John O'Connor, "The Secret History of Bigfoot" : CSPAN3 : April 13, 2024 9:10pm-10:01pm EDT : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive (2024)

i welcome to see your hills.

we are happy to be hosting john o connor tonight for the release of his debut book, the secret history of bigfoot field notes on a north american monster. originally from michigan. and coming to us from massachusetts, o'connor is a journalist and a teacher of journalism at boston college as a regular contributor to new york times travel section o'connor's writing has also appeared in the oxford american the believer. gq, financial times and other publications. what brings us here tonight is o'connor's debut nonfiction book that asks the question what it about bigfoot that has caught our imaginations?

for those who have seen time and time again the classic image of pacific northwest official or unofficial mascot, i'm practically every surface, but haven't yet delved into the history. the legends and the mania. the secret history of bigfoot is the place to start. while the debate bigfoot's existence continues, the fact that the large humanoid ape has a has become a cornerstone of american culture. and in this book o'connor guides us on an adventure filled with shrouded forests, firsthand accounts and conventions to see why that is so again, welcome to panels heroes crossing. please join me in welcoming at john o connor. right. hello. hi hi. all right, it's nice to be here. it's so nice to be somewhere where nobody is wearing red sox stuff or new england patriots

gear in boston. like even the dogs on the are wearing like red sox hats. and so but in all seriousness i'm really glad to be back here i began my book i began my research here in oregon in washington for obvious reasons there is just such a rich history of of bigfoot here and i mean some of the oldest indigenous legends in the world deep from here and and also i'm ashamed to say had never been here before. i you know, i'm from the midwest and when i started doing some early research and kind of cold calling bigfoot ears and asking them know, getting some opinions of where i should go, a couple of them said to me, you know, you don't have to come all the way out here. you can go to ohio as maybe you guys might know. but ohio a is a particular hot spot, right?

just about a half an hour as the crow flies from columbus, ohio, is one of the big, big in spots. and and no offense to ohio, but i'm from the midwest, i was like, i know what it looks like i don't want to go to ohio. i want to go to the pacific northwest where. it all kind of begins with bigfoot. so that's what i did in the fall 2021. it was still really the tail end of the pandemic. the we were the delta variant was still with us, if you guys remember that. but as soon as it became possible, i flew out here and spent. ten days driving around camping and hiking, meeting bigfoot tourism, and i could driving what i, what i'd always thought as a kid of there's goonies country, which was a for very foundational film in my in my past so anyway i'm going to read so my my first chapter. i open in washington just a

little north of here and it's called shadow country. and then i open, open things up for, for questions. if you guys have any. all right. some time the night the noise started quietly at first. then less quietly, then a grew urgent, then livid until it was positively beside itself a freeform sphincter shuddering howl attended by subliminal reverb coming from just beyond my tent. i'd been lying there trying to sleep, feeling overly proud, feeling exultant, really, at having up from the road that morning, caring way too much upside. cloisters of douglas fir across scrubby fields of red hawthorn were crickets pinged off my tracking polls into meadows of

pale and purple heather and tangy wild blueberries hardly bigger than nerds over shattered rock fall past weird hammock deposits of turf that turned out to be marmot dense along a narrow culvert whose edges tipped into the void and onto this imposing yet minor summit. the northern cascades, where cursing and sweating like a farmhand. i'd plopped a flimsy tent, an abandoned fire lookout and climbed when the whole event commenced. yeah. suddenly i was eight years old again as the night air shuddered, i shuddered to i'd been diluted and coming here had once more distilled my neurotic acidified armchair jones for wilderness into a sierra club fantasy. yet here i was 15, maybe 20 miles from another soul 25 from asphalt, 100 from the nearest wendy's. it was a place where two hikers, including an ex-marine, had gone

missing in recent years. like the narrator of the rosemary talks poem, i'm being broken at this very moment, i sense slippage, mass losing solidity, the foreboding that strung a bear bag among sagging cliff floats, cliffside spruce but an edible trail bar, the kind that gums up your intestines for 72 hours, lingered in a coat pocket. ditto a sodden ziploc tangerine to the proper audience. i was a rack lamb only once in the smokies had i encountered a wild bear this high up at this time of year on this solitary spur, the bear would odd. so i told myself what then marmots these adorable beefcake guinea occupied the shoulders of my perch a colony several dozen strong when i first heard their shrill graveyard screams that had shaken me to my core. but this wasn't. that was it. which led me by way of a certain line of thinking to bigfoot.

