The Confessionals - 696: The Art of The Hoax

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

In episode 696: The Art of The Hoax, Trey, the creator of the popular Instagram page @squatch_me_now, and his hoaxing partner, Brock, join to talk about an unorthodox topic, hoaxing Bigfoot. Together, they explain the unanswered questions about Bigfoot videos, and why video evidence often falls short of expectations. Trey shares his insights from years of examining photographic and video evidence, addressing the challenges of capturing high-quality footage of such elusive creatures. They also discuss their ongoing docuseries "Masters of the Hunt", where they conduct groundbreaking experiments, including ethical hoaxing, to reveal just how difficult it is to fake a Bigfoot sighting. With Trey's deep dive into the history of giants and Brock's hands-on experience in Bigfoot costuming, this conversation takes a fascinating look at what it really takes to explore the phenomenon, and attempts to answer the biggest question surrounding Bigfoot sighting videos...Are they real?Squatch Me Now: @squatch_me_nowHurricane Helene Relief Efforts List: https://www.theconfessionalspodcast.com/helene-reliefSasquatch and The Missing Man: merkelfilms.comMerkel Media Apparel: merkmerch.comThe Confessionals Members App:Apple Store: https://apple.co/3UxhPrhGoogle Play: https://bit.ly/43mk8kZBecome a member for AD FREE listening and EXTRA shows: theconfessionalspodcast.com/joinAFFILIATESGo Silent with SLNT Faraday Bags: https://alnk.to/clXuRY5EMP Shield: empshield.com Coupon Code: "tony" for $50 off every item you purchase!SPONSORSSIMPLISAFE TODAY: simplisafe.com/confessionalsCONNECT WITH USWebsite: www.theconfessionalspodcast.comEmail: [e-mail] to the Newsletter: https://www.theconfessionalspodcast.com/the-newsletterMAILING ADDRESS:Merkel Media257 N. Calderwood St., #301Alcoa, TN 37701SOCIAL MEDIASubscribe to our YouTube: https://bit.ly/2TlREaIReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/theconfessionals/Discord: https://discord.gg/KDn4D2uw7hShow Instagram: theconfessionalspodcastTony's Instagram: tonymerkelofficialFacebook: www.facebook.com/TheConfessionalsPodcasTwitter: @TConfessionalsTony's Twitter: @tony_merkelProduced by: @jack_theproducerOUTRO MUSICJoel Thomas - Free The RabbitsYouTube | Apple Music | Spotify

Merkel Media This was all circulating around the base that a giant had to kill but no one was supposed to talk about it I saw three long boning fingers reach up underneath the door curl up to grab it and then disappear

When he came over to me Dude he slithered over to me The giant comes out of the cave and they're all frozen And he starts running and firing at this giant. With a giant move, he's got a spear in one hand, and he's running really fast, and spears Dan holds them up like this. Somebody else, shoot him in the face, shoot him in the face. They basically decapitated. And I look over and there are two push and I touch air because I know I'm seeing a monster. Welcome to the show, everybody. You're listening to The Confessionals podcast.

I'm your host Tony Merkel. Thanks for being here. You have a crazy wild experience you want to share with me on the show. Go ahead and shoot me an email. My email address is contact at theconfessionalspodcast.com. That's contact at the confessionalspodcast.com. Or go to the website, the confessionalspodcast.com, hit the contact section, and you can reach me that way as well. Either it works for me, just get a hold of me. If you want more shows on a weekly basis, we got you covered, the confessionalspodcast.com

slash join or even on YouTube. They are both memberships that we offer, both get the same content, just two different locations, once through our website and you get access to the members app. or if you just want to remain on YouTube, just stay on YouTube and become a member there and you get the same content as well. Either way it works for me, just come hang out with us on the membership side. Also friends, go ahead and check out murkmerch.com. That's mercmurch.com for all your Merkelmedia apparel needs. I'm wearing right now the confessional's hat. You can get yours right now at Merkmerch.com. Also check out Merkelfilms.com for all your Merkelmedmedia

streaming. On-demand streaming available right there, Merkelfilms.com. More film. to come very, very soon. Friends, I just want to let you know. Thank you very much for all the people who have been donating to the Hurricane Helene efforts. My friend William, I talked about last week on Weird Wednesday. He received tons of donations after we had him on the show talking about what he's doing. So thank you very much. I've been reading through the comments on the donation page. And a lot of people saying that the confessionals sent him there and some very, very large donations. I've seen up to $1,000 being donated by the confess. listeners. So thank you very much for all you guys are doing with helping the locals. William is going to try giving me a message for you guys coming days here because there's a lot of stuff developing and he just wants to be able to share it with you guys since you guys are graciously donating. Today we have Trey coming on the show and he runs the Instagram account called Squatch Me Now. It's a very popular page. And I wanted to bring him on to talk about what he's doing because, well, him and a guy named Brock, Brock is about six.

seven and dresses in a Bigfoot costume and does events, but they are also doing what they're calling ethically hoaxing Bigfoot. We had a great conversation about how you can ethically hoax Bigfoot in attempts to show the world how it's hard to actually hoax this footage. All right. Let's get to Trey and our great conversation right now. All right, today we got Trey and Brock on the show. How are you guys doing? Good. How are you, Tony? Doing good. Doing good. So, uh, you know, unique conversation we're going to have today because, Trey, we got connected through Instagram and you run the Instagram page, Squatch Me Now.

How long ago has it been since you started that? 2019, July was when I got started. Yeah, I remember coming across it, and you must have just started it because it was like 10 to 12,000 followers or something that. I remember it was less than what it is now. I remember seeing it grow. And it's funny because you see some of these Instagram accounts. And rarely ones like yours do they really show the person behind the account?

