#129 "Tracking Cryptid Legends" with Pat Spain

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Any of the one.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
And then looked out and there was this big, red,
blinking UFO. I can just say this, something's going on
in the woods.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
Something's going on.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
They're not dogs, they're not coyotes. What could it be?

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Right?

Speaker 3 (00:32):
I had an encounter with a skunk cake and it
completely altered the course of my life. I got a call,
got walk on building, what about?

Speaker 1 (00:41):
What about?

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Saying E sighting of a u f FO hovering over
a farm really.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Woke up from a dream. And when I went into
the bedroom, she said, there's a monster on the wall.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
They saw that the creature had run through a barb
wire fence that.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
They were able to obtain cares.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
They sent the hairs to their lab and it came
back as an online creature.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Creature creature?

Speaker 2 (01:13):
What is up?

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Bizarre Rights and welcome back to the most bizarre showing
the internets. I am the one that a handful of
people refer to as Shane Squatch. What is that fucking thing?
And alongside me I have the infamous Big bad Boo
Daddy himself, Sir Orn Felix, trying to pg up the

(01:39):
show a little bit. Maybe we'll uh, you know, not
be taken a little bit more seriously if we get
don't get too too far taken away with using sound clips.
So we're gonna we're gonna mature up our soundclips a
little bit around here.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
We're probably never gonna be taken seriously, but uh yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
So we can try. We can try. At least we.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Traded the sexy, suggestive opening or more spooky one, so
I'm all for it.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
It's still moaning, just a different type of moaning.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Hey, that is true.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
You've got us there. It's hard to argue that. So
just a quick piece of news and updates. So next
week I am not going to be available to record
on our normal recording date. My baby sister is getting married.
Woo precedents over bizarre encounters. I'm sorry, Shane, but it does.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Family always comes first, that's you know. Some podcasters don't
have that mentality, but me, being a dad man, family
always comes first.

Speaker 4 (02:31):
That's all right.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
So we're gonna do something a little different and special
for you guys next week, so be on the lookout
for that.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
If you guys might be interested in checking out the
Halloween special that'll be happening on October thirtieth at seven
to fifteen pm Eastern Standard time over there across all
of the different places that you can find Bizarre Reality
Media and if anybody might be interested in being part
of that special still, you guys can call in leave
your own bizarre experiences for us to share on the show.

(03:00):
And as I always say, if you guys need to
be anonymous, I can definitely do that for you, but
specifically you guys will have to be robot Alex Jones.
But if you guys mntioned't be interested in doing that,
that number is three one three, three six four one
five to five to one. You guys can text or
call that twenty four to seven. And again if you
happen to miss that, it is available down in the
show description.

Speaker 4 (03:20):
Scary robot voices only.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
Maybe a ghost Maybe I'll do a ghost voice. Ghostvoice
might be fun.

Speaker 3 (03:27):
And our next episode of Bizarre Inquiries, our YouTube live show,
is going to be Thursday, November sixth, roughly seven to
fifteen Eastern time on the Bizarre Reality Media.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
See I did it, there you you got it? That's
on there you a.

Speaker 4 (03:40):
Bizarre Reality Media YouTube channel.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
So you guys be sure to submit questions or clips
or articles or anything you want us to inquire about
and also join us in the chat during the episode.
And if anyone is interested in being a guest on
the show or getting up with us for any reason whatsoever,
Shane tell them how they can do that.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
You guys can first and foremost email us at Bizarre
Encounters at outlook dot com or that number that I
mentioned a little bit earlier. You guys can again always
text or call that twenty four to seven, and again
if you miss that, that number is three one three,
three six four one five to five to one.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
And if you guys would like to support the show, Shane,
now tell them how they can do that.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
You guys can definitely go and check out the Bizarre
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Speaker 3 (04:40):
And you guys can also check out the Bizarre Reality
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plus shipping.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
Wow, that's fantastic. Who said that? And if you guys,
it definitely wasn't me. And I know time's can be
tough out there. But if you guys would like to
support the show in some other ways, what are some
awesome ways that they can do that?

Speaker 3 (05:03):
Or you can leave a review and like, share and
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Speaker 1 (05:09):
You guys can always go and follow the show on Instagram, Facebook,
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Speaker 3 (05:14):
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Speaker 1 (05:20):
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Speaker 4 (05:40):
All that stuff.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
I don't understand what it is, but anyway, all this
shit we've mentioned is in the link tree and the
show description.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
Please welcome to the show Biologists, cryptozoologist, and some may
even know them as the beast Hunter. Please welcome to
the show. Pat Spain, how's it going today, Man?

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Do it all right? How about yourself?

Speaker 1 (05:58):
Absolute pleasure to get have you on the show, Jo
Man doing pretty good. Always excited to talk to you
about cryptids and creatures and all of your research that
you do on your end. Man. So as usual, Man,
I'm always looking forward to these conversations.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
Same here, Yeah, I always. I love your questions and
I like how you dive a little bit deeper than
a lot of other interviewers, which keeps me on my
toes and I think it gives everybody a little bit
more than they get from other spots, So thank you
for that.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
And we got a third mind thrown in on this conversation,
so who knows where we might end up going because
we've got three analytical minds diving into cryptids who do
a lot of our own research into it. So I think, well,
we might hopefully uncover something new and interesting here. Man.

Speaker 4 (06:32):
Excellent, Yeah, good to meet you, orin Yes, it's nice
to meet you.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
Pat thank you so much for joining us tonight. Like
I said a little bit before we started recording, Shane's
told me a lot about you, So I'm definitely excited
to pick your brain a little bit. With that being said,
would you mind kind of sharing a little bit about
yourself and some of the research you do.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Sure? Yeah, So I am. I went to school for
marine bio, and I've been doing biology, wildlife biology basically
my whole life. When you're the kind of guy who's
in a field who just caught a rattles, you tend
to get a crowd gathered around you, and you know,
that's kind of the reputation that I ended up getting
grown up, So I ended up giving all these impromptu talks,
you know, just about the animals that I was finding

(07:10):
and how excited I was to find them, walk around
the neighborhood and teach people about, you know, whatever it
was that I can get my hands. And oh, I
found a giant yellow spotted salamander. Come on, everybody, check
it out. And then I went to school for marine
bio and I taught a bunch of classes and labs
and loved that and loved trying to reach reach people
who maybe weren't as interested in wildlife as I was.

(07:31):
And then my wife actually suggested that the way that
I could get a bigger audience for this stuff and
to really express my passion for these animals is to
do it on TV. So that's what I did. I
went out for a show called King of the Jungle
two on Animal Planet way back in two thousand and three,
and I've just been kind of going ever since then.

(07:51):
But I have this whole other side where my great
uncle was Charles Ford, and I grew up reading his books. Yeah,
without even realizing that he was without really he was
a relative. I was into his books. And it wasn't
until high school that my grandmother, who always used to say,
you're just like your uncle Charlie, I had no idea
what she was talking about. She saw me reading the

(08:13):
Book of the Damned, like rereading, and she's like, you know,
that's your uncle Charlie. So all of it started to
click and started to make sense. And I've always been
into cryptozoology. I held off calling myself a cryptozoologist for years.
I just didn't feel like I had earned it. But
after being elected or being granted Cryptozoologist of the Year,

(08:36):
in twenty twenty three, I guess I can officially call
myself one, So I'm proud to have that title.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
Also, not just any cryptozoologist, Cryptozoologist of the Year and
paranormal forty in royalty.

