The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 146: Bigfoot

Episode Date: December 10, 2018

Bozeman, MT- Steven Rinella talks with journalist and podcaster Laura Krantz, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: “Wild Thing” podcast; the newest oldest hunting weapons ever found in America; Clovis hunters; what good is a squirrel’s tail; Steve stands corrected on Pancho Villa; the other kind of knocking boots; old Bob Milligan’s game dinner; a critique of Teddy Roosevelt; the Four horsemen of Sasquatchery; burning a village to save it; what a bigfoot nest looks like; the two types of bigfoot believers; the Patterson-Gimlan film; a 1-million-dollar bounty for a dead bigfoot; the human need for the unknown; and more.For the show notes featuring the historical documents referenced in this episode, please click here.Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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download the hunt app from the itunes or google play store know where you stand with OnX. Okay, we're here with Laura Krantz. Hi. Can I call you a Bigfoot expert? No. You don't like that? Well, I'm not technically. I know you're not, but I mean, I just wanted to say it. Yeah, you can say it. Because it's a teaser. Because we're going to do something else. We're going to do something else before we talk about this. I thought if I could say there's a Bigfoot expert. Yeah, I think there's people. What do you like to go by? I know you don't like. I'm a journalist.

Yeah, but you've developed a little bit of expertise on what Bigfoot means. I guess compared to the general population, I've developed some expertise. Compared to the Bigfoot experts, I have a long way to go. Yeah. Yeah. Who was it? It was Jack Hitt. You know the writer Jack Hitt?

The name's familiar, but keep going. He wrote a piece one time talking about how the study of dinosaurs, like dinosaur things, how he's like incredulous of dinosaur research in general because he's like how seriously can you take a discipline where the people that know the most about it tend to be 12 tend to be 12 years old yeah i wouldn't say that about he's a humorist right i mean jack hit like makes points you know he also has a very spirited argument about um what an irresponsible mother sacajawea was but he just like he argues these kind of like insane points you could also say that moses's mother was irresponsible yeah so and i'm sure jack jack hit would probably like that opinion so he's a humorist

but in one of his pieces he was like deconstructing i don't know why i'm talking about dinosaur study oh because from my perspective as someone who's like decidedly not just a disbeliever i'm like i'm anti bigfoot what so um you're a monster yes so from my perspective i would say that someone with your perspective has more who's taken like a sort of trying to take an impartial look, to me, that would be more like being a Bigfoot expert than someone who is diehard, like, I believe this is true. You're all idiots for not realizing. So you're my kind of Bigfoot expert,

even though you don't want to be one. Reluctant. You can call me a reluctant Bigfoot expert. A reluctant Bigfoot expert. I'm going to talk about a handful of things before we start talking to you laura but chime in all right chime in um like some feedback we got to cover some i like to cover some feedback especially corrections places where you make mistakes and past episodes and set them straight but here's not a correction but just something interesting so we like if you listen to the show you hear that we often will

talk about if you listen to the show you hear that we often will talk about if you listen to the show you'll hear we often talk about folsom hunters and clovis hunters you know the folsom culture the points yeah these are old these are price age yeah ice age hunters uh people used to think like like for a long time the oldest stuff we knew about was clovis so clovis would be 13,500 years ago. Yeah, that's nothing. And when we talk about the Clovis culture, it's just kind of like there's a projectile point. They made a spear point. The bow and arrow hadn't beenile point. They made a spear point. This is, the bow and arrow hadn't been invented yet.

They made a very peculiar, particular spear point. And the spear points are so particular that they're regarded as being diagnostic. So if you were to dig down and find a Clovis point, they were so particular about how they made them that when you find one, it itself is diagnostic of its age so it's like carbon dating yeah well it's different than that it's like i mean like a carbon date sort of like if you find it in a certain layer of archaeology you're like oh i know exactly where we are right

exactly like those dudes made their points in a way that no one else made them before and no one else made them after they would have had like made them after. They would have had like a trademark now. Yes, they would have trademarked it. And in fact, yeah, they would, because it's one of the most beautiful projectile points. So that's like 11,500 BCE or BC, whatever you're picking on that little bit of lingo. But they just did a big

excavation near austin texas and found what is now the oldest stone tools that they've that have yet been recovered here in what is now the united states of america they found a bunch of stone tools that are 15 500 years old so it sets back the clock what's interesting about this is that people used to think that people used to argue about did the clovis hunters arrive here as clovis hunters because all of a sudden around 13 500 years ago you see this see these projectile points are all over the country. And it's hard to find stuff that's much older than that. So people used to think that there used to be this argument that it was Clovis first, meaning that the Clovis hunters must have arrived here, that their ancestors having crossed the Bering land bridge they must have very rapidly colonized the mid-continent and arrived here as a sort of fully formed culture but you're assuming

they came across the land bridge which they might not have no listen listen there's no more assumptions any other there's a lot of fun little ideas that get floated around there's this fun little idea called the salutary in connection that it was in fact western europeans had somehow come over because they were making projectile points 30 40 000 years ago that looked similar to clovis point so there's this idea that western europeans came over taught the native americans how to make cool looking arrowheads, died out. Yeah. Just like they came over and showed the Mesoamericans how to build pyramids, right?

That it couldn't have been formed here. And there are ideas that Polynesians may have. Island hopping, essentially. That a Polynesian type people or an early progenitor of Polynesians might have somehow landed in South America. that the first Americans came by way of Eurasia and arrived here by coming across Beringia. Well, there's one other theory. Walking or in skin boats. Well, yeah, I was going to say

they may have followed the coastlines. They may not have walked. But it may not have been the full land bridge at that point. They may have gone up the northern coasts and eastern coasts of Russia. Yes.

And then come across and trying to keep land in sight which is what you would do if you were okay i'm comfortable with that okay i thought you were gonna you were an argument of other aliens aliens dropped those hills that i'm sure there are you know what there are some people who think that there was an alien influence do you want to talk about them no neither do i but i spent a lot yeah i spent a fair bit of time uh in this world and read about all of the crazy theories. Yeah.

And I think, like I said, the scholarly consensus still, the first Americans arrived by way, they were Siberians and arrived here. And so there used to be this idea that the Clovis showed up like a fully formed culture. But then we have these older dates that keep popping up. And so now there's an idea that there were pre-Clovis peoples here. So now we have a date that has scholarly consensus. All the experts agree this is a legitimate date of 15,500 years old. And what are the chances that you found the first place that anyone ever camped in North America,

and it happens to be down in Austin, Texas, meaning there's a lot of stuff we're missing. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff we're missing. There's many, many miles between Austin, Texas and Beringia that have campsites that no one's found. These 15,500- 500 year old projectile points were not clovis so now the the fashionable idea is that clove the clovis culture which went spreading all around the country and they hunted they were they were big game hunters and

hunted megafauna and certainly ate all kinds of seeds and vegetable matter and seafood that doesn't store well in the archaeological record but that Clovis was a distinct North American creation people showed up here and developed into the Clovis culture and the Clovis culture was sort of this like unified culture that was widespread and this puts another nail into the coffin of the Clovis first idea. I'm going to hit a couple more of these. You okay? Yeah.

I should have boned up a little bit more though. I didn't realize we were going here. We had a conversation about squirrel tails. And we were talking about. This was like two episodes ago, right? Yeah. When hunting squirrels that a squirrel's tail often betrays the squirrel up in the tree. Like, you know there's a squirrel up in the tree somewhere, and you're looking for him, looking for him, looking for him,

and when you can't find him and you got your binoculars and you find him, usually, quite often. You comfortable with that? Mm-hmm. Is the tail flicking? No, just catching the sunlight. Oh. Just like, he'll plaster his body

he'll like plaster his body against the trunk or a limb but his tail gives him away because it's blown in the breeze okay or it just catches the light and it gives like a halo effect and so we're talking about what a liability a squirrel's tail is and a couple people took offense to this and one guy wrote in about how you need to watch how a squirrel works his tail when he's around a predator. What he's doing is he's creating a false target. He says, watch a squirrel run out on the road in front of your car when he's real nervous, the car is coming. He's got his tail up and he's working. And when a squirrel gets nervous about a predator being nearby, he'll have his tail up working. And when

he's running, he's got his tail up. And he thinks that predators, that he's luring the predator to something that's non-vital. Like those extra eyes that are on the back of certain amphibians or butterflies. And he says, when you're up bow hunting, watching squirrels, notice how many squirrels are missing a chunk of their tail. And he thinks that when something's on it, it's drawing the attention to it and it will take the blow from a hawk or a fox, grabs the tail

and misses the main body. You'd think the hawk or the fox would have figured this one out by now. I mean, there's been several thousand years of being able to like... But it probably works with like neophytes like yeah ones that haven't done it yet yeah another guy and ermine does that too right with the black tip on his tail could be in the winter could be uses it as a no it seems like a nose but it's not yeah the trouble with physiology you never know the real answer if there is there's there's no real answer could just be pretty yeah

could be pretty could be. Could be pretty. Could be sexual, like a sexual selection thing. Like, there's all kinds of things that animals have that we look like, why does he have that? It's like,

only because it's a, only because it's a gesture or symbol to other creatures. But it's useful still. Yeah, but look how vulnerable, look at a gobbler gobbling.

That does not make him a wild turkey out gobbling in the woods does not make him bigger faster it's a it's a real vulnerability that gets you killed but sexually it's so important so you can't be like um what is the advantage of gobbling in terms of fitness? It's just that it's a necessary evil. He has to do it to breed, but it actually doesn't benefit the individual. It only benefits the individual's ability to spread his lineage.

I was talking to these researchers one time and they had a bunch of gobblers that they had trackers on. And the gobblers did great all winter. Spring came, they started gobbling, all five are dead. Bobcats. Oh, sad. Bobcats.

Yeah. And when you're calling turkeys, you're calling all kinds of stuff. Another guy wrote in about the squirrel thing, and this is his thing on it. He says he was recently sitting out in his tree stand, and it was 40 degrees, 25 mile an hour gusts from the southeast. I observed a squirrel sitting on a branch, facing downwind on the leeward side of a tree. So he's using the tree for a wind buffer and facing away from the wind. He was sitting upright and had its tail up and over

itself like a hood. Then he said, the squirrel sat there for 20 minutes unmoving. The sun broke from the clouds and started hitting the side of the tree. He then went around to the sunny side of the tree and pasted himself flat out in the sun on the sunny side of the tree. He sat there for 10 minutes and then went about his day eating. So his feeling is that they also are using their tail for that. A guy was listening to a real old podcast. This is moving on from squirrels.

Well, I'd like to just put a concluding thought on the squirrels. It's like those are both great points, but it doesn't change the fact that it's a real liability. It's a real liability. It's a liability. Yes. But they were saying that I guess their perspective on it is, yes, it's a liability with dudes looking for you with 22s and binoculars.

