SC EP:1129 It Entered The Cabin

I will be welcoming Ron to the show. He had an encounter back in the early 1990's. Ron said "We were on vacation, staying in this cabin in U. P. Michigan. The family was down swimming and fishing. I came back to the cabin and I thought someone was in there. I got to the room I thought an intruder or a thief was in there but something told me not to go in there. Sasquatch never crossed my mind. As I grabbed my shotgun it ran out. I followed it out but lost sight of it. As I walked into the forest looking, the intruder got up and ran for the water and jumped in. It wasn't human, it reminded me of non human primate. I never saw it come up for air, it could have swam around the bay in an area I could not see. It was the strangest thing that ever happened to me."

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  It looked like somebody was bent over and had their head in the window of the deer blind and it either heard me or smelt me and he pulled his head out of the tent and stood straight up and that, that shocked me. They don't make people that, that big.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  The way it moved, almost as if it was gliding across the beach. I've never seen anything move like that in my life.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  They were screaming at each other in gibberish.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  It sounded like a language and they were chuntering away, back and forwards, back and forwards, back and forwards.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  I know what a bear looks like and there is no way on this planet that what I saw bears.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  911, what are you reporting?

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ, you better... Karen, see ya!

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Hello?

• 1:20Speaker 03

  Get somebody out of here.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  What's going on now, sir?

• 1:23Speaker 03

  That son of a bitch is about six foot nine, I don't know.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Do you see him now, sir?

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm looking right at him. Uh-oh.

• 1:32Speaker 04

  This is Nenka from Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada. You are listening to, in my opinion, the best place to share your encounter stories, Sasquatch Chronicles.

• 2:24Wes Germer?

  Welcome to the show, everyone. Thanks for being here tonight. Got a great show planned for you. We'll be chatting with Ron. And Ron comes to us from Michigan. And back in the early 90s, he had this encounter where this creature entered the family cabin. And Ron kind of caught it in the process. I'll let him go into it tonight. And Ron is an educated man. He has firm beliefs in evolution. And my challenge, Ron, on this topic with my 4th grade education, how does it turn out? I guess we'll find out together. If you've had an encounter, and you'd like to be on the show, shoot me an email. My email

• 3:08Wes Germer?

  address is [email protected]. And if you get a chance, check out sasquatchchronicles.com. You can become a member and get additional shows. Let's jump into it tonight. I want to welcome Ron to the show. Ron, thanks for coming on. It's my pleasure, Wes. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, and you had this encounter back in the early 90s. Before this encounter happened to you, Ron, what was kind of your take on Sasquatch? If someone said to you, "Hey, Ron, what do you think of Sasquatch?" How do you think you might have answered?

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Well, I would have, I would have probably, I would have leaned towards the belief that of its existence because I am a biology major with an emphasis in anthropology. So I know a lot about evolution. I know a lot about comparative anatomy, zoology. I would not have rejected the existence of some kind of creature or cryptid because it's happened before. And a good example would be the siluchant, which is a prehistoric fish that that 400 million years ago that they discovered that they thought was completely extinct. And then again, in the early 20th century, it was discovered off the coast of Africa. So I'm a believer.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  I give, I think I give the benefit of the doubt to nature. There's a lot of things out there that we don't understand and that we can't explain, and that doesn't mean that they don't exist. Every day, somewhere in the world, a new species, maybe of insect or bird or some small reptile is discovered. So to me, that lends a lot of credence to the fact that there may be a more evolved creature, like a primate, for example, which I believe Sasquatch would fall into that category. They could definitely exist. But then the question would be, well, then how, how could we haven't seen it? Well, I did. You did. I think a lot of people out there did see it. I even believe in my heart that the government is aware of its existence. But I can't figure out why they don't want

• 5:09Speaker 03

  to release that information. So that was my mindset prior to my encounter. So actually, you know, growing up, being a kid who grew up in the woods, kind of, you know, I grew up in a rural suburb of north of Chicago. I spent a lot of time outdoors, fishing, exploring. I lived in the woods. I loved it. And so I don't have, I didn't have too much trouble believing in its existence. But until I actually saw one with my own eyes, you know, there's a saying, I want to digress for a second, there's a saying that I wanted to talk to you about. Abraham Lincoln, I believe I can attribute this to Abraham Lincoln. He said, believe nothing that you read, half of what you hear, and everything you see. Well, when

• 5:51Speaker 03

  you see something with your own eyes, that's about as good as proof as you get, right? So, um, I didn't give it much thought. In other words, growing up as a teenager in my twenties and early thirties, I never thought about Bigfoot. I never said, hey, let's go in the woods and explore and try to find this thing. This wasn't something that I was into. I wasn't going to golf and, you know, girls and just living my life, my job, what have you, my getting through college. Um, Bigfoot wasn't something that was as mainstream as it is today. So it just wasn't something that I, uh, um, was, was interested in, like as a hobby or something. Um, we're now going back,

• 6:31Speaker 03

  after thirty years since my, my encounter, I've had a lot of time to reflect. And after thirty years of reflection, you start to think of all the what ifs and what, what could have done and maybe I should have done this. And, and my final conclusion is, I've given it a lot of thought,

• 6:49Speaker 03

  is that I feel very fortunate to have had the experience because unless you see it with your own eyes, you're always going to be a little skeptical. You're always going to look at people uh, and take it with a grain of salt when someone says, hey, I had an encounter. I saw this. I love listening to people's experiences because I can relate to it then. And I know it. I can feel the sincerity in a lot of the people that you interview. Um, I've yet to meet someone personally that's had a Bigfoot experience, like a friend or a colleague or just someone on the street, you know, that I happen to meet. Um, not that that's the first thing I bring up in a conversation, but I've yet to meet someone personally that I know, a relative, whatever, that's had an experience like I have. But when I listen to YouTube, uh, like your show and many others like

• 7:34Speaker 03

  your show, then I get to hear all the people that have had these experiences and it just lends more credence to, to the, to the fact, the reality, uh, that and the implications of this creature, I'm going to call it a creature. I believe it's some type of hominid and, um, it, uh, that it's real. It's for real. It changed my perspective on a few things. It didn't change my life. Like psychologically, I wasn't damaged. It didn't change my life. I haven't, I really didn't give it much thought. Three days after it happened, I basically forgot about it. And then as the years went by, I told a few close friends, I told relatives, if somebody brought up the subject, I said, "Hey, you know what? I got a story for you. Let me tell you what happened to me back in

• 8:17Speaker 03

  the 90s." And, and just as of late in the last 10 years with the advent of the YouTube and shows like yours, I, I enjoy listening to people and their experiences. And so that's what made me want to, after 30 years of reflecting on this, and after, and not really going out and telling everybody I know about it, unless it came up in conversation, I decided I wanted to share my experience with your listeners, with everyone out there who's interested in it. And, and for the sake of, of Sasquatch itself, too. Because it does exist. I've seen it with my own eyes. There's a lot of little nuances to it that you can make some inferences

• 8:59Speaker 03

  from that are, that are similar to everyone else who's had the experience. There's so many similarities between every experiences that I think an educated person who just kind of uses their brain a little bit can make the, make the same conclusion, come up with the same conclusion. There can't be so many people out there who've had this experience and are making it up.

• 9:25Wes Germer?

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I really appreciate your answer on it. The quote that you brought up, "Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see." It's one of my favorite quotes as well. I believe it was Edgar Allan Poe and not Abe Lincoln, though. I know it gets attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but I think he was partying in France at the time. But, but that's neither here nor there. If you would, take me back to the early 90s in Michigan. What were you doing and what happened?

• 9:57Speaker 03

  I will. Let me paint, first of all, let me kind of paint a little picture about the property, because it's important to know the layout of the cabin. Because my experience was a little different than a lot of the experiences where people are in the woods and run across Sasquatch. So.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  My father, who was a dentist, had four friends of his, and one was an older gentleman who had been going up to U.P. Michigan fishing and hunting all his life. And when the property that he was, that he would go to became available for sale, he approached his partners and said, "Guys, we should buy this property," and they decided to buy it. It was 600 acres in the U.P. Michigan, and it had two lo, two small lakes on it. They were by 60, 80 acres apiece. And right in between them was like a little piece of land that the cabin was situated on. And this cabin was built, and then around the cabin was pretty much all grass with a little bit of woods that kind of, that you could see the lakes clearly, but there was a little bit of brush, I'm gonna say about 15 to 20 yards of brush before, between

• 10:59Speaker 03

  the water and the grass surrounding the cabin. And that grass surrounding the cabin probably was about a, about 100-yard perimeter around the cabin. So it was pretty long. So if you wanted to walk to one lake on, on one side of the cabin, you had to walk about 80 yards, and then the dock was there, and you had to go through about 20 yards of, a little bit of, um, of woods before you hit the dock. And it was the same on the other side, at the other lake. It was a little dock there, and you walked over there. But you had a nice clear perimeter of grass that was completely cleared and open around the cabin. And the cabin was built in the 20s, and it was originally a lumber camp. So it was just a very crudely, it wasn't crudely built, but it was very simplistic, a rectangular cabin, two-story, with a front door and a back door.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  And the front door had a porch in front of it that was screened in, and it was like a rectangle. Um, as you, uh, so the whole cabin itself, when you, and this is important, like, cause it's a very important detail. When you, when you pulled up to the cabin, it was just a grassy drive. It was no road, no asphalt, nothing like that. It was the dirt trail, basically, with two paths that the, over the years, cars had made. And, um, and then when you came up to the cabin, you just parked on the grass. And then you unpacked your car or whatever, and you got your fishing rods out, or whatever you need, your food, your supplies, and you went into the cabin. But as you went into the cabin, your first thing you entered was an old, was a screen and porch that, um, ran the whole, uh, width of the cabin. I'm gonna say it was maybe 20 feet wide.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  And it had an old screen, it had an old door in front, two wooden steps leading up to it. And then, then you opened an old squeaky door that was on a spring, so it would close, so it would keep bugs and mosquitoes out. And it would always make a noise when it closed, unless you closed it very quietly. But if you didn't, it went wap, wap, wap, and, you know, like an old screen door does, old wooden screen door. And then when you walked through the screening porch, you went to the cabin, then there was another door, which basically was always left open. I mean, I don't think we ever closed it, even when, when we left the cabin, we think we left that open. Because we never, never in the 25 years that my father and his partners owned the property, did we ever have a single intruder? Did we have ever had a single problem, theft, anything?

