SC EP:1194 The Journey

John writes "I was present when the East Central Ohio Bigfoot Chatter was recorded. I am willing to discuss my experiences publicly with some level of discretion." Spoke to John and he agreed to come on the show. John is a working professional, highly educated and comfortable in his routines: commuting, meetings and deadlines. As a child, an incident in the dense woods near a cabin still haunted him. Many years later John listened to a recording on TV of what he heard as a child, remembering that event shattered his worldview. Questions flooded his mind: Was the noise he heard in his youth the elusive creature? Tonight John shares experiences spanning over decades.

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.

• 0:26Speaker 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. They were screaming at each other in gibberish. It sounded like a language and they were chuntering away, back and forwards, back and forwards, back and forwards. I know what a bear looks like and there is no way on this planet that what I saw bears.

• 1:01Speaker 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.

• 2:09Wes Germer?

  Welcome to the show, everyone. Thanks for being here tonight. Got a great show planned for you. We'll be speaking with John. And John is a working professional, highly educated, and he was comfortable in his daily routine of meetings and deadlines. And but as a child, he had this incident that happened to him in the dense woods near this cabin. And many years later, he heard a recording of the exact same thing he heard as a child. It was the Ohio howl heard on a TV show.

• 3:11Wes Germer?

  Remembering the event that happened to him when he was young, kind of shattered his worldview, and his mind kind of flooded with questions. So he started going out with people to find out if Sasquatch was real or not. Tonight, John shares his journey over many decades of looking for answers, and his exploration, and some of the different things that have happened to him. And again, we're going, this is stretching over decades. But I asked him to kind of come on and share these events. If you've had an encounter, and you'd like to be on the show, shoot me an email. My email address is [email protected].

• 3:51Wes Germer?

  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 John to the show. John, thanks for coming on.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  It's my pleasure, Wes. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you.

• 4:10Wes Germer?

  Yeah, and you had this incident happen to you when you were very young. And it kind of stuck with you throughout your whole life. If you would kind of start from the very beginning and buck me into this because I know we're going to span over decades and I'll try as little as possible to interject. But if you would start from the very beginning.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Well, the first experience that I think was Sasquatch related for me was probably in 1976 or 77. And it was in Ontario. So the story is that, you know, my father, um, who, you know, I grew up in Toronto. And, um, my father loved to go fishing up at Lake Superior. It's about an eight hour drive out of Toronto, all the way up to an area called Batshuanna Bay. Uh, so when my dad would go fishing, uh, my mother and I, and sometimes my brothers, uh, we would stay behind at this cabin, uh, at an old motel that's long gone now, but

• 5:14Speaker 04

  some of the structures are still there. It was called the Black Forest Motel. And, uh, it was a pretty scenic area and it had a couple of really big, uh, marshes in the back. And so now, you know, typically we go in the spring and, uh, my dad would go fishing for steelhead trout and rainbow trout at that time. And, uh, you know, my, me, my brothers, my mom, we'd go on these old logging roads and go hiking back into the bush. And, you know, we'd find bear tracks, moose tracks, all kinds of things. Uh, if we were lucky, uh, we got to see a moose at a distance. Uh, we'd find, um, you know, all kinds of birds like ptarmigan. Uh, we used to call them rough grouse. I don't know if people still call them that up there.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  And, uh, you know, and we'd, we'd, I, I was really into bird watching and stuff like that as a kid. I was crazy about owls and I was always trying to find owls and catching frogs and, you know, stuff that we used to do. So, uh, one night, uh, one time I was up there with just me and my mom and my dad. I think both my brothers were, I think, uh, going to university at that time. I'm the youngest of three. So we were up at the cabin. My dad had just come back from fishing and my mom was getting ready to prepare something for us. And I said, I wanted to go out to the big marsh, which was probably a little less than a quarter mile away. And to go kind of listen to the spring peepers.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  And if you're familiar with Northern Ontario, I know the spring peepers kind of all over Ohio and other places. But in those gigantic marshes, it's almost a deafening chorus of frogs. And I used to do things that were, I don't know, in retrospect, I think maybe even daring. I used to go by these, these, these kind of, these pits that were dug out to make landfill for the highway. Uh, and I'd go in the bush and I'd lie down on the ground and cover myself with leaves. Just so my, my face was the only thing that was sticking out and I would observe wildlife. And I actually one time saw a wolf that way. And then I realized I'm only 12. This probably isn't safe.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Uh, so after seeing the wolf, I took off just to make sure, you know, nothing, nothing bad happened. But I would do stuff like that. So I was out in this forest, uh, well, um, to be clear, I was walking down this road behind a motel to a bridge and the bridge is right alongside this rather large beaver dam that was there. And, um, so I'm just listening to this giant chorus on the, on this marsh and, and frogs. And the sun goes down and it starts to get dark and I'm looking for, you know, birds, birds of the evening, you know, owls, uh, herons, bitterns, storks, stuff like that.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  And, uh, and then suddenly at the back half of the swamp, all the frogs stop.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  So I thought, oh, there's probably going to be a moose coming in because you know, when the moose comes in that part of the swamp, the frogs all go quiet. And I've seen that before. But this time, no moose, at least there's nothing I could see. You know, it's when that twilight stage when the forest is kind of gray and everything sort of blends together. And way back from the back of the marsh, I hear two really loud, bellowing screams is the best way I can describe them. There was a recording on the internet somewhere that sounded a lot like it. But it was kind of like, started low and then went up to like a [makes a loud noise]

