done by,
put together by guys more qualified, that tetrapod kind of dinosaurs would evolve in this
upright walking bipedal progression, partly because as their brains got bigger or they
became smarter and things like this, that adjustments would be made in the head and the way
they carried the head and, you know, this sort of thing, that if something had survived,
and then perhaps it would appear like people are describing this lizard man.
So it would have to be something that was here all along.
I mean, it's too big of a creature to just be an offshoot of any sort of normal lizard,
even a Komodo dragon.
I mean, those are big, but they're a far cry from something standing up that looks anything
like, you know, humanoid.
You know, so, but the problem with that, of course, is it's like, you know, how could there
be only one?
I mean, if something like that survived, you would expect more, a little more sightings or something
else, which makes it sort of an anomaly, something that was just there and gone.
And, you know, the thought of this lone surviving dinosaur, something that evolved
is romantic, but it can't be just wanted to have to be multiple.
and I think you'd have more sightings in South Carolina, for example.
So that's the only way I could fit it in is if it was something that had changed over time and become this.
What fascinates me is especially in the Ohio River area, just obviously it is a hotbed for cryptological, ephological, paranormal madness.
But the river monsters from the indescribable Octaman to the Green Club beast, which was never seen but just yanked a woman, you know, like the river monsters.
from the indescribable Octaman to the Green Club beast,
which was never seen but just yanked a woman,
you know, like the day after the Hopkinsville goblins.
I mean, it's a paradise of weird there.
If there was something, I'm just going to wildly speculate,
amphibious, and it could just as easily spend its time
sleeping in the mud, breathing the water, eating the fish,
having no reason to interact with the airless apes topside
because we're just trouble and we own guns,
would you think that there's any chance
that something like that's just smart enough to avoid us could represent a small portion of what
these sightings are rather than a lone air breather in a swamp.
It's possible, certainly.
I mean, and I certainly never rule anything out because we have to rule everything in until we
can, you know, find an explanation.
So, yeah, certainly it's not out of the question, though improbable it's not impossible
that something like that could survive.
And you do have those other.
and I talk about this in the book, the Ohio River incident where the thing reached up and grabbed the woman, the Thettecet Lake Monster, the Loveland Frog, anywhere you have these sort of anomalous, amphibious reptilian creatures that are big enough and that appear to walk on two legs, you know, not out of the question because a lot of the places where they're going to live are, you know, a swamp.
I mean, there's not, you can't develop all of that.
There's not many people walking.
You know, nobody's hiking and biking through there.
I mean, you have hunters and canoes.
But, you know, you could live back in there relatively untouched.
Who knows?
Now, I may be accused of being primate-centric here, gentlemen and lady,
but I'll share this following passage from the Tete de Boulet about their witigo or
windigo traditions, different variants on the same concept.
you know, the cannibalistic giants in Native American Indian folklore, but the account here,
and this one actually comes to us from John M. Cooper's article, the Cree-Wittico Psychosis.
I've been researching this stuff today, can you tell?
And the account goes that the Whitaco used to rub himself like the animals against the fir, spruce,
and other resinous trees.
And then when he was thus covered with gum or resin, he would go roll in the sand so that one
would have thought that after many operation of this kind, he was made of stone.
And it got me thinking, I mean, that certainly might give one the appearance, you know, with hair covered in resin and then with, you know, the dust and the stone sticking to that.
I mean, a scaly kind of appearance, too.
So what's interesting is that is a traditional motif of the quote-unquote stone giant throughout all the Native American traditions.
I know, especially with Lyle, I'm preaching to the choir because he reads so much of this stuff too.
But I'd wondered about that in relation to the lizard man idea as well with the scaly appearance.
Yeah, I mean, that's another thing.
You know, it's intentionally rolling in the mud and it drying and caking and any number of things like that to try to reconcile what it was people are seeing that gave the impression of scales.
So one other really interesting thing was, as I discovered during the process of researching the book, that the Native Americans of that area that lived along the Petey River and Santee Rivers and all those that ran up and down,
through South Carolina.
They had a
stories of a
race of beings
that they, it translated as something
called sharp tales,
but this race of beings that would
appear every once in a while
and come and visit, and they had to make holes
because they had these tails,
but short tales,
hard sort of tales, but they would
sit and visit with them
or interact in some way with these
creatures. And the description of
album is not very far from sort of a lizard man type thing. I mean, they've got a tail. They're coming
from the sea or some, you know, on the coast. And, you know, they're seen for a while. And they said,
when the fish kind of ran dry or something, they never saw them again. But I thought it was really
coincidental and really weird that the Native Americans would have any sort of a story about,
anything that we could equate with a lizard man in that very area.