sasquatch, if you prefer the strange and ghost like forest being that local socks, a waddle and skagit indian legends describe the humanoid giant that european fur trappers and railroad loggers and miners claim have encountered during their westward ravages the quote unquote, abominable snowman that two boys mark me 16, and marshall cabe, 14, ran into just east of here at cub lake in 1969. the monkey or gorilla, that tourist sign crossing saw crossing highway 504 and cowlitz county. the source eerie howls like people yelling elk hunters heard recently on spencer butte the ogre trickster or cave monster mountain devil wild man and cannibal child slaver. nearly every indigenous american culture has a name for the tabloid curiosity. transient and scariest figment of my dreams. imaginary herald of our oldest and most hard dying myth or long

odds candidate for a real yet undiscovered hominid species, whatever it was marmot or missing lake, it my barricade of fleece and down i lay perfectly still eyelids bolted shut my only weapon a plastic spork clutched tightly to my chest there came surgical howl followed by on my own this time a feral childlike trombone trombone. and then the crash of rock, rock. we all have our coping mechanisms. mine was to burrow deeper and hum a few bars of little weeds will in little will, and while weeping inwardly later, when the noise subsided, pulled myself together, wriggling of my bag, i slipped on my unzipped the tent and stuck my face into the darkness. i clapped as meant to do with bears. nothing stepping outside, i found a loose tent peg being dashed against the rocks by the wind.

its guidelines snapping in a frenzy, dance thus had a seam open between tent and rain fly, creating that unfathomable howl, which should have been obvious from the comfort of my bag. after so much excitement, i decided to make coffee. this was early. the wind was a wet, but the eastern sky blue gray. as the sun began its interminable crawl over the mountains. what a balm. the daylight provided to the south. i make out the 10,000 foot glacier peak, its summit wreathed in clouds directly opposite was another 10,000 footer. mount baker a black dorsal fin, breaking a blue line of surf due east beneath the crest of sinister peak. the fast retreating tuckerman glacier. i was aboard the palpably inferior green mountain, 6500 feet of and a sight center and humble pie, usually snow packed till mid-summer. it's warm now bluebells and silvery sage fox barrows, golden

crown king glitz and my favorite of all the ubiquitous junco on holiday mexico and bounding past on mysterious errands smoke from wildfires further south around mount rainier gathered the valley below and behind me standing like affairs cap on the summit was a shuddered fire lookout that east crumbling unto a boulder strewn mist coiling from its steeple. this tableau was the reason i'd here for half the reason, the other half being the stated subject. this book long story short i wanted to write about bigfoot. it's the myth and meaning where it comes from. it be which is confounds and occasionally terrifies us. months back, midway through the pandemic, gotten caught up in the spirit of our strange times. i couldn't stop myself. if you'd had asked me then i'd have said bigfoot was a beautiful, yet harrowing intimation of the future. a terminal co*cktail of hope mixed with discontent and a twist of climate apocalypse,

where some such a green mountain. and i could read a lot of the personal and public dread of 2020 into that thinking. well, it seemed clear to me that fear and self-delusion were intertwined with bigfoot. that was also painfully aware of our uneasy rapport with nature. but still do not virtually nothing about the big guy. i had a lot to learn and truth. one rarely thinks about whether into something until long after they've begun. perhaps bigfoot was always there in the back of my mind. perhaps i thought it would fade. instead, it gained momentum. i began imbibing bigfoot literature, the podcast chat room banter, instagram posts and facebook rants. i watched the unwatchable films spoke to believers non diehards and weekenders, clear headed skeptics and fervid charlatans climbing the thin margins between, credible and contrivance between reasoned inquiry and unhinged pursuit of a creature whose exact location no one could specify, but whose

