CLASSICS (Bonus Episode): Henry Franzoni

This "classic" episode is being re-released in memoriam of Henry Franzoni, a pioneering sasquatch researcher who recently passed away. Originally published in December of 2019, this conversation with Henry offers some insight into his perspectives, his humor, and his kindness. He will be missed. 

Get Henry's book "In The Spirit of Seatco" here: https://a.co/d/aFa6cgE

Get Henry's book "Failing In A Cooler Way" here: https://northamericanbigfootcenter.square.site/product/book-failing-in-a-cooler-way-frank-franzoni/1362?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=false&category_id=5

Sign up for our weekly bonus podcast "Beyond Bigfoot & Beyond" and ad-free episodes here: https://www.patreon.com/bigfootandbeyondpodcast

Get official "Bigfoot & Beyond with Cliff & Bobo" merchandise here: https://sasquatchprints.com/bigfoot-and-beyond-merch/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Big Food and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. These guys
are you faith? It's so like to say, subscribe and raid.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
It live Star and Greatest Gone Yesterday and listening watching
lim always keep it's watching. And now you're hosts Cliff
Berrickman and James Bubo Fay.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Hey, everybody, it's a Cliff here. Bobo's not here right now.
But you know this is going to be a special
kind of bonus episode in a weird sort of way
and kind of a just something to honor a good
good friend. Most of you are probably aware that our
good friend, Henry friend Zoni has passed away, but yeah,
it's kind of a devastating blow to the Bigfoot community
in a lot of ways. Henry is really almost become

(00:51):
like a patron saint of the paranormal folks in the community.
And I've got I certainly have a lot of good
friends who are paranormally inclined. I'm not primarily inclined, but
they are good, good people and good folks, and they
all looked up to Henry because he was kind of
a pioneer in that sort of way. But from my
side of the fence, so to speak, the flesh and
blood folks. Henry is also very important. I mean, he

(01:14):
was bigfooting a long time ago. He was instrumental in
a lot of the things that the Western Bigfoot Society
had going in the nineties and two thousands and whatnot.
He worked on Peter Burns' Bigfoot research project back in
the nineties. He worked with that Glickman guy for that
nasty the North American Science Institute release on the Patterson
Gillman film. He basically made the first online presence of

(01:38):
bigfoot anywhere in the form of the IVBC, the Internet
Virtual Bigfoot Conference, which was basically nowadays like a list
serve sort of thing, you know, some sort of forum
you'd go on, But back then it was groundbreaking and
it really pushed the ball forward and it was basically
through that that any of our big foot websites are
are now in existence. You know, pushed the BFRO into existence,

(02:02):
It pushed Bobby's short stuff into existence. And the ivb
C was everybody. It was a who's who of bigfooters
from that time and even nowadays. Legendary names were on that.
You know, Rick Nole was on there, Autumn Williams was
on there. We had Doug Hicheck on there. There was
Moneymaker was on there. You just go down the list,
like all these names from the nineties and two thousands

(02:25):
and beyond were there. I was even in there. I
never posted anything. I'm too socially awkward to that. I
just kind of read everything and absorbed and Henry. That
was a brainchild of Henry, basically. Yeah, And he was
just a good dude, super funny. Was always really despite
the fact that we disagreed on the nature of sasquatches,

(02:45):
you know, but he was always so encouraging to me
about doing what I'm doing and just so happy for
me that I would loved what I was doing and
trying to stay above the fray and his challenges with
that as well. So yeah, we thought that with the
passing of our good friends Henry, maybe we should put out,
you know, the episode with it, because Henry was on
our episode, one of our episodes early on in the podcast,

(03:07):
and we thought that this would be a good opportunity
just to kind of remind everybody who Henry was, you know,
and kind of tip our hat to our good friend
who's checked out and now has moved on to where wherever.
All the answers are now. Henry knows what was up
with sasquatches and lucky guy. We'll all get there eventually,
but he went there before us, as he did in
bigfoot as well. He was there bigfooting long before I was. Yeah,

(03:30):
and we all as a community owe something to Henry.
I'm going to miss him dearly. He was a good friend.
I love the guy. So here's you, Henry, wherever you are. Well. Henry,
thank you very much for coming on and joining us
this evening. I appreciate it. And I thought perhaps a
good way to start is because we've entered into this
difficult time in bigfooting, and that difficult time I think

(03:51):
was the resurgence of the subject. It's due to the
resurgence of the subject, and probably finding bigfoot is at
fault here. So there's a ton of new bigfooters who
are kind of stumbling into the subject for the first time.
And these poor souls out there, they get most of
their information from YouTube and chat rooms and Facebook pages,

(04:11):
and so they don't know who you are. By and large,
they don't understand that your significance in the subject. They
may not even know your name. For those people who
are listening, who might have watched a thing or two
DVDs or something. Henry Franzoni's the guy playing the drums
in the snow. You know, That's how most people might
know you from a Sasquatch odyssey. But you were in

(04:35):
the game a long time ago.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Yes, nineteen ninety three to nineteen ninety eight was my
five year obsessive period where I just lived and breathed
looking for Bigfoot and was completely obsessed and barely got
anything else done in my life. And so since ninety eight,
though I've had I've stepped out of the public eye.

(04:58):
Ninety eighth when I decided to go quiet and leave
the public forum for Bigfoot and basically go off with
my own approach in my own way, and leave the
world of big footeurs people looking for bigfoot, bigfoot researchers behind.