And certainly people, you know, I've got to say that like Christopher Davis, this young man
that made up this, you know, that reported the story, people say, well, he made it up or whatever.
You know, he would have never known about the history of those kind of sightings.
And there was theories that a local farmer dressed up in a costume and he was the lizard man and stuff.
But those never account for the fact that there was all these sightings,
going on for several years and some of them quite credible in which five people saw it
once.
That's not a farmer.
I mean, a guy would have been super busy running in and out of the swamp and such.
So if you just take out the hoax aspect, it becomes more weird and the fact that perhaps,
you know, the Native Americans had an encounter with something they couldn't explain.
I'll just add one thing because, you know, I mean, being in North Carolina, I've been down there
to Skate War passing through it.
but I've actually been out in a canoe in adjacent areas, including like a four-hole swamp.
And when you encounter a cotton-mouth water moccasin with a head as big as your fist,
you know, coiled up over there on the bank, the first time you see one resting in his environment like that,
you know, and you realize you're the intruder, the last thing you're going to want to go do is getting a suit and go trudging through those swamps.
I mean, you are risking your life, so do so at your own peril.
Absolutely. None of that holds water. It's, you know. I was fascinated. Oh, no, go ahead, Ryan, please.
Oh, sorry, Rob. I just wanted to ask, while, your opinion on the cultural significance of something like the lizard man. I mean, you've got Flatwoods Monster, you've got Mothman, you've got the Roswell UFO crash. Like, these events bring a lot of commerce into these areas where this happened. So I'd love to get your opinion on Bishopville. Like, is this the game?
case there? Do they have a festival? How does the sort of identity of the area, does it morph and
change when something like this occurs? I mean, I know for Roswell, like without that festival they do
every year, that place would probably disappear, to be completely honest. So yeah, what are your
thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, and that's one of the things I like in writing these books, especially
where it's a concentrated case, because I like to, you know, what were the effects of this thing on the
the town itself and the people.
And in the case of Bishopville,
not unlike some of them,
it's kind of been a love-hate relationship with that.
I think while some of the townsfolk, you know,
entertained it or at least even if they just don't believe a lizard
man that's interesting folklore,
you know,
they just counted as part of the history.
And then you've got a section of people who just are like,
it's embarrassing, they don't like it.
There's a restaurant there,
a restaurant there that has a lizard man motif to it. It's called Harry and Harry 2. And the sign out front has a lizard man on it. It's really cool. And there was actually a lizard man festival that happened a few years ago that was put on down there. And I was, you know, the keynote speaker for that, obviously. But it was not put on as much by the community in themselves. There's a cotton museum.
down there, the South Carolina Cotton Museum.
And the people who work there and run that,
they love this because it's just part of their,
the fabric of the history of Bishaville.
And they recognize that, hey, it's just part of our culture now.
And, you know, if you Google Bishaville,
you know, you're going to come up with lizard, man.
You can't escape it.
So they've, over time, people have tried to convince the local town commissioner,
or the board of directors or whomever,
let's capitalize on this.
It is what it is.
Let's have a Luzerman festival.
And while they've incorporated the Luzer Man into their cotton festivals,
there's a float with a lizard man,
they haven't really completely yet embraced that,
hey, let's make this fun and have a festival.
So other than the one, which was organized by somebody
who actually didn't live in Bishopville,
that's as far as it's gotten.
And so it's still in the kind of love, hate, I think.
Well, I think the six of us have probably encountered more than once,
and I'm sure a lot of the people listening to this understand this,
is that the average people out there and the skeptics that disguise themselves as debunkers
are always saying, oh, they turn to profit, oh, they exploited it,
oh, a small town wanted to celebrate the month man or the lizard man or a UFO crash in Roswell.
Somehow that, like, taints the veracity of it.
But in my mind, a local chamber of commerce and a local community trying to exploit anything they can to bring some attention on the traditional history of their town to turn a buck for their citizenry in no way negates the truthfulness of the original eyewitness setting.
Like if, you know, Dover wanted to have a demon days.
I think all states should have cryptid mascots and should be celebrated.
But I think it's very important to realize, and I know it sounds like I'm on a soapboxer, so I'll make it quick, that just because a small.
all town exploits an experience that happened does not mean that the experience itself was created
for the purpose of exploitation.
