Getting uNcomfortable with Jeff Meldrum part 1

Fantastic conversation with Dr Jeffery Meldrum.
This is part 1 of a nearly 3 hour conversation with arguably one of the most recognizable voices in scientific Bigfoot research. What a pleasure it was getting to listen to the wealth of knowledge this gentleman puts forth. Hopefully I've asked the questions you as listeners wanted answers to! Many thanks to Dr Meldrum for setting aside the time to have this conversation and entertaining my questions and ramblings. Part 2 will air next week and you'll be able to watch the full video episode on YouTube next week as well!


www.isu.edu/rhi

https://www.paracay.com/sasquatch-legend-meets-science/

https://www.paracay.com/sasquatch-field-guide-folding-pocket-guide/

https://www.paracay.com/sasquatch-yeti-and-other-wildmen-of-the-world-a-field-guide-to-relict-hominoids/

https://www.paracay.com/dr.-jeff-meldrums-relict-hominoid-fun-and-learning-activity-workbook-five-pack/

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome back to the show, my friends. I am your host,
Eric Solodgi. If you've had an uncomfortable experience and you'd
like to have it shared here on the show, please
get a hold of me at contact dot uncomfortable at
gmail dot com. The world wants to hear your story.
They want to hear your cryptid and UFO experiences, So
please reach out to me and let's get yours on

(00:37):
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(01:01):
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(01:21):
Take a minute and check out the Uncomfortable Link Tree.
It's the single best place that you can find anything
and everything uncomfortable, all in one spot. The link for
that is in the show notes below. I got a
great show for you tonight. Part of me doesn't want
to spoil it, and another part of me wants to
tell you everything about it. So we're gonna meet halfway.

(01:44):
Tonight's guest is an esteemed member of what I like
to consider the topic of bigfoottery. He is responsible for
the Sasquatch Field Guide, Sasquatch Meet Legend meets Science, and
he is arguably one of the most record regnizable names
in sasquatch research. A professor of anatomy and Anthropology in

(02:05):
the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University. Ladies
and Gentlemen, Tonight's guest is an expert, a true expert
on foot morphology and locomotion in primates. If you haven't
guessed Tonight's guest by that, I'd be shocked. So if
you're ready, let's get into it. So, if you will,

(02:42):
please give a warm, uncomfortable welcome to doctor Jeffrey Meldrum.
Doctor Meldrum, Welcome to uncomfortable.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
Thank you, pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
It is a pleasure to have you here, sir. I
was kind of google and ogle in there for for
a little bit before before we started. It's truly a
pleasure to have you on here. It's you are someone
who has captured my attention, my imagination for for quite

(03:16):
a quite a long time. I mean, you're no, you're
no newbie to this. How many years? How many years now?

Speaker 2 (03:23):
Oh? Gee, it's got to be uh in excess, Well
it was ninety six, so yeah, almost thirty years.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Yeah, it's impressive.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Yeah, it's impressive, especially unsuccessful, but impressive, I guess. And
that was sake.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
Well, you've had your you've had your run ins. I mean,
it hasn't been an easy fight, has it.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Well? No, And as soon as I said that, I
don't want to diminish the successes we have had, short
of the oldultimate success. But I think in the thirty
years we have have analyzed, marshaled and analyzed quite a
litany of evidence. I think the case for the footprints

(04:13):
is a remarkably compelling one. And you know, as Napier himself,
John Napier, the primatologist from the Smithsonian in his book,
which was one of the first written by a scholarly
academic primatologist, in this case primatologist and anatomist, he concluded

(04:33):
something was leaving footprints. And I think that's an inescapable conclusion. Now,
the one possible caveat is is that something an unrecognized
species of bipedal horminoid or is it something else? Is
it someone dawning crude stompers and leaving footprints to deceive

(04:58):
even the most informed and qualified observers. That's that's where
it comes down to.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Now you've you've got quite the collection of of footcasts.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
And.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
I have to imagine that I have to imagine that
it is more than just pulling them out of a
drawer and and oh yeah, that's yeah, it looks you know.
I mean, I've heard you talk about the dermal ridges.
I've heard you talk about the mid tarsal break. The

(05:40):
different structures of how the foot is configured in order
to allow something of that size to be fluid and
and traverse terrain that is is very uneven and you know,
would cause major problems for you and I to go through, at.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
Least to do it efficiently and with minimal energy expenditure. Right, absolutely,
and that is one of the most obvious benefits of
having a large collection. It's not. It's not so I
can say, well, I've got the biggest collection. We can
argue whether Cliff has the biggest collection. We have very

(06:27):
openly reciprocated back and forth as things have come to
our attention. But with that large sample, from that, patterns
begin to emerge. And what at first glance from a cursory,
you know, perusal of a few newspaper clippings or some

(06:47):
TV documentaries, might seem like quite varied, quite distinctly different
examples of footprints actually contain this remarkably con I mean
we're talking now over much much more than a half
century that these have been documented, either photographically or in

(07:07):
plaster castings. There's this remarkably consistent but yet distinct anatomy.
These are not simply enlarged facsimiles of a human foot
at all, and and they're very different than the remarkably
crude carved stompers that have been employed by the Rant

(07:29):
Mullins and the ray Wallace's and such and more of
some more recent vintage attempts at hoaxing. But they are
very very distinct, and as you point out that in
their distinctions, they are remarkably suitably adapted to the type

(07:49):
of locomotion that that we have precedent for actually in
the fossil record, and extrapolated into a very gigantic, relatively
gigantic proportions of an upright biped you know, standing somewhere
between seven and nine feet in high weighing.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
Is that commonly recognized, the nine foot threshold recognized as
as as possible.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
Oh as possible, definitely, And that's a conservative I mean,
there are people, you know, and you may have heard
stories of true giants which have actually not even to
give deference to by naming them or mentioning it. But
you'll hear stories of eleven foot twelve foot creatures. And

(08:40):
that's I mean, you know, that's like Godzilla walking through Tokyo.
If a twelve foot tall eight that would weigh you know,
two twenty five hundred pounds is stomping through the forest,
there would be a trail of damaged trees and shrubs
and two inch deep footprints pressed into the mud and

(09:04):
the pine duff and so forth. But that's not the case.
I mean, six foot seven foot up to it at
the most, I think I don't place any any credence
in footprints that are larger than about nineteen inches, which
would accord with about a nine foot individual. But those
those are few and far between. But that texture, it's

(09:28):
interesting that that size is appropriate for the texture of
the forest habitat that these creatures are in, as you mentioned,
being able to get around on this uneven broken terrain.
I mean when you think about in some of these
ancient forests, you know, the fir trees or there's six

(09:53):
eight inches in diameter through those trunks, but a dead
falls down, that's an six to eight foot obstacle have
to get over. And you know for us, and all
you have to do is read the accounts of the
early explorers of the Olympic Peninsula. They ended up eating
their horses because they were useless and they kept breaking
their legs. They couldn't navigate with horses. But the first traverse,