Speaker 4 (08:49):
So I mean, you're a man of many hats. That
sounds like I keep busy.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
For sure.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
And not only that, but unlike a lot of cryptozoologists,
he has like a different spun perspective on it. I
know a lot of people like to get into the
wu woo, and I know that Pat definitely gets into
the wu wuo, but his perspective as a biologist kind
of brings a lot more like real world validity to
a lot of these creatures. And I think that one
of the most interesting things about the way that you
do your research pad is that you don't go out
there saying like, oh, I'm gonna find this monster. You

(09:15):
end up trying to find the folklore, all the roots
of everything. How people actually kind of got to the
idea of developing this creature. And of course you're gonna
call something out if you think it's really out there,
But on the flip side of it, you're one of
those people. It isn't gonna let something continue on for years.
If you don't think that there's anything to it, you're
gonna say, all right, this is the animal that I
think that they were talking about. And the reason I
say that is because of all these stories, all these stories,

(09:37):
like you just do it a lot differently, even with
the even with the expection that you actually go out there,
you talk to the tribes, you actually get their folklore
firsthand instead of collecting it from other people. Just a
really interesting way to do research.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
Man, Thank you very much. I appreciate that. And yeah,
I mean I love the I love the stories, I
love the myths behind it. That's really what I think cryptozoology.
Cryptosology is just biology with folklore. So there really isn't
a distinction. I mean, any animal that hasn't been given
a scientific name yet is a cryptid. So there's a

(10:10):
million crypt I mean potentially that's not even an exaggeration.
There's a million cryptied insects out there, but we don't
really hear that term being used for them. But until
an animal has been been given a scientific name, it
is a cryptid in my mind. So when I hear
these stories, when I hear these myths, and these legends
from people who live in the area where these animals
are found. I want to hear more about it, and

(10:32):
just like Shane was saying, I want to go there
and I want to hear the stories directly from them,
because a lot is lost in translation and a lot
is lost on the camera. If you just watch a show,
it's not the same as being there. You know, if
you're I'm talking one on one to an individual and
the camera is showing like a two shot of me
talking to that person, but what you don't see is
their entire family behind them, who's either feeding them lines

(10:55):
or kind of nudging each other and laughing, where I'm like, oh,
this is probably not legit what they're saying right out,
or absolutely horrified and reminding them of, you know, a
little factoid that maybe they they had missed or they
forgot to tell in the retelling of this because their
family's been hearing this story for so many years, or
you know, with the ring con deck. When this one

(11:16):
gentleman was kind of describing his encounter with it, he
was glossing over some of the details, and then one
of the researchers that I was with actually asked about
it it's genitalia, and his wife just blushed and turned
and she started hitting him and yelling at him, and he,
you know, immediately lit up and he's like, no one's

(11:37):
asked me that before, and he went into a really
in depth, definite details about the animals genitals, and that
just made it so much more real. I mean, it's
it's funny because of what it is, but also having
that interaction and seeing that firsthand was like, oh, this
guy is not making this up. This is not you know,
some kind of story like this. He's clearly talked to

(11:57):
his wife about this before. But yeah, so being there
and hearing from people who've actually witnessed the creatures, or
who know the folklore because they grew up with it,
or who just know the areas where the animals are spotted,
gives you such a depth of knowledge that you really
can't get anywhere else.

Speaker 3 (12:17):
Well, I think an interesting point that you brought up
is the fact that you, like you said, a cryptid
is really just an undiscovered, undocumented animal.

Speaker 4 (12:26):
And you know, we're guilty of it as well on
this show.

Speaker 3 (12:29):
But a lot of times it seems like you know
the Hopkinsville Goblins and you know, the Flatwood's Monster and
things like that get lumped in with cryptids, who if
these stories are true, they're clearly not cryptids and some
undiscovered animal. So, you know, it's just the idea we've
been talking about a lot lately is all these stories

(12:49):
probably have this nugget of truth somewhere, and you just
have to figure out the nugget of truth. And especially
with these older tales and like Native American type legends,
you have to kind of ask yourself what could these
accounts mean in modern day, real world terms. And it
sounds like that's kind of the work that you're doing,
is going boots on the ground, talking to these people

(13:11):
who have had these real world encounters and figuring out
that nugget of truth in these kind of fantastical.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
Stories exactly exactly. And that's one of my favorite examples
of that is the Mongolian death worm.

Speaker 4 (13:23):
So we've covered that on the show too.

Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, it's wild, right, I Mean, you hear these stories
and you're like, what, there's no way you know, this
monster like this, this thing can't shoot electricity and blow
itself up and spit hot acid, and you know, all
of a sudden pop up out of these sands and
what's a worm doing in the sands anyway? But when
you get to Mongolia and when you really start investigating

(13:45):
the biology, you're like, oh, you know shooting blood, Well
there's a horn lizard that shoots blood out of its eyes.
Oh okay, Well there's an electric eel that you know,
can electric get and oh and some thing's burrowing, you know,
burrowing through the sand. It could be building up a
static charge. And then you're like, well, is it really
and there So I was digging in the Gobi Desert
and it's I mean in parts of it it's soil.
It's not actual sand, it's soil. And you're like, oh,

(14:07):
I probably could find some kind of warm here. And
then you start really talking to the individuals who are there,
And the more conversations that I had with the nomads
who are there, the more that I was realizing that
they have such an immense respect for nature. Just absolutely.
It's a Buddhist country and they have respect for all life,

(14:29):
but their sort of reverence for the wild is like
no other culture that I've really experienced. And it's a really,
really harsh environment. And one of the rules of being
in a harsh environment is you don't want to get hurt, right,
You don't want to get hurt because any injury can
turn deadly pretty quickly, and you're in a really harsh environment.

(14:49):
So they essentially all of the legends that I learned
could boil down to don't mess with nature if you
don't have to. That's really what. So they're not digging
looking for lizards, they're not catching snakes because they have
no reason to catch a snake. So they know the
animals that they interact with every day very very well.

(15:10):
But anything that's trying to stay hidden, they're gonna let
it stay hidden. And all the stories of the death worm,
all the horror stories that you hear, I really started
going through and you know, I have like a log
somewhere of all the story, all the interactions that I
could find, Every single one of them was someone messing
with it. It was like, oh, this person poked it. Oh,

(15:31):
this person stepped on it. Oh, this person you know,
through a through gasoline on it. Oh this person tried
and every one of them is someone messed with it.
It's never the Mongolian death worm came up and ate
this person who was asleep or who you know, spit
acid on someone who was just walking the other direction.
So it really comes down to okay, you know, there's
stories about this, and the legends about this are all

(15:52):
just allegories for just don't mess, like, don't mess with
something that you don't have to, like, just live in
harmony in your environment, live and let live. And if
you see something that might look like a death worm,
like just don't hook.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
We apologize, guys for the interference, but we will be
right back and now back to the show. So I
know in Mongolia they do put a lot of stock
behind like the existence of the Mongolian death worm, Like,

(16:30):
what was some of your conclusions with it? Do you
put stock or validity into it? Or you think it's
a misidentified animal?

Speaker 2 (16:35):
Like, So I do think that there are unknown creatures
in Mongolia, and I think that anything burrowing is the
most likely to be some kind of unknown creature. I
don't think that there is one animal that has all
of the traits that they're describing. I think it's probably
an amalgamation or kind of a combination of a few
different animals. I think there is it's very very possible

(16:58):
that there's a type of spitting cobra that that is
there that we know that there are ones bordering in
the in the areas that border the Gobi Desert, so
it wouldn't be too hard to say that one made
its way there. There are sandfish like the lizards, that
really go through the sand very very easily and kind
of disappear quickly. If you just saw the tail of
one of those going away. There's also grubs, so a

(17:21):
really large grub. I dug up a mole cricket, and
if you ever seen a mole cricket, they're about that big.
They had these really cool kind of front paws that
that they you know, that that they separate the sand with.
And they also send this vibration. They send out a
vibration that's their call, like their mating call. So they
dig a tunnel and the tunnel gives them acoustics to

(17:43):
send out this this mating call. So we heard one,
we could feel it on the sand, and then I
dug it up and the nomads that I was with
freaked out. They were their mind was blown. They had
no idea what this was. There these huge, hulking wrestler
guys were like, ah, what are you doing? Like you
messed with something, why would you mess with it? And

(18:06):
they shake so like I picked it up and you
could feel it kind of give like a little vibration.
There was nothing I could say that wouldn't convince them
that was an electric shock. So really, what that's saying
to me is that there's there's these activities of known
creatures that happen that in their mind, you know, you
don't mess with anything that you don't have to, And

(18:27):
it's just conflating these stories and making it into something
like the Mongolian deathworm. That's that there are unknown animals there,
But I don't think that there's an actual Mongolian death
worm in the way that we think of it, right,
And that's another problem with cryptozoology is that I love

(18:47):
cryptozoology and I would love to find an animal that
that kind of meets the descriptions of this. But for
the general public for cryptozoology, like take the Mongolian death
worm or sea serpents, if I found a new species
of squid that could explain a lot of the sightings
of a sea serpent, most of the public would go, yeah,

(19:08):
but it's not a sea serpent. And if we find
a relic polar bear in Nepal that meets with a
lot of the sightings of the Yeti. People will go, yeah,
that's cool, but it's not the Yeti. You're like, but
it is, like what if it is? So if we
found a new species of spitting cobra in Mongolia, which

(19:30):
is entirely possible, I would be super excited, be like, yep,
death one, but the general public would go, now, it's
still not the death. We're still looking for it.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
That's another thing we talk about a lot on the
show is this idea of the issue of language and
people trying to describe indescribable things with the best language
they have, and like you said, throughout the years, these
tales could get confabulated into something more fantastical than maybe
they initially were when they started off more as cautionariy retails.