(05:20):
So yeah, I can understand why people don't know who
I am, because I tried to cover my tracks pretty much.
I did have a moment where I decided I did
not want to be the main go to narrator for
things bigfoot, and for a brief moment in time, I

(05:40):
was kind of the go to narrator for the media
but things were much smaller back then, and there weren't
anywhere near the amount of companies involved, and there weren't
anywhere near as many people involved. It was a much
smaller thing entirely in terms of just popularity and bull
and things like that. And yeah, finding Bigfoot probably really

(06:03):
boosted the amount of bigfooters. Once upon a time, John
Green accused me of creating all the new bigfooters by
putting a discussion group on the Internet about bigfoot.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
Yeah, which is what the IVBC is what you're referring to.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
I believe right, Yes, you created far more big footers
than anybody, both of you, guys, I think. Yeah, point fingers, Yeah,
I point my fingers right at YouTube. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
I started my bigfoot trek back in around ninety three
and ninety four, And I will say the IVBC was
seminal in that. So again I can blame everything in
my life upon you. Now, the IVBC, for those uninitiated,
is well if correct me if I'm wrong, it was
the internets or International Virtual Bigfoot Conference Internet.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yes, ten ninety three. Internet was a big thing. Yes,
I'm glad. Well, see some good came out of it.
That's that's excellent. No, I'm glad that you know it. Well,
sorry about ruining your life. But on the other.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
Hand, my only regret is I only have one life
to ruin for Bigfoot.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
Back in the beginning, you were interested in Bigfoot. You
were one of those guys that came into it. There's
two well there's the other. Are two types, those are
interested to get into it and those that have an
experience and get into it.

Speaker 4 (07:32):
You're part of the latter group. Correct.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
I had an experience that you know, a story I've
told many times, and in fact, I'll tell it again
at the drop of a pin. Yes, But the I
had an experience that I couldn't really explain, and that
first experience really colored everything that followed for me and

(07:56):
took me off in the direction I went off because
I really didn't go. You know, well, maybe this is
the root a lot of people. I studied the science
and I studied Indian legends, and from the very beginning,
the whole Bigfoot thing for me had something to do

(08:17):
with Indians, because the experience I had was based on
not looking for Bigfoot so much, but looking for the
evil god of the woods that some Chinook Indians said
lived at Schookum Lake in Clackhamus County, and so my
girlfriend now wife, and I went up there one night

(08:41):
to see if the evil God of the Woods still
lived there, and that was my first encounter, and I
did not set forth to look for Bigfoot that day.
I set forth to look for the evil God of
the woods. But when I smelled something that smelled like
wet dog fur and it was really pungent, really strong,

(09:03):
That's when I got a picture in my mind of
a big hairy animal. Even though I didn't see anything.
I smelled the smell that smelled like wet hair, and
so you know, your mind pictures a big hairy monster.
And at the same time that I was smelling at smells,
while the crickets stopped making any noise, and my wife

(09:29):
looked at me from the passenger seat of the van
we were in and said, I'm gonna take a nap.
I'm tired, and she just immediately went to sleep. And
it was something weird about it because she went to
sleep so fast, and so suddenly we had just been
drinking coffee, and then my hair stood up on the

(09:50):
as if a balloon was being rubbed on my hair,
and the hair was being pulled up by the static electricity.
My hair went out like I was being hit with
static electricity, and my van went dead. And it turned
out the starter motor was blown. So even though I
never saw anything, I got hit with an energy field.

(10:13):
It blew the starter motor and I had to hike
out and come back the next day with a new
starter motor to leave. My wife mysteriously went to sleep,
and then as suddenly as it happened, it stopped. The
smell went away, the cricket started singing again. The only
lasting damage was no starter motor. But I was completely

(10:35):
weirded out by the experience because that wasn't what I expected,
you know, the evil god of the woods to hit
me with some kind of static energy, static electricity. I
felt later that it had to be some form of
static electricity because my starter motor died. So that was
the first five minutes I ever looked for Bigfoot. It

(10:57):
was super weird. I didn't understand it. I didn't have
an explanation for it. Whenever I tried to tell people
that experience at the time, I was ridiculed, and pretty
much everybody explained it to themselves by saying I had

(11:17):
some kind of perceptual failure. I was drunk, I was wrong,
I was mistaken, I was crazy, I was looking for fame.
I was you know. Luckily, this is like twenty six
years ago, so actually not that's true. But the thing
is is that very first experience set me off in
a slightly different direction where I wasn't really sure what

(11:41):
I was looking for. Didn't strike me like a simple
animal out in the woods. I wasn't convinced that I
was looking for something like a gorilla. For me, that's
an experience, and wisdom comes from organized life and experiences
in life. Science is different. Science has organized facts, and

(12:06):
those facts have to be things that you can actually
reproduce and test and judge and measure, and so science
has a place when you're studying facts, but when you're
studying experiences like this, where there is as science as
we know it today, couldn't explain that to me. There

(12:29):
was no scientists I talked to at the time that
could possibly explain that to me in any terms other
than there was something wrong with me. And I didn't
believe that. I didn't think there was anything wrong with me.
I thought that was just a really weird thing to
have happened, and so I was kind of set forth

(12:49):
on an outcast path from that point on.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
Well, you know, science is like any other tool. It's
good for specific problems, and experience is one of those
tools that science seems rather ill equipped to deal with
physical world. It does great. Science does a wonderful job
at creating bubbles and toys and you know, getting to
the bottom of some truths, but not the human truth.