(10:17):
the first several traverses across the Olympic Peninsula were really
arduous undertakings because of that texture. So a bigger, much
more agile, much stronger by piedelhamanin would be able to navigate.
You know that kind of terrain remarkably more efficiently than

(10:37):
a modern human would be able to. And in fact,
I mean again that's attested to by the fact that
indigenous peoples don't inhabit those areas. They usually don't venture
back into those art forests for longest time. They tended
to hug the shorelines and the water right ways the
river systems, and left the remains or the deep dark

(11:00):
forests to the wild men of the woods where where
they lurked. But so yeah, it's very it's very interesting,
and we've tried to draw attention to that, to formalize
that through my naming of the footprints. So there is
a taxonomic convention by which typically paleontologists can name fossilized

(11:27):
tracks and traces, whether it's burrows or castings or you know,
other other signs of animal movement and occupation and habitation.
When the fossil evidence of the track maker is not
quite recognized or established, you can still attach a name

(11:50):
to this, to a type specimen of this kind of
track or trace. So this was encouraged, I was encouraged
to undertake this by practitioners of this science. And even
though some of the skeptics just had a literal meltdown

(12:10):
that it was totally in violation of all the guidelines,
all the rules that it had to be an extinct species. Well,
it was, like I said, it was people that are
in the top of this field, you know, that encouraged me.
And it was published in a peer reviewed article after
it had been presented at an international symposium on sennazoic

(12:35):
tracks and tracers. Tracey, excuse me, And so with the
encouragement of the editor of the journal himself, the publication
it was published and a name was attached. But more
important than the name, which is a bit of a
tongue twister for the lay person, it's anthropoid depez and
Marra borealis, the North American apes foot basically. But more

(13:00):
important is the diagnosis. As you pointed out, as I
tried to echo, there are distinctive characteristics that set this
foot apart from the non human apes that have a
divergent big toe of varying degrees, and so that's more
like humans in that it has the non divergent toe,

(13:23):
but in so many other aspects it's not like human.
It has a flat, flexible foot, lacking a longitude and
the large it has much greater bright breadth to length
ratio in order to increase the surface area of support,
contact and support for that disproportionately large body mass. Since

(13:43):
volume increases to the cube of linear dimensions, the surface
area of the foot is just the square of those
increasing linear dimensions, so it doesn't keep pace with the
increasing body mass. So you can't have the exact same shape.
You have to alter the shape and greater breadth, greater

(14:04):
length for body size, for leg length, which gives it
that very distinctive high stepping gait, and modifications to the
behavior how it walks. Instead of a stiff legged you know,
not a goose step like you stop we quite, but
we walk with a much extended stipper knee and vault

(14:27):
over that support limb. These creatures come down on the
flat of the foot without that distinctive heel indentation or
ball and toes. Instead, that whole foot is taking up
the weight for a brief period at the push off.
It's the front half of the foot, which is why
we tend to have deeper four foot impressions and sometimes

(14:50):
that mid tarsal pressure ridge as a result of the
mid tarsal break. This flat flexible foot adaptation is an
ancient adaptation of homds that originated from climbing adaptations with
a divergent grasping big toe. So you have a grasping
part of the foot and then you have the leverage

(15:12):
part of the foot, and the access of flexion between
those two parts is the mid tarsal joint, hence the
mid tarsal break or flexi that occurs during the step.
So I mean, the fact that we could sit here
and have this conversation, I mean, this is what's funny.
You know, it waxes a little bit technical and for

(15:34):
some people just you know, it's it's maybe a little
of twuce. But just focus for a moment on the
point that the fact that we can have this conversation
and intelligently talk about the remarkably consistent signal of these
specific adaptations that are appropriate to the type of creature

(15:58):
and it's sort of phylogenetic position and it's exhibited mode
of locomotion. I mean, that's amazing, isn't it. You know,
we couldn't have such a such a conversation. It would
be very different if we're just talking about Rant Mullins
or Ray Wallace I mean, we're talking about Easter egg
toes lined up on a straightedge, exaggerated indentations that that

(16:23):
are trying to mimic some of the flextion increases that
are found in those feat with with longer digits and
and so on. But we'd have a very different conversation.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
And that that brings me to something that I wanted
to bring up with you because it is quite embarrassing
for me, and I'm sure at the moment that it
was happening, you probably were thinking, what the hell is
going on here? Is this guy trying to rip me off?

(16:57):
Or what I want to say? Three four years ago,
the Ohio Bigfoot Conference in at Saltfork. It was a
crazy It was a crazy time because I was I
was fairly new with with the show. It was my

(17:19):
first large Bigfoot conference. My son was with me, he
was manning my my uncomfortable table, and uh, there were
there were a lot of things going on. One the
woman who I am and madly in love with and
who just this last weekend moved in with me here

(17:41):
in South Bend, Indiana. She was the head of banquets
at Saltfork and she probably helped you with your accommodations
and and everybody else. So we we struck up a
relationship and it's been a couple of years and now

(18:01):
we're together. But at that first at that first meeting,
I asked my son, I said, hey, if you don't
mind watch the table for a while, I want to
go down and talk to Meldrum and see if I
can get a cast or two. And he's like, yeah, yeah,
go ahead. So I walked down I think maybe one,

(18:21):
maybe two flights of stairs. I was fortunate because there
was not maybe three people in front of me. You're
sitting there, You're very gracious, you were talking and taking
time with everybody that was there. And then I specifically
said I was looking for one of the casts from
Grays Harbor, or one of the originals from Patty, which

(18:46):
Patty is right there above my shoulder. This was the
other one that I got.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
Yep, that's Harbor.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
And I stood lying there and I think there was
a combination of nerves and excitement and kind of like
a final self realization of like, holy crap, I'm actually
here and I'm doing what I've thought about doing for

(19:20):
so many years. The conversation continued. I picked up one
of the field Guides and ended up buying two of
the uh two of the well I say, I bought them,
but technically I tried to sneak off with them because
we continued. I was holding them. You signed the back

(19:44):
of it for me of the Gray Harbor, Gray's Harbor one,
and and then I just excused myself and I started
walking away, and you very nicely. It reminded me that
I had not paid yet, and I was absolutely mortified.
I was like, you should, Yeah, I might as well
just pack my stuff and go now, because oh terrible.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
Oh it, it happens not that uncommonly, actually, uh for
for the very reasons you describe. People just get caught
up in the moment, and there's so much hustle and bustle,
and we're usually passing things back and forth, signing this
sign and that the way it gets all all bundled
up together, you know, you off you go, And so.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
I just mortified.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
They're not the only one that's done that.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
Absolutely mortified. Yeah. But the reason I uh, another reason
that I that I bring this up is not maybe
a year ago. My son who was with me, he says, hey,
I want one of those casts and I assay, yeah,

(20:54):
all right, I'll get you one. And then I had
a I had a brainstorm because when I look at
this cast, it is it is difficult for me. It's
difficult for me when I look at like just how

(21:18):
almost perfect those toes, you know, and everything about it,
and it's kind of a kind of makes me feel weird.
It's kind of like, you know, yeah, I truly do
think there is something out there, But would it looked
that perfect? You know, what are the chances that you

(21:40):
got to find the right substrate and you know, the
right mud to sand, to water ratio to leave that print.
So what I decided to do was I went and
I purchased about forty dollars for these two bottles of silicone,

(22:02):
and I took it and I made a crude mold
around this cast, and then I poured that silicone on it.
When I took the silicone off, pulled the print out,
and I flipped that silicone over and I looked at it.