Speaker 4 (20:00):
And as you were telling that story.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
It reminded me of we covered it's probably been a
year or so ago on the show the mackelay Bembek.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
I was just about to bring that up too, and it's.

Speaker 3 (20:10):
You know, a very similar story from my understanding, and
I'm sure you're far more of an expert than me
and Shane combined.

Speaker 4 (20:17):
But you know, these people.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
Went on all these expeditions to try to find this thing,
and eventually, you know, they showed the locals and the
natives pictures of I believe it was like a rhinoceros
or something.

Speaker 4 (20:27):
They're like, yeah, that's it. So, I mean, that's all I.

Speaker 3 (20:30):
Could think of while you were telling the story about
the Mongolian death worm. Is how similar to that account
it really is? And like we said, like how through
the years in the game of telephone, these normal things
can be just really blown out of proportion.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
One hundred. So I went to West Africa. I was
in the Congo, Cameroon and the Central African Republic and
lived with three different tribes there, and two Pygmy tribes,
the Baka and the baiy aka Uh tribes, and they
were incredible and very welcoming, and you know, it was

(21:05):
a really unique experience and we I did that. So
I had pictures on an iPad and showing them the
different photos because you always read the stories about you know,
like oh, you show someone a soro pod and they're like, oh,
that's Mokelia and Benbe, And I definitely found that it
was a lot of it was in the way that
you ask the question, and a lot of it was

(21:28):
in the order that you show the pictures, and a
lot of it was if you're at in. What I
found in the Baka. In the Biaka is that you
were never talking one on one ever. It was a
group always. They wanted to be there. This is the
most action that the village had seen. I was the
first Westerner that any of the kids had seen, which

(21:49):
was super fun. So I got to put like millipedes
on my face and like run around the village and
they were like, he's crazy. You know, just all kinds
of fun stuff with that. But so this is like
the most exciting thing that's happening this week for this group.
So you're with a group of people, and I would
because one of our producers spoke French and he could

(22:14):
hear like the side conversations that were going on. And
we showed a picture of a crocodile and the person's like, oh,
that's a that's a monitor lizard, and someone else's like, no, no, no,
it's not a monitor lizard. Like monitor lizard, you know,
they're the ones that we find over blah blah blah.
This is a caman. They're like, nah, I don't think
that's a caman you. So there was a lot of

(22:35):
that back and forth with literally every photo. And then
we'd show, you know, like a jaguar and they've never
seen or heard of a jaguar, but they're like, it
kind of looks like maybe a leopard. And it's like, okay, well,
I can understand that. That makes sense, and then whatever.
The first big animal that they didn't recognize was that

(22:58):
was Michelambbe, and then there'd be like a conversation about it,
like I don't think that's it. I'm pretty sure, like
that one has that one looks like the neck isn't
long enough, or that doesn't have spikes, and you know.
So yeah, there was a lot of tales being told
over over many, many years. But my favorite thing about

(23:19):
Mackellya and Bembe is whether whether or not you believe
that there is a dinosaur in West Africa, which I
do not other than all the birds. All birds are dinosaurs,
but other than that, I don't think there's a Sosaa
pod there. But this legend needs to exist and it
needs to perpetuate because in the tribes that I was with,

(23:40):
there's a huge like machismo kind of culture where you
have to be the toughest, you have to be the bravest.
People file their teeth down to points to make themselves
look more fierce, and they do this facial scarification to
make themselves look more fierce. So if you say I
don't want to go down to the river at night

(24:01):
because there are crocodiles, people will be like, oh, you're weak.
You know you're disrespecting your family. How can you? But
if you say I don't want to go down to
the river at night because Mokela and Bembe was fine,
everyone goes, oh, smart, yeah, good move, don't do that.
So it's like almost a social out. This legend needs
to be there in order to not do really dangerous

(24:23):
and dumb things.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
Well, and Shane, I'll let you get a word in
because I know I've just kind of been going off
to the races this episode.

Speaker 4 (24:31):
But that's so funny.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
We've been talking a lot lately about how a lot
of these stories could have started off as cautionary tales,
like The Wind to Go is what we've talked about
a lot recently. And then Shane did a great episode
just last week on vampire lore, just kind of like
for Halloween, and we saw a lot of connections between
windigo lore and vampire lore and how a lot of

(24:53):
that could have started off as cautionary tales as well.
And Shane, now I'll shut up and let you talk.

Speaker 1 (24:57):
I mean, even expanding into some of the paranormals we're
talking about. I mean, you hear about all of these
different cities that all have these roads that they're haunted roads.
You got to drive slow, you got to do this
on them. And we're talking about even with those those
are cautionary tales because if you tell the kids in
the local area on this really really sharp turn that
there might be ghosts, you better not go through that area,
or if you do, you better go slow. Then you're
avoiding people actually going off the side of the road

(25:20):
because now they're looking for a ghost. So even some
of these cautionary tales, even in like modern like United
States society, also play that same role because I mean
it's keeping people, it's making people be a little bit
more cautious and aware of what's going on around them,
which honestly is never a bad thing, even if it
is focal or if there is truth to it.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
I mean one hundred percent. There's this great story from
Brazil that I love with the Boto. Are you guys
familiar with the boto the I don't think so. The
Boto is a pink river dolphin and these are real,
real animals. But the legend is that occasionally the Boto
will leave the river and put on like a fancy

(25:58):
suit and go to like dances and impregnate women and
they have no ability to resist the Boto. He's just
so desirable and just this this like siren song kind
of thing. And there's actually in remote areas of Amazonia
people who have the Boto listed as their father when
there's like an unexpected pregnancy, and it's it's this amazing,

(26:21):
like culturally accepted story where you know, a young woman
shows up pregnant, who's unmarried, shows up pregnant, and the
parents are like, oh my god, I can't believe this happened,
Like what are we going to do? And she's like, no, no, no,
you don't understand. Like I was at the dance it
was the Boto, like it must be, I don't remember,
And the parents are like, oh, well great, all right,
Well so we're going to be really happy about this

(26:42):
and like maybe your boyfriend will like marry you anyway,
and see like this is and the guys are like, yeah,
well I'll raise them as if it's my O, and
like this is a totally culturally accepted thing, and I
think that's really beautiful. It's like, well, we don't really
want to deal with this, so we have this story
that everyone eyes into and yeah, we're gonna go with it.

Speaker 1 (27:03):
I mean, you end up hearing those same stories even
it translated into the United States with I mean talking
about like going to dances with the devil. You hear
this down in like Mexico and stuff too, So it's
almost like you see these same stories reoccurring. It's just
like the archetypes stay the same, but like the visual
of them changes up a little bit. Because even how
many stories have we covered or and where it talks
about these things coming from the water and then having

(27:24):
relations with people on land and going back in Like
what was that one we covered recently where the person
had like the half the bottom of them was like
a crocodile or an alligator from like Brazil or.

Speaker 4 (27:32):
The el Ombre came on.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
Yeah that one, Yeah, that's another prime example of the
same thing.

Speaker 4 (27:38):
Well, and we've other than that.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
You know, we've told stories about like sasquatch type entities
here in North Carolina where I live that you know,
they do the same thing, like hide in the the
edge of the woods and watch young women while they
bathe and then you know, beat them over the head
and abduct them and drag them to their caves.

