What if the monsters we tell stories about… are still out there?
In Part 1 of this special interview, Robert Barber talks with cryptozoologist Dr. Brian D. Parsons about the eastern U.S.'s most persistent legends—Bigfoot, Mothman, the Beast of Bladenboro, and the Loveland Frog.
Explore how folklore, geography, and belief collide in these paranormal stories, and why the forest isn't the only place these creatures live—they haunt memory, maps, and even AI.
🎧 This episode blends true stories, mythology, and the blurred line between hoax and horror.
##Check out Dr. Parson's newest book, Eastern Cryptids, HERE
🎧 Listen now to State of the Unknown—your go-to for haunted history, cryptid lore, and eerie encounters. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and everywhere you listen.
State of the Unknown is a documentary-style podcast tracing the haunted highways, forgotten folklore, and unexplained phenomena across America’s 50 states.
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Some stories don’t stay buried.
We go looking anyway.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
In the quiet woods east of the Mississippi, things
move just beyond the lightShadows, too large sounds with
no source, eyes in the dark thatblink and vanish.
People have names for themBeast of Bladenboro, mothman,
(00:23):
skunk, ape, grassman but forevery name there's a dozen
others that never made thepapers, just warnings passed
down, stories traded overfirelight.
Some say these creatures aremyths.
Folktales stitched from fearand isolation.
(00:44):
Are myths, folktales stitchedfrom fear and isolation.
Others say they're real fleshand blood, just clever enough to
stay out of reach.
So how do we explain thethousands of sightings, the
blurry photos, the midnightscreams, the missing livestock?
If these things walk among us,why haven't we found one?
(01:05):
Today we begin a conversationwith someone who spent decades
chasing that question.
(01:30):
Dr Brian D Parsons has beenchasing the unexplained for over
25 years.
He's a paranormal investigator,researcher and former host of
the Paranormal News Insider,which ran for more than 500
episodes.
He's also the author of ahandful of nonfiction and
fiction books about theparanormal and cryptozoology.
(01:53):
His latest work, easternCryptids, explores the strange
creatures and elusive legendseast of the Mississippi River,
from the Dover Demon to theSnallygaster.
East of the Mississippi River,from the Dover Demon to the
Snallygaster.
Today this is part one of ourconversation where we talk about
what drives a search, why thesestories persist and whether
(02:14):
cryptids are more than justshadows in the woods.
This is the story of creaturesthat won't go away, despite the
odds, despite the questions,despite the silence.
I'm your host, robert Barber,and this is State of the Unknown
.
Dr Parsons, thank you so muchfor joining me today.
(02:39):
It's an honor to have you onthe show.
For those who don't know, drBrian D Parsons is a seasoned
researcher with over 25 years inthe field of the unexplained,
and author of the book EasternCryptids, which we'll be talking
about today.
He's also the former host ofthe long-running Paranormal News
Insider.
Really excited to have you here.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
I appreciate it.
I love podcasts.
I love being on either side ofthe mic, either hosting or being
a guest, but I really love yourcontent.
Every episode is enthralling,so I'm even more excited to be
your first guest.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Thank you so much.
I really do appreciate that.
Dr Parsons, before we get intothe book, I'd love to give
listeners a sense of who you are.
You've been chasing the unknownfor more than 25 years.
What first drew you to theworld of cryptids in the
Unexplained?
Was there a moment or maybe astory that made you realize this
(03:37):
was more than just a passinginterest?
Speaker 2 (03:40):
So for a lot of people I've met they have these
exciting origin stories wherethey were in the woods and they
heard a strange noise and theysee a fleeting shadow.
Or they're in their house andthey see an old woman standing
in front of them.
I don't have any of that stuff.
I just actually was researchinglocal urban legends when I was
in college, first went tocollege and you know the whole
(04:03):
legend tripping thing, which I'msure we've all done.
I'm sure even the younger kidsare getting involved in that
stuff, and I was kind of on theother end of that.
I thought that some of thesestories were very foolish and
kind of full of it too with someof the things.
But I was really interested inhow people believed those
(04:23):
stories so adamantly and if youasked a younger guy or you asked
an older person they would tellyou the same exact story and I
thought that was reallyinteresting.
So I kind of got drawn inthrough the folklore piece and
then I'm a master of the rabbithole, so I get lost all the time
and I started looking at onepiece which was ghost and how,
(04:46):
how this supposed ghost workedand I wanted to figure out if,
is that really real?
Is that possible?
And next thing I know I wake upand I'm running a paranormal a
few months later and I didn'thave any intention of doing that
and that was back in themid-1990s, so about 1996, I
don't remember exact dates.
People always ask me.
I'm like I don, I didn't know Iwas going to be doing it.
It just kind of happens.
(05:09):
And my goal was to kind offigure out what was going on
behind these things and knowingfull well that there had been
scientists at that point 130years Now it's been over 140
years back in the age ofspiritualism, 1882, with the
Society for Psychical Research,that were digging into this
stuff.
So it wasn't like I was goingto figure anything out, I just
(05:31):
wanted to know kind of formyself.
And I think that's where a lotof people are at.
They're looking for their ownpersonal answers and admittedly
that's where I was at when Ifirst started trying to sort
past these local urban legends.
But now these ghost stories,these ghost events were actually
happening to people and thatwas, you know, again mid-1990s.
(05:52):
This was the age of the.
The internet was getting big.
You know, back then we had weactually had yellow pages for
the internet, worldwide web,yellow pages you can get in a
bookstore.
But then you know, things gotbig with, got big with ghost
hunters and everybody became aghost hunter.
And you know I branched outinto cryptozoology and UFOs and
(06:13):
I've really fallen more in lovewith cryptozoology for a list of
reasons, but that's kind of howI got my start.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Okay, you're a researcher, a paranormal
investigator and a longtimepodcast host and broadcaster.
How has your approach evolvedover the years?
Has your mindset shifted?
Your skepticism, belief?
The way you weigh a good story.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
It's funny because I was thinking about this a few
weeks ago I was at a UFOconvention and somebody kind of
asked me the same question and Iwas like you know, it's funny
because I feel like I've comefull circle.
I'm right back where where Istarted out, which is weird
because I started looking aturban legends and folklore, and
that's pretty much what easterncryptids is it's.
It's a book of of legends, of,you know, these urban legends
(07:01):
that have become folklore allover the East Coast.
But when I got into the ghostfield, admittedly, I started to
believe and I started to kind ofrub off on the people that were
around me and people telling meoh, ghosts are real, this is
real and this technology is real, and so I started to believe
all that.
So I kind of I finally camearound.
(07:23):
It took me a little little,admittedly a little longer than
I wish it would have, until Irealized I was kind of falling
for all these tricks,subjectivity, um, situations
that were going on, and then, uh, you know, I was afraid to kind
of part ways with that becauseit became part of who I was with
this paranormal group.
I was surrounded by people whobelieved and I was starting not
(07:48):
to believe, and so it was kindof a hard struggle.
But then you know, kind oflittle by little you kind of
come out of that and you kind ofyou try to get people to be
more balanced.
And it's at that point where Iknow a lot of other people out
there, a lot of otherinvestigators, that turned and
you know you could say like aSkywalker turn, going from the
(08:10):
light side to the dark side,going from I believe, to I
absolutely hate you people forfooling me, and now I'm going to
become that skeptic with thedark cloak and take you all down
.
I didn't do that I could haveand I kind of felt like that
(08:31):
because I felt betrayed to anextent.
But that was my fault, and soI've kind of found my foothold
and my foothold is trying asbest as I can to be balanced in
the middle.
It's so easy to write content orwrite books or to sit here and
tell you that Bigfoot is realand all of these things are real
beyond the shadow of a doubt,because I can't and it's easy to
do that and I could easily dothat to get a lot of fans become
(08:52):
famous, get on a TV show, butit's also just as easy to be a
skeptic and say this is all notreal.
There's no bodies, there's noevidence, there's no.
None of this stuff is real,it's all just.
You know, folklore, it's justpart of our culture.
But the hardest part to do isto stay evenly keeled on both of
(09:12):
those topics and both of thoseends and kind of be that speaker
in the middle and say here'sthe story but here's the other
side.
It's up to you to believe.
And that's where I've reallytried to be since, really, my
first cryptid book, which wasback in 2014,.
A handbook for the amateurcryptozoologist.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
I think you really touched on an important point
right there the idea ofimpartiality and objectivity,
and that's definitely somethingthat we try to do here.
With State of the Unknown, welay out the facts, lay out the
story as known and let thelistener make up their own mind,
rather than telling them whatis quote-unquote true or not.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah, you can't be judgmental either way, you can't
totally agree with somebody.
It's like, you know, when thepolice take a report, you know
they're not going to say, oh,absolutely, that guy's a
criminal.
Or absolutely you have no cluewhat you saw.
People are bad witnesses.
You, you, you know, youprobably saw a blue jumpsuit.
You're saying it's red.
You know they're not going todo that, they're not going to
take sides Although sometimesthey do.
