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August 1, 2025 • 27 mins
Archive 183 Bigfoot and Other Creatures

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
I'm from Mississippi originally, but I've lived in Oklahoma, Texas, Pennsylvania,
West Virginia. Since I've discovered the subject of sisquatch. I'm
so sure that they're real. I don't need to see
one believe me. But here is my second hand story.
My mom and her siblings made up a huge family

(00:27):
who lived on a plantation in Sunflower County. Mom always
called it the Patterson Plantation because there were more daughters
than sons in this family. Mom and her sisters always
worked with their dad in the field hoe in cotton.
The boys were too young, The girls were about eight
to twelve years of age, and they were hard workers.

(00:50):
Mom would tell us that when their dad was sick,
the girls would go to the field by themselves. They
were just carrying on for daddy. The only thing that
truly spooked them was the fact that something on two
legs would paste them. The girls would be on a
dirt road which was flanked on either side by the
Sunflower River or the forest. This animal would pacete them

(01:15):
just out of sight in the forest. Mom said. One
time they asked my grandpa Daddy, what is that walking
next to us? Mom said that he grinned and said,
it's just a bunch of squirrels. This went on for
a while. It never showed its face, And yes, if
it had been a vagrant or an escapee from parchment,

(01:36):
surely he would have been seen at some point. The
girls were not the only ones who heard this noise.
Mom said other adults in the field would also walk
the same direction, and they also heard the noises. But
to top this off, my mom's family all lived in
a little shotgun house that had two bedrooms, a kitchen,

(01:59):
and a living room room. The kitchen door was secured
by a thumb. Look at night, Mom said, someone would
open the kitchen door walk across the linoleum kitchen floor
to their bedroom. All the girls slept in one bed.
They would walk around the bed and stroke the girl's heads.

(02:19):
Mom says she always wanted to know who was doing this,
so the next time it happened, she jumped up and
she hit the lights. She wasn't quick enough, though. Darn
it anyway, I just thought I would pass this along
before I forget about it. Keep up the good work,
signed Cheryl in November of nineteen seventy nine. I was fourteen,

(02:43):
not old enough to hunt legally in New York. My
dad was an avid hunter who usually hunted in Naples.
They call it part of the southern tier of the state.
My dad worked with a man who owned some prime
hunting property there. My uncle was supposed to go with
him that year, but something came up, so my dad
asked me if I'd like to go in his place

(03:05):
and push the deer. Of course, I said yes. I
was so excited I barely got any sleep the night
before we left. We drove off at four am and
headed to the dark and frozen woods and our ford
pinto wagon. Dad explained as we went what my function
would be. I would head into the woods alone and

(03:26):
push the deer to where he would be set up
and ready for them. We got to the gravel road
that took us into his coworker's property and Dad told
me to walk about two hundred yards in the woods
and hunker down for forty five minutes or so, and
then start walking east. I actually knew a lot about
the woods even then. I spent pretty much every spare

(03:49):
moment of my time in the woods around our home. Well. Anyway,
Dad handed me his twelve gage shotgun. It was empty,
but I had a couple of slugs in my coat
pocket just in case. I stood there watching the tailgates
of the pinto disappear over the crest of the hill,
and then turned and let my vision adjust to the
darkness for a minute before I started walking. I wasn't

(04:13):
afraid of the woods back then. I walked quite aways,
and I had to scale an old fence line. At
one point. I remember the patches of snow and how
cold I was, despite being dressed in three layers of
clothes and a good pair of winter boots, the kind
with liners that can be removed. It began to get

(04:33):
light outside, but the sky was overcast in dark shades
of angry gray. I went into a deep gully with
ten to fifteen foot banks, and I followed it until
it turned east, the direction I had to go to
get to my father. Then I climbed the tall bank
and found a good sized tree that had fallen, and
where I squatted and rested my back against it. And

(04:56):
by then I was tired. Without a good night sleep,
I'd been running on pure adrenaline all morning. I guess
I've knotted off. I woke up to the sound of
a tree branch snapping, and I panned the area across
the gully to the opposite ridge, thinking it might have
been a big buck. And I searched across the area