(22:24):
Now I was seeing what the actual print in the
ground looked like, and it was completely different.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yeah, I can can be that way.

Speaker 1 (22:37):
It was. It became so much more realistic. It became
very believable seeing it in that state, even though it
was a got awful royal blue silicone, it became very

(23:00):
the distinct difference between looking at a cast and looking
at what that actual print in the ground would have
looked like, even though it's only about an inch around it,
you know, just seeing it in its natural state was
phenomenal for me. And I can't decide. I can't decide

(23:24):
which I like better now.

Speaker 2 (23:25):
Right, Well, And there's there's a couple of reasons for that.
One is different people's brains are, at least the perceptive
part of their brain is wired a little different, and
they some some people find it very difficult to visualize

(23:46):
or imagine back and forth between positive and negative. They
have a real time dealing with the fact that you
pulled something out of the ground and turned it over,
and now there's this positive image and the fact in
their minds they're they're sometimes even looking at a photograph
of an imprint, they see it as a three dimensional
object that protrudes out.

Speaker 1 (24:07):
I've had that happen. Yeah, it's not all the time,
but if if it's taken in the right.

Speaker 2 (24:12):
Everyone is the effect of that optical illusion a bit
now and then the other point I think that is
important to recognize is that a foot print is not
a mold of a foot, even even this particular one,
which is almost given the clarity, But it is a

(24:34):
record of the continuous disturbance of the soil by the
foot through the entire course of the step. So you're
capturing a record of a dynamic process, not just the
shape of an object. And that can be distorted by by, uh,

(24:56):
you know, the way in which the foot spreads, the
way in which underweight, the way in which there's something
might be a comet tale, there might be a pressure ridge,
there might be dragons or slidings rather or drag outs
of the toes when lifting off. All those things can
influence the way your positive looks. And so sometimes when

(25:23):
you have you know, when it's in the ground, it's
one thing you're kind of thinking, well, yeah, that's a footprint,
not a foot, But when you see the positive, your
brain wants to think, well, that's the foot that's responsible
for making that track, right, not it's not quite now
in that instance of the Hareford. This is why I

(25:43):
give out usually now at least consistently, I give out
these little one page annotations and try to give some
bacron and I include a photo of the actual footprint
of that that Hereford cast, And when you see the conditions,
you realize why it seems like lightning has struck, because

(26:05):
it really was. It was this hard packed landing, logging
landing at a logging site with a thick layer, you know,
an inch and a half of dust pulverized flower that
had been wet down by the rain. And so when
the foot stepped and again there's this more direct downward

(26:28):
step rather than a distinctive heel strike and a toe off,
and the opportunity for sliding. You know, the push off
comes from the entire forefoot. The toes provide traction, but
they're not really propulsive, so there's less distortion. But in
this case it pressed right down through to the hardpan.
So you can see if you look closely on your cast,
like an under the heel where the greatest weight is concentrated,

(26:50):
even under a flat foot and the toe tips they
are very, very flat. They look almost artificially flat. A's
because they've hit that unyielding hard pan underneath the moist
and dust. But then that wet mud just extruded up
around and between around the foot and between the toes
and all the toepads encircled as you and you can

(27:14):
see the Deputy Sheriff, Dennis Hereford, was so impressed with
what he was seeing that he I think he quadroned
it off and then zipped back down to the station
and came back some time later with the casting kit.
And by then the sun had come out. The sun
was beaten on those tracks apparently, and they started to dry.

(27:36):
And those little little ridges you see are the infilled
cracks of the dried mud that has desiccated and shrunk
just a little bit and created those cracks. Some people
get confused and think it's some kind of vane or
it's some feature of the foot. No, it's an artifact
of the drying of the mud which was then captured

(27:56):
by the casting process. But that's why that is such
a pot I mean, not only the credibility that it
was documented by an on duty deputy share, but but
the fact that it's just so remarkably clear. It's rare
that you get a situation that produces such a such

(28:17):
a dramatically vivid example of the foot interacting with the substrate.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
So using this one as a as an example, Yeah,
are there significant distortions in what I'm looking at?

Speaker 2 (28:37):
No?

Speaker 1 (28:38):
Or or is it this is like lightning struck and
you got the best you're probably gonna ever get.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
Just about yeah. Yeah. So so that's about as close
as the process that you undertook. You see, if you
were to do your your exercise with that silicon with
someone's foot sitting up on top of the table, you know,
like down, and then you put a little wall around it,
you pour that silicon rubber around it, and then peel

(29:07):
that off. That's a mold of the foot, not a
cast of a footprint. This process of stepping in that
mud with a fairly flat step. And that's further attested
to by the fact that where there are snapshots that
show multiple footprints, the creature was not striding with earnest

(29:33):
motivation to get from point A to point B. It
was seemingly investigating, and so it was stepping with small steps,
so not a big step ling, which would further exaggerate
the simple placement of the foot, rather than stepping out
with more propulsive force during the push off from the forefoot,

(29:54):
which would have produced maybe an extrusion feature of the mud,
creating a more of a pressure ridge. But in this
case it's just you know, was just stepping carefully, cautiously
and impressed that into that mud that just came up
extruded around to make a ridge all the way around,
perfect dam for holding the plaster and preserving the outline

(30:18):
of the foot. So it's a pretty darn good outline.
There's not really much distortion. The only distortion I would
suggest is what I've mentioned is the sasquatch, by as
evidence by examples where they have, say, stepped on a stone,
have a rather substantial soul pad. I mean, we all

(30:39):
do to varying degrees, and the great apes do as well,
but this, given their size, could be even more because
the volume of that adipose tissue anchored with connective tissue
septa and columns, that that's the shock absorber. It's like
an elephant. You know, I was telling some of the

(31:00):
other day. Did you realize that elephants are digital grade.
They walk up on the tips of their toes because
that space back behind is filled with this gigantic melon
of fat. Their fat pad is enormous, and so their
toes are just touching. But the yield is sitting on
or resting down on a pad that's three four five

