CLASSICS: John E.L. Tenney!

Cliff Barackman and James "Bobo" Fay chat with John E.L. Tenney in this "classic" conversation from 2021! John is a paranormal researcher and author, and is here to discuss his background and experiences researching the unknown!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Big Food and Beyond.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
With Cliff and Bobo.

Speaker 1 (00:08):
These guys are your favorites, so like say subscribe and raid.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
It Live, Stock and.

Speaker 4 (00:18):
Gratious Gone Yesterday and listening watching Lin always keep it's watching.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
And now you're hosts Cliff Barrickman and James Bubo Fay.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Hey, Bobo, how you doing today?

Speaker 3 (00:33):
All right? How's going to your Cliff?

Speaker 4 (00:34):
Things are pretty good, man. It's been an eventful week
in general. I've got some phone calls. I've got an
exciting report on Monday that was kind of cool. Somebody
saw one on a highway twenty six, right up past
rhododendron at five o'clock in the morning on his way
to work. So I went out and looked around a
little bit, cast something. Not so sure it's a print,
might be erosion, but you know me, I cast everything

(00:55):
and figured try to figure it out later, I guess,
you know. But yeah, it's been a great week.

Speaker 3 (00:59):
Cool, Yeah, I mean this is prime time. This is
one of the most reports of the year coming right now.

Speaker 4 (01:03):
Sure seems like it, doesn't it. October seems to be
the month.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
It's definitely October when it comes to squatching.

Speaker 4 (01:10):
Right, Squatch tober. Yeah, so, Bobo, who do you have
for us today? Actually I know, but I just want
to be coy.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Who do you have? I couldn't be more excited.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
We got the esteemed John E. L. Tenny, who famous
paranormal researcher and a lot of people say debunker. He's
an author, he formerly ran for MAYORVA City. He's a
well rounded guy and so welcome to John E. L. Tenny.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
John, Welcome, Welcome, welcome, So excited to have you on. Well,
it's my pleasure to be here. I'm excited to get weird.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
With the two of you.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
That's the thing.

Speaker 4 (01:49):
You are, by far one of the most unusual people
I've ever met, and you're extraordinarily intelligent and well spoken.
I know a lot of weirdos and stuff, but some
people are just so weird in such a way that
I don't want to hang out with them. But you're
just not one of those people. You're delightfully eccentric and
I just love that about you. And well dressed and

(02:11):
well dressed. Yeah, so I got three can sit on
right now that you know.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
What's really funny is that started pretty much back in
when I was in a punk rock band back in
the days in the eighties, a friend of mine who
had this super tall mohawk and a leather jacket, and
I cut my hair in a mohawk and showed up
with a leather jacket, and he said, what are you doing?

Speaker 2 (02:31):
He's like, I thought you wanted to be yourself. You
look like everyone else that's here.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
And the next show that I went to, I bought
a three piece suit and worked at the punk show,
and everybody started calling me the weirdo in the three
piece suit.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
But I look different from everybody.

Speaker 4 (02:43):
Right, you still do you stand out? Not everybody who's
interested in unusual things dresses to the tea.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
T shirts and jeans pretty much seem to be the
standard these days.

Speaker 4 (02:55):
Yeah, yeah, well you're up in the game for everybody.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, there's another aspect to it.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
When I used to go into lectures and conferences back
in the eighties and nineties, like whether or not it's
just a subconscious thing that happens with us with authority figures.
But I always took the guys who were talking about
everybody was talking about insane, crazy stuff, but the guys
that were wearing ties, I was like, oh, maybe maybe
he knows something more.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
He looks like an adult.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
That's a documented that's a documented phenomenon. Actually, I believe it.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
I mean, I really do think that it makes a
difference when someone is kind of put together, and even
if they're telling you about UFO's and Bigfoot or ghosts,
like your brain sees that as some kind of authority
figure or.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
A doctor's coat, white lab coat.

Speaker 4 (03:39):
Yeah, yeah, I would normally say a mask, but you
know that's not the case nowadays.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
It's a different thing.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
So I got to say, the last time I was
talking to you, John, are you ready to admit now
that you were wrong and I was right that Bob
Lazar is the real deal?

Speaker 2 (03:56):
No, No, I still don't believe Bob's story.

Speaker 4 (04:03):
Well, who's the Problemazarre, Bring me into this. Who's this guy,
the UFO.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
Guy from Area fifty one that came public in Oh yeah,
that guy Element fifteen and all that.

Speaker 4 (04:13):
He claims to have worked there and seen everything and
all that other stuff. That guy, right, Yeah, Okay, so
that's not the real deal, John, in your opinion.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
You know, Bob's story first came around in the late eighties,
and by the nineties people had their doubts, because when
you say that you've been to colleges and worked at places,
there should be some kind something, some kind of paper
record trail of you being there. And by the mid nineties,
no one could find any of it, and his story

(04:42):
kind of got brushed under the carpet as made up.
And then, for whatever reason, his story came back around
a couple of years ago and they made a documentary
about him, And like you, there's still no evidence that
he ever worked at the places he says he worked,
or even went to school at the places he went
to school.

Speaker 4 (04:58):
I bet that feeds his narrative, though, doesn't it Like
he's kind of twisted it and maybe he did work there.

Speaker 3 (05:03):
Who knows.

Speaker 4 (05:03):
I don't know anything about this guy, but I know that,
at least in the bigfoot world, like when you ask
for evidence about a certain thing, particularly the strange things,
the person usually comes back no, there's they got rid
of it, or the government brushed it under the rug,
or that's what they want you to think or know.
They scrub the website, or there's some sort of a
more even more fantastical paranoid thing behind it that feeds

(05:27):
that person's narrative.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
Yeah, but with Bob. But with Bob though, I mean
they did. He's a bunch of stuff he said back then,
it's now bored out to be true.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah, But like I think, you know, if you look
at science fiction writers, a lot of the stuff that
they wrote bore out to be true too. Like if
you if you guess enough and you say enough stuff,
and you talk for a long and a period of time,
some of what you say is probably going to end
up being true, thank God.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
But he knew about the.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
Hand the way the hand sensor worked and element one
point fifteen and his description of how they've and all
that kind of stuff. How does he guess that?

Speaker 1 (06:03):
But I mean, like even the hand sensor thing like
people have now discovered, Like there was an episode of
Outer Limits that shows a hand sensor, and there was
a science fiction movie out of England that showed in
the United States that showed a hand censor, like back
in the sixties and seventies. And so I mean, you're
just kind of thinking forward. And like I said, if
you say enough stuff. The thing that really cracks me up,

(06:25):
because you're right, Cliff, Like a lot of people, especially
in the UFO community, will say, well, my record's been
scrubbed by the government if I of course they're they're
going to erase my trail and my history. But the
thing is a lot of the times, the majority of
the time in my life, I've found it's even people
working against you make mistakes. They're just people, and something

(06:47):
ends up slipping through the cracks. Like there should be
a yearbook somewhere with his picture in it, you know,
saying that he wanted to go to MIT, like he
said he went to MIT. And the only evidence that
anyone can find of that is like he intended like
an extra course that anybody could join in, like a

(07:08):
like a four week course on physics at MIT that
anybody can just join to.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
And that's not graduating from MIT.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
We found that paperwork, but then all of his doctoral
paperwork just seems to have vanished.

Speaker 4 (07:19):
Well, you know, I think that we're getting ahead of
ourselves a little bit.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
Let's do this.

Speaker 4 (07:24):
There may be a couple of people listening who don't
know who you are on like for example, like I
didn't know you're on a television show until years after
I met you. I just you're just some cool guy
I like to talk to. You know that we see
at these conferences and whatnot and etc. So bring us
all the way back and tell us how you got
so darned weird. To begin with, he's not weird.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
I say that in a be loving way.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
By the way, yeah, I mean I talk about that
at my lectures too, Like the first time I was
called weird were by some kids that were probably punching
me in a stomach, you know. And I really love words,
so really quickly before I give you my brief history,
like when I talk when I call people weirdos and
when I say people are weird. The etymology of the
word weird comes from the fourteenth century. For its w

(08:07):
y r d was the original word, and it literally
meant the people who lived on the outskirts of town
that didn't follow the rules of the kings and the queens.
It translates into those who manifest their own destiny. So
when I call someone a weirdo, I'm saying, like, you
think for yourself, and you don't necessarily.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
Follow the rules. So I does it Does it share
a root with the word wild? By any chance? It does?