• 13:09Speaker 03

  As a matter of fact, we never saw another human being, except maybe a curious fisherman who would maybe come up the driveway one day and say, hey, listen, can I fish your, your lakes? And that happened maybe five times over the course of 20 years. So of course, we'd say, sure, go ahead and, and enjoy yourself. So whether they be locals or people just kind of like, you know, exploring the national forest. And by the way, it was in the middle of the Ottawa National Forest. That's where the cabin was located. And like I said, it was an old lumber camp, so it was very wooded around the area. And there wasn't another single cabin within 12 miles of us. And that would have been in the nearest town. And it was a very small town of about a thousand people. So, all right, go back to the, the cabin.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  So when you went into through the screening porch, you entered the cabin and immediately to the right was a stairway that went up to a lot, to the second floor, which was just wide open. There was nothing up there, no bathrooms, nothing. It was a wide open, like a big dormer. And we had about 13 or 14 old beds up there that they had collected over the years. So we could sleep a lot of people there. So whenever we brought a group up there, it was a lot of fun, a lot of closeness. Everyone had a great time because everyone's laughing and somebody would, in the middle of their sleep would, you know, say a joke or something like that, everyone would crack up. It was a lot of camaraderie and everyone enjoyed it. The women, the wives, not so much because we didn't have plumbing. And there wasn't electricity. We had propane gas, we had propane lighting, we had propane refrigerator stove.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  And we had an old tank up in the attic, up in that dormer upstairs. Where we started a pump down by the lake and that would fill that pump. And that gravity from that water would run the one toilet that we had in the cabin. No shower. If you wanted to take, that's why the girls didn't like it that much. They didn't have a shower. There wasn't warm running water. Um, it was rather primitive, but that's what gave, that was part of the charm of it. And subsequently, by the way, we sold the property in like the late nineties and a young, a very wealthy gentleman bought it. Tore down the old cabin and built up a multimillion dollar cabin, which is just incredible. And he's still alive to this day. He's about, he's in his nineties. So I just wanted to give you a little full history of what happened after we sold the property. So.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  When you went into the cabin, immediately, when you got through the screen porch, immediately to the right was the staircase going up to the dorm, to the second floor, and right at the base of that stairway to the right was the one bedroom. So there was a doorway with one bedroom. And if you walked past there, you couldn't, you could only see part of the bedroom. You'd have to poke your head and then look to the left to see the majority of that bedroom. And that was, this is very, that's germane to the one I want to tell you. That's why I'm describing it in detail. So after you walked through that door, that bedroom was to the right, the stairway going up was to the right. And the rest of that, the rest of the room was a big open room with some couches around the perimeter.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  And just an old potbelly stove up against the wall where we'd, where we'd always make a fire to heat the cabin. Then if you went past the potbelly stove, you had the kitchen area, which had one little small wall that came out about halfway. Where the refrigerator and I think a little cupboard or something like that, uh, was there. And so when you walked in that front door, you could almost see the entire cabin. Except for the little area behind the left in the kitchen, inside the bedroom to the right. And then back in the kitchen area to the right, there was another bedroom. And that's where I would always stay. Whenever I had friends there or whatever, that was kind of my de facto bedroom. I kind of put dibs on it whenever we went up there. I said, okay, I got the back bedroom and and you guys can have the front one. If there's a couple, we let them stay in it.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  And then if you were, it's the single guys or kids, they slept upstairs. So. Thank you for listening to Holly. I want to describe the outlet, the, uh, the floor plan of this cottage, cause it's, um, it's an important detail. So. I let my cousins, we always had friends and cousins ask us if they could use the cottage. And because it was old and, you know, it didn't really, it couldn't really hurt the place. We didn't even care if it burnt down. We'd say, sure, go enjoy yourselves. Have a great time. There's not even a key for it. Just let yourself in and, you know, let us know how you, if you have any problems, give us a shout. So, my cousin was about 10 years younger than me and him and three of his friends from Illinois State. And their girlfriends decided to go up there one June after school got out. This was in the early 90s. I think it was about 91.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  And he called me, he's like, Ronnie, could we use the cabin? And I'm like, sure, no problem. Who are you gonna bring up there? And he mentioned who was going. I'm like, you know what? I may came up and see you. And I did. I rarely went there by myself. I always went there with somebody, either a buddy or my family or who knows what, but I always went there with somebody, a group. But this time I decided, since they were gonna be there, that I would go up there and spend a little time with them. So, they were there the day before I was there and then the next day I drove up there. And I pulled in and I got out. I walked in the cabin. We all said hello and, um, I unpacked my stuff into the back bedroom. They were nice enough to move out of there. They spent the first night. One of the couples, one of the boys and girls stayed there the first night. And when I got there, they said, Ronnie, we know this is your bedroom. You like this back here.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  We'll go sleep upstairs or something like that. So, I took the back bedroom. And I had an old 410 that I brought up there with me. And I happened to bring it inside with my, with my duffel bag of my clothes and my fishing gear. And when I got there, I went in the back of that bedroom and I put my gun away and I just, that was it. So, the first night, we, I don't know, I can't even recall what we did. The normal stuff. We sat around, we played cards, we made a fire and we just cooked something, had a barbecue. Maybe we even fished that first day, I can't remember. But the second day, that, the first night, the, the day after the first night that I was there, that would have been the second night that they were there. They all decided to get up early in the morning, go out fishing. So after they loaded up their stuff and went out there on the boat and were out on

• 18:51Speaker 03

  the lake, I decided to get in my car and there were so there would have been three cars there now. There would have been two cars that they took and then my car. And I decided to go into town at about nine o'clock in the morning. Now, they had just gone out onto the water and I was the only one in the cabin. So I I decided to go into town. I can't remember what for, Wes, maybe buy some food or some bait or something. So I drove into town and when I came back, the road coming into the cabin off the old forestry road was about a quarter mile long to get back to the cabin. And it ran along the one lake that they that the my cousin and his friends happened to be fishing on. So as I drove by, I kind of went really slow and my car didn't make much real noise on the

• 19:36Speaker 03

  on the road because I was going really slow because I was checking out where they were fishing and they were right in the middle of the lake. So I pulled up to the cabin unusually quietly. And I had no expectation of seeing anything, which is a normal afternoon. But it was about eleven thirty, eleven o'clock. I got out of my car and I immediately had an overwhelming sense of, and I don't want to say it was dread, but something came over me and it was absolutely for like turning a light switch on. It was unmistakable. It was um, it was, I'm not going to say it was dread or fear, but something told me clearly,

• 20:19Speaker 03

  and I'd never had this experience in my life. So it was absolutely unmistakable, that something was amiss. Something just felt off. And it's hard to describe this feeling because it's an abstraction. You can't really describe what it's like, but you you just feel it. You absolutely feel it. It's like it's like a presence that's there. Maybe it's like someone's watching or something. You know, you've always said, oh, you know, you could always tell, I feel like someone's watching me. Well, you have this presence, this feeling come over you, but it was absolutely incredible. And my adrenaline started to kick in a little bit. So I walked in, when I walked in the cottage, I immediately had this sense of, of foreboding. And I looked in, so I got through the screen and porch.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  I, I started to walk into the cabin and I noticed that the, the position of all their stuff, their clothing, their backpacks, there was even a wallet laying on the floor. Um, it hadn't been gone through, it was just laying there. And it just looked like it was out of place because I left to go to town after they already went out fishing. And I know that their stuff wasn't in that position when I left. So something immediately told me that something was very wrong. And I, I, and this is what's absolutely amazing. And we've heard on other interviews that people about mind speak or telepathy, that somehow these, uh,

• 21:46Speaker 03

  these creatures could communicate, uh, non-verbally. Well, it's not that I had that go off in my head like, uh, don't come in here. But I had the strongest impulse not to stick my head in that first room in the right, that bedroom in the right. Until I was able to get my 410. Because I, my first thing that I looked at was I felt that someone was in the cabin with me. I felt that we had an intruder. I didn't even think about a Bigfoot. I thought, okay, we have an intruder, someone was obviously scoping the cabin out. They saw everyone go out on the water, they saw me leave, they knew it was empty and they decided to go in and take a look. Maybe for what reason, I don't know, to steal something, curiosity, I don't know. But like I said, in 25 years, we never had that occur.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  So I went straight back to the, my bedroom in the back right of the cabin. And as I'm walking back there, I said out loud, very loud, all right. I know you're in here, just come out and I've got a gun, but I won't use it. I won't call the police if you just get out, come out of here and leave. And I, because that's how strong the feeling was. I've never done that in my life. But I was, something overwhelmingly told me that something was in that, something was in there, some presence was in that cabin with me. And it was specifically in that bedroom to the right, which I had the strongest impression come over me. Do not stick your head and look in there until you go back and grab your gun.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Because I didn't want to confront who was ever in the cabin unless I was armed. In case they were, in case they had a knife or in case they had, you know, will, you know, bad intentions or something. In case they were a thief or something. I just didn't want to have a confrontation with someone unless I had my 410. So I went back to that bedroom on the right. As I'm saying, okay, I know you're here. I've got a gun. Please come out. I won't do anything. I wanted to disarm the situation. If it was some young kid or from town or something like that, I wanted to just say, hey, get the hell out of here and never come back. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it. But I went back, I got my 410, I opened the breach, you could hear it open. I put the shell in when I closed it, you could clearly hear it, hear it close. So I walked back out of that bedroom.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  And believe it, this was strange too. Even though the strongest sensation came over me not to stick my head in that first bedroom on the right. I had no problem walking into the back cabin to the bedroom on the, where I was staying. I didn't, I didn't have any fear about that. But I had the unbelievable fear about going in that first bedroom. And after 30 years of contemplating this, now I realize why. So I come out of that bedroom after I got the 410 in my hand. I look back towards the screen and porch. I don't see any movement. I don't see anybody coming out after I said, okay, come on out. I know you're in here. For a split second, I glanced to the right. In other words, I glanced away from the screen and porch and towards the back of the cabin.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Where the kitchen has that little alcove in case somebody was hiding back there. And in that time, in that one or two seconds, and it was just a fraction of the time that I looked away. That, that screen and door.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Slapped close and it slapped closed like someone ran out of it fast and didn't have time to slowly let it close to be quiet. But I want to add that I didn't hear a single sound, not a board creaking on the floor, not footsteps, nothing. All I heard was that screen door. And when I turned and looked at it, I could still see it flapping. Because when it would close, it was all kind of warped a little bit. It would go flap, flap, flap, flap, flap before it would settle down. Because on an old spring, that would keep it closed. So immediately, the alarm bells went off in my head. I said, okay, I was right. My intuition was right. Someone was in the cabin. And they just got out. But I couldn't for the life of me figure out how I couldn't notice it. And that's short