You know, it's one of the faceless accounts. And so today I suckered you into bringing your face on. So thanks for that. Yeah, you know, it's a, I wanted it to be about the subject, you know. And there's phases to this, and I want to start with you in terms of starting to put myself more into that platform. But, you know, to begin, I really just wanted to start with the subject and kind of where I was and what I was looking at about the subject, what I was from various perspectives I have on not just the subject as a broader phenomenon, but what's going on with, evidence that we have. I do have a film and video background. So most of our evidence is photo or video. And I think to some extent I can bring a perspective to that a lot of people don't have. And

certainly the broader phenomenon from a anthropological perspective, historical is very interesting to me and sort of tying that all together. But it's been great to sort of look at the evidence and look at the reaction the evidence gets from certain people. And so for me, to a certain extent, became a market research for future content that I'm creating. What are the questions people have? What are the questions that need to be answered? One of those being like, why is Bigfoot Blery? You know, like, that's one of the most common comments I get on video,

or photo evidence, specifically video where there is a blur to the figure is, you know, why is it blurry? We have these great cameras. Everybody has a cell phone, blah, blah, blah. We should have better quality visual evidence at this point. And the truth is everybody's really spoiled with National Geographic, you know. And where in the Bigfoot world do we have a massive, a legacy corporation like National Geographic that's dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars

on photographers set out in the wild with, you know, $50,000 worth of photography equipment for years at a time to get that Arctic fox, you know? Yeah. That's how you get that kind of footage, you know. It's a 600-millimeter lens on a, you know, which is 10 to 20 grand on a $10,000 camera body, on a $2,000 tripod for five years in the Arctic. And that's how you get that beautiful footage of these rare creatures. And you're still not talking about what I think is super athletic, intellectual, or intelligent,

pommeted running through the woods adapted to avoid you. So, you know, try to get that a great, beautiful shot. And then most of these videos are from a random person who picks up their phone and says, hey, let me film that. And so if you don't have any concept of how photography works, you're going to wonder why Bigfoot's blurry. And I have some other theories that come from a biological perspective of why it might be blurry. But just from the baseline,

photographically, it's very hard to go film your dog running around in the backyard at dusk. And your phone, especially as most people have it on some sort of auto settings, it's going to say it's twilight, you know, it's going to lower the shutter speed to adapt for the low light. And as soon as you do that, you start getting more motion blur and all these kinds of things.

So if you have a dark colored animal moving quickly across any landscape, you're going to lose a lot trying to shoot that with a 24-millimeter cell phone lens from 50 yards. And then there's also, even if you shoot that, you know, people say, oh, we have 4K, we have 8K. Even shooting at that high resolution, there's only a certain extent that you can zoom into that before you start losing data, visual data, you know? So with SquatchMe Now, it's really been a great thing.

for me and my research, not only see this from my perspective and see the phenomenon from my perspective, but to see it from other people's perspective and see the answers that need to be sought and taught to these people in terms of why this is more realistic than I think most people understand because they don't understand what they're looking at, really. And not necessarily they don't understand what the creature is. they don't understand the quality of the footage they're looking at and why it's not what they want it to be. And that's just one thing. I mean, I have Brock here with me.

This is my partner in crime. And he wears a bigfoot suit. We have multiple sort of variations of a modular suit at this point that we're able to use to sort of test how easy is it. to then hoax. If you're going to try to hoax a Bigfoot video, what's that going to take? And we can tell you, you know, it takes a few thousand dollars in producing a suit. It takes a lot of time to put it on.

It takes a lot of time to, you know, do the makeup effects. And then not everybody has a six foot six, six foot seven, three hundred plus pound ex-wrestler to wear said suit. And even when he puts it on, you know, it's not an easy thing to wear around across rough terrain, you know, actually out in any sort of wilderness. And so when you see these videos where these creatures are moving down a boulder field very quickly or they're moving through a tree line carrying a deer on their shoulder or whatever's happening in the video, I can.

tell you like that's a very hard thing to fake it's a lot harder than people think people think people are going to walmart picking up a suit going out in the woods and making a realistic bigfoot video you know if you look at any of these guys like thinker thunker who do more like you know optical physics uh type side of of sort of the camera and are estimating you know what the size is how many people out there anywhere close to big foot size You know, so when you see a lot of these videos and they're at a significant distance and that thing still looks pretty big, how's that happening? You know, even, you know, how are you creating that? And then if they're moving athletically, if they're actually moving in a way, that's something I usually look at when I'm looking at videos.

If it's large and moving quickly, that's pretty hard to do. Yeah, talk about it. Yeah, I mean, it's putting. on that suit, you lose a degree of mobility. I mean, we had test after test after test trying to get the suit right and then trying to get the facial plans as right to see and adapt and move. And one of the things that he and I were talking about before was when you're this size just normally interacting with your environment, how you bump into things, touch things, step on things. If I see videos in some of these videos I've seen and I don't see that thing is supposed to be this big, why didn't that tree break when it leaned up against it? Why didn't that break when it walks through there?

Why is it not, the environment's not moving? Why did the floor not move now? Why did this not sink? Why did there's physics there that aren't happening in some cases? And it takes time to adjust. I think another interesting thing that we learned just testing the suit, and this was a complete accident pretty much, but we were doing our early test of the suit for a facial appliance that we're not currently using.

Put them in the suit, put the facial appliance on. and did a few hours of makeup. We were in a warehouse in a fairly busy area of Waydhampton Boulevard. A big intersection, Leighthinton Boulevard. Yeah, and I took him outside. So let's take a walk. And we have this on camera.

And just had him go stand at this busy intersection in the middle of the city. I would say of all the people that drove past this, you know, once he's in the suit, he's over seven feet. Of all the people that drove past maybe 10% saw. him. It was amazing. And he's standing in a parking lot. He's not standing behind anything, beside anything. He's the only thing,

this big, dark, hairy, big foot. And I was waving at cars as they were coming by and shocking how many didn't even just see me standing there. So that's sort of the other perspective too is people are like, wouldn't we see these a lot more? That's another statement you get. We should

be seeing these. Hundreds should be, more people should be seeing these. If If a seven foot, big foot can stand in the middle of a busy intersection, only 10% of the people driving past see him, then if it's standing in a tree line outside a highway, watching cars go by, where are the chances, unless it crosses in front of one? So these are just sort of interesting experiments that we're doing as part of a larger project, which is a docu series on the subject and that sort of experiment with photography and experiment. with hope you know what I call the art of the hoax um which is a lot more difficult craft than than people realize um that that's part of this sort of larger project that we're working on um but it's been a very interesting uh journey to sort of understand that this is not quite as easy as people think it is to just be like you know all these are hoaxes you know well i'd like to

I want to kind of affirm to you just a recent experience I had. So we're recording this of September. My wife made it very clear to me that in August I was out of state for 18 days. I did a lot of traveling. And recently I just got back from Utah. I spent a week in Utah in the beginning of September. And I'm sitting in the airport and this was the Atlanta airport. It was about, I'd say, 8 o'clock in the morning or so.