However, people haven't been looking for them with 22s and binoculars long enough to drive any particular evolutionary trait. And how much squirrel hunting is there? I mean, in a percentage of the population looking at squirrels, how many people are actually going after them with a 22 and binoculars? I would love to know what percent of the nation's squirrels, even if you remove urban squirrels. So what percent of the nation's squirrels that are on huntable land are subjected to some amount of hunting my guess is small subjected to some amount so you're not calling considering my backyard and slingshot no i'm saying even if like even if you're gonna run out even if you're gonna like exclude so just like what percentage of like

huntable squirrels are hunted, I'd be shocked to hear that it's more than 25%. I think that's a lot of work for not a lot of payoff in terms of... There's a thriving squirrel hunting culture. I don't doubt that. And you can cover a lot of ground hunting squirrels. Okay. So exposed to some degree of hunting, like what percent of squirrels on huntable land had

a squirrel hunter pass within 100 yards of them yeah i don't know are we cool to move on with it now god was listening to a military guy i was listening to an old podcast and he said he found it disturbing disturbing that i would have defined black Jack Pershing's push into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa as a failure. He says, yes, it failed to achieve its primary mission of capturing Pancho Villa, but it set about conditions that weakened his influence and depleted his manpower significantly. It also set conditions to force diplomatic relationships between the U.S. and Mexico. Mexico didn't desire full-out war with the U.S. and started to take proactive measures

to deter cross-border raids and pursue VIA. Like so many of today's targeted operations against specific leadership of terrorist organizations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, is it clear that I'm quoting right now? Yes. Sometimes you don't get the individual, but operational pressure can neutralize their

influence and capabilities, effectively nullifying them. So I stand corrected on Pancho Villa. Now, another guy was saying this. He wrote in to say, he's 99.99% sure that he's called in two different bull moose by knocking boots. Now, I know knocking boots as a euphemism for lovemaking, but he's using knocking boots as like banging the mud off his boots. Because you think like a bull moose during the rut goes, mm, mm,

mm. You do it once. Mm. Yeah, and I could see how the thud of a vibram soul caked with mud. It's the kind of noise you get by the leather that's attached to it i don't know you guys sound a little more soprano than like beating boots together has more of like a clopping sound but but here's the thing i mean people also i'm not

a moose but i know people all people do this is something that happens people call in moose by banging like accidentally calling moose by hitting trees with axes. Oh, really? Because when you hear it, it's such a weird sound that you're not sure you're hearing it. Okay. And here's a weird thing, too. I was out with my kids, and my kids were hearing a bull.

They didn't know what it was, but they're hearing it go, mm, mm, mm, way off, and I couldn't hear it. Oh, because it's high? And it was only when they kept talking about it that I'm like, oh, you're right. They're right they're like what is that i'm like what is what it's not high it's just like it's like when you're hearing it it's like you feel it oh weird it's like you're aware that you're hearing it but you can't it's strange yeah okay strange so he's saying he got hit it has this happen he's banging his boots and the bull shows up he's

hunting the yukon and then one showed up 20 minutes later no one believed my theory of why he came in but sure enough i tried again a couple days later and another bull strolled in grunting right next to camp two more a guy was listening um and he has he's talking about our idea that older animals lose their quality, like palatability. Hunters always think that palatability is better with younger animals. So someone will get a little buck, and he'll be like, oh, it's just a little one. And people to salve his ego would say, oh, it's a good eater, though. This is very common in the hunting world. Because the flesh

is more tender because they haven't gotten all ropey and old yes that's that's how that's the thinking on it even though there are notable that makes me feel better because i'm about to hit 40 which means i'm less likely to be cannibalized because i won't be like oh that's not a good eater so um this guy goes on to say that he has a problem with us saying that like waterfowl, that you should, that older waterfowl is less good. Because he's saying that the best goose he ever ate was at, I'm reading this guy's email because I like some of the lingo he uses. The best goose he ever ate was last year at, quote,

old Bob Milligan's game dinner. He brought a goose that Bob Milligan smoked. And he said that this goose was tagged. So he had a banded goose that was banded on James Bay 15 years earlier as a mature bird. That was an old birdie. So he brings a bird that's at least 16 years old over to bob milligan's bob milligan smokes it says it's melt in your mouth tender like you would think it still had the yolk sack attached and he goes on to say i highly doubt that this had anything to do with

bob's smoking technique as his smoked venison is like eating an old boot. Last point, quick to make. Someone was saying that we got Mark, like my talking about Mark Twain. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clements, so the author of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer. His name was Sam Clements and he adopted the name Mark Twain. We were talking about how Mark Twain comes from

when the rivermen on the Mississippi River would have a line that was marked in what I now know to be one fathom increments, a fathom being six feet of water. There's a guy whose job is to stand in front of the boat with a rope and a weight, and he throws the rope on the way out. It swings down, hits bottom, and he calls to the captain the depth. And Mark Twain is two marks, meaning two fathoms. So you have 12 feet of water and 12 feet of water was safe passage for the boat. This guy goes on to say that that's not quite right. He teaches Twain and he says that it's precarious. 12 feet is safe passage. And when you hit Mark Twain, you're like saying it's safe, but who knows? The next mark could be much shallower. And he talks about that Twain,

his choice of that word was symbolic and that he occupied the precarious space around safety and danger. The guy whose job it was to throw the rope has a rope that goes to four fathoms or 24 feet. After that, he yells out, no bottom. If he throws it out and it doesn't hit, he says, no bottom. These deeper waters would be considered much safer than the call of two fathoms or Mark Twain. So his choice of two fathoms halfway between Twain, zero, and four suggests waters that are safe for the moment but could change to become more dangerous or more safe with the changing level of the river bottom therefore clemens choice seems to reflect his views of america at the time and his writing style in

general he also goes on to say that twain, he talks about how we're always celebrating Theodore Roosevelt. Twain hated Theodore Roosevelt. Really? Yeah. Here's what Twain had to say about Roosevelt in 1907. Mr. Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the 20th century, always showing off, always hunting for a chance to show off. In his frenzied imagination, the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience.

He would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off and he would go to hell for the whole one. Wow, that is an awesome quote. Nah, did not like OTR. You don't hear many critiques. Nope. About him. Hated him.

Wow. Okay, Bigfoot. Oh, here we go. How do you want to start out? Do you want to start out talking about your relative? Your relative was a Bigfoot expert. Yeah. I think that's because otherwise people are like, this woman's crazy.

Yeah. But he was a legit Bigfoot expert. He was. And he was also a legit anthropologist. And he probably would have had a lot more to say to you about Clovis points than I can possibly imagine. But I wouldn't be able to listen to anything he said because he was a bigfoot person that's unfortunate because he actually did make good findings in the field of anthropology but then negated them do you think so i don't think you tell me so the one finding i do know

about is he tell us tell us his name his name is grover kranz in reading up like in studying up to talk to you uh-huh you can't type in like no bigfoot evidence without finding out about grover kranz right he's he's considered one of the four horsemen of sasquatchery which is a phenomenal phrase that i would like to try and use every day from here on out if possible um there's him and three other old dudes all of them are dead but one a guy named peter burn who is 93 years old and still looking for bigfoot but spent his formative years in the himalaya looking for the yeti like this guy he's got i do an interview with him a bonus one and like his stories are crazy well can you explain

that real quick yeah is that how it goes is that the yeti is from down south and then no no the south come on not like the america oh no like hey there have been bigfoot sightings in every state of hawaii because bigfoot can't swim that far right yeti i'm asking about yeah that's what i'm asking about um they're cousins they're they're if if if they're real the idea is that they're sort of branched off from some part of the tree way on back and that's a white bigfoot yeah i'm not sure entirely what the uh what all of the uh didn't some dude turn up with the top of a yeti's head and it had white hair on it i mean like i don 80% of all Bigfoot things, it was a hoax. Like it demonstrated to be a hoax.

Yeah. Well, no surprise there. I hadn't heard that story. There is a story about someone turning up with a hand at one point. In fact, it was Peter Byrne. Found a hand. Nice. He was in the Himalaya and he was at some Buddhist temple and they said, hey, we've got a Yeti hand.

Come check it out. And he came and looked at it. It was this huge hand with these giant nails on it. Okay. And he's like, I want to take that back. And they're like, no, no, no. It's a holy symbol. You can't have it.

And he tells this story way better. So he flies back to London. This is in the 60s when all you're doing is cabling back and forth. And this is when Bigfoot was getting fashionable. Yeah, this is before he even knew about Bigfoot. This was still Yeti. There was a guy named Tom Slick who was a Texas oilman who financed all these expeditions, first in the Himalaya and then in the United States.

And he died in a plane crash in 1962, and his family was like, okay, we're done with this. Pulled all the money, and that was the end of those particular expeditions. Okay, so the hand. Yeah, so the hand. Peter Byrne, this guy I talked to, Cables Tom Slick, says they've got this hand up here. And Tom says, well, can you bring it back? This is all cables going back and forth.

And Peter's like, no, this is a holy relic for them. And he said, come to London. So they go to London. They meet with the prosector of the London Zoo. And the guy says, here, give them this hand. Instead, pulls a hand out from under the table where they're having lunch in a brown paper bag. And so Peter takes that hand back to the Himalaya and gets a finger off of this hand that's there, the supposed Yeti hand. Brings it back to London. And that's a, this supposed Yeti hand, brings it back to London. And that's a whole story in and of itself,

but I'm going to, it involves Jimmy Stewart and smuggling stuff out of the country. It's crazy. Jimmy Stewart? Yeah. You ever see How the West was Won? No. Dude.

Do I need to? Yeah. Okay. Should I write that down? He plays a frontiersman. Someone, I'll forget that. You know it was a Christmas movie, right? It's a Wonderful Life.

Yeah. I've never seen it. It's a Wonderful Life flopped at the box office. Did it really? Yeah know it was a Christmas movie, right? It's a Wonderful Life. Yeah. I've never seen it. It's a Wonderful Life flopped at the box office. Did it really? Yeah. It was a horrible... Yeah. People...

A production company went out of business over what a failure This is a Wonderful Life But everybody talks about what a great movie it is. It was resurrected. I've never seen it. And every time I say that, people think I'm a communist. Yeah, I think so. You got two strikes against you. Wow. I think that a Christmas... How many do i get a christmas story has the same story that it was a it was a flop the leg lamp

yeah i think i'm popping my peas a little bit am i no oh sounds good a christmas story yeah flopped yeah yeah it's a wonderful life flop and it was made by a returning you know it was one of the director who was returning from World War II. Really? Yeah. And he had been profoundly impacted by things he saw in World War II and came home and made It's a Wonderful Life

and it flopped and it was devastating, but then it became this movie that every American family watches every year. Yeah, except mine. Every American family should watch every year. Well, we're busy reading Karl Marx. It's a Wonderful Life. I'm getting way off pace here. No, Jimmy Stewart, it threw me reading Karl Marx. It's a wonderful life. I'm getting way off base here.

No, Jimmy Stewart threw me for a loop. Jimmy Stewart's involved in this. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, Jimmy Stewart helped smuggle this finger out back to London where they examined it, and the guy at the zoo said, this doesn't look like any specimen I'm familiar with. Put it in a drawer, and then it disappeared for years and years and years and years and years.

Pre-genetics. Yeah. Well, then they found it, and it was in his private lab at the back of some building in the zoo, and they dug it out, and they ran genetics on it, and it was Peter Burns' DNA that was all over it, which was really kind of interesting.

So even though he'd handled it decades before, I think they did the dna testing in 2013 his dna was still like coding it which is fascinating stuff the dna stuff come from um they think it was human i think it was human it's just like some guy with a really big hand oh i know right not the yeti the legend yeah it does does. It helped feed the legend for decades. Right. Anyway, back to Grover, my relative. Grover Krantz. Grover Krantz.

You being Laura Krantz. Same last name. Yeah. And what is the relationship? He is my grandfather's cousin. So I didn't know who he was. He had gotten this big write-up in the Washington Post because he donated. First, he donated his body to the Tennessee Body Farm, which is where they run forensic analysis. They'll take bodies that have been donated and they'll leave them in a field or in a pond or in a trunk of a car

and see what happens to them as they decay. And then they use that stuff to do forensics on crimes and missing persons when they do find the body, that kind of thing. So he did that first. And then his skeleton went to the Smithsonian along with the bones of his three Irish wolfhounds, Yahoo, Icky, and Clyde. Clyde was his favorite. And the Washington Post did this huge article on him. And that's how I found out about him. I had no idea who he was.

And then at the last section of that article, there was this sort of, I don't know, three or four paragraphs about how he was known for driving around the Pacific Northwest with a spotlight and a rifle searching for Sasquatch. A rifle? Yeah. You mean to tell me that Grover, your kin, he was prepared to do the unspeakable. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he actually came out and told a reporter this because he knew that for science, you

have to have a type specimen to prove the existence of a species, to get it put in the Linnaean system, to get it categorized. You have to have the equivalent of a Bigfoot stuck in styrofoam with a big pin, like the butterfly, like same kind of thing. So he told a reporter this, that he was prepared to shoot one for the purposes of science. That story got syndicated in newspapers all over the country and Grover got so much hate mail that he had to resort to a form letter, as did Washington State University, where he was a tenured anthropology professor. They were sending out letters left and right saying, you've misinterpreted this. But people were angry. Even people who didn't think Bigfoot was real were pissed off.