• 25:40Speaker 03

  of a period of time. I only turned my head away for a second or two. And by this time, the door was already flapping. So I immediately ran to it. It was about fifteen, twenty feet away. I immediately ran to it with the four ten in my hand. And I before I walked out of it, I looked to the left, and I looked to the right, and I could see, you know, the whole grassy area in front of me. And I couldn't see anybody. And that was very unusual. And it was suspicious to me, because I couldn't feel like how anybody could move and get away from that, that area that I could see in one or two seconds. I didn't see how it was humanly possible that anybody could move that quickly. So the only, only thing that had happened is they could have got out of the cabin, and ran around the

• 26:20Speaker 03

  corner of it. So I had two choices now. And I so I said, I'm gonna walk out, and I'm gonna go to the left, and I'm gonna look around the side of the cabin. And if it's there, I'll see it. So I did that. I looked around, nothing. I turned to the right, I walked around to the right side of the cabin now. I looked around the side of that, again, nothing. I couldn't believe it. So I was absolutely flabbergasted that whatever was in that cabin with me, if it was a, and I didn't think, again, Bigfoot, I didn't think Bigfoot. I thought it was a person. But it was, but obviously, it was real, because it exited the door. I know for, you know, it happened. So.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  The first thing I wanted to do was go down to the lake and yell out to my cousins out there to come on in that we had an intruder in the cabin. So as I'm walking down now, it's about fifty, sixty yards. It's about eighty yards to the lake where the dock was. But like I said, that the first, from the, where the dock was, there was some woods there. But they weren't dense woods. They were like low scrub. There weren't any giant mature trees. There were a couple scattered pines that were maybe ten, twelve inches, you know, in diameter. And a lot of red alder scrub and some other low bushes. And there was a little trail in between that that led down to the dock. So I scoped around the whole area. I obviously didn't see anybody. I figured, okay, they ran off in the woods and they're gonna make their way back wherever

• 27:42Speaker 03

  they came from, from town or wherever they were and had their car parked in the woods or something like that, who knows where. So I'm walking down to that, that dock to get, to yell to my cousins, hey, you gotta come in here. We just had an intruder. And I wanted them to go through their things and see if anything was missing. So I'm yelling to them and they're yelling back at me. What do you want? And I'm like, just come in. We had an intruder here. We had an intruder. And they, I could finally see them kind of reeling up their lines and said, all right, we're coming in. And as I turned around, and this is what's unbelievable. So walking in that little trail, that, that, and I gotta back up again a little bit here. I gotta go back a little bit.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  When I walked to the, down to that dock and I, when the woods started, nothing, I didn't see anything there. And I thought, I thought I could see pretty clearly in there because it wasn't that forested, but there were some trees and what have you. So I got to the dock, I yelled for them. As I turned around to come back towards the cabin and me, just at the beginning of where that, where those woods are, I, in other words, I walked right by it. It was sitting there as quiet as it could, behind a tree, extremely stealthy. It must have known the lay of the land perfectly because it was the fast, it was the only place it could go. Cause I said, when I came out of that cabin, I couldn't see anything. I couldn't figure out anything physically was possible that I could get out of my, my, my view that quickly.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  So as I turned around to come back to the cabin, I noticed right behind one, a pine tree there. It this this about six foot high about my height creature started to plow its way through about ten yards of brush from behind that tree and dove in the lake.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  I couldn't make it out very well because it was brushy, but I could tell that it was a that was a furry bipedal hominid. And it jumped in the water. And when it jumped in the when it dove in the water, didn't jump in the water, it dove in the water. And when it dove in the water, I got a look at it. So I didn't see its face. I didn't see it perfectly standing up, but I saw it and it was as it was going through the water, just as its hands were hitting the water and the rest of its body was just at the above it out of the water. And I couldn't believe it. And it made a splash, the biggest splash. I used to do a lot of swimming when I was a kid. We used to cannonballs and stuff off high dives. It made the biggest splash ever I could use that I'd never never ever saw in my life. I couldn't believe it.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  So I immediately scampered through that little brush that it had ran through. And I waited I the the the circle of the splash in the water was still there. The waves were still moving around from the splash and everything. And I said, you're OK, I'm going to see it. Whoever jumped in this water, I'm going to see him when they come out. So I sat there for three or four minutes right on the edge of the water and nothing came up. And I had a pretty good clear. The little bay that it jumped dove in was about fifty yards in all directions. So it either swam underwater fifty yards, went around a little turn, came up for air, and then somehow got out of the woods. But my point is, it never I never saw it came out of the water, which to this day I'm

• 31:02Speaker 03

  still amazed by either its ability to hold its breath, the power that it must have taken to swim that distance. It was unbelievable. So I looked down at right where it jumped in the water, right where the water meets the the land. It was all pretty much all mossy rocks and grass and bushes everywhere, except right about the first twelve inches. If you can kind of picture this, Wes, where maybe the waves lap on the on the land a little bit, it's a little muddy right there. So I looked down and there was a footprint as clear as day, fresh as can be, sitting right there on the edge of the water, right where it dove in. I looked down at the footprint.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  It had, I could see the dermal ridges clearly in the, in the footprint. It was a normal human footprint. I didn't see any, and I know all about human biology and anatomy. And it wasn't some giant 16 inch, seven inch wide footprint. It was very similar to my footprint. I could make out all the impressions of the toes. I could make out the impression of the arch. I could make, the only thing I could make out was the impression of the heel because there wasn't a heel mark. It was just the fir, front half of one foot. But I immediately said, oh my God, there's not going to be a human being that's going to run around the woods barefoot. There's too many little things sticking up. There's

• 32:26Speaker 03

  too many sharp rocks. There's too much stuff. It's so, I knew right then and there, based on the animal, seeing the animal at the very moment is diving in and seeing that barefoot that I had just encountered a Sasquatch. Never came up. So my cousin finally came in. I told him, I said, I just ran into a Bigfoot. They didn't believe me. They kind of like laughed it off a little bit. Yeah, sure. I said, go in the cabin and tell me if any of your stuff has been disturbed. They went into the cabin. They looked around. They said, yeah, I didn't put my backpack here. And one of the girls was like, yeah, I didn't leave my hairbrush out here. And I said, I knew instantly that something was off when I came in the cabin because I left

• 33:11Speaker 03

  after you guys left and I could see all your stuff neatly put away. And it was all kind of in disarray when I walked into the cabin. And that's what led me to believe we had a intruder. Um, so they, they, they, they kind of didn't believe me when I told them what I'd seen, but I saw it plain as day. So I, that day I became a believer. And I can describe what I saw and it was the bottom of its feet were bare, just like our feet. But the rest of the body was hairy. And it was blackish brown, more leaning towards the black side, but it was like a, I think like a real dark brown. And I didn't get enough, I didn't get a face to face view at it.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  So I can't really describe it's any kind of facial features or anything like that. But I can describe its general morphology, its size, its shape, how it moved, it moved just like a human being. It dove in the water just like a human being. It had the presence of mind to hide from me. It had a presence of mind not to come out of that room when I entered it. And here's where it gets a little spooky for me after looking, reflecting on this after thirty years. If I would have, and, and the reason I didn't poke my head in that first bedroom is something came over me and said, "Do not go in here." And now I'm gonna digress back to this, what we, people say that Bigfoot can mind speak or uses telepathy or something like that.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Something told me, and it's not like I heard a voice or words in my head, but I just had the most powerful feeling, "Do not, do not look in there. Don't even stick your head in there until you go back and grab your, your four ten. And, and at least until you make an announcement and let them, let this person, whoever's in the cabin come out and show themselves." So, this is what, what spooks me about the whole incident. I was in, I was in a cabin enclosed with a, with this creature. If I would have went into that bedroom, which would have been the, basically the first impulse for anybody would have been to just stick their head in there and look. But, but something told me not to. And I don't know for what it was, I don't know what it was, it was an angel or something.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Because here's what, here's the scary part about it. If I would have gone in that room, I would have been in a, a small bedroom, maybe ten by twelve. And I would have been by myself, face to face with the, whatever, with, with, with that Bigfoot. And that's, that's what scares me. Looking back on the whole thing, I thank my lucky stars that I didn't go in that room. Because I don't know what I would have, what I would have done. I don't know if I would have dropped of a heart attack. I don't know if it would have attacked me. I don't know if we would have came face to face in the same room, a confined space. So that is the scariest element of the whole story to me. And it's also the part that I, that I don't regret not going in there. So after 30 years, I say to myself, thank God that something

• 36:06Speaker 03

  came over me. Not only did somebody come over and say, hey, there's something wrong in here. There's somebody in this cabin, but don't go in that bedroom until you go back and arm yourself. And even if I had this, and even going one step further, even if I would have had that shotgun,

• 36:22Speaker 03

  and I'm, I'm, I'm, I think my, I'm grateful that the damn thing got out of the cabin before I had a chance to go back to that bedroom and walk in there with that 410. Because I don't know what it would have done if it saw me standing there confronting it with a, with a gun in my hand. I don't know what, how it would have reacted. But it certainly had the physical advantage on me, just by how it moved. Like I said, I can't give you a good example, a good idea of the exact proportion of it, because I never came face to face with it. I saw it momentarily run from behind that pine where it was hiding, to jump in the water. But I never saw it come out, because I really desperately wanted it to come out of the water. So I could figure out what the hell was this thing? Because when I did see it dive in the water, I knew it

• 37:07Speaker 03

  wasn't a human being, because it didn't have any clothes on.

• 37:11Wes Germer?