And I'm sitting there, Jack's on his computer, working on an episode or whatever. And I'm just people watching. That's what I do. I have people watch. I just, I know people think it's creepy these days, I guess, because everybody's in their phones. But I just, when, when, and you could probably, to a certain extent, sympathize with this. I mean, when your life is your phone, when you have to, you know, look at a computer screen for what you do for living and stuff, you'd rather not, you know. And so when I'm on a plane or I'm in an airport, I just kind of sit and chill and watch.

And as I'm watching, I see this guy that's probably 6-4-ish walking by kind of stocky, not totally in shape, long hair. And I see him. And I'm like, that's that dude from Instagram. His handle is nerd ork. And he's the guy that does like the videos where he pretends to be pulled over by a police officer. he's like, no officer, I didn't know. And it's just like this whole shit. Right, yeah.

And he comes walking by with a buddy of his. And I'm like, nobody, like, because this guy has millions of fathers. I'm like, does nobody see this guy here? You know? And I said to Jack and he didn't see it. And then I heard somebody else talking about how they bumped into him. And I was like, that was him, you know? But it's like, people are so kind of in their zone.

And when you're talking about people driving down a road, like they're going to work. It's every day. It's repetitive. It's one of those things where, you know, You leave the driveway and you don't remember the trip to work because it's just so repetitive, right? It's like a lot of memory. Yeah. I think it's very easy for people to miss things that could be right there just because it's not on the agenda for the day.

I made a note here as you were talking. And I would like for you to maybe go into the docu-series a little bit on what you're working on and kind of the details of it. So people can understand the direction it's going. So when it's available, they're interested in actually checking it. out. But I wrote down this, these two words here with a question mark, ethical hoaxing. And I think that there is, there is a thing called, there should be at least a thing called ethical hoaxing in the sense that can we, can, how can we hoax something? How easy is it to hoax it so that we have a barometer, a gauge as to what is actually feasible when somebody's claiming something is

legitimate evidence. Right. I, you're talking, you kind of started out with the whole blurry side of things. I have a video that I have never released on my Instagram. I've never released it anywhere. And mainly because I really enjoy showing the people, the video at conferences when I speak. So it's one of those things where you're not going to see it unless you're at the conference kind of thing because I don't want to show people this really cool thing.

And they're like, oh yeah, I saw that already. You know, so I save it for the conferences. but it's a video that was given to me by, I've mentioned this guy before in my show, Eddie from Legends and Lower Pizzeria and Madisonville, Tennessee. He gave me this video. This couple came in,

gave him the video. It happened around the pizza shop, and it was broad daylight with a cell phone. They saw something walking on its hind legs along a tree line off the road, across a field, so it's a great distance. And it's an 11-second video,

and it picks up in their, both kind of arguing, what is that, you know? And one of them is like, it's a human. And it's like, that's not a human. And then it drops down to all four and starts running off into the woods. And when that happens, the video stops. All you hear is the guy go, like, oh, ah, you know, and it just cuts off. And the video, though, is blurry. And it's, it's because they had to zoom in across a field to shoot the video. I've been able to stabilize it, which helps. But how many, you know, people are actually getting up close to a big foot to get a clear, stabilized video where they're not shaking and adrenaline pumping and scared. I think when you really just practically sit and think

about some of the logistics behind capturing a good video or picture, it all of a sudden becomes a lot harder. And I think, like, we were talking guns early before we started recording. And, you know, I carry, I tell people all the time, I mean, it's not a secret. I like my guns and I carry. And I've never been somebody who's been in combat. I've never had somebody shooting at me. And I hope I never do. If I ever am in a situation where I need to pull my gun out, it's going to be a situation that I have never been in before. And my adrenaline is going to pumping so hard that I have very deep concerns of how accurate I'll be able to pull the trigger to begin with, with the shakiness in my arms and things like that. And so when you're watching a Bigfoot, something that

shouldn't exist in front of you, there's also the factor of the adrenaline pump people are experiencing and what does that do for even stability of the camera in their hands? Well, I mean, yeah, that takes me, I mean, it just goes back to what I was saying with a National Geographic photographer. You got a long lens. You got a, you know, expensive camera body. It's on a tripod. You've been sitting there for it. And that's what we really need. If we want that footage, then we need to get together as a community and fund that kind of expedition to put those people in the right places. We can look at the data. We can look at map data and see where this activity is.

And at what time of year, we need to put people there. We need to put them there with the right equipment. And I think we'll get what we need if they're placed. correctly, you know, this is sort of my end goal is getting to that point. But you're, to your point, you know, once you zoom in, even if it's a did, whether it's a digital zoom or analog zoom, whatever kind of equipment you're using, whether there's a camera or phone, when you start zooming in, you're going to get more handshake. It exacerbates. It amplifies the handshake visually. So the more you zoom in, unless you're stabilized, the more shake you're

going to get. You're probably also going to lose. some of your, you know, how well that camera is receiving light. And again, if it's dark, if it's a lot of these sightings happen at dusk, probably because that's when they're coming out to hunt. That's when most predators come out to hunt is it in the morning at dawn and dusk. That's magic hour. If you are filming correct, you know, with the right equipment at the right time, with the right lighting, that's great.

But even if it's right before Magica, you're not going to have, is it standing in a shadow? It's already dark. I mean, just look at, I mean, I work with some nonprofits that do stuff for our local animal shelter. And I do a bunch of pro bono work raising money through social media for them, not through the Squadsmenow platform. But we have a hard time getting black dogs and cats, you know, adopted out because they're very hard to photograph without a lot. lot of lighting. So if we're talking about most Bigfoot, regardless of the color of hair, I would say you may

confirm or disagree, but a lot of sightings describe sort of a grayish dark skin. If you've got a dark color hair, dark, you know, skin color, it's going to be much harder, especially at a distance, especially in low light, to get any sort of detail on that image. You know, there's a lot of things They're terrible about cell phone. A cell phone is not a great. A cell phone's great for selfies and taking pictures of your food. That's about it. I encourage people if you have a cell phone, that's your only camera source,

and you're trying to do this kind of stuff. Go online and get one of those spotting scopes for like $80 on Amazon. I have those links on my, in the links on my Instagram. And a lot of them have a mount for your cameras. So at the very least, you can get a longer lens. It's not a great lens. be high quality for 80 bucks, but you're going to be able to see something at a more detail on something at a distance using your phone with a $80 spotting for hunting.