Speaker 4 (27:55):
So, I mean it.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
Seems, you know, like Shane said, this is a motif
that pops up time and time again and just a
little bit of research we've done.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
What was that one that we covered recently where he
got the female from giving her the little like gemstones
and stuff. It was a North Carolina story too, the boojum. Yeah,
that was another problem with.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
Sasquatch type wild man creature who was, like we said,
spying on women as they bathed and then abducted one
of them and you know, made her his wife, and yeah,
lured her with shiny rocks and gemstones, as one does.

Speaker 1 (28:30):
Yeah, isn't that where that I think that's that's the
one where the whole hooton nanny thing comes from, right,
Because the girl's name was was Annie or something like that,
and she'd go walking through the woods hooting for him
or whatever. So they started using the hooting nanny.

Speaker 3 (28:43):
The folklore is that the young girl who got abducted,
her name was Annie, and to communicate with this bigfoot
or wild man, she would you know, hoot and holler
at him in the woods, and they, you know, locally
started calling her hooting Annie, and then you know, that's
sort of the term hooton nanny for you know, like
a party or whatever in the rural South came from.

Speaker 4 (29:03):
So, yeah, it's funny. You know, I've lived.

Speaker 3 (29:05):
In North Carolina my entire life. I never knew that
aspect of the story until I was doing the research
for that episode.

Speaker 4 (29:13):
So it's funny.

Speaker 3 (29:14):
You know, basically a cryptid story has pervaded culture and
society at that point.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
Yeah, that's pretty awesome. No, I had never heard that either.
That's great.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
All right, guys, we got to take another break. We'll
be right back, and now we're getting back to the bizarre.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
Well, I guess since we're kind of talking about some
Sasquatch stuff, we definitely have to dive into some of
your eight Men research. I know that you've done this
in multiple different places. So whatever one you might want
to get into, but I always think it's fun to
maybe talk about the one that you maybe put the
most stocker validity in.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yes, I think a ring Condec is one of the
most fascinating to me, and I went into that investigation
really thinking that this was mistaken identity for an orangutan.
I just if you've ever seen the giant male orangutans,
when they get so large that they don't really go
up in the trees very much anymore, they're basically on
the ground. They get these crazy long dreads like in

(30:16):
their they just and their face plates get enormous, so
they just look otherworldly. And I really thought that that's
that's what I expected to find, and that is not
what I found when I got there. When I got there,
I found that the folks that were seeing are in
Condec had really great biological stories to tell, and all

(30:41):
of it made sense from from the perspective of a
wildlife biologist. People were talking about, you know, animals that
don't that don't necessarily use trails, so they'd be really
hard to capture images of. They were talking about primarily
nocturnal uh primates, of which Gibbons really are the only
one one that are you know, that's a that's a

(31:02):
borderline nocturnal primate. The way that they described their anatomy
was nothing like in Orangutan, The way that they described
their behaviors was nothing like in Orangutan. And the fur
color on them, which they always said hair, They would
never say fur. They would always say that that it
had hair, which was interesting, and they did make that

(31:22):
distinction between them and UH and other primates. The way
that they described the coloration was not like anything for
a given or or in orangutan either because it's hair,
not fur. A lot of the people that we spoke
with would always say that it was black hair because
the only hair that they're used to seeing is black,

(31:45):
so fur can be all different colors. But then I
brought a Laurel color chart with little hair, and I
was like, can you show me, like, which one of
these is the closest? And it was across the spectrum.
Like they would point to all different things like never black,
but because of his hair, it had to be black.
So it was just like this weird kind of lost

(32:06):
in translation thing and yeah, so and finally it really
came down to this one guy who was an eyewitness,
and as I'm asking him questions about it, I was
somewhat leading, like letting it slip that I, you know,
I really thought that he had probably seen a given.
This individual. I thought that he had seen a given.
And at one after like you know, maybe five minutes,

(32:29):
he kind of sat back and laughed and he was like,
look at man, I know what a given is. He's like,
the only people who don't believe in a rank and
deck are people who don't live here. And I'm like, oh,
all right, yeah, good, good point. I am a you know,
I'm being an ugly American right now, and yes, thank

(32:49):
you for putting me in my place. You're right, like,
why should I question this when you know you live
here and see them all the time.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
Well, that's like a double edged sword too, because, like
we're talking about a little bit earlier, sometimes you need
that outside visual to actually kind of bring it into
the picture. But then in the other situations like this,
it's like when people are all describing the same thing
and they are aware of the animals in the area,
then it's like what direction do you really go in?
I mean, if there's some of these tribes where they
don't necessarily like have much communication outside of like their group,

(33:16):
then that's one thing. Of course, they might have some misidentification,
they might have different words for things, but if they're
like honestly familiar with that area, like I said, it's
a double ed shorty, you don't know which direction to
go in. Is it a matter of a different perspective
or is it really really something out there? And I mean,
it's like the stone apes. I know, I always bring
this one up every time we talk Pat, but the
stone apes are like a prime example of that. That's
one of those things that like exists in folklore. But

(33:38):
even like the Vietnam vets that we're going at the time,
we're like, yeah, these things are everywhere, they'll just start
throwing rocks at you. Like there's so much validity behind
those stories. Everybody in Vietnam even believes in them. But
then everybody outside is just like, Yep, nope, it's just
another sasquat story. It's just another folklore thing.

Speaker 2 (33:53):
Yeah, but that is a great one, and that's one
that I really really want to get over there to explore.
My wife is Vietnamese and she's a second generation she
was born here, but both of her parents came over
as refugees, and I've gotten I've tried to get her
father to talk about the rock apes a couple of times,
and it's really one of those things that like he'll

(34:14):
tell me a couple things, but then he always goes,
but you should not be looking for them, like you
should not go. So you should definitely go to Vietnam,
do not look for them while you're there. And I
want to look for them.

Speaker 1 (34:28):
Well, I mean with the stuff like that, it almost
kind of makes you wonder if they might not necessarily
be fully what you expect, but maybe some type of
like undiscovered tribe, because even if they go generations generations,
generations no contact, they're all breeding within with each other.
I mean, they might start starting to get that smaller
gene where they all start becoming shorter, because that's the
only gene that's getting passed around. And I don't know

(34:49):
how far this would go with people, but obviously you
throw like a hog out in the wild and eventually
they'll start growing hair, and they'll start growing tusks and
start turning into a bore. So I know there's a
lot of people that have thrown theories with these like
wild men type people. But if you have generation and
generation and generation, like who knows where that could possibly
end up. Like what we're thinking is the stone Age
could be literally just like a miniature tribe of like
really hairy people that exists in this area. But they

(35:11):
have their own language, they don't communicate with the outside world,
so they look like a whole different creature, not realizing
that again, they might just be like a tribe of
small people.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, so I mean it is it the wild boar
well pigs like domesticated pigs and humans two very very
different scenarios, where the domesticated board does kind of revert
back to the more wild type as it's being being released.
But those are traits that are in there. But then
you're right that isolated populations can develop either what we

(35:43):
would call island dwarfism or island gigantism, and all different
species do show that they believe that's what happened to
Homo floresiensis the hobbits in Indonesia, they think that that
was island dwarfism, but that occurred there were also tiny
elephants that were there and giant komodo dragons, So you
get some island dwarfism island gigantism, and I've read different

(36:03):
theories as to why one happens versus the other. Most
likely due to nutrient availability, but the pigmy tribes in Africa,
that definitely does not explain them, because it's the same
nutrients that are available. There's abundant nutrients. They think that
that may be more the trait for being small. There
was an advantage to being able to get through the

(36:24):
bush easier, for you know, you're not getting hit with
as many things, there aren't as many things in the way.
But when I saw a true most of the pigmy
tribes that I was with, unfortunately there's a lot of
discrimination against them by the local peoples, and a lot
of them have tried to sort of marry outside the
tribe and have kids outside the tribe to no longer

(36:48):
be full pigmies. But there are some who are, and
when I saw them, it was striking. It was really
you know, there were some who still lived in the forest,
still lived in nomadic lifestyle, and when they would come in,
you just kind of see them on the outskirts the
size of children, but people in their thirties, so that
that is possible, and there are when you do have

(37:09):
an isolated population and you are getting a smaller gene pool,
there are certain traits that can be that do get
perpetuated that would make someone look unusual. So yeah, there's
every possibility that this is more of a group or
a tribe.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
Just in that case too, just out of curiosity when
they develop this like dwarfism. Is it like dwarfism like
how we know it where you kind of get some
of the like not normal body proportions or is it
almost like they have normal body proportions but they're just
like a shrunken size.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
Just a smaller size. Yes, yeah, it's just they use
the same term, the island dwarfism or island gigantism. And
there's also a benthic deep sea tends to do the
same thing. Deep sea you tend to get out of
the tiny or huge as well. But yeah, the tribe
that I was with, at least they it was the Sames,

(38:01):
but just much much smaller, and it really was striking.
It was really like at a distance, I thought this
was a child, and then you get up close and
see like wrinkles and the scarification and the filed teeth
and he's like, WHOA.