existence was taken as a matter of faith. other people's obsessions don't turn me on. saul bellow once wrote other people's obsessions are precisely what turn me on. they become my own obsessions, propelling me down, uncertain, making life more interesting. with bigfoot, there are paths you can find him everywhere. and while i plan to hit all points, the compass on my bigfoot walk about north, south, east, west. it's in the pacific northwest as. everyone knows where bigfoot story begins. i hadn't left my bend in years, it seemed. when it became possible in the fall of 2021, i flew from boston to, the washington cascades, laden with instant noodles and covered 19 self-tests. not exactly to look for bigfoot, but to see the landscape arguably the biggest bigfoot country in the lower 48. a 60,000 square mile glaciated column that backed all the way up into canada. i had it on good authority that the mount baker, snoqualmie national forest and this very

darrington ranger district was a favored bigfoot haunt of late. plus, it'd be big fun sleeping under the stars lying with a book under leafy grounds to be moving again, taking part in the existence of things. as keats put it with narrow nary an eyebrow raise at my quarantine, hair and waistline, and not knowing what the days would bring, knowing only they wouldn't bring the drudgery of sameness felt as vital as a beating heart. i'd been in such a yearning to get. and here i finally was the spot to begin my fieldwork as i was calling it a dark and, unfathomable forest where 800 pounds monsters roamed undetected and and where imagination could lurch unmediated from one vision to the next. it was the most beautiful place i'd ever been, but i couldn't stay another its sheer beauty served only to intensify a desire to leave rattled my sleepless night. i struck camp, jumped on my pack and headed down my car.

an hour later i met a pathogen head and kock on a trail and lower down a peka, a short eared and -- cousin of the rabbit scampered from its journey down to eyeball me. i could hear everything that was going on a. nuthatch whistling a crow flapping grass during slowly the trees closed and growing bigger and taller. douglas fir an engelmann spruce western and bristlecone pine the branches tied together in feathery loops, stopping for a drink, a rifle, sharp, cracked and uncomfortably by. it was two weeks before the high hunt. picking up my pace, i crossed a hilltop and caught sight of the tarp and camp stove stashed away in some bushes. other people armed, hadn't been so distant after all finding my car at the trailhead. i shook a beer from the styrofoam cooler and back, stifling the urge to pour it directly onto my face. the car was rental. i drove it too quickly down. a rugged forest service road.

every spin of the wheels. producing a hammer straight to the buttocks and made camp on the suharto river a mile from back up from buck creek. the site had a fire pit with a circle stones and a log bench on which had scrawled in hunter orange sasquatch 2021. the river was massive. it ran color of dishwater around sandy island's with young alder and cottonwoods from the center most island. a few treacherous rock leaps away. i turned and stared back at the protagonist's. i'd left behind the place, been so eager to leave, suddenly exerted a gravitational pull. bigfoot i knew like bears would be would more likely appear the river a reliable food source. still, i couldn't help but feel deflated and ashamed at having the upper air for the lower elevations, realizing too late that i'd succumbed to the lamest of clichés. a irrational fear as revealed to be exactly. well, the mountains had felt so alive. the chaos of, the river being passed like a train drowned out

even the word. the birds pollachi swirls of dog tracks littered the banks and a few bear prints. but no sign of bigfoot unless. bigfoot wore a size nine tibia you. was happy to. take questions. either about bigfoot or about the nba. where everyone. what anyone wants to discuss. i want all travels. are you still the diehard skeptic that you were when you began. there is a short answer to that in a long answer to that. me, the answer is yes. i i did not see a year of big footing anything that suggested to that there is a seven or 800

pounds mammal living undetected the american wilds, or by some accounts in the, you know, american suburbs. it just sort of defies sort of defies logic and lot of ways. it is, i'm afraid. i'm afraid i am still a skeptic. yeah. yeah. yeah. so being a skeptic that you claim to be. have you talked to someone who was such a believer they really actually made you think that this could be possible? well, yeah. i mean, i talked to a lot of people during, the research for this book, i mean, i think i probably met upwards of 100 or so bigfoot ears and almost of them had stories that i found difficult, if not impossible to discount. i mean, that was really one of the hardest things when i was