I can see both sides of it. Can you? Tell me. Why do I see both sides of it? Because sometimes you need to burn a village to save it. Yep. Just like Vietnam. If you were to prove definitively that there is this species, it would no doubt lead to a lot of protections, legal habitat otherwise and people would have to reckon with

this reality that grover believed in so you're killing one and people like to have this idea that bigfoot is like a thing it's like a singular specimen but you'd have to have here's here's this this is where i start this is one of the many areas in which I start to not believe in Bigfoot, is that you'd have to have a breeding population that has survived here for tens of thousands of years. And so there must be a couple thousand of them in order to carry on. That's one of the theories, yes. If you look at what it takes to support, I mean, we're talking about something that's

600, 800 pounds. It's enormous. And then you look at what we know about other animals of that size. It's very hard to maintain stable populations of large mammals that are in that you know you can't carry on for 10 000 years with just two or three of them running around you need a breeding population of them right but people like to have this idea that it's just this lone wandering thing i think that part of that idea stems from tabloid stuff what idea the idea that there's just one because i hear that a lot from from people who aren't bigfoot experts yeah where they just say oh is he still alive

sure but as people who are really steeped in this world they believe that there is a breeding population the idea is roughly 2,000. So there's, but then there's been Bigfoot sightings in all 50 states. Yeah. I don't know how many of those came out of a bottom of a whiskey bottle. Okay. So, so, so Bigfoot, we're getting ahead of ourselves, but Bigfoot, Bigfoot people, Bigfoot believers. They don't like to be called believers. What do they like to be called?

I don't know. I haven't figured that out yet. But the term belief is a bit of a, they put that with faith. Well, that's, we're going to keep, I want you to supply me with the terminology. I know, I don't have a better one either. And I actually thought, I had a lot of conversations about this. I'm just saying that belief is a hard word for them to swallow, but they actually end up using it because they don't have a better one. They don't have a better one. Yeah. So, Bigfoot believers, like the top tier Bigfoot

researchers are saying that, like, let's just, let's go down to core Bigfoot country, the Pacific Northwest, right? Northern California, Oregon, Washington. It seems like Bigfoot ground zero is the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. I'd say up into Canada, too. Up into Canada? If you were going to consider. So they're suggesting that there are 2,000 Bigfoots running around that turf. Is it Bigfoot or Bigfeet? Bigfeet.

Okay. I don't know what they would go, but where do they go? I say I'm running a poll on this right now. There seems to be tied between Bigfoot and Bigfoots, as in Bigfoot like deer. Yeah. Okay, Bigfoots. 2,000 Bigfoots. You know how many grizzly bears are in Montana and Wyoming and Idaho?

500? No, about 2,000. Okay. You know how often people run into those things? How often? A lot. Many people every day. Many people every day. Many people every day.

You're not telling me anything that I'm surprised about. They get hit by cars. They show up in chicken coops. They're in people's backyards. They're in people's backyards. They're down at Yellowstone National Park lingering around. They're nowhere near as elusive as a Bigfoot. But I want to get back to him shooting one so i me seeing both sides well first off you wouldn't shoot at a bigfoot if you

ran into one you know you're thinking about it well yeah especially after listening to uh laura's podcast definitely because you shoot and kill a bigfoot you have to have a specimen yeah dude i never would do that because otherwise you just we've had this conversation before otherwise you come back and you're just then another dude another guy that you're gonna be like that guy was cool but now i consider him crazy and in talking about this before i said that if i saw one i would absolutely not kill it and i would never tell anyone that i saw it uh see i had had the same problem. Because if you see one and then you're like, God, I can't tell anyone about this. They're going to just think I've gone

off the deep end. I've been out in the woods too long. Or I've been around Bigfoot people too long. Now, if I could... If I found one dead, I would be shouting that from the rooftops. Yeah, shouting that from the rooftops. But to wrestle that into the car? Yeah, shouting that from the rooftops. But no, I wouldn't kill a Bigfoot.

Why not? Because you of all people... Me of all people? Well, I'm just saying because you don't believe and wouldn't you want people to... I wouldn't kill one because I just don't go off shooting guns and whatnot at things that I don't have. That's not what I'm saying.

Just because you don't believe, if you did see one, and knowing what the sort of general populace thinks of this or what people would think if you were to come back and say, you just wouldn't tell anyone. And then you'd bury it in the back of your mind and never think of it again? Yeah. That's what I would do. Okay. What else have you seen out there that you're not telling us about? Thankfully, nothing.

Okay. Thankfully, nothing. But no, I wouldn't kill one. Giannis, I'm disappointed that you would kill one. I feel like you'd be in some trouble. Is that not true? Well, it's not like it's a protected species. I believe Grover's saying was, and i don't know if i have this correct but he was the first person who shoots one should get a medal the second one should go to jail gotcha so he really from a

science perspective he felt you needed to have a specimen in order to prove its existence now dna would change that to some degree because if if you got DNA off of something, and it was significantly different from anything else in that phylogenetic tree, then you might have more of a case. But even then, I don't think they allow you... Well, I don't know this for sure. You might be able to name a species based on DNA alone. Now.

But you can't do it for footprints. you can't do it for footprints you can't do it for other stuff yeah you mentioned the linnaean system that's like us being homo sapien kingdom phylum class order family genus yeah that's like our when you see like the the linnaean name or some people call it the latin name for an animal and. And there's binomial nomenclature. Yeah, I got a refresher on high school biology when I started doing the second episode, which is on evolution. Yeah, we haven't established this yet.

Okay. Your show. Oh, right. I have a show. Yeah. Yeah. Tell people about that real quick. So the Grover thing got me interested.

And then I kind of sat on this story for a few years. I didn't really know what to do with it, but with the background in radio, and then when I was living in Denver, when I moved to Denver, I found out that Grover's fourth and last wife lived about 30 miles away. And I thought, you know what, I'm just going to go talk to her. And she had some good stories about Grover that weren't necessarily Bigfoot related. They were just like about an interesting, really kind of a fascinating guy. And then she put me in touch with a few more people. And by that point, I was realizing that these interviews were pretty compelling and pretty fun to do. And I was like, I'm going to do a podcast. And so that's what I decided to do. So I had a podcast. It started on October 2nd. It's

called Wild Thing. And it's about Grover, this relative of mine. And it's about the people who are looking for Bigfoot and who are spending all kinds of time and money and energy. And then it's sort of suspending disbelief and saying, okay, if Bigfoot is a thing, where would it fit in the evolutionary tree? How would we, what does the evidence look like? What are some of the encounters that people have had?

And then it's also looking at the cultural significance of Bigfoot. Because even for people who don't believe in Bigfoot, don't think Bigfoot's real, think it's kind of silly, there is a fascination. And a lot of companies have tapped into that too. I mean, Bigfoot beers and Bigfoot bikes and- A small cooler company called Yeti. Yeah, but that's the Yeti. Totally different. Oh, totally different species. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. My bad. See, I haven't learned anything yet. I haven't learned anything. But yeah, I mean, the Yeti, I think, falls into the same category in terms of this appeal. Mythical creatures. Yeah.

What's the word crypto? Cryptozoology. Crypto, studying stuff that doesn't actually exist. Crypto, well, it's kind of secret, I guess. I don't know the full, I didn't really do the etymology of the word, but yeah. I want to move on from Grover. Okay.

But I understand the genesis of your interest came from him. Came from realizing that you were long lost relatives with a leading Bigfoot researcher. Yeah, not many people get to claim that. But I want to point out something that I'm picking up about Grover. Okay.

Four wives, right? What happened to the other three? Divorces? Bigfoot ate them. Bigfoot killed them all. Yeah. No, the first three were divorces. I don't think the first two lasted very long.

The third one didn't really either. And then the fourth one, he was married to Diane for over 20 years. Okay, so a bunch of spouses donates his body to be to learn how to study rotting corpses his bones and his dogs go to smithsonian i'm getting the you're painting a picture to me of a person who has an like outsized perspective of themselves and who is an eccentric and wants people to know about it. I think that is probably fair. Which is also not what you're generally looking for when it comes to a researcher. There is some truth to that however i did talk to students and friends and

people who'd worked with him and he was very well liked and well respected his classes were always full people loved him as a professor so i don't think he was just and you know egomaniac running around look at me look at me look at me yeah I feel, well, maybe this isn't the case. Some showmen, they do stuff because they want people to like them. And they want people to pay attention to them and respect them and think that they're great. I think Grover didn't really care what people thought. He just had kind of weird ideas and liked to pursue them.

At one point, he was trying to figure out why certain human ancestors had this sort of prominent brow ridge. The Permian brow. Yeah. And so he took a piece of styrofoam or styrene, and he carved a brow, and he glued it to his forehead, and he walked around campus for a couple weeks like that, just to kind of try and understand why, what the point of something like that might have been. Shaded his eyes? Yep. So he didn't have to walk around with his hand up all the time?

I think that's ultimately what he decided is, you know, it served as an eye shade, which may not have been enough for it to stick around as a residual evolutionary trait. But on the open side. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians trade but on the open hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes

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Now, boy, I think about it. I'm more interested in to see if i have these super uh athlete gene more than if you are in fact if you are in fact what you think you are yeah because maybe i'll just realize i haven't really been hitting my potential no that's true so between now and december 25th get 30 off any 23andme kit order your dna kit at 23andMe.com slash meat eater. That's the number two, number three, A-N-D-M-E, 23andMe.com slash meat eater. Again, 23andMe.com slash meat eater. Meat eater being one word. Where did you sit on, what was your sort of feelings about, knowledge about

an opinion on Bigfoot before you realized that you were related to a Bigfoot researcher? I thought this was tinfoil hat stuff like all the way. What's that mean? Just conspiracy theory and people who are a little unplugged from reality. You know it's tabloid it's like bigfoot had my baby yeah headlines on the weekly world news and the national inquirer in my one movie that i'd ever

seen was harry and the henderson's yeah is that supposed to be your uh relative the guy with the gun trying to kill big no that is uh the guy who's supposed to be closest to Grover is Walter... What is his last name? He's the nice guy, the older guy who's like, I'm never going to see a Bigfoot. And then he turns and looks and there's Harry right there. I forget what his name is. That was your relative.

Supposedly loosely modeled on Grover. And the gun guy was modeled on a... Guy named Rene de Hindenon who was a swiss immigrant to canada and was supposedly a little unhinged but i also don't know how closely these hued to their actual yeah just like but maybe informed the yeah it's like in jaws um in jaws the the the shark hunter is modeled off of frank mundus who was the guy in Montauk who would take people out to kill big ass sharks and would wear the teeth. Okay.

I don't think I knew that. He was Spielberg modeled or took attributes from Frank Mundus. It's called the Monster Man. Oh. And formed that character. So is there a conspiracy? You mentioned like you thought of it as conspiracy theory stuff, but there's no like conspiracy. Like Bigfoot people think the government's hiding the truth. Well, so here's the other thing I learned. Bigfoot people, from the outside, it's a monolith. When you start investigating a little

bit more, it kind of starts to divide into smaller groups. So there is a group similar to Grover who are looking at this, you know, Bigfoot is a undocumented primate. It's flesh and blood. It's beholden to the same laws of physics and nature that the rest of us are. Then there's a whole group that are like Bigfoot was dropped off by aliens it can move through dimensions which is why you don't see it because you'll like see the rustling and then it moves into another dimension and then you're not seeing it anymore but it can still see you and it can you know it's got telepathy and i got you yeah you know you know mitch the comedian mitch hadberg yeah it's about bigfoot uh he's blurry around the edges it just is blurry

which i didn't know that joke and i used that i was like i thought i was so clever i was like look at this funny joke that i wrote and i put it into the third episode and then someone's like mitch hadberg wrote that joke oh really there's no new material out there i was reminded of it by the third dimension out like the third dimensional idea that so there are people that fourth dimension actually could be moving through oh yeah you're three dimension yeah i'm three okay so so there's that so there's a school of thought that grover occupied it's a species yeah it's just an it's been an undocumented subject to all the things that we're subject to and then there's people who are like no it's it's supernatural paranormal you know it's not

beholden to the laws of physics and nature which i just i didn't spend any time looking into that because if you decide to suspend the laws of physics for bigfoot you probably ought to do it for everything else too a native american man explained because we dog on bigfoot a lot. A Native American man explained to me, wrote a letter to me once trying to explain sort of the position that they didn't call it Bigfoot, but there was a Native American tradition about this large creature. There are a lot of them.