(31:23):
inches deep, and so and so. Yeah, so when when
this Hereford track, when that foot hit the hard pad,
there's probably a little bit of lateral displacement. Oh and
we see this. This is an interesting, interesting line of conversation.
One of the other dramatic features that's so compelling too

(31:44):
about the Hereford case is that there are two half
tracks associated with the casts that were documented. Now by
a half track. What I'm talking about is, you know
you've got in your mind because of the mess that
you've made a pretty good visualization of the mid tarsal
break which occurs right there in the midfoot, separating the

(32:08):
heel segment from the forefoot. And I'm doing this metaphorically.
My fingers are not equivalent to the forefoot's back. If
I had a model, I should have grabbed a skeleton
model and I could illustrate it better. But when they run,
unlike us, where our foot can be poised up on

(32:31):
the ball of the foot supported by a longitudinal larch,
in the absence of that arch, their foot isn't up
on the ball. It collapses into flexion and it's the
entire forefoot that leaves an imprint when they run. Well,
there was a stretch of the trackway there where it

(32:54):
apparently was startled by probably somebody coming to the site
and bolted back to towards the tree line with nearly
twice the step length. And so the distance between tracks
and those tracks were half tracks, it was up on
the front half of the foot. Now I bring this

(33:14):
up because I mean, that's interesting because the half track
terminates right where we would predict the presence of the
transverse tarsal joint. So it fits the morphology, fits the
model of the morphology perfectly. But the other subtlety that's
so fascinating is if it was running with some increased
impact on a more limited area of the of the soul,

(33:36):
namely the forefoot, the fat pad under the forefoot, that
increased compressive force causes greater lateral displacement of the.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah, so the front foot is wider exactly.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
And so when you take that cast, that resulting cast,
and one of the features that's kind of distinctive about
the hair for track, when you see the on the
lateral see there's kind of two distinctive bulges. I think
arthritis of the head and the base of the fifth metatarsal.
We see examples of this in other other tracks, totally unrelated.

(34:13):
There's a good one down in the blues of southeastern Washington,
for example, that shows that similar kind of pathology, and
it's very consistent with human you know, clinical cases of
of you know, osteoarthritis. So, but what's interesting that distinctive
appearance of the double double not ball, but double bulges

(34:33):
there in the half tracks. That's obliterated by the expanding
soul pad underneath the foot because it extends out to
the point that it mutes that that very distinctive pair
of bulges. I mean it, but it makes perfect sense
again the subtleties of anatomy that pop up when people

(34:57):
just say, oh, those are just made by someone with
fake feet. Oh, that's just a man in a first suit.
You know. Well, that's easy to say until you're held
to account for how you create a first suit that
mimics muscle movements. That that shows, you know, details of
morphology that are remarkably again consistent with evidence from early

(35:21):
bipedal hominance from the fossil records, based on their skeletal
morphology and crania, dental proportions and so forth. It's it's
anything but just as soon as someone uses that word
absolutely ignorant of the subject, Yeah, because they.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
And I want to I want to get to to Patty.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
But kind of back to the foot thing. So my
son is, as I said, game with me to the
debacle where I try to steal from you. Uh. He's
he's six four and a half, played football in high school.
Big dude. But when you see him, if he takes

(36:09):
his shoes off in the summer and walks across the
wet grass and then hits the cement, he has such
a high arch that you can see his toes, you
can see the ball of his foot, and there's a
very thin line along the outside edge before you get
to the heel, and nothing else touches. We've spent a

(36:33):
fortune with trying to get him the right things to
put under his arches orthotic and then I've you know,
my foot looks more normal. And then I've seen people

(36:55):
who like almost the entire flat of their foot is
is shown when in the same way. So I'm going
to assume that that it would be referencing being flat footed, right, Yep,
with bigfoot, it seems that they would be more in

(37:21):
line with being flat footed.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Right, flat flexible feet, and a human foot, even if
it is flat, may not be hyper mobile. Sometimes, you know,
the expression of the arch is somewhat variable, and this
is in part I've argued because it's such a recent
innovation in evolutionary history, it is a characteristic in its

(37:46):
full expression of Homo sapiens. But given that recency just
a few hundred thousand years, there's quite a variation, so
much so that you know, the figures vary depending on
the extent of the surveys. But at least twenty percent
of modern humans have asymptomatic flat flexible feet. They don't

(38:11):
have arches. And some people, then with the wide spread
the commonness of obesity, have a tendency to not only
be flat, but to be very pronated where they roll
inward and then that outline instead of there being a

(38:31):
sort of an hour glass shape like your sun's narrow
little bit, some people have hyper arches where there's no
part of the midfoot that touches the cement. And you know,
and that's not good either. That high arch configuration makes
individuals prone to stretch fractures as much as hypermobile flat feet,

(38:53):
and they're they're kind of rejected from the infantry as
much as people with flat feet. They don't. But the
point is the instead of that hour glass shape of
pronated foot will have a convexity on the middle, on
the excuse me, the inner side of the foot because

(39:14):
they're rolled so far in. Of course, that's hard on
the ankles, it's hard on the knees, translate all the
way up to the hips and even the lower spine.
So so yeah, it's a very recent innovation. And this
is part of the problem I've had, you know, kind
of knocked down, drag out arguments with a couple of

(39:35):
pediatrists in the past who only see the foot well
that's all they've ever looked at are human feed They
only see it through a human morphology, human adaptation lens
and anything that is different because sasquatch is not, like
I said, it's not just simply an enlarged facsimile of

(39:56):
a human foot. It shows retentions of primitive characteristics. They
see those retentions of primitive characteristics and try to equate
them with pathologies with injuries to the foot, and uh,
you know, like fallen arches or like a Lisprunc fracture
where where the mid tarsus is is you know, the

(40:20):
joints are deranged and collapsed and and and it does.
It is a debilitating injury, that is that handicaps the victim.
And they so they argue, well, how could the sasquatch
then survive in the woods with these handicaps? And I
go handicap you ever? I mean, the things that we're

(40:41):
describing are the normal anatomy of a chimpanzee foot. Is
a chimpanzee? Is it handicap? Is it not able to
get around in the forest? It's and and boy, back
and forth and back and forth. They could not see
beyond and that this this is applied also to some
of the famous man trackers. See and there's a reason

(41:03):
that they have that label. They are man trackers. They
are not bigfoot trackers. They are not chimpanzee trackers. You know,
they might be able to apply some of their skills
they're tracking expertise to tracking anything, but as far as
interpreting the anatomy, recognizing the morphology of the foot, that's

(41:26):
something that they don't have the acumen. They don't have
the training. So Joel Harden, for example of Washington State
Border Patrol agent who was called in by the Forest
Service down in the Wall area to look at the
tracks that Paul Freeman had discovered and others, and he

(41:46):
criticized them as being a hoax. And he gave his criteria.
At least, he didn't just pronounce a verdict and let
it hang. He provided a set of criteria upon which
he based that determination. Each and every point of distinction
he drew attention to was a deviation from the human condition.