researching i and you'll read in the book, i have many testimonials from people telling me about their bigfoot encounters. often, you know, telling me in terms that made it clear that it transformed transformed their lives. you know, some of them me with like tears streaming their cheeks, you know, and i didn't never got sense that anybody was was -- me or lying or being or deceptive. i found it, you know, like almost moving at times to hear people tell those stories and and that's why i, i chronicled so many of them. and that's why i wanted to write this book. so in my intent was never to kind of cast on their, you know, affirmations. the last thing i wanted to do was parachute in from cambridge back to, you know, to the pacific northwest or kentucky, texas and, you know, wag my finger at people, say, no, no, no. you've got all wrong like i did. that's not was not my intent.

i would not i did not want to write that kind book. and i certainly wouldn't want to read that kind of. so that was something i struggled with a lot in the writing. was how to square people's personal testimony annies with my own experiences and. and with and with the lack of verifiable evidence for bigfoot. you mentioned. 1969 to young men may have spotted. you mentioned tabloids at some point. when did it first start appearing in the media? i believe your journalist. and so i guess you might have looked at newspapers. when did that sort of start happening? that really the modern kind of iteration of. bigfoot started in 1958 in bluff creek, california, was what were word bigfoot comes from some loggers, guys that were clearing

roads in northern california started to see bigfoot prints around their tractors in the morning when they arrived work and and and they started to refer to the the as bigfoot. it was the two words to begin with. and then a local journalist for a local newspaper shortened it to one word in and that was picked up by the newswires by the new york times and in the los angeles times and and more. and that's where bigfoot entered the lexicon. yeah, i believe. i sure do. did you get a chance to talk to lauren coleman? you know, we have. i did. and directly, we've back and forth. yeah. i went to his museum in maine and we, you know, we kind of missed each other. but do you know him? i communicated with the one time. it's okay. yeah, but you know, i don't know him. i won't go into the crypto zoology conference in may that he puts on so, but yeah we've, we've only communicated via

email. oh yeah. thank you first of all for listening to people without because they feel validated. you pointed out it's such important. a couple of questions and then i just have presumptions. you've been in northern california already. what's next on out for you and what has been your favorite local brew. a but literally my favorite local brew. sure, whatever. however you want to answer that. okay. what's next? you know, it's funny. i'm like halfway through my next book, but it's not it's not related to bigfoot or cryptids or anything like that. and to be perfectly honest i'm not sure how much i'm supposed to say about it. it's yeah. it's unrelated to this topic and my favorite local brew.

i'll try to answer that. both literally and metaphorically. the second is, you know, i think my one of my favorite experiences was yeah, i'm sure you probably know the powers i'm getting on film which is you've probably seen the footage you guys are kind of grainy footage, a very large bigfoot walking across a creek bed in northern california in 1968. it was shot by two guys, roger patterson and bob getting them. it's one of the kind of most well known and and contentious pieces of bigfoot evidence out there. that's i, i just got in this huge conversation with my uber about it, who felt very passionately about the subject and that's like one of the great things about bigfoot is that you just like immediately if people are into it, you know, and we talked for like 40 minutes about that film and, and, and i went, there's guys in bluff creek now called the bluff creek project who are trying to remake that

film. and they're two of them are filmmakers and they're trying to remake it sort of establish try to establish the veracity of of how it was made, whether it could possibly be that that creature that we see in that film and they've been at it for years. and it's a very difficult to access. and and they've got an aptitude for some like really truly -- weather ad but what they're doing is really interesting and they're great and they run a a podcast i highly recommend and and that was probably my favorite. was just outside the norm for me. you know i on a lot of expeditions with bigfoot who were there mostly of the same flavor you go basically in a very undistinguished patch of woods and sit around waiting for bigfoot and these guys were it was more intentional you know they weren't they were trying to do something and they had trail cameras set up all over the place and and they had just