(13:15):
And that's where I try to. Even though I'm not
a WU kind of person, as you know, I'm more
science based in my pursuit of this phenomenon, I do
give lots of room for those people who do experience
strange subjective things, and to me, it's just another way
to celebrate weird in the in the universe. And I
love weird, but yours seems like a very reasonable platform

(13:36):
from which you set out on your trip. Because if
you haven't caught on yet for the listeners, yeah, Henry's
on the WU side of things. If you want to
believe that there's actually sides to this sort of thing,
I don't think sides exist in a circle, you know,
in a sphere. And in fact, Henry is well looked
up to by the likes of people like Tom Powell.
For example, Tom will go consult Henry before writing books,

(13:58):
and Tom's well known to be in the lose side
of things and the paranormal side of things. So it
seems like a very reasonable place to start your trip
when weird stuff came looking for you.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
The thing is is that that subject that you have
just described is part of what sets me apart from
both sides of the discussion, because I think something else.
I think that the paranormal people and the science people
both just see part of the picture and both have

(14:30):
an incomplete description of the phenomenon. Back then, I didn't
really have the credentials I have now, which is that
I became a scientist, actually a fisheries scientist, a quantitative
fisheries scientist, and doing statistical analysis in particular for twenty

(14:52):
five years. I had a whole career. I'm very sympathetic
with science, and I understand it very much. I now
have published many peer reviewed papers, but I have also
yes gone and discovered that for me, the real problem
is simply this science as we know it today has

(15:15):
no logical explanation from my experiences, so I have set
forth to devise new science and new scientific principles, or
at least conjecture what they should be, in order to
provide a logical explanation for my experiences. Because I believe
in science and its logical experiences, it just can't catch

(15:38):
up with my experience, and at this time is way behind.
And I think that one day science will advance far
enough to explain the woo woo stuff, but at the
present time, it's not that advanced. And they actually there's
all kinds of a tension between on one side or

(16:00):
the other. But I don't think either side should really
have tension with the other, because I think both of
them only have a partial picture.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
Nobody really knows what's going on, you know, And we
all have our models that seem to work with our
own subjective experiences, you know, But really, at the end
of the day, no one knows what the hell that
we're talking about.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Absolutely no. It's true that Peter Byrne, of all people,
many many years ago, told me there's no such thing
as a bigfoot expert, and that's basically what he was
talking about. Because nobody really knows very much. We all
really don't know very much. We have little bits of

(16:43):
experiences and knowledge and things that we we try to
see patterns in and we try to put together a model.
Like you said, like, yes, I've made a model of
you know, speculative science, let us call it. And that
seems to work for me. And see, I have a
trouble because when I'm talking to a person who's on

(17:06):
the woo woo side of things, often what happens is
that conversation degenerates into offering that person some validation for
their latest woo woo theory. And so if you're identified
as a person who's sympathetic with the woo woo perspective,
you can be approached by so many really out there

(17:27):
folks and they read your book or they read some
interview with you, and they think you're going to agree
with them. And I don't know. You guys probably know
this better than me. But I had so many conversations
that after I had them, I was like, boy, I
really that was a hard conversation to have. I really

(17:49):
didn't enjoy it. And yet I felt kind of alienated
from the science people too, because I was like, no,
science people, you know, this is science here, but science
as we know today isn't advanced enough to actually understand
things that have to do with awareness and consciousness as

(18:09):
well as biological animal reality.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
Will be right back after these messages.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
It leads me down a sort of a third way,
which is a merger of the two, because I have
written two things. One was pure science early on ninety
eight and Nazi North American science is the two report
on towards the Resolution of the Bigfoot phenomenon.

Speaker 1 (18:48):
That was a paper headed by Jeff Glickman exactly exactly
where they Peter Burne and those guys I think gave
as much data as they could to y'all, and then
you did all sorts of number crunching and this and
thatts and determine the size and the weight and this
and that about the Patterson Gimlin film.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
Yeah, Jeff was the lead guy, and I was, well,
I don't know what I was. I was just kobitzer.
I got to play with all the stuff and hang
out with Jeff, and so I contributed a lot to
that paper. But even then, nineteen ninety eight, I was
looking at the Indian legends as the greatest source of information,

(19:28):
and those old pre nineteen thirty five Indian stories that
I could find had more information in them than anything
else that I could find. So I had sort of
really folks, you know. Actually what I did was I
got carried away with the first day in my first experience,

(19:51):
and I looked, you know, to Skookum Lake to find
the Evogotta woods. Then I looked at everywhere skook that
I could find, and I got into mapping everywhere scook
them in the North America. And then I spread to
all the other names of Bigfoot, in seatc Mountain, of
everything you could possibly think of, and looked at it

(20:15):
like a computer guy and just put search terms into databases,
looking for geographic locations, and then looking for patterns in
the geographic locations. But I got carried away with all
the different aspects of Scukum Lake from my first day,
the whole idea that the Indians knew where they lived

(20:38):
and were familiar with the land, and that the Indians
were the best intelligence agents that had been gathering intelligence
about another intelligent species, which is what I concluded in
my personal findings. They were I concluded they weren't an ape.
They were in another intelligence speed. They were like the people.

(20:58):
That's what I thought, That's what my experience told me,
is closer to people than closer to animals. But you know,
people are animals, so you know, it wasn't really saying much.
The thing is is I went that direction early on,
and once I went far enough down that road, I

(21:20):
kind of came to the conclusion that the Indians did
have claim on this more so than the white culture
in a way, they had been paying attention to it
for a much longer time. They had much more respect
for these creatures, and they had much more information. But

(21:42):
you know, as I'm sure you guys know, there was
a huge, continued, huge spectrum. I talked to one hundred
different Indians, let's say, and they would have one hundred
different opinions about Bigfoot.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
Well, at the end of the day, they're just people
with their own subjective experience, but the differences they have
a cultural foundation in which to put those subjective experiences.
I think our cultural foundation is sadly enough, like In
Search of, you know, and stuff like that.

