SC EP:1249 Laura Krantz

Laura Krantz is a journalist, editor and producer, in both radio and print, and co-founder of Foxtopus Ink. Her podcast, Wild Thing has received critical acclaim from Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic, which named it one of the best 50 podcasts in 2018 and 2020. Wild Thing is also the inspiration for a series of non-fiction, middle-grade books from ABRAMS Kids, including The Search for Sasquatch, Is There Anybody Out There?, and Do You Believe In Magic? In addition to Wild Thing, her recent work includes reporting, editing and production work on Master Plan (The Lever), The Syndicate (Imperative Entertainment/Foxtopus), Side Door (Smithsonian), Air/Space (Smithsonian), and others. Laura's prior experience includes a decade of editing and producing at NPR in Washington, DC, and at KPCC in Los Angeles.

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.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  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? Jesus Christ, you better... Karen, see ya! Hello? Get somebody out of here. What's going on now, sir? That son of a bitch is about six foot nine, I don't know. Do you see him now, sir? Yes, I'm looking right at him. Uh-oh.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  My name is Atlas and you're listening to the best podcast ever, Sasquatch Chronicles.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  Woohoo!

• 2:09Wes Germer?

  Welcome to the show. Tonight, we're joined by Laura Krantz. Laura is a journalist, podcaster, and author. She's the creator and host of the podcast Wild Thing. I've been a genuine fan of the podcast Wild Thing. It first came out, I want to say it was 2018. And across the three seasons, the show explores a range of topics. The first season really dives into the world of Bigfoot. Let's jump into it tonight. I want to welcome Laura to the show. Laura, thanks for coming on.

• 2:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm excited to be here. You're like the number one Bigfoot podcast. So it's fun to be able to talk to you.

• 2:53Wes Germer?

  I appreciate you saying that. I'm not sure if that's true or not. I really am a fan of your work. One of the things that stood out to me about Wild Thing was the way you structured the show. And I know the audience probably doesn't care about how sausage is made, but what I really liked was the transitions, the fading in and out of interviews, how you added narration, and then you kind of returned to the conversation. It gave it a really engaging rhythm. And before we kind of start off our conversation, I'll play a clip. This is from Wild Thing, the podcast. You can get it on any podcast player. This is from season one,

• 3:34Wes Germer?

  episode four, Eyewitnesses. And it kind of highlights that style I was talking about.

• 3:41Speaker 05

  On a road trip with his family, late at night in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, Hal Haldeman saw something.

• 3:48Speaker 06

  As we come around through an S-turn, we lift this thing up that was standing under a tree right on the edge of a road.

• 3:55Speaker 06

  The creature was taller than the van.

• 3:57Speaker 05

  Taller than the van. Well over seven feet tall, he thought. And absolutely gigantic.

• 4:03Speaker 06

  Massive upper body. Big, huge triceps hanging down off the arms. And it was very light colored. Almost white, but kind of dirty, maybe gray.

• 4:13Speaker 05

  He shot right past it before slamming on the brakes, bringing his giant van to a standstill.

• 4:18Speaker 06

  I said to my wife, I said, "Do you see that?" And she goes, "Yes." And I said, "I gotta go back." And so when I started to throw it into reverse, she freaked out and started screaming and clawing on me and wouldn't let me go back.

• 4:30Speaker 05

  The sound of her panic woke their three little kids who were sleeping in the backseat.

• 4:35Speaker 06

  "What was it, Dad? What was it?" And I said, "I think we just saw a Bigfoot." He says, "Go back, go back, go back." And my wife's just crazy screaming. And I didn't go back. And that's mostly what eats at me. I want to see it again.

• 4:51Speaker 05

  This happened 28 years ago, and it still gnaws at him.

• 4:56Speaker 06

  As a matter of fact, though, sometimes I feel in ways it's ruined my life.

• 5:00Speaker 05

  Hal wasn't someone who believed in Bigfoot, but that one sighting changed everything. It took over his life. He moved his family from Arizona to the Pacific Northwest and kept trying to find the creature. But he hasn't seen anything since. Not a glimpse. Hal's not alone. Thousands of others have reported seeing Bigfoot and become consumed by the search.

• 5:22Speaker 07

  To me, it was just a big mountain gorilla. Except it didn't have canines. It had big teeth like chicklets.

• 5:27Speaker 08

  When my son and I were driving up the road, this animal crossed in front of us, and I had to stop the truck. What I thought in my head was orangutan, a baby orangutan.

• 5:38Speaker 05

  But this is in Canada, not exactly prime orangutan habitat.

• 5:42Speaker 08

  And so I started thinking, "Yeah, that was probably a baby Bigfoot."

• 5:48Speaker 05

  Some of these stories are decades old, and the people telling them live hundreds of miles apart. I've hung out with them on weekend camping trips and at seminars and spent time talking to them one-on-one. And for the most part, I really don't think they're nuts. All of them have seen something that they can't explain any other way.

• 6:08Speaker 05

  I'm Laura Krantz, and this is Wild Thing, a series about Sasquatch science and society, the search for Bigfoot, and why we want so badly for it to be real.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  Eyewitness accounts, these stories of people's personal Bigfoot encounters, they're completely fascinating. While I believe that many of these witnesses saw something, I also know that their stories are hard to verify. So did my cousin Grover Krantz, one of the world's most respected Bigfoot researchers. At a Sasquatch conference way back in 1978, he spoke about his hesitation in relying on eyewitnesses.

• 6:53Speaker 09

  Eyewitnesses can be interviewed, studied, cross-examined, but only by a handful of curious scientists. Very soon, they will decide to shut up or else change their stories.

