CLASSICS: The Adventures of Dr. Capparella!

Check out this "classic" chat Cliff and Bobo had with ornithologist and biologist Dr. Angelo Capparella! Dr. Capparella has been heavily involved with the scientific pursuit of the sasquatch for over two decades, and joined us back in February of 2021 to talk about his adventures!

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Episode Transcript

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

Speaker 2 (00:06):
With Cliff and Bobo. These guys are your favorites, so
like say subscribe and rade it.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
I'm star and me.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Righteous on yesterday and listening, oh watching always keep its watching.
And now your hosts Cliff Berrickman and James Bobo Fay Bobo.
How are you doing today?

Speaker 4 (00:33):
Excellent? Sir? How about you? Cliff?

Speaker 2 (00:35):
I am doing very well. Thank you. Anything exciting going
on we should know about her? You just want to
jump right into it because I just kind of want
to jump right into it because of our guests today.

Speaker 5 (00:43):
No, I know who we got on today, and I
got nothing to say until he says something, because he's
going to enlighten us in the audience.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, nothing that we have to say is going to
add to our conversation. So let's just jump right into it.
So I've had the pleasure of meeting this gentleman before
I actually met him at Beach Foot and the kind
of a West Coast event that Todd and Diane Nice
put on for a number of years. And I listened
to this guy speak and I was blown away because
not only is this guy like a legitimate academic with

(01:12):
an interest in Sasquatches and you know those that combination
right there is amazing. But he's a historical figure as
well for old timers. And then that when I say
old timers, you know, I feel old, but I know
I'm not an old timer. The old timers are the
four horsemen, you know, Burn and Grain and Krantz, you know,
hind in those guys. But for the next generation, I

(01:33):
call it generation, the second generation, you know, but really
it's the it's the nineteen eighties, in the nineteen nineties,
and that's kind of this this this area, it's like
the dark ages of Bigfoot, because not a lot of
information comes out. Not a lot of people seem to
be super active. He had stuff from Krantz, you know,
the dramatic glyphics, he had the Blue Mountain activity that
was going on there. But really, you know, the other

(01:56):
people are kind of low profile. That's the Joe B. Lart,
that's the Cliff Olson's, that's the Richard Greenwells from the
International Society of Cryptozoology. And that's why I was stoked
to hear our guests speak, because this gentleman that we
have on here today, Angelo Capparella, he was involved with
doctor Greenwell on his expeditions to northern California and southern

(02:19):
Oregon and all of that. A historical figure in cryptozoology
is with us today. So he's an ornithologist at Illinois
State University. And listeners, please welcome in Bobo as well.
Please welcome Angelo Caperella. Angelo, thank you so much for
joining us today.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Thank you very much for the invitation to be on
your podcast. Appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
We are thrilled whenever we can have a legitimate academic
on the program. And so why don't we start with
that very briefly, like why don't you tell us what
your job is? And we promise not to tell anybody
because we know how like you know, college professors are
treated if they're under big interested in Bigfoot. But luckily
no one listens to this. Your word will not reach out.

Speaker 6 (02:58):
Okay, well, actually, by ja now is getting used to retirement.
After thirty one years as a zoologist at Illinois State University,
I finally decided to retire let a new, younger generation
come in. And this was after getting very involved in
conservation biology and fostering our collections of birds and mammals,

(03:19):
doing a whole host of things educating graduate students. I
still have an affiliation at the University of Illinois State,
but my retirement effectively, I would say, occur in June,
and so I'm just sort of adjusting things. Getting used
of the COVID kind of threw a ringer into some
of my plans at least for now, as it has
for so many but basically continuing doing projects in affiliation

(03:44):
with university, but now have a little more flexibility. And
thankfully all you educators out there can under appreciate this.
Thankfully don't have to teach under the COVID issue that
causes so much difficulty for both teachers and students.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
I can't even imagine. And I was an elementary school
teacher for fourteen years and just to think that, like
what teachers are going through now just to educate their students,
you know, and just teaching is hard enough, but this,
I mean, teachers deserve medals, you know, they certainly deserve raises,
but they absolutely deserve medals for what they're going through now,

(04:20):
as do the students. I might end.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Yeah, it was challenging.

Speaker 6 (04:23):
My last semester teaching was last spring of twenty nineteen,
and we had to pivot right in the middle of
the semester to all remote teaching, which was quite a
struggle for everyone since it had to happen so quickly.
But I got through it, So I guess that's good
and now I can concentrate well on other things.

Speaker 5 (04:42):
So with googling all that, Now are your students to
do like goo you? Are they aware of your big
foot interest? Were you like real quiet at school about it?

Speaker 4 (04:51):
Or did you was it known just not a real
big deal? How'd that work?

Speaker 6 (04:55):
More of the latter, I would say. In fact, they
even had a couple of students, an undergraduate and a
graduate student kind of helped me as we sort of
were using analyzing for vocalizations a lot of the SD
cards that the NAWAC was providing and picking a look
making spectrograms of vocalizations and things like that.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
They were helping me with that project and that was
a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
So how did you get into the Bigfoot thing? Because
I mean, you're a bird guy. I guess your initial
your main interest interest being in an ornithologist would be
you know, birds in general. Was the interest always there
as it is with so many of us, like from
when you were a little boy, or did it arise
because something happened to you or when you were around,
or tell us little bit about your history with the subject.

Speaker 6 (05:41):
In zoology, my initialive interest was not actually herpetology, So
I grew up herping in North Carolina.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
Which of course study of reptiles, reptiles.

Speaker 6 (05:49):
And amphibians, reptiles and amphibians, herptiles, herpetology, reptiles and amphibians,
And it was only a little later that. In fact,
it wasn't until undergraduate at University of North Carolina that
I got into birds. And as a verneber zoologist, I
was pretty much interested knowns, including mammals, so I considered
myself pretty general, although over time I gradually specialized more

(06:11):
and more in ornithology. As I continued through my academic career,
getting my master's at Texas Tech and then my doctor
at Louisiana State University, that shifted me more to birds,
and particularly neotropical birds, birds of South America. So I
was on a lot of expeditions during my graduate years
and after looking for new species of birds with museums

(06:32):
down in South America. But in terms of cryptozoology, I
was interested as a teenager. I can trace that back
to getting on the Track of Unknown Animals by Bernard
hu Humans, and of course I'm in Sanderson's works and
John Green's work, So it wasn't just a sasquatch that
I was interested as all of cryptozoology, which sasquatch gave

(06:54):
me the most opportunity to do some field work in
the nineties with Richard Greenwell.

Speaker 4 (06:58):
That's all my head.

Speaker 5 (07:00):
My next getting Stu as you're talking about the books,
you got my head a done real fast.

Speaker 3 (07:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sounds familiar.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
You're building Bobo's neck muscles. Excellent. You became interested in
cryptosology in general to all of the various animals that
might be out there, on Bigfoot being one of those.
But you how did you make a connection to Greenwell?

Speaker 3 (07:22):
When he started the International Society of Cryptozoology. I found
out about it right when it started.

Speaker 6 (07:27):
So I was one of the early members and visited
me in New York City when I was at the
American zoom Ansal History as a postdoc, and invited me
in the nineteen nineties to come on the board of directors.
So I was elected to the board of directors, served
on the is International Society for Cryptology Board of Directors
from nineteen ninety three to two thousand and five.

Speaker 3 (07:49):
And I actually even.

Speaker 6 (07:51):
Before that, he had me on an editorial board starting
in nineteen eighty eight for the journal Cryptozoology, and I
would hear with you relevant article for the journal and
got to talk to him quite a bit and became
really good friends. And then when I read within the
journal his field report for his expedition one of the

(08:14):
maybe it was his second expedition I don't recall exactly
through the Siskew Wilderness of the Sixth River National Forest
in northern California. It was one that Jeff Belger was
on and along with a couple other people, including his son,
Richard's son, And when I read all of the activities
they had and talked to him more about it, I said, Richard,
you got to get me in on this that you're

(08:35):
following the same philosophy that we followed at LSU to
discover new birds in South America.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
That is, you.