Speaker 5 (08:34):
Actually, yeah, yeah, I can see that. That's very interesting. Okay,
you know, speaking of the weirdos that band review or
the weirdos of the band. Yeah, they had a great
squatch setting down in San Mateo County below San Francisco,
come Highway won They've had a gig at Santa Cruz
at the Catalyst the night before. Then they had a
Friday morning morning radio Zoo cruise show or some kind

(08:58):
of thing like that. They had to appear in play
live at like nine thirty am up in San Francisco.
So they left at the butt crack of dawn. Sanmaca's
driving Northland the Highway one, and a big female bigfoot
walked out into the Highway one. Hell, there had a
like stop like halt, like a cop wood or a
traffic you know, crossing guard then waved in. Then three

(09:19):
from like teenage size to like kindergarten size, three little
hairy squatches came out single file and trotted across the
road and they walked off into the tree line.

Speaker 4 (09:30):
Yeah, well, my goodness, Well you know, I'm going to
continue hurting these cats around a little bit. So weird
means somebody who's living on the fringes of society, then,
is essentially what you were saying.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah, absolutely, and I'm not one of those people that
you know, there's a lot of people in paranormal cryptozoology
that have stories about when they were little and something
strange happened to them. I'm not one of those kids.
I legitimately was just a nerdy kid growing up in
the kind of lower middle class suburb of Detroit, and

(10:02):
I didn't like people telling me what I could and
couldn't think about. I think that's part of why I
joined a punk rock band and stuff. I just didn't
want people telling me what I could think about. And
I ended up making friends with people who were witches
and psychics and UFO researchers and conspiracy theorists, and by
the time I was eighteen, I was giving lectures on

(10:24):
things like political assassinations of the nineteen sixties or seventies
and UFOs and Michigan has a long history of strange cryptids,
so that fascinated me too. And when I was in
my second year of college, I thought I was just
going to be a history teacher with a major in folklore.
A friend of mine called me and asked me if

(10:45):
I wanted to research for the show Unsolved Mysteries. So
I quit college and that was my first foray in
television and kind of never really looked back. I mean,
I held a lot of normal, everyday jobs, but I
was always supplementing it by driving around the country, going
to libraries and talking to people about weird stuff, or
working on television shows in the nineties like Sightings or

(11:06):
very scary stories on Fox. And when paranormal shows popped
up in the mid two thousands, like all of a sudden,
here's me. It's still relatively young, with you know, twelve
to fifteen years of research under my belt. So I
got tapped by a lot of those shows to find
them cases.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
And work with them.

Speaker 4 (11:23):
Yeah, a lot of the cutting edge paranormal or bigfoot
or what you know, whatever word you want to put
their research is frankly nowadays done by production crews. I mean,
Lauren Coleman's kind of put that out there in the world,
and he's kind of put that thesis there that it's
no longer benefactors and whatnot, you know, from you know,
Tom Slick sort of folks in the nineteen fifties. Nowadays

(11:44):
it's production companies, which is good and bad. I mean
it's good because there's a lot of money there. Of course,
be thrown around, and these people are under the gun
and they get some stuff done. And also they're so
gutsy and have no scruples because and they'll just call
whoever they don't care and just get to the bottom
of things.

Speaker 3 (11:58):
Man.

Speaker 4 (11:58):
It's also bad because it's television and the vast majority
of things on TV end up being nonsense or you know,
sensationalized at least. So, yeah, you were one of those
guys back in the day with those early paranormal's sightings. Huh.
That was the Henry Winkler Show, wasn't it.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
Yeah, there was. He did a few episodes.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
I think they eventually switched away from him and just
kind of did a voice over host because you know,
just for money purposes. But yeah, there's a I'm sure
if people dig through somewhere on eBay, a lot of
those old weird UFO, Bigfoot and ghost VHS tapes that
no one wants anymore. If you watch the very end credits,

(12:36):
you'll probably see my name in there somewhere as a researcher.

Speaker 3 (12:39):
Cliff on the story about the flair video of the
big Foot from the helicopter.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
Oh yeah, that what show was? That first unsolved mysteries,
Unsolved mysteries. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (12:51):
Fleer contacted Finding Bigfoot at one time, saying they were
clearing out some closets and they found a VHS tape
that all it had was were Bigfoot on it, and
so they put it in and they're for all you know,
it seemed to be a Sasquatch on flear walking, maybe
like a helicopter footage or something like that. It's like, well,
what in the world is this? And they sent it

(13:12):
to our producers and they sent it to me or
me and I'd never seen it before, as I don't
know what that is, and they said, well, let's do
an episode. Yeah, I mean it looks good. Let's do
it and find out it looked really good, right, And
then I have We were filming in Maine at the time,
and I was visiting with Lauren Coleman at his museum

(13:33):
and I said, yeah, Lauren, we're going to be filming
this thing in a couple of weeks. And I showed
him the footage and he looks at it and he goes,
that looks familiar, and I go, really, oh, he goes,
let me think about that, And then like later he
sent me an email or called me or something, and
he recognized the footage from one of those old nineties documentaries,
the one where Peter Burne was in it. And they

(13:53):
filmed over around the east side of Mountain Hood and
he was talking about how he has a helicopter at
his beck and call at twenty four were seven and
thermal imagers and all this stuff, and like ninety four
and they got they put some dude in a suit
and they follow him around in a helico. That's what
we're That's the footage we were watching. But I had
not seen that episode, so I didn't resonate anything with me.
And then I said, oh my god, so we got

(14:15):
to get ahead of this. We almost hit an episode
on it. So I called the producers and said, stop everything,
check this out. And they said, oh my gosh. So
I will forever Oh Lauren for that. I think we
all will forever. Oh Lauren for that one was talking
about have an egg on your face from some of
the old research stuff.

Speaker 3 (14:34):
Excited. Oh it was three. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (14:37):
I think that was the one that eventually turned into
the Oregon versus Washington one. Maybe I can't remember which
one was one of these ones that we filmed so
stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo.
We'll be right back after these messages. But were you
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See website for full details, restrictions and important safety information. Anyway, Yeah,
so to talk about that old research in the nineteen
ninety stuff, some interesting things have fallen through.

Speaker 1 (16:48):
The c OH I would I would, I mean, I
wouldn't be shocked if they're I mean, there's I know,
at least for unsolved mysteries, like with the production of
any show, right, Like there are literally sometimes hundreds of
hours of stuff that never gets used and shown. And
I have to believe in my little heart with some

(17:09):
hope of hopes that there are still you know, a
quarter inch and three quarter inch tape and videotape somewhere
that has all of the interviews, like the extended interviews
that we did with people, a lot of the b
rule that we did because a lot, like you said,
a lot of that stuff doesn't make the cut just
because it's not hyperbolic, but it's still information, and I

(17:30):
hope that doesn't get lost.

Speaker 3 (17:32):
It will.

Speaker 2 (17:33):
I hope the stuff that I set off, you know,
didn't make the cut gets lost.

Speaker 3 (17:38):
I've be canceled in jail.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Well, that stuff for sure exists too.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
But I mean, you know, filming paranormal shows, a lot
of the time, something strange will happen if you're in
an allegedly haunted location, and for whatever reason, like the
narrative just it doesn't fit all with you know, being
able to craft a story that fits in forty four minutes,
and so that stuff just never sees the light of day,
and that kind of bums me out sometimes.

Speaker 4 (18:08):
Oh yeah, so tell me about the or tell us
I guess about the show you hosted. I've never seen
this show, and I want to learn more about it.
I definitely want to watch it episode.