(05:17):
and I saw what looked like a large man standing
next to a tree. Well, I focused in and I froze.
It wasn't a man. My father was six feet tall,
and this thing was nearly twice that. It was covered
in hair, but it wasn't a bear either. I couldn't
see its face, its long, matted hair covered it, but

(05:39):
I could see clouds of breath pouring through the hair
on the cold morning air. Its hair was all brown,
but a lighter shade on its chest in the front
of its thighs. Based on its body position, it had
to be looking straight at me. Well, I figured it
was standing like this for five minutes or so, which

(05:59):
felt like a lifetime to me. My heart was pounding
out of my skin the whole time, but I was
frozen in place and I couldn't move. And then it
took one step in my direction, and that unfroze me.
I turned and started running as fast as I could
in the direction that i'd come. I had the twelve gage,

(06:20):
but I didn't think about it at the time. I
approached the fence line and I chucked the shotgun over
it and dove over the fence behind it, and then
I grabbed the gun and briefly looked back to see
if anything was behind me. And I kept running until
I got to the gravel road. During that Olympic run,
I managed to lose a boot. I was only wearing

(06:43):
the lining, but I didn't care. I got my bearings
and headed up the road in the direction my dad
had gone, and I found the Pinto parked on the
side of the road, but to my horror, it was
locked there. I was surrounded by heavy woods in the
middle of nowhere, and now painfully aware that monsters do exist.

(07:05):
I loaded the gun and knelt down with my back
against the car and waited and listened to every single noise.
When my dad finally came out of the woods, he
was asking, what the hell happened to you, boy? I
told him exactly what happened. It was probably a bear,
if anything at all, he reasoned. I told my best

(07:26):
friend back then, and he seemed to believe me. I'm
now fifty six and I live in Florida. Dad has
been gone since nineteen eighty seven, but I can relive
that morning like flipping a switch. I did some small
game hunting after that happened, but only in the woods
where I grew up in Neverden. When I was in

(07:47):
my thirties, I ran across the BFRO and reported the
incident to them. A man contacted me about it, and
we spoke for quite a while. The research I've done
since then shows that these things migrate from the Adirondack
Mountains down through the Herkimer Valley and into the Southern Tier,
as well as northern Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley regions.

(08:15):
This happened in Brasstown, North Carolina, in nineteen eighty six.
I was fifteen and staying at my grandparents' place. They
lived in the Styx, and they had no neighbors close by.
The wood circle. My grandparents' trailer about eight miles in
every direction. As an adult, looking back in hindsight, I
can say it was really beautiful, and being that far

(08:38):
back in the woods, we, being non hair humans, were
not in our element. We were only guest actors in
Mother Nature stage. I always played in the woods. My
grandfather taught me how to carry and use a gun
when I was ten years old. He never let me
leave the house without protection. I've always I wondered if

(09:00):
my grandpa knew about these beings that dwell in the woods,
and if that was the real reason he taught me
how to use and carry a gun at such an
early age. I once wrote a comment in response to
a YouTube video that really got me angry. I edited
it at the time, and I wrote it because I
wasn't nice. It was making fun of the notion of

(09:23):
Bigfoot and the people with the courage to report their encounters,
and that's why people won't step forward about what they
have seen and what it did to them. Mentally, it's
not a joke when you're staring down a monster and
you're the poor bastard who's just stumbled into the domain
of a predator, when suddenly everything becomes primal and your

(09:44):
gut reaction is to either fight or flight, and that
gun that you've brought for protection, it most likely will
only piss it off before it charges you. It had
a massive chest, and judging by the size of its
head hands, it was a fit specimen that reminded me
of those barrel chested men you see on those tough

(10:06):
man challenges, except this thing was four times as big,
and if it didn't duck its head, it would have
clocked it on a tree limb. It had shiny hair
that seemed unusually well groomed. More than anything else, I
was fascinated by its face. It had a wide jawline
and a mouth set lower than a human, with a