(42:09):
But those deviations aligned perfectly with the model of the
sasquatch foot, which is a coherent, functional, rational model for
a large bipedal, primitive hominin or hominoid species. And so again,
I you know, wrote a clarification and showed how each

(42:31):
one of his criticisms could be easily accounted for. And
in fact, the fact that someone with his credential drew
attention to each of those distinctions gave greater credibility.

Speaker 1 (42:44):
To the credibility that it.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
Wasn't just some guy with fake feet or whatever. You know. Anyway,
I mean, the only one that didn't didn't fall into
that dichotomy was. He asserted that the track started and
stopped abruptly. Well, I my re butt to that was simply,
how can that be? I mean, you're the professional man tracker.

(43:07):
If if, if the scenario is someone downing fake feet
and they start and stop, why can't you track the
track maker, the human track maker, the hoaxer? Uh, before
and after his hoaxing shenanigans. I mean, he didn't just
vanish into thin air. You're be able to track a

(43:30):
mouse running across a cement driveway. It's bet you're telling
me that the hoaxer was able to, Yeah, to just
beam into into the spot and with his footprints or
his feet already strapped on, trot off the little trackway
and then snap his fingers and he disappears into the

(43:50):
ether in the thin air. You know, it just doesn't
make any sense, and so uh it. I mean what
makes more sense to me is is the acts along
a certain stretch, because of the wet conditions on the
shoulder of the road, were very distinct, but then very
quickly entered into areas where it's difficult to track. And

(44:11):
he was so convinced that these were fake he was
looking for signs of further bakery and in his mind
and didn't even recognize that the sign that was there.
But anyway, that's it's an interesting story and one I
have been meaning to because he published a book and

(44:32):
has a whole chapter devoted to his experiences there in
the Blues and bashing Bigfoot basically, and I've been meaning
for some time to write an article and just deconstruct
his whole his whole thing, because it's very unfortunate people. Again,

(44:54):
you know, he speaks from a position of authority, and
a weak argument is to appeal to authority, and so
people who don't have the wherewithal to evaluate the fallacies
of his arguments just simply accept it, except well, he
must know you know, well, no, it's not the case. Now,
I've worked with other Man tractors who who who are

(45:18):
really good and see right past the fallacy of that interpretation.
And and you know, I'll have to when I write,
when I write an article, I'll have to get some commentary,
some appendix commentary from some of these other other Man
tractors who have been more open minded to the possibility

(45:38):
of sasquatch based on their examine.

Speaker 1 (45:42):
That's a that's a great kind of a segue. Wasn't
necessarily intending to go there. But you know, like so
many times, you know, your your scientific experience, your academic experience,
versus my side of talking to people who have seen, believe,

(46:08):
they have seen, believe, they've heard, you know, their experiences right.
So many times you'll hear of, you know, the tracks
just stopped, Yeah, they stopped.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
And you know, I.

Speaker 1 (46:27):
Started to tell you that, you know, I've had some
experiences in my life that would go down a paranormal road.
I don't know. I guess I have to say the
longer I'm in this, I do have to give a
little bit of a nod to the possibility that there

(46:51):
is something odd going on. Sure, but when these when
these tracks just up, I don't I don't think they're
going through a portal. I don't. I don't think they're
you know, traversing to their dimension. But where do they go?

(47:15):
And I mean, is it is it something that you
have studied enough that you can you can say unequivocably,
you know, we understand that this happens, but it's because
it went to a different type of substrate or right,
you know, I've wondered, you know, do these things go arboreal.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
That's another possibility. Yes, So in answer to your first question, no,
I haven't looked at it that carefully because I didn't
think that quite honestly, that it warranted that attention when
in comparison to other things that were were begging my attention. So,
but so I've only heard the anecdotes, and that's problematic

(47:58):
because I can't rely on other I mean, if I
can't rely on Joel Harden's interpretation of a trackway, why
would I put credibility in Joe Schmoe's you know, ability
to read a sign and so you know, and I've
talked again to other trackers about this notion, and they

(48:19):
just kind of roll the rise and say, well, I
mean it happens all the time. I mean, that's why
trackers have those those sticks, those poles. It might be
an antenna, it might be a rod that they have demarketed.
But when it appears that the footprints have disappeared and
they have established kind of the pattern of the step length,

(48:40):
you take, like if it's if it's an aerial, you
collapse it down to that step length and you put
it at the tip of the last footprint and you
strike an arc essentially, I mean, you don't score it
in the ground, but you strike an arc because the
next footprint should be somewhere, and then they look for

(49:00):
it some sign and it might be nothing more than
a bent piece of grass or a broken freshly broken twig,
or a pebble that's been displaced and exposed the cavity,
you know, and that's the next footprint, and then you
take go from that one and you measure out, and
that way they work through the spots where it appears

(49:20):
that the tracks have disappeared. So that principle is well established.
But first I want to say, I haven't had so
many experiences and gained all this gray hair without having
learned that you never say never. I mean, there are things.
There are things in this world a ratio yo, the
quote that we just can't imagine. And so I'm open,

(49:45):
I'm always open, but I hold anyone with such an
anecdote or such a proposal proposed explanation, they have to
be held to the same standard of evidence. Otherwise we're
talking a totally different well. And many aspects of the
paranormal realm apparently don't lend themselves to our empirical, experiential

(50:10):
observation and analysis. So I want to make it clear
that I'm not so so, you know, stubborn in my attitudes,
are so set in my attitudes or my my conclusions
that I don't acknowledge the possibility. Now, I hope that
doesn't open a Pandora's box, because my experience has been

(50:33):
when people and my well, let me back up one step.
My experience has been because I, you know, I'm always
keeping my eyes open for tracks, whether it's just deer
tracks or the neighborhood dog. But you know, back when
I used to go on long walks much more. I mean,
this was part of the reason I would spend so
much time in the field, so that I in parts

(50:56):
not only to find the evidence of so forth, but
also so that no one can justifiably claim that I'm
just this armchair never put boots on the ground. I
mean I put boots on the ground, probably more than
most of your investigators out there until of late, you know,
spending a month at a time in the back country
in roadless areas. Not many people can lay claim to

(51:19):
that kind of Because I had the luxury of three
months summer with no content to teach and just to
be able to conduct my research and so forth. So
there's that. The other thing. Another thing to add is
many of these so called claims of tracks starting and
stopping are in snow. And in snow when you have

(51:43):
tracks going under a tree, or you have tracks on
open exposed areas where the wind blows, you can erase
the trackway without a trace left, and it looks like
for all intents and purposes like and in fact, in
many cases the tracks are not bigfoot at all, but
they're a bounding creature like a deer. Or even I