(10:14):
But you, you know, as a, as aresearcher or as an investigator
, you have to take a neutralstance and unfortunately, I've
seen it a hundred times wherethey don't you know, or even you
know.
Tv shows are a good examplewhere they're people like I
spend my whole entire liferesearching and investigating
ghosts.
I finally made it on the tvshow.
(10:36):
I see a ghost and my firstreaction is to scream at the top
of my lungs dude run.
I just watched that episode theother night I know exactly what
you're talking about why in theworld would you you wasted your
whole entire life to get to thatpoint just to do that for
entertainment, um, or you knowthese, these guys out in the
woods looking for bigfoot.
You know, finding bigfoot,which is, they're not finding
(10:59):
bigfoot.
Um, they're looking for stories.
They're looking for moreadditional things, the folklore,
but they it's all subjectiveand it's frustrating because
we're not supposed to be puttingourselves in the middle of
these things.
We're the documentarians.
We're supposed to be takingnotes and trying to figure these
things out, finding evidence,finding information, documenting
for the future, not insertingourselves in there so we could
(11:23):
be on TV.
So it gets a little frustrating.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
I'm sure it does Now, after all that experience, what
keeps you coming back?
What still pulls you in?
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Well, I would say, you know, finding these
creatures, but I don't thinkwe're going to find any of these
creatures really.
But I just I really love the.
This is going to sound weird,but I love the folklore.
I love the fact that so manypeople believe these things,
even blindly.
You know, so many researchershave never seen a Bigfoot, but
(11:54):
they still search for Bigfoot,they're still looking and they
believe in it and it's justamazing that that kind of
mentality continues to bringpeople back.
But I enjoy, you know, I enjoyjust sitting back chewing
popcorn and watching the wholething.
Really it's entertaining to me.
And the ghost field wasfrustrating because I'm trying
to uncover answers, I'm tryingto create new methodologies of
(12:15):
investigation, and people justdidn't get it.
They didn't care, they wantedthe easy way out.
The science takes work.
It's not easy.
Nothing is handed to anyscientist.
You have to work hard for itand they don't care.
They just want to be sitting ina circle and have something
happen to them and they jump upand down and put it on youtube.
That's not me, you know.
(12:36):
I want to help, I want to dothings, uncover things.
But you know, in cryptozoologythere's not really a whole lot
you can do.
You know we're not.
You know you'll look at thedefinition of cryptozoology
right the search for and studyof animals whose existence or
survival is disputed orunsubstantiated.
You could tell.
I've said that a billion times.
We got it memorized so that youknow search for hidden or
(12:58):
missing animals is misleading.
You know, when this firststarted out as a, as a kind of
an area of I don't know, youcan't really call it, it's not
science, it's not.
You know it's cryptozoology.
But it has nothing to do withzoology.
It's nothing to do with science, it's just a pursuit.
When, believe it or not, a lotof people say well, bernard
Houvelman is the father ofcryptozoology.
(13:19):
No, ivan T Sanderson was thefirst one to say it, back in the
mid-1940s I think it was 1946and 47, he wrote a couple of
articles about sea monsters andused the term cryptozoology.
Then Bernard Hovemans, a fewyears later, put it in a book
and it got a lot of traction.
Then it's few and far inbetween.
(13:39):
The whole concept ofcryptozoology was you know, it
wasn't these fantastic creaturesas much as it was sea monsters
and potential dinosaurs stillbeing alive.
There were people that weregoing out there and looking for
these things, but it was stillthe collection of folklore and I
think now it's become more ofthe collection of folklore that
it is actually getting put inyour strap and your boots on and
(14:01):
getting out there in the wildand looking.
Although some people still dothat, it's few and far in
between.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Really interesting background information.
Now let's talk about Easterncryptids.
This isn't just a list ofstrange sightings.
It feels like the culminationof years of work.
How long did it take to compileand research this?
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Was it a fresh project or something that grew
out of older investigations.
So pretty much my most popularbook is my 2014 book Handbook
for the Amateur Cryptozoologist,with a second edition in 2015,.
Because I had Loren Colemanwanted to get involved with that
book.
He voted it in the top 10 ofcryptid books in 2014.
(14:47):
So wrote a forward for it.
I released a second edition in2015 and this book is still
getting me library presentationsacross the state of ohio, where
I reside, and I kind of feltlike I'm missing the mark here.
If I'm still getting stuff aboutcryptozoology and I'm still
talking about cryptozoology, Ineed to write about
cryptozoology.
Granted, uh, after 2017, Iwrote a book, a handbook, for
(15:09):
the amateur ufo investigator.
I focused back on writingfiction and I really wanted to
get fiction out.
My first two first two novelscame out last year, which is
crazy that actually it took meeight years to write one and
took me one year to write thesecond, and they both got
published within the samecalendar year, which is
(15:29):
mind-boggling.
But after that I decided Ireally need to finally write
something and this is going tosound crazy, but I actually
wrote this book in about sevenmonths, which sounds bad because
people are like oh, you justrushed this together.
But, like you said, I've beenresearching cryptids since about
(15:52):
2006-ish.
I did my first presentation in2009,.
But I was researching cryptidslong before that and compiling
all this data.
And compiling all this data, Idid a podcast 534 episodes with
Paranormal News, which the firstpart was always cryptozoology.
So I had over 1,300 pages ofnotes that I had to fall back on
(16:20):
, including links and storiesthat have happened since 2008.
And links from doing researchfor library presentations.
So I already had done a lot oflegwork, but my goal with this
book was to strip away almostall of that and just focus on
what really happens.
If I could go back in time andreally document these stories,
whether they happened in 1773 or1925 or 1965 or 2008 or
(16:46):
whatever how can I approach thatin a way, that's, I can
carefully research these storiesin a way that I'm not being
fooled by the media who, youknow, early newspapers, even
newspapers into the 1990s wouldfabricate things or embellish
things to sell newspapers, tosell stories or to get other you
(17:08):
know larger newspapers to, toget that story syndicated.
So they could, they could getcredit.
So, yeah, and how do youdisseminate that?
And then, of course, peoplemake horrible witnesses.
People like to embellish things, they like to get attention.
So how do you see through those?
But it wasn't my job to saywhether these are real or not.
(17:31):
It was trying to find the best,clearest picture of what really
took place and put that in thebook, and I went one by one, I
didn't jump around.
I started at the beginning ofthis book and I researched each
individual thing until I wasdone.
So I had literally 30 tabs ofedge open, 30 tabs of Chrome
(17:53):
open, with newspaper clippingsand all these links, and
following the again the rabbithole down, well, here's this.
Where did this person get thisinformation?
Oh, here and here.
Well, let me go to thoseresources.
Where did those people gettheir information?
And so on and so forth.
Just traveling through time toget all that information, which
(18:16):
you would think it would take alot of time.
And on top of that, though, Iwas working a seasonal job, so I
ended up taking about threemonths off.
So this was for three and ahalf months.
This was my full time job, so Iwas working a lot of hours on
this book, and it's also a greatthing because knowing I had a
date to go back to work in thespring I had a drop dead date
(18:41):
that I had to really get thisbook done and it really made it
exciting to to kind of relearnall these things.
And I think that was part of ittoo was since I wrote handbook
for the amateur cryptozoologistsand I'm doing all these library
presentations.
I'm I'll tell us about theLoveland frog.
Okay, loveland frog, is this,this and this?
And I tell the same story.
But sometimes I kind of forgetthings or maybe I put the wrong
(19:02):
thing in there and so I've had afew people say well, that's not
what happened and this happened.
I'm like you know what, you'reright, and I'm kind of
forgetting because I'm justrehashing the same thing.
So I kind of went back to thedrawing board and re-researched
all these things from scratchand again very carefully
researched and amazingly, whenyou do this, sometimes you find
(19:23):
mistakes.
So I found a lot of mistakesthat people had written in books
and once you you could find theoriginal book, because all the
books after it have that mistakein it.
So people are copying andpasting instead of really doing
that research.
And I found a lot of that,which is kind of scary because
some of these are really bigresearchers, big writers out
there.
So that's the kind of stuffthat I dug up and my goal for
(19:47):
each one was to learn somethingthat I'd never known or uncover
something that was not includedin any other major resource or
any book that I'd read, to kindof do something new and
different.
You know, being in Ohio, Icould have easily written just
an Ohio book, which has beendone about a dozen times, and
that's only a few small things.
(20:09):
So you've got to do a lot ofresearch for each one.
But then do I do a whole UnitedStates one which you know.
Dozens of cryptids which Ithink I had over hundred and
over a hundred.
That I started with, but Ithink I think there's only like
70 titles or 70 titles, but Iput a few at the end which
didn't get included, but I kindof summarized so it was well
(20:30):
over a hundred.
Um, that would have probablydoubled that if I would have
done the whole united states.
So you know it would have beena blurb or a page.
I wanted to do more than that.
So that's why I chose easterncryptids, east of the
Mississippi, which amazingly, 26states exist east of the
Mississippi, so it's more thanhalf of the country You're
counting right now.
I can tell.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Eastern North America has always had a distinct kind
of mythology Dense woods,forgotten roads and towns where
stories linger longer than names.