Speaker 1 (18:19):
How many people did? Yeah, not many people did the
show ghost Talkers. Yeah, so it was just it was
it was a paranormal show. But I don't, you know,
I have tend to working with networks and producers since
the nineties. I tend to not work well with them,
and I'm sometimes problematic with what I want and what

(18:41):
I kind of demand if I'm going to be filming something.
And so when I pitched this show to them, where
it's going to be me, someone who's done this for
a long time, and someone who's never done this before,
investigating haunted locations, and I'll go in for one whole
night by myself, and then the next night the other
person will go in and we can kind of show
the difference between a seasoned investigator and someone who has

(19:04):
no real frame of reference for it. Like they liked
that idea, but like the first thing right off the
bat was, I told them, you know, I'm if I'm
going to be in there all night long, I don't
want a camera crew like I want us to be
shooting everything. And that kind of blew their minds first
of all, that I was going to be investigating actually
all night long, because a lot of the shows ghost shows,

(19:26):
you know, they might investigate till midnight or one or
two o'clock in the morning, but they're really not shooting
from nine o'clock at night untill nine o'clock in the morning.
Just union rules, like your camera crew can't be there
for fifteen hours shooting a show. But I talked them
into giving me camera credits, and Chad got camera credits,

(19:46):
and we actually went into places and investigated all night long.
And once the network realized that Chad was going to
scream a lot because he's in the dark and has
never done this before, they really just edited the show
around at and they thought it was really funny and engaging,
and so a lot of the actual cool stuff that
happens I think kind of got glossed over.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
Plus, we shot at a time where our.

Speaker 1 (20:14):
First episode was up against a premiere, like a season
premiere of The Walking Dead.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
We just got buried in us too.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
Yeah, we have to go against Sunday Night Football, which
was the highest rated show in America, Walking Dead and
Game of Thrones.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
Yeah, that happened to us.

Speaker 1 (20:34):
We got our first episode got put against The Walking Dead.
Nobody watched it, so they moved us, they moved our time,
and when they moved our time, they moved us to
Sunday night football and we got buried again. Then our
third episode they moved our time slot again. So I mean,
we're three episodes in, we've already been on it three
different times during the week, and that was enough to

(20:55):
just sink the whole thing.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
Oh yeah, and you're trying to keep it real, yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, And there were some again, there was some great
stuff on that show that just we were the first
paranormal show that was in twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen.
There were paranormal researchers the Psychical Research Society out of
England in like the eighteen hundreds, and they studied ghosts.
You know, they're still around, but they were kind of
the first ghost hunters and ghost stalkers my show in

(21:24):
twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, Like we were the first show
to ever talk about them and show them on camera,
and like I thought that that was just a huge thing,
like there's research missing from paranormal shows, and so I
wanted to kind of solve that with Ghost Talkers, and
we did to a certain extent. But also, you know,
if someone asked me. We went to a location where

(21:44):
someone had seen what they said was a goat man,
and they asked me about that. And so I gave
this kind of long dissertation on the history of goat men.

Speaker 8 (21:53):
And if it was a short dissertation, it got cut
down to one line because I was I said, you know,
in this like fifteen minute diatribe about goat men, at
some point I said, and you know, goat men are
sometimes also recognized as demonic entities.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
And that was They cut everything but that sentence.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
And like when I saw the when I was doing voiceovers,
and so I saw what was going to be the
final cut, I just like, Wow, this is what it's
going to be. I guess what is your thing on
goat men? I think with animal people, I think that
there is something. I think there's something psychologically like deeply
embedded in us from at one time evolving from small mammals,

(22:37):
from being mice or the equivalent of something small and
warm blooded millions of years ago, that there are these
kind of archetypal imageries set into our psychology where when
it's dark, when it's unknown, when we're in a situation
that we're unfamiliar with these kind of ancient, evolved archetypes
in our mind can pop up and we start seeing

(22:58):
the things that we feared when we were tiny, warm
blooded creatures on the ground. I think that accounts for
a lot of fear from UFOs and alien abductions. I mean,
if you think about the fact that mice are snatched
off the ground by these silent, giant eyed owls with
white faces coming out of the darkness and just pulling

(23:19):
them into pulling these mice into nothingness, and then you
look at alien grays with these giant eyes and white
faces coming out of the darkness and abducting people in silence. Like,
I think there's something there to that.

Speaker 4 (23:31):
Do you think that would be the source of the
dog Man phenomenon that we're watching unfold now?

Speaker 2 (23:37):
Yeah, I mean it's possible.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
But also I think that especially now with quarantine and pandemic, like,
people are really exploring the outside and seeing things like
with new eyes.

Speaker 2 (23:49):
The thing that's.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
Difficult with me with dog Man or Bigfoot and like
the mix of the two of them is if you're
in Wisconsin and you're near Bray Road, and you have
it in your head that you're going to see a
dog man, but you see sasquatch, Like, how do you
rectifyd that? If you see a big, tall, hairy thing
walking through the woods and your mind is set on
dog man, you're going to say you saw a dog man,

(24:11):
but you might have seen sasquatch.

Speaker 3 (24:13):
Well, yeah, a lot of people don't see them though,
that's not the case. Like they didn't even they never
even thought of dog many never they didn't think it
was possible. And then they'd say I saw a bigfoot
and you get the description to be like huge dog snout,
you know, pointed er was on top of a tail,
you know, like it's like that does big lits don't
look like that's anyways bigfoots. You're not saying Bigfoot's not real,

(24:34):
are you?

Speaker 4 (24:35):
No?

Speaker 2 (24:35):
No, no, I'm saying that.

Speaker 1 (24:36):
I think that when when people when people see things
that they don't commonly see, if they have bigfoot in
their mind and they write right and they see a
dog man, they say they see bigfoot. If they saw
bigfoot and see a dog man, like the two can
get wrapped up in their mind because what they're they've
never seen a large, upright hairy creature walking through the forest,
and so whatever is in their brain at the time,

(24:58):
which is most likely sasquatch, because just the most popular
they're going to say they saw sasquatch. But like you said,
after you get their description and stuff, you can be like, oh,
that's not a sasquatch, that's something else.

Speaker 4 (25:09):
Let's talk about dog Man a little bit more. I mean,
I'm completely satisfied. This says like sasquatches are living, breathing
hominins or hominoids at least of some sort of other.
They're really here. They're to me completely biological. I've seen
no reason to think otherwise. Dog Man I don't know
what to think because the precedent really isn't there. To
my knowledge, there's not historical newspaper archives and stuff that

(25:29):
details fightings with these things to my knowledge, at least
to the extent of sasquatches. I've never seen a Dogman footprint,
for example. But yet I know some good witnesses, So
there's something up like what is your idea or what
is your hypothesis about that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
Yeah, with dog Man, I really don't know.

Speaker 1 (25:48):
Because so a couple of years ago I have went
and researched dog Man case up in northern Michigan, and
the farmer had come out his back door of his
house and looked across his field and thought he saw
a man standing far off, maybe an acre and a
half away from him. Saw a man standing against a

(26:09):
barbed wire fence, like legs kind of crossed, arm on
the barbed wire fence, kind of leaning back, chilling, And
as he walked toward it, he said that he saw
what looked like a coyote, a very large coyote, standing
on its hind legs with its arm propped on the
barbarare fence. And when he got closer to it, it
dropped down onto all fours, flipped itself backwards over the fence,

(26:32):
and took off into the woods. And when I went
out there, I went out there a few days later,
there were no tracks or nothing. By that time he
had pretty much destroyed all of that by running around
the area himself.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
But it's just this.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
Strange case of it not even acting like a wild animal,
like acting human.

Speaker 4 (26:52):
And that really fascinated me. So I really don't know.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
I mean I did.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
There was a dog man conference actually that I was
a part of in Defiance, Ohio, and Defiance Ohio has
a dog Man, but it's more werewolf than it is
dog Man. You know, it was seen wearing a shirt
and pant like ripped up pants, very werewolf esque that
attacked people on the railroad tracks in Defiance. So I
don't know if there's something else happening with dog Man

(27:20):
that is perhaps more psychological and less physical.