Speaker 4 (22:13):
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
I did an episode of In Search of I'm a
guy running across the ground with my wife under the
Fleer helicopter. That's chasing the guy we had dressed up
in the visibility suit running around the woods.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
No, No, that wasn't in search of That was another
one from the nine. I'm not sure that's my serious
encounters either. That's to me sounds like that video that
we all most did an episode on for Finding Bigfoot.
Did you ever hear about that, Henry, No, I'll check
this out right. The good people at Fleer, right, the
actual corporation, they liked the show. I mean, there's a

(22:53):
poster of us in their in our entry room and
the Wilsonville office and whatever else. They love Finding Bigfoot,
and they pulled me in for a few gigs over
the years, and we're just, you know, we have a
good relationship. Well, they were cleaning out some room at
some point and they came across this VHS tape and
it was marked with a label that said Bigfoot, and

(23:14):
that's it, right, So they go, what is this and
they put it in there, and it's thermal footage of
what appears to be a sasquatch walking underneath some sort
of like chase helicopter or something like that, and it
looks really good, and so the producers get a hold
of it, they go, oh my god, what is this?
And the Fleer people say, I don't know what this is.

(23:34):
It was in a storage room. We have no idea.
So Chad, one of our you know, our lead producer
basically on Finding Bigfoot, he gives me a call and says, Cliff,
what do you know about this? And he sends me
the footage. I'm going, I don't know anything about that.
That looks amazing. And I find the backstory and I go,
oh my god, what is this? And like we're basically
set to do an episode on it, Like we're literally

(23:56):
like a couple of weeks away from doing an episode
on this, and it just looked so convincing to me,
you know. And I happened, we happened to be filming
a main episode, and I showed it to Lauren Coleman.
I said, Hey, Lauren, look at this footage. Yeah, and
then he goes, that looks familiar, you know. And then
like a day later, maybe a couple hours later, I

(24:17):
don't remember, Lauren calls me and says, hey, man, that's
from this episode of this program. And it wasn't mysterious encounters.
It wasn't in search of it was something else. Larry
Lund was there, Peter Burn was there the whole and
I don't do it, And so I had to call
the production company, said, dude, I found the source of this.

Speaker 4 (24:34):
Video unsolved mysteries.

Speaker 1 (24:36):
Well, and I think that I think you're right. Maybe
that was it. Luckily Lauren Coleman came through and saved
the day.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Yeah, I made that, you guys, and we made it.
We didn't make it to fake a bigfoot. We made
it to practice or response because we had set up
one eight hundred big Foot number, and we had this
dream that we would call the Fleer helicopter in which
we had on call. We paid him to be on call,

(25:06):
and we would then jump in and race after the
latest sighting, which would be reported two minutes before they
called one eight hundred bigfoot. And we had actually coordinated
with all the local law enforcement guys Portland Police and
the SWAT team and guys in Vancouver, and we had

(25:30):
actually worked out what we were going to do with
the body and what we were going to do with
you know, it was dream on fellows, but we actually
we spent a lot of money. Man, where'd you guys?
Get all the money money was it?

Speaker 4 (25:47):
You guys got it from like sponsors.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
Sponsor one sponsor.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
This one eight hundred Bigfoot deal was, of course the
Bigfoot Research Project, one of Peter Burns several year operations
looking for sasquatches full time out you know at the
Dowels I think, wasn't it.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
No Hood River actually Parkdale out of Parkdale? Yeah, it
was one of Peter Burn's many fund you know, he
had a lot of years that he was funded to
look for Bigfoot. He was the great fundraiser. Peter Burn
looked a part. I mean, I love the man. I
won't get into his personal character, but he had this

(26:27):
ascot in this beautiful hat and the accent, the accent,
and the whole whole thing was just you know, it
was just such a He's actually British too, right, and
so the whole thing was just so impactful. And the
thing is is that Peter was hooked up with the

(26:47):
Explorers Club out of New York, and through the Explorers
Club there was Robert Rhinds, the guy who looked for
the Lucknus Monster forever. That was also one of those
old white gentlemen, you know, the old Adventurers of yesteryear.
The money came out through there, But what it actually

(27:08):
was was there was a guy who didn't want anyone
to know who he was, and I think even today
because he went into politics in Indiana and he was
a garden tool manufacturer and he did not want anyone
to know who he was. So only about three of

(27:28):
us knew who he was, and he passed. He laundered
the money through Robert Hines, the Luckness Monster guy, and
his organization, the Academy of Applied Science, and so the
Academy of Applied Science officially funded the Bigfoot Research Project,
but it was actually this one dude in Indiana, and

(27:52):
that guy. The funder got sick of Peter Burne at
a certain point and fired him and Jeff Glickman took over.
So there were two projects, the Bigfoot Research Project then
the follow on project the North American Science Institute, and
the one collected all the data and the second analyzed

(28:14):
all the data. And so it took five years to
get that far, and Glipman did some really excellent work.
I thought I did, and I held you know, I
was there with him doing a lot of it. I've
remained friends with him since because he's a great guy.
And he went on to look for Amelia Earhart. He

(28:36):
gave up Bigfoot and moved on to other interesting problems
to solve.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
Yeah, and it was just in the news this past
year about a discovery of some wing or something from
Amelia Earhart's plane if I remember right, Yeah, like maybe
last maybe last year or something.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, it's been doing it lately. You know, he's he's
a fascinating dude. I really liked I love Jack Man.
He's a great guy. You know. We had we had
we had great we had a great time. And but
after this experience, everybody else, I mean, with the exception
of Peter and myself, everyone else forever abandoned the world

(29:14):
of Bigfoot, including Glickman. He's done no work in Bigfoot
since I was the only one that was still keen
for the game at the end it ended in tears,
and I was the only one left that was like, Okay,
let's look for Bigfoot. Glutton for punishment.

Speaker 4 (29:37):
You work with a lot of people, don't know your
story of it.