Why do you think this region inparticular is such fertile
ground for cryptid legends?
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Well, it's the oldest part of our country for us, you
know, for the Europeans thatstormed the shores, you know,
found shelter here.
We've been bringing so manycultures here, plus the native
american cultures have beenrubbing off on us as well, so
there's so much that's mixedinto this.
(21:28):
You go to europe, you know, yougo to england and the united
kingdom and they have theirbackstory.
It's pretty much somewhat, forthe most part, unchanged.
It's just goes back, you know,hundreds, hundreds of thousands
of years, because it's the samecultures.
Granted, they've been stormedby different countries and
things.
But here in the united statesit's, it's a.
It's kind of a flash in the pancompared to the rest of the
(21:50):
world with our history.
But we've had people pour infrom all over the world and
there's so many different thingsthat have have occurred here,
um, with with history andclear-cutting the forests and
hunting all these creatures tothe furthest corners, killing
off the mountain lions, thewolves and, you know, fearing
(22:12):
everything.
But you know, people stillwonder what's in the woods and
you have so many, again, so manycultures that have settled here
, that have brought theirtraditions and brought their own
folklore, and it's kind ofrubbed off on this country.
But then again you have allthese strange corners of the
east, especially the AppalachianMountain region where tons of
(22:33):
these stories occur.
Um, then you have, you know,river basins and all along the
east coast, you know, with thefishing industries and seeing
all these lake and sea monsters,and it's just, it's just really
fertile ground, and you look atso many people that live on the
east coast that a lot of thesestories have taken place in the
(22:55):
shadow of even new york.
A big red eye, a giant Bigfootcreature, less than 50 miles
away from New York City, amountain lion struck in the
Wilbercross Parkway in 2008,.
Thought to be an eastern cougar, ended up being a dispatched
male mountain lion that traveled1,500 miles from South Dakota,
(23:18):
struck and killed again on theWilbercross Parkway in
Connecticut, 60 miles from NewYork City.
A large population of peoplelive so close to all these
legends and all this.
These are amazing.
It's hard to not see that.
We all have that in ourbackyards.
Every state has their top fivecryptids and you know, we think
(23:42):
of, you know, we think ofSasquatch or Bigfoot.
We think of, you know,california, which sure,
washington, california lead thelist, but Ohio is in the top
five.
Florida is pretty big withBigfoot sightings, so you know
we have our own out here on theEast Coast.
So you know we have our own outhere on the East Coast seeing a
menagerie of mysterious beaststhat fly through the skies and
roam through our forests andswim through the waters as well.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Absolutely.
In Eastern cryptids, many ofthe creatures you cover have
roots that go deep, somestretching back before colonial
times.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
How did Native American oral history shape or
echo the sightings that we hearabout today?
Well, there's a lot of thatthat rubs off, of course.
You know people jump toSasquatch, which is on the West
Coast.
We wouldn't talk about that guybut you still have.
It's amazing, like you don'trealize how much Native American
history rubs off on anything.
American history rubs off onanything here in ohio ohio
(24:44):
itself is a native american termlake erie, um cuyahoga county.
So many different words comefrom from that.
But also their traditions,their oral traditions, kind of
cross over with ours as well andyou can look at, even like the
loveland frog.
The loveland frog is actuallythey had a similar creature that
they believed in, had a similarcreature that was a large
(25:05):
shunahook, which is a riverdemon that looked like a giant
frog.
That was their creature.
At how many frog or lizard typecreatures, whether reptile or
lizard, which are differentthings but people just describe
them differently all occur alongthrough the Ohio River Basin
(25:33):
and even through on the easterncoast as well, through like
Chesapeake Bay, and all throughthat area, these similar
creatures which are based on.
You know, native Americans hadtheir own beliefs in those
things, which is kind ofinteresting.
But of course you know nativeamericans had their own beliefs
in those things, which is kindof it's kind of interesting.
But of course you know we haveall kinds of other.
You know you have thepennsylvania dutch that brought
over, you know tommy knockersand you have all these other
strange creatures that that areborn from folklore, from from
(25:54):
other countries, and allthroughout, especially in the
south, I mean, you have.
I mean I always talk about thegulagichi from, uh, africa
basically, where you get yourcarolina blue.
People paint their doors andshutters blue because of toward
off evil spirits and people dothat now just because, well,
it's carolina blue.
That's what we do, but it'sit's because of that culture and
(26:17):
it's spread and people somepeople don't even know where it
comes from.
They just do it because theyknow they're supposed to.
But different cultures havereally embedded themselves in
this country and that's kind ofwhat makes it more interesting
to me than looking at the LochNess Monster.
Scottish history is Scottishhistory.
It's the Scottish.
They believed every body ofwater, even a puddle, had a
(26:38):
monster in it.
That's boring.
It's the Scottish.
They believed every body ofwater, even a puddle, had a
monster in it.
That's boring.
It's exciting but boring.
But here we're influenced by somany cultures at any point in
time and it just overlaps withour beliefs as Americans, or
whatever you want to call us,because we're a melting pot.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
That's a fantastic point, and you're right, that's
what makes our country sointeresting.
Now you write something in yourbook that really stuck with me
and I'm going to quote it here.
While it is difficult to ignorethe sheer number of eyewitness
accounts, we must also recognizethat there has never been one
caught or definitively proven toexist.
(27:16):
Now that contradiction, thattension, is at the heart of
cryptozoology.
Why do you think so many peoplecontinue to report sightings
despite the lack of physicalevidence?
Speaker 2 (27:28):
So I mean, it's folklore, it's what we believe,
it's kind of embedded in us.
You know, it's this belief inthese creatures that defy,
sometimes defy physics or defythe laws of nature.
I mean not all of them incryptozoology, so not all.
Cryptozoology is all thesefantastic creatures like Mothman
and Sheep, goatman and JerseyDevil and all those things.
(27:50):
Some of them were once livingcreatures like Thunderbirds or
you know Pteranodons, whichpeople?
I don't buy into that wholething, but anyway, you know.
Then you have the EasternCougar, you have the
Ivory-billed woodpecker, stufflike that.
That's real, that has existed.
The problem is, when you getinto creatures like Bigfoot,
(28:11):
even Mothman.
So Mothman and Jersey Devil andsome of those other creatures
are the one-offs, the ones thatI call the one-offs.
They defy physics, they defylaws of nature.
There's really no way thatthose things could exist in in
their form, because we wouldhave had.
We have to start somewhere.
You know the let alone, youknow finding a holotype, you
(28:34):
know the original creature, butthere's nothing to go on.
At least bigfoot, you can kindof sort of say well, you know,
it could be this, it could bethat, even though most of these
things are completely wrong,like gigantopithecus, I don't
know where, why they startedthat one.
That doesn't even make anysense.
Science says that it walked onall fours, not on, it wasn't
bipedal and it didn't even livein didn't even live in the
(28:56):
americas or what would becomethe Americas.
But it's difficult when you'retrying to take folklore, which
is basically word of mouth.
You're taking these legendsPeople saw this or they saw that
and you're trying to makescience out of it.
You're trying to find evidenceto support a statement.
(29:18):
It's not always that easy,especially when you have nothing
to go on.
So we're talking about Bigfoot.
You can find all the prints youwant, you can find hair, you
can find whatever, but until youfind a body or bones, none of
that really matters because youhave nothing to go on.
You have no original thing tosay.
Well, this is where we started,this is what we have.
Does this match?
(29:38):
Does this evolve?
From that?
Again, we go back to thedefinition, the search for and
study of animals whose existenceor survival is disputed or
unsubstantiated.
Sounds cute, um, it sounds likewe're all putting on our little
boonie hats and going out withour machetes and looking for all
this stuff and the, the woodsof the carolinas and the you
know appalachian trail orwhatever, wherever we're looking
(29:59):
.
But it's really, when peopletalk about the search for hidden
or missing animals, I don'tthink it's really, unfortunately
, the physical search anymore.
I think it's more thedocumentation of these legends,
of the total folklore which isactually.
There's a term for that, calledethno-knowledge.
Ethno-knowledge is the kind ofthe summary of all that we know
(30:21):
about cryptids and it's a sharedbelief system.
People believe these thingsexist Even though science says
quite the contrary.
The Mothman was a sandhillcrane, the UFO sightings with
the Mothman were weatherballoons that schools were
putting out at the time, theexact time that everything was
seen.
All these things can beexplained away by science, but
(30:41):
people don't want to listen,they don't want to hear that.
They're just like, oh yeah,swamp gas, right, it's going to
explain everything.
They ignore all that because itmesses with their beliefs.
It messes with that folklore.
That's what makes theethno-analysis that people
believe all these things.
It exists in a bubble outsideof, dare I say, at the rational
world, and that to me isfascinating, that there's this
(31:04):
firm belief, and and you know, Idon't want to, I don't want to
get anybody angry or mad oranything but to me.
It's very similar to peoplethat are really deeply religious
, that believe you know all, youknow creation and and and god
and all these other supernaturalthings but then they say, well,
bigfoot can't be real.
Wait, bigfoot can't be real.