Speaker 1 (38:14):
Well, I mean that throws more into like the whole
stone amp concept then, because if they're not, you know,
oddly proportioned, then it would make it that much easier
for them to be able to get around the jungle
super easy and had the ability to throw their what
rocks as precise as they do. So, I mean, I mean,
I feel like that's probably a pretty good idea on
what these things could potentially be, on top of possibly
some you know, undiscovered eight possibly. I mean, I definitely

(38:37):
put stock into the fact that there might be some
mini variation of sasquatch, because it seems like those stories
that kind of exist all around the world. And I'm
not putting stock in that every single one, but at
a certain point, I think that there has to be
something like this out there, or there was something like
this out there, otherwise these stories wouldn't exist all around
the world. But my biggest fear is not being able
to catch up with these things before they become extinct,

(38:58):
and then they become this thing that exists forever, ends
obscurity and you never really know the root of where
it actually came from.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah, Yeah, And that's I do think that we're seeing
that with a rank and deck. The people that I
spoke with, they said, like my grandparents used to see
them much more often. My parents would occasionally see like
a family unit, but my generation, the only ones that
we've seen are older ones, like we've seen lone individuals,
and they're they're all older, which leads you to think

(39:26):
that they are, you know, dying out. They're seeing the
last of them, which is unfortunate. But I think that
there's what seventeen thousand islands in Indonesia, so there's a
lot of unexplored places to still get to. But the
it's it's always interesting to me when you talk about
Harry hominids and these stories to make the distinction between

(39:48):
Homanid and a primate, because there were really like the
legends kind of span this gambit and we think of
them as the same thing, but there really is this
huge distinction between a Homanid and a primate, and we
don't have another living Homanid that we've identified where we
can really get to the scientific basis of how we're

(40:10):
going to make that distinction. Because humans are a part
of the like we are primates, right, but we call
ourselves home Itids, So would we extend the same kind
of respect to another Homanid species that we saw? Like
what are we basing it on? Is it just on hair?
Like if we had if a chimp was born with
a mutation where it had where it wasn't as hairy,

(40:33):
would we Yeah? So I always find that aspect of
human evolution really fascinating because we lived in a world
where there were you know, a dozen species of Homanids
interacting with each other at any given time, and now
we don't, or maybe we do, but we don't commonly
accept that we do.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
I mean that could be where a lot of the
Sasquatch stuff comes from. I mean, I know a lot
of people kind of throw the like undiscovered tribe concept,
but I mean that could go to a whole other
level that you know, if there was all these different
subcategories of like human like beings, you know, if one
kind of state amongst itself, of course it would develop
amongst itself kind of like we're talking about with the
last one. So you know, maybe the whole thing of
the Sasquatch thing is more of what like the natives

(41:15):
talk about that they're us they're people. They're just a
different tribe, a different variation, because I've heard from a
couple of different like First Nations, that they kind of
have this distinct set of rules that when people started
developing and started using fire, they started doing all this stuff.
This group of Sasquatch decided they didn't want to do that.
They want to stay everything natural. They didn't want to
be part of that. So if you start hearing some
of these old native stories, like it adds even more

(41:37):
of a human component to some of these things. And
I'm sure that you know, you've traveled around the world,
talked to a bunch of people about this type of stuff.
I'm sure that that's probably one of those things that's
universal across countries, across continents, is that you start seeing
these same things that are reoccurring.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Yeah. Absolutely, that's the First Nations groups that I spoke
with in Vancouver told me the same thing that they said.
They were like, yeah, you know, you're thinking about Sasquatch
all wrong, Like, this is not an animal. This is
just a different tribe of people, Like this is these
these are humans, just not in the way that like
they don't look like us, but these are people, And yeah,

(42:14):
I thought that was a very interesting perspective on this.
And when you're talking about for rank and deck, I
do think that there's likely two different animals that people
are talking about and they're just using this one term.
I do think that there's likely a ground dwelling gibbon
that is there, and you know, primarily ground dwelling upright

(42:35):
walking gibbon, because it would give it an evolutionary advantage
the main predator in the area as a tiger, and
tigers are not in the area are not known to
attack humans. The only place where tigers really predate humans
with any regularity is in India, and there's a number
of different factors for that, but in Indonesia they tend
to leave people alone. And the theory is it's because

(42:57):
we look so different than their prey, because we're walking upright,
so like, we just don't look like an easy meal.
So if a gibbon was to evolve that and to
walk upright as well, they would get the same type
of protection.

Speaker 1 (43:11):
That we have.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
And then there's the hominids, where the descriptions of them
are very very clearly home ind where it's really, you know,
just a smaller human like likely a descendant of homoflooresiensis.
And Mike Moorewood, who was the researcher who found Homo floorsiensis.
I was able to meet with him at one point

(43:33):
while I was over there in Java, and he said
that he had evidence that Homo floor asiensis was around
until at least the nineteen twenties. And he said, it's
not good enough evidence for me to publish in a
scientific paper, but I'm working on it. I'm working on
gathering more and unfortunately he died less than a year later,

(43:55):
and the research is apparently gone. Nobody's been able to
find it. Spoken with, you know, some members of his team,
and I've had a production company that I was working
with reach out to members of his family, and nobody
can find the research that he was talking about that
gave him at least he believed that they were there
until the nineteen twenties.

Speaker 3 (44:15):
I think that was a really interesting point you just
brought up, Pat about how it could be kind of
two different creatures or two different things being kind of
confabulated into one story, because I think Shane will attest
to this. That's something just again in our limited research
for the show, that's something we've come across time and
time again. How again, this real world nugget of truth

(44:37):
could be combined with this folklore throughout the years to
come up with this kind of again outlandish story. We've
talked about kind of sea monsters and river monsters here
recently on the show, and it seems like, especially in
those kind of cases, it could be Yeah, it was
a really big catfish.

Speaker 4 (44:57):
Or something like that.

Speaker 3 (44:58):
But then you get just as many where it's you know,
a seasoned riverboat captain or something as like, No, that
was no whale or whatever that I've ever seen. So
it could be these two things that kind of get
combined throughout the years. So I was just wondering, have
you come across any kind of sea monsters or anything
like that in your research, and if so, what are

(45:19):
your opinions and thoughts on those type tales.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
Yeah? Absolutely so. I've done both Lockness and Caddye. Those
are two of the expeditions that I've done. And Lockness,
I'm very sorry to say, I don't believe there is
a large undiscovered creature there. I think that there are
some really cool things in the lake, but yeah, it's
an extremely deep and very very cold area. But they've

(45:43):
recently done e DNA surveys and found you know, there's
a lot of eels, there's a lot of salmon like fish,
but there's really nothing. Nothing that came back with like
unidentified DNA. And I do think that there's a lot
of when you read the Locknew stories, it's exactly what
you're described.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
Hold that thought. We'll be right back after this brief
commercial break and we are back to the show. Let's
hop right in.

Speaker 2 (46:19):
Some of the original original sightings of the Lockness Monster
happened miles away from the lock On land.

Speaker 1 (46:25):
Yeah, I was gonna say it came on land more
often with the old stories. You never just saw them
in the water at the old stories.

Speaker 4 (46:31):
Yeah, like the salamander theory, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
Oh yeah, yeah, I've heard that as well, But I
mean a salamander that big would be a real tough sell.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yeah. The old stories, they would mention that they'd come
up and eat their sheep and stuff like that and
then disappear back into the water. So like maybe there's
something there at one point, but then it kind of
turned into this big folklore thing as the years went on.
But again, like the characteristics are so different.