Speaker 4 (27:24):
And how do you think this would tie into the
union theory about UFOs being like physical manifestations of something psychological.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
Yeah, I mean when I get into the weirder occultish
metaphysical parts of it and start thinking about paulpas and
agrigors and thought forms and can you manifest something into
the reality, Like that's where a lot of the stranger
creatures I think might be coming from, Like these kind
of deep seated archetypes and embedded fears that we have psychologically,

(27:56):
or perhaps we're seeing something that we just have no
frame of reference for and so our brain has to
categorize it as something. If you see a creature with
a long snout, we're most commonly familiar with dogs looking
like that, and so our brain says, that's a dog man,
But who the hell knows what it really is?

Speaker 3 (28:16):
We could be familiar with it through the whole demonic aspect.
That's the case, yeah for sure.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
And again, like you know, it's one of those things
you were saying, you know, the Bigfoot has like this
kind of real generated history that we have tracks and
we have prints, but the idea of where people is
far older than Bigfoot. The idea of a large upright hometed.

(28:44):
Like we have stories about where wolves and where beasts
of all different variant sorts that are that are coming
from somewhere that are historically talked about throughout folklore and
mythology for centuries.

Speaker 3 (28:57):
Yeah, that's a tough one. I don't think we're going
to crack today.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
But I'll tell you my favorite Michigan case is from
the sixties, and I'm sure you guys know about it,
but it's I always call it the atomic Bigfoot, which
is the Monroe Monster, which was Christine van Acker and
her mom and allegedly a bigfoot tried to pull.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
Her out of a car and gave her a black eye.
And it's right over by the Fermi power plant in Michigan.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
Whatever. How with that one, Like the cops came and
there's police reports, right.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
Oh yeah, So the cops came.

Speaker 1 (29:31):
There was a like two week long search that fifteen
hundred people like combed the forest looking for something, and
then a sasquatch type creature got spotted in Three Rivers, Michigan,
which is a few hundred miles away on the other
side of the state of Michigan, and so then the
search started over in Three Rivers to look for that thing.

(29:52):
And a couple of weeks later, the police basically just
made a statement in the paper saying it was a
man in a woman's fur coat.

Speaker 4 (30:04):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and beyond with Cliff and Bogo.
We'll be right back after these messages. Yeah, easy to
ride things off like that.

Speaker 3 (30:18):
She was injured, wasn't she.

Speaker 1 (30:20):
Yeah, her face was scraped up, she had a black eye.
And that same night, about two hours after her alleged attack,
there were some women coming back from her card like
they had a woman's card game night and they were
coming back in their car and something jumped in front
of their car and actually slammed its hands on the

(30:42):
hood of their car and dented the hood of their car.
That same night, and the police said, you know, this
was just this guy trying to fool people and scare people.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
It sounds like a really dangerous way to do that.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
Yeah, probably jumping out in front of driving cars in
the middle of the night smashing their hoods is probably
not the smartest, greatest thing to do.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
Women, I might have a girlfriend for twelve years.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
What's interesting to me about that case, though, is, as
far as I know, and I've tried a couple of times,
but I just end up getting lost or getting involved
in another case because it leads somewhere else. Is that
Christine Vanacker, that woman who was attacked, is still alive.
She still lives in Michigan, and there still has to
be I mean, she was relatively young. I think she

(31:31):
was seventeen at the time, in the sixties, and I'm
sure a lot of the people who searched the woods
at that time are still around. But you know, as
the days go by, the people you know pass away
and information gets lost. And I'm really surprised no one
has tracked her down and put her on record.

Speaker 4 (31:51):
It's not easy to dig into some of those older cases.
And I mean, because the people are dying and I'm
finding now I'm dealing I'm dealing with this whole Bossberg
thing right now, Osburg, Washington, stuff that dealt with those
the so called cripple foot casts, although I don't it's
kind of an inappropriate name nowadays, but like the Bossburg incidents,
and I'm trying to find witnesses who had seen them.
I spoke to one gentleman who actually saw the prince

(32:13):
in the ground. His brother is so far eluded to me.
And I've been working with the Callville Historical Society to
try to dig some of these people up, not literally
because some of them actually are dead, but they're to
try to find them and uh and I've gotten some
uh stuff like but like no contact. But the most
recent thing I heard was, yeah, Cliff, a lot of

(32:35):
those people are dead, but that set and implies that
they're not all dead, so can help me out, you know.
So I'm still trying to find people like that too.
And I do think that these historical cases are worthy
of looking into, because even even already and my cursory
glands at the Bossburg thing for the last couple of months,
found new we found new casts that didn't that nobody

(32:56):
knew existed, you know, from from almost or fifty years
ago pretty much. So these old cases I think are
very worthwhile looking into, because as the young whipper snappers
in the community that we once were, and you know
now we're the old men of whatever field it is.
But we're looking at this thinking, oh, well, the horseman

(33:16):
already looked into that. I mean Green was there, Krantz
was there, the Hinden was at the Bossburg thing. I
mean Patterson was there, Dennis Jensen was there. Certainly they
would have done as thorough a job as could possibly
be done by humans.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
Apparently not.

Speaker 4 (33:31):
I think that old cases like that need a second glance,
no matter how many decades have passed. So I hope
you hope you either chase this person down or know
somebody who does.

Speaker 1 (33:42):
So, yeah, it's one of those things, right, Like I
was trying to put together a television show about the
UFO sightings in Michigan in nineteen sixty six, which are
arguably like the largest UFO sighting, that's the one that
became known as the Swamp Gas sighting. But you have,
you know, of people seeing these UFOs over the course
of two weeks. The police officers are chasing them in

(34:05):
their cars, and I was like, this needs to be documented,
and so I went to a network and pitched a
whole show about, like, we have to find these people
because now they are passing away, it's getting less and
less every single day. Let's get them on record finally,
and maybe we can come to some type of not answer,
but at least some kind of resolution about how they

(34:25):
should feel about their experience. And the network was super
into it, and we started shooting and going around with
the network. There was a telephone call and at some
point they said, well, is there any way that we
could slip some like bigfoot type monsters into the show?
And I was like, no, it has nothing to do
with that, and they were like, well, we just think

(34:46):
it would be more interesting if there was a monster.
And I told them, like, I didn't want to do
the show, and they that's how I don't get along
well with networks.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
Like I just told them, Okay, I'm done. I'm not
doing the show. And then we didn't do the show.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
And I'm kind of sad in it because we were
getting people on tape who were really instrumental and really
involved in the sixty six sighting. But yeah, like that
Christine van Acker case, like everybody makes documentaries about almost anything,
strange now, which is to make content. And I'm so
surprised there's not an hour long documentary or a Netflix documentary.

(35:21):
This is a Bigfoot attack, right, like, this is a
not very common experience of the an enraged Bigfoot, you know,
physically attacking someone and attacking another car, and fifteen hundred
people searching the field. Like you'd think that'd make a
pretty good two hour doc. And where did you hear
about this case?

Speaker 2 (35:39):
John Oh?

Speaker 1 (35:40):
I think I first read about that case in probably
one of Lauren's books. I know that it got covered
here extensively in the newspaper that was, you know, a
Michigan case. So it was pretty easy for me to
go to the Troit Public Library and just pull all
the microfeature records and start xeroxy everything. But I think

(36:02):
I probably first read about it in one of Lauren's books.

Speaker 3 (36:06):
Yeah, it's pretty well known, Cliff that one.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
But you know, I have about names, man, names are
like water in my hands.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
But yeah, I mean, since it's close to the Fermi
power plant, like I said, not to some things are hyperbolic.
But in my notes into my files, I always write
the atomic Bigfoot, just because it was right there and
it sounds so in nineteen sixties, it sounds like a
good sci fi movie.