Speaker 3 (29:41):
You work with a lot of the tribes in Oregon, right,
You're you're constantly surrounded by that community.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
Yes, well, I worked for a tribe in Washington. Now
I've changed, I've moved down river and I worked for
the Kowlitz tribe now. But yeah, I've spent one six
years working for the tribes for the Yakima Warm Springs
as person you Matilla with a little bit of the

(30:09):
Shoshone and a little bit of the Colville Reservation. You know,
I spent a lot of time in Indian country the
last twenty five years, in part because what happened to me,
what Bigfoot said to me when Bigfoot spoke to me
in my art, was that Bigfoot's role in nature was

(30:29):
to take care of all the other living creatures. I
mean that might be, that might sound a little utopian
and naive, but as I tried to understand what their
role in nature was, it seemed that they were the
god of the woods. In essence, they were actually conservationists
of a form. And so I thought, what a great

(30:53):
thing to be. I'll be a conservationist. And so I
aspired to be a true conservationist and work for the
tribes as a tribal conservationist on their fisheries for twenty
five years and had a whole career and spent a
whole huge amount of time out in the mountains, up

(31:15):
in the headwaters of all the salmon bearing streams in Oregon, Washington,
and Idaho region. So I've lived out there, you know,
like really a longton a lot, been out been outdoors
a lot, studying the wildlife and studying all the measuring
quantitatively all of the environment and wildlife, and then doing

(31:40):
fiendish calculations and trying to measure the mortality and survivability
of all the different animal populations, but particularly fish.

Speaker 1 (31:53):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
Will be right back after these messages.

Speaker 2 (32:05):
You know something that I wound up doing, and strangely enough,
it was my ability to map Bigfoot sighting reports really
early before other people had ever done it using GIS,
which now like everybody can do all the time, Grandma
can do it in two minutes. But there was a

(32:27):
time where I was like an expert because I was
like the only person that knew how to do it,
and I mapped. I mapped where I thought Bigfoot was,
and then we looked at all kinds of We looked
for patterns and looked for things like what seasonal patterns
and food patterns, and you know, we looked for are

(32:49):
there any patterns? And so that became a useful skill
in real biology when it came to actually trying to
save in endangered species. And so I was my Bigfoot
research actually helped me become a scientist. That's kind of
a backwards, isn't it a little You would think that's

(33:12):
a little backwards. Yeah, yeah, but yeah. Now I work
for the Cowlitz and I am a pure it guy. Again.
I used to be the sort of combo it guy
fish biologist, but fisheries really fisheries and it. But now
I'm back to pure it and everything I'm doing is

(33:35):
really focused on helping people and helping the tribe with
their people and providing services for all the people.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
Well let's look at your computer literate background a little bit,
because let's go back to the IVBC, the Internet Virtual
Bigfoot Conference. That was the first thing I had ever
seen online about Bigfoot because I was roman around the
Internet looking for stuff at that point. And again, it
was nothing fancy. It wasn't even a website really, it
was a list serve. It was a somebody would post

(34:07):
a question and then underneath as somebody wanted to answer,
it was indented a little bit, and then they could answer.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
It was a public domain, open source mail server list
server that was called major DOMO.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
I was never active. I didn't participate because perhaps you
can't tell, but I'm actually a quiet introvert and I
don't interact. I'm more of a lurker on those sort
of things. But when you go back and look the
list of names that were active then and there, many
of them are still tangentially active or interested in the

(34:43):
subject even still. I mean, I think Lauren Coleman was
on there. You were on there, Adrian Ericsson was on there,
Moneymaker was on there. Rick No. Many of the future
luminaries essentially you know, no matter how brief their luminescence was,
were present on that list. Oh, Eric Beckjord, Eric Beckjord.

(35:05):
I think he actually ended the whole thing, I remember, right,
And then it eventually kind of morphed and changed and
started the BFRO in a weird sort of way, didn't it.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yes, I guess what I could tell you is to
tell you the story of that, for the people are
who are interested in history. So there was an Indian
named Silas Salmonberry who was a Kootenai Indian, but he
had been taken as a child from his tribe and
raised in Chicago in the Foster family. The only thing

(35:37):
that was Bigfoot at the time was Usenet had a
Bigfoot newsgroup on usenet, the first thing that was run
on unix machines, back in the beginning of the Internet,
before the Web, or before really much except email. Usenet
was where we shared text right newspaper articles supposedly. So

(36:02):
there were two groups, Bigfoot and all Dot. Bigfoot was
the name of the newsgroup, and all Dot Barney was
the name of another group that worshiped Barney the Purple Dinosaur.
And these two groups fought a battle where we just

(36:24):
flamed each other endlessly, and all we did was insult
each other, and it wasn't about Bigfoot at all. We
had just insulted each other and got really creative and
artistic in our putdowns and in our flame wars, where
we flamed and flamed each other, and we really relished flaming,

(36:45):
unlike today when people are tired of it now on
the Internet, after you know, thirty years of this crap.
But in the very beginning, we just thought it was
hysterical to just you know, be as bad as possible
and insult everyone as much as possible. These two groups
insulted each other, and then me and Silas come along
and we become friends with the administrators of this group,

(37:10):
and we go, look, we want to have a serious
bigfoot newsgroup. But they controlled everything all dot bigfoot on Usenet.
So we convinced them to create a sub category all
dot bigfoot dot research. And that was the first serious
place to talk about a bigfoot on the Internet. And

(37:32):
it was this Usenet newsgroup and Silas set it up
with me, and then Silas and I. I said, hey, Silas,
check this out. I got this pearl script major Tomo thing.
We can set up a list serve, you know, with
like discussion groups, and so poof, we did that, and

(37:54):
then Silas and I parted ways. He lost interest in
pursuing the bigfoot stuff in public, and he actually moved
back to the koot and Eye Reservation and I've never
seen him again. He disappeared, but he should be credited
as he and I were the first true believers on
the Internet, going wow, we have to do this. So

(38:17):
we had this Internet virtual Bigfoot Conference and this list
serve and all those guys. And then I set up
a website for Peter Burn and one for Renee to Hindon,
and I was working on Patty Patterson's Robert Patterson's Roger
Patterson's wife's website briefly during this time. That's when I