Speaker 2 (46:54):
Yeah, there's one of the one of the original stories,
it's like a deer Like they're describing a deer very
very clearly, and you're like, I don't understand, how is
this the lock Like this is definitely a deer that
this person just had never seen a deer this big.
But and then there's there's the idea of a deer
swimming the head sticking out of the water. So I've

(47:15):
I've gone camping extensively up in Maine, and if you're
ever out on like a kayak and a moose pops
up next to you out of the water, like that's
a sea monster. That moose pops in seat up if
it doesn't have antlers, You're.

Speaker 4 (47:29):
Like, what the hell is that?

Speaker 2 (47:31):
You know, huge eight foot tall animal that you're in
the you're in the water, you don't expect to see
a moose. But they eat algae, they're really good swimmers.
I can see where people have this kind of misidentification.
Or even a whole bunch of birds in a row
kind of moving in the same powern So there's a
lot of different things that can be misidentified with the
Lockness monster. With Caddy, I think that there, there's some

(47:54):
of that. So there's some of these. You know, we
we found this mysterious blob squatch that that washed up
and no one's exactly sure what it is, and like
usually it's a basking shark or a sperm whale or
something that's decayed in a particular way that makes it
look like this. But then I do also think that
there are undiscovered creatures in the deep ocean. Even the

(48:16):
most conservative marine biologists will say that there are undiscovered
creatures left. Darren Nash, I think famously did a mathematical
analysis where he said, I think he came up with
six I think there's six large creatures over ten feet
long left to be discovered or something like that. But
I mean, even like I said, even conservative biologists, and

(48:38):
the unique features of Vancouver are that you're in a
heavily populated area that reaches deep water really really quickly.
So usually from the shore you can't see an area
that that goes down one thousand feet, but in Vancouver
you can. And the sightings of Caddie correlate to the
colder water currents that are coming in. So I do

(49:01):
absolutely think there's some kind of large undiscovered creature that
normally lives in the deep, but people in Vancouver just
happened to get glimpses of it when it's coming up.
You know, it's probably following a prey species on a
migratory route. And yeah, so I really think there is
something behind that, but I tend to go with it's
probably some type of squid more likely. But I don't

(49:23):
really have a reason for that other than I really
love squids.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
Well, I mean, there's a lot of giant squids that
are still somewhat recently being discovered. I mean, the whole
idea of like the kraken existed in folklore forever until
what maybe like the early two thousands when they started
discovering these giant squids, and then they realized that they
would attack whales, and then they started correlating the fact
that from underneath when there's not a lot of movement
going on back in the day, they saw a boat,
they assumed it was a whales. They'd come up and

(49:48):
attack it, and that's where all these different kracking stories
come from. But I know that there's even a lot
of different species of squids that they theorize and know exists,
but they haven't even laid eyes on them yet, Like,
what was the what's that really really weird looking one
that has like the really longated head and has like
the big long, like almost like kind of square looking
tentacles that come down and they've only clashed.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
Yeah, the long arm squid.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
Yeah, they only caught like one picture of that thing
so far, and it was a baby's They don't even
know the full size of these things can even reach anyways.
I mean, just simple stuff like that correlating into like
the early two thousands, I mean, what else could possibly
be down there, especially species that don't have the ability
to come up ever, Because I'm sure there's a lot
of stuff that's so used to existing at such high
pressure lower in the water that there's probably some giant

(50:33):
stuff that has never even come anywhere near the surface before.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
The wildest animals that we will ever find are down
at the deep parts of the ocean. I mean, you're
talking about the volcanic vents where you've got a tube worm.
You know, you might have an eight foot long tube
worm where the base of it exists in an area
that's seven hundred degrees seven hundred degrees from the and
then the top of it, So eight foot difference, the

(50:59):
top of the animal is going to be in like
thirty degrees, So the animal and it can survive like
it can survive that temperature variation. Imagine having your feet
in seven hundred degrees in your head just above freezing.
It's wild to me, absolutely wild everything that we find
in the deep ocean. But yeah, there's there's a lot
of squid species that are yet to be found. Shark

(51:21):
species as well. I mean, I think they've only seen
the frilled shark. We've only got a couple pieces of
footage of it ever, and the megamouth I want to
say like a dozen, you know, less than twenty of
them have been found. So yeah, there's the sharks and
deep sea sharks and squid are the two most likely

(51:42):
in my mind, large animals for us to find.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
Well, I'm gonna ask you, Well, I will.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
Say that it's a sea serpent and no one else,
So that's the bummer.

Speaker 1 (51:50):
Well, I'm gonna ask this, considering that you're a biologist
and you've definitely studied into this type of stuff, have
you done any research into those? A couple of people
have discovered them. It's almost like a body of water
underneath water where it's like has a lot more How
does that work. Yeah, there's a lot more sul to it,
so it like exists at a different spot. But even
when they try to take the subs into it, they'll
like bounce off of it because it's two buoyants. They

(52:11):
can't actually enter these spaces, Like, have you done any
research to see if there's good possibility of there maybe
being undiscovered species that live in those And I mean,
who knows how far down those things could go. There
could be like another second underwater ocean that has an
even bigger set of animals and we'd have no ability
to get to them, and they'd have no ability to
get through that to us either.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
They are really really interesting areas and there will be
undiscovered creatures there, but they're likely tiny. They're likely very small,
and you know, microbes and things in there because it
is such a harsh environment and it's something where it
would it would be very difficult for cellular life to
multicellular life to form under those conditions because of the

(52:56):
pressure and because of the hypersalinity. But it always a
SpongeBob square Pants and they like go to the beach
under the water, because that's really what it looks like.
And if you see some of the footage, there'll be
a fish that's like swimming along and swimming along, and
all of a sudden it'll go over one of those
lakes and it's like, ah, I'm dead, just dies and
sinks down because even within a few feet of it,

(53:19):
the salinity is so high that it just kills anything
that tries to get there. So yeah, I think they
will find undiscovered species in there, but they are probably
microbes and other things just based on the cellular makeup
on multicellular life. But hey, we've been proven wrong. I
mean those hydrothermal events, there's animals that exist with absolutely

(53:40):
no oxygen or they're chemosynthetic, so they are surviving purely
off of like sulfuric acid basically, which I mean, if
you can survive in sulfuric acid, then anything's possible.

Speaker 1 (53:58):
See the way I'm seeing it too, I feel like
there's got to be some spots where, some big pockets
that things exist on there, because if we know that
there's all these giant squids that exist on there, I'm
assuming that there has to be a food chain that
goes along with those things. So not only is there
probably gonna be bigger sharks, but there might even be
other stuff that we're not even aware of yet, because
I'm assuming that the way the system would work is
if this thing's bigger, everything else has to be bigger

(54:18):
in comparison. It wouldn't make sense that there would just
be one giant, monstrous animal and then everything else be microscopic. Otherwise,
what would that thing's food source be, Like, there's got
to be at least something else that would counteract back
and forth with those giant squids. Otherwise, why they would
they have developed to that size if they didn't have
predators that were that size for example.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
Yeah, Yeah, and that's the interesting thing. It's called abysmal
or benthic gigantism. God, my professor would be so angry
at me, but it's Yeah, it is wild when you
see that there are a few different evolutionary factors that
push for the larger size, not just for prey, not
just for predation, but just the environment that's down there.

(55:00):
Larger that you are, the more spherical that you are,
the more able that you're able to withstand the pressure
and to Yeah, it just makes it makes it easier
to survive when you're kind of a bigger size with
more of that type of body shape that you typically
see in the squids for the deep sea creatures, and
you see that with a lot of different deep sea animals.

(55:22):
You see that with greenland sharks as well. They kind
of get this large, elongated body shape. That's it's just
that's the way to survive those pressures. To be that
kind of like that, that's really the evolutionary factor that's
pushing them towards that larger size.

Speaker 3 (55:41):
We're actually just talking Oh I'm sorry, but no, no,
I can't believe you brought up the green We're actually
just talking about that on probably three or four episodes.

Speaker 4 (55:49):
Back, Shane, if you'd like to.