Well, there's even more obvious piece. I mean, he and I've been trying to work out, like when we go out, like the best example, the biggest crowd we've had is year before last, we were at the Marion Bigfoot Festival. And he had a camera and what was her name was with us, had a camera, to help with the crowds around us. Yeah. I may be, he may be, I mean, 10 feet in front of him, walking in front of him, and I'm trying to see the crowd and people react to me.

So I may see somebody off to the left and I'm walking and he's on me and I turn it. I'm going that way. Or I stop and turn and come back towards him. Or I see that there's a dog that I want to be careful of that's scared. I'm going to step over this way. Or I just walk by a child or a chrome man that's terrified and starts crying. He doesn't know where I'm going. So I can turn and come right back at him, turn and step off to an edge, turn it away.

Like we had at one point, we had so many people, what we got in the center of the town square. And I said, no, there was 100 people around us. So I'm just turning and hugging kids and holding people and saying hi and doing things. But he's constantly moving. So we're working out a headset piece where I've got a headset piece in. And he's microphoneing. Stay to your left, stay to your right, slowdown. Hey, there's a kid following you because I don't have the periphery in that suit to see everything perfectly.

Hey, there's a kid to your left that's been a phone on you for 20 feet. Stop and talk to him. Or, hey, there is a dog coming up on your right. Watch it. So even like you're saying, that filming in broad daylight, 10 feet from me, when we were going through footage, it was, well, that's where you moved. That's where you changed. That's where I didn't know that that lady was going to walk out of that booth and grab you. It changed.

I mean, yeah, to his point, it's difficult even when it's not an actual Bigfoot. It's just a buddy and a giant Bigfoot soon. In broad daylight, it still can be difficult to get the footage that you need, just depending on how fast he's moving around or what's going on. And it's difficult for him. I mean, like the facial appliance blocks his peripheral vision. So that's another thing, you know, when it just comes to. I unfortunately need these.

But I can't wear those when I have this on. And I can't do a contact with it because we can't take the chance of the makeup causing an infection with the contact. So when I've got this, like my doctor's like, no, because I wanted to have contacts made so I could see better when I moved. And she was like, no. She's like, if any of that, just the smallest amount of that makeup that you're getting on or even the remover gets in that contact, you don't know it.

It doesn't come off when you're cleaning it. You put it back in your eye. You get an infection. So I can't do that. So I'm already, everything's sort of fuzzy. And then I've got this piece that cuts down on that periphery. So that's why we're trying to figure out the, hey, I don't see that. coming in from the left, I'm trying to very turn and move to see so he can talk to me.

So I think to your point for ethical hoaxing, that's what we're kind of trying to do, is, you know, just experiment with what it actually takes and show people that not only hear how hard it is to actually do the hoax, but if this was a real thing, if this was a real creature, hear all the problems involved with actually capturing quality. footage of it. So that's part of that sort of larger experiment. And I even experiment, you know, sometimes I feel like a little bit like I'm playing 5D chess with my audience because, you know, I'll throw something up and I'll literally put in the comment, this is a fake video. You know, this is a fake video. I'm telling you right now, I just want to see how many people actually read the caption. And for me, that's such an interesting experiment about human nature. And we

were talking about how people are like this, but also like, and especially with what's going on the world right now, how many people just read a headline and they take, they shape their entire worldview. Yeah. They didn't read the article. They read the headline. Their entire worldview is now shaped by this headline. Now, how many of those people that actually read the headline read the article?

And then that one article shaped their entire worldview about that subject. And then how many people that actually read the whole article, read other articles on said subject? And then actually got a sort of a broader concept of what that subject was. And you see a lot of that with the Bigfoot community. One of the things I get really frustrated about, you know, the argument, is it ape or is a human? Yes. The answer is yes. You know, is it, is it, you know, supernatural or natural?

Yes, you know, I mean, to me, that's the answer, because I don't think we're dealing with, we started where it was like, people thought there was like one Bigfoot in Northern California, right? There were probably still some people that think that. And then there are people that, you know, now think, okay, Bigfoot is just a population that's just in Northern California. you. And I think people are starting to obviously understand that this is a worldwide phenomenon, but the idea that you're just dealing with one type of thing that composes the entire phenomenon is almost silly to me, but you see this sort of dogmatic approach to it, you know, and people breaking into factions or it's this or it's that. When I really feel like it could be, or it likely

is, most likely all of it, to a certain extent. People say, is it, or is it multidimensional? I usually say, aren't we all? You know, that's what quantum physics is selling us, right? And, you know, there's the Arthur C. Clark quote, magic is just science. We don't understand it. So I really- I hate that quote so much, but I understand it. Why do you hate it, Tony?

Because I don't want to think that one day, some of the magical things that happen around us today could be explained by science. Like, I just want to live, I just want to live in my ferry, too. Yeah, but science, you know, no, I get that. But, you know, science is not, I think, unfortunately, science is not science anymore. And that's why I, too have a very, like, like, I grew up, though, loving the concept of science. The problem is it's not, if we can't question the science, which is where we've gotten, right? Yeah.

then it's not science. It stopped being science. The whole, for me, from a Christian perspective, science is the journey to understand God, but a journey will never, something will never achieve, obviously, to better understand God's creation, if you will. But that's not achievable.