Speaker 3 (36:28):
Because John, you're a noted skeptic and you're a debunker.
Do you ever get hired to do that for these shows?
Because I mean, you've I can't rub the top my
heavy You told me some great cases that you unraveled.

Speaker 1 (36:40):
Yeah, So every now and then people will call me in,
not so much to debunk an entire case, but ask me.
You know, one of the things I did when I
really realized I was going to be a researcher an investigator,
one of the first things I did was like joined
the International Brotherhood of Magicians and the Society for American
Magicians because I wanted to know how my brain could

(37:01):
be tricked just by magic. And then I started studying
hypnosis and going back through all the old books that
people use to fake seances and spiritualism. So a lot
of times with ghost hunting shows, they would call me
in and say, you know, this is happening, this is happening.
Can we figure out if there's an actual rational explanation

(37:24):
for this where it might not be a haunting or
someone might be trying to trick us, And you know,
that's good because you don't get fooled on television. You know,
the show doesn't come out and then someone says, oh,
I tricked you and fooled you.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
But people have done some really.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
I mean I've seen people do stuff as crazy as
putting swallowing dry ice chips so that their stomach will
gurgle to sound like a demonic like voice in the dark.
No kidding, Yeah, I mean it's crazy with the lengths
people will go to to kind of hoax and you
try and full television shows because they want to be

(38:02):
on TV.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
You know it, because I remember we were at one
of those paranormal conferences and I was impressed because I
wasn't impressed with a lot of like a lot of
those people like palm readers and psychics and this and that.
I was like, these people are They're fooling themselves and
fool in other people. But the one person, the one
person that I thought this person's the real deal was
Amy from a Dead Files to get a shows And

(38:23):
you said Amy Allen, Yeah, yeah, Amy, And I go,
she's I just knew she was the really that you said.
You know what, the thousand people I've interviewed you said,
she's one of four that I've believed.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
Yeah, I mean, I've run into so many. I used
to in the early two thousands.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
I used to go around, go around Michigan and test psychics,
Like I had this huge thing that I would do,
and people would tell me they were psychic, and I'd
have them come in and do all types of experiments.
And I don't know, I must have tested hundreds of
psychics in Michigan, and out of the hundreds I tested,
there were maybe two or three that that could do

(39:00):
something that was really interesting. And sometimes it was you know,
there was one guy that everybody told me was the
best psychic, and I was really doubting what they meant
by best psychic, and I brought him in and tested him.
And the first thing that I would do a lot
of the times, if I was not really impressed with
meeting the person and maybe not thinking that they were
psychic right off the bat, just kind of using my

(39:22):
BS detector, the first thing I'd do is I just
have them do a red and black gas on a
fifty two deck of cards. And he did his fifty
two reading and he looked at me and kind of
giggled when we were done because he had gotten fifty
of them wrong and he had two of them right.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
And he said, well, what do you think of my
psychic powers?

Speaker 1 (39:43):
And I said, I think that you're probably one of
the best psychics that I've ever seen, because getting fifty
wrong is as insane as getting fifty right.

Speaker 4 (39:52):
Yeah, I had a fifty percent chance with each card
it makes. Yeah, that's astronomical. The odds in set are phenomenal. Yeah,
And so like the idea, it was so funny just
he was a psychic. And after I continue, I tested
him for about a week and a half and what
seemed so bizarrely incredible to me was that he was

(40:15):
a psychic who always got everything wrong. And it was
this whole twist on psychic powers, like he just couldn't
get it right.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
There was something in his brain that he did the
opposite of what he was supposed to be doing, whether
it was card guessing tests or doing remote viewing, it
was always exactly the opposite.

Speaker 2 (40:36):
It was so strange.

Speaker 4 (40:37):
Yeah, it's like a you know, Church of the SubGenius Jr.
Bob Dobbs thing where Bob Dobbs bungles his way through divinity.

Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
The art of of the divine accident, I guess, you know, yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
Being a magician too, you know, it did help because
a lot of psychics and a lot of mediums are
just doing magic tricks.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
They're just doing cold reading. You know that they know
the estimates.

Speaker 1 (41:03):
If you're talking to a man who seems to be
between the ages of you know, eighteen and thirty, there
are a lot of things that you can say to
a man eighteen and thirty, no matter who he is,
if he was brought and usually you know, you find
their name, you can pretty much guess that they're in
the location that you're in speaking, and you can generalize

(41:24):
to the point of seeming like you're psychic.

Speaker 3 (41:26):
With Amy, for instance, what convinced she was telling the truth.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
One of the things that I find with people who
seem to actually have some type of psychic power is
that they I don't like to use this word, but
I will just for lack of better terminology, which we
don't have in a lot of the paranormal supernatural world,
but they seem to almost really be cursed with it,

(41:54):
and the way that they their body, their eyes, their mind,
their voice, like everything reacts while they're doing it. It's
almost as if there's some kind of miswire that's happening.
And I see that a lot when I watch Amy
do what she does, and just the way that her
throat will click. There's little subtle things that happen with

(42:16):
her eyes. Some of them are not so subtle. And
if she's faking, I mean, it's one of the best
I've ever seen. So she's almost like uncomfortable in a way.

Speaker 2 (42:28):
Oh yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
One of the people that I know who lives in
Michigan that I think is a really valid psychic friend
of mine, names Damien. He does not promote himself as
a psychic. He doesn't do really psychic greetings. I asked
him to do psychic greetings. I told him, like, I
want you to get out of your wheelhouse and I'm
going to do a lecture, and I want you to

(42:50):
come in the back and do psychic greetings for people
and don't charge them. I'll pay you whatever you want.
I'll pay you fifty bucks a reading or something like that.
And I did my lecture and at the end of
my life, sure, he came up and he was like,
you don't know me anything. He's like, I did half
of one reading, and I just got really bummed out
by it, and I thought to myself, like just that
aspect of like if you were in this to make money,

(43:14):
like he could have sat back there and made a
few hundred dollars during the lecture. And he looked so
worn out and so tired after doing a quote unquote
psychic reading for someone for ten minutes and then just
refused to do any more for the rest of the night.
Like that's that is really telling about a person.

Speaker 4 (43:35):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Bobo will be right back after these messages.

Speaker 2 (43:46):
You know, a few years ago I heard you speak.

Speaker 4 (43:49):
I wasn't in the same room, but you were actually
over the loud speakers at the time, which I really
appreciated because you know, I was at my vending table
and I don't get a chance to see the other speakers,
but actually heard yours And it was the first time
i'd heard your any any of your your lectures. And
what would I took away from it that I thought
was really cool that you don't get a lot of

(44:10):
was I could hear in your voice, and I could
hear your encouragement for the audience. To dive in deep
and enjoy what you're doing. I enjoy the weird that
that you find yourself in and how phenomenal that is
to be able to do that. And you're so encouraging
to the audience in this sort of way, because frankly,

(44:31):
i'd be rate the audience. I say, we're not doing enough,
good enough job. You call yourself a researcher, you know,
like that, And like the old man Crotchety Cliff is
on stage and everybody feels bummed when I leave, right
because I'm trying to up everybody's game. But you, but
you're much more encouraging than I am, and I just
think that is so gratifying to hear. So can you
tell us a little bit about that, about just that

(44:52):
sort of spirit from which you come?

Speaker 1 (44:54):
Yeah, I mean I have always been the type of person.
First of all, I know that people have difficulty talking
about their bigfoot encounter or they saw UFO, or they
think they saw a ghost, like the weirdness that people experience,
a lot of people have difficulty with voicing. And I

(45:15):
really do believe that if there was if we all
talked about the weird stuff, we did the weird psychic flashes,
that we have premonitory dreams seeing a weird light in
the sky. If we discussed that openly and honestly with
each other, we would realize that it's not so weird,
Like we live in a vastly strange universe that we

(45:36):
know actually very little about. And not only that, but
the joy that comes along with mystery and the hunt,
like going out into the woods in the darkness, going
into an allegedly haunted house, staring at the sky looking
for UFOs. These are things that the majority of people

(45:57):
don't readily do, and so when you're doing you should
be able to think to.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yourself, like, how much fun is this?