  I want to come back and ask you a couple of questions about that overwhelming feeling that you had of don't go into that room. Before I do, you know, with your educational background in biology, and when you were looking at this thing, and I realize it was very brief, it happened very quickly. But when you caught a glimpse of it, what stood out to you about the creature? I mean, was it bigger than you?

• 37:38Speaker 03

  It it had it had more bulk. So at that time, I was so I'm five eleven, one hundred and eighty. At that time, I was probably about the same. I was probably about the same. I was in my, I was thirty one, thirty two years old. Now I'm sixty three. And um, so eh it I could tell that it was bulkier than me. I mean, I played football. I played sports. I mean, now, come on, you could. If you see somebody down the street and they're larger than you or smaller than you can make that distinction. So I made that I could realize that it was bulkier than me. It was um, it was furry. I couldn't, and I know a lot about anatomy. I couldn't get a good picture of its skull.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  So I couldn't tell whether it had a sagittal crest or a neutral crest. I couldn't, I didn't have a front frontal view of it. So I couldn't make out any morphology of the face, or I couldn't see um, the chest, obviously. So I couldn't tell whether it was male or female. I couldn't make out any genitalia because it was just, I only saw it for uh, two or three seconds as it ran from behind that pine. By the way, it didn't move. When I walked by it to go to the dock and scream for my cousin, yell for my cousins to come in. It stayed in its position. It was only until I kind of started walking back that it, that I had a different perspective on that tree now.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  And it knew, it realized that I was gonna, I was gonna see it. And it didn't want to be seen. The probably one of the biggest impressions I had is not that it moved so quietly, it moved practically invisibly. It it hid so stealthily from me that my, I, after thirty years of contemplating this, I came to the conclusion that the, it it's number one priority was not to be seen. It didn't want me to see it. Yet I couldn't avoid it because it had to run through the woods a little bit. So I did catch a nice glimpse of it. But I could, but I think that it's number one priority was it didn't want to be seen. It, and and I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful that it didn't want to have a confrontation with me.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Because if I was in that cabin and had a confrontation with me, I don't know what the hell would have happened. But I, but I, but it was, it's not a good feeling. I think if I would have cornered it and it had no way out, but threw me through that doorway. And by the way, that would have been the doorway to the bedroom, the doorway out of the cabin, and then the door leading out of the screen and porch. So it had to go through three portals to get out of there past me. So something would have happened. I'm quite certain that if I would have confronted it face to face in that enclosed bedroom, it either would have, I don't think it would have cowered, and I don't think it would have just stood there. I'm quite certain they would have tried to gotten past me, though it would have used physical force. Though I'm thankful, I'm thankful for the encounter because I feel very fortunate.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  I feel special to have had it, to have seen it. You know, it's like, it's like witnessing a miracle. You know, you don't believe it until you see it with your own eyes, but once you see it, you can't deny it. Looking back on it, I'm, I'm lucky that, but it wasn't just dumb luck that I didn't go in that, or me just not wanting to put my head in there. The first thing I wanted to do was look into that bedroom. That's the first thing I wanted to do, my first inclination was to look in that bedroom, but something stopped me. And I don't know if it was the big, was the creature itself sending me some kind of mind speak saying, because it was a, like I said, it wasn't words in my head, it was just an unbelievable feeling, do not go in there.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  Whatever you do, don't poke your head and look inside what's in there. And in other words, I, I had, I had a real strong suspicion that whatever was in that cabin was in that bedroom, but I didn't want to confront it unless I had, unless I was armed. And not because it was a Bigfoot, because I don't think the gun would have done crap against it, to tell you the truth, unless I put that barrel right against its throat and pulled the trigger. I just had the 410 because I thought it was some townie or some, you know, some, uh, uh, kid trying to rob us.

• 41:38Wes Germer?

  When you guys got back to the cabin, I would imagine you went into that room. Was anything moved or was anything taken?

• 41:47Speaker 03

  No, nothing. I did go in the room. When I went, after I went, after I went out, after I chased it out the and I didn't chase it because I was just responding to the door closing, slapping shut. I didn't know what left the door. I just thought it was somebody robbing us. And I, I didn't have, I didn't even look in that bedroom because I already knew whatever was in there was out at this point. But when after I called for my cousins, after I had seen the creature and came back in, the first thing I did was go in that bedroom to look and see if anything was disturbed. And nothing was disturbed. And here's another detail. There was no smell at all. Nothing. You know, some people say, oh, then maybe they had a smell or something or, you know, maybe they smell like, you know, skunkiness or something like that. No.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  So there was no odd smell at all, but the feeling, the oppressive feeling was indescribable. And until you do describe it, it's almost impossible to impart that feeling to someone else. Um, so as human beings, we do have the ability. So I, I think it was part our ability to sense danger. And, um, I mean, that's how we evolved. We evolved, you know, early hominids evolved avoiding prey and what have you. Um, so we have an innate, um, ability to sense danger. But this wasn't your normal thing because I've come across lots of wild animals. I came across bears, coyotes. I came across all kinds of danger situations and I never had a feeling come over me like this.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  So I think it was partly our, our ability, our human ability to sense danger. But, and I'm gonna say that's 10% to 20% of it. And the other sub 80 to 90% of it was something was telling me. I don't know telepathically. I don't know how it was doing it. But along with, coupled with the feeling of dread and my adrenaline and my heart running at 100 miles an hour, something absolutely told me, don't go in that bedroom. Because I wasn't really afraid of a lot of stuff, you know, I figured, hey, you know what? I was pretty, I was an athlete and I was pretty quick. I figured if I stick my head in there, I could at least, if someone in there, I could at least bolt out of the cabin and run and jump

• 43:59Speaker 03

  in my car or something. Um, but, uh, the feeling that I got was absolutely unmistakable and I've never had a feeling like it in my life, other than that time. If it ever happened again, I would notice it, I would know it in a second because it's unmistakable, Wes.

• 44:17Wes Germer?

  Yeah, it's a very strange feeling and you're right. Once you have that feeling, you pick up on it 10 times quicker the second time around. Um, you know, a lot of encounters, you'll hear of Sasquatch going up and rattling the door handle or, uh, banging on the door or trying to push a door in, but rarely do they ever come into, to a home. And from my impression, it's not like you guys are at this cabin all the time. Why do you think it came in?

• 44:48Speaker 03

  I'm glad you asked that question. I wanted to address that with you. So first of all, when we first bought the place and we first started to go up there in the mid to late 70s, we would always hear behind one of the lakes, maybe a thousand yards away. You know, we had 600 acres, so it's that's one square mile. So it's a pretty big property. Well, about a foul, I'm gonna judge between 800 and a thousand yards away. Um, we would hear knocking. And this was before the advent of, that the term wood knocking became popular in the American lexicon. And I mean, nowadays, most people to say, you know, if you're talking about Bigfoot, you say, hey, do you know what wood knocking is? Almost everyone will know what the term means. Well,

• 45:28Speaker 03

  we used to hear wood knocking constantly, but we used to write it off to something in nature, you know, just something happened, but we'd always say to each other, what the hell is that knocking going on? But none of us ever said, let's, let's go back there and check it out. Maybe it's a Bigfoot. We just dismissed it. But reflecting back on it, we used to always hear this wood knocking. And I mean, a lot of it, not just an occasional knock, knock. I mean, we'd hear it all day long on some days. So going back to going, going there, um, Yeah, we'd spend about, uh, we'd spend about, and here's another detail, and I'm glad you asked this. We'd spend about six weeks of summer there if we were lucky. Um, let's go cut it back to four.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  And, but the four families owned it, so, but the other four families, after the first time they went up there, they're like, we don't even like this place. We're just in it for the investment. So it was basically the original dentist who had been going there for years and me and my dad and my cousins and all my family that loved fishing the outdoors that used it, that made the most use of it. So I went, we would probably go there four weeks out of the year, um, total, you know? And not at one time, obviously, you know, we'd go on a Friday, come back on a Monday, or we'd go there for two weeks if we had the time. If we weren't working or something, or maybe as soon as school got off before we started working that summer, we'd go for a week and a half or something. And I'd always bring different people with me. We'd always bring other kids who wanted to go and everyone loved it.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  And we all, we still to this day, um, uh, reflect on how wonderful it was, uh, of a place to have and what a great experience growing up that a lot of people didn't get to have. So we felt very luck, fortunate to have had it. But I did make winter campouts because I was a big winter camper. I loved winter camping. And this just, I just, this just came to me right before you called me, we started the interview today, that I never heard wood knocking in the winter. Not a sit, never once, that I'd never hear a wood knock in the winter. But every time we'd go in the summer, we'd hear it all the time, mostly in the evenings. It would start in, uh, before the sun went down, it would start maybe two hours before the sun go down. And then it would end, mm, maybe an hour or two after it got dark. But it was all, you know, it happened all the time.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  We just never put two and two together. Reflecting on it now, I wish I would have grabbed three or four of my buddies and grabbed our AR-15s and our, you know, 308s and our 12 gauge pumps and, "Hey, let's go back and see what the hell's going on over there." We never did that because Bigfoot wasn't something that we, we didn't even think about Bigfoot. It didn't even cross our minds. We weren't Bigfoot hunters. We weren't Bigfoot explorers. We weren't interested in the subject of Bigfoot. We were young and, you know, had other things to think about. So, but if I had, if I had it all to do again, and it isn't hindsight always 2020, if I had to live my life over again, I would have went and investigated those wood knocks a little more carefully.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  So going back to the winter camping, I never, um, never heard a wood knock in all the years I winter camped there, which I thought, now that I thought about that, that was kind of unusual too. That's an important detail because it was so cold up there. I don't believe that they live there in the wintertime. I believe that they migrate. Because if they're a primate, which I'm positive they are, I'm positive it's some sort of undiscovered or yet unclassified hominid. I believe that they migrate to warmer climate. Because I don't think that, without being able to hibernate, I don't think they would be able to live in the subs-freezing temperatures of that area.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they had little caves or maybe they had, they built shelters of some sort. Maybe they, but you know, there's so much to talk about Bigfoot and of all the stories that I've ever heard in my life, I've never once heard of the Bigfoot's ability to use fire. Which kind of amazes me because it certainly has a high intelligence. It has a high intelligence and curiosity enough to go into a, to scope out a cabin to make sure no one's there. Right? That's like doing reconnaissance, right? So you need awareness. You need to be able to watch people. You need to be able to decide when it's safe to go in and explore an area. So it had the intelligence to scope us out, to wait till we were gone, make it take its opportunity to go in the cabin.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  And then it had the intelligence to be quiet enough to wait after having me say, "All right, I know you're, someone's in the cabin. Come on out. I've got a gun. If you come out now, I won't call the cops. I just want you out of here." Um, it had the intelligence to stay quiet during that period. It had the intelligence to wait for me to momentarily walk to the back of the cabin, turn my head to make it exit. It had the intelligence to move so fast, it's, um, inhuman.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Completely inhuman. It would be like a deer. You know, we've all seen deer run, right? It must have ran as fast as a deer to get to where it was, because I got out to that screening porch within a matter of seconds. And I don't know how I could have missed it going out to the point it did. But it had the intelligence to go out and use stealth to hide from me, to observe my motions, to observe my actions, and then to react from my actions. So if it was a bear, or if it was some kind of animal that wasn't that intelligent, it would have, what happens when you confront a wild animal? It doesn't hide behind a tree from you. It doesn't, you know what I'm saying? It doesn't care if it makes noise evading you. It just wants to get away and run into the woods.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  Well, this creature acted as if it was with high intelligence. So there's so many questions about this, um, this animal that I have after reflecting after 30 years. And, and what, what made me think more as I grow older and I, I listen to more podcasts about other people's experiences and how similar they are to mine, all the similarities, all the parallels. I've came to the conclusion that, um, it's, it's very highly intelligent.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  But I'm also at the same time confused that it hasn't, it, it doesn't have the ability to use fire or you, or create a tool of some sort, or build shelters that we can readily identify. Um, so there's so many questions that I still have about it, but, um, I, uh, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything in the world.