• 7:04Speaker 05

  I found this tape of Grover in the Smithsonian's archives, and it illustrates how wary he was about these stories. But his papers also contained a list of supposed Sasquatch sightings, so it seems like he couldn't completely dismiss them either. For each sighting, he'd note the date, the location, the name of the witness, and whether he thought the stories were legit. He'd put a big red X by most of them, ones he'd checked out and that didn't pass muster. But about a handful had question marks or a maddening "maybe" scribbled next to them, and that's it, no additional information. If he took more detailed notes, they're not with the rest of his papers. Diane Horton, Grover's fourth wife,

• 7:45Speaker 05

  we met her in the first episode, she remembers collecting eyewitness accounts with him. He also got testimonials in the mail.

• 7:52Speaker 10

  And he had hundreds of those letters. With a brief little story, "I was out by the barn and this Bigfoot thing walked by."

• 8:03Speaker 05

  But he didn't keep any of those either. Horton says he didn't think they were sufficient enough evidence on their own, although he still checked them out, just in case.

• 8:15Wes Germer?

  You know, Grover Krantz, he was an anthropologist at Washington State University. I would say at that time, he was kind of the Bigfoot world's Jeff Meldrum. You know, he was a very serious scientist, and he was willing to look into the subject. You know, I never met Grover, but I've probably watched every interview he has given. And I think I would have really liked him because he was brilliant, he was sarcastic, he was likeable. There was something very likeable about him. He was funny, he was charming, but he also could be kind of a bit of a dick.

• 8:52Wes Germer?

  And I say that with fondness. That was probably my favorite part about him. How did you first discover that you were related to him?

• 9:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, so sadly, I didn't find out I was related to him until after he'd already passed. So I never got the opportunity to meet him, which he was just up the road from me when I was living in Walla Walla and I still kind of kick myself for not making the connection sooner. But um, yeah, I was actually living in DC at the time and there was this big article in the Washington Post that was talking about um, how they were going to do this display in the American Museum of Natural History, I'm sorry, the National Museum of Natural History, about forensic anthropology. And one of the exhibits was going to be this guy and his dog. And it was modeled on a photo they had of, you know, a tall guy in someone's

• 9:42Speaker 05

  backyard and this giant dog with his paws up on his shoulder. So I'm reading this article and learning about it. And the guy's name is Grover Krantz. And I was like, huh, well, same last name. That's kind of interesting. And then I started reading a little bit more and found out he was from Utah, from Salt Lake City, which is where my dad's family was from. Um, he was kind of the right age to be in like the same cohort as my grandfather. And I just, you know, sent my dad a note. I was like, hey, are we related to this guy? And my dad said, yeah, that was your grandfather's cousin. And then, you know, the article also had this little, little paragraph that said he was known for driving around the Pacific Northwest with a spotlight and a rifle, searching for Sasquatch. And I was like, who is this

• 10:26Speaker 05

  man? I need to know more. So that's really how I learned about Grover and kind of how I got sucked into this, this world.

• 10:35Wes Germer?

  And Laura, not really having the background, the Bigfoot background, or really having a major interest in it. When you watched the interviews with Grover, what did you think watching these different interviews as he talked about the subject?

• 10:52Speaker 05

  I admired his confidence because he was like, this is what I'm interested in. This is what I want to pursue. And I don't give a rat's patootie what anybody thinks about me, which was pretty amazing. There's like one video of him where he's like pasted a Cro-Magnon brow, like a big, thick brow ridge onto his own face. And I think he carved it out of like foam rubber and was walking around outside on the campus at Washington State University where he taught. And he was trying to figure out what the evolutionary advantage of having a big brow ridge like that would be. And I can only imagine what people must have thought about him as he's like walking around campus with this thing like pasted to his face.

• 11:35Speaker 05

  But I spoke to, you know, during the process of doing this podcast, I spoke to people who had had him as a student, either undergrad or graduate student, and they loved him. They just said he was such a great teacher and he was, you know, all the things you mentioned where I guess he kind of arrogant and like very self assured, but at the same time, he loved talking to his students. He loved sharing stories with them and he gave them the, his time and attention where I think a lot of professors are kind of like, class is over, you know, see you next week.

• 12:09Wes Germer?

  Yeah, he was the greatest. I really wish I could have met him. I love the old interviews where, you know, some guy's asking him one ridiculous question after another. And like, he lights up a cigarette and he's like, what's your question again? I thought he was the greatest. When did you say you found out that you were actually related to him?

• 12:30Speaker 05

  I, let's see, I think I read that article in like 2006. So I think he'd passed away two to three years earlier. I think he died in 2003, I want to say, maybe it was 2002. And yeah, that article didn't come out until 2006. And then I kind of sat on it for a long time and didn't, I didn't really start working on the podcast until almost 10 years later. Um, my husband kind of pushed me into doing it. He'd been an anthropology professor and Grover was well known in anthropology circles. Whether or not you studied Bigfoot or you'd gone to Washington State, like his was a name that people knew, partially because of the work that he'd done on human evolution and human migration too. So when my husband and I started dating and I mentioned I was related to Grover Krantz, he was like, what?

• 13:15Speaker 05

  You have to, you have to write a book. It's like, I can't write a book, but eventually I got around to doing a podcast.

• 13:22Wes Germer?

  And you started your podcast, what was it in 2018?

• 13:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I started working on it in 2016, but it came out, the first season came out in 2018.

• 13:33Wes Germer?

  You know, prior to actually starting the podcast, what was kind of your take on Bigfoot? What was your feelings on the subject as a whole?