virtue of their energy and an interest they helped establish cult images of a called the not bigfoot but the humboldt marten which thought to be extinct and their trail cameras helped establish a viable in humboldt county enough to get it put back on the endangered species list. and that i found to be like one of the most interesting groups out there. and it just like kind of just joyous experiences being down there with them and what they're up to and yeah, yeah. hi. thanks for writing this. do you, have you had any contact with a bigfoot field researchers organization that is actually accepting and qualifying stories on bigfoot record and recording them on maps? yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

definitely. two of the expeditions i went on were kind of by the bay of faro. if you guys, i mean, if you want to, you can they run like a dozen or more expeditions all around the country every year and they're expensive, like a couple hundred bucks mean you got to get yourself there but but yeah definitely. i talked to matt moneymaker, who's that started the bfr. he's lawyer. he just started the bfr a couple dozen years ago. and they have a vast set almost mind boggling online inventory of sightings and, testimonials and only a fraction of the testimonials they get make the actual website and make that. i mean, it's like a maybe an eighth or something of the total. i think have like five or 6000 on there, but they have upwards think archived of 75 to 80000 or something. a lot of them get dismissed as like kind of hoaxes or like miss ids and that sort of thing. but, but yeah, definitely.

they're great guys, but not a great guy and and they run really good expedition. my experience they run really even if you're not a believer, it's fun to just go sit out in the woods and and did they talk about how they actually screen the stories, the pictures, the sightings, the records? yeah. do they actually is it a scientific based thing? and did you think it was valid and pass the straight face test? yeah, i, i might put scientific in scare quotes. they're like, i mean it's, it's hard to operate scientifically know. i mean even trained scientists grew up, you know there's like as far as datasets go, there's like bad datasets. you know, there's this guy at columbia. whose cancer research just turned out is going to all his data is screwed up, you know, and so it's hard to bigfoot has put a lot of stock in that operating scientifically, but in my experience they try up to point. but yeah, but they all the ones

that make their website there is a certain category i think like they rank it a, b or c depending on certain criteria. a number of people who were there and so on and they as much as possible, they try to send someone out to talk to the person who reported the sighting. they don't always do that. yeah, but yeah, there is a kind of vetting system that they have so yeah. does that answer your question? okay. in your opinion what is it going to take for the scientific community to say that this an actual animal that out in the woods. well, it's funny i was just talking i had my mom on my book launch. that was like last tuesday. and i had a friend of mine, a

guy named wilke, who leads a heads up bigfoot and group in massachusetts. and he was of asked that question and he was i think he said the kind of the most obvious answer is a bigfoot body, you know, and he said it made it sound like a kind of a like bigfoot is are waiting basically if you it was he's almost like a discouraging kind tone to it. you know, it's now been three quarters of a century or more since this sort of modern iteration of bigfoot came out of bluff creek and and and there's still no body, no bones, no verifiable, you know, great. you know, evidence. the kind of evidence that scientists need so he made it sound kind of sort of sad to hear him say it. he was like, you know, we were kind of in a holding pattern, basically waiting to see what happens. so i think that for scientists, what it's going to that's what it's going to require know.

so what's the appeal of bigfoot? why do people want to believe in him? and it's a good question. it's a really complicated answer. i mean, there's just so many answers to that. and if there is bigfoot is in the audience what i'm about to say, they say that's complete -- like but, but i there are kind of three things that i kept coming back to and i kind layered on. both in my with bigfoot isn't just in my reading and my research and the first one is just are legit and lower that's handed down the centuries. you know we really love our myths and in our myths die really hard whatever your name mythic yearning that they evoke in us is just it's hard to discard it. you know, it's not just bigfoot but all kinds of myths.

so that's that's part of it. i think the other thing i spent a lot of time in my first chapter on and this resonates with me personally, i'll admit is just the the sort of wanton destruction our landscape and our ecology that's been a utterly devastated in the in the course of the last 200 years. and and i think partly bigfoot is. a desire to have a little bit more wildness out there know wildness in us, in our in our lives a little bit less kind of modern domesticity and a little bit more kind of freeform danger and mystery and, you know, and the searching, the things that go bump in the night, you know, searching for things in the darkness that, you, you can't quite identify identify.