Speaker 6 (08:41):
Select a site and you just sit there and you
work it, and you work it for weeks, if not
months in the case of grow and you get to
know it well. You don't just go trapsing all over
the place you really become part of the forest and
get to know that area.

Speaker 3 (08:55):
And he had selected this area, which was centered.

Speaker 6 (08:58):
On Elkhole in the Siske Wilderness, based on past research
that he had done, as potentially a really excellent place
to have a long term field project to try to
get evidence of Sasquatch. And as I say, after I
found out about the successes they were starting to have
with encounters, I asked, Hey, I'd love to be on

(09:18):
some expeditions up there. And I was on three of
three of them. I wasn't able to go on all
of them nineteen ninety eight, nineteen ninety nine, and the
final one two thousand and five, which was just before
his tragic passing.

Speaker 5 (09:32):
I was so bun I missed those because I was
I was around in that area when you guys were
out there, and I knew about you guys been out
there one time, but I knew Melgium, but not that well.
And I was like, man, I was wishing I could
get a gig like Holland bags for you guys or
doing whatever.

Speaker 6 (09:47):
That's certainly how we got into some of these areas.
Although to get into el Whole we actually well, actually
one year he told me he ridded lam as. She
said he would never do again, said they were very unreliable.
But in subsequent years we did horses and mules, rented
those and got into alcohol, which was a really hard
place to get into, but a great place to work.

Speaker 4 (10:10):
Well.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
Yeah, the Siski Wilderness area in general has just a
reputation of being one of the gnarliest areas in North America.
There are stories of the wildlife firefighters being dropped off
and having to be rescued out of there. It is
some of the densest, thickest, nastiest off trail areas you
could possibly go, with tons of bears, tons of animals,

(10:34):
and just treacherous terrain. Perfect for sasquatches in every way
you can imagine, and for the historically oriented bigfooters listening.
Not far at all from Bluff Creek.

Speaker 6 (10:45):
Yes, In fact, in nineteen ninety eight that's when we
actually did do Bluff Creek. We hired orders to take
us down and we spent about a month in Bluff Creek,
and that was my first trip with him.

Speaker 3 (10:57):
He decided to.

Speaker 6 (10:58):
Switch from the sisk Wilderness Bluff Creek, but then after
we had nothing.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
I don't have to Bluff Creek.

Speaker 6 (11:04):
We went back to the wilderness, and that was in
nineteen ninety nine. But though it was a very useful
comparative study to have done Bluff Creek, and it was
fun just because he took me down to the Patterson site,
which I would have never been able to find on
my own. And it was just kind of neat historically
to see that side, although it had changed tremendously. As
those of you who've visited sets.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
Now this is this is so funny because I mean,
Bluff Creek is essentially Bobo's home stomping grounds, and I've
been working the Bluff Creek area since nineteen ninety four.
So we were all there at the same time, just
we happened to miss each other. Like I think any
one of us could have been that weird, suspicious guy
on the road going the opposite direction in that car.
You know, some of us are more suspicious than others, perhaps,

(11:47):
but still, like, it's so interesting that we were all
there at the same time more or less. Certainly we
must have overlapped at some point.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
Probably so.

Speaker 6 (11:55):
And actually we were filmed by a film crew for
a TV show. We were like a set, but within
one of those many many different TV shows at the.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Time that would deal with crypti problems.

Speaker 6 (12:06):
One of the ways that Richard tried to find these
expeditions was to invite camera crews from different kinds of shows.
One year even had it from a Japanese TV series
to kind of helped underwrite it so that we could
go down to these areas. And at least for the
nineteen ninety eight one, we did have a film crew

(12:27):
there briefly. They then left and then we did most
of our work after that. But that's on a TV
documentary somewhere. I forget now what TV show was on,
but you can see us coming out of the Bluff
Creek Quildness after about a month, looking pretty disheveled.

Speaker 3 (12:42):
Particularly since we ran out of food while we were there.

Speaker 6 (12:47):
Planning got better after that, and so I partly try
to find where that TV show was that has that
segment of us.

Speaker 3 (12:55):
I know we were profile along with the Seilacant and
something else.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
Well that would be that'd be very seem to look into.
So I know Greenwell did expeditions to the Sixes River area,
which is in southern Oregon. You weren't on any of
those trips. It sounds like no, I.

Speaker 3 (13:11):
Wasn't on any of those. All of mine were in
northern California.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
Okay, so Six Rivers National Forests.

Speaker 3 (13:16):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
What are some of the highlights or some of the
adventures that you can share with us from those expeditions.

Speaker 6 (13:23):
Well, there were certainly many. The nineteen ninety nine one
was a lot of fun. Basically he was still refining
a lot of his techniques, so some of the techniques
and teaching them to be as well. I mean, one
of the techniques was broadcasting. His son was a real
electronic whiz and put together an incredible broadcast system. So

(13:43):
we were actually alcohol is at the up at the
headwaters of bill And Creek. Billan Creek is one of
those areas that you can't walk down because it's just
too much, too much brush, too dangerous. People do get
stranded there, as you mentioned, But he had the philosophy
was that it's very hard to walk up on a sasquatch.
So we want to interest them in us. We want

(14:05):
to be the bait. We want to engage their curiosity.
That was his philosophy. Bring them to us. That's the
only way this is going to make any sense. Because
there's no way you could just stumble across that without
your can't as well known and do.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
Any kind of long term study.

Speaker 6 (14:20):
So we wanted to engage them in being curious about us,
and that was his philosophy. He did a lot of
different things to try to enhance their curiosity and he
was very good. Richard was at finagling high tech equipment
on loan because again we had really no budget other
than our own personal finances, and he would get the
high end cameras, thermal cameras, the impetuers, I mean, our

(14:45):
source of stuff, seismic sensors. He was he could talk
anybody into giving him anything. It was amazing in his
impeccable British accent. I think that helped a lot. His
British accent really really helped in his interactions with people.
But he was very verbally adept at engaging people, very extroverted,

(15:07):
very very friendly, and could get anybody talking to him,
which was really neat. And we had all sorts of interesting,
you know, sounds and things like that.

Speaker 3 (15:16):
I remember the nineteen ninety nine was.

Speaker 6 (15:18):
The year that I became convinced that we needed to
have better recorders because we kept missing sounds, you know,
we had. It was one of those deals where we
had the recorder ready to turn on, and of course
by the time you turn it on.

Speaker 3 (15:31):
The sound isn't happening anymore.

Speaker 6 (15:33):
That was incredibly frustrating, and so for the two thousand
and five we actually bought a couple of digital recorders
that we made sure we're going twenty four to seven.
Of course, out we have these autonomous recording units that
you can get that will go for months continuously without
your having to change batteries or SD cards. But at
the time it was challenging because again, you just never

(15:55):
knew when a vocalization would happen, and it was very
frustrating to miss those.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
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Speaker 4 (18:00):
Angel What birds have you heard them imitate?

Speaker 5 (18:03):
Because I've heard of new owls and it sounds like
a finch and a few others.

Speaker 4 (18:08):
What have you heard crows? And what have you heard?

Speaker 2 (18:11):
Well?

Speaker 6 (18:12):
The one that blew me away actually happened when I
started working with the Nawac and the Wachitaw.

Speaker 3 (18:19):
Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma.

Speaker 6 (18:21):
One of the recordings I had that blew me away
as an ornithologist is a perfect redent rendition of a
common cuckoo, which is what the cuckoo clock sound is.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
And it was weird.

Speaker 6 (18:33):
We were in camp and hearing this thing, and I'm thinking,
what on earth? There's no way a common cuckoo would
be a vagrant from Europe in the mountains of the
southeast Oklahoma. I'm not even sure if they were recorded
from North America, and so it would be either from
Alaska or from northeast Canada. So that's one bird that
was weird and The only thing I can ascribe that

(18:54):
too is I know that over the years they have
broadcast all sorts of assimblies of calls or the NAWAC,
and I can only assume that somebody at some point
during all the field work there must have broadcast a
cuckoo sound and that was a perfect rendition of a
common cuckoo. I have that on as a recording and

(19:17):
you couldn't tell it from So that's a bird that
freaks me out in the most now, And of course
it stood out to an ornithologist because we knew it
wasn't a bird that could be there. Whereas if they're
imitating other birds that could be there or are there,
it gets a little bit trickier to ascertain whether you're
dealing with demoicry or the real thing.