• 51:54Wes Germer?

  And I know that you don't know and I don't know, but why do you think it went into the cabin?

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Well, that's a great question and I, and I have an answer. I've thought that one out too. So this cabin's been around since the twenties. It's hardly ever used, right? It, 90% of the year, not 90% of the year, but 11 months out of the year, it sits abandoned. We don't even lock the door. So I think over the years, and I'm, and I, when I'm in my years, I mean decades, I think over decades and decades, it knew that people were rarely there. And when we were there, we weren't interested in hunting and looking for Bigfoot. So that gave it a sense of security, for one. We never went into the woods looking for anything, you know, that

• 52:41Speaker 03

  like, if, for instance, the wood knocking, to figure out what the hell's causing that. Um, I think over the years of, of, of, of that being its territory, that it realized that that cabin was almost always unoccupied. It had probably gone in there many times before that. And I believe that it was, um, it knew, it knew the schedule of that cabin. In other words, it knew that sometimes people were there, but not very often. And in this particular, I believe it used it. I believe it went into that cabin, not to use the toilet or to use the sink, of course not. But I believe that it was, it curiosity, that the animal is curious, and the fact that there's no neighbors, that the nearest neighbor's

• 53:25Speaker 03

  12 miles away, that it's in the middle of the auto national forest, that there's not even a ranger station nearby. Um, I believe that over the years, it had developed the knowledge that this place was basically a, a safe zone for it, that it could go in there without, you know, worrying about, uh, someone coming over from work or something. It's not like it, I believe that it re, it knew it, it knew the schedule. It knew that, um, it was rarely used. And, uh, I don't, and you're right. I think the reason Bigfoot doesn't enter a lot of dwellings is because they're either inhabited, you know, full time, or they're used more often, or they're locked. So it's got to break a lock or break

• 54:08Speaker 03

  a window or something to get in. Uh, in this case, we, we left it a lot light open. And I think I told you this earlier before we spoke, you could have left a thousand dollars on the kitchen table and came back a year later and it wouldn't be touched. We never had a single incident of a break in of, there was nothing to steal.

• 54:26Wes Germer?

  Yeah, you bring up a good point, Ron. There is a lot of reports of these things coming in and out of abandoned buildings. And you also hear farmers talk about encounters of these things being in their barn. Maybe it was kind of treating it like that because, you know, you guys were rarely there. Um, and it kind of sounds like it was a younger one because from your description, I mean, it's not like you ran into King Kong.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  No, it was definitely not an alpha male. It was, it was approximately as it start, I only got about a two, I'm going to say it took two seconds. One, I'm going to say it took between two to three seconds for it to make its way from behind that pine tree. That it went to immediately when it exited the cabin. I came to the conclusion that when it, when I came out of the cabin looking for it, it had already made its way to that tree and it positioned itself behind it. And it was, it was a master of stealth because I looked that way. And I got a pretty good eye. I know how to observe and I didn't see anything there. So, but when I walked by it coming from the dock, I was three feet away from it. That's how close I was when it bolted from behind that tree. I was three feet.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, it bolted away from me towards the water and I only got, I only got a back view of it. I didn't even get a that much of a back view. The best view I got of it as it was diving into the water. So like I said, I can't tell if it was male or female, but it was definitely uh some type of hairy primate. It had a gait of a man, it had a gait in a run style as it went through the woods. It wasn't like an ape or a chimpanzee or anything like that. It was on two legs. It was completely upright. Um, it dove like a diver. It dove like a, like a, like you or I would dive into a pool, put our, our hands out and put our head down. That's how it dove into the water.

• 56:20Wes Germer?

  Yeah. It reminds me of, uh, episode 1125 when I interviewed, um, Andy. He's a, uh, New York cop. He's retired NYPD, no nonsense guy, moved out to Pennsylvania and he had this encounter with this creature and he actually washed it for a long time. Uh, but once it noticed he was there, it, at first he thought it dove into the water, but he thinks it actually went down there. He was kind of on an embankment. He thinks it went down in between the water and the embankment to hide, or he wasn't going to go check to see where it went. He ended up leaving, but you know, you do hear about them swimming. There's a couple of accounts of eyewitnesses reporting seeing them

• 57:04Wes Germer?

  in the channel between here and Victoria, BC, uh, people on the ferry seeing them and even on the Columbia River. There's a lot of famous cases of people seeing them swim across the Columbia River.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  You took the words out of my mouth. I read, I read about the experience of the three or four of them that were, uh, cited swimming across the Columbia. Um, so not only are they, um, masters of their environment, uh, terrestrially, but I think they're also masters of, of the environment aquatically. Why wouldn't they be? They live in the woods. I mean, these, these, this isn't some animal that's just spends its weekends in the woods. This is the animal that is born, raised, we don't know the lifespan of these animals, but, um, this is something that the woods are its home. It's like our living room to them. They know every square inch of it. They know how to,

• 57:58Speaker 03

  they know everything. They know every trick in the book about evading the, probably the number one thing that they wanna, are, are most, and I don't know if these animals are, have fear. Um, I believe they do. Um, if they're flesh and blood and, you know, and obviously part of, you know, the evolutionary process, fear is something that all animals have, um, and react to it. I believe that they, uh, have the ability to, they're, they're masters of their environment, the absolute masters of their environment. I still can't believe that I couldn't see it come out of the water, though. I don't know what could have held its breath for that long. So as I want to describe this little bait here that it died, it jumped into. The lake was basically a circle. It was called Round Lake, actually,

• 58:41Speaker 03

  because of the shape of it. But it had one little, um, one little bay, and that's where, near the dock, and that's where it dove, dove in. And what the only thing it could have done is when it dove in the water, it would have to swim incredibly powerfully to work its way around a bend, and then maybe stick its mouth up to grab another gobble there, and then continue swimming to a point where I could have, where it knew I couldn't see it get out of the water, and that would have ran into the woods. But that, that was absolutely amazing to me that I was there in a second. Soon as it dove in the water, I was right on the edge. And that was kind of dumb. Because I, I thought to myself, well, Jesus, you know, I ran right up to the water, and literally looked down into the water, you know, hoping I'd catch a glimpse of it swimming away, which I didn't, which again

• 59:23Speaker 03

  is unbelievable. I literally was there a, just a split second after it dove in the water, and I didn't see it in the water. But yet the splash was still moving around. And the splash was incredible. Absolutely incredible wake when this thing jumped in the water. But, um, three to four minutes of sitting there, squatting on my, on my, you know, squatting, not on my knees, but squatting down next to the water, looking, and it doesn't come out of the water. But here's the, here's the kicker. Here's the kicker. Looking down into the mud, there, there was the footprint. Barefoot, dermal ridges, the whole ball of wax. And the terrain, I'm going to describe the terrain to you there. There were so many little branches, sticks, sharp objects, what have you. Uh,

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  there's no way in hell that any, any, any man or woman or anybody is going to be running through that barefoot. So it wasn't someone in a costume. It wasn't someone in a suit. It wasn't. It was a it was a live animal. It was a primate. It was, I'll say, you know, based on my my my educate, my background in biology and evolutionary biology and physical anthropology. Uh, this was a some type of undiscovered or yet unclassified hominid. But I believe that the government is aware of it. Um, I'm not really sure what their motive for hiding it. It the knowledge that it exists from the public. Um, that would be a fascinating conversation. But, uh, it's it's it's it's real. It's, uh, it's real.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  And it has the ability to put off some type of, um, uh, energy where we can clearly pick it up. You know, if I if that was a if it was a black bear, let's just say it was a black bear wandered into the cabin was hiding in that bedroom. I certainly would have had, I would have known them. I wouldn't, not a million years would I be would have had the sensation that something was in there. Or raccoon, let's say, or whatever kind of animal, a possum or something. You know, not in a million years. I would have walked in there and the damn thing would scampered out. I would have jumped back. I would have been shocked, of course. But I wouldn't have had the feeling, hey, there's something amiss here.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  There's something that is, uh, unmistakable, absolutely unmistakable. I'm telling you, it's like black and white. If that's how distinctive the the feeling is.

• 1:01:43Wes Germer?

  Yeah, and I know the feeling well. Um, I felt it a few times and even in my first encounter. Uh, you know, I'm not psychic. I don't have like special powers, but I remember even telling my brother, and this is before we even saw anything. Something's wrong here. Something's very, very wrong here. And I had a hard time kind of articulating why I was feeling that way. What I can tell you, though, years later, I was in a home that was haunted. There was poltergeist activity going on. And the moment I walked into that home, I felt it. It was like, and this isn't scientific, it's just feelings. But I had this feeling that.