• 13:41Speaker 05

  Honestly, I hadn't ever really thought about Bigfoot. I mean, I grew up in Idaho, like I went camping all the time. We were out in the woods a lot and like Bigfoot wasn't a story that was really present, at least where I grew up. Um, you know, I'd seen Harry and the Hendersons and classic movie, but it was just sort of more like tabloid, front of the National Enquirer, maybe a campfire story kind of thing. So I hadn't put much thought into it, which I think is why Grover's, the fact that he was both a scientist and he was certain of Bigfoot's existence, or was, you know, very much wanted to prove Bigfoot's existence or find if Bigfoot was real. I was kind of like, how can you be both of those things?

• 14:25Speaker 05

  And that's sort of what pushed me down that road. Um, I just, I was like, maybe I missed something. Maybe there's this whole thing about Bigfoot or there's, there's information about Bigfoot that I've, I've completely just missed and there's more to this myth than I thought.

• 14:43Wes Germer?

  Tell me about starting the podcast and specifically season one. Did your opinion change about the subject as you did the podcast?

• 14:52Speaker 05

  It did to some degree. I mean, I went in being pretty skeptical and I'm still skeptical. I haven't seen the kind of evidence that I think would have convinced Grover or convinced me that Bigfoot exists, but I think I understand.

• 15:10Speaker 05

  More why people are fascinated. I under, you know, I have talked to so many people, like not nearly as many people as you have, like, how many episodes, like 1,400 episodes at this point?

• 15:22Wes Germer?

  Yeah, I think I'm about 50 shows shy of 1,300.

• 15:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. So you've obviously talked to tons and tons and tons of people, but all of these people who have had some pretty intense and kind of questionable experiences out in the woods where they've experienced something that they, they just can't recognize what happened. And a number of those people are people who should know what's happening simply because they are naturalists or, you know, people in the biological sciences or fishing game, wildlife, like they know these ecosystems, they know the kinds of animals that are in them. And then they have an experience that sort of, you know, just changes their opinion on everything. I think hearing those conversations with people, sitting down, looking them in

• 16:08Speaker 05

  the eye, hearing what they had to say and realizing that they've had these kinds of experiences, made me think a little bit more about the possibility of Bigfoot's existence, or at least understand how people end up thinking that Bigfoot might exist.

• 16:24Wes Germer?

  I think Grover wrote like over 60 academic articles and 10 or 11 books. And I've watched his different lectures and interviews. And even where he's holding up these prints, and he would argue that in these prints, there's anatomical details consistent with like a real primate. Even before Jeff Mulder came along, Grover was talking about the flexible midfoot, or the mid tarsal break for the pressure distribution. And some of, even some of the casts he had actually showed dermal ridges, which would be very hard to fake and kind of get by a guy like Grover, who has a trained eye for this. Being kind of

• 17:08Wes Germer?

  skeptical, did you get a chance to go through Grover's evidence?

• 17:13Speaker 05

  I did. I read his book, which is in my bookshelf somewhere down there. And then I was able to go through his, you know, he donated all of his stuff to the National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, and I was able to go through his stuff at the archives, which was pretty incredible, you know, seeing the casts, reading some of his papers, the video where he tries to mimic the walk with, mimic Patty's walk in the Patterson Gimlin film. You know, I am not an expert in the Bigfoot world and especially going into the research for this. I may not have necessarily known what I was

• 17:56Speaker 05

  looking at either. So I'll be the first to admit that there could be stuff in there that I just didn't recognize it for what it was. But in reading his papers and in looking at the materials that he had, you know, it was clear that he was gathering pieces to try and make a solid case. But even in his own writing, at the end, he's like, I still am not convinced that it's, that Bigfoot's out there. I still want that body or that big piece of a body. It was really interesting. You know, he'd made it very clear that he was going to go out and try and hunt for a Bigfoot. And then the letters that he got from people, just these like, I can't believe you would do this, even if Bigfoot doesn't exist. How dare you go out and even think about opening fire on this creature? Like,

• 18:41Speaker 05

  leave it alone. Just tons and tons of these, of these letters. We're so angry with him about that. But that's science. And as messed up as it is, you do have to have like a type specimen to prove that is, that something exists. I think he would have been fascinated by all the DNA technology now, although even that I think has, has fallen short of people's expectations for what's going to prove the existence of Bigfoot.

• 19:09Wes Germer?

  You know, that's one thing I always appreciated about Grover. He never backed down from that stance of wanting a type specimen despite all the crap that he got. You know, I interviewed Peter Byrne many years ago, and he was this Irish American explorer. He was a writer. He was known to be a Bigfoot investigator. And Peter and Rene DeHendon, John Green and Grover, they were kind of dubbed as the four horsemen of the Bigfoot world because they're really the first ones to really jump into it and take it serious and try and get evidence. And I got along with Peter really well. He has a story about stealing a yeti hand, what he thought was a yeti hand

• 19:54Wes Germer?

  or yeti finger. It's kind of a long story. They wouldn't let him take a piece of this yeti hand to get it tested for DNA. And he's like, okay, that's fine. So you got all the monks drunk and once they're all hammered, he basically jacks a finger off of this yeti hand and he takes off and he leaves. It's this crazy story. But anyway, one thing about Peter, I used to always disagree with him about, you know, he had all this funding from investors and he had a 24 hour hotline you could call and he had his little place up there. I think it was in Oregon. And they would all jump in the van and then rush to a place where an encounter happened.

• 20:38Wes Germer?

  I used to tell Peter, what is it? What is it you're trying to accomplish? He's like, well, I'm trying to prove Bigfoot. And I'm like, the creature is gone by the time you guys get there. So what is it? I don't understand. Like, how do you? And he was so against getting a type specimen. I think I even have a clip here of Peter and Grover and their viewpoint on this.