Yeah. And he explained it in that way. Like he used the term of a shapeshifter, like a sort of magical creature, and that was the way it was discussed. Yeah, and I didn't know that there's a lot of creatures in Native American folklore and Native American stories that are everyday creatures that are imbued

with these kinds of magical qualities. Grover's theory was, well, with those, if you strip out all the magical stuff, you have the animal. So he thought maybe Bigfoot would be the same kind of thing. Yeah, like Coyote was a trickster. Or Raven or Thunderbird, they think, was the condor, which apparently should be extinct,

according to John Mualem. Oh, yeah. Don't bring that up. I guess people riled up. Oh, does it? Oh, strike that from the record. So, no, that's something I've been meaning to talk about more at some point, is more condor thoughts.

So we got a lot of condor feedback after we talked about the condor. Is there another variety? So you have the metaphysical Bigfoot. Yeah, and then within, there's also some people who think there is an actual government or logging industry cover-up. The idea being that, similar with the spotted owl, if something like Bigfoot actually has proved to exist in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, well, shit, you're not going to be able to.

Can I swear? Yeah. I'll try and cut it out. Don't get carried away. I won't. No, that word's fine. Okay. Yeah.

We can't go in there and log anymore it's going to ruin our industry i mean if they did that for the owl what are they going to do for bigfoot so there's a theory conspiracy there's a conspiracy idea that either the forest service or the logging industry is somehow involved in covering this stuff up because they want to keep on business as usual yep all right that brings up something that brings up a real problem for me with something in your show that i feel like needs better explanation okay early on and without giving too much weight to the listeners okay early on in your series on bigfoot you go out with some fellers to investigate some Bigfoot nests.

And they explained to you, and I had a very hard time with this, they explained to you that a timber cruiser, like a person who assesses timber ahead of a timber harvest, to see like, you know, timber cruiser go out and would be like, you know, is cutting here warranted? How many board feet are here? What's the, you know, accessibility?

Wrapping ribbons around the trees. Accessibility of the timber. Yep yep that a timber cruiser goes out and finds bigfoot nests and these individuals bigfoot people suggest to you that they then called off the timber harvest in order to give them a couple years to do research on the bigfoot nests and locked off all access to the area on the Olympic Peninsula locked off all access to the area in order to allow them to carry out their research and only they can go into the area really that's true the land was already gated it was private timberland okay so it wasn't like it was forest service land. It wasn't Weyerhaeuser.

It was private forest land. This guy was out, and it's his family's land. And so this guy was out looking for timber and figuring out what the cut was going to be on this particular plot, and then came across this stuff. Found the nests. Found the nests. Called in the Department of Natural Resources from Washington and called in the Olympic Project. Now, my feeling is if you called in the Olympic Project,

it's probably because you already have some sort of ideas about Bigfoot in your mind. Because they're a Bigfoot research group. They're a Bigfoot research group. Very nice people, very down-to-earth. They run some really interesting programs that actually, well, we can get to this later, but I like the idea that some of the stuff that happens with Bigfoot research is people get trained to recognize animal calls, to recognize things in the woods, so they're not assuming that everything out there is a Bigfoot. But that's kind of a sidebar.

Anyway, DNR came out and Olympic Project came out, and everyone's kind of looking at these things thinking, I don't know what they are. And so the timber guy, because it's his family's land, said, you know, we'll log somewhere else. You get five years. Why won't they allow anyone to photograph the Bigfoot nests? Oh, they will. They just wouldn't let me. How far are the Bigfoot nests from the world? If you Google Bigfoot nests Olympic Peninsula, you'll find them online, no problem.

Pictures of them? Mm-hmm. Okay. Can you just give us a rough sketch of what these look like? I'd say, yeah, 8, 9, 10 feet in diameter. They're woven. They're like a bird's nest. Now, I saw them two and a half years in, three years in after they'd been found,

and they were pretty degraded. But you could still tell that they had been woven up the edges and up the sides um and why hasn't anyone just run why hasn't anyone run genetic swabs on these things they have okay that's in the podcast they're running they're running yeah and what what what is the this isn't running until after december 4th right correct okay what species is it that left the... They found any kind of species you would have expected in the Pacific Northwest.

The only primate they found was human. Real human. Human, human. Not close to human. And then they found horse, which was kind of weird. But somebody probably tracked that in on their boots and so it was contamination so these were run at a lab in new york or it's probably whoever made the nest or these guys out there cutting samples out of it because it's going to be very unless you go in like you're and even crime scenes get cross-contaminated all the time

unless you're going in and like a full level four biohazard suit um yeah yeah you know any number i mean if that finger that peter burn touched 70 years ago the yeti hand still had his dna on it that stuff could have been there for yeah who knows but when you usually when you pull dna from a bone you usually go in you know you go into a very controlled atmosphere and pull material from inside of the bone where you don't have as much surface contamination. Well, they did. They took big pie-shaped wedges out of the nests. They bagged them up.

But there were some problems with the material still having moisture in it. So that hastens degradation of samples. And then they also did not do DNA testing on the nests immediately. They waited a few years. So wind and rain and sun and all the rest of that had also done some damage to it. So, you know, and that sort of has people holding out hope that, okay, maybe these samples were contaminated and so we didn't get everything we needed out of it. Or maybe whatever Bigfoot is,

it's so closely related to humans that we're perceiving this human DNA as contamination, but it's actually Bigfoot. Okay. Can you lay out, just like totally like just straight face, like nevermind my negativity. Like lay out for me what in the community, yeah, in the Bigfoot community, what are the biggest,

like in the Bigfoot community, what are the, right now sort of the hot pieces of evidence? Like right now, like what is the, you know, if you're really going to sit down and present at a conference of scientists, okay, you're really going to sit down and present at a conference of, of, of, of scientists, okay, you're going to present and you get the best, brightest mind from the Bigfoot world.

And he needs to come in and be like, this is real. We need to pay attention to this. What are the three or four things that he's going to lay out for us? The Patterson Gimlin film. Or she, I don't mean to, I'm not,

he or she will lay out for us the patterson gimlin film will always come up this is that 1967 footage extremely shaky was shot in the six rivers national forest area of northern california so sort of near eureka willow creek um that is always held up as being a piece of evidence um what's it called again it's called the patterson gimlin film and you have seen it. Everybody has seen it, or they've at least seen the still from it, which is the Bigfoot sort of one hand in front,

one hand behind, looking back over its shoulder. But didn't the Bigfoot, wasn't that person, they were going out to film a Bigfoot? They were out. So Roger Patterson, yeah, I know. Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin were down there looking. There had been tracks found in that area around some logging equipment that had been put in over a weekend. And then the loggers came back in on a Monday morning and there were these tracks. And everybody got all kerfuffled about this so roger patterson and bob gimlin came down from the yakima washington area and spent three weeks three or four weeks out there just kind of looking around but yes the fact that they were out looking for bigfoot and roger

happened to be running a camera at the moment adds questions to it the flip side is no one has ever brought the suit out. The suit that was worn in that film. Yeah, and there's some questions about something that is seen. Someone can see a clasp and they argue that it was dried dung sticking to the Bigfoot. Whoa, that's a new one.

I haven't heard that one. I don't know if it's true or not. But this is the thing. If you go to the Patterson-Gimlin Wikipedia page, we'll see you next year. You'll be in there. Every link that you could possibly imagine. It's one of the deepest rabbit holes I've ever spent time in.

And I just finally, I was like, I can't. I'm done. I have to move on to something else. But three different people have claimed to be the guy in the suit. No one's details match anyone else's details. I see. It's just there's a lot of questioning about it. In the same way that there is about a lot of the other other evidence like what is real what is not real what they still

hold that famous because no one has disproved it so they still put it up as being a significant piece of evidence there were also footprints taken from the creature that day, there's plaster casts, and those are around as well. And seen as there's a, I think it's the, is it the metatarsal break? It basically is the break halfway in the foot where it would be bending. Whereas if these were fake feet, they would have been flat on the ground,

and this has a break in it. So it looks like it's got pressure. So the foot anatomy and mobility is brought into play there. Gotcha. Yeah. So it's like these little tiny bits. Those are the kinds of things where you're like, well, maybe.

And they're hanging on to that still. Yeah, they hang on to that one. Okay, lay some more on me. The other thing that's brought up a lot is how many footprints there actually are. And the idea that someone could be hoaxing all of those and being, you know, out there with fake feet seems impossible. So if you've got one, one hand, all these fake footprints, they're all fake. And on one, on the other hand, it's like Bigfoot, both seem equally silly, but what seems more likely? Well, they, they tend to think Bigfoot is more likely. What are some of the other ones? I mean, the DNA, there's a lot of hope being held

out for DNA stuff. And who knows if that will ever turn anything up. It would be helpful if they could actually get samples of something that is different from, you know, bear poop or human DNA or deer hair. Because a lot of samples get sent in and then some guy saying, oh, I saw this weird thing out in the woods and then sends in the sample and then it ends up being the same as... Not non-private.

Yeah, nothing. Nothing unusual. I want to come back to Good Pieces of Evidence. Are there any more? Are there any real zingers right now? In terms of physical? I know there's a body print from 2000 where someone put out some fruit bait.

Oh, yeah, and it slipped. And that's the body impression? Yep, the butt print, I think that one's called. I can't remember what. And someone proposed that. The Skookum cast, that's that one one and someone proposed that he the bigfoot in getting the bait didn't want to leave track that they don't like to leave tracks and so he approached the bait somehow laying down and someone pointed out well if he doesn't want to leave footprints

it seems that he would also not want to leave a large body impression of himself. It seems fair. That was in 2000. And that was researched by the Bigfoot Field Research Organization. Are you familiar with them? Yes. That was a group started by a guy named Matt Moneymaker, who I know is not a great name. It's his actual name. I did interview him. He was on Finding Bigfoot, that TV show that ran like nine seasons, seven years, nine seasons, something like that, and was extremely popular.

We were talking a minute ago about DNA. Yeah. And if more evidence comes up, let's come back to evidence. But we're talking about DNA, which brings up this question of what is the idea of like, what is it? How did it get here? Do they believe that it...

DNA? No, no, no. Oh, I was like, I can't help that question. Okay. Again, imagine that Bigfoot people are explaining this in a symposium. There's sort of two theories on this that I found sort of... I mean, I, again, the stuff I did in this was very Bigfoot 101. So there's much more elaborate theories out there.

But the way I saw it was there's people who think that Bigfoot would be closely related to humans, would be descended from an ancient human ancestor. There's a guy named Jeff Meldrum, who is a professor of anthropology at Idaho state university. He's kind of picked up the mantle from Grover, my relative as being the academic Bigfoot guy. And he thinks that it's probably descended from an ancient human relative and, you know, branched off a couple million years ago. And passed through the Bering Land Bridge?

Or passed through Beringia and arrived here ahead of humans? No. You know, I don't remember what he said about how it ended up in... Yeah, no, it would have come here around the same time as humans. It would have been following along the same time as everyone else. So one of the interesting things I learned during this process was about evolution. And the idea for a long time was that evolution was a straight line. It was this slowly evolving line from primitiveness to perfection. To more complex.

Right. And that's not the case. It's a shrub, basically. There's all these different offshoots and branches and things that look like they were promising and then just poof, kind of died out. And at one point in time, there was as many as eight or nine hominid species walking around the planet at the same time. Yeah, you get in the area of around the southern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and northern Africa. And there's just all kinds of different stuff. Denisovans and Neanderthal and Homo florenziensis.