Speaker 5 (19:36):
Bird wise, what have you been like perplexed about, like
what you couldn't for sure say either way it was
an imitation or an actual bird.

Speaker 6 (19:45):
Well, from my own experience, everything I've heard so far
in terms of birds that are supposed to be there
have been those birds. So I haven't heard any imitations
of native bird species that made me suspicion. So in
terms of that vocal arena.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
I haven't. I can't really offer more on that score.

Speaker 4 (20:08):
Eight hundred pound owls.

Speaker 6 (20:10):
No, No, all the owls that we hear, and we
hear a lot i'll sound like the regular owls of
different species. Yes, but again, the mendicory of that common
cuckoo was just spot on. And if they're that good,
and you've sounds like you've had experience with that, if
they're that good, then it might be tough to tell
a part without doing a spectrogram, without doing a spectrographic analysis.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
Yeah, that's something that often I've wondered about. Is I
do hear a lot of bigfooters say that I've heard
an owl, but it was eight feet off the ground
and had to be eight hundred pounds and all this
other stuff. I say, Well, I don't know. Shouldn't we
be giving sasquatches more credited being better imitators than that? Like,
I think that if a sasquatch was doing something, unless
it was completely out of place, like a bird species

(20:53):
that doesn't live there, you would have a hard time
figuring out if it was a big foot mimicking something
or if it was the actual thing. Just recently, on
on on on another podcast we were doing with Kathy Strain,
and I mentioned this every once in a while. I
mentioned hearing car doors slam in the woods, and for me,
if I was anywhere else but the woods, I would

(21:13):
just assume it was a card door slamming. So is
there any way that one can tell the difference if
the if the sound is indigenous to the area, you know,
because obviously card door sounds aren't indigenous to the bottom
of the Siski Widerness Area or something. But what avenues
do you think that a researcher could take to kind
of show that they're not just saying it better microphones.

Speaker 6 (21:37):
I suspect, well, yeah, I suspect if you had a
good recording and you did a spectrogram gram uh spectrographic
analysis compared it to known sounds, that you would see
differences that would start showing up. And you might even
hear that and experience here who really knew the native
birds might well be able to detect differences too in
terms of pitch or some other more subtle aspect that

(22:00):
might not be evident to a non ornithologist and actually
member create itself. It's really fascinating because if you look
about the great apes, they don't mimic, and they particularly
don't whistle. And the fact that we have whistling vocalizations.
In fact, that was one I also heard down in
the watchatas that completely freaked me out. The average a

(22:20):
person would probably just thought it was some sort of
nighttime bird, But we had a visitor into camp right
at dusk that did a series of really fascinating whistles,
and I told my camp mates at the time that.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
This is no bird. This is clearly no bird.

Speaker 6 (22:35):
And it had come in response to having done some
broadcasting earlier in the watch Guitas. So one I think
may if you aren't familiar with your local soundscape, people
may be overlooking certain vocalizations that are being made by
these things.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
Oh yeah, and how many people are really fluent, so
to speak, at all the different night sounds. I mean,
Bobo and I spent a lot of time in the
woods at night, probably more than most, I think it
might even be fair to say. And I can't even say,
I can't claim that I'm familiar with the vast majority
of night sounds. I mean a lot of them. Yeah,
but still I hear whistles and I don't know what's

(23:11):
making them. It's it's just it's just a difficult it's
just too much, too much to be able to master
unless you're a specialist.

Speaker 6 (23:18):
That's true, but all the more reason that we should
be doing a lot more recording than we do because
the vocal arena. I know people want to see these things,
for sure, but I guess maybe coming as an ornithologist,
I find the vocal aspect really fascinating in terms of
trying to contextualize it, see if there's regional variations in
the types of vocalizations and the like, because I think

(23:40):
that that as with birds, if you've ever talked to
a birdwatcher, you find a lot more birds by sound
than by sight, and that may work in this arena
as well.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
Oh. For sure, not only should we be recording more,
we should also be collaborating more because other people know
a lot more than I do, you know, and it's
a good thing to have people on your team where
you can ask questions of that just might be able
to identify those sounds in the dark.

Speaker 3 (24:06):
Yes, and actually it's interesting.

Speaker 6 (24:08):
In nineteen ninety one I wrote a small little paper
in the journal Cryptozoology called cooperation a Key to progressing cryptozoology.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
There you go.

Speaker 6 (24:19):
Yeah, what I advocated is that is that field researchers
collaborate as much as possible with sympathetic scientists. I've seen
too much of irritation, understandable irritation with the scientific community
of doing things and the light, but it had gotten
to the point where people were just saying.

Speaker 3 (24:37):
Well, the heck with scientists and heck with science.

Speaker 6 (24:40):
You know, we're just going to get rid of that altogether,
instead of trying to find those sympathetic scientists and trying
to collaborate because the big SO community is doing a
lot of that, are doing incredible fieldwork, but to help
with the analysis, it's good to have academically trained biologists
as well, and both can comple at each other.

Speaker 5 (25:01):
Oh for sure, because I like guys I've grown that
grew up hunting around you. I grew up in the
cliff and I both grew up in the city. I
went out and the Wizard with my dad and stuff
like that. But he didn't know what we were hearing.
But I think a lot of people go, that's all
you know, that's a mountain liner, that's a bobcat, or
that's a now or whatever. Or they'll just say, I'm
not sure what that is. It's but it's not a
big foot. It's like, well, you you might have been

(25:22):
told since your dad was told his dad was told
that that's that's a mountain lion.

Speaker 4 (25:27):
That weird. It's just a weird, stunting mountain line. They've
may have been hearing.

Speaker 5 (25:30):
Bigfoots all these years and just didn't and they had
no idea exactly exactly.

Speaker 6 (25:34):
Yeah, learning the soundscape in your area it takes a
lot of work. And uh, even for me, I really
know the birds well, but I still don't know all
the mammals that well, even locally out and many of
them can make some pretty bird sounds. Fortunately, there's a
lot of acoustical research being done and you could go
on places like the McAuley Library at Cornell and learned

(25:56):
a lot of sounds that are in your area of
both mammals and birds, and that's a real big help
in terms of trying to cut through all of that
and ask if what you actually have recorded or heard
might be a part of a sasquatch or something unknown.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
Well, you know, we got off on the tangent there
for a second, and it was a valuable tangent, but
still I kind of want to hear more about the expeditions.

Speaker 4 (26:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah, both Oma and I are both students of Bigfoot history,
and you were right there for big junks of it.

Speaker 6 (26:28):
Right again, I was so amazed at what Richard could
pull together in terms of equipment and other things.

Speaker 3 (26:33):
I mean, the basic techniques are things that.

Speaker 6 (26:35):
Are done today, you know, putting up cameras, although we
now know how hard it is to get things on
cameras and thermal imagers and just trying to record with
really inferior equipment. At the time, the broadcasting was new
to me. I don't know how commonly that was done
at this time, but there when he first started doing

(26:56):
his trips through the wilderness, he had his son put
together a state of the art broadcasting system that when
it projected we basically Elkohol looking at the headwiters of
Dylan Creek.

Speaker 3 (27:08):
You could go to an overlook, a rocky promontory and
you could.

Speaker 6 (27:12):
Project down into Dylan Creek and I swear you could
hear at least seven echoes as it echoed down from
the canyon, trying to bring them up to see us
and figure out what's going on and trying to induce
the curiosity response.

Speaker 3 (27:26):
That for me was new to see that being done. Again.