But you got a guy out therewith a stick parting the seas
(31:26):
like hold on a second.
What is more fantastic here?
So it's.
It's weird how people pick andchoose what they want to believe
and how they believe it.
But so that's why I don't haveany problem with people having
these beliefs or or feeling thatway, because it's it's folklore
, it's culture, it's the same.
I don't attack people for theirreligion, their beliefs.
My god's better than your god.
(31:46):
That's just how.
That's how the world is.
There's there's not one god.
There's there's at least 150 ofthem for all these different
religions.
Well, how could there be somany different ones?
Because it's culture, it's whatthey believe, it's it's what
they were brought up on.
And the same with cryptozoologyand these cryptids.
It's a lot of these people.
They believe in it becausethat's what they were brought up
on.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
It's part of their culture it's really interesting
that you brought up religion,because, as you were speaking,
one thing that I was thinkingwas belief sounds an awful lot
like faith correct.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
And yeah, and I think a lot of people latch on to
these cryptids, because the samefor me, when, when I was
searching for answers, when Igot into the ghost field, it's a
search for spirituality, it's asearch for oneself, one, one's
place, one's belonging, um, weknow a higher thought, a higher
thinking, what's, what else isout there?
(32:37):
And it's it's weird.
When you get a new person inthe group, you'd interview them
and they would say, yeah, I hadan experience when I was a kid
I'm just trying to figure it outand I don't know.
Already, in the back of my mind, as soon as this kid gets
something, he's gone.
As soon as he sees something,he'll light a click on and he'll
leave the group, which is okay,okay and sure enough.
That's what happens, becausethey find their answer.
(32:57):
They find that personal thingthat they were looking for and
that's it.
They move on to their nexthobby and sometimes I think
that's what people are lookingfor.
They're looking for thatspiritual answer, you know.
And bigfoot, you know, you gota lot of people that believe in
the spirit of the wolf, you know, but then you have the spirit
of bigfoot.
It's the same, it's just adifferent creature.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Absolutely.
It's 2025.
We live in a world blanketed incameras, security footage,
trail cams, drones Everyonewalks around with a high
resolution video camera right intheir pocket.
So why, after all this time, isevery cryptid video still shaky
blurry?
Speaker 2 (33:39):
or inconclusive?
Well, the first thought.
I've been asked that questionquite a few times.
But the first thing I alwayslaugh because I think of how
many times I've been out hiking.
We're just walking and myphone's in my pocket and I go to
reach in my pocket to take apicture of this rabbit or snake
or whatever's at my feet and bythe time I get my phone out, get
my camera on and go to take apicture, it's gone.
(34:00):
And that happens quite a bitand I challenge anybody.
I mean a deer, okay, deer.
They stand there and stare atyou and kind of move their head
around, especially here on theEast Coast, because they don't
have any predators except forcars and people, but most
animals.
You're not going to be able toget a picture that fast unless
you're on your phone and thepeople that are on their phone
(34:21):
really aren't paying attentionanyway.
They're on TikTok and they'vegot their face planted in their
phone anyway.
But as far as most technologyyour ring cameras or your stuff
that's around your house it'snot really pointed out toward
anywhere, it's pointed at yourproperty.
So those really aren't going topick up anything.
It's amazing how they do pickup police ch, police chases and
(34:44):
people that are, you know, justtrying to escape on in cars, and
those things end up in courtall the time with uh car, uh,
police pursuits and things likethat, but they're not going to
pick up animals.
Uh, drones, like drones are,are good, but you you can only
use them in certaincircumstances for short periods
of time.
(35:05):
We've seen some drone videothrough the years that were, uh,
hoax.
We had the one where bigfootwas seen I forget where it was a
utah I think and there's justflying over this field and you
see this bigfoot running andthat came out and everyone's
like, oh, we finally got proof.
And like that's got to be ahoax.
And sure enough it was.
A was a hoax.
The guy laughed about it.
Everybody looked foolish.
(35:26):
It was reporting, saying it wasreal.
But yeah, just because we havetechnology, cameras, doesn't
mean that we're going to pick upmore of these creatures.
Folklore it's just stories.
So some people may be havingthese things happen to them, but
a lot of the times they justwant to be part of the story as
(35:50):
well.
So it's maybe there's not asmuch flesh and blood as you
think that's out there.
And of course you know youcould argue too that if you have
an intelligent creature andthey hear a little buzzing in
the sky, they're sure going tobe kind of cautious about
putting sticking their head outto get viewed on a on a camera.
But you know we've cameras,aren't you know new of matt,
(36:11):
moneymaker of the bfro, as he'sbeen using infrared cameras and
emf detectors and all kinds ofstuff out in the field trying to
find bigfoot for 40 some oddyears with no luck.
But yeah, we have more camerasnow than ever trail cameras used
all over the world for studyinganimals in the wild.
They've captured some amazingcreatures, such as albino
(36:34):
mountain lions, which has neverbeen seen in nature.
We've seen black pantherscaptured well north of where
there's usually thought to havebeen, but even then we got to
get out there and we got to usemore than technology to capture
these things.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
It's really interesting that you bring up
the idea about the deer, andwhen I think about it, it makes
perfect sense.
Even I, at different times,trying to pull out my phone and
take a picture of a rabbit orsome other animal or something,
and as soon as you pull it out,they're gone.
So that makes complete sense,thank you.
(37:10):
Now, to make it even morecomplicated, we now live in an
age of artificial intelligence,deep fakes, video manipulation,
ai-generated creatures none ofit's science fiction anymore.
Has that made it harder to takenew evidence seriously?
Or even harder to take newevidence seriously, or even
harder to trust what we'reseeing with our own two eyes?
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Well, 100%.
I mean I come from themid-1990s when I was first
starting out in the ghost field.
Everything that we used wasanalog.
I had a shoebox recorder, atape cassette recorder, a
microcassette recorder, 35millimeter camera, so you'd have
like 24 to 32 frames.
(37:51):
And you, you know the trick waswhen you took it to the photo
lab you would, when you go topick it up, you choose what you
wanted to take to pay for it.
The false positives are theones that were dark.
Oh, you're like, ah, I don'tlike that one, so I don't, I'm
not going to pay for it.
We even then had a lot of thingsyou could manipulate with film.
(38:12):
You could take the negativesand do things to them to make
new prints that had differentthings on them.
I mean, heck, you can go backto the early or the late 19th
century, the 1800s, with thatfamous picture of Mary Todd
Lincoln with Abraham Lincoln'sghost over her shoulder Spirit
photography.
You know, manipulation has beengoing on for hundreds of years.
(38:32):
It's not new.
The digital era brought allsorts of issues, all sorts of
problems with digitalmanipulation and of course we
adjusted.
We learned how to fight thatwith viewing the exif
information.
You know the metadata withinevery image.
You know, if you're going toshow me a picture, I need to see
(38:53):
that that metadata to verifywhat was changed or what wasn't
changed.
People got fooled all the time.
Look up the ufos over jerusalem.
That was a huge thing wheremultiple angles were manipulated
at the same exact time Reallyfooled a lot of people.
But now we're in this AI ageand it's tough.
(39:14):
It's hard and we're actuallynow at the point where AI isn't
exactly new anymore.
Early AI you get a picture andyou look at if it was a
Bigfootfoot.
It had six fingers and seventoes or stuff like that.
It was pretty obvious.
Well, now all that's prettymuch fixed.
It's really difficult.
There's only certain things youcan find now, like, um, when
(39:37):
you have people, that is one ofthe easiest.
There's a couple easy things tosee.
When you're looking at a videolike there's all these things on
tiktok, people don't realizeit's all AI.
These videos started with anews reporter lady and there's a
whole bunch of different videosof that.
Of course, the Bigfoot ones Ilove.
There's very little that we canreally connect with now.
(39:59):
There's no XF information,there's no metadata.
Now because you type it in, youget the product, there it is.
There's no metadata now,because you type it in, you get
the product.
There it is, there's your video.
There's no stream ofinformation in there anymore at
least that I know of so it's alot more difficult.
But on the same token, I thinkthis is the first time that this
(40:20):
stuff has come out and beenmore of negative than a positive
.
For us, digital was greatbecause, my gosh, it's tired of
spending all that money on onfilm and and money on prints and
development, having to waitlike a couple of days, like, my
goodness, can you imagine nowwaiting to get you take all
these cool pictures but youcan't see them for a couple of
days?
People lose their mindsnowadays.
(40:41):
That's just how it was back inthe good old black, when
everything was black and white.
It's just a matter of time untilwe're able to kind of like feed
these into a program and getyou know yes, this is
definitively ai and here's why.
Uh, you know, so we can kind ofexploit this technology against
itself.
I mean, it's, it's gonna happen.
I think if we're patient and wecontinue to utilize this
(41:03):
technology for the good that ithas, maybe we can focus on.
Let's get out there in thewoods and look for this stuff
again.
Let's go back to the way itused to be.
Let's take these documents ofthese people that were seeing
these things and interview them.
Stop worrying about trying toprove it to the world and let's
just solve it one case at a time.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
That's the first half of our journey with Dr Brian D
Parsons, researcher, author andchronicler of the Strange.