so that's it. i think that's two. and then the third is the kind of maybe the least sexy you're most controversial is just. problems that i think have problems with and perception and memory, cognitive biases, you know, which is admit i think in a lot of the stuff, cognitive biases i write about in the book are i have learned about from big voters. but. yeah and just sometimes we see what we want to see i had had the good fortune to meet bigfoot or on one of my expeditions who was a police officer officer in indiana i think don't quote me on that but but she was really and i went on you know we were in the woods one night and people were hearing and a lot of what they thought was bigfoot and she kept whispering to me she was a big for herself she's

like, you know, people just as investigator like we encounter all the time even like really honest, reliable witnesses get stuff wrong all the time. it's it's hard to kind of admit that and to reckon with, but i think if you're looking into bigfoot and the phenomena of bigfoot popping up as much as it does, and you have to reckon with, with that sort thing, again, i get into my comments i'd like to as much as it's to extract. the sort of individual testimonials you know i think it's almost necessary to put that in a kind separate category. i'm kind of i'm talking about bigfoot, you know, popping up in like the suburbs or like, you know, a half an hour from a city, a million people, you know, in ohio. so. anyway, that was a really long winded question. i mean, answer hope i answered.

hey so i was just going to comment about the patterson film. i listened to to coast a lot and one of the guys that was interviewing was saying, if you look closely at that video, the muscles on the and the thighs and everything, that it can just be like suit of of something. and i haven't really analyzed that. i just thought that was an interesting thing. so if anybody goes home and looks the video you know on youtube can be interesting and as far as like getting a bigfoot, that's going to be pretty tricky because and again i'm just in this for the mist, you know, the mystery or whatever. and they're like, what you were saying before is just kind of, kind of fascinating to see like, hey, is there any chance that this could be real? but but the fact that a lot

people think that they're interdimensional can just disappear in an instant and that sort thing. yeah, like i think that'd be pretty hard to actually. i mean, if that's the case, be hard to find a body. yeah but anyway. but yeah, it's pretty fascinating. yeah, i was just like a, you know, reading books and like, ooh, could it be that, you know. yeah, well, the, it's to your first point, the gilliland film is, you know, it's as said, it's i mean, it depends on who you talk to because a lot of people there are others have analyzed that film again including as has said, you can see the metal clasp on the suit. you know, they had that like hollywood makeup artists look and say, oh, this is like it's an obvious fake. but but other people have said there's no you know, they don't have the the technology back then to do it. you know, it's it's 1968. they didn't have the film technology. they didn't they didn't have the makeup technology to do it.

so. yeah. and to your point, you know, there's there's kind of two divides and bigfoot, it's complicated than that, maybe, but there's sort of two basic poles and and you touched on one of one of them, which the first is far more prominent, which is what people call sometimes flesh and blood ours, which people who believe that bigfoot is just a undiscovered hominid species and there's the what sometimes called the wu woolworth's, who believe that bigfoot might have a more supernatural or paranormal provenance. and and then, you know, there's huge gray area shades of belief between those two poles. but but but in my experience, the vast majority fall into the first camp. most bigfoot is are conversant in woo and. they sort of are open to ideas. but i think i know some where in

their minds that it's ridiculous and and want it to be to not be that, you know, because of that they're like once open that door, then what possible, you know. so and i think most big footers at least the ones that i met, want to keep their feet firmly planted, the real world. so but again, it's like, yeah, it's like that's part of the allure is entertain possibility and mystery and definitely feel that, you know we must be governed by reason, rationality and verifiable fact. i mean, if you just as much as possible now we all believe in irrational stuff, whether we realize it or not, but as much as it's possible. i think you have to try to stay, you know, remain reasonable, reasonable and rational on that. but you also at the same time don't want to lose contact with a more enchanted view of the world, you know, in the you

know, in the sense of mystery. yeah. so i had an unusual opportunity to work with daughter in law of man and his two friends who actually made the movie, the famous movie of the moving through the forest away from my camera and the one that's under contention all the time. he actually ordered sued from hollywood and he was six foot four anyway. and so they had actually this kind this engineered suit, and they were kind of like these forward rancher boys who were. yeah, out there with just a camera and so even though that movie was not capturing the actual animal, i really that it's i'm sad that that has out