Speaker 6 (27:28):
I don't know how commonly that was being done at
the time, but for me it was a new technique
to see and operation. And then the other thing that
was methodologically was just again just spending good time in
the camp. He also felt like we also insisted that
we all dressed in camo but not carry any guns,
And part of his thinking there was that they would

(27:50):
be curious is why we looked like hunters but didn't
fully act like hunters. So that was another aspect of
what he argued for one year on year, and I
think that was in nineteen ninety nine. One of the
craziest this is to show how good he was, he
actually brought he had gotten hold of a urine sample
from a menstruating orangutan and deployed that from the promontary

(28:17):
where we would broadcast tracking it all way to camp.
I don't think it actually elicited anything, but just the
idea that he could even come up with something like
that just always amazed me. Yeah, like who do you
talk too to get that? And you know, like, yeah,
I really need this. What do you need, Well, we'll
get to that later.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
I really need it.

Speaker 6 (28:36):
Yeah, he had developed a whole network of contexts, contacts,
and if you're familiar with the Society and the journal,
you know that all academic scientists were on both the
board of directors and editorial boards. So he had really
been working for a couple of decades to put together
an academic group of knowledge academics at non institutions where

(28:58):
the museums or university, to try to elevate, if you will,
the perception of cryptozoology among everyone, and to also provide
a peer review system through the Peer of You Journal,
and a forum for exploring this in a very scientific sense.
And I think all of that paid off of the
years he was just incredibly good at networking.

Speaker 5 (29:20):
Yeah, you know, I was going to go back to me.
You said they might they'd be confused. But I've seen
these guys without guns and cameo. I can assure they
were not, because that was back in the heyday, guys
growing illegal weed out there. And I actually had two
buddies that grew in Dylan Creek for twenty years, and
they would always see a big white male, like head
to toe white, like a dirty white and they just

(29:43):
they said, it never got a digressive, it never did
anything to them, but they would just watch them.

Speaker 3 (29:47):
Wow, well, yeah, that's really funny. Well, we didn't try
to do that, so he went wrong, I guess.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
So, I guess, so you could have funded your own expeditions.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
Well indeed, for sure. Well two thousand and five was
really the pinnacle and all, but it was kind of
a tragic into the pinnacle because he passed away a
couple of months later from a cancer that came out
of remission, and nothing ever got written up.

Speaker 6 (30:20):
He had all of the materials and things to be analyzed,
and I was unable to get those from his heirs
as far as I know, they're still in storage somewhere.

Speaker 3 (30:30):
But I can tell you a couple of things that
happened that just really impressed me.

Speaker 6 (30:34):
One was that once we started broadcasting, we had visitations
every night. Something was happening every night in terms of
hearing things and seeing the remnants of them behind our
tents and things like that. I never had a visual,
but his son and his son's friend Mike, had some visuals.

(30:55):
At the head of the trail that goes into that
gets you back to alcohol, as well as his son
had a visual on the road to the head of
the trail when he was coming back with some refurbished equipment.
But one of the most amazing things that happened happened
to Mike, who was a friend of Darwin Greenwell and
was on the trip for the first time. So we

(31:17):
had as our protocol saying that if anything happened at
the night that woke us up, we would still pretend
to stay asleep, the idea being that we didn't want
to try.

Speaker 3 (31:27):
To look on our own or anything.

Speaker 6 (31:28):
So we were forbidden to unzip the tent or do
anything but stay asleep until morning, with the hope that
if there was a visitation, you know, there would be
enhanced the likelihood it would get in front of the
cameras or whatnot. Well, Mike had the record for composure
because what happened to him is he apparently he was
in one of these smaller tents. He was up against

(31:51):
the brush line, and he had his back against the tent,
and he said, the next thing he realized is he
could feel this giant hand pushing in the tent along
his back, kind of feeling up along his back and
onto his stomach and then retracting, and he kept his
composure the entire time, which I'm amazed at, until dawn,

(32:16):
which was a little bit later. And then he got
out of the tent. He was pretty shaken by it all.
He went to have a smoke and something started throwing
rocks at And when he told us that the next morning,
we were pretty amazed at that whole experience that he had,
that the thing actually touched him through the tent.

Speaker 4 (32:38):
He controls bowls even yes, give.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
Him credit for that.

Speaker 3 (32:44):
I mean, he was clearly shaped by it all.

Speaker 6 (32:46):
But he followed the protocol and that was I would
say the closest if you will encounter that we had.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
Now, did you guys retrieve any physical evidence, either footprints
or photographs or casts or anything like that or anything
at all.

Speaker 6 (33:01):
We did have some footprints, but they were in the
duff and they were just impossible to cast. It was
just the soil was just not castable. We did have
hair samples. One of the things that I brought was
a DNA sampling kit. I had DNA storage buffer and
all of that. I had materials, so I could you know,
wipe down any tweezers, any forceps, so that I could

(33:25):
just infect them ahead of time and make sure that
were no contamination. And one night after a visitation, that
night we found about six hairs with follicles attached that
were on a part of the broken limb just behind
our tents where this thing kept hanging out. And discovered
it first thing in the morning and immediately got out
my DNA sampling kit, followed clean technique, had gloves, I

(33:48):
had everything you would need for doing that, put it
in the DNA storage buffer, and then brought it back
And that was the one piece of evidence that I
did convince them to send me before Richard passed away
the recordings and other things. Unfortunately, like I say, there,
who knows where? I don't know where where they are
at this time. But I had these hair samples and

(34:09):
had them refrigerated, and then here I was stuck with
the idea what do I do with them? So I
started inquiring trying to find a lab that would handle them,
you know, to do some DNA work, because I knew
they were totally fresh, I knew it had the follicle
along with the main hairstem. We knew that it had
to be a sasquatch. The only other possibility was a bear,
but we had had no bear activity in camp.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
For a while. And finally, finally, finally, I heard about
the project that the Melba Ketchum and David Polaidi's were
talking about, I forget the name of the project where
they were looking for samples, and I sent them my samples,
all six hair follicles. They passed the pre screening morphologically apparently,

(34:54):
and then became of that study. But as we all know,
that whole study sort of evolved into what and I
regret to this day having sent all of them to
that study because it just did not work out.

Speaker 2 (35:08):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo.
We'll be right back after these messages. Yeah, the lesson
learned there is give one keep the rest, you know.

Speaker 3 (35:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (35:25):
Well, I had spent several years trying to find anybody
who would just take a look at them, and that
was really frustrating. So when I finally heard what I
thought was going to be a credible approach, at least
as it was initially presented, I thought, Okay, you know,
have at it, because we really need to get these analyzed.
But unfortunately they're long gone.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, never to be seen again. Probably, I'm guessing.

Speaker 6 (35:48):
Never to be seen again, that's true, But that was
probably some of our best physical evidence that we had
along with Oh and I think the other thing that
really impressed me is we had a thermal imaging camera.
We never could get any thing, as you all know,
on these night cameras, and as people speculate, these are
certainly night cameras that had a pretty evident red light
on them, and so if anything really wanted to avoid them,

(36:11):
they could certainly see them easily enough. But interestingly enough,
we had a thermal imaging camera that we kept on
our little camp table in the center of camp, and
we put a little draped a little camo over it
and had it as part of sort of a messy table,
and it was pointing right at the brushy area where
the two small tents were behind which we.

Speaker 3 (36:30):
Were having nighttime activity.

Speaker 6 (36:32):
And one night it picked up this huge heat signature
rising up behind the tents and then going back down.
And the next night we tried to replicate it with
their own body heat and we were a pale imitation.
So this was behind Mike's tent, which later had that
activity with the thing feeling him up, and that we

(36:56):
got serendipitously as the one image. I mean, it was impressive,
the about of heat off of that big thing. We
couldn't see a clearcut, totally clear cut shape, in part
because it was behind branches and the tents, but it
was really shown through.

Speaker 3 (37:12):
It was pretty impressive.

Speaker 4 (37:13):
How made you think it was well?