If you're intrigued by thecreatures we haven't caught and
the stories that won't die, staytuned.
Part two drops next week wherewe dive into Bigfoot belief and
(41:47):
the future of cryptid research.
Follow State of the Unknownwherever you listen, leave a
rating, share the show and helpus keep the folklore alive.
I'm Robert Barber.
Until next time, keep your eyesopen, because some things
refuse to stay hidden.
In the quiet woods east of the Mississippi, things
move just beyond the lightShadows, too large sounds with
no source, eyes in the dark thatblink and vanish.
People have names for themBeast of Bladenboro, mothman,
(00:23):
skunk, ape, grassman but forevery name there's a dozen
others that never made thepapers, just warnings passed
down, stories traded overfirelight.
Some say these creatures aremyths.
Folktales stitched from fearand isolation.
(00:44):
Are myths, folktales stitchedfrom fear and isolation.
Others say they're real fleshand blood, just clever enough to
stay out of reach.
So how do we explain thethousands of sightings, the
blurry photos, the midnightscreams, the missing livestock?
If these things walk among us,why haven't we found one?
(01:05):
Today we begin a conversationwith someone who spent decades
chasing that question.
(01:30):
Dr Brian D Parsons has beenchasing the unexplained for over
25 years.
He's a paranormal investigator,researcher and former host of
the Paranormal News Insider,which ran for more than 500
episodes.
He's also the author of ahandful of nonfiction and
fiction books about theparanormal and cryptozoology.
(01:53):
His latest work, easternCryptids, explores the strange
creatures and elusive legendseast of the Mississippi River,
from the Dover Demon to theSnallygaster.
East of the Mississippi River,from the Dover Demon to the
Snallygaster.
Today this is part one of ourconversation where we talk about
what drives a search, why thesestories persist and whether
(02:14):
cryptids are more than justshadows in the woods.
This is the story of creaturesthat won't go away, despite the
odds, despite the questions,despite the silence.
I'm your host, robert Barber,and this is State of the Unknown
.
Dr Parsons, thank you so muchfor joining me today.
(02:39):
It's an honor to have you onthe show.
For those who don't know, drBrian D Parsons is a seasoned
researcher with over 25 years inthe field of the unexplained,
and author of the book EasternCryptids, which we'll be talking
about today.
He's also the former host ofthe long-running Paranormal News
Insider.
Really excited to have you here.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
I appreciate it.
I love podcasts.
I love being on either side ofthe mic, either hosting or being
a guest, but I really love yourcontent.
Every episode is enthralling,so I'm even more excited to be
your first guest.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Thank you so much.
I really do appreciate that.
Dr Parsons, before we get intothe book, I'd love to give
listeners a sense of who you are.
You've been chasing the unknownfor more than 25 years.
What first drew you to theworld of cryptids in the
Unexplained?
Was there a moment or maybe astory that made you realize this
(03:37):
was more than just a passinginterest?
Speaker 2 (03:40):
So for a lot of people I've met they have these
exciting origin stories wherethey were in the woods and they
heard a strange noise and theysee a fleeting shadow.
Or they're in their house andthey see an old woman standing
in front of them.
I don't have any of that stuff.
I just actually was researchinglocal urban legends when I was
in college, first went tocollege and you know the whole
(04:03):
legend tripping thing, which I'msure we've all done.
I'm sure even the younger kidsare getting involved in that
stuff, and I was kind of on theother end of that.
I thought that some of thesestories were very foolish and
kind of full of it too with someof the things.
But I was really interested inhow people believed those
(04:23):
stories so adamantly and if youasked a younger guy or you asked
an older person they would tellyou the same exact story and I
thought that was reallyinteresting.
So I kind of got drawn inthrough the folklore piece and
then I'm a master of the rabbithole, so I get lost all the time
and I started looking at onepiece which was ghost and how,
(04:46):
how this supposed ghost workedand I wanted to figure out if,
is that really real?
Is that possible?
And next thing I know I wake upand I'm running a paranormal a
few months later and I didn'thave any intention of doing that
and that was back in themid-1990s, so about 1996, I
don't remember exact dates.
People always ask me.
I'm like I don, I didn't know Iwas going to be doing it.
It just kind of happens.
(05:09):
And my goal was to kind offigure out what was going on
behind these things and knowingfull well that there had been
scientists at that point 130years Now it's been over 140
years back in the age ofspiritualism, 1882, with the
Society for Psychical Research,that were digging into this
stuff.
So it wasn't like I was goingto figure anything out, I just
(05:31):
wanted to know kind of formyself.
And I think that's where a lotof people are at.
They're looking for their ownpersonal answers and admittedly
that's where I was at when Ifirst started trying to sort
past these local urban legends.
But now these ghost stories,these ghost events were actually
happening to people and thatwas, you know, again mid-1990s.
(05:52):
This was the age of the.
The internet was getting big.
You know, back then we had weactually had yellow pages for
the internet, worldwide web,yellow pages you can get in a
bookstore.
But then you know, things gotbig with, got big with ghost
hunters and everybody became aghost hunter.
And you know I branched outinto cryptozoology and UFOs and
(06:13):
I've really fallen more in lovewith cryptozoology for a list of
reasons, but that's kind of howI got my start.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Okay, you're a researcher, a paranormal
investigator and a longtimepodcast host and broadcaster.
How has your approach evolvedover the years?
Has your mindset shifted?
Your skepticism, belief?
The way you weigh a good story.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
It's funny because I was thinking about this a few
weeks ago I was at a UFOconvention and somebody kind of
asked me the same question and Iwas like you know, it's funny
because I feel like I've comefull circle.
I'm right back where where Istarted out, which is weird
because I started looking aturban legends and folklore, and
that's pretty much what easterncryptids is it's.
It's a book of of legends, of,you know, these urban legends
(07:01):
that have become folklore allover the East Coast.
But when I got into the ghostfield, admittedly, I started to
believe and I started to kind ofrub off on the people that were
around me and people telling meoh, ghosts are real, this is
real and this technology is real, and so I started to believe
all that.
So I kind of I finally camearound.
(07:23):
It took me a little little,admittedly a little longer than
I wish it would have, until Irealized I was kind of falling
for all these tricks,subjectivity, um, situations
that were going on, and then, uh, you know, I was afraid to kind
of part ways with that becauseit became part of who I was with
this paranormal group.
I was surrounded by people whobelieved and I was starting not
(07:48):
to believe, and so it was kindof a hard struggle.
But then you know, kind oflittle by little you kind of
come out of that and you kind ofyou try to get people to be
more balanced.
And it's at that point where Iknow a lot of other people out
there, a lot of otherinvestigators, that turned and
you know you could say like aSkywalker turn, going from the
(08:10):
light side to the dark side,going from I believe, to I
absolutely hate you people forfooling me, and now I'm going to
become that skeptic with thedark cloak and take you all down
.
I didn't do that I could haveand I kind of felt like that
(08:31):
because I felt betrayed to anextent.
But that was my fault, and soI've kind of found my foothold
and my foothold is trying asbest as I can to be balanced in
the middle.
It's so easy to write content orwrite books or to sit here and
tell you that Bigfoot is realand all of these things are real
beyond the shadow of a doubt,because I can't and it's easy to
do that and I could easily dothat to get a lot of fans become
(08:52):
famous, get on a TV show, butit's also just as easy to be a
skeptic and say this is all notreal.
There's no bodies, there's noevidence, there's no.
None of this stuff is real,it's all just.
You know, folklore, it's justpart of our culture.
But the hardest part to do isto stay evenly keeled on both of
(09:12):
those topics and both of thoseends and kind of be that speaker
in the middle and say here'sthe story but here's the other
side.
It's up to you to believe.
And that's where I've reallytried to be since, really, my
first cryptid book, which wasback in 2014,.
A handbook for the amateurcryptozoologist.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
I think you really touched on an important point
right there the idea ofimpartiality and objectivity,
and that's definitely somethingthat we try to do here.
With State of the Unknown, welay out the facts, lay out the
story as known and let thelistener make up their own mind,
rather than telling them whatis quote-unquote true or not.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah, you can't be judgmental either way, you can't
totally agree with somebody.
It's like, you know, when thepolice take a report, you know
they're not going to say, oh,absolutely, that guy's a
criminal.
Or absolutely you have no cluewhat you saw.
People are bad witnesses.
You, you, you know, youprobably saw a blue jumpsuit.
You're saying it's red.
You know they're not going todo that, they're not going to
take sides Although sometimesthey do.
(10:14):
But you, you know, as a, as aresearcher or as an investigator
, you have to take a neutralstance and unfortunately, I've
seen it a hundred times wherethey don't you know, or even you
know.
Tv shows are a good examplewhere they're people like I
spend my whole entire liferesearching and investigating
ghosts.
I finally made it on the tvshow.
(10:36):
I see a ghost and my firstreaction is to scream at the top
of my lungs dude run.
I just watched that episode theother night I know exactly what
you're talking about why in theworld would you you wasted your
whole entire life to get to thatpoint just to do that for
entertainment, um, or you knowthese, these guys out in the
woods looking for bigfoot.