(38:42):
got discouraged, and I said, as I had learned more
at that point about my own personal experiences with Bigfoot,
I just thought it was a waste of time to
publicize everything and getting arguments with people in public about
meaning of this or the interpretation of that. And I

(39:04):
just turned into a grinch and I just said nah,
And so I decided wanted to bag it all. And
Eric Beckyard was a factor because he was stalking me
at the time. But right then I created a subdirectory

(39:25):
for Matt Moneymaker to create the BFRO and then Matt,
being really super intelligent, immediately said, wow, you know, I
could all do this myself, and then I would be
in control and I wouldn't have anybody giving me a
subdirectory on her website, and poof, he went running off.
And I had been engaged in an argument with the

(39:48):
funder of the Bigfoot Research project about whether or not
to build a database online for citing reports, and I
really wanted to do it and had made just a
draft little database where I threw a bunch of sighting
reports into one single table, you know, with no real
organization to it. And the big fight was they didn't

(40:12):
want me to facilitate hoaxers, and so I got squelched
from the funder of the project, who didn't want Glickman
too was on that side of things, and they didn't
want to give the hoaxers any extra information about things
so that they could make their hoaxes more real. And

(40:35):
so because of that, I just sort of said, all right,
I'm not going to do this database thing. And at
that very time Matt, who you know, God bless his soul,
he thought wow, and he told me at the time,
I'm going to avoid the mistakes that led to your failure,

(40:58):
and I'm going to make an improved model of this thing.
And I said, more power to you. I said go
for it, buddy, because I just didn't want to play
that role in society and had a taste of it,
and you know, had I don't know if I would

(41:20):
have ever done that, you know, but at that time.
That's what I thought about this whole thing, And of
course my views have changed radically since then. And liked
those other Like those other people, I was interested forever
and I learned a lot from working for the Indians
for twenty five years.

Speaker 4 (41:40):
What's the most important things you learned from the tribes.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
I'm an outsider, you know, I worked for the tribes,
but I'm an outsider. I'm not privy to a lot
of things. But no, I've had what's the most important thing, Well,
that's a tough one. Just there's there's so much more
going on too. That's the other thing is I guess
one of the most important things that I started to

(42:06):
see was in terms of the flesh and blood versus
spirit to be which is endless. I found from reading
three hundred year old reports and stories from Indians that
they've always argued about that there's always been an argument
in an Indian country as to whether or not big

(42:28):
but can turn invisible, and it's gone on for hundreds
of years, nothing new, And I thought that was really
interesting when I learned that. I guess, Yeah, the most
important thing is that many the different culture that you
referred to earlier, of the Indian culture. All the tribes
are different, and there's no generalization you can really say

(42:53):
about the tribes that's fair. So I'll avoid that.

Speaker 1 (42:58):
Well, yeah, that's a stereo hyping and a different flavor
is all that is.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
Yeah, I want to avoid I always want to treat
everybody as an individual and avoid that if possible. But
the most important thing is that these beings have a
relationship with tribal people that they don't have with most
white people because the culture that the tribes are raised in,

(43:24):
their culture is different than us. And as children, they
are often in some tribes they go on vision quests
as children and they go up in the mountains and
they meet their spirit guides or they encounter their spirit
guides and they seek power in the mountains. And when

(43:46):
the basic idea of going on a vision quest is,
you know, you go and meet your power animal or whatever.
I mean, it's taboo to talk about whatever you seek.
And that's a taboo that I'd say most all the
tribes are like that, and they have different rules because
all the tribes are different. Some tribes you can talk

(44:08):
about it only in battle or at the moment of
death or when you're threatened with death, and at that
time you can actually talk about it, but otherwise no,
and so it's hard to get information. But whatever meets
those kids up there is Bigfoot as well. We see

(44:29):
them later as Bigfoot, but see for a long time,
I thought they're a physical creature that has puzzling powers,
one of which has to do with electrical fields that
they can broadcast. And another is that they themselves can
turn into electricity. They can just turn into a ball

(44:49):
of energy, like they're pure energy creatures.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
And would that be the orb phenomenon.

Speaker 2 (44:56):
The orb phenomenon is offshoot of it. But basically what
I learned from the Indians is these these creatures are
balls of light and they take the form the physical
form of a Bigfoot, and they can take other physical forms.
And Indian children are acquainted with them from a young age,

(45:19):
and so they these creatures know these individual Indians from
a young age. And we can't say the same, I
mean white people they grew up not in that culture.
There were not known by them at a young age.
But many Indians are now. I wouldn't say many. I
don't know what the number is. It's different in every tribe,

(45:42):
and it's it's different across America, but here in the
Northwest from all that contact I've seen, it's what is
behind it all, and there's other there's like that's another
order of life, balls of water, and there are many
different species of balls of light. Bigfoot's not the only

(46:06):
thing out there. And that's like one of the most
amazing things I learned from hanging out an Indian country
for twenty five years is they're really there. You know.
It's like Star Trek episode sort of in that there's
an episode where the Klingons and the Federation are trying
to fight, and Kirk's trying to get in a fight,

(46:28):
and they're trying to protect this helpless society on a planet,
and it turns out that the helpless society is really
energy beings that are pure energy, and they're so evolved
compared to humans that, you know, Spark makes some comment
like it'll be like billions of years before we're evolved

(46:49):
that far. It's kind of a situation where in my
opinion is that science can't really accept any of this yet.
But that's where I have to go with the experiences
of my Indian panels and say, well, you know, sciences
can't catch up with this. This is yet it will.

(47:12):
I have faith in science. I think science as we
know it today will will get way more sophisticated and
be able to comprehend how this can be and how
there can be a well, the relationship between consciousness and
the body, and how there can be a Creatures such

(47:35):
as the Sasquatch wo they have conscious control over the
true power of their subconscious mind, and so they can
incarnate as a flesh and blood creature and then just
turn into an electrical field.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Bobo will be right back after these messages.