Speaker 3 (37:16):
Based on the tracks were The tracks we were finding
were about i'd say ten inches, So we're pretty more
in a large juvenile size, not an adult. And this
was consistent with what he had had with when Jeff
Beldern was with them. We're pretty sure they were getting
juveniles visiting the camp as opposed to full size adults,
and so I think that would be somewhat consistent with

(37:38):
a younger, more curious individual. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (37:42):
One of the things that I thought was pretty neat too,
is I was a co author with him on two
presentations in two thousand and four at the fifty seventh
Annual Meeting of the Northwest Anthropological Conference in Dean, Oregon.
I actually had the title in front of me. He
presented along with me as part of Summering those years
in the Sisky Wilderness, New field evidence in physical finds

(38:05):
supporting the presence of an unverified primate species in the
Pacific Northwest, and we were actually on the program, which
was pretty hard to get on these scientific programs.

Speaker 4 (38:16):
I got to see that well, and as part.

Speaker 6 (38:19):
Of the abstracts that were published did not have I
don't think he ever sent me the complete flight show.
I had to go back and see. I've got a
whole welter. Part of what I've got to dig through
in retirement is to try to get a lot of
my old files and computer and everything else kind of
up to date, because I kind of lost track of things,
and I have a lot of Greenwell related material, some

(38:40):
of which I'm sending.

Speaker 3 (38:41):
The Cliff for the museum.

Speaker 6 (38:44):
Had to help me with archiving, and so over time
I hope maybe I can find that again. The other
presentation is actually even more amazing by Richard and myself.
In two thousand and four was at the eighty fourth
Annual meeting of the American Society of Amalogus. We were
really lucky because it happened to be held at Humble
State and we presented there the same basic program to

(39:07):
the mammalogists there, and just to get on the docket,
you know, just to be able to get a talk.

Speaker 3 (39:12):
It was packed, Richard Dave.

Speaker 6 (39:14):
The talk was pretty hard to do because professional mammalogists,
at least publicly, are very sceptical. But what we learned
was that privately many of them are not, which was
a very interesting.

Speaker 3 (39:26):
Kind of an indictment academia when you think about it.

Speaker 6 (39:29):
But we had a lot of people tell us privately
afterwards their own experiences in the light, although publicly they
would never own up to them. So the fact that
he was able to present some of the results of
our of those years of work, some of the years
didn't involve me, at both that anthropological conference and at
the American Society of Mynology was.

Speaker 3 (39:49):
Pretty pretty unique.

Speaker 6 (39:50):
I mean, those were pretty bitch marks to have those
kind of presentations at those kinds of societies.

Speaker 5 (39:55):
Yeah, I think didn't dig steck at you guys on
the here's the professor at Humble.

Speaker 4 (39:59):
I think you guys on the bill there didn't.

Speaker 3 (40:01):
He wasn't him. Oh gosh, I've forgotten the name now.
Brian Arbagast I believe was his name.

Speaker 6 (40:09):
He's no longer there, but he was sympathetic enough that
he thought, okay, well, let's just see what you have
to show. I have to tell and got us on
the program.

Speaker 4 (40:18):
Yeah, I went to Humboldt State.

Speaker 3 (40:20):
Oh boys, that a beautiful campus.

Speaker 4 (40:23):
It's the prettiest one in the country probably.

Speaker 3 (40:25):
I think you're right about that. I was just really impressed.

Speaker 4 (40:28):
And what year was that there was in the nineties, right,
two thousand and four? Two thousand.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
Okay, So now you're you're retired, and you're gonna be
hopefully spending a little bit more time doing some Bigfoot
field research and you're a member of the newac the
North American wood A Conservancy. All that's correct, I hope.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
Yes, that's correct. I am retired, I partially.

Speaker 6 (40:48):
I've developed some health problems that have kind of plagued
me recently, and I'm trying to get some control of
those so I can I can do some local fieldwork,
but I can't write at the moment do any a
little more distant field work. But I'm hoping to get
that solved so that I can. Plus, also, with all
this COVID crap, you know, everybody's really been hampered by that.
But I have been trying to through some other beings.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
I did advise the society, and in fact, I would
advise anyone if you want to get into the acoustical arena.

Speaker 6 (41:17):
It's a little pricey. The song Meter four from Wildlife
Acoustics eight hundred some dollars. But these devices, you just
set them up and they record twenty four to seven
for depending on what kind of batters you use, a
month or even three months, and you've suddenly got a
welter of recordings that can potentially have vocalizations documenting what

(41:37):
you've heard or even if you aren't there, documenting what
was being stayed happening at the time. And so I
encouraged the organization to invest in two of those, and
they've been ploying those of their camps ever set and
we've been getting a lot of meat recordings of vocalizations
through that method. Again and probably coming from my ornithological training,

(41:58):
but they're using ARU. This is what they called an
autonomous reporting unit. There are other kind of units out there,
but this seems to be the kind of the easiest
to program and to a high, very high quality. They're
used in field research all the time, including in primatological
research in the tropics. They're used quite a bit in
primatological research they're actually even able to through if they

(42:19):
get enough vocal material, they can actually start picking out
individuals within these groups of monkeys that they're studying down there.
So then there's a lot of versatility in terms of
what we can learn from the vocalizations.

Speaker 3 (42:32):
And again coming from an ordiological background, I'm.

Speaker 6 (42:35):
Very vocalizations are so key in a lot of avian studies,
less so in terms of mammalogy, except for bats, where
they're very key.

Speaker 3 (42:44):
But these are being.

Speaker 6 (42:45):
Used more and more in mammalological studies, typically primate studies
in the tropics. So I think we ought to be
using this more in our field work if you can
afford them.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, that's one of the interesting things that came up
in a previous podcasts that we did with a woman
named b Mills who is doing a recording project out
in southeast Ohio and you know, being a cast guy,
you know my things kind of footprint cast. We're identifying
the same individual sasquatches from the data set. You know,
they leave the same they leave their tracks in the
same area over time, and so B is now starting

(43:17):
to think that she can recognize the sounds of different sasquatches.
So she's tracking individuals by their sounds now, which it
sounds like exactly what you just mentioned here, And there's
no reason you can't do that, especially if their voices
are so are are different than one another, just like
you know, you can hear that. I am not Bobo
speaking on this podcast, even though you can't see me

(43:37):
right now. And there's no reason I think that Sasquatches
wouldn't have different sounds and timbres to their voices as
well to be able to do.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
This exactly, and age and sex differences as well.

Speaker 2 (43:48):
Oh yeah, she actually mentioned she's been hearing what she's
interpreting as one maturing over four or five years. Yeah,
even to the point where she kind of speculates I
might have heard its voice crack you that.

Speaker 3 (44:02):
I don't know.

Speaker 6 (44:02):
I don't know that much about puberty and sasquashes, But
that's an interesting cuctivation no.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
One does know, and what an interesting at least hypothesis.
And it's up to her and kind of build the
case for it. But how interesting is that? I think
that's pretty cool.

Speaker 6 (44:17):
Yeah, I'd love to know if there's regional variation in
sasquatch vocalizations too.

Speaker 3 (44:22):
I mean there's a lot of regional variation in birds
where we.

Speaker 6 (44:25):
Can tell different subspecies part even within the same species
biological species, and you can find these kind of regional variants.
And also we find birds if they often will adjust
their calling to propagate within the type of vegetational surroundings
that they're found, so that birds in the canopy have

(44:46):
a different pitch and type.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
Of call than birds in the forest floor. And I'm
sure there would be variation between the Pacific Northwest and
the Everglades, so so that would be interesting too. I mean,
there's so many Again, using birds as kind of a model,
there's so many things that we could potentially learn if
we had a good library of vocalizations recorded from different
areas different times of the year. I'd also like to

(45:10):
know just seasonally, if there's changes, I mean, you think
during mating season. I don't know if their mating season
is year round or if they have a particular peak time.
And then just in terms.

Speaker 6 (45:20):
Of just general moving about, when are they vocalizing when
we aren't there. I'm actually kind of more equally interested
in vocalizations that may be occurring in the area when
no one is there and when no humans are there
versus when humans are there. So I mean there's a
whole welter of information one can get. And the nice
thing with these SD cards is you can store them

(45:41):
forever and analyze them over time using different software analysis packages.
So it's a very, very again underutilized technique that I'd
love to see where researchers are can afford it try
to use.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Now, most researchers, I know, they use old audio recorders
generally said on MP three setting instead a wave, so
it takes they can record for longer periods of time,
and these cost one hundred four hundred bucks or something
like that. Right now, by and large, that would that
information be valuable to That's good enough at this point

(46:19):
for the average Joe researcher.