Speaker 1 (46:03):
I'm in the woods looking for Bigfoot or I'm in
this old prison and I'm looking for ghosts. Most people
who have lived and who will live don't do what
we do. They don't think about what we think about.
And that is joyful to me.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
Yeah, it really is.

Speaker 4 (46:19):
And it's nice to hear a voice like that because
being so deep into it, like I am, and I
know Bobo is and all that you know, but being
in our positions, I think it is something that is
easily for myself, at least forgotten that I do somehow,
you know, live an extraordinary life, even though it seems
like my ordinary life is when I wake up in

(46:40):
every day. But it is extraordinary, and I forget that
sometimes because all my friends are weirdos too.

Speaker 1 (46:47):
Yeah, for sure, But it's one of those things, right,
Like to look for a UFO doesn't mean that you
have to have like flears and night vision cameras and stuff.
It just means you go outside and like stare at
the night sky and look at space. And while you're
doing that, there's something in you that starts to contemplate
the weirdness of reality and what's going on.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
When you're sitting alone in.

Speaker 1 (47:09):
An allegedly haunted house, you start to think about your
mortality and the seemingly shared reality you have, what's going
to happen with you when you die.

Speaker 2 (47:20):
You get very philosophical sitting out in the woods listening
to nature and seeing this vast, crazy world of color
and sound that the animals experience, probably in a very
different way, and how you relate to it because we're
animals as well, and I do just really think it's wondrous.

Speaker 4 (47:39):
Yeah, it absolutely is. Now now the experience you to
subscribe is essentially the description of a fan or an aficionado,
or someone who's interested in the phenomenon whatever it is,
UFO's Bigfoot, etc. So, where is the line in your
opinion where someone crosses over from being an enthusiast and

(48:00):
into a researcher.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
Is zrey Lyne?

Speaker 4 (48:03):
And if so, where is it?

Speaker 1 (48:04):
I think for me the line was the first time
I cold called a witness. I think that really made
a deep difference in just being someone who was fascinated
with the phenomena to actually like standing on a stranger's
front porch and I am about to ask this question
of a stranger. I am about to get into this
conversation with this person who had what they thought or

(48:27):
might have had an experience. And I think doing that
talking to experiencers and people who have had experiences and
tracking down old cases that you can go and talk
to those people, I think that's kind of where the
line gets crossed.

Speaker 4 (48:44):
So in a way, it's kind of probing someone else's
life uninvited and documenting it.

Speaker 1 (48:51):
Yeah, that part of it, And I think there's also
a part of it too, where I think that you
leave being a fan behind once you are doubting what
you're thinking about.

Speaker 4 (49:03):
Well, that's an important thing. Tell us talk to us
a little bit more about doubting what you're thinking about.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
I like this line of thought.

Speaker 1 (49:11):
It's one of those ideas. I mean, now, especially with
social media and just the way the Internet is, you know,
we get in these spheres that reconfirm everything we already
believe and think that we believe, and it's hard to
get out of those bubbles, and when you start to realize, like, oh,
maybe that is not how it is.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
You know.

Speaker 1 (49:30):
I always tell people, and it's another reason that I
sometimes get razed in the different communities, whether it's UFOs
or cryptos or ghosts. I tell people all the time,
like I truly try not to believe in anything. Like
a belief is a concrete shoe. It keeps you from moving.
I have an infinitude of ideas. Ideas are malleable and flexible,

(49:52):
and they can change over time. And that's something I'm
very receptive to, especially when I'm talking to someone about
something like sasquatch or talking to someone about UFOs. Like
if a person thinks that UFOs are only nuts and bolts,
and that's it, it's just a high tech civilization that
figured out how to do this before we did, and

(50:14):
they came here. That doesn't seem all that interesting to
me if that's all the phenomena is. But if that's
what you believe it is, I think it's very limiting
in the scope of realizing how weird the world is.
And so I think challenging your own belief and saying,
am I right?

Speaker 2 (50:31):
Am I wrong? Is that idea better?

Speaker 1 (50:33):
Being able to throw out your old ideas as your
ideas evolve, I think is vastly, vastly important.

Speaker 4 (50:41):
How much should your own modification of your own paradigms
be based on evidence versus say, gut feelings or something
like that hunches.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
I think it's different for different scenarios.

Speaker 1 (50:57):
When it comes to something like if you're looking or
a flesh and blood Bigfoot, there is evidence, which I
think physical evidence, that will change your ideas about that
physical creature. When it comes to something like ghosts, that
change has less to do with evidence, because I think

(51:17):
that ghostly experiences and supernatural experiences like that are individualized
and they're kind of meant to help us on our
path to development of our understanding of the world. With UFOs,
it gets into a really weird area where there is
physical evidence and also a very deep psychological part. So

(51:40):
I think it plays I think it plays different roles
in the different phenomenon.

Speaker 3 (51:46):
Well, because you had your own, like you died and
all that back in the day, I remember what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
Yeah, when I was eighteen, I had a heart attack
and died and total time of death was three and
a half minutes. And when I recovered from that, that's
really when I started my journey. Before that, I was
doing a lot of lectures on government conspiracies, and I
think I said that earlier. And when I recovered from that,

(52:13):
I was like, Oh, what happened to me? Not only
biologically but psychologically? What did that experience mean? And what
does it mean when humans have that experience and how
does that change us? Do you remember any of it
or is it just a missing three and a half minutes?

Speaker 2 (52:28):
No.

Speaker 1 (52:29):
So with my death experience, there are so typically with
death experiences, there are three major experiences that people have.
The first one is the tunnel of light and loved
ones and going toward the light, and it's very happy
and positive, and that's the one you hear about the
most because it's a positive experience, and that's how people
understand it as a positive experience. The second one is

(52:52):
usually the person is out of their body. They're watching
the doctors work on them, they're aware of being dead.
They're in the hospital room or the ambulance, watching everything
going on, seeing people cry. That is kind of the
second most common experience. And then the third experiences, which
is the one I had, is called a null or
a void experience, which is you go from living in

(53:16):
this seemingly shared reality with everybody else to existing solely
by yourself inside of infinity forever, and there's nothing there
but you. You are nothing but thought or you can
call it consciousness, but you are only aware of your
personality existing in the void forever.

Speaker 2 (53:38):
And that was my experience. It's kind of.

Speaker 1 (53:41):
Difficult to talk about because it encompasses eternity and infinitude,
which don't have really great words. So the idea that
I was in a place forever seems strange to be
saying to you now, because this is obviously after forever,
and forever isn't supposed to have an end.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
It's supposed to go on forever, so the words kind
of fall apart.

Speaker 3 (54:04):
At a certain point, I think you, I've got a
preview of your trip to hell coming up.

Speaker 1 (54:11):
So the thing that's really interesting when I talk to
other people who have had similar experiences is that in
the moment, it seems very hellish, very purgatory. But the
reality is that when you recover, when you internalize it properly,
when you really start to think about it, it is
a very transformative experience in the sense that I when

(54:32):
I returned back to this reality, I was much more
caring and much more loving, and much more appreciative of
colors and sights and sounds and simple things and animals
and people, and so it was a net positive experience.

Speaker 4 (54:49):
I would have to think that dying would make you
appreciate living, certainly.

Speaker 2 (54:54):
I tell people all the time.

Speaker 1 (54:56):
One of the things that I remember, like when I
woke up in the hospital bed, there was this whiteboard
across from me, and it was framed in kind of
dark oak wood, and I remember looking at the wood
frame and thinking to myself, Wow, brown is such a
beautiful color.

Speaker 2 (55:14):
And I almost never saw it again.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
You realize that brown gray, like these things that we
take so much advantage of, we don't even think about
them anymore, how spectacular and beautiful they are. And then
when you start to think about people and individuality and
each person you meet, how uniquely special they are. It really,
like I said, is transformative.