You know, finding bigfoot,which is, they're not finding
(10:59):
bigfoot.
Um, they're looking for stories.
They're looking for moreadditional things, the folklore,
but they it's all subjectiveand it's frustrating because
we're not supposed to be puttingourselves in the middle of
these things.
We're the documentarians.
We're supposed to be takingnotes and trying to figure these
things out, finding evidence,finding information, documenting
for the future, not insertingourselves in there so we could
(11:23):
be on TV.
So it gets a little frustrating.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
I'm sure it does Now, after all that experience, what
keeps you coming back?
What still pulls you in?
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Well, I would say, you know, finding these
creatures, but I don't thinkwe're going to find any of these
creatures really.
But I just I really love the.
This is going to sound weird,but I love the folklore.
I love the fact that so manypeople believe these things,
even blindly.
You know, so many researchershave never seen a Bigfoot, but
(11:54):
they still search for Bigfoot,they're still looking and they
believe in it and it's justamazing that that kind of
mentality continues to bringpeople back.
But I enjoy, you know, I enjoyjust sitting back chewing
popcorn and watching the wholething.
Really it's entertaining to me.
And the ghost field wasfrustrating because I'm trying
to uncover answers, I'm tryingto create new methodologies of
(12:15):
investigation, and people justdidn't get it.
They didn't care, they wantedthe easy way out.
The science takes work.
It's not easy.
Nothing is handed to anyscientist.
You have to work hard for itand they don't care.
They just want to be sitting ina circle and have something
happen to them and they jump upand down and put it on youtube.
That's not me, you know.
(12:36):
I want to help, I want to dothings, uncover things.
But you know, in cryptozoologythere's not really a whole lot
you can do.
You know we're not.
You know you'll look at thedefinition of cryptozoology
right the search for and studyof animals whose existence or
survival is disputed orunsubstantiated.
You could tell.
I've said that a billion times.
We got it memorized so that youknow search for hidden or
(12:58):
missing animals is misleading.
You know, when this firststarted out as a, as a kind of
an area of I don't know, youcan't really call it, it's not
science, it's not.
You know it's cryptozoology.
But it has nothing to do withzoology.
It's nothing to do with science, it's just a pursuit.
When, believe it or not, a lotof people say well, bernard
Houvelman is the father ofcryptozoology.
(13:19):
No, ivan T Sanderson was thefirst one to say it, back in the
mid-1940s I think it was 1946and 47, he wrote a couple of
articles about sea monsters andused the term cryptozoology.
Then Bernard Hovemans, a fewyears later, put it in a book
and it got a lot of traction.
Then it's few and far inbetween.
(13:39):
The whole concept ofcryptozoology was you know, it
wasn't these fantastic creaturesas much as it was sea monsters
and potential dinosaurs stillbeing alive.
There were people that weregoing out there and looking for
these things, but it was stillthe collection of folklore and I
think now it's become more ofthe collection of folklore that
it is actually getting put inyour strap and your boots on and
(14:01):
getting out there in the wildand looking.
Although some people still dothat, it's few and far in
between.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Really interesting background information.
Now let's talk about Easterncryptids.
This isn't just a list ofstrange sightings.
It feels like the culminationof years of work.
How long did it take to compileand research this?
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Was it a fresh project or something that grew
out of older investigations.
So pretty much my most popularbook is my 2014 book Handbook
for the Amateur Cryptozoologist,with a second edition in 2015,.
Because I had Loren Colemanwanted to get involved with that
book.
He voted it in the top 10 ofcryptid books in 2014.
(14:47):
So wrote a forward for it.
I released a second edition in2015 and this book is still
getting me library presentationsacross the state of ohio, where
I reside, and I kind of feltlike I'm missing the mark here.
If I'm still getting stuff aboutcryptozoology and I'm still
talking about cryptozoology, Ineed to write about
cryptozoology.
Granted, uh, after 2017, Iwrote a book, a handbook, for
(15:09):
the amateur ufo investigator.
I focused back on writingfiction and I really wanted to
get fiction out.
My first two first two novelscame out last year, which is
crazy that actually it took meeight years to write one and
took me one year to write thesecond, and they both got
published within the samecalendar year, which is
(15:29):
mind-boggling.
But after that I decided Ireally need to finally write
something and this is going tosound crazy, but I actually
wrote this book in about sevenmonths, which sounds bad because
people are like oh, you justrushed this together.
But, like you said, I've beenresearching cryptids since about
(15:52):
2006-ish.
I did my first presentation in2009,.
But I was researching cryptidslong before that and compiling
all this data.
And compiling all this data, Idid a podcast 534 episodes with
Paranormal News, which the firstpart was always cryptozoology.
So I had over 1,300 pages ofnotes that I had to fall back on
(16:20):
, including links and storiesthat have happened since 2008.
And links from doing researchfor library presentations.
So I already had done a lot oflegwork, but my goal with this
book was to strip away almostall of that and just focus on
what really happens.
If I could go back in time andreally document these stories,
whether they happened in 1773 or1925 or 1965 or 2008 or
(16:46):
whatever how can I approach thatin a way, that's, I can
carefully research these storiesin a way that I'm not being
fooled by the media who, youknow, early newspapers, even
newspapers into the 1990s wouldfabricate things or embellish
things to sell newspapers, tosell stories or to get other you
(17:08):
know larger newspapers to, toget that story syndicated.
So they could, they could getcredit.
So, yeah, and how do youdisseminate that?
And then, of course, peoplemake horrible witnesses.
People like to embellish things, they like to get attention.
So how do you see through those?
But it wasn't my job to saywhether these are real or not.
(17:31):
It was trying to find the best,clearest picture of what really
took place and put that in thebook, and I went one by one, I
didn't jump around.
I started at the beginning ofthis book and I researched each
individual thing until I wasdone.
So I had literally 30 tabs ofedge open, 30 tabs of Chrome
(17:53):
open, with newspaper clippingsand all these links, and
following the again the rabbithole down, well, here's this.
Where did this person get thisinformation?
Oh, here and here.
Well, let me go to thoseresources.
Where did those people gettheir information?
And so on and so forth.
Just traveling through time toget all that information, which
(18:16):
you would think it would take alot of time.
And on top of that, though, Iwas working a seasonal job, so I
ended up taking about threemonths off.
So this was for three and ahalf months.
This was my full time job, so Iwas working a lot of hours on
this book, and it's also a greatthing because knowing I had a
date to go back to work in thespring I had a drop dead date
(18:41):
that I had to really get thisbook done and it really made it
exciting to to kind of relearnall these things.
And I think that was part of ittoo was since I wrote handbook
for the amateur cryptozoologistsand I'm doing all these library
presentations.
I'm I'll tell us about theLoveland frog.
Okay, loveland frog, is this,this and this?
And I tell the same story.
But sometimes I kind of forgetthings or maybe I put the wrong
(19:02):
thing in there and so I've had afew people say well, that's not
what happened and this happened.
I'm like you know what, you'reright, and I'm kind of
forgetting because I'm justrehashing the same thing.
So I kind of went back to thedrawing board and re-researched
all these things from scratchand again very carefully
researched and amazingly, whenyou do this, sometimes you find
(19:23):
mistakes.
So I found a lot of mistakesthat people had written in books
and once you you could find theoriginal book, because all the
books after it have that mistakein it.
So people are copying andpasting instead of really doing
that research.
And I found a lot of that,which is kind of scary because
some of these are really bigresearchers, big writers out
there.
So that's the kind of stuffthat I dug up and my goal for
(19:47):
each one was to learn somethingthat I'd never known or uncover
something that was not includedin any other major resource or
any book that I'd read, to kindof do something new and
different.
You know, being in Ohio, Icould have easily written just
an Ohio book, which has beendone about a dozen times, and
that's only a few small things.
(20:09):
So you've got to do a lot ofresearch for each one.
But then do I do a whole UnitedStates one which you know.
Dozens of cryptids which Ithink I had over hundred and
over a hundred.
That I started with, but Ithink I think there's only like
70 titles or 70 titles, but Iput a few at the end which
didn't get included, but I kindof summarized so it was well
(20:30):
over a hundred.
Um, that would have probablydoubled that if I would have
done the whole united states.
So you know it would have beena blurb or a page.
I wanted to do more than that.
So that's why I chose easterncryptids, east of the
Mississippi, which amazingly, 26states exist east of the
Mississippi, so it's more thanhalf of the country You're
counting right now.
I can tell.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Eastern North America has always had a distinct kind
of mythology Dense woods,forgotten roads and towns where
stories linger longer than names.
Why do you think this region inparticular is such fertile
ground for cryptid legends?
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Well, it's the oldest part of our country for us, you
know, for the Europeans thatstormed the shores, you know,
found shelter here.
We've been bringing so manycultures here, plus the native
american cultures have beenrubbing off on us as well, so
there's so much that's mixedinto this.
(21:28):
You go to europe, you know, yougo to england and the united
kingdom and they have theirbackstory.
It's pretty much somewhat, forthe most part, unchanged.