• 1:02:26Wes Germer?

  Whatever was in that home hated my guts and it was like two inches away from my face, but I never saw anything. So it's kind of hard to really articulate that sort of feeling, but I can tell you it's very, very similar. The, the feeling of being in that haunted home and my spidey senses going up is very, very similar to when Sasquatches around. The feelings are almost identical and I'm not saying Sasquatch is a poltergeist. I'm saying that feeling is almost identical in those two separate situations.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  That's fascinating, Wes, that you made that parallel, that you, that you draw that parallel between those two, uh, between the, um, the, uh, poltergeist and the Bigfoot. I'm not saying they're related either, but the feeling and the sensation, the change in the atmosphere. Oh, another thing I want to bring up too. It was as still and as quiet as can be. And you hear that, how many times do you hear that in Bigfoot stories? That the woods go silent. Cause there was always bird chirping or chipmunks or wind or something. When I got out of my car to, to get into the cabin that morning, when I got back from town and they were out fishing, uh, it was like, it was like the earth stood still.

• 1:03:40Wes Germer?

  Yeah. A lot of eyewitnesses report that and I've experienced it. And to this day, I, I don't have a great answer for anyone on why that is. There's nothing about it that feels normal. Um, it feels very paranormal. You know, even the insects go quiet and I call it, you know, the forest taking a deep breath. It's like you go underwater. I wanted to ask you, you know, you had this encounter 30 years ago and you've kind of had a chance to look into this subject. What do you think that these creatures are?

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  Well, thanks for asking, um, because I have given it a little thought, you know, after 30 years, you, you get to reflect back on it. You, you keep asking yourself over and over, you know, what, and you, you could, and it's amazing too, that I keep coming up with a little extra details that I don't remember, that I didn't remember at the time of the incident, but that are, that I solely recall. Um, one was, um, uh, and I'll, I'll answer your question about what I think it is, but I wanted to tell you. I for a second there, I thought that it maybe had the ability to cloak itself or had some power of invisibility because I can't understand how I couldn't see it, exit that bedroom, go out the front door, and then make its way 60 yards to those woods within a fraction of a couple of seconds. I it's remarkable to me that I couldn't see it.

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  But it all changed when I when I when I just when I surprised it by walking directly to where it was hiding. It didn't expect me to go down by the lake, but that was the closest area it could find a big enough tree to hide behind. So that was just that was just a circumstance that it went to that spot. But when I went by it and I just and I disturbed it where it realized it couldn't hide from me and it had to run away from me. So I couldn't, I couldn't see it. And that's what I'm gonna reiterate and go back. That's why I think it didn't want to be seen. I think that was the biggest thing is it just didn't want to be seen. Um, because it could have bull rushed me right out of that cabin soon as I walked in it, right? Soon as I walked in that door and heard it heard me, it could have bull rushed right out of there if it wanted to, right? But

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  it didn't. It stayed as quiet as a mouse. As a matter of fact, it stayed immensely stealthy, making its way out the screen door. But it certainly didn't want to give me time by closing the door carefully, because I would have seen it then. It bolted out that door strong enough to make that door go flap, flap, flap as it closed. Um, so anyways, going back to your question, what do I think it is? Well, um, so I studied comparative anatomy at Illinois. I have a degree in biology. Um, I had I actually had more hours in anthropology than I did in biology. But I had every class. I had genetics, comparative anatomy, invertebrate zoology, invertebrate zoology, um, and you name it comparative anatomy, which is probably the best comparative anatomy. If someone knows comparative anatomy, they can really give you a great, it'd be like Dr. Jeff Muldram

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  or something. He could, you know, tell you about the gait and the shape of the foot and the position of the of the of the um, of the digits on the foot, like I'm referring to the toes, whatever, the pattern of that, the dermal ridges. Um, it's an unclassified To the public at least, maybe some kind of governmental labs or scientists that know what the hell it's been based on DNA analysis, but it, um, some unclassified hominid, it could be a cousin of ours, it may have even in, no, so I've heard some interesting stories about how Sasquatch could kidnapped women, children, I even heard a story about a female Sasquatch that kept a guy captive and used him as a, basically as a stud for over a

• 1:07:05Speaker 03

  week's time. I don't know if you heard that story, but I believe that they may have inbred with us. So if they're in the same genus that we are, which would be homo, hominid, they, they, they, there's a possibility that they could interbreed with us and produce offspring. And maybe those offspring would be fertile. So over time, this may have occurred, and I believe in some of the Indian lore, that there are tales that kind of allude to this, um, they may have inbred with us. So they may have, over time, adopted some of our characteristics through our, through exchanging, uh, exchange of DNA by interbreeding with Homo sapien, because I don't believe it is Homo sapien. I believe it's a cousin

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  and, but I believe that there could have been now over, and who knows how far back, a thousand years, 200 years, 500 years, um, that there was some inbreeding that took place. And over time, that's why we get such a, um, a diverse description from different people. Some people say, oh my God, it has human features. Other people say it looks like a gorilla. Other people even have said, oh my God, it looks, it had blonde hair. Other people have said it had red hair. So I believe that maybe there was some inbreeding taking place. That would be my hypothesis from a, from an edge, from my scientific view. And I'm not a PhD or a master's degree holder, but I do have a, a university level

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  degree in biology and anthropology. So I'm pretty well equipped to make a, a good, um, a good guess, an educated guess on what it was. So based on how it moved, based on its behavior, and with behavior, what I mean is how it, it avoided. avoided me by using stealth um its ability to um uh it's it's it's it's curiosity which in a in a way is a would be a a human characteristic and not a uh like a wild animal characteristic. Now, if there was food there, that'd be different. I could see a bear or some kind of thing going up. You left some food out or a pile of fish. Yeah, you're gonna attract some animals. But

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  there was no food in that cabin. There was no nothing in there. I believe it was so this is my take on it. I believe it it knew we were there because that was its that's its territory. Even though we own the property, we had the cabin. Mr. Faulkner, the guy headed before us, lived there solo as a kind of a hermit for probably since the thirties. Um, I believe that it knew all about the schedule, you know, the when people were there, when they weren't, when it could take opportunities to investigate. I believe that it um it knew that no one was in there. And I think curiosity got the better of it. I think it wanted to just go in there and look around. And what it did was it opened a few backpacks. It kind of took a few things

• 1:09:55Speaker 03

  out, just left them there. There was a wallet sitting there on the floor. Well, my cousin didn't leave his wallet on. I told I said, Danny, your wallet's on the floor here. He said, Well, I didn't leave that there. I said, Of course you didn't. I mean, what I said, Is there anything missing? Any credit cards? Any money? He said, No, everything is here. I think it was just curious. I think it wanted to go through and look and um because if it's intelligent enough, first of all, if it's a cousin of ours, if it has the intelligence to do all the stuff that I described earlier, it certainly has a sense of curiosity too that comes with that intelligence. Because intelligence is a is a function of curiosity and intelligence are

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  linked. You gain intelligence by exploring uh different things um and uh learning different things and by trial and error, so to speak. So I think this thing this animal said plenty of times, centuries upon centuries, as long as we've been here in our present form is Homo sapiens, possibly. I don't think this thing just occurred spontaneously 10,000 years ago. I think it was a a part of our evolutionary tree, leading back to the earliest bipedal hominids that in Africa. And I'm specifically referred to Gigantopithecus. So that's my, that's my take. That's my conclusion after my experience. But the hard evidence was not only seeing it with my own eyes, knowing it was there.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  Uh, the feeling, that's not hard evidence, but I'll tell you, it was nothing, it was absolutely indescribable and unmistakable. But the real hard evidence is when I looked down into the mud and I saw the footprint just where it dove in the water. And there it was, fresh as can be. After a couple of hours, that footprint was gone. And I kicked myself in the rear for not going out there and taking a photo of it. But with four cell phones, you know, nowadays we have a cell phone on us every minute of our lives, right? So we can take a photo of anything we want or a video. This was before the days of cell phones. And I didn't have the presence of mind when my cousins came in because I was too excited to show them what had happened and tell them what had happened. To say, hey, did anybody got a camera? Cause I should have went down there and took a photo of that footprint. I certainly didn't have any plaster or Paris with me to take a, take an imprint.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  But it was, it was at a stage in my life when it wasn't really that important. You know, I, I didn't think, uh, you know, do I really need to record this? So was I, you know, am I part of a, you know, B F R O, am I in a club looking for Bigfoot? I mean, nowadays we have, you know, clubs built around the existence of this creature and finding and proving its existence. Back in the seven, back in the nineties, certainly not in the seventies, when we first started the wood knocking, we didn't, we didn't really know what the hell it was. We just, you know, said, hey, God, that's awfully strange noise. But now, after the fact, I have, I'm firmly believe that that wood knocking was a, a, a group, a family, a clan, whatever you want to call it, extended family of Bigfoot. And they were communicating or they were signaling us because they knew we were there.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  They could, they, they, they noticed our presence when we were there. So they would knock maybe to tell us, hey, this is our territory, don't come near her. God knows what the reason for that wood knocking was, but it happened all the time. And now that, now after the fact of realizing that that was a, that's a, a common element in most of these Bigfoot encounters, that, um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you with almost a hundred percent certainty that that wood knocking that we heard was, was this, this animal that I encountered.

• 1:13:17Wes Germer?

  Yeah, I kinda wanted to pick your brain a little bit on this evolution, Ron. As you and I were talking before we started recording, I'm not a huge fan of the Darwin evolution theory. I'm not so sure that, you know, Darwin kinda came up with this cockamamie theory. And I wonder if anyone asked any follow-up questions, or it seems like science and it was taught in schools as, you know, gospel, when it really wasn't. And I know he studied invertebrates, but when you look at his, his background, I think he was a better geologist than he really was a biologist. And going back to what you were just saying there towards the end, with regard to Sasquatch

• 1:14:02Wes Germer?

  kind of integrating with Homo sapiens. For the most part, animals have to be so closely related for them to be able to have offspring. And even when they're a little bit off, nine times out of 10, that offspring will be a hybrid and it'll be unable to reproduce. There's other examples that we know that rule doesn't apply, like with lions and tigers when they make the ligra. But even that situation's a little bit unique because they have the same genus. But let's take chimpanzees, for example, and humans. We know that we share about 98, almost 99% of the same DNA.