(10:28):
wide gap between its nose and top lip. I would
compare its brow to a Neanderthal, except a little more evolved,
and it didn't protrude as far. Its hairless face was
framed by a beard, and I could understand someone not
wanting to shoot at it because of the human characteristics.
I could sense intelligence, but when we made eye contact,

(10:51):
there was a feeling of something sinister, like nothing in
the realm of goodness. Have you ever walked into a
room of people you don't get along with. Nobody says
anything nice, They just stopped talking and look right through you.
It was humbling times ten that instantly put my world
into perspective and crushed my soul. This monster made me

(11:14):
feel like a shell of a man. Now was nothing
more to it than pray. The beet stared me down
with its greenish red eyes, letting me know who the
boss was in our stand off. It was unreal to
me to see something so gigantic be so agile. It
walked with no jerk to its step, and its head

(11:35):
did not bob up or down. Its attitude was all, Hey,
you're lucky to be alive. You punk human. For lack
of a better word, it took the fifteen year old
boy right out of me. Other people like me have
had similar encounters and won't say a word to anybody,
partly because we don't want to be laughed at. I

(11:56):
don't know which screws you up more mentally the encounter
of the doubters that hang labels on you. There are
a lot of fake videos on the internet, and to
those uploading them, I would say, please, don't insult my
intelligence by claiming these stage clips are real. They always
missed the mark by about four feet or five hundred pounds.

(12:18):
In my thirty plus years of digging into this topic,
with all the cover ups, the lies, and the truth
that would blow the average person's mind away, it's just
another day at the office. To me. I've read thousands
of testimonials and stored thousands of pictures and videos that day,
the gun and I were both useless in every sense

(12:39):
of the word. To those who want to find a bigfoot,
I would say, don't even try to those that have
I'm sorry, and I mean that. I remember it vividly.
It was a summer of nineteen ninety eight. Sarah, my
wife the time, and I had spent a lovely first

(13:02):
week of our vacation with my parents and siblings in
Michigan's Upper Peninsula along the southern shore of Lake Superior,
camping and canoeing near the mouth of the Two Hearted River.
It is a wild and beautiful place that I have
been visiting since my childhood, and it always seems to
call me back. Sarah and I had not spent much

(13:25):
time in the lower portion of Michigan before, so we
decided to split off from the rest of the family
and do some exploring For the remainder of our vacation.
We spent several relaxing days at Lake Anne State Forest,
then planned to break camp take a day to hike
the Sleeping Bear Dunes, which culminates with the breathtaking view

(13:46):
of Lake Michigan and its many shades of blue. This
is where the story begins. The day was sunny and hot,
and by late afternoon the ambient temperature on the dunes
was probably hovering around any degrees or above, and we
were ready to be done. Once we completed our hike,
we planned to find a camp site, preferably by the water,

(14:10):
and then drive back home to Ohio. The following day,
we stopped at the ranger station to inquire about nearby camping,
only to discover that pretty much every campground in this
part of Michigan was full. In retrospect. I should have
expected this since it was a Friday in the high
summer and had a very popular destination for weekend vacationers.

(14:35):
The ranger told us that we were probably out of luck,
though he knew of a trail camp some ten miles distant,
primarily used by equestrian campers. It wasn't much to look at,
yet would do as an overnighter. I was grateful for
the tip, and we thanked the ranger and set out
for our destination, and we followed the directions he had

(14:56):
written down for us. The site was it's not easy
to find, since it ended up being on a road
or off a road off another road, but we finally
located it and pulled into the entrance. We travel further
down the dusty gravel course that ended with a loop
and a clearing. It was sparse, with trees and hitching

(15:17):
posts set at regular intervals. To our surprise, there was
absolutely no one within view, and my first thought was perfect,
we'll have this place to ourselves. And I turned off
the van and we got out to look around and
decide which site to choose. This is when things got freaky.