Speaker 2 (48:05):
The other thing I've learned is that some tribes their
creation story is a big Foot story, and other tribes
have secret religions that place Bigfoot as their highest protector.
There's a tribe Montana that Bigfoot is their highest protector,
and they have a religion that's so complicated that it

(48:29):
takes a lifetime to learn it, and they estimate thirty years.
No outsiders can know that it exists, and they don't
worship Bigfoot, but he's their highest protector. I've learned a
lot of things about the different tribes and their feelings
towards it, and you know, it's always much more complicated

(48:51):
at first. You're like, oh, and then that tribe has
two different factions and the one factions you know this way,
and yeah, right, you know, there's always it just keeps
going like that.

Speaker 1 (49:02):
But I would argue that the modern dominant culture, like
you know, the Western European culture that is not on
the reservation. Basically there's our factions of Bigfooters that also
take Sasquatch as their religion.

Speaker 2 (49:16):
You would know, really, and you're right. No, I mean,
I'm I'm out of touch, but I tend to I
have to agree with you man. You know, it's there's a.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
Whole spiritual path I guess to walk with Sasquatches. Yeah,
it seems that people defend the subject or their perspective
on the subject with the religious fervor. You know that
could you know, rival any of the more dominant religions.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
Yeah, I think you're right about that. Man. I essentially
look at you know, and I'm sure Tom Powell probably
says that this kind of thing that I look at
the whole mystery as an intelligence problem. We are trying
to gather intelligence about another intelligent species. Now others make
other assumptions. You know that they're looking for an ape

(50:07):
or an animal, and I think that colors the whole path.
You know, that's a choice. You make the one assumption
it's an animal. You make all the billion other assumptions
based on that first one, and the same thing with
the other one. I assume their intelligent and so I
gather intelligence. I don't try to measure the with and

(50:33):
ratio of the footprint. I gather intelligence in terms of
stories from people. So there was this woman I met
early on early nineties. I met some really interesting old
ladies in the early nineties, and one of them lived
in California, and she was at a girl Scout camp

(50:56):
and see, I have a pardoner. I digress again this
thing that if you know, it's not the stories that
are like the other stories. The way information theory works
is if something happens one time and one time only,
it has the most information, and if it has happens twice,

(51:19):
it has mathematically less information. And if it happens ten times,
it's low information twenty times. So whereas some people look
at all the sighting rom parts and say, hey, I
want to look at the ones you know, bigfoot across
the road. Well, there's hundreds of them like that, you know,
and everybody goes, yeah, okay, mine's just like everybody else's.

(51:42):
But I was always fascinated with the one of the condoins.
So this woman had this one of a kind story,
which was she was going to she was sneaking into
the dining hall at her girl scout camp at night
to get some bug juice because she was thirsty, and
there was a big foot standing in there, and he

(52:02):
had a belt on with a red and green led
on it, and while she was looking at him, led
went from red to green, and she she said, and
then it dove out the window.

Speaker 1 (52:19):
That's something I can't say. I've heard that one before.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
Right, I never heard that one ever, right, you know?
And I said, wow, that's a weird story. I don't
know if I believe that. Ye, I don't know if
I believe this.

Speaker 1 (52:35):
Be the woman believe it is another step that the
first step is to listen to it and enjoy it
because it's so bizarre and unusual and novel. You know,
that level of novelty should tickle your brain in some
sort of way, whether it's bs or not.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
Right, it tickled my brain because she was an old woman,
she was eighty ninety years old and was just telling
me the story in her manner and attitude was like
she didn't expect me to believe this, but I was
like fascinated. I was like, oh, that's really really weird. Man.
And it was things like that that happened one time

(53:15):
and one time only that really stuck in my mind.
And so that one was one where I was like,
what the hell is really going on here? How smart
are these guys? And I couldn't really shake this one
story that just kept bugging me. And that was like
one of them where I was just like, you know, Eli,

(53:36):
Dia Belt, really that sounds pretty weird.

Speaker 4 (53:42):
What was your best setting? Would you say?

Speaker 2 (53:45):
The funny thing about me is that I've only really
had one sighting. I've had many communications and encounters and
conversations and interactions and all kinds of things, but I've
only really had one sighting and wasn't far from where

(54:07):
I live. But I've had like I've had. I mean,
I'm not a visually oriented guy. Really, I'm more auditory,
I think. But the I was driving behind scapoos and
I was on a logging road in the hills behind Scapoos,

(54:27):
and that if you go to the north end of
Forest Park and then keep going past Forest Park, there's
the mountains just get bigger and bigger. And that's where
I live now, you know. So I just drove. I
I was driving down a logging road and I suddenly,
with no explanation, I turned a sharp ninety degrees crossways

(54:54):
on the road, shining the headlights into the bush. And
there was a bigfoot in the bush. And I saw
these two green glowing eyes and shape of the bigfoot
creature moving behind a bush. And I have no understanding
for why I turned ninety degrees and shine the light

(55:14):
right on it ten feet away, but I did. And
I didn't do it consciously. My wife was with me too,
and I just turned ninety degrees and it was right
in front of me. And that's the only time.

Speaker 4 (55:30):
I had your copy of your book, and you gave
you a song copy.

Speaker 5 (55:33):
I think it was in two thousand and nine, but
I just got it in the spirit of siat Sea Tco.
And I don't think a lot of people are aware
of this book because it's out of print. It's almost
impossible to get but you've got like about one hundred
and seventy five pages where you particulously. I indeed, every
place like you know, landmark like a creek or a

(55:55):
mountain or a ridge with the word devil in it
in North America. It's really really, it's a great research.
But in the lat longitude, so you can look it
right up on Google Earth. That's I don't know, if
I don't could find it. But in the spirit of Siaka,
your book is one of my favorite books.