• 1:14:46Wes Germer?

  And even with the DNA, you know, with insertions and deletions, when you take those into account, that 98, 99% closely matching our DNA might fall to like 96%, which is very, very close to us. And we know that, you know, if some freak wanted to breed with a chimp, it's not gonna work. They're not gonna have any sort of offspring, even having that same close genetic makeup. When you talk about Sasquatch, and there's a lot of accounts, even Native American accounts of them kind of reporting that Sasquatch is able to breed with humans.

• 1:15:30Wes Germer?

  In my mind, going off of your, your education, because you, you know this way better than I do. In order for a human to successfully breed with a Sasquatch, that Sasquatch would have to be Homo sapien, correct?

• 1:15:48Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, it would have to be, it would have to not only be in the same genus, but it would have to be our, the same species, which was sapiens.

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  Now, now is it a Homo sapien that evolved through, by the mechanism that drives evolution, which is environment? Maybe it, it changed its morphology. So it could be, here's, here's another take on this. Okay. It could be, and mutation is also the driver of, of evolution. So the, it could be Homo sapien. So it can interbreed, but it could have mutated or it could have adapted to its environment. And thus you have the hair, the, a much, much greater monofolical on the, on the body. Thus producing hair for insulation because it lives outdoors.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  The musculature, the, I'm trying to think of some, I mean, I, I don't have one in front of me. I don't have enough of what is, but there are enough similarities that I've, that I'm aware of. I have seen some pictures, by the way, of Bigfoot that are purported to be pictures of Bigfoot. We don't know whether they're CGI, we don't know whether they're, you know, fakes or mockups or something. But looking at some of the features that I've seen on some pictures that look to me fairly genuine, fairly authentic. I can see enough similarities that maybe, maybe the differences just became, we are, they are Homo sapien. They're just have a line that is genetically stronger, hairier,

• 1:17:20Speaker 03

  has possibly even some ways of communicating and getting on some borderline kind of

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  weirdo stuff here, but with telepathy, you know, with a communicate. I mean, it's proven that even among us, a modern human beings, that telepathy is proven. We all have it, we just don't know how to use it. Maybe they've developed that sense greater than we have because they don't have communication like we have. They don't have telephone, they don't have writing, they don't have, so maybe they've developed that sense a little greater than we have. You know, it's when we don't use something is when we lose it.

• 1:17:57Wes Germer?

  Let me ask you, Ron, I mean, when you talk about changing morphology, I get what you mean. You're talking about like the structure, the, when you take an organism, you're talking about the size, the shape, kind of the characteristics of it. And I realize that when you crack open a book, adaptation falls under evolution. And I'm not so sure I agree with that on a traditional sense when we're talking about Darwin. But adaptation, we can prove, I mean, it's something, I mean, why are American men much larger and generally stronger than Filipino men? It has to do with environment, has to do with food, diet.

• 1:18:39Wes Germer?

  There's factors that go into it, but again, we're talking about adaptation, not so much Darwin's evolution theory, correct?

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  No, no. So the, when you were talking about the differences between, even though, you know, if I wanted to marry a Chinese girl, of course, we could have a child and that child would be normal. You know, have kids and all that. Okay, so that's called, those are called, that's called a haplotype. And because, and then it isn't, and the reason we are different, the reason they have the epicentric fold, the reason we have different pigmentation, the reason we have different height, like the people in New Guinea are all short, the people in Norway are all tall. They belong to different hapdo groups. And there's, there's about 12 hapdo groups that homo sapiens, and it's basically goes back to where they were, where they evolved, where they began, whether it was Africa, whether it was Europe, whether it was Asia.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  And then you have the difference that we're talking about, why Bigfoot maybe have these different adaptations, because those were adaptations to do to their environment. So, and over time, the, and it just like the, you know, take two animals, the stronger one's going to survive, it's survival of the fittest. So the one that, if you've got two animals in an Arctic environment and one has a thicker coat, it's more likely to survive, breed, have offspring, so and pass its genes along to the next generation. And over a period of time, you're going to see that change occur. Um, there's also another theory that mutation, that evolution occurs in spurts and not over

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  periods of time by mutations. And an animal may have a mutation that gives it an advantage and is able to reproduce um or defeat the other contenders. Like if it's another male that's competing for females and what have you. So that could change the morphology too. There's several mechanisms at play there. But going back to your question, why we're different than Asians, or why we're different than Africans, or what have you, even though we're all of the same, we all have the same root. We all have the same mother, believe it or not. At one time, there was one female, and we could all trace our ancestry back to that one female. Um, I'm not trying to sound like a know it all. I mean, that's just basically evolutionary biology. They guys, the geneticists have figured that out a long time ago. But um, which is amazing, isn't it?

• 1:20:57Wes Germer?

  Yeah. And I really appreciate you answering my uh dumb questions, Ron. I hope I'm not coming across, like I said, argumentative. Um, I don't think you sound like a know it all. I really do appreciate it, because I mean, this is your wheelhouse. And I'm sure the audience is like, man, Wes is asking a lot of dumb questions today. Uh, so I appreciate you being patient with me. You brought up the uh, the haplotypes. And basically, my understanding of that, and correct me if I'm wrong, uh, but let's stay with uh, from a homo sapien point of view, uh, we're talking about the same genetic makeup. So if there's

• 1:21:37Wes Germer?

  two different races of humans, and they have a child, there's variance that might change. Like, for example, the pigment of the skin, or uh, you know, different characteristics and traits that the child would get from uh, both parents. There isn't quite the drastic change in the biological makeup of that child. So for example, like with Sasquatch, and you've seen him, Ron, I've seen him, you hear eyewitnesses describe them. Physically, they, it doesn't sound like anything close to us. Uh, if two different races through

• 1:22:18Wes Germer?

  haplotypes have have offspring, that offspring isn't going to all of a sudden have long arms almost down to its knees. Um, isn't going to have the ability to move faster than any human alive, isn't going to have like a wide jaw, you could fit two softballs in. None of the overall genetic makeup that makes us Homo sapiens changes even with haplotypes. With Sasquatch, it's like it looks more like a great ape than it does a Homo sapien. They look nothing like us. And that's just kind of where I struggle with it.

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  My best guess, and all it is is a guess, you know, it's a, it's just a hypothesis is that, and I'm basing this on my, not my background in biology and evolutionary biology and physical anthropology. Those three combined, I think are the ones that probably shed the most light on that particular question, is that they're more than likely some, an evolutionary cousin of ours. Somehow they've, I don't, in other words, I don't think they're their own separate line. They have to be within our genus. So they have to be, they have to be some kind of hominid.

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  I don't think they're, I don't think that they are a, an ape, which are not hominids.

• 1:23:49Wes Germer?

  Right. You know, you had brought up earlier that humans can all, regardless of race or whatever, we all trace our ancestry back to one mother. From Darwin's evolutionary theory, where did that one mother come from?

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  Right. It's like the chicken and the egg question.

• 1:24:16Speaker 03

  That mutation,

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  some mutation that gave an evolutionary, that gave a, that gave an advantage to some, to some, to an entity, to an animal, that gave it an evolutionary, that gave it, so a mutation in the form of a physical adaptation, that gave an evolutionary advantage that over time, and that's the mechanism, I believe, you know, whether you buy into Darwinism or not. But it doesn't have to occur exactly in the fashion that he laid out. But um, I think that's why we have, uh, you know, we've evolved from a small bipedal like Australopithecus um, to modern Homo sapiens. You know, here's another good thing too. What

• 1:25:05Speaker 03

  about uh, what about uh, Neanderthal man? So supposedly, we, modern humans, uh, we um, uh, we absorbed them. We absorbed Neanderthal man. Um, by, in other words, they didn't just die out um, all by themselves on a different line, that we absorbed them into our genetic pool, uh, you know, by having sex with them and by, you know, the offspring, uh, taking on the uh, the um, uh, the features or the characteristics of the uh, whatever gave it more uh, ability to survive. And that was probably intelligence. Cause Cro-Magnon man probably, I mean, uh, Neanderthal man probably

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  had to, was very probably well adapted to its environment, from a physical standpoint.

• 1:25:55Wes Germer?

  Yeah, that's a good point, Ron. I've often wondered really what were the Neanderthals? And we know that they were human. I mean, they buried their dead, they used tools, uh, they had a language, they played music, you know, they had a social structure. Um, and I think Homo sapiens and Neanderthals actually share that same common ancestor you were talking about, uh, earlier, going back to the, the female. You know, the other thing I think about too with um, Darwin's evolution theory, why don't we see it today? You know, we, we see adaptation and you'd think evolution would be on a linear scale where it would

• 1:26:40Wes Germer?

  continue and we would see it today. Uh, going back to the common ancestor as far as the one mother we all share. Um, so is your, your theory is that two Australopithecines, they got together and they created a Homo sapien mother? And it's a sincere question. I'm not being a smart ass.

• 1:27:05Speaker 03

  Um, I'll try to put that into a, uh, something that I maybe a little more simplistic terms. If you had a population of an animal that obviously didn't, that was, uh, that's, let's say 500,000 years ago, or 800,000 years ago, or a million years ago, because using the fossil record, we can't trace our early ancestors, uh, back about that far. So you have a population, um, and it's relatively isolated. And within that population, um, or, and there's two, two theories on this. One is we have a population that's isolated.

• 1:27:44Speaker 03

  Another theory is you have a population that, two populations that are, are isolated and somehow they mix together. So on the first theory where we have a, an isolated population, you could have a mutation within that population. And that, um,

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  gives that, that, that crea- that being the ability to pass its genes on better than, in other words, a higher rate of survivability. And because of that higher rate of survivability, and I'm going to try to give an example of that. Let's say that an animal is born, um, in a population because of a mutation that has a greater, a higher level of pigmentation in it, which would give it better UV, uh, protection. So it would more than likely be able to survive than the, than the, uh, and another example of an individual in that population that didn't have it. Or let's, let's even use a better one. Let's use one that, um, is faster.