You can't understand the mind of God or whatever. you know, you want to believe, but you can, just like you can seek to be more like him, you can also, and never will be, never will achieve that, you can also seek to understand his creation better. I know there was this alien interview from back in the day, and I don't remember if it ended up being a hoax or not, but something that supposedly the alien said, which I thought was interesting was supposedly the military people that had him ask is your technology natural or are you natural or something like it and it said everything is natural now i don't know that i believe that totally but everything has to come from one source right to a certain extent

uh even the devil came from god right so everything comes comes from one source and everything. Now, is it a, you know, what is the path that takes? It doesn't mean it's a, is technology a natural extension of humanity? And if it is, that's just one path we could take. And if we look at Bigfoot, to me, whatever that phenomenon is, it is an extension of something human-like that didn't take the path of technology, at least in part, maybe not all of the phenomenon, not everything that represents the

Bigfoot phenomenon, because I think that's pretty broad. To me, that's anything that is a humanoid of mammalian, well, maybe not even mammalian, because you would include dogman in that. But, you know, everything is sort of above that relict hominid spectrum is the Bigfoot, is part of that Bigfoot phenomenon. And, you know, what I find most interesting about it is it seems to be a more natural path of development. If we're talking about a Denisovan, are you familiar with like Denisovans and Denisovic cave. So, okay, so

Denisova Cave is in Asia. It was a cave discovered where there were fossil evidence that they initially thought were Neanderthals. They did DNA testing. It was not Neanderthal.

Somewhat related to Neanderthal. They named this humanoid, hominid variation. Denisovin based on the cave. Now, what's interesting about it is they found a tooth in Denosovo Cave, a molar, that they originally thought it was a cave bear tooth because of its size. Now, Cave Bear grew to be about 10 feet tall.

When they did DNA testing, it came back Denisovan. So you either have a Funko Pop bobblehead hominid with a giant head and giant teeth. or you have a hominid that is of the size that a cave bear tooth size molar would fit in their skull. So to me, like, and we have very little fossil evidence of anything. And, you know, that's a whole other debatable thing on a whole lot of other levels. But just taking it from, okay, this is the accepted fossil evidence that we've discovered. that's a very just the process of fossilization is extremely rare finding a fossil is extremely rare

so it seems to be if you take that as a baseline there was a time on this planet where there were a lot of human-like things running around of various sizes and to me the Bigfoot phenomenon outside of sort of more fringe paths, just keeping it more basic for the average enthusiasts, we're talking about relics of that time that have been interbred and incurred environmental adaptations, wherever they are, for another 100,000 years, 10,000 years,

since humans decided to split off from whatever was going on there. And my theory and sort of where I go, the whole first season of my docu-series is about the Uncanny Valley. Are you familiar with the Uncanny Valley? Yeah, briefly. I don't know, like, probably what you know, but yeah, I've heard of it. I mean, I feel like the, if you look at where civilization popped up originally, and this is somewhat, ironic. If you look where civilization popped up originally, it's the same place we met Neanderthals. Almost the exact same location of where the first civilization started to emerge was

the same place where we started to really slam into other early hominids that had already left Africa or had developed outside of Africa. So we know from the Uncanny Valley, for people who don't know what it is. The Uncany Valley was an experiment done by a Japanese scientist in robotics in the 70s. And what he was doing was showing people different versions of robots that were on varying degree of less human to more human. So the R2D2 trashcan robot was very cute and everybody loved it. But as soon as that robot gets to be very human-like people, there was this dip in the

graph of data based on their reactions. People got very nervous. And what this indicates is an ancient memory of something. something that looked human but wasn't and was likely preying on humans. Now, people could put a lot of different stuff into what that is, but for me, the most seemingly obvious explanation would be, okay, we met other things that looked like humans that weren't humans, right? And we know from fossil evidence that there were a lot of those, and we know that Neanderthals were both inbreeding and cannibalizing humans.

So, and eating humans. So, I mean, we found that evidence. We found human bones that we've DNA tested and found that, you know, there were Neanderthals eating humans. And I'm sure that the mating wasn't the Geico Caveman showing up at the human girl's cave to pick her up and take her on a date with some flowers. You know, that probably wasn't a very sweet process. So, I mean, for me, the Uncanny Valley is likely...

due to running into these other hominids. And then taking it a next step, did that experience, because it happened around, you know, the same place that civilization first cropped up, did that have anything to do with why we needed to put walls around us? And if you need to put walls around, you need to grow crops to feed people because you're not necessarily leaving those walls too often to go hunt. Or if you are, you're sitting out a bunch of people. And so if that necessity to survive the other hominids invoked civilization and its technology, did our technology in the 1970s of robotics discover the origin of civilization and technology? Is that evidence of why we started civilization in the first place, encountering these human-like predators.

And is that technology leading into AI and robotics and transhumanism going to create the new predators, you know, of humanity, the new super predator? The answer is yes. The answer is yes, yeah. Hopefully not, but hopefully you get that solar flare. Yeah, yeah. I looked at the, to fill people in the solar flare, we were both sitting here before we started recording, fantasizing about what life would be like with a solar flare and how it would kill all the electronics and we'd be forced to live a simpler life and probably smile more. So it was a good fantasy. You know, I often wonder what humanity would have become had we not crutched on civilization. And I really think if we look at a lot of what,

maybe not all of it, but a lot of what's considered the Bigfoot phenomenon, that is pretty close. I mean, humans have actually gotten small. They got, for a long time, they got smaller after agriculture began. Less robust. Our bones were thicker. Our skulls were thicker. And thicker bones indicate thicker muscles.

So we were probably much more robust before civil. civilization, we were. And we've just sort of declined. And now, I guess, with, you know, all the steroids and stuff in our food, you know, we're at least getting taller. I'm not sure that we're getting more dense or, you know, physically adept. But as a whole, obviously, that doesn't seem to be the trend. But I do think, you know, a sort of more natural process of evolution and development is what we see and could account for some of the more woo aspects of the Bigfoot phenomenon, like MindSpeak. You know,

MindSpeak is something a lot of people will message me and talk about, but be like, don't tell anybody about this part of my sighting. So in 2019, CIA declassified a bunch of telepathy documents. I don't know if you've seen any of those, but if they had data of successful telepathy experiments in humans, That means that there's at least a seed for that possibility in human-like organisms.

Would it be a reasonable adaptation for a hominid that had never crushed on civilization, had never needed that? And so when you look at verbal communication in humans and the evolutionary adaptations we have based on verbal communication, the whites of our eyes, the scolera interrupt the whites. are part of an evolutionary adaptation to aid in verbal communication. They help sort of let the other person know what we're thinking and feeling when we're talking and direct sort of our verbal communication. That's how it originally evolved. What do we see in a lot of Bigfoot sightings, completely blacked out eyes or browned out eyes?