Amen.
Yeah.
You're precisely right.
I mean,
it's,
it's,
they just need to look at it more in terms of people are fascinated with monsters.
I mean,
look at all the cable TV shows.
They don't realize that,
hey,
having a local creature,
it's part of the culture.
Even if you just look at it as,
hey,
you know,
we may not believe in it,
but let's,
do something. But yeah, that doesn't erase the fact that in 1988, we had real people
undergoing lie detectors investigated by the sheriff's department. Who's claimed to have seen
something? And if, you know, if they want to have a festival, the Mothman Festival, that has
no effect on what actually happened. And, you know, that's great if they do. I love this stuff.
You know, I hope they have a festival just because it's, you meet people and talk to people. And
maybe that's when some person comes out, comes to the festival, said, well, you know, I saw it, but I never said anything in 19-year.
I've met, you know, people that criticize researchers and stuff are going to these conferences, like it's a big money.
It's like, I have met a lot of people by networking, even in a small town, I would have never met these people because when they saw the festival, they thought, well, I guess they're not going to laugh at me if I go to this, and then they come up to me and say, you know, I saw something.
And boom, now I've got another entry into the log of sightings that I would never have if the community hadn't embraced it.
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Yeah, wow. By the way, also, you know, people who criticize researchers for going to these events,
you know, y'all are just in it for the money. I also like to point out, if I wanted to make money,
I'd go be an investment banker, all right? Last thing I'd be doing it.
Money. What is this money you speak?
I know. Seriously, I'm counting all my tens of dollars that I make.
Spend that stimulus check wisely.
thing is, is I mean, most of us who are involved in this kind of stuff, you know, reality is,
we do other things, you know, often to supplement our income, you know, we're driven a lot of
us, I'd like to think, you know, by a true passion, like you're saying, Lyle, for, you know,
the interest that we all share in this. And again, you know, people who are participating there
in the chat, same thing, by the way. Hello to my brother, Jazz, who's in there. And I saw
some Hidal talk a second ago going on over there. So, Shannon, yeah, they're on to us.
Go, oh, let's go, Ike, where's Ike? Go home. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a fun subject.
And even, you know, going to the Roswell Festival or some meet, you know, it's fun for everybody.
No matter what interest you have from a researcher all the way to just somebody who are like UFOs.
It provides an outlet for all levels of interest just to come together and to, you know, celebrate these as part of our history because they're the fun things in life to me.
you know, it's like look at what's going on the world.
At least we can kind of take a break from that
and talk about some really strange phenomenon
that's still going on.
It's a good diversion, you know.
Here, here.
That's why Derek and I created this
and we'll be cutting you guys as massive checks later, okay?
Those will be in the mail at some point next week.
As soon as mind clear.
Yeah, I mean, there is a stipulation there.
But, yeah, Derek, do you have anything to say
in closing here? I just wanted to ask a quick question, probably Lyle, I guess. These footprints
that are associated with, I believe, the Chris Davis encounter, what are your thoughts on these
things? Because I look at them and, well, I'll wait and say what I think after you do that. I'm curious
to see what you think about the footprints that were found in the tracks. Yeah, I get asked about
that. And essentially, those were a few weeks after the Christopher Davis incident. The
Sheriff's Department got a call late at night and a couple of the deputies went out to this
Bramlett Road which runs down by Skate War Swamp and they were patrolling because this
moment had said you heard some weird stuff that they wouldn't have normally responded to you but
in this case they did but they went past and as they were coming back they saw what looked
like footprints across the road and they got out and looked and they saw these rather large
they have oval pads and there's three big toes and they're rather exaggerated.
They look monstrous but somewhat not, you know, biologically sound or solid as far as what an animal print would make.
But they could see no evidence of how they were made.
There was no footprints.
There was no car treads or tire tracks and nothing.
They just, there was big things and they tromped off way off into the woods.
They kind of followed them for a while with a flashlight.
And then they got spooked and were like, I don't know what this is and left.
So the next day they came down there and got the Game Warden and everybody else and Sheriff Truesdale.
And they, you know, the Wildlife Commission just kind of wrote it off.
They're like, these don't even look real.
But fortunately, they had the wherewithal to cast these tracks and they cast several of them.
That's the good thing about this case.
Usually the police don't do anything.
I've got affidavits.
I've got drawings.
I've got the footprint cast to be able to look at today.