• 21:04Speaker 11

  Would you like to capture one? No, we're against the idea of capture. So you'd like to track? I mean, you'd like to find or? We'd like to find one, confront one if you like, and see if it's possible to communicate.

• 21:17Speaker 11

  So you'd like to give Peter Byrne a gun instead of a camera? Yes. Peter Byrne and his camera is never going to prove it. He may make himself a nice name if he gets some good film of it, but he's never going to prove it to the skeptics. The skeptics will look at everything he gets, the best he can possibly get, and they will say fake. They said that to Patterson's film, they'll say it to Peter Byrne. So if even one of those wasn't fake? Yeah. You don't need half, you don't need 1%, you just need one, one real one. And then you know that the species is real.

• 21:50Wes Germer?

  I really wish the audio was better. While I loved Peter Byrne, he was 100% delusional. I mean, walk up to one, communicate with them, I mean, he's no Jane Goodall. And I know people get upset when you talk about the type specimen, even today. But grow up. I got news for everyone, there's hunters now that shoot them out of fear because they don't know what they are. Grover is 100% right, and it's a very scientific mindset.

• 22:20Speaker 05

  Anytime, you know, you have scientists going out and doing fieldwork, like if they are going to assert that it's a species, a new species or a new subspecies, they have to have a type specimen. That's just kind of the way it works.

• 22:32Wes Germer?

  Yeah, it's frustrating because the loudest voices actually come from quote unquote Bigfoot researchers. And I hear about all this research, I've never seen it, but I've heard about it. But they'll go on and on about the scientific method and, you know, you gotta, you gotta really know the environment and I'm going out there risking my life and. Well, the scientific method says, collect a specimen. And as cruel as that sounds, and I realize that hurts some people's feelings. If you want Sasquatch to be proven, which by the way, if it is some non-human primate we haven't caught up with. Which I don't buy, but let's just go with that.

• 23:13Wes Germer?

  By collecting one specimen, you've protected the whole species now. Now, if you want to go out and shoot one, it's against the law, you're looking at like a felony and probably prison time. So there's a lot of benefits to collecting a specimen. And that's what I loved about Grover, he would just give it to you. He wouldn't sugarcoat it. He wouldn't, you know, you just got it. You know, going back to your podcast, The Wild Thing, when you were interviewing eyewitnesses like in the season one, episode four, and all throughout season one, really, is there one encounter that kind of stays with you?

• 23:52Speaker 05

  The one that has stuck with me the most is John Meinzenzki's story, just because this was a guy who really did and still does have such a good sense of the landscape and the ecosystems and what's in it and how things behave. You know, he's such an intelligent and thoughtful person and to sit down with him and have him tell his story about his experience in Wyoming, in the Wind Rivers, was just kind of, that one still kind of makes the hair on my neck stand up because he never went, you know, he, out of the gate, he didn't think it was Bigfoot. And then it's only after someone else said something to him about that possibility

• 24:33Speaker 05

  that he kind of started pulling on that thread a little bit, but he knew that what was happening was out of the ordinary. He's like, bears aren't throwing pine cones. Bears don't have, you know, hands, paws that look like that, like a lot, he was gathering information the whole time he was going through that experience and his, that data told him that this was not something ordinary. That's the story that's still kind of like, if I'm camping, I'm still like, huh.

• 25:01Wes Germer?

  Yeah, and John is a respected scientist. I think he's a wildlife biologist out there in Wyoming. He does something with the sheep, the bighorn.

• 25:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, he was doing bighorn sheep. And I don't know if you've ever heard his bear story. He was asked, they were having a problem with, this was in Wyoming as well, they were having a problem with bears going into camps and raiding them. And they were trying to figure out where the bears going after people? Or were they going after the food? And so John's boss, I'm gonna botch this story. He tells it so much better than I will, but John's boss was like, I need you to go out into this area where we know there are bears, grizzly, you are going to

• 25:46Speaker 05

  Bed down in a, in a sleeping bag in the middle of this meadow and we're going to see what happens. And so John is laying down in the sleeping bag at night in this meadow, in the middle of nowhere. Somebody is watching him and he's got a radio on him and he's got a gun. And they know that there's this problem bear there and this bear comes up and it starts spiraling around him in the, in this meadow, getting closer and closer and closer with each turn. And then it comes up to him and he's laying in his bag and a thing blows in his face and snorts back up. You know how bears smell? And then it walks away. And so they're like, okay, well, we know it's not the people. It must be the food.

• 26:28Wes Germer?

  Wow. I hadn't heard that before. Nothing like your employer actively trying to get you killed.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  I know. I don't know how he didn't just die of a heart attack right there. And then they, I think they asked him to do it again. I don't know if he did, but um, yeah, I mean, this is a guy who like is very comfortable in nature.

• 26:46Wes Germer?

  Yeah, I probably would have died. And I could see why you would be intrigued with John's encounter. You know, he's an experienced guy. Let's actually listen to it. This is a clip from Wild Thing, season one, episode four. This is John Myenzinski's encounter.

• 27:06Speaker 05

  Eyewitness accounts, these stories of people's personal Bigfoot encounters, they're completely fascinating. While I believe that many of these witnesses saw something, I also know that their stories are hard to verify. So did my cousin Grover Krantz, one of the world's most respected Bigfoot researchers. At a Sasquatch conference way back in 1978, he spoke about his hesitation in relying on eyewitnesses.

• 27:31Speaker 09

  Eyewitnesses can be interviewed, studied, cross-examined, but only by a handful of curious scientists. Very soon, they will decide to shut up or else change their stories.