And I mean, there's just lots of different things. It's kind of like nature throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks to some degree. But many of these things had enormously long, you know. Right. Like Neanderthals were in neanderthals yeah i know but it's like you know you mean there's certain things there's certain things you know they're right and you don't care anyway but you don't do it because it just winds up making a statement about itself okay like there's certain words you struggle with like like the niche or it's niche

right so you wind up being like okay i get i understand you're supposed to do it this way like buffalo and bison yeah okay buffalo and bison i struggle with it all the time It's niche, right? So you wind up being like, okay, I understand you're supposed to do it this way. Like buffalo and bison? Yeah, buffalo and bison. I struggle with it all the time. So I'm just going to go Neanderthal. Okay, that's fine. That's what I'm going to do.

I'm not going to judge you. Knowing that I'm not saying it right. That they occupied Europe for far longer than modern humans have occupied. They were there for 600,000 years. So to call them a failure is like, by what measure? Right. And I'm not saying they're a failure necessarily. That's not what I was trying to imply in the least.

But what's interesting and what they found out in recent years is they may not have in fact died out. They may have just interbred. Bred out. And now you can do those 23andMe, Ancestry.com DNA tests, and people are like, oh, I'm 20% Neanderthal. Yeah, I have less than average. Oh, do you? I have less than average Neanderthal introgression. And it turns out that... What does that mean for you?

Nothing, but what surprised the dickens out of me was I always thought I was one-fourth Sicilian. Oh, and you weren't? Well, I'm like 23% Italian, 2% North African. Oh, interesting. Yeah, and this all gets so complicated because there's all kinds of things. And how accurate is it actually?

There's all kinds of things in your lineage that don't pass down parentally. It's just a whole other conversation. But I took note of being less Neanderthal than average for the number of people who've submitted themselves to the testing. But still a little bit. So yeah, the Neanderthals,

yeah, they didn't, it wasn't like the last one one day faded away and died. Right. They were somehow interbreeding with modern humans. Yeah. So anyway, the idea is that maybe Bigfoot is another one of these like relic hominid species that has existed. And traveled a long damn ways. Well, pretty much most hominids did travel fair distances.

But that's a long ways. It's a long ways. And then the other theory is that Bigfoot's descent is further back on the evolutionary tree and is more closely related to primates and is descended from an ancient Asian ape called Gigantopithecus, of which there is very little information. They have some jaws and several hundred teeth, several thousand teeth, and that's it. They don't have any long bones.

They don't have anything that would really help with descriptor. So some people think, okay, Gigantopithecus, look at the size of the jaw, look at the size of the teeth. This thing must have been huge. And some people say, this thing ate a lot of coarse grass and fibrous plants and needed a big jaw and big teeth to be able to get through that kind of food. And probably wasn't that big. But nobody knows. So everything, all of this stuff is just theoretical.

What is the most fashionable idea in the community about what they eat? Same stuff as bears. It's very omnivorous that's what i heard over and over again is like if it's if an area can support a bear population it can support a bigfoot population and they're and that will kill and eat meat um i think so. There's a guy, I own a cabin in Southeast Alaska. And I bought it from a guy who bought it from a guy who bought it from a guy who had had a Bigfoot who had found a nest. Oh, really? Prince of Wales Island. Okay. And he found the nest because he could smell it.

I've heard that Bigfoot smells very bad. This is actually something that's come up in... And there's rumor in that part, in those parts, that this Bigfoot population exists out on this island, which creates a whole problem for it. It's on an island. Limited resources, unless it's getting shipped in. They got problem for it it's not an island limited resources unless it's getting let's say they got john boats it's a huge island okay like it could support you

know sports thousands and thousands of black bears right um but yeah there's a some these folks feel there's a sustainable handful of people that i've run into feel there's a sustainable population of them out there or that that's that's existed over the eons, that they like to stick deer up in trees. I've heard that. That they stash their deer up in trees. Cougars do that too, though, don't they? No, they don't stash them in trees.

They don't? No, leopards do that. Yeah, that's true. But cougars don't? They bury them at the bases of trees. Oh, okay. They scratch up dirt and sticks and leaves and wedge them on a branch.

You hear them sometimes drug up onto rocks. Under. So they're caching them. You say under or onto? Onto. That doesn't surprise me, but I haven't heard that. I've never heard of a mountain lion dragging a deer up into a tree.

We'll say this, then someone's going to have a bunch of pictures of it having happened. You're going to get a letter. Yeah, but leopards stash them in trees. Where was I going with that? A guy had a cabin. Oh, he was a believer in the nest. But I had another thing about that. What about it?

What was it about? You were talking about the smell. The smell that he went by, that he located it based on its odor bears i hear don't smell very good either though there was a there was a grizzly attack in the park like two years ago yellowstone national park um and it's actually a the kid of a friend of my parents i think and he just got ripped to shreds, lived. But he said the things he remembers the most was how bad it smelled. Yeah, I've smelled all manner of bears.

How do they smell? I haven't found it to be. Pleasant? No, I haven't found it to be unpleasant. I guess it depends what it had been into. Yeah, I guess it depends on how close your face is to its face. I wouldn't be surprised that it would have something all over its fur that might smell.

But they don't have a bad, they don't have a general odor about them. Not like a skunk or something. No, that's off-putting at all. Okay. Yeah, I've heard the smell thing a number of times. And you were asking about evidence. The one other thing that still sort of makes me question is the eyewitness accounts that i've heard some of them are just crazy can we hold on to that because i know we were talking about we're talking about like the

diet so diet would be similar to a black bear yeah that's the thought and they might eat meat fish pretty much anything they can get their hands on yeah i was also told that they like fruit pies is that right yeah i remember reading the thing that researchers the bigfoot researchers will try to lure me with watermelons oh that's a new one i'd heard like fruit pies but my feeling is if you put a fruit pie out you're gonna get raccoons i mean anything anything out of the sun campers nearby like yeah anybody who knows who's going to walk in the door of the fruit pie and then so anything that eats something has uh excrement how do they explain the lack of that yeah do they clean up their own droppings yeah

uh there's a theory they might bury them oh um but yeah there is no so there's a guy at New York university who's a molecular primatologist and he's got, you know, he's an anthropologist and he works in DNA and he does not think Bigfoot is real. He said the chances are adjacent to zero, but he's one of these guys that's just fascinated by the phenomenon. And he will work with a few very select researchers. If they raise the money, um, and send them hit their samples he will run tests on them and he says i just get so much bear crap because people send it in he'll be like i found this and then he'll run it through the test and it's bare over and over and over again nothing nothing different is it true that right now someone still has a million dollar reward out for a dead Bigfoot?

That's a distinct possibility. There is a guy named Tom Biscardi who I think put up a reward for that. For a carcass. Yeah. What do they feel, the people you interviewed, what do they feel is happening to the bigfoot carcasses um they're scavenged they're saying you know how often do you see a bear carcass in the woods and all the time see i've never seen one i find bear skulls i shouldn't say all the time but i found a bunch of bear skulls okay well a bunch of bear remains the idea their their theory

is that you don't find bodies of animals in the woods very often. That they get scavenged, that the porcupines eat the bones, that the bones get scattered as the animals, you know, it dies. It's 800 pounds of stinking meat and it just gets eaten up. No. That's their theory. But. I have not, as someone who's hiked and camped pretty much their whole life not probably not as far into the backwoods as you've gone in fact i'm 100 positive of that um but i have only ever seen

one dead full dead skeleton ever yeah it was a deer and it was gone by three months later but they but the but bones are captured in the paleontological record. You're like La Brea Tar Pits. They are and they're not. This was actually another interesting conversation I had with a guy named Ian Tattersall, who is an anthropologist out at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And he said it is incredibly hard to become a fossil. But things manage to become fossils.

They do. But what we have available to us is only a very small fraction of what the full fossil record is. Because if you think about it, you have to die in the right place, at the right time, under the right conditions. It has to be the right kind of material that you're buried in and then you have to be uncovered at the right moment and the elements and the conditions can't be wearing it down and you have to be discovered by someone yeah but okay but it's think about this for a minute uh-huh we're talking about a population of give or take maybe 2,000 things that weigh 800 pounds, 6 to 800 pounds. There is no other large mammal that exists in North America that we don't find the remains of all the time. All of our large mammals get hit by cars every year even when you had 50 florida panthers when the population was as low

as 50 multiple ones would get hit on the highway every year in florida it's like you can't say that you can't look someone in the eye and explain to them why that 2,000 animals that have coexisted with humans here, not just, like, never mind, like, coexisted with Native Americans for what we now know to be at least 15,500 years, coexisted with Euro-Americans here for hundreds of years that no one's ever found a bone because we find like all of our other large mammals are well established in the paleontological record you go to la brea tar pit the la brea tar pits dozens of mammoths hundreds of dire wolves every creature that we know would show up there routinely.

So it is a real problem to say that there is a thing that's alive right now. That we don't have any bones for. Because the porcupines got them all. I know. These are big damn bones. I know. The one other thing that has been presented to me is that the DNA analysis on a lot of bones is fairly recent. So if somebody found bones before and they ended up in a collection somewhere, they are not running,

and Ian Tattersall told me this. I said, well, if we've got all these hominid species that we're finding now, what else is there? What have we misidentified in these collections of bones that all you museums have? He said, nobody's going back and digging through those collections because there's no glory in that, essentially. It's like, if you find the new thing out in the world, that's exciting. But who wants to go back to the storeroom and be the guy sorting through the bones and running analysis on those? Yeah, like maybe someone's like, man, that's supposed to be an 800-pound person. Yeah. Or like, you know, this is a weird bare bone, and then it ends up in some locker somewhere, and nobody ever does anything with it i'm not saying that that's the case but i think that you know people will find reasons to

make this creature real yeah hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes, and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public

and crown land hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24 K topo maps, way points, and tracking. That's right. You were always talking about, uh,

we're always talking about on X here on the meat eater podcast. Now you, um, you guys in the great white North can, can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function.

As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Can we talk about sightings yeah this eyewitness accounts yeah and i bet you will i want to get around to tech while you're gonna get letters about this i want to get around to why all this matters let's talk about eyewitness yeah

um i heard what's your perspective these are actually the hardest thing for me to throw out because some of the people I talk to are 30-year U.S. Forest Service, fishing game, BLM. They're outside all the time, familiar with wildlife, familiar with the ecosystems that they're in. And then they see something that completely alters their view

of the wildlife out there. Their beliefs. Yeah, their beliefs. And it's hard for me to throw that out because they clearly had an experience that shook them. Whether it's Bigfoot, I don't know. I wasn't there. I didn't see it.

I wasn't part of it. But it clearly is something that has just rocked them to their core. Did you talk to a lot of people who had eyewitness accounts? Can you tell me about a couple? Tell me about a couple of the ones that surprised you, where you're like, wow, this seems like a sane, rational person. Yeah. So one of them came from a guy named John Mayanzinski. He lives down in Wyoming, in Atlantic City, if you know where that is. Atlantic City, Wyoming?

Yeah. No, I don't. Teeny tiny. It's not far from Pinedale. Okay, I know Pinedale. Yeah. All civilization you'll ever need, according to their sign. Yeah. He was working for, must have been the Forest Service at the time. And it was his turn to go out and run this sort of scouting thing. They were doing research on bighorn sheeps. Sheep, not sheeps.

Big feets. And he went in, got his gear from the depot, and grabbed his stuff, and then headed out into the woods. And on the way out the door, this guy yells to him, hey, I spilled bacon grease on that tent, just FYI. Okay.

So he goes out and pitches. This is Wyoming. This is not Bigfoot country. This is Wyoming. Arid, open. Well, not all of it. There's forest over there. Yeah, it's pretty arid and open.

I mean, just in general as a state. I think he was in the winds. Yeah. And he was camped out there in the forest somewhere and had gone to sleep and then woke up to the sound of something breathing. And for a while thought it was a bear. And then he said it sounded different from a bear.