So if they don't have Scalarra, is it possible that something huge, human life that's continued to develop parallel to us might have further developed that ability to use telepathy and not needed to adapt the scolera in their eyes. Certainly would be beneficial to, you know, ambush hunters, which we see in early hunter gatherers and probably in Bigfoot, we certainly see or have witness reports of people seeing them ambush hunting deer and that kind of thing. So I don't know, man, it's a big subject. I don't know that we're going to get to everything I could talk about, but it's a,

there's a lot going on with this. And so my goal was Squatch Me Now, and this is sort of a lifelong goal. I'm not planning on quitting this anytime soon, so I'm also not in a rush, but is to sort of like really get people thinking bigger about the big foot phenomenon. I think it's a much bigger subject and we don't need to argue about whether it's a nephlum or it's an ape or it's a human or it's a Neanderthal or let's just look at it from a bigger perspective and and sort of chase all and pull in all those threads. And I think we'll get a better idea of like the full tapestry of what's going on here. It's a pretty big subject and people really, it's, you know, humans naturally want to just

sort of make things simple so they can understand it. need to make things, understand things are very complex and we need to adapt the complexity of these phenomena as opposed to trying to make it fit in our understanding of the world. Because we'll have a better understanding of the world if we do that. Yeah, I think we naturally, I mean, I don't even know if it's natural, but we live in a world where we're told what to think constantly, you know, it doesn't matter what, you know, media source you're tuning into, into that media source is designed to tell you what to think. And so we now naturally just want to say, just tell me what to think. I just want to know what to think. Just tell me. And with this,

this topic and the stuff that we do, maybe the common ground is, you know, hey, do we both agree that something's going on? Yes. Okay. Then let's not get caught up on our differences on thought with this and let's just start building from there. Something's going on and, you know, we may never agree on the origins of certain things. Let's stop telling the individual what to think and start telling the individual what questions to ask or at least guiding them down that path of questioning and let people figure out what they want to believe. We talked about that before we started. I'm not a Bigfoot believer. I don't believe in Bigfoot. You know, that belief requires faith.

I've seen quite a bit of stuff. I've heard quite a bit of stuff. I've studied quite a bit of stuff. None of it makes me want to believe anything. I'm taking a lifetime of data. This has been my whole life. I've been interested in the subject. And I'm inferring that there's got to be something to this.

Even if it's, and this doesn't make any sense because we have so many modern accounts and evidence. let's just say it's just a psychological contagion based on an ancient memory. It still existed. It still was a real thing. And we have fossil evidence to back that up. So, you know, I think just getting people, Bigfoot, too, and the reason I started with that subject on social media was it's sort of the catalyst subject for everything else because it's about our origins, really. And you can, you get, I mean, if you can just say, okay, there. is something going on with this, then there are governments covering it up, right?

It has to be. You know, I get people still saying this isn't real. And two years ago or whatever, the government has just told us UFOs are real. UFOs are absolutely real. We're declassifying military videos we have of it. We know it's real. Whatever it is, I don't think what we, when we eventually get full disclosure, I don't think we'll get the truth.

But we know there's something going on with that. And the government is now telling us, if UFOs are real, but people still want to be like Bigfoot isn't real. It's a much more grounded in reality subject matter, even than extraterrestrials or interdimensional or, you know, whatever. That's a whole, obviously, a whole other direction. But Bigfoot is a great catalyst subject to just be like, you know, you can get into so many other things off of that stepping stone into the world of, you know, the Matrix. Well, I mean, it's, well, now that my thought's gone, there's something I was going to say, oh, well, it's gone. See you later. See you later, thought. Nice knowing you when I knew you. But so we talked about this a little bit in the beginning. And I wouldn't mind circling back around to this.

Maybe if there's a little bit more detail to go into, you mentioned about the docu-series that you're working on. and how this docu-series, from what I understand, to, you know, explore the idea of hoaxing and how easy is it and stuff. And you guys, you know, you got your, you got a big foot sitting next to you and you guys have hands-on experience with this stuff. And I just want to clarify with people, I personally do believe there is a thing called ethical hoaxing in the sense of this. If somebody's hoaxing, you know, like I'll use you guys an example. example. So you guys are doing experiments. How easy is it to hoax a big foot in a city setting or in the woods at night with the camera, all that stuff? If you put it out there, first of all, if you put it out there and say, this is our experiment, take it for what you want, that's, in my mind,

that's more of an experiment than a hoax because you're now telling people what it is all about. But say you run an experiment on your end, you put it out for the world to see what is believable for people. I think there is a window of time. Just say you put that out there and then like a day to a few days later, you come out and say, hey guys, we hoax this, we were just trying to, and you kind of break it down as to why you put it out there. I think there is an ethical aspect to that because it allows people who are believers in Bigfoot to have a gauge as to what is actually possible. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think you could, you can sigh up, siop people into sleep and you can sigh up people awake.

You know what I mean? There's a lot of that going on in the media. And, you know, we live in a very interesting time where, you know, when I started in the film industry, if you wanted to get an aerial shot, you need to get in a helicopter with a film camera. You know, if you wanted to, you know, edit, you had to process film and then, you know, chop it up and this, that and the other. Now I can throw a drone out of my sunroof, you know. Now I can, you know, I don't have to have a big steady camera. I have a gimbal. So I can shoot in 4K, you know, so as media makers, I think we really have an independent

ones. We have a great opportunity to really change the world in a big way. We have social media that we can put it out on as long as you don't get censored. You know, you're not doing a subject that's prone to that. So while. the larger scale media is trying to keep the people asleep. We have a great opportunity and certainly what you're doing to help people wake up. And we have everything, all the tools we need.

I mean, we have all the, everything you need to make really high quality content and media is at our fingertips. For me and my project, it's called Masters of the Hunt. And that is, it's now, it'll be almost five years. when I started documentaries took a long time to produce. This is a, you know, I do plan on some sort of shorter pieces that are quicker in production. I also started the end of 2019 and was starting to shoot some interviews and then COVID hits. That put some delay on things. And then I had a son that put delay on things a little bit.