Speaker 1 (56:13):
Oh, and that's one of the things that you're carrying
on right. You are best known, I think nowadays, not
for your early technological it sort of pioneering or fringe
theories based in intelligence and stuff, but or the book
for that matter. You're best known for your research on

(56:33):
place names. Scuok them, lake Skukum, you know this, and
that cultist devil you name it man And that's what
Bub was referring to. So at the very least, even
if people haven't heard of you, you've affected most bigfooters
lives in some ways, you know, And that's a kind
of a cool thing to lay claim to.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
That was my big idea, was the idea that place
names they were like sighting reports, but you know, which
was if a place, if a place was named Bigfoot,
maybe that meant someone saw a bigfoot there, maybe it didn't,
similar to sighting reports. So I said, gee, you know,

(57:17):
they're the same kind of sketchy thing, and they were
done by people before there was any kind of modern
tainted this, before there was any kind of modern occurrences
that like made everybody go to Bluff Creek things like that,
you know, So I said, you know, they could be useful,

(57:40):
and so I just got carried away with that idea.
That was from the very first day where I saw
went to schoo them Lake, and then I had to
read all eight different dictionaries definition of the word schook
them and shinook jargon, and you know, basically track down
every scrap of evidence about what skookam meant. And one

(58:03):
of the strange things was one of the definitions of
skuok them was Indian jugglery and I think that was
Horatio Hail And I said wow, And I had to
figure that out and it basically meant magic, and it
meant Indian magic tricks. And I said, that's interesting because

(58:25):
there was a connection between Indian magic tricks and bigfoot
let us just say yes in a certain way. And
you can find it in the very early definitions of
the word skook them. Because now that the internet's here,
all eight dictionaries Chinook English dictionaries are online, so it's

(58:48):
a much better time today. You don't have to dig
through old libraries anymore. But yeah, I did do the
place name thing, and I got carried away and took
it to the integree, so that there was you know,
I mapped out all of North America. It was interesting
to me. The Yeah, the whole place name thing, it
was a was a good idea. It's my one original idea,

(59:11):
I guess I could. I can say that it was
my one original idea.

Speaker 1 (59:15):
Yeah, it really pans out. I used that that sort
of thing all the time. I am more apt to
go camping in a like down the Cala Wash near
Ogre Creek, for example, you know, than I am at
some other spot with no other reference whatsoever if the
area is just generally squatchy. And also we've noticed through
the years man bigfoots would be hanging out at the

(59:36):
same spot, whether it's you know, five years ago or
one hundred years ago, as long as that area hasn't
significantly changed. We called the Halibu effect because back in
the day when I was living in southern California and fishing. Yeah,
it's called the hall of because back in the day,
when I was fishing all the time in southern California,
I would notice I'd i'd go to a spot and
I'd catch like three or four halibit and then I

(59:58):
wouldn't catch anything for a while. But if I back
a week later or something two weeks later, the fish
should be back and I would catch them again. And
it's really nothing magical. It says that the conditions in
that spot are good for whatever animal it is. How
of it like you know, hard flat bottoms and somethn
Sasquatches like it their way, so where they go once,
they'll go again. But if you can combine an area

(01:00:19):
that looks great with a geographical name, or hopefully a
couple of them, then that changes the game altogether. And
generally speaking, that is true. One of the spots I've
been working this past month is outside of Colton, and
in that particular area you have not only a variety
of sightings over a small area, but you have Cultis

(01:00:41):
Creek you have Memluse Creek and Cultis of course is
a dreaded place, right, and then Memalus, which is place
of the dead, and then finally Hellian Creek, which is
somebody who raises hell.

Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:00:55):
So all these sort of chaotic monster, spooky names are
in this one spot, and sure enough, every November it
pumps out silence. It tests true.

Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
Yeah. Yeah, when you have a bunch of them in
an area like that, it's really a it's really a
kind of indicative of that, it's an area they like
to hang out in.

Speaker 1 (01:01:13):
Well, I knew that Henry would be a good guest.
He's got a lot to say. He's got some wild
ideas that are all born from experience in an intelligent mind.
So every idea is worth listening to. Whether you believe
it or not, it doesn't even matter as long as
you listen and enjoy it, because I think the joy
is in the weird.

Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:01:34):
Well, all right, Henry, thanks so much for having having
time to come on with us. We really appreciate it.
Love new ideas, love being super weird, and you have
an overabundance of both of those two things.

Speaker 4 (01:01:45):
Man.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
Well, thank you very much, man, And my pleasure and
to talk to you guys again soon.

Speaker 4 (01:01:52):
So that was good.

Speaker 5 (01:01:53):
Thanks Henri, Well, hey, Cliff, thanks so much for getting.

Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
Henry on board.

Speaker 5 (01:01:57):
That was a true honor, pleasure and informed and just yeah,
I can't get enough of that guy's great.

Speaker 4 (01:02:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
I thought that that'd be a fun dip in the
pool of weird, you know, put the beyond back in
a Bigfoot and beyondest I keep saying, because if there's
anybody who's gone beyond and above, it's Henry.

Speaker 5 (01:02:15):
Well, great, Cliff, Well, until next week, you and everyone
else out there listening, Thanks for listening, download share all
that give us likes, good reviews. Well, help you and
everyone out there listening until next week. Keep it squatchy.

Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond.
If you liked what you heard, please rate and review
us on iTunes, subscribe to Bigfoot and Beyond wherever you
get your podcasts, and follow us on Facebook and Instagram
at Bigfoot and Beyond podcast. You can find us on
Twitter at Bigfoot and Beyond that's an n in the middle,

(01:02:55):
and tweet us your thoughts and questions with the hashtag
Bigfoot and Beyond.