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  Or even has the ability, maybe is a little smarter to create a tool to help with a process, maybe of finding food. Or extracting food, or, or, that would give it an advantage in as far as survivability, its survival rate. And if it had a greater survival rate, it would be able to, it's more than likely that it would produce offspring where, because it's got higher survivability than it's, um, some, another individual in that population. So what happens is then, so you were, and how, how I'm tying this into the first mother was, there was maybe a, um, a, and you know, you go all the way back, they say phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny.

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  And what that means is that, you know, even the earliest, uh, so if you, if, if you take, um, evolution in its strictest definition, we basically crawled out of the ocean, right? So the, so we're all vertebrates. Not all animals. I mean, a lot of animals are invertebrates, okay? Snails, slugs, insects, all that, okay? But more modern animals, we all have a vertebrate. Even primitive fish have vertebrate. So some fish a long time ago was able to make a, uh, a, an evolutionary leap. It was able to come on land a little bit. And maybe that gave it the ability to, um, hide from a predator, or find a new food source. And

• 1:30:20Speaker 03

  that would increase the odds of it growing its population. So that's how, that's how it would, uh, establish itself as a population. It would give it a little bit of advantage. So supposedly a fish crawled out onto a primitive vertebrate, was able to use its four legs. Cause you know, if you go back into the fossil record, even primitive fish, primitive vertebrates have pectoral and pelvic fins that they eventually evolved into our arms and legs. It's bilateral symmetry is the word for it. So. Over a period of time, that mutation or that characteristic, maybe it is even a mutation, maybe it's not even a mutation, maybe it's in a spectrum within a population. And the spectrum that exhibits that certain characteristic that gives it a greater rate

• 1:31:04Speaker 03

  of survivability, that's the one that's able to establish its population and grow it over a period of time. And that just keeps recurring over and over. But that's supposedly what happened, you know, supposedly a primitive vertebrate was able to live on land, so a fish became a reptile, or an amphibian. Amphibian became, because amphibian means its life cycle has to occur in the water, but it can also live on land. Then amphibians had an evolutionary jump due to a mutation that allowed them to reproduce outside of the water, maybe by creating an egg with a shell around it, so it doesn't dry out. And then that became reptilian, like snakes.

• 1:31:44Speaker 03

  And then reptilians adapted and formed another adaptation and gave them a higher rate of survivability, and that allowed them to go into primitive mammals. And primitive mammals then evolved based on, and that is basically what I'm describing is just the raw mechanism of evolution. I know you discussed that you're not a believer in it, and I don't know if that's what you're trying to convey to me, that you didn't believe in evolution. I think a lot of people, you know, so what they've used to prove, or to try to prove evolution, or at least Darwinian evolution, is the fossil record and comparative anatomy.

• 1:32:27Speaker 03

  So they found fossils, and they're able to date them. And then, of course, if something is older, in these stratigraphy, if the fossil is embedded in an older rock or an older strata, they can basically make the conclusion that that goes back to a farther period, whether it's the Devonian, the Jurassic, the Triassic, and this goes all the way back past dinosaurs. So. What happens then is basically you have a population that just keeps using an adaptation to increase its rate of survivability and then you have, so maybe I'm not hitting exactly on the point you're looking for, because I'm basically just describing a simple, pretty

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  simple concept of evolution based on mutation and how mutations help a population, whether it be fish, squirrels, men, it doesn't matter what it is, increase their odds of survivability. And when you increase your odds of survivability, you increase your odds of reproduction. So you're able to pass your genes into the gene pool. And animals that don't exhibit that particular characteristic that gives them that higher rate, their genes eventually die off and are eliminated from the gene pool. And so that's what makes the gene pool change. And then when you have the change, you get differences. And that can be as minor as coloration, or if an animal lives in the jungle, and obviously if it's got better camouflage, it's going to survive predators better than the one that doesn't. And so that's kind of essentially

• 1:33:51Speaker 03

  how that works. But I think the subject of Sasquatch, what it is, how did it evolve? There's so many different, so many different, so many different theses, there's so many different ideas of what it could have, I mean, some people say it's interdimensional. Some people say that it's alien, maybe it's not even from planet Earth. I don't buy that. I just don't buy that. There's too, there's too many similarities to us. Again, you used the word morphology. The morphology is so similar to ours. The behavior is so much like ours.

• 1:34:37Wes Germer?

  Yeah, and I don't want you to think I'm tearing apart, you know, your belief in evolution. To me, it sounds like a house of cards. It sounds like a hell of a lot of luck. If one of those things fails, all of mankind fails. And for nothing to fail, it seems like a hell of a lot of luck to me. But, you know, on the other hand, I could be too stupid to understand evolution as well. I'm willing to, uh, to agree to that. Um, kind of a last question I want to ask you. And again, I really appreciate your feedback on this, Ron. It's cool to have this conversation with you. I'm sure the audience is bored to death and probably turned off the podcast, but my last question to you,

• 1:35:21Wes Germer?

  with regard to evolution, I was telling you earlier, evolution, the whole theory is on a linear scale. So it never changes. It's something that, uh, is constant. So if you saw it in the past, you would see it today. Where would we see evolution today?

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  Okay, so evolution is most readily, um, seen in populations. And I'm going to give you a perfect example. There's a fruit fly called Drosophila. And you learn that in my first year in college and you can manipulate the characteristics of the population of Drosophila within a couple of days, literally, because it life, it's life cycle. It only lives for like a day. It reproduces extremely quickly. And so basically in like in biology 101, or even maybe genetics of an early or a lower level genetics class at university level, they, we would use Drosophila. And we could actually manipulate the characteristics of that population in real time.

• 1:36:22Speaker 03

  Within a few weeks, I could change the, um, the size of the wings or the, um, uh, the rate of the metabolism. Or the, there's so many different little things. So yes, in a population that has a very short lifespan, that, um, that you can manipulate in a laboratory very easily, because out in the, in the wild in nature, it's very difficult to see, uh, evolution in action. But in a laboratory setting, we do have, um, we do have mechanisms. We'd have, uh, experiments that can show how we can, um, evolve. If that's the way you want to say it. We could use the word evolve or we'd use change, but we could change its, um, its morphology.

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  It's physiology, it's, uh, metabolic rates, it's, um, ability to survive temperature. Um, we give it different characteristics right in the laboratory, just by manipulating the population.

• 1:37:17Wes Germer?

  That's really cool. I didn't know that about that fruit fly. Uh, let me ask you, could you change or evolve that fruit fly into a bee?

• 1:37:29Speaker 03

  No, no, I don't think we can, uh, at least not, not at that stage yet. Um, you know, they're using CRISPR technology right now to insert, you were talking about early about deletion and insertion of, of, of a loci on the chromosome sites where you can actually, you know, um, they're actually, I don't know if you knew about this, but they're actually doing the experiment right now where they're going to clone a woolly mammoth. And what they're doing is they're inserting, they're taking some modern DNA from the Indian elephant and they're taking some, uh, frozen DNA that they found maybe in Siberia or somewhere and they're using CRISPR technology to create mammoth again. So you borrow some genes, but obviously that's science, you know, and that's not happening

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  in, in nature. Uh, in nature, it happens at a much slower rate, I believe, but using CRISPR technology, well, we can delete and insert genes, uh, who knows what we can come up with all kinds of chimeras and hybrids and things like that.

• 1:38:25Wes Germer?

  Yeah, I, I think that it's a terrible idea. I don't have anything against, uh, woolly mammoths, but you know, at what point does it stop? You know, what point does, uh, some egotistical scientist who wants to play God, what's his next dumb idea? You know, what's his next idea on what he wants to create? And, you know, maybe that's why I'm not a scientist because I'm, I'm kind of jaded that way. But it is crazy how our science has advanced so much that we can bring back something like that. And, you know, I really appreciate you coming on, Ron, and sharing what happened to

• 1:39:05Wes Germer?

  you and, you know, answering my dumb questions about evolution. I've always wanted to talk about this on the show and I'm really glad I was able to, uh, today. So thank you so much for your time. I'm sorry to keep you so long, but I really enjoyed chatting with you and I really enjoyed having you on, Ron.

• 1:39:24Speaker 03

  You have a great show, Wes. Keep up the good work. I'll be listening to more of your podcasts because I love to hear other people's experiences. You've got great guests and it was a, it was a, it was a pleasure to be on the show and it was an awful honor to be able to get, for you to let me share my experience with your audience.

• 1:39:45Wes Germer?

  The honor was mine. Thank you again, Ron. And that's it for tonight, everyone. Remember, if you've had an encounter, shoot me an email. My email address is [email protected]. And if you get a chance, check out sasquatchchronicles.com. You can become a member and get additional shows. Until next time, everyone.

• 1:40:17Speaker 06

  She's got a smile and it seems to me reminds me of childhood memories where everything was as fresh as a bright blue sky.

• 1:40:33Speaker 06

  And now and then when I see her face, she takes me away to that special place. If I stare too long, I probably break down and cry.

• 1:40:50Speaker 06

  Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, sweet child of mine.

• 1:40:58Speaker 06

  Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, sweet lover mine.

• 1:41:15Speaker 06

  She's got eyes of the blue as skies, says if they thought of rain, I'd hate to look into those eyes and see an answer, baby. Her hair reminds me of a warm, safe place where as a child I'd hide. And I prayed for the thunder and the rain to quiet the

• 1:41:45Speaker 07

  Pass me by, I Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, sweet child of mine

• 1:41:56Speaker 07

  Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, sweet lover mine

• 1:42:04Speaker 07

  Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, sweet child of mine

• 1:42:13Speaker 07

  Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, sweet lover mine

• 1:42:20Speaker 07

  I'm singing, where do we go now? Where do we go? Where do we go now? Where do we go? Where do we go now? Sweet child of mine, yeah I'm singing, where do we go now? Where do we go? Where do we go now? Where do we go? Where do we go now? Sweet child of mine, yeah I'm singing, where do we go now? Where do we go? Where do we go now? Where do we go? Where do we go now?

• 1:43:05Speaker 07

  Sweet child of mine Oh, sweet child of mine

• 1:43:14Speaker 07

  Sweet child of mine

• 1:43:18Speaker 07

  Sweet child of mine