But the tracks to me, I mean, if I look at them, they just look hokey right off the bat.
And the story behind those as I investigate, I mean, I talk about this as it unfolds in the book,
so I try not to do spoilers if somebody wants to read it.
But ultimately, yes, those are suspect at the very least.
They don't look natural.
and they are exaggerated and they perpetuate this three-toed track thing.
People are constantly with the Boggy Creek and the Honey Island Swamp Monster and the Lizard Man,
always a three-toed track.
But the thing I believe about this is this happens in a few of these cases where all these sightings start coming out,
well, you've always got jokers who are wanting to add to it.
And again, it doesn't take away from what the witnesses originally reported.
But you've got to be suspect that now kids are naturally going to go out and do something to kind of add to it because it's going to be in the newspaper.
But I don't think those are tied to the sightings.
You know, these footprints are hokey.
And you can go down to the South Carolina Cotton Museum and see those footprints to this day.
So I really think that would just something that somebody tried to add to the case and it wasn't the actual footprint of the creature.
that people had reported.
I mean, I'm sure you might agree.
Yeah, definitely.
What were your thoughts on that, there?
Pretty much the same thing.
I mean, they just don't look biological.
The three-toe thing really throws me off for a bipedal creature like that unless it's
some sort of bird.
My thought was that maybe it was a gator track that somebody kind of messed with a little bit
to make it a little longer, make it look a little more humanistic or whatever to alter
the shape of it.
But I'm not just like the Honey Island Swat Monster tracks, I'm just not a big fan of.
Yeah, and they're definitely not gator tracks that were altered.
And there were multiple tracks.
You know, usually if it's one track, then it's, you know, who knows, but there were multiple and they all look the same.
The sheriffs, they still can't figure out how they were made.
And that was kind of a weird thing under itself, is how those tracks were made in that short period of time that those police had driven by.
Well, awesome, guys.
Well, Lyle, let's start with you.
Where can everybody find you and your work?
Just dropped by Lyle Blackburn.com.
And that's got links to all my various projects, books,
participation in the Small Town Monsters documentaries,
which you can see those on Amazon Prime.
You can get my books on Amazon as well in both paperback and Kindle.
And you can buy those direct from my store.
There's a link at Lyle Blackburn.com.
So it's dropped by there.
And if you've seen anything weird that you think I should know about, definitely drop me a line.
Micah, how about you?
Yeah, it's easy to find.
Micahanks.com is, of course, the website.
And right there on the website, you'll find all the podcasts and other stuff I'm involved with,
including all the archaeology stuff.
And there will be some new projects in the next hopefully a few weeks.
So some crypto-themed stuff.
So I'm kind of excited about that.
Mr. Pladman?
You can find me at somewhere in the sky's.
all my upcoming projects on the trail of UFOs be sure to check out mike and i are both a part of
that amazing project by small town monsters um you can watch uh my c w network television show
mysteries decoded for free at cwc.com and otherwise you just look me up i'm everywhere
and mr rob morphy um you can find the podcast i do the kryptonop podcast with mark stores and
Chris Carnicelli at Cryptonoppodcast.com, but it's available on iTunes, Stitcher, every platform
available. Our resource site, which was formerly American Monsters, is now Cryptopia.us,
and that's where you can see a lot of articles. And if anyone just wants to check out my artwork,
rob morphy.com. And Derek Hayes, don't you have a little show called Paranormal Caught on
camera coming on tonight? Isn't that why we did tonight's edition a little bit early?
Do you? Yeah, we had to move this up. They moved the show to Sundays, so apparently at
six o'clock Pacific time,
nine o'clock Eastern Paranormal Conant Camera on Travel Channel.
You can also find me Monsters Amongest Podcasts wherever you can find podcasts.
And of course, Into the Frey Radio.com for Into the Frey.
Thank you guys so much for doing this with us.
And I'm sure all of us will be talking again soon at some point.
So everybody out there, thanks for joining us in the chat.
And we'll see you on the flippity-flop, everybody.
Good night and good luck.
Good night.
Goodbye.
That's it for this very special panel discussion.
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Hey guys, Ryan Sprague here.
And whether I'm researching, working on the podcast, or skywatching from my roof late at night,
I need something to keep me awake, alert, and ready to tackle the mysteries in our skies.
That's why I'm so excited to announce the launch of the official Somewhere in the Sky's coffee.
That's right, we've got our own coffee roast.
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somewhere in the skies.