It sounded like maybe a sick bear. Okay. And then whatever it was kind of came up to the tent and pushed its face in, he thought, right where that bacon grease spot is. And he's like, well, damn, it's a bear. So he like yells and like whacks it on the nose to try and scare it off. And it runs off back behind the sort of,

the dog hair pines that were on the edge of his camp and hears it breathing again then it comes back a second time it does the same thing and he does that hits it again then it comes back a third time and this time it seems like it's over top of the tent because he can silhouette see it silhouetted over the top their moon was full and he thinks it's holding on to the lodgepole pine above his tent. And he's standing there, or he's sitting in the tent trying to figure out what he's going to do to sort of scare this thing off. And then another face sort of presses itself into the bacon grease stain. And he's like, well, it's a mama bear and her cub. Like this is the worst possible situation to be

in. But he wants to sort of like get them away from the tent. So he whacks it again. And this time it's not soft like a nose. It's like rock hard. And whatever this thing is, he throws it off its balance and it comes crashing down onto the tent. He's getting out of the tent and trying to wiggle his way out of it.

And then the thing takes off and it's big. That's all he can tell. And it's hiding behind these pines on the edge of camp. And he's sitting by the fire with a blanket over him and his 45 in his lap and just thinking, what the hell is this thing? And then whatever it is, starts lobbing pine cones at him and lobs 30, 40 pine cones. And he's not in any hurry to get away from the fire. And then the thing kind of just shuffles off. And the next morning he gets up and he looks to see if there's any footprints or, you know, bear tracks or anything like that. And there's too much pine dust, so he can't

see what it is. So he goes, gets up his stuff, goes back into the station and tells his boss about it. And it's his boss who says, I think you might've had a Bigfoot encounter because apparently there'd been a bunch of people who had reported something similar in that area over the past few months. And this is a guy who worked on the lunar exploration module in the 60s

when he was like a graduate student or an undergrad in college he'd worked in fish and wildlife he'd worked with blm he's very soft-spoken he's not grandstanding um just like yeah rational like he's just like the kind of guy that he just was so down to earth and he tells you the story and you're just like, what was it? And he's like, I still don't, you know, to this day, I still don't know. Hit me with another one. Okay.

I like these. I got no comment. You got to listen to episode four. They're full of them. Another guy I talked to was a guy named Derek Randles, who is up in the Olympic Peninsula and he's actually one of the- That's Bigfoot country. Yeah. And he is one of the founders of the Olympic Project because of an experience he had in the 80s where he'd gone out camping. He was back.

They were in the back country. He and a couple of friends. And they were setting up. They were getting ready to set up camp on this sort of ridge line, maybe a quarter mile, half mile off the trail that they'd taken up. And something started throwing rocks at them. First, they were all coming into the right of

them. Then they were all coming into the left. And then they could hear this thing sort of coming through the trees at them. And they all flipped out, grabbed up their packs and like took off down the trail. And then Derek remembered he had a gun in his bag. And so he, you know, pulled off the pack, pulled out the gun, and then he saw this thing standing in the trees, just staring at him. And I asked him, well, what was it? And he said, it was eight feet tall. It was just absolutely enormous. And he just said, just scared the bejesus out of him. And these are the kinds of stories I heard where people were kind of out doing their own thing. They're used to being in the wilderness.

They grew up being outside. They're not the kind of people who are going to be easily startled by the animals and the things that they see out there. And this just really changes everything for them. Yeah. Do you, you have a background as a journalist? I do.

Yeah. You are a journalist i do yeah you are a journalist yes um why is it that journalists what is it about journalists attraction to people who believe in bigfoot like i i'm obviously part of this uh-huh i'm wanting to talk to you yeah this is like like believe in Bigfoot. I'm obviously part of this. I'm wanting to talk to you. For me to talk about it, I've got to talk about it to someone like you.

For you to talk about it, you want to talk about it to the actual people who I'd have more of a difficult time with. You need to have a little bit of separation. I like the buffer because I can just get the questions that I have answered better if there's a layer between that. But why do journalists like the story? Well, I think part of it is it is a colorful story, no matter how you slice it.

There is a lot of color to this. There was a, you know, last fall, there was a, well, this fall, it is still fall. There was a Bigfoot festival held in North Carolina and probably six different. North Carolina. Every state, every state, every state but Hawaii. There was probably like six or seven journalism outfits that showed up there because it's, you know, it's, you know.

It's zany. It's zany. And it's, you're going to talk to characters right it's going to be interesting and you know especially i think right well anytime anytime when the news is difficult and hard to swallow and there's a lot of of hard things going on you're looking for stories that will get people interested, but won't necessarily turn into like a political knife fight, so to speak. I got you.

And I will say Bigfoot is a fairly universal topic. I, you know, aside from my accountant who there's only, and you who hates Bigfoot, there's been, I have not had a conversation yet with anyone who's not first they'll like laugh or they'll kind of joke about it and be like oh this is dumb but then they have all these questions

so yeah yeah so there's something about bigfoot that people do find appealing and then journalists are among them there's a thing i've talked about a bunch. I need to go reread it to make sure I'm getting it right. But no doubt you're familiar with the writer Joan Didion. Yes. Okay. It's early in Slouching Towards Bethlehem or early in the White Album. I think it's early in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She talks about a way in which people, and she's writing pre-internet. So she wrote this before the internet came out.

But she's talking about a way in which people rebel against information. I'm paraphrasing what she's saying. But there's people who, as information becomes so available, and we know about so much much and we can find out about so much. There's a way to rebel against information by tenaciously grabbing onto rumors and myths and conspiracies because it gives you a sense of knowing something that everyone else just can't see. This thing that like, I know the truth'm special i'm inside i'm i'm aware and all the rest of you people are not aware yeah and that gets that that's the conspiracy theory thing too i think that just gets taken to the sort of a very extreme level but it's this idea that somehow i have knowledge about things that you don't and that makes me special yeah you're rebelling against widely held information to become that you know the truth,

but no one can see it. Yeah. And it's like a type of mind frame. Or it's a mindset. Yeah. Did you find that mindset in the time you spent with Bigfoot Believers? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I've found that in a lot of the different people that

I've ended up talking to over the course of my journalism careers. People like to feel like somehow they have knowledge, somehow they're different, somehow they stand out, somehow they're able to separate themselves from what society is trying to make you do or what the government's trying to tell you to do or what conventional wisdom is. The part I've never understood is why. Why is there that need to feel special? I mean, we all have it.

I think to some degree, pretty much everybody wants to feel like they're an individual. They're different. They're not just thinking things because someone has told them to think those things. But yeah, where that comes from, I don't know. Is the Bigfoot world predominantly male? I expected it to be more male than it was. There were quite a few women. And actually, next summer, I've been invited to go on an all-women's month-long Bigfoot expedition. You're going to do it?

I'm going to do it. I think I'll probably go on part of it because there were some women I met before. Really nice. And part of what they really want to do is they just want to educate people about being outside, too. That screaming sound is not a Bigfoot. That is an owl. This is how you set up a proper camp. Like part of it is wilderness education in some ways. Which is part of the reason I think I also like Bigfoot

is because it's, I don't know, I'd rather have people go out and look for Bigfoot than play video games. I think that's a more valuable use of your time. When you were doing

your research for your podcast series, tell us the name of the podcast series because I want to hit it multiple times wild thing wild singular two words two words singular when you were doing the research did you you came into it thinking it was hokum did you vacillate through your journey a little bit like the first time I saw those nests,

I was like, this is weird. Like this is not something I've seen before. And again, I do not have the level of expertise that you guys have with being out in the woods, but I grew up in Idaho camping and hiking and being outside. And this was not like something I had seen before. And then you would hear,

someone would show you, they'd be like, oh, I've got a picture of a Bigfoot footprint. You got to see it. And you'd get your hopes up. they'd be like, oh, I've got a picture of a Bigfoot footprint. You've got to see it. And you'd get your hopes up. You'd be like, this is going to be it. And it would look like a puddle. And you're like, oh, that's nothing.

So there was a lot of kind of this back and forth, and especially, like I said, when I heard those stories from people, those were hard for me to dismiss because it's hard to say to someone, you didn't see that. You're just making stuff up. It just wasn't that kind of situation. Did you find yourself needing to act like you were more of a believer than you were? No.

I mean, when I went into this, and no matter where I went, I made it very clear. I'm going, coming into this as an objective observer, you know, tell me what your experience has been. Tell me what you've seen. Tell me about your evidence, but I haven't made up my mind one way or the other. Would the people you talk to feel that it was a betrayal that you right now, you know,

like the way we like to put it, if God can put a gun to your head wow instead is bigfoot real or fake you'd say fake in this situation right yeah would they feel like it's a betrayal that you that you would say that now they might is there like a is there like a code of honor here where you're supposed to believe when you're in the community? No, I don't think so. Because I would ask questions.

I ask people a lot of questions, you know, and I ask them too, like, how can you keep going out day after day or year after year and look for this thing when there is so little, when there is no physical evidence? And they'd say, you know, sometimes it's hard, but I just, I really think it's out there.

Like, I think they understand too that what they have is very tenuous. There are some people who are adamant that there is proof, but a lot of people I think are quite shaky on it, but it's something that they want. Do they feel protective of it? Like, let's just say for a minute, let's say for a minute that of a sudden uh one gets hit by a car okay he's crossing i-5 you know where it runs up through washington it's like down in la bummer no he's migrating eastward yeah he's like the genet to spokane well he's wyoming has him yep there's gotta be some genetic exchange there i mean there can't be a thriving population in wyoming well he's wyoming has them yep there's gotta be some genetic exchange there i mean there

can't be a thriving population in wyoming so there's gotta be they migrate he's headed east out of the limbic peninsula gets hit on hit on the highway it's a pregnant female whoa right gets rich right pregnant female all of a sudden it's like wow they were right would the people you met, would they be like, great? And then the real scientific community comes in and it becomes this whole thing. Would it lose its luster? I think there's an element of that.

I think there is some recognition that if Bigfoot was emphatically proved to be a real species, that your citizens, Sasquologists, was emphatically proved to be a real species, that your citizen Sasquologists, your amateur Bigfooters, they're going to get kind of cut out of the game. Yeah. Yeah, because it's going to be government scientists and primatologists from all the finest research institutions

and all these forests are going to be off limits. And all of a sudden, it are going to be off limits. And all of a sudden, it's going to be a very different thing if that were to happen. And I imagine, I'm sure they've thought about the fact that if Bigfoot is in fact proved to be real, then what? What do you do then? You're not going to be able to pursue it with the same abandon.

Are you familiar with the comedian Joe Rogan? Yes. Joe feels that he spent some time looking at, similar to you, but from a comedian perspective, digging into the world. I don't want to use the word that he used, but he used the word that like

he found that bigfoot researchers are um white men that people would not want to make love to oh that's mean yeah he had a term like i'm a bowl i'm i'm i can guess. Yeah. That there's a sort of pulling away from the normal exchanges and things that make up our lives among this community. I didn't feel that, honestly. No, I mean, I thought it was actually a very robust social community. Everything I went to was like a big family reunion, and people would come in from all over, and they were buddies. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

I mean, I think in any group, I don't know. That just seems kind of mean to me. Oh, yeah. Well, he's a comedian. Yeah, I know. Okay. He also made the joke that, like, why is no one mad at bob marley for having shot a sheriff it's a good question right he's just he's just he's a comedian yeah um i specifically went in with the idea that i didn't want to be making fun of people and being

mean um i can see his point but there's a lot of subcultures in american society that are filled with a similar descriptor like i think you can i think it's unfair to just be like oh big people bigfoot people are not the kind of people you'd want to have a relationship with you know i'm not going to say anything else because i don't want to get hate mail but sure there's a lot of uh there's a lot of subcultures that are filled with people you might not consider conventionally attractive or interesting or socially adept. I mean, Silicon Valley is like loaded with them. Yeah, I bet you a lot of people would say the exact same thing about hunters.