and made the whole entire mystery look like it was a waste of time and that it was made up by someone else. i actually think that there are sufficient sides and sufficient history, especially oral history with the indians to say that these creatures are amongst us were amongst us or something. yeah. you know, it doesn't mean that big foot didn't exist. yeah. you're use talking obviously about the paris agreement the one to northern california right, right. the one in 1968. yeah. yeah. there has been various i think it was 1964, actually. mm hmm. there's been various, you know, folks have come out over the years. there a guy i think bob is his name and yogi yakama guy who said he was the one who wore the suit. and there's another guy that patterson ordered the suit for him to make suit. yeah. so bigfoot is would you argue against that was vociferously, you know, i mean they they don't

buy it and and to their credit, you know, like a big fundraiser, often the ones who are to discount, you know trying to verify things know and if you guys remember like a this, like a couple of months ago, i think in colorado, oh, there was this bigfoot caught on camera. there was like a tree from a train window was like squatting. and it became very quickly became a meme and turned out it was it was a hoax put on by the owners of the railway who were just trying to it was a publicity. it was big for us who went out and that like a week or two later. so bigfoot is do not like to be trifled with you know they they take very seriously and they hate it when people do something kind of silly like that, you know, for the most part, yeah. hi. want to say thanks for being here tonight. your information with us. a lot of writers say that in the process of writing a, they're changed and is such a mythical

and mysterious. i'm curious how, writing this story changed, you as a person. yeah, that's a good question. i you know, i think in terms of bigfoot, it didn't change my feelings about bigfoot, but was what i was really surprised that you know, i mean i a couple of things like how open people were to me and not just an outsider but a journalist like journalists really have a get bad rap, too. i think there's like a very sort cultural, like widespread misunderstanding about what journalists do and and but bigfoot is who are already very marginal and kind of the somewhat maligned subculture. i had a few weird experiences early on, but by and everyone was super nice to me and like open and you know, just welcoming and i was really kind of moved by that in a way, you know, and even though we

probably a lot of them, we probably disagreed politically on virtually everything, you know, and but it didn't matter like big furries don't care, you know, if you if you as long as you're not there and kind of judging them and especially if you're they're kind of affirming their own beliefs like. yeah, they it's like it's almost like fandom in a way like the way like sports kind unites people of widely disparate backgrounds, you know, it's like bigfoot is kind of a, the bond bonding, you know, and, and yeah, and i was just really endlessly surprised by how open and nice and welcoming people were. some of them didn't want me to use their names, you know, they were worried that it would just destroy professional reputation or so, but for the most part, everyone was. yeah, and that just surprised me. i mean, i think i know one of the guys i met on in.

he was he was a first time bigfoot and i was like, did you expect is this what he like? you know, i thought just between you and me, it was going to be a guy, people with, like, tinfoil on their heads and, you know, and and i was like, yeah, i've sort of thought the same thing. and but it wasn't like that. like the nicest, like verite and very, you know, otherwise kind of sane, lucid people, very nice, you know, it wasn't overtly political, weren't it was an easy to pigeonhole them or their beliefs and any real salient way. and so that i don't know if that's quite what you meant by that. i found that that changed me quite a bit because i'm, you know, admittedly pretty pretty much to the left of political issues. i have some nonstandard views on guns and stuff like that but for the most part i, i differed politically with my subjects in almost every conceivable way and it didn't matter know, you

realize like how much of that is just noise and and you know, you know. yeah. how much of it is just kind of background noise. so yeah. there was someone over here i thought who had you. you mentioned a lot about people that wanted to believe and wanted to promote the idea of bigfoot. i was just wondering, you had any deep or had contemplated what would be the motivation for faking like a film or, faking an evidence and that other side of and what was the purpose of that would be it's i don't know it sounds interesting to. me yeah, yeah. there have been, there has been that element to big footing since the very beginning. and in fact some of those that tracks that i mentioned creek in