(15:37):
As in aside, I should point out that I have
always considered myself to be somewhat of a psychic brick.
If anyone is going to hear ghosts talk with their
spirit guides or have premonitions, it isn't going to be me.
Not that I'm not open to it. I'm just not
very sensitive in that way. The sun was getting low

(15:58):
in the sky and the air was warm, but still
it was quiet here, even peaceful. Yet I could not
explain this growing sense of dread. I scanned the area
to explain my cognitive dissonance. Where was this perceived danger
coming from? All I saw was an apparently tranquil meadow

(16:18):
with nobody around in virtually no places for a threat
to be concealed. I pushed down the feeling, telling myself
that I was just imagining things all because I didn't
want to worry Sarah. She looked at me and she asked, so,
what do you think. I don't know. I said, something
feels off. She agreed too quickly, and it turned out

(16:41):
that she had been sensing the same unease and didn't
want to mention it to me either. Let's get the
hell out of here, I said, in a low voice,
without wasting another moment, we hurried back to the van
and locked the doors and spun the tires in our haste,
leaving a cloud of dust behind all to put some
distance between us and a nameless menace. We traveled east

(17:05):
toward home, and we molded over, trying to understand what
had just transpired. There had been absolutely no visual or
auditory que to indicate that anything was amiss in that camp,
yet we both had the distinct feeling that something very
bad was about to occur, and had we stayed, we
most certainly might die. Since then, I have never experienced

(17:31):
that level of dread for something that didn't happen. More
than twenty four years later, I still think about it
from time to time, and I wonder what did we avoid?
Had there been an axe murderer in camouflages hiding behind
a tree preparing to pounce. Was something paranormal about to unfold?

(17:52):
I wonder if that feeling of something being wrong precedes
an abduction event or the spontaneous opening of time and
based portals. Only many years later did I discover that
the Great Lakes area, particularly Michigan, is known for its
unexplained disappearances of people, ships, and aircraft, as well as

(18:14):
other paranormal activity. On multiple occasions, I have tried to
locate the trail camp that we visited using Internet searches
based on its probable position, but without any success, and
unfortunately the original written directions have long been lost. Did
we wander into and out of an unstable pocket of

(18:37):
reality just before it collapsed? I'd love to know the
answer from a distance, though I'm eternally thankful that we
didn't experience at firsthand whatever it was. Back in nineteen
seventy five, while we were in law school, a friend
of mine and I were fishing in Lake Chappaka on

(18:59):
the Canadian Washington border. At that time, the road to
the lake was long, dirt, rough and rocky drive. They
may have paved it since then. I really don't know.
We were poor students who didn't have trucks or four
wheel drives in the lake, but instead we had my
family's old Volvo. Volvos and rocky roads don't mix well.

(19:24):
But soon he'd lost his steering or transmission or some
damn thing, and I crawled under the car to take
a look. When he fired it up, a stream of
fluid came shooting out of a metal tube. Apparently a
rock had punctured the line. We had no choice but
to try to make it back to civilization, and we
got to the main highway before we could go no further.

(19:48):
As we sat there, a huge yellow nineteen sixty Pontiac
convertible pulled up. A six foot five inch tall man
got out and asked if he could help. The man
looked rather strange. He was very pale and long bleached
blonde hair that was combed straight back. He was slender

(20:09):
belt and had bird like features. But hell, he wanted
to help and we needed to get to the nearest town.
We explained our circumstances and he said, no problem, I
can help. He walked back and opened his massive trunk,
and inside we could see his entire life. Clothing was
deeply folded in the cardboard box, and toilet trees were

(20:32):
organized in another. We saw framed photographs, food and water,
and tools, and you name it, he had it. He
proceeded to pull a long four inch nylon strap out
of a box and affix it to the front of
the volvough and then towed us into town, which boasted
a gas station and very little else. The attendant put

(20:55):
the car on the hoist and proclaimed that we were screwed.
He had nothing to place a tube on the volvo,
and before we had time to digest this fact, our
newly acquired friend, who had been standing patiently and knowingly nearby,
again proclaimed I can help. He then walked back to

(21:15):
the cavernous truck and pulled out a small rubber hose
and two small hose clamps, and followed by a hack saw.
The hose was soon replaced, but the gas station didn't
have the fluid we needed, and it should have come
as no surprise when our blonde friend dove back into
his trunk and produced the proper fluid. Our amusement had

(21:38):
now progressed a full on amazement. We offered to pay him,
but he refused any form of compensation except for the fluid.
He then offered to follow us out of town to
make sure everything worked okay. About five miles out, the
road straightened and went uphill. We heard the roar of

(21:59):
his huge as he passed us at a high rate
of speed, smiling and waving with his blond hair flying
in the wind. It's a side I will never forget.
And then as he screamed up the hill in front
of us, he and his convertible vanished. They faded away.
There were no side roads, no turn offs, no brake lights, nothing.