Speaker 6 (46:20):
Yeah, it's kind of like what you deal with burners
who are getting into burning. You know, you have binoculars
that span the spectrum from the you know, a decent
pair of two hundred dollars to kind of have this
price of a car twenty five hundred dollars or so.
I mean, you get what you pay for in terms
of quality, but you still can do good science with these. Again,

(46:42):
it depends on your budget obviously, but I would encourage
recording at some level. The main thing that we were
concerned that we got so frustrated with in the Cisco
Wilderness was even when we you know, well in two
thousand and five, we did a better job of being
able to continuously record, although at that time the technology
we could afford only allowed us to go twelve hour periods,

(47:03):
so we had to make sure that we were careful
and put it as we had two recorders, and so
once one gave out, we put the ed X wind rolling,
the other one time to recharge or whatever, put the
batteries in, all that kind of good stuff, and so
you know, I mean, my philosophy is anything is better
than nothing, but you do get what you pay for.

Speaker 3 (47:24):
But I would say, yeah, I mean I would. I
mentioned in hearing Anything.

Speaker 6 (47:28):
I mean, some of the earlier recordings that NAWAC did,
and I'm not even sure what kind of recorders they
used there at the time. It's probably some of these
smaller digital recorders. They produced some pretty good sounds that
we were able to get nice spectrograms off. And we've
been trying to catalog, you know, looking at frequencies and
things like that.

Speaker 3 (47:46):
The different kind of vocalizations.

Speaker 6 (47:49):
What's happened in the bird world is as people study
bird species which have a diversity of multification, diversity of vocalizations,
particularly if you're a song bird of passerine or something
like that, is that make you try to do a
catalog of all the different vocalizations and then you try
to contextualize them behaviorally as to what they're communicating.

Speaker 3 (48:11):
And so I would love to see us get a
library of.

Speaker 6 (48:13):
Sounds of sasquatch sounds that can then be contextualized to
try to figure out the extent that we can what
behaviorally is being communicated.

Speaker 5 (48:24):
So, Angelo, what are the best audio recordings you've heard?
I'm sure you've heard lots of samples over the years.
What impresses you the most?

Speaker 6 (48:33):
I must well, anything that obviously is not made by
native mammal or native bird impresses me the most.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
And I can be very to be honest, I was
in some.

Speaker 6 (48:45):
Ways more impressed by the whistling that we heard than
the Ohio Howe rendition that we heard, in part because
the ability to whistle takes a very different lorangeal structure.
Only humans among the great apes can whistle in any
significant way, and I think there may be an orangutan

(49:06):
or something in a zoo that was trained to whistle.
But apparently whistling takes a orthology that's really unusual and
not represented within other great.

Speaker 3 (49:16):
Apes outside of humans.

Speaker 6 (49:18):
And so that actually impressed me a lot, just because
I knew that vocally. Mechanically, that's harder to do with
the vocal apparatus than the ohio helm.

Speaker 2 (49:29):
Oh, you know that's interesting. Have I actually have a
whistle recording that Bobo and I got. We thought we
had a sasquatch around. It was making noises like they
tend to, and we Boba and I were doing night
walks from one camp to another, and we left one
camp and just a short while after fifteen to twenty minutes,
or I'd have to check my notes. After we left,

(49:52):
something came by that camp and did a followed by
a like a big tree knock right out afterwards, And
I got it on recorder that I found later, So
I'll send that to you. I'll give you an email
of that and you can listen to it and tell
me if it's a bird that I don't know about,
because I don't know about all of suff no.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
I love. I'd love to hear that for sure.

Speaker 4 (50:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
In fact, I hope you don't mind. You're probably gonna
get a fair number of vocalizations and recordings over the
next year or two as I get more and more.
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
We'll be right back after these messages.

Speaker 5 (50:33):
Last year in Massachusetts, we heard an incredible whistling display
put on by two of them. And they were small ones.
They were only like human size because I actually saw
it through my thorn. I saw it through my throne,
and I thought there were some other guys are with us.
This was just in like central Massachusetts, and this thing
started whistling these craziest like notes and the up and

(50:54):
down and so intricate, but it didn't repeat anything. It
wasn't like a song or it was just random. And
they were going back and forth, just putting on like
like if you're the best whistler in the world, trying
to show off, is what it was like.

Speaker 4 (51:06):
And I thought, man, these guys are I can't believe
these guys. These guys are incredible.

Speaker 5 (51:09):
And then they came walking down five minutes later and
those things took off down into a swamp.

Speaker 3 (51:14):
That's fascinating. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (51:15):
Again, the anatomy that it takes to do whistling, particularly
complex whistling, is not something that you find in other
species of great apes.

Speaker 4 (51:23):
So maybe maybe just a juvent.

Speaker 5 (51:25):
Maybe the adolescents are maybe they get so big they
can't do it as well, or they can, they're more
limited when they get there. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (51:31):
There could be I know, I'll bet they can still
whistle if they've got the vocal apparatus that as a juvenile,
it's probably still there as an adult as well. I mean,
it may be that Potextually, the jubiles are more likely.
I have no idea, but I wouldn't see a reason
why the adults couldn't do it as well.

Speaker 5 (51:49):
The big one, well, I know for sure a big
one did it because I saw it. But it sounds
like you know when people put like their forefinger and
their thumb in their.

Speaker 4 (51:56):
Mouth and do that one super loud. Yes, when humans
do that. I've heard them do that one.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
Wow. That's fascinating. Yeah. The full repertoire that I hear
about more and more is just amazing.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
Well, and it makes sense, you know, I think in
a lot of ways that that that they could replicate
a lot of the sounds that we do just because
we're built the same in a lot of ways. We
don't know about the insides about you know, the functions
of you know, trachea or whatever else they got going
on in their in their tubes there, but they're they
kind of look like us, and it makes sense that
they can probably make a lot of sounds like us too.

Speaker 6 (52:28):
Well, I have to disagree with you there, it's hard.
It's hard to see why that vocal capacity should be there.
I mean, again, if it's not in any other Great
Eight species, why did it evolve in this one?

Speaker 3 (52:41):
That's a mystery that's a real miss is involved enough
it involved in us?

Speaker 6 (52:46):
And now maybe yeah, but I mean to me, it's
a mystery of why. I mean, you never know if
the any any characters that undergo evolutionary change, all you'll
have like the primary adaptive function, but then you can
have secondary capabilities that just kind of happened to arise
out of having that particular character evolve in that direction,

(53:09):
so that it wasn't really being selected for that purpose
functional purpose, but it's a correlate that is then enabled
it's what they sometimes called it acaptation. And so it's
difficult to know if why the vocal apparatus evolved within Sasquatches,
if that's what's going on to explain the whistling, which

(53:32):
I'm pretty convinced must be why it would go in
that direction, I'm not quite sure if the palaeo anthropologists
understand how that what was the selective forces, the selective
adaptative advantages of having the vocal apparatus change from the
regenitor grade eight and humans in the direction that it went,
you know, as a consequence. And then if so, why

(53:54):
do we not have full speech within the Sasquatches.

Speaker 3 (53:57):
So I don't know, and that in itself is constant
controversial as to how much potential faux speech? What is that?
What is that that's going on with so called faux speech.
I'd love to know more about that.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
Yeah, I've always taken the you know, the Morehead recordings
and stuff, the Albery recordings from you know, the Sierras,
the Sierra sounds that as well as first hand accounts
of witnesses who had heard those things. I've never heard it.
I wish I had. Bobo has heard it before, but
I've never have I've never heard them speak or a
quote unquote speak back and forth to one another, but
I've always kind of taken that as an interesting, well,

(54:29):
certainly an indication that they might be having this faux
speech or even speech we don't really know, back and
forth with one another, and that seems to jibell. We'll
see my model for them as everybody who listens to
this nose is. I think that they're probably paranthropists and
not gigantos. I think they're probably paranthropists, some sort of

(54:50):
robust australopithoscene, and their ability to have some sort of
speech or proto speech or whatever like that kind of
falls in line I think with a lot of at
least what I'm thinking about them at this point.