(52:05):
posted not too long ago on Facebook just to illustrate,
I think it was a weasel. Just when it was done,
it looked like a little series of single footprints in
in the the over a tribute to tight rope walk.
The tightrope walk, the single file march is is grossly

(52:29):
over exaggerated and is not a litmus test of of
sasquatch trackway, and it has led to much confusion. Anytime
you see someone post a picture of a of a
remarkable straight line of impression in the snow, but they

(52:51):
don't bother to come up and take a picture directly
over one of those holes where you would very likely
see the individual hoof prints or paw prints of the
bounding animal. That's a big red flag not always a giveaway.
People are, you know, in they are not necessarily thorough

(53:11):
in their collection and presentation of evidence. I mean, to them,
it's more informative to see the panoramic shot than to
see the close up. But the close up, you know,
the proof is in the close up. You've got to
look down into that punch hole and see if there's
any any detail. A lot of times there's not. The
snow falls in or more snow drops on top, and

(53:35):
then it mutes the details and it looks like a
singular impression but all important.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
So that straight line, that's that's pretty much a miss snomer.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
Then it is, because, I mean, all all humans have
quite a variance in the step width or step straddle
it sometimes is called with It can be measure different ways,
as long as you're consistent and and explicit in reporting
how you measure it. Usually it goes from center of

(54:08):
heel to the center of heel perpendicular to the line
of travel. I keep waving my hands in front of
my face and I'm trying to you know, and so
humans very tremendously. You know, you've got the cat the
cat to walk model walk where the feet cross over
completely to the almost to the other side, and then

(54:30):
and then the straight line with very little you have people.
The tow angle too, is quite varied from person to person.
There's a lot of variants. Well, when you look at
just one person and you walk, increase the walking speed,
the faster you walk, the narrower the straddle kits because

(54:53):
we were reaching out further and so to increase well, yeah, yeah,
the hips turning exactly. That's a good point. Hips are turning,
which influences the placement the foot, but also you're getting
the center of mass more directly over that line of progression,
over this and over the support. And then if you

(55:15):
start running, then you have a very straight line. If
you're carrying a heavy load, I mean to a point
to become so heavy that you're staggering, then you do
spread your But if you're backpacking, you'll tend to walk
with your feet placed more directly under the load, and

(55:36):
so you have a straighter line. But you show me
one historical picture a contemporary picture. Trackways, first of all,
are very rare it is very a few examples. One
that is often sided is the picture just inside John
Green's on the track of the Sasquatch where tracks along
the Blue Creek Mountain road. Well, they're walking on a curve,

(56:00):
and so the change of direction. I mean, if you
if you've got your one foot here, but you're you're
trending this way, your placement of the next foot is
going to be towards the curve. And that's exactly what's
happening there. So that's often cited as a tight example
of tight rope walking. It's not. It's walking a curve.

(56:23):
And so anyway, I just I just always am uncomfortable
when people make assertative generalizations that it's this is the
way it is, and if you see it this way,
it's true, and if you don't see it, it's false.
The tracks that I examined in ninety six, they were
it was walking slowly and cautiously, kind of like the

(56:44):
tracks at the Hereford, only they had a bigger step.
It wasn't slowing down probably to look around. It was
just looking over its shoulder, I think at an oncoming
car coming down the mountain in the wee hours of
the morning. But it's it's straddle and I didn't, unfortunately
take measurements. I was so you know, like you. I

(57:05):
was like you. I didn't say I had a video camera,
one of the old fashioned on your shoulder VHS scamra
orders behind the bench seat of the pickup truck, and
I totally forgot about it. I snapped the pictures, but
I could have videotaped the whole thing, from step to step,

(57:25):
the whole panorama and everything, and I just totally spaced it.
But anyway, the point being, those footprints were walking kind
of cautiously until they took off running and then then
a series of half tracks. But there was a considerable
straddle there as well, just as with the tracks from
the Hereford side. So I don't think that that is

(57:48):
a litmus test that we certainly didn't raise that point
in the description of the tracks and trackways that are
on record in our description are naming of the UH
signing an CHNO taxon to the prints.

Speaker 1 (58:04):
You brought up the half tracks again, and and it
it reminded me I wanted to ask you when the
half tracks I assume cast of those were made as well. Yes, yep,
once it was under a more heavy locomotion was the

(58:31):
was the depth of those tracks considerably deeper than you
know because of the weight displacement and and the inertia
moving forward quickly? Did they did? They seem to be
set into the ground a bit deeper.

Speaker 2 (58:52):
They were set quite deeply, But it was hard to
make sort of a real quantitative comparison because as the
slower moving tracks were largely on the little farm access
road which had had lots of ATV traffic, so it
was kind of compacted. And then the where it really

(59:15):
struck out running uh, the the foot and there were
some full length footprints as well, but where the heel
did make contact although the depth of and that was
quite interesting. The depth of the heel is just a
fraction of the depth of the forefoot. But they were
down across a fallow field with tilled soil and stubble

(59:39):
just left behind. And so the even my tracks you know,
were twice as deep in the soft soil of the field.
So it's hard. And then again with the Hereford example,
since we used that example and I mentioned those half tracks,
they were hitting the hard pan undern eat, so regardless

(01:00:01):
of increased compressive force or not, it could only penetrate
to the depth of that layer of soft mud on
top before it hit the hard band, and then it
flattened out. As I was saying, one interesting thing about
the halftrack, you know, because some have questioned, well, you know,
is that is that a justified interpretation or did someone

(01:00:23):
pour in the plaster just run out because it kind
of tapers and is quite attenuated. There's actually a jagged
piece of plaster that has broken out. Well, Cliff Barrickman
has become since his with his notoriety from his his
tenure on the cast of Shinding Bigfoot, he's become kind

(01:00:48):
of displaced me in fact, as the lightning rod for
footprint casts being brought to his attention. And one that
was really quite stunning was someone it appeared at one
of their town hall meetings on the show, and someone
came up and said, we've got a cast from this

(01:01:09):
Hereford incident. And apparently some people had gotten word. I
don't know if Hereford talked to people when he went
back to town to get his casting kid or whatever,
but some people started getting word and were coming up.
They had to tape it off, tape off the area
while he was working. But he had, as he saw

(01:01:30):
often the case when you mix up plaster, there was
a little bit left over, and he saw this one
couple that were obviously very intrigued by the whole thing
and the incident in the process, and he apparently motioned,
more so, here's some extra plaster. You want to make
a cast of your own. And so they did, and
they made one of the half tracks, and it was

(01:01:51):
actually the mate, the matching foot to the other half track,
I mean, not necessarily in sequence. But what it showed
in why I was impressed with it. It confirmed that, yes,
this is a halftrack. It had the same dimensions at
the same point of termination. You held them up side
by side, and they just looked like mirror images of