Speaker 3 (55:51):
Elaborate a little bit on our greenland shark theories.

Speaker 1 (55:55):
Oh yeah, I'll let you lay down the episode the
ground work for and then I'll throw in the greenland
shark part I. We sort to connect it.

Speaker 3 (56:01):
Okay, So we were covering a cryptid sea monster lake
monster called the Alta Mahaha lake monster native to Georgia,
and you know, we were talking about how this lake
system kind of connects to the ocean, and then at
that point, you know, all bets are off.

Speaker 4 (56:18):
It could be anything.

Speaker 3 (56:20):
And then from just going through the different folklore and
the descriptions of the creature, and you know, Shane was
googling while I was going through that.

Speaker 1 (56:26):
I was looking for a lifespan of like two hundred
years or so, and how it stuff that wouldn't breed
very often that might actually come up to certain areas
to breed every Like what was it The sightings were
every like one hundred years or so for that I.

Speaker 3 (56:36):
Can't remember off the top of my head, but yeah,
kind of correlating with these cycles of when this thing
was kind of reported, there were like eighty one hundred
year gaps between you know, kind of the big waves
of sightings, and it seemed like, you know, the deeper
we got into it, and the more Shane googled as
we were talking, it was like one thing after the.

Speaker 4 (56:54):
Next, she was like, oh my god, here's another connection.
So we kind of came.

Speaker 3 (56:58):
Out of that episode thinking, Okay, either this is a
greenland shark or it truly is just some undiscovered something.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
Yeah, some undiscovered shark, but the greenland shark, I mean
it really it is one of the strangest animals out there,
and nothing about it really seems logical when you first
start describing it to people. But yeah, they're they're incredible.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
Yeah, we're reading that they were one of those ones
that not a lot of people know much about them,
as much research as they've done into them, Like they
don't really know much about their breeding habits. They don't
know necessarily like they had the area of where they
like to be in, but they're spotted going into even
like warmer waters during like the colder months. So we're
even looking into some of these sightings and we're realizing
that they were around like January February where the water
would be a little bit colder, so it makes sense

(57:41):
that they would start coming down there. Like this is
what I was talking about, where we end up connecting
in a lot of this stuff kind of like you do.
Like we're talking about the Beast of bladan Borough and
we're talking about how this thing used to like smash
animal skulls and everything, and then we started connecting in
with some other stuff that was happening around that time
and realized that it was a normal thing for people
that have pet hyenas, like Roosevelt had a pet hyena,

(58:01):
and then all of a sudden they passed this law
where people couldn't have them, so everybody just like pushed
them outside before anything else happened with it. So then
we started kind of correlating that we think the Beast
of Bladenburgh was literally just a hyena or a pack
of hyenas, because they're known to have that crazy jaw
and be able to smash skulls. So just another one
that it's like, if you kind of look at the
context around it, it seems like it's a I mean,

(58:21):
I put a lot of stock into it. I think
that honestly, the Beast of bladen Burrow was probably a hyena.
But you have to be able to correlate the two
things happening at one time, because if you're just hearing
one side or the other side, it doesn't make any sense.
But if you hear these stories and then you hear
about hyenas getting released in the area at the time,
typically not something to be in the area, but it
makes sense that would be happening at that exact time
that people just kicked out their hyenas, that they had

(58:43):
his pets.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
Absolutely, and that's Charles Fort's biggest contribution I think to
the zeitgeist is he just obsessively read newspapers, got newspaper
pers from around the world and got all these stories
and he would put them into like by date, put
them into groups because he wanted to see what was

(59:05):
happening everywhere at this one particular time, so that he
could make those kind of correlations and he could make
those associations like that, and that's what he would do.
That's how he found a lot of his biggest findings
were just from making those kind of correlations and those associations.
He was one of the first to really mention like
climate change because he found that, you know that in

(59:28):
given years, you know, based on the amount of pollution,
there would be this weather event that was happening here.
And he was like, maybe we're doing something really bad
in the environment. I'm not sure, I'm just throwing it
out there, but I mean he made he took this
huge amount of data and kind of correlated it down
into to make these associations, and people really weren't doing
that at the time. They were looking at everything happening

(59:50):
as a very very localized event and it's not going
to have you know, repercussions, and he was like, no,
we have to look globally like we are. Every is
a connected system. And just as you're saying, like, yeah,
releasing hyenas into the wild is going to cause some
really crazy stuff and people around here have never seen hyenas,

(01:00:11):
so sure, Yeah, there's gonna be some stories that pop
up about these giant mutant dogs.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
Yeah they're smashing livestock's head. I mean, where else would
that make sense?

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
Yeah, well, and if I remember correctly, in the Beast
of Bladenborough story, it was a very short lived kind
of cluster of sightings, which would make even more sense
if it was you know, a handful of these once
domesticated or domesticated quote unquote pits that were released into
the wild and then you know, whether they got killed
off or died of natural causes. Then the stories kind

(01:00:42):
of stopped. Sit tight, guys, we got to pay some
bills and now back to the show. But I did
to comment on something else that you said, Pat. You know,

(01:01:02):
we talked about the concept a lot on the show
of for a lot of these type things we talk about,
answers are never going to be found. We can't really
hope to find concrete answers. But I think as much
as we can hope to find these answers, it's in
the connections between these different subjects. And you know, a

(01:01:23):
drum I beat all the time on the show is
more than one thing can be true at the same time.
But anyway, so that kind of just got me thinking about,
like you're talking about with mister Ford and kind of
drawing these real world connections to these more you know,
paranormal or Fortian type circumstances. So being that you come
from a more scientific background, I was just curious here

(01:01:46):
as we are kind of wrapping up and towards the
back end of the show, is there any just like
outlandish forty and paranormal story that you kind of unironically believe.

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
So, I mean, I I will say that I love
all the stories about aliens, anything alien related. I want
to read more about, I want to learn more about.
I want to know more about this. It's Fort. You know,
Fort did investigate this and did you know, try to
uncover this. But I do find that stuff fascinating. That's

(01:02:20):
a little bit more concrete. I think that my favorite
of all of Fort's ideas that I don't believe, But
I do love his you know sense of drama. Is
the super Sargasso see where he just thinks that it
was the source of like this Sargaso Sea is such
a weird body of water, right, Like there's so many
different stories about this and different things in frog fish

(01:02:40):
are so weird, and he just he threw out that,
you know, his concept that this giant Sargasso Sea is
where all weirdness comes from. It's where all strange things
where everything else. And then I love the fact that
it was years later, like, you know, dozens decades later
after fort died, that we find that the Sardasso seas

(01:03:01):
almost certainly where eels come.

Speaker 1 (01:03:02):
From, which we know nothing about, and they go and
breed in the Bermuda triangle.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
Like, but the Sardasso seed that is the source of
the weirdness, that's the of the eels. And I was
like he's he was on the subthing.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
Ahead of his time with his ideas, man, because I mean,
the eels are one of those weird things that even
to this date, as much research as people have done
in them, we still don't know anything again about the
reproductive cycle. All we know is that they go down
to the Bermuda triangle. No matter where they are in
the world, they reproduce them. They go back like, we
don't really have much of explanation.

Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
Water streams, all of a sudden, elvers pop up, and
you've got like, you know, thousands of pounds of glass eels,
these little like shiny clear things showing up. I mean,
they really That was one of the reasons that they
thought of spontaneous generation, that they thought that there are
some animals that just spring out of nothing. So they're like, well,
there was nothing here, and now it's like the river
is literally full of elvers, So where are these things

(01:03:55):
coming from?