Speaker 4 (55:03):
Now.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
Mind you, I don't think that they they're rocket scientists
or anything like that, but I think they're smarter than
the average you know, chimp being a hominin like, I
kind of put them in the hominin line. So would
I be thinking too out out of bounds if I
think that speech would be somehow or some sort of
proto speech might be inherent in the hominin lineage.

Speaker 6 (55:26):
Not being a paleoanthropologist fully conversant with the fossil record,
I couldn't say, but we do see a lot of
parallel or convergent evolutionary trends within different lineages of mammals,
and so I wouldn't in and of itself sway me
towards paranthropists. I still am more of the Giganto Orangatan
clade as praising these things in part by geographically it

(55:48):
makes the most sense to be as well as to me,
when John Bindernaugele put together his book arguing that it
is North America's great Ape, it just seemed to me
like the bulk of the characters that he documented that
we're being shared with other great apes. You may remember
he did that comparative study looking at the great apes guerrillas, chimps,

(56:08):
and o Regatan's a brilliant study where he was saying,
this has analogous to what's going on in this particular
great ape or that particular grade ape. To me, convinced
me that the most parsimonious explanation is that it is
a great ape and not a homin en. I think
that's a bigger stretch, but I could see where you know,
You can certainly pick out some characters that might argue

(56:29):
for a homin en. It's just that I think those
are outweighed, to my mind, at least by characters that
look more a great apeish to be. And also we
know the power of conversion evolution as well as parallel evolution,
and so it's very hard to know. I mean, this
is this is why, and this will be the controversial
request is we've got to get a specimen. Somehow, We've

(56:50):
got to get a specimen. I'm speaking as a museum
scientist and speaking as someone who's worked with documenting new
species of birds, where until we got the specimen, we
really didn't know what we were dealing with. Speaking on
the history of total misidentifications of things of two species
of mammals, even primates, using just photographs or anything else.

Speaker 3 (57:11):
A specimen is if we don't get that, we're never
going to get this field advanced further than it is
today in my mind, at least in terms of scientific acceptability.
But once we have that specimen, and we just need.

Speaker 6 (57:24):
One that's properly secured and curated and analyzed, then all
of this incredible wealth of material that you and others
have collected over the years, from casts through hair to
scat to vocalizations, all of that will then be available
retrospectively to go back and have a whole bunch of

(57:46):
academically trained people take and really work out what this
all really means.

Speaker 3 (57:52):
That the context of what that specimen revealed.

Speaker 2 (57:55):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, Unfortunately. I mean I'm not a hunter.
I'm not going to be the guy to pull trigger,
as I said one hundred times, but a specimen is necessary.
So people out there and I get this all the time,
like there's working really hard to prove the species, Like, no,
you're not unless you're buying ammunition and you know you're
you're really not. You're maybe collecting information, but that's not

(58:18):
trying to prove the species. And people come back, I
can't wait till these things are proven and say, well, yeah,
then I mentioned a dead one. They go, oh, I
don't want that to happen. Well, you can't have you know,
you can't have it both ways. Unfortunately, not by the
rules as written today exactly.

Speaker 3 (58:34):
And it's not just the rules that are written, it's
the reality. If any of you are familiar with the
history of taxonomy and systematic biology, you know that that
you've just got to add specimens, a whole body specimen.
You even DNA is not the end all be all.
There's so much you can gain.

Speaker 6 (58:49):
If you've ever seen the monograph that was written with
the first specimen of the giant panda, I mean, it's
a thick book. It's just amazing what the comparative An
Adams was able to term it and figure out. And
as you know, even the giant panda was controversial as
to where to put it. Is it a bear or
is it in the prociona the raccoon family, Even that

(59:09):
took a while.

Speaker 3 (59:10):
Even having the specimen and so.

Speaker 6 (59:12):
Especialmen just gives you so much more information in terms
of the physical properties of the organism that you would
never get from DNA. But I will put in a
caveat here. Don't go out trying to hot one of
these things. If you have it first thought through.

Speaker 3 (59:28):
Number one, how the heck are you going to get
the thing out of the woods? Number two? How are
you going to preserve it properly so that it can
be scientifically viable? And number three, how are you going
to contact appropriate members of the scientific community to make
sure it's handled properly. You don't want to get a
fly by night person to take your data and just
ruin the outcome. We've kind of seen that happen in

(59:50):
some other arenas, I'm afraid. So you want to have it.

Speaker 6 (59:53):
You want to have a planned as museum collectors around
the world know, we do it under very plan carefully
and circumstances. So when we collected these pieces of parative through,
we knew how to make it into a usable scientific specimen.
We had liquid nitrogen with us, which was the preservative
of the time, to keep tissue samples.

Speaker 3 (01:00:13):
We had recordings that we had made of it, photographs,
I mean, we had everything that we could document and
permanently document by bringing that material back and compare it
to material and the museums of other related species in
order to document it. So you can't just have anybody
out there just shooting these things. It has to be

(01:00:34):
part of a coordinated thought through careful effort.

Speaker 2 (01:00:38):
I tend to think that the first dead one will
probably come from a very very frightened hunter who brings
down a small one because the deer rifle can probably
handle it or very luckily placed shot. Essentially, if that
person happens to be listening right now, What would you
recommend to them?

Speaker 3 (01:01:00):
Interesting question Number one. I would recommend you might want
to get out of there right away, because we don't
know what kind of.

Speaker 6 (01:01:09):
Reaction might occur from any surrounding adults, if it was a.

Speaker 3 (01:01:13):
Young or any relatives that might happen to be there.
I mean, I would be cautious. One of the plans
should be how can you get it out as quickly
as possible and also have backup in case there's a
hostile response, because while in general I don't think of
these things as very hostile, and have the being out

(01:01:34):
around them that.

Speaker 6 (01:01:36):
Would be different that eliminate a a you know, a
hostile response that you might want to be careful about.

Speaker 3 (01:01:44):
We also don't know what they do with their dad.

Speaker 6 (01:01:46):
So if you did leave the area with the thing
body there, would it be there when you got back,
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:01:54):
Yeh likely not, I agree.

Speaker 6 (01:01:56):
And so I don't know what to say, you know,
And then of course people are very fearful of the
legal ramifications. We think it's probably happened before, right, I mean,
there's certainly some potentially credible tales of people having shot
one through fear or fear of what they were seeing, and.

Speaker 3 (01:02:16):
Then maybe even afraid to tell about it until later.
So I don't know.

Speaker 6 (01:02:21):
I'm not told to convince that it would come to
the four that easily, I think, to be honest, and
this is what Richard thought, so I have to since
we're talking about Richard Greenwell. Richard was pretty convinced that
at some point a semi or train would hit one,
as happens often with big animals, and he therefore had
arranged with the University of Arizona folks to be able
to He actually had a plan where they would airlift

(01:02:42):
it to a lab at the University of Arizona through
the contacts he had there with the forrinsic people, and
that I think might be more of a situation that
would be more tenable in a sense. But again, I
don't know what authority figures would do if they if
something like that had happened. I mean, my goodness, you
could go wild in terms of speculating as to whether

(01:03:04):
it has happened and things have been covered up for
whatever reason. I think about the implications of having fully
established that these creatures exist, the implication for the land
use for the way we use or abuse our public lands.

Speaker 3 (01:03:20):
Can I have huge implications. There's going to be huge
economic implications in terms of conservation. Personally, I think it'll
be on the good side in terms of preventing a
lot of the abuse we're doing now in our public lands.
But I could see economic interests not wanting this to
be discovered at all, that this could be a real

(01:03:40):
problem for a lot of economic interests out there that
depend on non sustainable uses of our public lands.