Speaker 3 (55:37):
Does that affect you when you're doing investigations in like
ghosts and that sort of terneral stuff.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
Yeah, to a certain degree.

Speaker 1 (55:44):
I usually come at the when I'm investigating for a
ghost or a spirit or something like that, I really
truly try to not personify that entity or spirit, whatever
people want to call it, in the sense that everybody
thinks that a ghost is kind of just like an

(56:04):
invisible version of you that can walk through walls and
stuff like that. And I really think that the six
year old me doesn't exist anymore, but John is still here.
I have changed and grown because of the experiences of
my life, and so if I were to die and
be out of my body and still exist in some form,

(56:26):
I would be having all new experiences. So how long
would I remain John? How long would I remain this
version of John? And a lot of people talk to ghosts,
like the people and taught, I try to speak to
entities or research entities or research cases as if knowing
that they were people at one time, but that they

(56:48):
have become something that's unknowable to me at this moment.

Speaker 4 (56:51):
Is that your model for what ghosts are things that
were once alive and are no longer some of them.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
I think that I have as many.

Speaker 1 (57:01):
I think that there are probably as many different types
of spirits and entities as our ideas about spirits and entities.
You know, whether you start to think about, you know,
if there are extraterrestrials, do they have ghosts too? You know, so,
and why wouldn't they come to this planet as ghosts?
And so maybe some of the extraterrestrials are ghosts. And

(57:21):
you know, when I was at I was at dinner
with Amy Bruney there's a couple of years ago, and
her daughter, I think was four or five at the time,
and her daughter said, you know, why are there no
dinosaur ghosts? And I thought to myself, like, well, maybe
there are. Maybe that's why you can't catch Ogo Pogo,
and you can't catch the Lochness Monster, and you can't

(57:44):
catch the dinosaurs that people have spotted, Like maybe we're
seeing the ghosts of prehistoric creatures. Maybe some of the
bigfoot sightings people see our caveman ghosts.

Speaker 4 (57:54):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and beyond with Cliff and Bogo.
We'll be right back after these messages, I will say.
One researcher suggested that these orbs are Bigfoot ghosts, which,
of course, you know, I don't even want to think

(58:15):
about it at this point because I'm worried about the
physical animal, let alone with this other stuff. You know,
but that's certainly been brought up before in the context
of sasquatches. That's something like that is going on, and
I guess why not. But I guess I'll worry about that.

Speaker 3 (58:28):
You know.

Speaker 4 (58:28):
Maybe when I'm dead, I'll look for Bigfoot ghosts. In
the meantime, I will look for living ones.

Speaker 1 (58:34):
That's the thing too, Like I tell people at my
lectures all the time, like research the thing that you're
interested in. You don't have to look for Bigfoot as
an alien or Bigfoot as a ghost. If you're interested
in Bigfoot as upright hominid, you know, with local motion,
like go go for that and research that if you
want to. If you do want to, you know, investigate
aliens simply as nuts and bolt saucers. Go and do that,

(58:57):
Like do what makes you happy and do what brings
joy into your life and fulfills that, you know, search
for the mysterious that we're all kind of on a
quest for.

Speaker 4 (59:08):
That's one of the things I appreciate about my friend
Tom Powell, who thinks that sasquatches are you know, paranormal
in nature, et cetera. And he goes at Cliff you Apers,
he calls me an apro even though I think that's
not exactly appropriate. It's not appropriate to actually what I
actually think is going on. But you Apers, I'm glad
you're doing it. It means I don't have to. We
just compare notes later, you know. So yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly,

(59:30):
you do you man, I'll do me yeah, and know that.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
The other thing I stress too is I try and
tell people at my lectures, like know that you're like,
it's not supposed to be a we're not supposed to
be trying to, you know, one up each other, like
whatever weird paranormal, supernatural cryptozoological experience that you've had personally
that each person has had personally, that experience is enough.

(59:56):
A lot of the times we have people saying like, well,
I saw a bigfoot one time and someone will jump
on them and say, like, well, I've seen twelve Bigfoot
in my life, and like seeing Bigfoot one time is
a big deal, and that experience is enough, Like you
don't have to keep up in your game, because that
sometimes will lead people to hoaxing stuff, which then messes
up everything.

Speaker 4 (01:00:16):
Yeah, how often do you find hoaxers versus real, sincere
people who experience something strange? Would you venture like a
percentage or something like that or even common often? You know,
that's how often are you feeling people are either lying
to others or perhaps lying to themselves.

Speaker 1 (01:00:36):
I feel like a lot of the times, I don't
think there's a percentage to hit, but I do feel
that when I encounter a hoaxer or someone who is
fabricating evidence, it really does have a lot to do
with repeater effect, where they will have one genuine or
real experience, and you know, then being unsatisfied with that,

(01:00:59):
they per they start making stuff up to stay current,
to stay in the kind of loop and conversation, and
and then that eventually will discount their original experience. You know,
if you discover that they are hoaxing stuff, then even
the real genuine one at the beginning.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
Falls into question, but I don't it's not that often.
I think that people are mostly genuine with their experiences.
I just think that there's also that part of humanity
where if they don't get the fame or you know,
recognition that they think they might deserve from having a
weird experience, that's that's where people can start really messing

(01:01:39):
up and start hoaxing and even I think, fooling themselves
about what they might be experiencing.

Speaker 3 (01:01:45):
What's the craziest thing you saw it through your mind,
like paranormal was, that's.

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
A fairly so if I go ghost.

Speaker 1 (01:01:55):
Then probably In nineteen ninety nine, a friend of mine
who worked for the well, this is not ghosts, but
kind of spiritual. In nineteen ninety nine, a friend of
mine who worked for the Archdiocese of Detroit. They asked
me if I wanted to sit in on a Vatican
spunctored sponsored exorcism, and so I did that. So I
spent you know, thirty two hours in this room with

(01:02:17):
the client and two priests and watched them perform in exorcism.
And that really warped my brain for a few years
trying to rationalize it and understand what I had seen
and what the experience could have and might might have been.
That was that was really crazy in a spiritual sense,
and so maybe kind of in a ghosty.

Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
Sense or.

Speaker 3 (01:02:39):
Weren't Was it successful?

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
It was successful. It was very very strange. I mean
it's not at all like you see in the movies.

Speaker 1 (01:02:47):
The client slept most of the time, but the client
did do things like speak multiple languages that there's no
way they probably could have known. They would manifest what
looked like bruises and scrapes on their skin that would
disappear within moments. The body would contort in various ways

(01:03:09):
that I would think would break bone and you know,
pop muscles out of joint and didn't. It was It
was very strange. And then when it was over, you know,
the client went to sleep and the priest said that's it,
and it was done, and one priest and one assisting priest.

Speaker 3 (01:03:28):
And then where does the spirit go? Do they put
it into something or they just let it go on
this ether?

Speaker 4 (01:03:33):
No.

Speaker 1 (01:03:34):
So I just actually had a conversation with a friend
of mine about this recently, which was, you know, some
of the things that don't get talked about or have
become popular because of movies that are, you know, based
around exorcisms and stuff. But when when a Catholic priest
is doing an exorcism, they don't really expel the entity
and send it back to Hell or get it out

(01:03:54):
of the body or whatever. What they're doing is they're
actually doing like a dissolution of evil, So it's just
dissolving out of the person, so it doesn't really go anywhere.

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):
It just ceases to.

Speaker 1 (01:04:05):
Be okay, and then you know, I've seen some pretty
crazy UFOs up in northern Michigan. There were some really
fast moving, non traditional lights in the sky that seemed
to be what people would say are and identified flying objects.

Speaker 3 (01:04:24):
And there structured on the actual craft or just lights.