1958, many of tracks again, this is an issue that bigfoot would kind of take up with me. i think many of those tracks were faked by a by a prankster named ray wallace, his buddy shorty wallace, who ran a construction company there that were clearing roads through the six rivers national forest outside of bluff creek. and and ray wallace was just a jokester. he liked screwing with people. you know, he was just a kind of practical joker and. and there's those those people in all walks of life and definitely in big footing. and i don't you know, i don't a lot of time on hoaxes because it's i mean, it definitely exists. and and bigfoot is like the sort of diehard is hate it because it kind of trifles with their beliefs and it's but is something that definitely goes on you know i didn't i didn't see any of it but there's a book by a guy named david dangling

who was, i think an anthropologist at the university of florida. and he contends that it's much more widespread than, most people assume, and that he sort of chalks up bigfoot's ongoing popularity to whole thing and to the internet and so and i didn't want to he felt like he kind of covered it. i didn't really want to deal with that. so i don't. but yeah i think it's just people who like. you know, just of screwing with people, having, you know fun and games and not not in a malicious way for the most part, i think. but yeah, it's it's definitely part of the what drives it, i don't know. but um. yeah so recently my wife and i would took a trip down to love creek. so this self-proclaimed bigfoot capital world, they're in humboldt county and we went to the museum, the bigfoot museum

and a lot of things that i saw there kind of changed my mind towards bigfoot was a big believer in it, but there was some things there that people aren't don't have to some self stories, things like this that are actually in the museum. some of the prints that they've casted and things like that. yeah. so have you ever had a chance to go visit that museum there? you know, it's funny, when i when it was closed the fall, they had terrible wildfires in willow creek in their big bigfoot festival. they have year was canceled at the last minute the fires were really came almost right through town and so it went and when i went it was not long after that and it was closed. that was actually a big disappointment for. but but i have seen a lot of casts elsewhere and i've seen cars being taken. you know, i've seen i've been there when bigfoot was fine, what they consider to be prints and watched them take casts and

you know and i've seen there's a lot stuff that sort of passed around amongst bigfoot films and videos that they that they don't want make public for various reasons and yeah so i feel like i've seen i haven't that particular museum, but i think i've i've had a good look at a lot of the evidence. um, does that your question. okay. oh, it's behind you there is much consistency in what in the you've seen and the footage that you've seen across these. yeah. there's great consistency. i mean folks from all parts of the country describe pretty much the same, you know, somewhere in the range of 500 to 800 pounds upright. so either. colored or lightly colored upright ape that, you know, and florida has like there are

regional variations florida has the skunk ape, which is a little different and depending on who you ask you know, you know, people will describe bigfoot. almost more like they're like dog man. do you like the dog man in ohio was kind of a kind of a similar related group. did but but but generally it's pretty much the same the same animal. is woman back there. hello hi. i'm sorry, but i haven't read your book, but that's okay. fascinate by your integrity and the sentiment in, your research style. do you intend to study other cryptids and of zoology? at the moment, yeah. as i said earlier, i'm working on another book. it's related to this and i have to kind of wait and see. i sort of feel like at the moment i've said what what i wanted to say about bigfoot.

yeah, i had a great sort of good fortune to interview late in his life. the writer barry lopez, who i was a big fan of. and he, you know, barry wrote like a couple of dozen books, both fiction and non. and it was an immensely sort of gifted writer. and one of his books was called wolves and men and he did, i think, about three decades ago. he went to the arctic, hung out with the wolf. researchers and wrote a really, um, he won the national book for i think it's a remarkable book. but he always lamented to me, you know that he was forever known as the wolf guy. you know, no matter what he did it was like he was that guy and and you know, it's not it's not that i'm like, ashamed be associated with it but you know anything that but but i think i don't to limit my subjects to just cryptids but i am sure that

i'll you know pals with some big photos i'm sure that i'll keep track of what's going on and they'll keep me up on up on it. so yeah, yeah. he was you know what i want to talk about the celtics. um, yeah. i mean, they're from michigan, you know so it was any of those like, kind of midmarket sports tend to evoke very diehard fans. so it's hard for me to even say the word celtic. um. well, that's it. i thank you guys for coming out. i really appreciate it. so i'll be signing books here for a

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