(22:23):
The dude was just gone. My friend and I looked
at each other. Our eyes were wide. Where the hell
did he go? I asked. We slowed and looked along
the roadway, but neither of us could find a place
where he could have pulled off the road. He simply
disappeared into thin air. My companion has since passed away,

(22:45):
and I'm pushing it, but I will not be surprised
at all if upon crossing over that blonde guy will
be there to guide me along. This is a true story.
It wasn't until I listened to you tell other people's
UFO encounters on your channel that I decided to share mine.

(23:07):
I hope I can put it into words, as I
have never told this story to anyone except my husband,
and that was only recently. So in your words, here
we go, all right, here we go. Though I'm forty
one now, on the time of my encounter, I was
ten years old and living with my parents in Arkansas.
We were in my father's pickup truck heading home after

(23:29):
a visit with one of his friends. It was late.
It was past midnight on one of those clear summer
nights where you can see every star in the sky.
I was tired, and, as I always did on long
journeys at night with my folks, I laid my head
on my mother's shoulder so I could close my eyes
and nap. On the way home, we were probably only

(23:53):
thirty minutes from our house. I caught glimpses of the
stars as I drifted in and out of sleep because
of the bumpy back roads my father always took to
get us home a little quicker. Suddenly, I heard my
mother call out my father's name, Wane. She said to him,
as my father snapped to attention behind the steering wheel.

(24:14):
What in the world is that, she said. I opened
my eyes and I saw my mother steering in disbelief
at something she'd spotted through the driver's side window. I
looked in the same direction and my mouth fell open.
There was a huge cigar shaped object over a pasture
just off the road, maybe one hundred yards away, and

(24:36):
it was hovering in the air. The trees blocked some
of our view, but the object was so close that
I could see. It had what looked like portholes that
dotted the sides and went around the hall, just like
a ship. The moon was bright that night, so I
could tell it was gray or silver in color. And

(24:56):
there was a slight humming sound, but it wasn't loud,
kind of like the hum of a ceiling fan motor.
My father started to slow the truck down to a
snail's pace, but my mother, shaken by what she was seeing,
hissed it my father, don't shut this truck off. All
of us stared quietly at the object for a minute

(25:18):
until my father, suddenly, gripped by panic, pressed the accelerator
to the floor and pinned us to our seats as
he fish tailed and sprayed gravel in a mad attempt
to put some distance between our truck and this weird,
metallic looking thing that my folks were at a loss
to explain. The vessel stayed in place as we sped

(25:41):
away from it, and my mother and father glancing fearfully
in the rear view mirrors and craning their necks to
see out the back window, praying this thing wouldn't take
flight and overtake our truck. At the time, I was
too scared to look, and I fixed my gaze at
the dashboard. The rest of the way home, no one
said a word, and once we pulled up to our house,

(26:04):
we went straight to bed, and in the days that
followed we never spoke of our unusual encounter. Oddly enough,
once I had time to think about it, I wasn't
scared by the experience. It was more like a strange fascination.
As the years went by, I worried more about what
the naysayers would think of my story. Rather than risk

(26:28):
ridicule from people who wouldn't understand, I kept my experience
to myself. My husband and I were talking about UFOs recently,
and I decided to ask my mother if she remembered
that night She responded with a curt yes, and that
was it. Decades had passed since that night, but clearly

(26:49):
for my mother, the memory of witnessing something not of
this world on a back country road in rural Arkansas
still lingered. We both left it at that
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