• 27:42Speaker 05

  I found this tape of Grover in the Smithsonian's archives, and it illustrates how wary he was about these stories. But his papers also contained a list of supposed Sasquatch sightings. So it seems like he couldn't completely dismiss them either. For each sighting, he'd note the date, the location, the name of the witness, and whether he thought the stories were legit. He'd put a big red X by most of them, ones he'd checked out and that didn't pass muster. But about a handful had question marks or a maddening "maybe" scribbled next to them. And that's it, no additional information. If he took more detailed notes, they're not with the rest of his papers. Diane Horton, Grover's fourth wife, we met her in the first episode.

• 28:25Speaker 05

  She remembers collecting eyewitness accounts with him. He also got testimonials in the mail.

• 28:30Speaker 10

  And he had hundreds of those letters. With a brief little story, "I was out by the barn and this Bigfoot thing walked by."

• 28:40Speaker 05

  But he didn't keep any of those either. Horton says he didn't think they were sufficient enough evidence on their own. Although he still checked them out, just in case. I can see the reasoning there. Many of these accounts probably seemed suspect from people who weren't all that familiar with the woods or with questionable claims about UFOs. But every once in a while, there are some stories told by intelligent, rational people who have seen something so strange, so inexplicable, that Sasquatch seems to them to be the only possible explanation. Like this one from John Mayonzinski. He was working as a wildlife biologist, doing research for the US Forest Service out in the wilds of Wyoming.

• 29:25Speaker 05

  He was camping, and he turned in for the night, but woke up to unsettling sounds right outside his tent.

• 29:32Speaker 12

  I could hear it breathing before I heard anything else. And it got close enough to cast shadow, and there was a rising moon that was almost full. The shadow was of something like a bear, and I thought it had to be a bear. You could see hair, tufts of hair in the silhouette on the tent.

• 29:49Speaker 05

  Mayonzinski spends a lot of time in the woods, and he knows tons about bears. He's not a novice outdoorsman by any stretch.

• 29:57Speaker 12

  My first thought was to scare it and make it go away. So I did the yell and the hit with the back of the hand. I hit something soft. And it ran off back behind the tent, but I could still hear breathing. And then it came back a second time, did the same thing. I hit it with the back of my hand again and made a really loud yelping sound.

• 30:19Speaker 05

  He hit a bear, or what he thought was a bear, twice.

• 30:24Speaker 12

  And it scared it again and it went back behind those trees, came back a third time. This time, the silhouette was over the top of the tent. And it looked like it was walking on two legs.

• 30:38Speaker 05

  He thought the bear had grabbed onto the branch of the lodgepole pine that stuck out over his tent. So bam, he whacked it again.

• 30:46Speaker 12

  And this time, I hit something hard as a rock. And when I, as soon as I did, this shadow came over the top of the tent. And it was a silhouette of a hand that was about twice the width of mine, with an opposed thumb and hair between the fingers.

• 31:03Speaker 05

  Holy shit. That's no bear.

• 31:07Speaker 12

  That mental image burned in my memory because bears don't have that kind of a paw. And it was bigger than a bear's paw and it didn't have claws, it had fingers and an opposed thumb.

• 31:21Speaker 05

  As the creature skulked off, Mayan Zinski abandoned his tent and retreated to the fire, bolt awake. It hadn't gone away. He could still hear it breathing behind a nearby line of trees. And he still had no idea what it was.

• 31:35Speaker 12

  Thought Bigfoot had not even entered my mind at that point.

• 31:39Speaker 05

  I'm trying to put myself in his shoes, all spun up on adrenaline and fear, palms sweaty, hands shaking, stomach churning. The night seems very dark and full of terrors. No way I'm sleeping. But then, once things calmed down again and the adrenaline levels drop, I can imagine feeling a little tired. And that's what happened to Mayan Zinski. It was 2:00 AM, he'd hiked all day and had been up for hours. And after a bit, he started to doze off.

• 32:12Speaker 12

  I don't know how long I was out there, but it was probably close to an hour when I was jolted awake. Something hit the ground and I didn't see anything. And then I saw a pine cone fall out of a tree. I thought, that explains the first noise.

• 32:27Speaker 05

  But then another one came at him, and another one, and another. And they weren't falling out of any tree. Something was throwing them.

• 32:35Speaker 12

  And over the course of 10 minutes, about 20 pine cones came in my direction. They all landed around the fire, around me, sitting there with my sleeping bag draped over my head.

• 32:47Speaker 05

  Bears don't have opposable thumbs, and they don't throw things. The creature, whatever it was, eventually shuffled off. Mayanszynski opted to stay close to the fire until dawn. When he went looking for animal tracks the next morning, he didn't find any. Too many pine needles, not enough mud. The encounter puzzled him. So when he got back to civilization, he quietly mentioned it to his boss at the Forest Service.

• 33:15Speaker 12

  And that's where it got interesting because he suggested the idea that what I had was a Bigfoot encounter.

• 33:22Speaker 05

  And apparently, Mayanszynski wasn't the only person to have had a sighting in that area around the same time.

• 33:27Speaker 12

  And he said that there were many people while I was in the mountains that had reported seeing a large ape-like critter running around, and it was scaring people.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  Mayanszynski's story raises the hair on the back of my neck. These aren't your typical fisherman's tall tales of landing a marlin when you actually just caught a minnow. They're not masterfully told, and many have been shared so many times that they sound kind of flat. They don't have a lot of zing. It's like they're trying to avoid sensationalizing it. Honestly, though, that kind of makes them seem more real. These eyewitnesses are less concerned about wowing their audience than they are about remembering every detail accurately.

• 34:12Speaker 12

  It was bigger than a bear's paw, and it didn't have claws. It had fingers and it opposed them.

• 34:17Wes Germer?

  Laura, have you ever actually gone out there to look for these things?