(01:02:12):
one another pretty much. I mean, there was some obvious
differences in the conditions and circumstances, et cetera, but it, yeah,
this was a legitimate documentation of a halftrack. Now, if
you look at the very distinctive footprint that was cast
by Bob Tipmas for example, just like I mentioned, the

(01:02:35):
full length track in the soft substrate where it was
clearly running left that differential impression under the heel versus
the much deeper forefoot. If you look at that mid
tarsal pressure ridge and Tipmos's cast from the patty side,
from the film side, the deepest parts are under the forefoot,

(01:02:58):
just in front of the pressure ridge where that soil
was displaced and humped will not displaced so much as
humped up a vertical displacement, But the deepest part parts
are under the forefoot because during that just that walk,
not a run, but a walk. When that heel comes up,

(01:03:20):
now all the body weight goes through half of the
surface area, and so the compressive forces are greater. And
then with the push off comes a little bit of
an impulse as well, with an increased ground reaction force,
but greater compressive forces that accentuate that greater weight bearance,

(01:03:44):
and you get that very distinctive look to the footprints.
So and multiple these aren't These aren't just spurious interpretations
of anomalous examples. These are based on the interpretations are
based on repeated appearance of these features over and over

(01:04:05):
and over again, spanning as I said, over fifty years,
all sixty years of time, and over all the places
where the Sasquatch footprints, and not only in North America,
but This is where it really gets interesting. Is I
had the chance, as as I've described repeatedly, the chance
to go to China. And the short of it is,

(01:04:27):
without giving all the background and answer any questions you have,
but a pair of right and left casts were made
of a yarn by a park ranger who had seen
it sunning itself out on the rock faith on the boulders,
and when he started it, it took off anyway. He
tracked it, and he also went back to get materials

(01:04:52):
to get plaster so he could make casts where it
had apparently squatted beside it of spring, had therefore elevated
its heels, rocked forward as you would expect, flexing across
the transverse stars to join, and this differential impression. When
he brought those casts out, they were dead ringers for

(01:05:14):
that extremely distinctive tipmos cast. But isn't the loan Again,
it's not alone, but it's just a particularly clear because
the conditions there were quite good. The cast that Roger
Patterson made, they're almost molds of the right and left
foot because he looked for the cleanest, clearest, flattest, you know,

(01:05:37):
least distorted example of a right and the left that
he could find in order to document the appearance of
the footprints. But there were others, you know, when Tipmus
came down, he cast ten in a row, regardless of
the quality and right, I remember variation in the in
the expression, and obviously some damage some weather due to

(01:06:00):
the rainstorms in the intervening period. But they eight of
the ten show indication of a mid tarsal pressure ridge.
But here we have the yerin with essentially identical foot
size and proportions and exhibiting the exact details of a

(01:06:23):
mid tarsal pressure ridge, the placement, the orientation, which is
important because the two joints involved they're slightly offset, so
the pressure ridge is slightly inclined upward and outward towards
the upper outer edge of the foot. And it reflected
all of that perfectly. Now, how did he know? How

(01:06:45):
could he have known? He couldn't speak English, He had
no idea that there was a sasquatch in North America.
He was asking questions about how much we knew about
the air and was there anything like the airin in
the United States, And so he had no way and
his cast I hadn't even when his cast was made,

(01:07:06):
I hadn't even published my interpretation of what that pressure
ridge was. And so if you were going to imitate
a classic, you know, typical bigfoot track, why would you
pick the one that everyone thinks is distort or broken
or mouthed forward to imitate? And yet turns out that's
one of the most distinctive, most dynamic, most revealing examples

(01:07:31):
that you could put your finger on. Well, and here
one more, let me just tackle on one more, because sure,
you know, because this was the criticism early on when
I interpreted it, so was, well, if this is real,
if what you're describing is is actually how the foot works,
then why do you have just this one cast? And

(01:07:54):
I wasn't. The first thing I did was to take
the three D scans of the of the and titmas
cast and rotate them. And when you do that, you
see this pressure ridge in almost all of them, in
exactly the right position. And so forth. Well, then I
had a chance to visit not Jerry Krw but his son,
John Crewe, who is the custodian of the crew excuse me,

(01:08:19):
crew footprint nineteen fifty eight. And when it was photographed,
you know, with his crew cut and his little spectacles
and and you know with that cast there they the
reporter used a flash of the period, you know, probably
one of those blue flashbulbs and flash big, big burst

(01:08:42):
of hard light that makes a stark shadow behind. Well,
it also has a tendency to flatten out. Because of
that illumination, things look flatter. I mean, Jerry looks like
a cardboard cutout, and that looks like a flat piece
of you know, cardboard itself. Well, I had a chance
then to actually take the original out of the shadow box,

(01:09:05):
set it on the counter and examine it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
Guess what.

Speaker 2 (01:09:09):
It has a pressure ridge, Absolutely a stinct unmistakable pressure ridge.
Looks just like a bigger version of the Tipmos cast.
But it was it wasn't appreciate it, just like you
don't appreciate it when you look at the other tipmus
casks cast until you rotate it and then all of
a sudden, that ridge indentation, the negative space shows up,

(01:09:35):
you know, I mean, so it's there for the first
documented cast of a bigfoot track in North America. Epitomizes
the distinctive morphology of the flat flexible foot, which has
it representation.

Speaker 1 (01:09:52):
How important is modern technology with you know, like if
you happen to watch Expedition Bigfoot, you know they've they've
got these scanners now and you know they can scan
uh impression in the ground and then they pull the
pull the cast out and the three D model all

(01:10:12):
that stuff is As far as your experience with the
the casts that you have curated over all these years,
is is there a I would have to think there's
some importance to the newer technology.

Speaker 2 (01:10:32):
Yeah, oh there is. There most certainly is. And this
has been it's always a bit of a little bit
of a quandary. I mean, I'm I'm a functional morphologist,
and you know, there are these techniques that have have
urgeoned as my career has been kind of waning, quite honestly.
But these what are called geometric morphometrics. In the old days,

(01:10:55):
we just called it multivariate statistics, you know, where you
look at associations or affinities based on the pattern of many,
many metrical dimensions and so forth. Whereas now with face
recognition protocols and so forth, you can determine lots and

(01:11:19):
lots of landmarks and can be crunched. And that's something
that you know, somebody, I hope someone will come up
in the ranks behind me and tackle that kind of
thing with AI. Now, especially the thing that has always
been caused me to be reluctant to jump into to
expend too much energy in that area, was that we're

(01:11:42):
dealing with a cast of a foot print. Remember our
discussion about between a print versus a mold of a
foot you know, and these these techniques have been long
used to compare say a femur, a static object that's

(01:12:02):
not subject to deformation or distortion during you I mean, well,
I mean nothing appreciable. Basically, you're Pullington skeletons or fossilized
bones out of museum drawers, and you're taking discrete metrics
that then you're doing the statistical analysis on. But when
you have a footprint that's subject to compression and expansion,