It's just goes back, you know,hundreds, hundreds of thousands
of years, because it's the samecultures.
Granted, they've been stormedby different countries and
things.
But here in the united statesit's, it's a.
It's kind of a flash in the pancompared to the rest of the
(21:50):
world with our history.
But we've had people pour infrom all over the world and
there's so many different thingsthat have have occurred here,
um, with with history andclear-cutting the forests and
hunting all these creatures tothe furthest corners, killing
off the mountain lions, thewolves and, you know, fearing
(22:12):
everything.
But you know, people stillwonder what's in the woods and
you have so many, again, so manycultures that have settled here
, that have brought theirtraditions and brought their own
folklore, and it's kind ofrubbed off on this country.
But then again you have allthese strange corners of the
east, especially the AppalachianMountain region where tons of
(22:33):
these stories occur.
Um, then you have, you know,river basins and all along the
east coast, you know, with thefishing industries and seeing
all these lake and sea monsters,and it's just, it's just really
fertile ground, and you look atso many people that live on the
east coast that a lot of thesestories have taken place in the
(22:55):
shadow of even new york.
A big red eye, a giant Bigfootcreature, less than 50 miles
away from New York City, amountain lion struck in the
Wilbercross Parkway in 2008,.
Thought to be an eastern cougar, ended up being a dispatched
male mountain lion that traveled1,500 miles from South Dakota,
(23:18):
struck and killed again on theWilbercross Parkway in
Connecticut, 60 miles from NewYork City.
A large population of peoplelive so close to all these
legends and all this.
These are amazing.
It's hard to not see that.
We all have that in ourbackyards.
Every state has their top fivecryptids and you know, we think
(23:42):
of, you know, we think ofSasquatch or Bigfoot.
We think of, you know,california, which sure,
washington, california lead thelist, but Ohio is in the top
five.
Florida is pretty big withBigfoot sightings, so you know
we have our own out here on theEast Coast.
So you know we have our own outhere on the East Coast seeing a
menagerie of mysterious beaststhat fly through the skies and
roam through our forests andswim through the waters as well.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Absolutely.
In Eastern cryptids, many ofthe creatures you cover have
roots that go deep, somestretching back before colonial
times.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
How did Native American oral history shape or
echo the sightings that we hearabout today?
Well, there's a lot of thatthat rubs off, of course.
You know people jump toSasquatch, which is on the West
Coast.
We wouldn't talk about that guybut you still have.
It's amazing, like you don'trealize how much Native American
history rubs off on anything.
American history rubs off onanything here in ohio ohio
(24:44):
itself is a native american termlake erie, um cuyahoga county.
So many different words comefrom from that.
But also their traditions,their oral traditions, kind of
cross over with ours as well andyou can look at, even like the
loveland frog.
The loveland frog is actuallythey had a similar creature that
they believed in, had a similarcreature that was a large
(25:05):
shunahook, which is a riverdemon that looked like a giant
frog.
That was their creature.
At how many frog or lizard typecreatures, whether reptile or
lizard, which are differentthings but people just describe
them differently all occur alongthrough the Ohio River Basin
(25:33):
and even through on the easterncoast as well, through like
Chesapeake Bay, and all throughthat area, these similar
creatures which are based on.
You know, native Americans hadtheir own beliefs in those
things, which is kind ofinteresting.
But of course you know nativeamericans had their own beliefs
in those things, which is kindof it's kind of interesting.
But of course you know we haveall kinds of other.
You know you have thepennsylvania dutch that brought
over, you know tommy knockersand you have all these other
strange creatures that that areborn from folklore, from from
(25:54):
other countries, and allthroughout, especially in the
south, I mean, you have.
I mean I always talk about thegulagichi from, uh, africa
basically, where you get yourcarolina blue.
People paint their doors andshutters blue because of toward
off evil spirits and people dothat now just because, well,
it's carolina blue.
That's what we do, but it'sit's because of that culture and
(26:17):
it's spread and people somepeople don't even know where it
comes from.
They just do it because theyknow they're supposed to.
But different cultures havereally embedded themselves in
this country and that's kind ofwhat makes it more interesting
to me than looking at the LochNess Monster.
Scottish history is Scottishhistory.
It's the Scottish.
They believed every body ofwater, even a puddle, had a
(26:38):
monster in it.
That's boring.
It's the Scottish.
They believed every body ofwater, even a puddle, had a
monster in it.
That's boring.
It's exciting but boring.
But here we're influenced by somany cultures at any point in
time and it just overlaps withour beliefs as Americans, or
whatever you want to call us,because we're a melting pot.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
That's a fantastic point, and you're right, that's
what makes our country sointeresting.
Now you write something in yourbook that really stuck with me
and I'm going to quote it here.
While it is difficult to ignorethe sheer number of eyewitness
accounts, we must also recognizethat there has never been one
caught or definitively proven toexist.
(27:16):
Now that contradiction, thattension, is at the heart of
cryptozoology.
Why do you think so many peoplecontinue to report sightings
despite the lack of physicalevidence?
Speaker 2 (27:28):
So I mean, it's folklore, it's what we believe,
it's kind of embedded in us.
You know, it's this belief inthese creatures that defy,
sometimes defy physics or defythe laws of nature.
I mean not all of them incryptozoology, so not all.
Cryptozoology is all thesefantastic creatures like Mothman
and Sheep, goatman and JerseyDevil and all those things.
(27:50):
Some of them were once livingcreatures like Thunderbirds or
you know Pteranodons, whichpeople?
I don't buy into that wholething, but anyway, you know.
Then you have the EasternCougar, you have the
Ivory-billed woodpecker, stufflike that.
That's real, that has existed.
The problem is, when you getinto creatures like Bigfoot,
(28:11):
even Mothman.
So Mothman and Jersey Devil andsome of those other creatures
are the one-offs, the ones thatI call the one-offs.
They defy physics, they defylaws of nature.
There's really no way thatthose things could exist in in
their form, because we wouldhave had.
We have to start somewhere.
You know the let alone, youknow finding a holotype, you
(28:34):
know the original creature, butthere's nothing to go on.
At least bigfoot, you can kindof sort of say well, you know,
it could be this, it could bethat, even though most of these
things are completely wrong,like gigantopithecus, I don't
know where, why they startedthat one.
That doesn't even make anysense.
Science says that it walked onall fours, not on, it wasn't
bipedal and it didn't even livein didn't even live in the
(28:56):
americas or what would becomethe Americas.
But it's difficult when you'retrying to take folklore, which
is basically word of mouth.
You're taking these legendsPeople saw this or they saw that
and you're trying to makescience out of it.
You're trying to find evidenceto support a statement.
(29:18):
It's not always that easy,especially when you have nothing
to go on.
So we're talking about Bigfoot.
You can find all the prints youwant, you can find hair, you
can find whatever, but until youfind a body or bones, none of
that really matters because youhave nothing to go on.
You have no original thing tosay.
Well, this is where we started,this is what we have.
Does this match?
(29:38):
Does this evolve?
From that?
Again, we go back to thedefinition, the search for and
study of animals whose existenceor survival is disputed or
unsubstantiated.
Sounds cute, um, it sounds likewe're all putting on our little
boonie hats and going out withour machetes and looking for all
this stuff and the, the woodsof the carolinas and the you
know appalachian trail orwhatever, wherever we're looking
(29:59):
.
But it's really, when peopletalk about the search for hidden
or missing animals, I don'tthink it's really, unfortunately
, the physical search anymore.
I think it's more thedocumentation of these legends,
of the total folklore which isactually.
There's a term for that, calledethno-knowledge.
Ethno-knowledge is the kind ofthe summary of all that we know
(30:21):
about cryptids and it's a sharedbelief system.
People believe these thingsexist Even though science says
quite the contrary.
The Mothman was a sandhillcrane, the UFO sightings with
the Mothman were weatherballoons that schools were
putting out at the time, theexact time that everything was
seen.
All these things can beexplained away by science, but
(30:41):
people don't want to listen,they don't want to hear that.
They're just like, oh yeah,swamp gas, right, it's going to
explain everything.
They ignore all that because itmesses with their beliefs.
It messes with that folklore.
That's what makes theethno-analysis that people
believe all these things.
It exists in a bubble outsideof, dare I say, at the rational
world, and that to me isfascinating, that there's this
(31:04):
firm belief, and and you know, Idon't want to, I don't want to
get anybody angry or mad oranything but to me.
It's very similar to peoplethat are really deeply religious
, that believe you know all, youknow creation and and and god
and all these other supernaturalthings but then they say, well,
bigfoot can't be real.
Wait, bigfoot can't be real.
But you got a guy out therewith a stick parting the seas
(31:26):
like hold on a second.
What is more fantastic here?
So it's.
It's weird how people pick andchoose what they want to believe
and how they believe it.
But so that's why I don't haveany problem with people having
these beliefs or or feeling thatway, because it's it's folklore
, it's culture, it's the same.
I don't attack people for theirreligion, their beliefs.
My god's better than your god.
(31:46):
That's just how.
That's how the world is.
There's there's not one god.