And then, you know, we've had quite a bit of stuff going on. But we also, it took us two years just to get the suit ready, the first suit. But it's called Masters of the Hunt, and it is named after giants that lived here between where you are in Tennessee, where I'm sitting in Asheville. They were known as Lords of the Game or Masters of the Hunt by the Cherokee. And that goes into the legend of Sul Kalu, who was the Cherokee devil. and that's an amazing story. I'm not going to get into all of it right now, but it's a very interesting story about mindspeak and giants

and interbreeding with humans and Cherokee sort of life at the time, and it was recorded by a man that went to live in the Cherokee with the Cherokee in the early 1800s, and it was told to him by an old grandmother in the tribe at that time, and it was told his fact that there were these giants that lived with the Cherokee people at that time. They were great hunters and they could control the minds of animals, which I think is interesting when we get into the idea of mindspeak as well as infrasound. So that's what's based on.

And I named that primarily in honor of those giants living in a place where I live and being the giants from where I'm from. And, you know, we've got Ron Moorhead who's in it. I've already interviewed Ron. Got Marcia K. Moore, who's been in Ancient Aliens, and she's a forensic artist. Basically, the only person doing forensic recreation art of the mound builders and, you know, the... Really? Skoles and all that.

She's amazing. She's great. She's doing this project now, too, called Tire Squatch, which people should do. check out where she's using recycled bike tires and making like Bigfoot sculptures that are really amazing out of them. She's her person's named Bojum. Bojum is another, and I find it interesting. Bojum is another story.

It's more of sort of the white story of Bigfoot in this area where the Buzhom would come out and peek at the girls who were at the swimming hole. and at one point one of the girls fell in love and was obsessed with Buzham and would go out at night calling for Buzham and eventually Buzham came and took her and went away with her. This is almost the exact same story of Sulkaloo, which is very interesting because you have Cherokee from say, you know, the 1600s or whatever talking about Sule Kalu and this one Cherokee girl that went off with him. And then you have, you know, in the 1800s, early 1900s, you have whites talking about. about the Buzum and this one girl that went off with the Buzhim. Now is the Buzim using Minespeak to control this girl? Like the Sulkaloo and his giant tribe could use their minds to control the animals.

It's very interesting. And then if you take, where did these giants come from in this area? It's not just the Cherokee that had this legend. If you look at early explorers to the southeast, almost all of them, and even the Caribbean and some South and Central America, America talk about running into giants when they came here. These first explorers, almost every single one ran into giants that they said look like giant Indians. Some of them, or they were red hair giants.

You know, you always get one of the other. And then you have the Aztec legends of the Kimmer-Metson. I probably butchered that name. I wouldn't know anyways. They supposedly killed most of them off and the rest they ran into the southeast. the United States about 500 years before those early explorers landed here. So, you know, what we're trying to do is sort of start in one place, which is like right here, you know, right where I sit.

And trace, where are these giants coming from? You know, where are these huge humanoids, huge hominids? What's the history of them? Where did they come from? Now, we've talked about in previous messages on Instagram. am about you have some sightings in your area of white bigfoot, right? White-haired, light-haired, blonde or whatever. One of the first guys' witnesses that I interviewed was going to school, I think, five miles or ten miles from where you live,

or that area where your guys had that sighting. And he had one while he was in college, just driving down the road. And he sees a white, bigfoot, like, run down this hill and cross the road and go to the other side. and what I find interesting is in Malta we have stories of these white, hairy giants that lived under the temples in Malta, Greece, and they're sacrificing people to them,

and they're living in these subterranean caverns and stuff, and then where you are, where there's probably one of the, that sort of circle of states right there, Kentucky, Tennessee, talking about the most cavernous areas in the world, and we're having white, bigfoot sightings.

So, you know, I kind of said, I'm trying to take this project to sort of be a bigfoot, sort of a theory of everything for Bigfoot. Where are all these, what are all these pieces and connecting? You know, it's great to just look at it, you know, have a documentary that just looks at this one area and that's awesome. But how does that connect to Malta? How does that connect to the Aztecs in Mexico? How does that connect to the Mayan monkey,

Haller Monkey God that has the same name spelling almost exactly of the Indian monkey god that led an army in the Bhagavidiquita. So there's like all these connections. This is a huge phenomenon that stretches historically across the world, both through fossil evidence as well as our historical accounts, indigenous all the way up to modern day. So it's a lot and we're trying to put together all those pieces historically in each episode, give them a little bit of a piece here and there while also tackling these subjects of

the art of the hoax, photography technology, how is that important? And then the sort of next element is actually getting into the field and applying some of these techniques that we're talking about and teaching people, let's get out there and show them, okay, so you need your camera to be stabilized, you need this long lens, you need it here. How do we get in the right place and create the right environment to get the shot that we need? And what would that look like? And what were the protocols for doing that? As opposed to just going out, running around in the woods, you know, hoping something happens.

because the likelihood of that is extremely, you know, poor. A lot of these sightings are just random people. And if you're not prepared, you're going to be shaken, right? You're probably going to be shaken anyway. Probably going to be shaken no matter what. Your adrenaline is going to immediately shoot up. But can you be prepared for that? And can you put yourself in the right place at the right time to do it?

And I think we have the data. I think we have the technology to do it. On the other hand, another part of it is recon trips to these areas. without technology and just being there and also i have a massive camera collection with old cameras that don't have all this emf fields coming off of them they don't have infrared they don't have emmf they're not doing all it's just an old wind-up film camera you know like they shot the original paddy film with and that kind of stuff taking those out can can you know is is that going to have any influence on whether or not we are scaring these

guys off or, you know, with infrared and EMF and all this stuff, um, using sort of, you know, call it more primitive camera technology. So there's a lot to it. Um, and there's a lot more that I won't get into today that from an experiment and, uh, sort of protocol perspective, but, um, you know, really just trying to push the envelope of the subject and, you know, what are we doing? and let's just go all in on Bigfoot because, you know, you can get distracted. You can go a lot of different directions. And that's great for content.