• 34:22Speaker 05

  I did go on a couple of expeditions. I went on one with Shane Corson, and we went up to, we were out in the Mount Hood National Forest where he had had a sighting himself. And so we kind of went back to that area and spent a couple nights just to see if we were going to see anything. I was there with him and with Gunnar Monson, who owns the Sasquatch Coffee Company in Portland, and Cindy Caddell, who is a, she works for BLM, I think, as a anthropologist and was involved in like... Her, her main job, last I heard, was she was preserving Indian pottery and things like

• 35:04Speaker 05

  that from getting destroyed by wildfires. So like trying to help do fire prevention around historic sites, anthropological sites. But I was with them and with Cindy's daughter, and we spent two nights out there and went on a night hike and put out a bunch of game cameras and looked around. There was one weird noise that we couldn't figure out what it was. That was kind of it. There wasn't a lot of activity. For a while, we had a, when we were out on this night hike, we had a, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Thermal camera. And so we could see something with a heat signature that wasn't too far away, but it never moved. It stayed in the same position for like, probably half an

• 35:47Speaker 05

  hour. And then we realized that it was most likely a tree that was decaying, or at least that was the assumption, that it was something that was just giving off just a little bit of heat, because it wasn't that bright on the, on the thermal sensor either. So that's the main one that I went on. And then I went to a couple of other, you know, a couple of other camping trips, just overnights to see what we might see. But, you know, maybe I did it wrong.

• 36:13Wes Germer?

  Yeah, I'm not so sure if there's a right way or wrong way of doing it. I don't think you can call them in. And to be honest with you, I think most of it is just dumb luck. Most encounters, and you know this, Laura, when people run into these things, in most encounters, they're not looking for it. They're out hiking or camping and they kind of run into each other. Let me ask, ask everyone on the show, what do you think Bigfoot is? And in your case, you know, being kind of skeptical, if Bigfoot were to exist, what do you think it is?

• 36:47Speaker 05

  Well, I'm kind of probably in Grover's camp in that I think it has to, it's a biological creature, and it has to obey the same laws of biology and physics that everybody else on this planet does. And that being the case, there would need to be enough to have a population that can reproduce. So it has to be like a self sustaining population. Needs to have enough environment and enough food available to keep the species going.

• 37:16Speaker 05

  But I think the idea of, you know, sort of a larger hairy ape-like creature is, you know, about as accurate as I can get without seeing any DNA and being able to find someone to compare that DNA to other DNA because I don't know how to look at DNA and tell you anything useful.

• 37:37Wes Germer?

  Yeah, I get it. And I appreciate your answer. Do you think it's actually out there?

• 37:42Speaker 05

  I want it to be. I really, really like the idea that the world is still like, that their forests are big enough and unexplored enough that something like Bigfoot could be out there. But I just feel like so many people are walking around with a phone in their pocket that's, you know, a camera and there's game cameras and trail cameras and security cameras and drone footage and like, there's so much now that just is being beamed back to us that it makes it harder and harder for me to think that it is still out there.

• 38:13Wes Germer?

  Yeah, and I think that's a fair statement. I'm generally not too hard on skeptics because they'll ask questions or make observations that are very fair, by the way. And I wish I had more of an intelligent answer than, that's a great question. I wish I had a great answer. And with your Wild Thing podcast, you kind of started out with Bigfoot and then you went into aliens, didn't you?

• 38:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, so each season has been a different topic and the first season was all about the Bigfoot stuff. And then the second season was about the search for extraterrestrial life, kind of ranging from, you know, Roswell all the way up to like what NASA and SETI have been involved in. So it's followed kind of a similar, it was a different, a different season. So it was like new people and basically, basically you can think of each season as being their own story. But yeah, the second season was focused more on like the search for alien life. And there were two things that triggered that. One was the, uh, the stories that came out in the news in 2017 about ATIP, which was the Advanced Aerospace Threat Initiative Program.

• 39:19Speaker 05

  Basically where they, they were their secret UFO program. And then the second story was Amuamua, which was this interstellar object. It was the first one that we had seen and known what it was. We'd probably been seeing them for centuries, you know, ever since we've been looking at the skies. But this one, we actually recognized it for what it was, which was this object that had been. Like was hurtling through our solar system at like remarkable speeds and was basically gonna like loop around the sun and then shoot out the other side and it clearly come from some other far flung system, um, who knows however many light years away and was just like, we were on the way of wherever it was going. Um, and it was named Oumuamua,

• 40:03Speaker 05

  which is a Hawaiian word because they found it by looking at the observatory at Manaloa photos from that. So there and there were some questions. Most people were like, oh, it's, you know, it's a, it's probably just debris, um, a comet or an asteroid from this far flung solar system. But Avi Loeb, who was or still is, I'm no, I don't think he is anymore. He was the head of the astronomy department at Harvard. He said, hey, you know, it probably isn't, but we need to consider the possibility that it could be alien technology. Like it is irresponsible of us to just say absolutely not aliens are not out there. You know, because given the size of the solar system, given, I'm sorry, given the size of the universe is there's a very good shot. There's a very good chance that alien life

• 40:48Speaker 05

  exists somewhere. So why not at least consider the possibility that whatever this is, it could be alien made rather than just sort of a natural object.

• 40:58Wes Germer?

  Yeah, I really enjoyed how you touched on different topics and I like the idea of kind of breaking it down by season. You know, I interviewed Travis Walton. I'm sure you've seen the movie Fire in the Sky.

• 41:12Speaker 05

  Maybe. I'm really bad with movies. I will sometimes get halfway through a movie and be like, oh yeah, I did see this already. So.

• 41:20Wes Germer?