There's there's at least 150 ofthem for all these different
religions.
Well, how could there be somany different ones?
Because it's culture, it's whatthey believe, it's it's what
they were brought up on.
And the same with cryptozoologyand these cryptids.
It's a lot of these people.
They believe in it becausethat's what they were brought up
on.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
It's part of their culture it's really interesting
that you brought up religion,because, as you were speaking,
one thing that I was thinkingwas belief sounds an awful lot
like faith correct.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
And yeah, and I think a lot of people latch on to
these cryptids, because the samefor me, when, when I was
searching for answers, when Igot into the ghost field, it's a
search for spirituality, it's asearch for oneself, one, one's
place, one's belonging, um, weknow a higher thought, a higher
thinking, what's, what else isout there?
(32:37):
And it's it's weird.
When you get a new person inthe group, you'd interview them
and they would say, yeah, I hadan experience when I was a kid
I'm just trying to figure it outand I don't know.
Already, in the back of my mind, as soon as this kid gets
something, he's gone.
As soon as he sees something,he'll light a click on and he'll
leave the group, which is okay,okay and sure enough.
That's what happens, becausethey find their answer.
(32:57):
They find that personal thingthat they were looking for and
that's it.
They move on to their nexthobby and sometimes I think
that's what people are lookingfor.
They're looking for thatspiritual answer, you know.
And bigfoot, you know, you gota lot of people that believe in
the spirit of the wolf, you know, but then you have the spirit
of bigfoot.
It's the same, it's just adifferent creature.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Absolutely.
It's 2025.
We live in a world blanketed incameras, security footage,
trail cams, drones Everyonewalks around with a high
resolution video camera right intheir pocket.
So why, after all this time, isevery cryptid video still shaky
blurry?
Speaker 2 (33:39):
or inconclusive?
Well, the first thought.
I've been asked that questionquite a few times.
But the first thing I alwayslaugh because I think of how
many times I've been out hiking.
We're just walking and myphone's in my pocket and I go to
reach in my pocket to take apicture of this rabbit or snake
or whatever's at my feet and bythe time I get my phone out, get
my camera on and go to take apicture, it's gone.
(34:00):
And that happens quite a bitand I challenge anybody.
I mean a deer, okay, deer.
They stand there and stare atyou and kind of move their head
around, especially here on theEast Coast, because they don't
have any predators except forcars and people, but most
animals.
You're not going to be able toget a picture that fast unless
you're on your phone and thepeople that are on their phone
(34:21):
really aren't paying attentionanyway.
They're on TikTok and they'vegot their face planted in their
phone anyway.
But as far as most technologyyour ring cameras or your stuff
that's around your house it'snot really pointed out toward
anywhere, it's pointed at yourproperty.
So those really aren't going topick up anything.
It's amazing how they do pickup police ch, police chases and
(34:44):
people that are, you know, justtrying to escape on in cars, and
those things end up in courtall the time with uh car, uh,
police pursuits and things likethat, but they're not going to
pick up animals.
Uh, drones, like drones are,are good, but you you can only
use them in certaincircumstances for short periods
of time.
(35:05):
We've seen some drone videothrough the years that were, uh,
hoax.
We had the one where bigfootwas seen I forget where it was a
utah I think and there's justflying over this field and you
see this bigfoot running andthat came out and everyone's
like, oh, we finally got proof.
And like that's got to be ahoax.
And sure enough it was.
A was a hoax.
The guy laughed about it.
Everybody looked foolish.
(35:26):
It was reporting, saying it wasreal.
But yeah, just because we havetechnology, cameras, doesn't
mean that we're going to pick upmore of these creatures.
Folklore it's just stories.
So some people may be havingthese things happen to them, but
a lot of the times they justwant to be part of the story as
(35:50):
well.
So it's maybe there's not asmuch flesh and blood as you
think that's out there.
And of course you know youcould argue too that if you have
an intelligent creature andthey hear a little buzzing in
the sky, they're sure going tobe kind of cautious about
putting sticking their head outto get viewed on a on a camera.
But you know we've cameras,aren't you know new of matt,
(36:11):
moneymaker of the bfro, as he'sbeen using infrared cameras and
emf detectors and all kinds ofstuff out in the field trying to
find bigfoot for 40 some oddyears with no luck.
But yeah, we have more camerasnow than ever trail cameras used
all over the world for studyinganimals in the wild.
They've captured some amazingcreatures, such as albino
(36:34):
mountain lions, which has neverbeen seen in nature.
We've seen black pantherscaptured well north of where
there's usually thought to havebeen, but even then we got to
get out there and we got to usemore than technology to capture
these things.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
It's really interesting that you bring up
the idea about the deer, andwhen I think about it, it makes
perfect sense.
Even I, at different times,trying to pull out my phone and
take a picture of a rabbit orsome other animal or something,
and as soon as you pull it out,they're gone.
So that makes complete sense,thank you.
(37:10):
Now, to make it even morecomplicated, we now live in an
age of artificial intelligence,deep fakes, video manipulation,
ai-generated creatures none ofit's science fiction anymore.
Has that made it harder to takenew evidence seriously?
Or even harder to take newevidence seriously, or even
harder to trust what we'reseeing with our own two eyes?
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Well, 100%.
I mean I come from themid-1990s when I was first
starting out in the ghost field.
Everything that we used wasanalog.
I had a shoebox recorder, atape cassette recorder, a
microcassette recorder, 35millimeter camera, so you'd have
like 24 to 32 frames.
(37:51):
And you, you know the trick waswhen you took it to the photo
lab you would, when you go topick it up, you choose what you
wanted to take to pay for it.
The false positives are theones that were dark.
Oh, you're like, ah, I don'tlike that one, so I don't, I'm
not going to pay for it.
We even then had a lot of thingsyou could manipulate with film.
(38:12):
You could take the negativesand do things to them to make
new prints that had differentthings on them.
I mean, heck, you can go backto the early or the late 19th
century, the 1800s, with thatfamous picture of Mary Todd
Lincoln with Abraham Lincoln'sghost over her shoulder Spirit
photography.
You know, manipulation has beengoing on for hundreds of years.
(38:32):
It's not new.
The digital era brought allsorts of issues, all sorts of
problems with digitalmanipulation and of course we
adjusted.
We learned how to fight thatwith viewing the exif
information.
You know the metadata withinevery image.
You know, if you're going toshow me a picture, I need to see
(38:53):
that that metadata to verifywhat was changed or what wasn't
changed.
People got fooled all the time.
Look up the ufos over jerusalem.
That was a huge thing wheremultiple angles were manipulated
at the same exact time Reallyfooled a lot of people.
But now we're in this AI ageand it's tough.
(39:14):
It's hard and we're actuallynow at the point where AI isn't
exactly new anymore.
Early AI you get a picture andyou look at if it was a
Bigfootfoot.
It had six fingers and seventoes or stuff like that.
It was pretty obvious.
Well, now all that's prettymuch fixed.
It's really difficult.
There's only certain things youcan find now, like, um, when
(39:37):
you have people, that is one ofthe easiest.
There's a couple easy things tosee.
When you're looking at a videolike there's all these things on
tiktok, people don't realizeit's all AI.
These videos started with anews reporter lady and there's a
whole bunch of different videosof that.
Of course, the Bigfoot ones Ilove.
There's very little that we canreally connect with now.
(39:59):
There's no XF information,there's no metadata.
Now because you type it in, youget the product, there it is.
There's no metadata now,because you type it in, you get
the product.
There it is, there's your video.
There's no stream ofinformation in there anymore at
least that I know of so it's alot more difficult.
But on the same token, I thinkthis is the first time that this
(40:20):
stuff has come out and beenmore of negative than a positive
.
For us, digital was greatbecause, my gosh, it's tired of
spending all that money on onfilm and and money on prints and
development, having to waitlike a couple of days, like, my
goodness, can you imagine nowwaiting to get you take all
these cool pictures but youcan't see them for a couple of
days?
People lose their mindsnowadays.
(40:41):
That's just how it was back inthe good old black, when
everything was black and white.
It's just a matter of time untilwe're able to kind of like feed
these into a program and getyou know yes, this is
definitively ai and here's why.
Uh, you know, so we can kind ofexploit this technology against
itself.
I mean, it's, it's gonna happen.
I think if we're patient and wecontinue to utilize this
(41:03):
technology for the good that ithas, maybe we can focus on.
Let's get out there in thewoods and look for this stuff
again.
Let's go back to the way itused to be.
Let's take these documents ofthese people that were seeing
these things and interview them.
Stop worrying about trying toprove it to the world and let's
just solve it one case at a time.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
That's the first half of our journey with Dr Brian D
Parsons, researcher, author andchronicler of the Strange.
If you're intrigued by thecreatures we haven't caught and
the stories that won't die, staytuned.
Part two drops next week wherewe dive into Bigfoot belief and
(41:47):
the future of cryptid research.
Follow State of the Unknownwherever you listen, leave a
rating, share the show and helpus keep the folklore alive.
I'm Robert Barber.
Until next time, keep your eyesopen, because some things
refuse to stay hidden.
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