Speaker 4 (01:04:28):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:04:28):
I saw in nineteen ninety three, I was actually working
a midnight shift at a job and I went outside
and saw a black triangle that was illuminated from underneath.
It had almost like orange bubbles beneath it, and it
was flying silently over the city. And at one point

(01:04:49):
it was so strange because when I first looked at it,
I thought it was someone was flying a kite. It
was like three o'clock or four o'clock in the morning.
I thought, who's flying a kite at three or four
o'clock in the morning, and then as it got a
little further in front of me, I thought, oh, that's
a weird flock of birds. And then right before it
disappeared over the top of the buildings to my to

(01:05:11):
my right, I thought to myself, Oh, that's that's a
that's a that's a UFO.

Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
And then it was gone.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
And it was so strange that I was looking at
this thing for a minute and a half and UFO
was the last thing that I thought about when I
saw it.

Speaker 4 (01:05:25):
It probably should be though, to be fair, you know,
kind of eliminated everything else, right, Yeah, well, you know,
when we were at Michigan Paracon together a few weeks
ago or a month ago, whenever that was.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
I have a pretty.

Speaker 4 (01:05:36):
Elastic sense of time.

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
It's hard to tell. Sometimes.

Speaker 4 (01:05:39):
You told this wonderful story about manifesting a sea monster
of sorts, and I think it's so I don't know.
I've been asking if you would mind telling that story,
because number one, I think it shows that, you know,
group thought is a pretty cool thing, and it's kind
of interesting and the possibilities what may or may not
come from it, especially when we're staring down, you know,

(01:05:59):
the all of a strange gun pointed at our world today,
that's all screwed up and everything. But also how when
you do manifest the thing of your wishes, it may
not be the form that you expect. Like I always say,
we know, like when you make a wish because you
see a shooting star and a wishbone in a turkey
or something. I always wish for something I already have,

(01:06:19):
because that way I know the wish is going to
come true, and it just seems to be efficient that way.
But whenever I've asked for something else, I always seem
to get it. You know. If I pray for something,
or if I sure want something and I meditate upon
it in some sort of way, I always get it,
but it's never the form I want. And I think
your story kind of shows a nice example of that
in a very humorous, awesome, lovely way.

Speaker 2 (01:06:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:41):
So I did a cruise with I didn't know if
I had told her, Dana had told it. We went
on a cruise. Amy Brune puts together these paranormal cruises,
and she asked me if I could do something like
can you can you do something for the guests after
the speakers, you know, after we have dinner. And I said, yeah,
I'll put together like a group intension, a group experiment.

(01:07:05):
And so we did this twice. We did it on
two different cruises. But the first time I didn't really
know what I wanted to do. I talked to some
friends back in Detroit and who are occultists, and I said,
you know, this is the idea that I have. Let's
let's try and manifest a giant sea monster, some kind
of love crafty and elder beast come out of the ocean,

(01:07:27):
and we'll see what happens. And so I got all
these people out on the deck of the ship and
I've got them all kind of chanting, and they've got
their hands over the water, and it's late at night.
It must have been a sight to see so much fun.
And the horizon that we were facing started to not

(01:07:48):
be very viewable, and it looked as if there was
a black cloud rolling in. And as soon as that
happened and people noticed it, you know, everybody's eyes were
open as we all noticed it, Like people stopped channing,
they removed their hands. They started to get scared because
it seemed like we were actually generating something that were

(01:08:10):
something weird was about to happen. And I was telling
people like, no, no, no, let's keep going, let's keep
doing this, let's keep doing this. But people got nervous
and started laughing, and some people got scared and walked
away from the deck. And this thing that was coming
toward us off the water, this black, kind of shapeless
cloud coming toward us, just kind of dissipated and disappeared,

(01:08:31):
and people were like, Oh, that's really weird, and I
wish I could, you know, I was telling people, I
wish we could have held on to it longer. And
the next morning I wake up to the sound of
fog horns and our ship, over the course of the
night had gotten lost in the ocean, and there was
a fog bank that had surrounded our ship, and they

(01:08:52):
weren't allowing anybody out on the decks because you literally
couldn't see off the side of the boat the fog
was so thick. And we were I think sixty year
seventy miles off course, and you know, those giant cruise
ships are all run by computer like they're not supposed
to go off course. And I really still kind of
think to this day, like we manifested something like something
happened to our boat and people on the ship were

(01:09:15):
very scared, but we eventually got back on course. The
thing that's really crazy is so that was we were
that was a trip to Bermuda and when we had
done that, we were actually just on the tip of
the Bermuda Triangle too. So that was one of the
things that I kind of wanted to do. And when
we got back to shore a couple of days later.
The day that we got back to shore, a boat

(01:09:38):
actually came. They found a boat had risen from the
bottom of the Bermuda Triangle while we were on our cruise.

Speaker 3 (01:09:45):
No, I love it. Yeah, John, Where can people follow
you on social media or your web page? You got
a book? I know you got a book you can
let us know about.

Speaker 2 (01:09:55):
Yeah. I try to make it easy for everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
So it's just Twitter, Instagram, facebo, book all that stuff
is just my name, one word, John E. L. Tenny
and then any book that you can find is probably
on Amazon. I suggest if people, if any of that
is too hard for people, they go to Google and
they type my last name T E N N E
Y into Google and then type the word weirdo after it,

(01:10:18):
and then just follow wherever it leads.

Speaker 4 (01:10:22):
Awesome, awesome. Now aren't you doing a podcast right now too?
Do you want to push that and you want to
plug that?

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:10:27):
I do.

Speaker 1 (01:10:27):
A podcast has nothing to do really with paranormal phenomenon
unless it comes up.

Speaker 2 (01:10:32):
But I do it with my friend Jessica. It's called
What's Up Weirdo?

Speaker 1 (01:10:35):
And I normally talk to her every single day, and
so I decided during quarantine, I wasn't getting my fix
of hearing weird bar conversation by going out and seeing people.
So I told her, like, let's just record our phone
calls and we'll put one a week out and people
can just listen to two friends talking to each other

(01:10:55):
and maybe they can find some camaraderie in that. So
it's called What's Up Weirdo, And that website is What's
Upweirdo dot com and it's available on all podcast platforms.

Speaker 4 (01:11:04):
Oh that's strange, just kind of how this podcast was born. Actually,
so I was already talking to Bobo anyway. So John,
thank you so much for coming on Bigfoot and beyond.
Whenever you're not near, I miss you. I only get
to see you once or twice a year, but man,
what a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much,
John for setting a site some time for Bobo and I.

Speaker 2 (01:11:25):
Oh yeah, I'm going to try and put an event
together for you and Bobo to come to Michigan.

Speaker 4 (01:11:28):
Oh I would love that, love that, Yeah, because you know,
we're all we're on the Bigfoot circuit and you're on
some other circuit and it's rare that our paths cross,
but it is always a joy when it does.

Speaker 1 (01:11:40):
Yeah, I need you guys to come up and look
at the swamp on my family's property that I just
found out might have a squatch on it.

Speaker 2 (01:11:45):
Oh, I really love to.

Speaker 3 (01:11:47):
Yeah, mister Tanning, we appreciate you putting on your three
P suit and getting on the air with us, even
though it's audio only.

Speaker 7 (01:11:53):
Yeah, Boba and are usually naked, so not today. It's
too cold, but it was Yeah that we appreciate it.
I can't wait to see you again. You're an awesome dude.
It a great guest. Thank you, No, thanks for having me, guys.

Speaker 1 (01:12:03):
It's honestly like a pleasure talking to fun weirdos and
getting the chance to reconnect with you guys.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
So thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:12:09):
So much for doing this and even having the show.
I love this show and just hearing you guys banter
about strange stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:12:15):
Now that I know the definition of weird, I'm not
offended at all.

Speaker 2 (01:12:19):
He finally came around, Bobes, You're a different kind of weirdo, Bubes.

Speaker 3 (01:12:23):
Thank you. Okay, folks, with that was another episode of
Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo and our guest
John E. L. Tenney. Thank you so much. We'll talk
to you next weekend. Until then, keep it squatchy.

Speaker 4 (01:12:39):
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,

(01:12:59):
and weet us your thoughts and questions with the hashtag
Bigfoot and Beyond.