(01:12:26):
to distortions by slide in by, you know, the three
dimensional surface is distorted based on compressive forces and points
of plunder pressure and toe position varies with inflection, extension
explain abduction, adduction, et cetera, et cetera. So how do
you compare I mean, just comparing footprints between of one

(01:12:51):
individual between steps would be quite challenging. I had tried
something where we look just at the soul path, but
see even that subject to distortion. But at least you
don't have to deal with the idiosyncrasies of highly mobile toes.
So I'm hoping somebody, you know, can can try to

(01:13:12):
maybe do that. You sure certainly could do dramatic contrasts
between human and non human I mean, we did things
like that when comparing fossilized footprints, like the lay of
totally hormon in footprints, comparing it to human tracings. And
because they're not just little humans walking around on arched feet,

(01:13:35):
they have very different proportions. They have a flat, flexible foot,
they produce pressure ridges, et cetera. And so we did
some morphometrics of the outline shape of the soul pad
because the toes were sometimes very indistinct or very very
quite variable. But and I had had started to undertake

(01:13:57):
such for the Sasquatch tracks, and I just didn't think
that it was gonna, you know, again, other than the
very gross contrasts with other species, to try to come
up with something that would recognize a credible Sasquatch track,

(01:14:17):
you know, and possibly even recognize repeat appearances of particular individuals.
We never got that really off the ground. But it's
like I said, I hope somebody with increasing technologies. I
think with AI algorithms, uh, you know, learning machines, learning algorithms,

(01:14:39):
they could learn to, just as we learn with practice,
to recognize the range of potential variation in the appearance
of a footprint, so that we can conclude with some
confidence that yes, this is probably legit, this one's not,

(01:14:59):
or yet this is the same individuals as this track
that we reported four years earlier, fifty miles away, you know.
And with AI it can learn to recognize on the
base the same basis that we infer and then do
it very rapidly and very accurately and very consistently on
the basis of established criteria. That would be really interesting,

(01:15:23):
I think, to see somebody pursue So someone out there listening,
I'd be happy to help with materials and so forth.
But I quite honestly, my plate is so full at
the moment I can't even contemplate undertaking a project like
that right now.

Speaker 1 (01:15:43):
When have you ever have you ever attempted to physically
recreate the structure of a big foot foot well anatomically,

(01:16:07):
you know, to see you know, where the tendons would be,
where the ligaments would be, the the the guts of
what is inside that for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:16:22):
Given the remarkable homology that the consistent comparison points of
comparison between say a human and non human great apes,
it's quite reasonable to conclude. I mean, if we can
exclude for a moment the unlikely scenario that Bigfoot is

(01:16:44):
has evolved on some other planet or in some other
dimension and is just an interlover here. If it's part
of our biosphere, then it is certainly nested within the
cluster that includes us a, non human apes, tail as primates,
and the remarkable consistency of the elements both skeletal and

(01:17:08):
connected tissue, tendons and ligaments between those two would say
that the sasquatch has basically the same components. Is just
how they are proportioned. So there's evidence they have a
longer heel segment the proportionately than humans or even other apes.
Given their large size, that would have especially with the

(01:17:30):
flexibility the instep, they need that longer heel for leverage.
You know, they have a non divergent big toe. We
can infer from flexion creases and creases in the toe
stems when they're visible, the relative lengths and positions of joints.

(01:17:51):
Let's go from the bones themselves to the points of articulation.
Even if we don't understand the details of the actual
appearance of the joint surfaces, or how robust the bones are,
or you know, those kind of subtleties, we can, I think,

(01:18:12):
and I have I think quite successfully inferred the skeletal proportions.
So like if you thumb through my book and you
see the cripple foot, or you can, I've done it
for the Patterson Gimlin film site tracks to illustrate how
a reconstruction based on the very Remember we said that

(01:18:34):
Patterson looked for the cleanest, clearest Christmas. As a result,
the outline of that of that in that cast contains
details of the outline of the foot remarkably well. So
there's a bulge that corresponds to the position of the
calcaneo cuboid joint capsule, which you have, we all have.

(01:18:56):
If you get like you said, come off the wet
grass or the swimming pool and step on the cement
where if if that foot is it all pronated the
greatest convexity. Oh I'm sorry, no, on the outside of
the foot. I was wondering why I had to come
up with that for a moment. On the outside of
the foot, on the lateral side is the there's a

(01:19:19):
bulge and that corresponds to the position if you take
the apex the most tangential point of the of that
convexity that marks the center of the calcaneo cuboid joint.
So anyway we can infer those features the cripple foot.

(01:19:39):
See this is what I uh, what motivated Krantz, doctor
Grover Krantz, and to justify his reconstruction of the foot
skeleton again proportionately, is the the cripple foot has a
skew foot deformity where the foot is bent inward and

(01:20:00):
that bending pulls apart the joints on the outer edge
of the foot, deranges them, we say, which then causes
inflammation and enlargement of the connective tissue, and you get
a bunyonet like the bunion on your big toe that
Grandma will be wearing the news. These on the outside

(01:20:25):
edge due to the same kinds of inflammation resulting from
the derangement of that joint. That progressive pathologic derangement causes
an enlargement. Well, if that's the correct interpretation, and I'm
quite confident is and reaffirmed by numerous clinicians that that's

(01:20:46):
most likely what we're dealing with. That marks the position
of those two joints. One of them is in the
transverse tarsal joint. And guess what that position agrees with
other tracks that show a pressure ridge that points to
the position of the transfer staroint. So it all, it
all reinforces, it's all interconnected and reinforces. So but beyond that,

(01:21:11):
it's the clues like the mid tarsal pressure ridges, the
other dynamics of the footprint, the tension cracks, the pressure ridges,
the slide ins, the half tracks, all of those things
together all are remarkably correlated at all point to the

(01:21:32):
general model of the you know, articular function of the foot.
Beyond that, I mean, we can we can imagine other
details and they're not going to deviate very much from
if at all. You know, there might be an extra
belly to a muscle, or if the attachment is a

(01:21:53):
little more restricted here, a little more extensive extensive here
with a given tendon, and you know, they may have
a slightly different expression of the development of the plantar apenaurosis.
You a sheet of connected tissue that helps to anchor
the soul pad to the bottom of the foot and

(01:22:14):
so on. But yeah, there's nothing. I don't I wouldn't
expect there to be any surprises.

Speaker 1 (01:22:21):
Put it that way, and that is where I'm going
to leave you, guys hanging for the next week. I've
got another ninety minutes with doctor Meldrum and you will
be able to listen to that next week. At the
same time, thank you for joining us. I hope you've

(01:22:43):
enjoyed the conversation so far, and as always, stay uncomfortable,
my friends.