That's great to build an audience. But let's, let's nail this down as much as we can. If that takes, you know, another 30 years, I've got time, you know,

hopefully. We'll see. But, you know, that's what I would like to do. It's just really focus on using the right equipment, the right technology, producing protocols, teaching people,

expanding people's thoughts and thought patterns on how this subject is approached and how they think about the evidence that's out there. Well, I love it. I love it. And it's funny with this conversation is happening today because this whole idea of ethical hoaxing and all the stuff we just talked about today and going into it is something that was new to me and brought up at the conference last week that I was speaking at and they had a discussion, a whole panel on stage talking about similar things. And they had a little more severe reactions than I did. Like, I forget who it was, suggested that if you're caught hoaxing, there should be jail time. I'm like, whoa. Like, whoa, that's pretty severe. But I understand the passion behind the topics and stuff. And

that was more geared towards the paranormal. So, but this is very exciting. Masters of the Hunt. Is there any window of time that people can maybe expect to check it out? So, you know, I actually have trailers and all this stuff already cut. I'm considering probably next month I'm going to launch a Kickstarter. I have it already built. It's ready to go. And that is for the purpose mainly, I mean, because I've been shooting for several years now.

I could probably put something out. I'm a bit of a perfectionist. but so I'm going to run a Kickstarter I'm going to give people a taste of it also have I don't want to fail to mention the guys from Jess and Joe from Helbert Holler who are sort of my local uh sort of the local investigators around here they're in it as well and you know I'm hoping by early next year you'll have episode one I'm thinking about doing you know sort of like the first six will be about an hour long long each and we're sort of doing the southeast, you know, and it obviously is not just the

southeast, but, you know, we're in North Carolina. We're in Tennessee. I'd love to come interview you when we come to Tennessee. I may, you know, go out with you guys a bit, but, you know, we're going to go to Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. It's big. There's a lot going on in Georgia. And the Georgia, South Carolina, called the dark corner around here. Helmet Holler sort of gave it that title and it's a very active area. I get almost

all my reports from the South Carolina into things in that area. And so we're sort of hitting up that area of the southeast. I'm going to go to Florida is going to be a whole other thing. So the first six episodes were through the southeast

excluding Florida sort of excluding Virginia, that's sort of a different area. And just sort of doing Tennessee, Alabama, Carolinas, Georgia. And then tying that into, like we said earlier, we've got white ones showing up in cavernous areas of the United States. We've got white ones showing up in Malta's. We got, you know, giants depicted in the southeast and all these early accounts. they happen to be pushed out of Mexico,

where can we go to Mexico and sort of tie that in? So while we're staying in the Southeast, we're also taking people out for the tie-ins on these kinds of things. And then we're working with Marcia to do these forensic recreations where she's actually modeling these up of different types of Bigfoot and different types of giants that are being seen. She's doing 3D computer models, then we're printing them, then we're running appliances,

and I'm going to have this guy basically be in a variety of different suits, a variety of different sort of presentations of different types of bigfoots and different types of giants that are not only being seen now by witnesses, but we're witnessed historically throughout the different areas we go to. So I want to create these like, you remember like Monster Quest, they had the really bad CGI, like Bigfoot types. I want to kind of do that, but, you know, we'll shoot on a green screen with a person actually in a physical practical effects situation and create these looks, these different looks through

practical effects, prosthetics, these kinds of things. I've got arm extensions, you know, we're going to mess with limb length because there's all this variation in witness reports. And we're going to show this to people. So this is why it's a big project and why I want to do a little extra fundraising just to be able to kind of do the wish list stuff. Like I could release a basic documentary right now of this is what's just the basic story. But I also want to throw in, you know, be able to show people these great, I think people get excited about having this movie quality presentation of these different Bigfoot types and giant types that have existed throughout history. And then also doing a little bit like with the Legend of Sul

Klu being able to shoot some cinematic scenes from those stories that are really high quality and really sort of lend themselves to the truth of the story and how it was described, because a lot of times anybody that's worked in the industry, or if you just watch it, watch a lot of stuff, you see where they cut corners. You see where it's just the big dark out of focus shape when they start talking about this or that, anything that's to do a big, because they don't have the budget. They don't have the budget to, they do, they do have the budget. Let's be honest, all these big, you know, product, these big, sort of,

of Hollywood or the industry productions waste an exorbitant amount of money. And so then there's none left for the actual creative process. Yeah. We want to do the creative process. I'm not here to become a millionaire. This is what I'm passionate about.

This is what I love. This is what I want to do. And this is what I want to show people. Like, this is what's exciting. This is we're bringing this back to life. We're bringing with the Cherokee Saul in, you know, at Devil's Head, North Carolina, at the devil's courthouse.

And we're bringing us. that to the viewers and bring these legends to life and bringing what people are saying today to life. I want to bring some of my witnesses' accounts to life accurately, not just a quick, you know, I find it's even funny. Art imitates life and the sense of a lot of times because their Bigfoot suit, because their creative is so bad in these shows, they have to make it blurry. They have to lower the shutter. speed. So there's all this motion blur as it runs across the because, you know, they don't want to show. Because they know you don't, the audience doesn't demand excellence. Right. I demand excellence. And so it's, you know, it takes me a while to get my stuff together. But in the meantime,

I've been building an audience organically on Instagram and TikTok. YouTube is, is there and it's going to be more coming to that. I'm going to start sort of dropping little promo clips, little shorter clips of longer scenes from the doc there and pieces of interviews so that people can kind of see the production value that we've

already achieved. And I'll be doing all that as we go into October and launch the Kickstarter. But there's all kinds, like Marcia does amazing Bigfoot art that's sort of very amazing style. And she's donated, I think, six original art pieces.

I've got, you know, a variety of t-shirts and posters and merch. And I'm working with an artist out of, an art director out of Australia named Nick Pizarro, who we're sort of doing a soft rebrand and going to have a lot of really cool merch coming out. You know, really trying to take sort of the merch aspect of this. And so the branding of the subject, if you will, for this platform, kind of to another level. So a lot going on behind the scenes and have been for a long time.

And in the meantime, I've built about a half million person follower on social media. So now I have the audience. I just want to really give them sort of the content they deserve. Awesome stuff, man. Trey, Brock, thanks for joining me. Thanks, Tony. It was awesome, man. Good time.