Right, yeah. Big game hunters, ew. But a broad stroke of folks. It wasn't like a particular demographic that you found. White, largely white. white some native american but i would say that that like if you had to do a demographic term for it it's it this is a whiter phenomenon yeah i don't think there's too much you can really read into that because just has a lot to do with demographics demographics distribution rural right and the kinds of people

who are going to be out in the woods to begin with. I actually had a really long conversation with a woman named Rue Mapp, who started a group called Outdoor Afro, which is to get more African Americans comfortable with going out into the woods. And she and I had a big conversation about this. And she said, look, you know, up until very, very recently, for black and for African Americans to be outside in the woods that was that was a sketchy proposition not because of bears or cougars but because of like other things that would

potentially cause a lot of harm so you know it's all it's relative on who's going to be out in the woods and and doing those kinds of things to begin with. Yeah. No, I don't read a whole bunch into that one. Are there things that I haven't asked you about that you wish I was going to ask you about? Just do those things for a minute. Just state the question within your answer. State the question within my answer. Like things that I really ought to know about. Like things you were dying to talk about that we didn't touch on i feel like we got to a lot of it i think the one thing i

do kind of want to talk about is what the appeal comes from like why people do want bigfoot to be real okay so not you as a journalist no i actually yeah me too this also gets to why i want bigfoot to be real okay um because my feeling is is um if you can't imagine the possibility of bigfoot if you can't imagine a landscape that's like wild enough and and can that they can hold something like bigfoot that everything's already so mapped out and pruned and paved and like uh you know it's all on google maps it kind of sucks the magic out a little bit like there's something i don't want to talk about magical bigfoot but there is something magical about bigfoot about something like a creature that's clever enough to elude us that can exist in this wilderness out there that has a lot of

appeal i hadn't thought of it in that way yeah that it's a belief that it's a belief in wilderness yeah when you say that to me i haven't thought about it but what comes to my mind pretty quickly is that right now in pondering wildlife and in pondering wilderness i think that realism is real important i think that that that instead of exaggerating its potential, it's really important right now to look at it as a finite thing that is there because we're making a commitment to having it there. And that it's not this unknown, unconquered thing that's something that we get and we can count it yeah down to the acre and we can watch it vanish or we can protect it and that it's not like anything that fosters this idea of it and it's the thing you find you know it's the thing you find often with people who i would call like people like like outsiders or people who are not accustomed to being in wilderness thinking about wilderness that they look at i sometimes think that they have a naive perspective about what its potentials are you know that it could that what we have left

could harbor a 600 pound primate you're like it's not like that anymore man we're down to the last little nubbins see even use the term vast anymore and in our wilderness is almost a stretch right but isn't that kind of depressing no i'm talking with people using vast when they know what the relative picture they're trying to present is. I use it too. But to be that... I think it almost oversells where we're at right now. That it could hide... The greatest ape that ever lived? Yeah.

That it could hide 2,000... Because look at what's going on with the giant gorilla. Go on. Tell me about the giant gorilla. They're vanishing. You're talking about the gorillas in Africa? Yeah. Yeah.

Silver. Silverbacks. Yeah. There's very few. They vanish. We find them dead all the time. There's no mystery there. There was a mystery for a very long time, no?

For thousands of years. There was a mystery around panda bears, right? And species do crop up from time to time, although they tend to be more ocean species than terrestrial. Yeah, I even read for a while, someone was comparing the hunt for Bigfoot with the hunt for the giant squid. Oh, okay.

And here's the giant squid, man, a very mysterious thing. Lives deep in the darkest zones of the oceans it was a mythological creature but now and then now and then every now and then yep one of them sons of bitches washes up on the beach and there it is and then you got to wrestle with the fact that there it is yeah uh i'm not saying that it's a logical belief but i think that it does touch on something that's important to humans and important has been important for a long time tell me that this idea that something outside the campfire ring the the thing lurking in the woods that maybe we're not in control that maybe we're not in control, that maybe we're not the toughest species out there on the planet,

that maybe you like, well, at least most people I know sort of like that thrill down the back of their spine and a little sense of mystery and a little sense of the unknown. And even if that is not the reality anymore people still want that but why can't they be maybe this is my gripe why can't they be happy and inspired by what is there i think a lot of them are but i think of them want more i think people want more they always never enough it

never is enough i mean look at us as a species. What we have is never enough. That's a good point. We want robots that drive our cars. We want to have the blood of younger people so we can stay young. We want to bottle our consciousness. We want to live forever. It's never enough. We're living at the best point in time you could ever live for humans,

and still they want more. Yeah. It's never enough. It's never enough. We're living at the best point in time you could ever live for humans and still they want more. Yeah. It's never enough. It's never enough. Yeah, honey. Would you like Bigfoot to be real? I don't have an opinion about it. If all of a sudden one got hit on I-5,

yeah, it would cause, I can't say that I would like it. It would of a sudden one got hit on I-5, yeah, it would cause, I can't say that I would like it. It would cause me to reevaluate everything I've ever thought. It would change everything for me. Yeah, it would shake me up. It would shake me up. I would all of a sudden become,

I at that point would become obsessed. Would you invite me back to talk to you again? Yes. Okay, good. I would become obsessed and my primary thing would be how is it possible that we missed it? Right?

And then I would hold these people, Grover, Grover Krantz. Grover Krantz. I would all of a sudden think that he was an American hero and a genius. And I would go to Rushmore and I would scrub someone's face off there and chisel his up on there. I wouldn't take OTR down, but someone would...

Yeah, I would be like, what a visionary. And everything would be different. But I'm not worried about one getting hit on I-5. What else we got? Are there more points you want to bring up? You want to plug the podcast a little bit about how people can go find it? Yeah.

Because they'll learn way more doing that than they will listening to this. That's probably a good point. You're comfortable with that? Yeah, I'm comfortable with that. Yeah, that's fair. So the podcast is available on pretty much any platform you get your podcasts on. Apple Podcasts.

You can't call it iTunes anymore. Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn for the sports people out there. Google Play has it. I know there's another one that I'm forgetting. iHeart Radio, whatever they are. Yeah. And yeah, it's available on all those platforms. You can also, if you don't feel comfortable with podcasts,

you can find it on our website, which is wildthingpodcast.com. Just stream direct. Yep. Yeah. And we also have some cool t-shirts there. Is it a thing to not feel comfortable with Apple Podcasts? Well, I think if there are some people who maybe are a little older and either don't have a smartphone or don't necessarily know how the technology works,

it's just easier to go. We're trying to be open to all. We're not ageist. Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. There's a Facebook page, Wild Thing Pod. We're on Twitter twitter which is you know twitter wild thing pod instagram wild thing pod they're all the same and then zap people with a couple

uh zap people with a couple titillating details about things they'll find if they listen that we didn't cover today well you'll learn a little bit more about grover because he's a pretty fascinating dude you'll get some more you'll learn a little bit more about Grover because he's a pretty fascinating dude. You'll get some more, you'll get some fun stuff about evolution. We'll talk a little bit about the different evidence that's in there. You get to hear more of these eyewitness encounters and they're way better told by the people

who actually experienced them than they are by me. There's a whole bunch of stuff about DNA, which we didn't really get into, but there's a lot of really cool info about DNA that's not even necessarily Bigfoot related. That's just like blow your mind science, which is pretty awesome. I go on a Bigfoot expedition. You can join me on that. And we get into the sort of cultural taboo around Bigfoot and all the different companies that use Bigfoot as the mascot or the name or in their label somehow, and why there is this sort of cultural or this commercial appeal.

All these companies have realized that even if Steve here doesn't think Bigfoot is the neatest thing since sliced bread, there's a lot of people that do, and they'll spend money on those kinds of products. Marketing Bigfoot. Marketing Bigfoot. The exploitation of exploitation of bigfoot yeah here's the other thing if bigfoot ever realizes just how much exploitation is going on i would not be surprised if it comes out of the woods and it's like pay up there's gonna be litigation trademark infringement all right so wild things no singular damn it i know that wild thing wild thing well i

was surprised i gotta say i was listening over the weekend you know prepping and uh how much my oldest my daughter was this like follow because i just put in my back pocket you know i'm listening to the podcast and walk around the house doing stuff and she's like following along and then like okay well hold on you know and she didn't she's seven you know she can't quite grasp everything so there's a lot of stopping and pausing and asking questions but it was i found it to be very family friendly because i enjoyed having conversations with my daughter about what she was hearing and that's the other thing i know there are some swears in this one i think there's like the s word gets dropped like 10 times over the course of the episodes and there's a couple little risque areas,

but I am going to release a clean version because I know a lot of people would prefer not to have swearing. A kid-friendly version. Yeah, well, it's basically going to be the same thing, but I'm going to cut out the swear words and some of the sexy stuff and have that available starting in January, I think. Oh, I got one last thing, man. Oh, yeah.

You good? Yeah. Yeah, it's making me nervous, I got one last thing, man. Oh, yeah. You good? Yeah. Yeah, it's making me nervous how I keep thinking you're dressed up. I realize the only thing you did different is you tucked your shirt in. But it makes me nervous like there's something going on.

I'm glad I made an impression. There's like something going on in your life I don't know about. You just tucked your shirt in. No, I felt like we had a special guest. I wanted someone to make sure. She didn't dress up. I know I didn't. I'm so embarrassed. I even had a button guest. Hold on. I just want to make sure. She didn't dress up. I know I didn't.

I'm so embarrassed. I even had a button come off my sweater. Everybody looks very nice. What was I just going to say? You had a question. Sexy stuff. I didn't know if there was... Oh, here's the thing.

Erotica? Can you tell me... No. Can you tell me what the Bigfoot community has to say about this? Look at trail cams, man. I know. Trail cams have rewritten the story of wildlife in america this was my question distribute like just distribution issues

and like all not just america all around the world it's rewriting our understanding of where of the distribution maps of certain species and what they're doing what is it what do the big foot guys have to say about the lack of trail cam footage that they're doing what is it what do the bigfoot guys have to say about the lack of trail cam footage that they're smart enough to avoid them oh or bigfoot is blurry and invisible could be invisible the fourth dimensional one i can see you can't okay because everyone knows you can't take a picture of a ghost yeah well you can though isn't there like some wasn't there some tv show that was like pictures of ghosts or something like that i remember the title but you can get the aura

yeah they explain it away trail cams yeah like they dodge the trail cams they can hear some high sort of high frequency something or other going on don't know because there must be thousands of trail cams set specifically to catch bigfoot at this point in time right now yeah i'm guessing right you did you probably talk to people that say yes i own hundreds and i have them set to catch big these yeah i mean i'm on i mean the amount of money that gets spent on some of the gear it's like Sennheiser mics and FLIR and Night Vision and high-end recording devices and trail cams.

And we're talking like tens of thousands of dollars that gets spent on gear. And we don't have anything. So they're bringing trail cams into the fight. Oh, yeah. But they're developing the idea

that he knows and he avoids it or she or it or they yeah there's females yeah of course you wouldn't have any so they're like damn it should have known bigfoot you can't catch them could be a good source for some hunting spots if you know if you live in that area and you know a bigfoot person yeah oh yeah if you're like hey uh you're running that kind of technology yeah here's the other thing is the the bigfoot people though often aren't just out doing bigfoot like they're out hunting like bigfoot's just sort of it's all it's on the side in addition to the other stuff that they're they're doing out there like they're i think the first love in some cases is off in the woods and just being outside. And this becomes part of that experience.

I do got one last question for you. Okay. Is anyone in the community now still walking around with a gun? Yeah. There's still guys that would drop one if they saw it. A couple of the ones I've talked to who are scientists said, yeah, unless you have a body or a big piece of a body, you're never going to convince anyone.

And they condone the idea of seeing one and killing it. Some of them do, yeah. No shit. A lot of them carry guns, though, for other wildlife. What do you mean? Protection. Protection, yeah. But they would.