  Oh, I'm sure you've seen it. It's an older movie. And I could tell you this whole account from a skeptical point of view will make you rethink a lot of things. There was a major, major search party out for him or Travis because he was taken away and they searched everywhere for this guy. Travis and I think the four or five guys in the truck, they all passed lie detector tests. And I'm telling you, when you sit across the table from Travis, which I did when I interviewed him, this guy isn't lying. It kind of felt like interviewing a victim of a crime. Like if you didn't know anything about his backstory and you just met him, you would think something happened to this guy.

• 42:06Wes Germer?

  What was your take on aliens before that season and then afterwards, after doing a full season on UFOs? What's kind of your take on UFOs and aliens now?

• 42:18Speaker 05

  I mean, I've always thought that there is alien life out there somewhere. I mean, it's just the universe is far too big and I don't think life just arise arose once in the entire universe. I think that that has arisen in multiple places and in multiple forms and under multiple, under very varying types of conditions. It was interesting talking to people who'd had the kinds of experiences that you're talking about Travis Walton and talking to people in SETI like Jill Tarter, who the movie Contact is based on and Seth Shostak, who's another very well-known SETI scientists. And their feeling is, is that, you know, people have definitely had very

• 43:03Speaker 05

  intense experiences that can't be explained, but it's not, they don't necessarily believe that it's aliens coming to Earth. And one of the arguments that they made, I thought was really interesting, which is that they talk about how, well, first of all, the amount of time it takes to get from one place to another in space. I mean, look how long it just took us to get to the other side of the moon and back. That was like a 10 day trip. And that's the moon. That's like so close in comparison with everything else. So like time travel or space travel is just so enormous and such a huge undertaking that why would a civilization come here and then not make that entire journey and then not interact with us except for like, you know, one or two people? I think that was

• 43:45Speaker 05

  kind of one of the big questions that came up during these conversations. And the other one is, is that this one sort of just blew my mind in thinking about time. And I don't remember who said this, but they were like, think of a Let's assume that there is life on multiple planets out there. Think of a Christmas tree and a strand of Christmas lights around it that are blinking. And as one light blinks on, another one is blinking off. Think of those as being the civilizations and all these different civilizations are going to be arising at different times and then vanishing again. And so the odds that two civilizations are A, going to be

• 44:27Speaker 05

  lit up at the right moment and then also come in contact with each other are so infinitesimally small. That just, I kind of like, was like, whoa, that's a really interesting way to think about it. But if you think about like, how old the galaxy is, how old the universe is, and humans are alive for fractions of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that time. Um, so I don't know, I can see their point about the overlap. It isn't to say that I don't think aliens are out there. It's just, I don't know that we're ever going to meet them.

• 44:59Wes Germer?

  And what makes you think that?

• 45:02Speaker 05

  Distance, time, um, you know, there's a, you know, maybe aliens did come to Earth, but they came when we were still in that sort of rocky lava belching methane phase. And they were like, I'm giving this planet one star only because I can't give it zero and I'm not coming back again. I just think that the amount of time and distance that all of this takes makes it hard for me to think that we are ever going to come across an alien civilization that is at the same level of technology or communication that we are or higher.

• 45:39Wes Germer?

  I love the, uh, the one star comment about Earth. I was muted out when he said that, but I was busting up. Do you think looking at what is going on in the skies and what people are reporting? And trying to compare it to our technology and what we have is kind of a flawed and invalid way to look at it. You know, we have lasers on frigates that will shoot down missiles. If I went back to World War II and said, oh yeah, in the future, we're going to have lasers that shoot these rockets down as they come in towards a boat. No one would believe you. Or when you think of like Bob Lazar. You know, Bob Lazar came out, what 35 years ago? Maybe a little bit longer.

• 46:23Wes Germer?

  And he said all of these what appeared to be crazy things at the time. Talking about the craft and how they propelled themselves and uh, this element 115. And everyone's like, ah, you know, this guy's full of it. He's making stuff up. Well, element 115 is now found on the periodic table of elements. It wasn't back when he was talking about it. Or he's talking about going into S4 and he has to put his hand up on this scanner so it can read his biometrics as a way of identifying him. And this is like, what back in the late 80s, early 90s? And everyone's like, oh, you know, this guy's been watching too much Star Trek. Well, come to find out, that's actually true.

• 47:08Wes Germer?

  I can't think of anything Bob said that hasn't been proven true through time. And so do you think it's kind of flawed to look at it like, well, we can't do this, so nothing else can?

• 47:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, there, there is something to be said, but you know, there's things that Arthur C. Clarke predicted. There are things that, um, you know, Isaac Asimov predicted that, you know, just because they ended up proving out, they had very good sense of where technology was going and a good sense of imagination and were able to imagine things that came to be. And I don't doubt that Bob Lazar also has a pretty extensive imagination, not to mention his background. Um, which I know there's been quite a few questions raised about the actual, his actual bona fides. But that aside, like, there's no reason you can't imagine some of these things as well. Also, I don't know, um.

• 48:04Wes Germer?

  Yeah, but element 115 is a, that's a pretty major thing to kind of imagine 35 years ago and have the International Union of Pure and Applied Science or Applied Chemistry. Go, hey, you know what? We're going to go and add that to the periodic table. And that's one example of many.