Speaker 1 (01:03:55):
And you're like, and I mean, since you brought up
aliens too, I gotta bring this one up, because this
has been a chain that we've been pulling on for
a long time. You know, just like Molder says, I
want to believe, we definitely believe in extraterrestrials. We want
to believe in them just because the concept's fascinating. And honestly,
I've put a lot more stock and validity into the
fact that we're not the only thing that exists in

(01:04:16):
the universe. Considering that the universe is so immensely big,
but on the flip side, with a lot of our research,
it's actually brought us back to this human connection. And
I actually put together at one point this whole episode
that was connecting in from you know, like the Nazi
experimentation to when we started pushing into this whole thing
with sci fi to an mk ultra started to when
all these experiments and everything started. And we've kind of

(01:04:37):
correlated the fact that we think a good portion of
the extraterrestrial phenomenon is actually humans that are using the
facade of extraterrestrials to continue on these experiments. And as
we've like gone down the line with stuff, we've noticed
all of these different people talking about like seeing mask lines,
seeing these different weird things, seeing like officers, seeing like
soldiers and stuff, but they leave that out of the

(01:04:58):
story sometimes, like even past how many times have people
talked about Pascagoula and Orrin is probably one of the
first people that I've seen that actually throws in the
fact that one of the people that experienced it said
that the female had a mask line, and that's kind
of what started this whole chain of events for us
that it seems like when you going into the thing
that you were kind of saying earlier that more than
one thing can be true at a time. You know,

(01:05:19):
I think that there's a huge human aspect to this,
but I also think that there's a huge extraterrestrial aspect
to this. And just like with a lot of this
scryptid stuff, you know, there probably is some weird, bizarre
things out there that cannot be explained. But on the
flip side, there's probably some very easily explainable things. But
people just don't want to hear that because it's a
lot more fun to live in that world of obscurity
than to be like, yeah, you know, your Mongolian death

(01:05:41):
worm is more than likely some type of snake or something.
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:05:44):
Yeah, yeah, with the Aliens, I got to I got
to give a speech at NASA, which was amazing. It
was I was the dumbest person, which was awesome, and
I got to tell a lot of crazy stories. So
that the direct at the time, with this guy Pete Ward,
who was fascinated by the fact that in modern era

(01:06:04):
there's still tribes. There's still like uncontacted tribes in the world,
So they brought me in just to tell some stories.
About living with different tribes all over the world. So
got like my wife and I got a full back
behind the scenes tour of NASA, got to walk around,
we got these cool badges like it was just an
amazing day. And then I got to spend half an
hour with Pete. So I got to hang out with

(01:06:25):
the director of NASA and we kind of chatted for
a while and he's like, all right, we got ten
minutes left. Is there anything you want to ask me?
Anything at all? And I was like, I couldn't leave
here without He looks at me go to aliens. He
was like, I'm going to tell you something really sad.
I was like, all right, I'm ready for it. And

(01:06:46):
he's like, if I had proof of aliens, I would
never have to beg for a budget from Congress. Again,
I was like, oh, that is really sad. He's like,
I'm not saying they're not out there. I'm not saying
there's not anything. And he's like, but if I had
like indisputable evidence, He's like, I would not have the
budget and I've got right now. I'm like, all right,

(01:07:07):
fair enough, But.

Speaker 3 (01:07:08):
I think that's kind of a good point and hits
on a lot of things we've talked about in this episode,
like people want to believe kind of the fun sexy thing,
like of just really big squid is not as sexy
and fun as a lucknest monster, some undiscovered primates not
as fun as sex and sexy as some woo woo bigfoot,

(01:07:31):
And like you said.

Speaker 4 (01:07:32):
I mean the whole alien thing.

Speaker 3 (01:07:35):
It's more fun to think that there's something out there
than you know, a lot of this could just be
government experimentation or you know, something much more mundane than that.
So I think that's a really interesting point and bringing
it back around.

Speaker 4 (01:07:48):
To, you know, something we talked about at the very
top of the show.

Speaker 3 (01:07:52):
It gets back to the idea of real cryptids versus
these more kind of fantastical outline just things that get
lumped into real and I think it kind of does
a disservice to the field of cryptozoology for a lot
of people that they're oh, that's just you know, hokum
and all this blowne pie in the sky crap, when
there's like true cryptids all over the place and they're

(01:08:15):
just all lumped in together.

Speaker 4 (01:08:16):
We need a different word.

Speaker 1 (01:08:18):
Feel like squonk is like always grouped in with cryptids,
and like every bit of research that I've ever done
into that it is simply created to get people to
stop destroying the forest in Pennsylvania. That entire book, like
the snipe Like that's the even funnier part is snipes
come from the same book, and everybody grew up with, Oh,
you're gonna go out and catch some snipes, you know,
go bang the pie, go on a snipehun But everybody

(01:08:39):
knows that's a joke. But then Squank for some people
in the cribpet community is still like it's out there,
like it's from the same book. Man, Like this is
clearly like.

Speaker 2 (01:08:51):
Yeah, agreed, But oh.

Speaker 1 (01:08:54):
Man, we'll definitely have to have you come back on again, man,
because we haven't even gotten into all of your fascinating
stories from travel, even beyond the cryptid stuff like you
getting to do like the fire or the ant ceremony
and all the different other stuff. So we'll have to
have you come back on at some point and we
can talk about all of your world travels and get
back into cryptids and stuff. All right, guys, this is
our last break, so hold on tight.

Speaker 4 (01:09:25):
And now back to the show.

Speaker 1 (01:09:28):
So starting to wrap up towards the end, Pat, if
anybody wanted to come and find all of the fascinating
research you do, possibly pick up a copy of your book,
even possibly get a signed copy. Where can people find
in the Internet and where can people come and find
your research?

Speaker 2 (01:09:41):
Thank you? So I'm at patsmain dot com and on
Instagram and TikTok, so you can find me at Any
of those books are at Amazon or you can get
your local bookstore to order them. I've got six books
in the series, and yeah, and then I'll also be
speaking at cryptid Con in November, and so come on

(01:10:01):
out and check it out. I'll have a table there
and I'll be selling some books and signing things. And
if you'd like to sign copies though, just patspain dot
com and I'll be happy to send them to you.

Speaker 1 (01:10:10):
Perfect man. I really appreciate you, as usual making the
time to come on having a conversation with us, and
I'm glad that we're able to include Orn with this
one because I knew it was going to be fun
having three analytical minds altogether.

Speaker 2 (01:10:20):
Absolutely no, this was a lot of fun.

Speaker 3 (01:10:22):
Thank you so much, well, Pat, thank you so much
for joining us tonight. It's been an absolute honor and
pleasure to talk with you. I hope maybe you'll grace
us again in the future, and I can't wait to
hear some more.

Speaker 4 (01:10:32):
Of your stories.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):
Thank you very much.

Speaker 3 (01:10:35):
All right, if anyone would like to get in touch
with us or be a guest on the show, Shane
tell them how they can do that.

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
First and foremost, you guys can email us at Bizarre
Encounters at outlook dot com. Or you guys get ahold
of us through social media Instagram, Facebook and TikTok are
the ones that we are the most active on. Or
you guys can also get ahold of us through the
submission form which is available up at the top of
the link tree and goes directly to our email. And
the last way you guys can get ahold of us
is through the hotline. You guys can call or text
that twenty four to seven and that number is three

(01:11:02):
one three three six four one five five to one.
And if you happen to miss that, all that information
is available down in the show description.

Speaker 3 (01:11:10):
And you guys be sure to show some love to
our sponsors and friends of the show. We got our
buddies Rick and Hans with Iosquatch for all your Squatchy
gear needs. We got our buddy Dave aka the snarle
Yao with Snarleyow Natural Products, and we got our buddy
Joe with Cryptoteology for all your well.

Speaker 1 (01:11:27):
Grobowl equipped its favorites. I wanted to throw it on
that one too.

Speaker 4 (01:11:31):
It can still be how aween equipped.

Speaker 1 (01:11:34):
Halloween equipped it. And if anybody is trying to get
spooky this spoosky season and you guys want to take
advantage of our affiliate links, you guys can go scoop
yourself some paranormal investigating equipment from Dimension Devices, and you
guys can also get yourself some stickers, T shirts all
that fun stuff from sticker Mule, and we got some
additional discounting credits available for you guys, and more information

(01:11:54):
on that is available down in the show description. And
with that, I have been the one that some refer
to as Shane Squatch and.

Speaker 4 (01:12:03):
I have been the big bad boot Addy or in Felix.

Speaker 1 (01:12:06):
And guys, I remind you every single show, and especially
the spooky season, always guys, remember to always always stay bizarre. Bizarre.

Speaker 4 (01:12:16):
Bizarre Squirt Squids is cool, cool quipped.

Speaker 1 (01:12:20):
It's

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