Speaker 4 (01:03:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:49):
I've always referenced people to doctor Krantz's book when it
comes to like what do I do if I shoot one? Well,
you're probably not gonna first of all, like just your
average Joe Hunter or something, and then you're in the
museum here, and I would say, well, I get, I get.
Doctor Krantz said, cut off the biggest piece you can carry,
get it out, cut off a finger separately, and keep
it and don't tell anybody where you put it, because

(01:04:10):
that'll prove it's yours. Cut out the biggest piece you
can carry, preferably the head, and bring it to the
media essentially, so everybody will know it's yours right away.
I don't do that. I would say I tell people
call me, I'll get meldrum on it right away. It's
basically all I can after I verify it, you know,
after that is out of my hands.

Speaker 3 (01:04:30):
Well, I certainly did recommend to the NAWAC, and they
probably thought of it, had already thought of it. Is
that the very first thing you would want to do,
if you're doing this in a planned way, is you
want to have your DNA storage buffer with you, and
you want to take a tissue sample immediately and put
it in that buffer number one, so that even if
you get pummeled by a family of sasquatches later on,

(01:04:53):
somebody will find the little cryor to issue sample in
it that's labeled for two. If you really do think
you're going to have trouble getting it out because it
might be an adult male or something, yeah, you know,
it wouldn't hurt to take a part. And then the
question is which part.

Speaker 6 (01:05:11):
And obviously the head would be primo, although an adult
that might be pretty hard to manage as well. Hand
and foot would be additional parts to consider as well
in terms of being really informative definitive pieces. So handfoot
and hand would be parts that I would argue for
after taking an initial tissue sample, and to be honest,

(01:05:32):
even if you don't have DNA buffaler buffer, just pull
out a chuck of hair and put it in an
envelope or wrap it in some paper or do something,
you know, just to get part of the specimen preserved,
because especially if you have to head out of there
right away and you have no way of getting it
out of there, at least you'll have some remnant of
what you have shot. So if a hunter does unintentionally

(01:05:52):
or through fright or whatever, shoot one, I'd say, yeah,
take a finger, take more. If you can take a
clump a hair, at least, you know, stick it in
your duffel bag or whatever you got I mean, or
your knapsack or whatever, and then head out of there.
Because I do think it could potentially be a hazards
situation if you're by yourself and you're not with others
have some firepower who could back you up.

Speaker 3 (01:06:14):
I do think we would need to be cautious under that.

Speaker 6 (01:06:16):
But yeah, and then you know, I mean, there's certainly
enough hopefully your self, Cliff, you're a very high profile
person going through you as an intermediary to get or
to Jeff elderm or someone. I mean eventually, if it's
stored properly, it could be analyzed.

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
It's a gruesome ways, but that's the only path towards
species recognition.

Speaker 6 (01:06:37):
And just think of what it means again, species recognition,
it means protection. There's a reason why the NAWAC has
conservancy as a nice part of its name, as they
recognize I mean, our national forests are just being way abused.
We have, of course, climate change and other factors that
are deteriorating. Well, look what happened with the Western wildfires

(01:06:58):
taking out some ancient support is in redwoods and the like.
I mean, there's so much we're doing to this planet
that's making it less habitable for everything, including humans, that
we really want to get these things protected. But until
they're legally recognized, which means that they're recognized by science,
you're just not going to be able to do that.
Once we can legally recognize them by having a specimen

(01:07:21):
that's accepted, not only do we get all the scientific knowledge,
but we can finally work towards actually conserving them more
and more today. For example, the parent that we discovered
and proved with the specimens after we brought the specimens
back and demonstrated that it was a new species, a
new national park was declared and what was going to
be a timber succession. So there it was worth the

(01:07:45):
sacrifice of those individuals to be able to check the
entire ecosystem and their population in the future.

Speaker 3 (01:07:51):
But that's the.

Speaker 6 (01:07:51):
Hard part of conservation today is you've got to prove
it before people are going to take things out of
economic production.

Speaker 4 (01:07:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:58):
In fact, we learned when we film Finding Bigfoot in
Vietnam that the Vietnamese government has already they already set
the boundaries for a wild Man preserve once they have
proven their version of the wild man the terree. Yeah,
so they've already set aside.

Speaker 4 (01:08:13):
Land for it in China.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
Oh and in China.

Speaker 3 (01:08:17):
Right, that's fantastic. I'm very happy to hear that. Yeah.
I hope we can be as visionary here.

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
We'll see, well, I think we'll have to be.

Speaker 6 (01:08:27):
I mean again, once we prove it and demonstrate whatever
it is, whether it's Haminen or great Ape or whatever
it is, it'll the public interest and seeing it really
protected I think will be such that that would really
be able to be a real win for conservation, not
just for them, but for everything else, Well, what happened

(01:08:47):
with the Ivory build You know, the irebuil winpacker was
supposed to be discovered in two thousand and four. I
say supposedly because there's still debate over whether one was
really filmed or recorded or seen, but it leveraged incredible
protection of southern swamplands throughout Arkansas particularly, and that was
with not even totally proving that the birds still survive today.

(01:09:12):
So these kind of things are really valuable in conservation.
I mean, there's a lot of ways we as conservation biologists,
which is another field that I've sort of shifted to
as I was at Illinois State University. Is there are
a lot of ways we justify preserving things, but concepts
like ecosystems and the like are sometimes hard to get
across to everyone. But if you have a charismatic megafauna

(01:09:35):
to always like that term, a really big animal, that
is very appealing to people. I mean, it's while the
World Widlife Fund uses tigers in the like, there's so
much more public support, dollars and everything else. That then
is an umbrella to protect everything. And my god, I'm
just so excited with the prospects of proving that this

(01:09:59):
thing exists and then documenting what it's full range is
that I think it would just leverage not only a
major advance in primatology, but a major advance in doing
conservation within North America.

Speaker 2 (01:10:13):
All right, well, angel with that, I can't think of
better words. To send our listeners off into their own
expeditions and try to gather some evidence to bring it
back and further the science, you know, get the ball
a little bit further down the field in this big
football field that we're playing on. So thank you so
much for joining us. Thank you so much for your
wisdom that you brought. And it's nice to have another

(01:10:35):
academic on the team. So we can't thank you enough
for spending some time with us.

Speaker 3 (01:10:39):
My pleasure.

Speaker 5 (01:10:40):
Thank you, Yeah, thank you, Angela. I appreciate it. And
I hope to see that at Area X sometime soon.

Speaker 6 (01:10:45):
That would be a lot of fun. Yeah, as I
get my health problems under control, That's where I'd.

Speaker 3 (01:10:50):
Love to go.

Speaker 4 (01:10:51):
All right, well, good luck with that.

Speaker 3 (01:10:53):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:10:54):
There we go again, Bobs. Another cool episode, a little
slice of history. You know, with the Greenwell expeditions, we
have a little insight into a scientist's mind and what
that's going to take. Yeah, it's just fantastic. I'm pretty
stoked we got Angelo.

Speaker 5 (01:11:10):
Yeah, I mean, hats off to these academics that stick
their neck out and you know, put it all on
the line, their reputations and potentially their livelihood to investigate
this biggest natural mysuy we have in North America or
the world even.

Speaker 2 (01:11:23):
Yeah, yeah, we're lucky to have them on.

Speaker 4 (01:11:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:11:26):
Well cool, Cliff, that was great, And so we got
a few of the Wood eight people coming up here
in a row. So this is this is great, and
I want to tell everyone you got it to go to
wood eight dot org and listen to their podcasts. They're
I think they're the best. I mean, obviously everyone knows
Sasquatch chronicles. If you want to hear stories like witnesses
telling you know, encounters, but if you want to learn
learn about bigfoot, go to wood dot org and listen

(01:11:48):
to those read I mean, they got tons of stuff
to read it. You can obviously listening to this like podcasts,
and their podcast is the best. If you enjoyed that,
tune back in next week. You've got some more coming up.
Until then, keep it Squatchy.

Speaker 2 (01:12:06):
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond.
If you liked what you heard, please rate and review
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(01:12:27):
and tweet us your thoughts and questions with the hashtag
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