• 48:24Speaker 05

  Right. Yeah. And that one I don't know enough about to be able to say anything useful on it. But that, that's a good point. But I think to your point, like, am I thinking about it from a human perspective? Absolutely. Because that's the only perspective I really know how to think from. And this was one of the, the things that was pointed out in the general search for extraterrestrial life. We don't 100% know what we're looking for. We only know what we know about life from the life that we are exposed to here on earth. Carbon based, needs water, like all of those kinds of things. So, you know, the, the way it was described to me, it's like, let's say you drop your keys outside somewhere and it's a dark night. When you go out looking for them,

• 49:08Speaker 05

  you're probably going to start looking under the lamp post because that is where there is light, even if you are pretty sure you didn't drop them there. And I think that the search for extraterrestrial life is similar to that in that because we don't know what we're looking for, we kind of have to start in that circle of light from the lamp post and then probe the edges and make sure we understand the science more as we go further out rather than just making leaps of logic that don't necessarily stand up to rigorous science. I like proof and evidence. I'm not one to make sort of leaps. I'm one of the, you know, I'm one of those boring people. I don't know that I'm right, but that's kind of how I perceive the world. So.

• 49:51Wes Germer?

  That's Grover coming out in you, Laura.

• 49:53Speaker 05

  It probably is.

• 49:55Wes Germer?

  Now, I understand where you're coming from, and I appreciate where you're coming from. I think most people are like that. I wanted to ask you, I know that you're an author and you wrote some children's books based on the work you did on the podcast. Will you tell us about that?

• 50:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this was kind of fun. What happened was after the first book, or I'm sorry, after the first season came out, the Bigfoot season, I started to get letters from parents who were listening to the podcast with their kids, which I hadn't really thought about kids when I was doing the podcast. It hadn't, just hadn't entered my mind. If I had, I probably would have cut the swearing out. Apologies for that. But parents listening with their kids and then teachers who were using elements of the podcast in their classes to talk about things like EDNA and the scientific method and how do we think about evidence, things like that. And then that happened again with the second season of the podcast with all

• 50:55Speaker 05

  the space stuff and aliens and extraterrestrial life. And my agent, well, she wasn't my agent at the time, she was my husband's agent, he's also an author, and she said, you know, you really ought to consider doing some middle grade nonfiction books because this is an area where there isn't a lot of material and parents and librarians and teachers are always looking for books that are going to catch kids imaginations, but also like help them understand facts and, you know, nonfiction. So yeah, that's, that's really how the process got started. So the first book was about Bigfoot. It's called The Search for Sasquatch. The second one was called Is There Anybody Out There? And then the third book, the third

• 51:40Speaker 05

  season of the podcast was about nuclear energy. I grew up in Idaho Falls, which is about 40 minutes from what is now the Idaho National Laboratory, but was once upon a time the National Reactor Testing Station. And they were just doing some crazy stuff back in the 50s and 60s. They were just like, let's see what the tolerances are of this reactor. Will it blow up? And it did on many occasions, just scattering radioactivity all over the desert. But in one case, there was a reactor that blew up unintentionally and it killed three men. And it's still the deadliest nuclear reactor accident in American history. I grew up in that area and I'd never heard about it. So I ended up wanting to do a podcast

• 52:23Speaker 05

  about that. But the book publisher was like, I don't think the kids are going to be really keen on the nuclear energy. So come up with a different topic for the third book. So I ended up doing like the science of magic.

• 52:38Wes Germer?

  And Laura, where can people find these books?

• 52:41Speaker 05

  You can get them anywhere that books are sold, Amazon, although I really encourage people to go to their independent bookseller and keep their independent bookseller alive. I think it's on bookshop.org, which is a great way to help independent booksellers. But yeah, they're available in a lot of libraries. You can kind of find it wherever.

• 53:01Wes Germer?

  Yeah, well, I hope people go out and get the books. I'll include some links underneath this episode. Have you ever thought about bringing the Wild Thing podcast back? Have you given any thought on what you would do it on? Because I mean, your next season really could be on anything.

• 53:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, that's the nice thing. I know I would like to do something short based on the research I did around the magic book. I specifically kind of want to look at curses because I heard a couple of stories of people who, you know, westernized, scientific types who had an experience where they end up being cursed and it takes hold, like they get sick, they have these experiences and they, they come back from them, but it's sort of like what happens, like what's going on in the brain and the body and the, you know, emotionally that something that you feel very detached from culturally can have that kind of an effect on you. So that's, that's probably what I'll end up doing next,

• 53:59Speaker 05

  just sort of a short little season as a nod to the work I did for the magic book. And then I have ideas for other seasons. I'm not quite ready to share them with the wider world until they're a little bit more formed. Right now they're just sort of like lumps of clay on the desk.

• 54:16Wes Germer?

  Yeah, well, I hope you bring it back. Like I said, I was a real fan of your podcast and I really enjoyed it. I would love to see it come back. And anyone out there who hasn't heard Laura's podcast, look up Wild Thing. Very cool podcast. Laura, like I told you in the beginning, you know, I've always admired your work and I've always wanted to interview you. And I can't thank you enough for taking the time to come on and, and just kind of chat with me. I really enjoyed chatting with you.

• 54:46Speaker 05

  Well, thank you for having me on and thank you for listening and for all your kind words. And I appreciate you taking the time to interview me when you have so many interesting people at your fingertips.

• 54:56Wes Germer?

  Thanks again Laura. 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 to check out sasquatchchronicles.com, you can become a member and get additional shows. Until next time, everyone.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  Streetlights fading slow.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  Walking past the shadows.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  No one calls my name.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  Every step in silence.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Every night the same.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  City never notices.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  Faces come and go.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  I became a stranger.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Longer than I know.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  No one left to follow.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  I walk alone.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Through the night again.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  No direction.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  No need for friends.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  I walk alone

• 57:17Speaker 02

  And I feel no way

• 57:25Speaker 02

  Every connection

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Came too late

• 57:42Speaker 13

  Footsteps echo softly

• 57:47Speaker 13

  On an empty street

• 57:54Speaker 13

  Silence feels like home

• 58:21Speaker 02

  I walk alone

• 58:26Speaker 02

  And I don't look back