There's guys out there right now in the community that would be like, I would kill it if I saw it. Dude, you want to see it blow up on social media. I do not want to step into that mess you're welcome to go you go let me haul ghosts send me a note just no i'm saying that guy's gonna get in major trouble in the name of science well that's what happened if you want me to read the letter that grover got or some of the letters i've got them on my computer you want to can we put them up in our show notes yeah i don't see why not that'd be the best thing for us okay i'll send them to you i'll send you a couple i'd like to have them in the

show notes yeah and any other kind of great stuff we'll put up the bigfoot video the famous thing from the 50s or 60s 67 we'll put the show notes we'll put up links for your stuff okay um yeah i've got all kinds of photos and illustrations too if you i'll show them to you when we're yeah done what uh in your mind from from what you looked at okay here's the thing i got to with the email i want to establish real quick okay just give me a yes or no okay do you believe do you believe that there's a that that that bigfoot and the way that we're discussing it, not the one that passes through time and space, do you believe that Bigfoot as a living, breathing, sustainable species or as just a fluke freak occurrence that was dropped off by an alien ship? Do you believe that it's true or

not right now yeah right now sitting here right now you don't no but i based on the evolution stuff and the long history of native american stories there may have been something like big foot one upon it once upon a time okay that's sort of where I am. But here's the thing, and this is what I get to in this last episode. Based on the evidence, no, I don't think Bigfoot is real. But I still really want Bigfoot to be real because I like that idea so much. And I think that's where a lot of people come down.

Giannis is nodding his head. I'm with you there. I feel the same way. Just the same way you feel about aliens. There's no evidence. We all know there. Yeah. I feel the same way. Just the same way you feel about aliens. Like, right? Like, there's no evidence. We all know there's not. There's nothing, but.

Yeah, if one shows up, I'll be like, hell yeah, great. Unless they're trying to kill you. Unless they're trying to kill you. But the problem with aliens is that it's a totally different conversation because then you get into questions of infinity. Yeah. You know.

You mean like the Fermi paradox? Well, no, there are like more planets oh yeah than grains of sand on earth so you get into this like right it's just a totally different it's like you're dealing in such different concepts scale entirely but the fact you know if aliens existed where are they why haven't they reached us out to us by now or are we the most advanced species in the entire galaxy or are we totally alone like there's a lot of like questions around that too for sure and uh we talked about this a bunch for with aliens is that uh i don't know if you're familiar with the physiologist jared diamond yeah yeah he talks about this idea that with with life in places, that life takes so many different forms and planets have life cycles and species have life cycles.

And that of all the species that have ever existed on Earth, only one has developed the ability to transmit signals. Like an electronic transmission of a signal, after tens of thousands upon thousands of species, one did that. We haven't been doing it for very long. Our future as a species is probably not terribly bright, meaning like, are we here in 10,000 years or have we self-obliterated so the fact that on some other planet that you'd have another species contemporaneous with ours trying to transmit electronic signals at this little blip in time that we are right it opens up like even if you even if you can get over the hurdle of imagining other life that it would somehow be contemporaneous with ours and have motivations and abilities.

And it's using electronic signals to talk. It could be using something else entirely. Like we don't, life could look like that coffee cup. Like we don't, it could be coffee cup planet and they all look like that and we don't even know how to talk to them. So he doesn't put it out as evidence. You can't put out the lack of communication

as evidence that it's not there. Right. Because. Well, science can't put out the lack of communication as evidence that it's not there. Right. Because... Well, science can't prove a negative. Yeah, which is the argument you hear with Bigfoot. Right. But I also hear that some people, in reading about Bigfoot, I hear some people say the biggest piece of evidence against Bigfoot is all of the evidence.

Because it's so contradictory. The tracks. I've heard's so contradictory. The tracks. I've heard that argument too. The tracks. People can't agree on how many, all of the tracks that show up. Does it have five toes? Does it have six toes?

Does it have four toes? What is the size and structure of the tracks? People are like, that's a Bigfoot track, but there's no commonality between the Bigfoot tracks. Descriptions of size, descriptions of diet, descriptions of sound. It's sort of Bigfoot.. Descriptions of size, descriptions of diet, descriptions of sound. It's sort of Bigfoot.

It's extremely contradictory. Bigfoot occupies this thing of like unknown things. And so people take like, they have a known concept of this thing, Bigfoot. And they take unknown things and force it into a shape that comes out being Bigfoot to account for the unknown. Why is that the shape? That's another question that I kind of am interested in exploring too, is because so many cultures have something like Bigfoot. Think about Grendel, like Beowulf. Did you read Beowulf way back in the day? Grendel, the Epic of Gilgamesh, like these giant, hairy,

human-like creatures. There is something about that shape, as you're talking about, that fascinates us. What is that? And then any other final concluding thoughts? Embrace Bigfoot. Just do it. I mean, it's a... Embrace the mystery. Embrace the mystery and embrace the fun of it.

I think that's part of it too. In some ways, it's meant to be, there's a lot of fun that comes with this. There's a lot of silliness and there's a lot of stupid stuff, but there's also just like, there's a lot of interesting science. There's a lot of interesting people and it's been a big part of American culture for a long time.

So it's worth spending a little time, roughly four and a half hours to listen to my podcast wild thing if you tag this on yeah you got any concluders uh no other than uh you should definitely go listen to it i thought it found it thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable so So nice way to pass the time listening. Yeah. Man, Bigfoot tears me up. Why can't it become fun for me too? I don't know.

Why can't it? God, just not that kind of guy. I'm going to try to make it more fun for me. Instead of just something that makes me want to pull my hair out. But obviously, here I am sitting here. I know. See? Even people who think Bigfoot is the dumbest thing they've ever heard of,

they end up asking me all kinds of questions. You can't help yourself. Yeah, you can't. I can't help myself. You heart him. No. I heart Bigfoot, man. Maybe it's a frenemy thing.

You know what? It's probably a frenemy. Yeah, you heart Bigfoot, man. Maybe it's a frenemy thing. You know what? Maybe. You know what? It's probably a frenemy. Yeah, you're right. It's like I'm one of those people that, you know, I'm one of those people that, you know, they get like a real ax to grind and their like primary thing in life is like fighting against something. Then you realize that that's what they do at night, right? And you're like, oh, I get it now. Yep.

It was like this self-loathing you're a self-loathing bigfoot lover yeah and it's like you just can't we can start a support group it's like a flame that you can't pull i think yannis and i can probably you know we can have online meetings and help you walk there's probably 12 and help me yeah help me get to a point where i can just come out and say, you know what, I just love Bigfoot and I love talking about it. I should probably know this from listening over the weekend, but what's like the first recorded Bigfoot sighting or evidence or anything? How many, what span of years are we talking about that this thing has been around?

Well, there's tons of Native American stuff. And some of them are sightings. Some of them are just more part of the mythology um but the one that i think most people stands out for most people came in the 50s in california so it's a pretty new thing then for like modern american culture yeah i got real fast 70 years yeah the first the first time the term bigfoot was actually used was in the 50s 58 i think yeah 58 well i was gonna make the point that i feel like had you been around maybe in the 60s it'd be just so much easier to dismiss it right it's something new it's crazy like whatever but now that it has 70 years behind it. Of nothing. Well, other than... 70 years of false leads.

I'm a believer now, buddy. Well, I just think of other things that also don't have a lot of true solid evidence but that people have now believed in for many, many years and they sort of become more real and easy to believe to and latch on to the more time goes by.

But you must have, I mean, the hunting community is full of these stories. What stories? Bigfoot stories. I have talked to, I mean, it's like,

you can't, you can't like make it real. No, but I'm just saying you must have been like hearing about this from people who listen to your show. I hear about it all the time. I used to live in Michigan's upper peninsula for a very short period of time. And it was a thing up there.

And even here, here in Montana, like it was a year ago or two years ago a guy jumped out in front of a car with a bigfoot bigfoot suit on got hit by the car and killed him what yeah i didn't catch that it was in northwest montana yeah i remember hearing about that so it's like you like you're trying to pray a prank on people you traumatize someone who's not gonna live with the idea they hit and killed. Well, and also you're dead. Yeah, but screw him. I mean, I don't mean that, but it's like, but that's like your own call.

I would cut that out of there. No, no, no. That's your own call to make. Right. That's your own call to make. You made a choice. If you want to put a suit on and jump in front of a car, that comes with inherent risks

that I think that anyone could point out to you. But I'm just saying, haven't you had- But you're putting a person in, you're putting a motorist in the situation of having had to live with the fact that they killed you right but i'm wondering have you heard stories from some of the hunters that you've interacted with and talked to that are similar to what i'm talking about where it's these stories that have really sort of shaken them to their core i've heard stories from a lot of hunters about seeing inexplicable things in the woods. Okay. But not that in particular. Okay.

I no doubt hang out with people who, I have a friend who tells a story of a mule deer that can blow bullets away by going, pfft, okay? So yes, I know and hang out with and associate with people who are open to the metaphysical, but I do not. Tell me more about this mule deer.

I don't know a lot about it. Oh, shoot. I don delve into my neck that could be season two oh i was told about it um one last thing for me we're good oh well yeah that did brought up a thought that i had that didn't make a note of but uh is there is there a season two do you see not on big future no big this is a one season thing i'm moving on to the next thing what's the next thing not the loch ness monster not the yeti uh i don't know fishing in loch ness oh did you so here's an interesting thing so there's a scientist out in scotland right now who says okay i am going to look for the loch ness monster he doesn't think loch ness is real but i'm going to do this by doing DNA, environmental DNA analysis of the lake.

And we will see what else has been in there. I think the chances of me finding a Loch Ness monster are slim to zero. But who knows what else has been in there? Because they can get so much information out of these teeny tiny pieces of DNA now that it's like they can, they might find DNA of ancient sharks.

They might find all kinds of stuff. So that's one of the other cool things about this cryptozoology stuff is often you will use something like Loch Ness or Bigfoot or the Yeti as the hook to get people interested. And then you go out and find out all this other cool stuff.

Yeah, so you lure them in with bullshit, but then teach them something real and interesting. Yeah. I mean, I don't know who would do anything like that. We don't necessarily... would do anything we don't necessarily i feel this is a really long wrap-up go ahead no i'm just saying it's like a good thing if the end result is that people know more about science wildlife outdoors and whatever it's great yeah if it gets him out into the woods think of the risk you're running though why not lure him

in with something that's not why not lure him in, if we're going to talk about Washington State. Do all of the above. Why not lure them into the problem of the fact that at this very moment, there may or may not be a grizzly bear on the U.S. side of the Northern Cascades? Yeah. That's a great question. That gets a certain segment of the population excited. Bigfoot gets other people excited.

Let's focus there because there we got a thing that really is mysterious and really does need some protection and really is something that we need to get people on board with or the fact that we now do not have any caribou in, again, Bigfoot Central, Washington State. We do not have any caribou that cross into Washington State, though in your father's and grandfather's lifetime, there were. We don't have any caribou that cross into Idaho,

and in your lifetime, there were. Agreed. There's plenty of rare wildlife out there to apply our you know emotions and science to you're right in a constructive fashion um real quick real quick laura was gonna answer what's next oh yeah or you were i thought you're like not actually i don't know what's next I have some ideas that are like very nascent but they are not ready to be shared with the world.

So. You're kicking some stuff around. Yeah, but I just need to figure out like if they're even feasible at this point from a getting access to information point of view.

You know what I think you ought to do? What? Well, never mind. What? No no you can't start this i'll tell you later i'll tell you later oh real quick before you go not you just other the people oh the people listeners real quick i got a handful of favors needed to do one go to uh the meat eater, please, and subscribe to our newsletter. That's real important to me for reasons I'll not get into. Go and do that.

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And lots of stuff is now in stock. If you go to our website and go into our store we have all kinds of stuff in stock including a bunch of meat eater podcast paraphernalia you need to get yourself a genuine blouch shirt um we didn't say blouch when we're talking about someone shooting at a bigfoot which seems inappropriate so all that yeah do that and you'll be in good standing with me and laura kranz thank you very much for coming on. I'll tell you my hot tip. Okay.

About what your next show ought to be about. Okay. And I look forward to getting a lot of angry emails. Anyone who's seen a Bigfoot, please write in. I will share your story on a future episode of the show. Thanks for listening. And thanks for having me on. Thank you. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that

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