• 8:55Speaker 04

  and it got really, really like definitely loud. And it would die down and then it happened again. And but by the second time, I was thoroughly freaked out and in the dark, I ran back to the cabin. And by the, and by the time I was running down the road, it was so dark, I could barely see my hand in front of my face. So I was, I was pretty frightened at that time. And my mother, decades later, still remembered me bursting into the cabin. Apparently you could see the whites of my eyes all around. Very wide eyed, quite frightened. And I told her something is screaming in the forest. So she remembered that decades later. So I never knew what to, what to think of that.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  And decades go by, about maybe 15 to 20 years, I think, kind of go by. You know, I go through, I went to school in, in university in Europe, came back to Canada. And I was, for about a year, I was living in a place called Kitchener, Kitchener Waterloo area of Ontario. And I just married my wife and, you know, and we were sitting down watching TV. And then we watched this program about Bigfoot. And there was a, it was a, I don't remember the name of the program, but the story went

• 10:20Speaker 04

  that there was a detective of sorts or a policeman of sorts on the native, one of the Native American reservations in Alberta.

• 10:30Speaker 04

  And he had received a report, I guess over the radio, I think, that there was an angry Sasquatch on a hill, kind of above the rez, or where the trailers and homes were, and it was throwing oil drums down the hill. I don't know if you've ever heard of that story. I remember, I mean, my memory's a little foggy on some of the details, but I remember the guy said something to the effect of, when he got to the site, the Sasquatch had stopped throwing the oil drums. It had gone into the forest, but it was still bellowing and screaming. And he had just come from a deposition and he had a tape recorder with him and a microphone.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  And so he turned it on and recorded it, and the screams that he recorded, struck me. It sounded, I suddenly remembered what I'd heard up at Lake Superior.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  And that got me questioning. I heard that and I thought, dang, you know, was that what I heard at Lake Superior? And, you know, and then after that, I kind of just, it was still a mystery to me. I didn't really give it too much more thought. I was going about life, you know, getting into, getting a job in the United States and things like that, and all the paperwork that went along with it, and the visas and everything else that was part of that. So somewhere, and I don't remember when that episode came out. It was in the lake, or when I saw it was probably the late 90s, I'm thinking. So anyways, so I, you know, get a job in the, in the United States in 1995 in Cleveland, Ohio.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  One of the jobs that I subsequently had was in, at one of the state hospitals in Summit County, which is just in, kind of in between Akron and Cleveland, and it's right next to the Cuyahoga National Forest. It's right on the grounds, actually. So I got a job there and it was a very scenic area around the hospital. You could walk around. So on some of my lunches, I would go walking around on the grounds and one time, I can't help but think this was around... 2000, when I just started working there, I was walking down by a creek called Sagamore Creek.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  And I came across a really large footprint. It looked about 16 inches in the mud, and it was deep and it had toes. And I, I remember looking at it and going, "That cannot be that here." What, you know, I was confused. I was, you know, just befuddled by this thing. I was looking at it and going, "Is that a Bigfoot here? No." And I, and I played a mental trick on myself, so to speak, and just dismissed it outright, saying, "It's not possible." Some, some big tall guy was walking out here barefoot and left that footprint. And I didn't find any others. It was kind of just crossing the path.

• 13:35Speaker 04

  And it was in a very deep scrubby area that's actually quite hard to walk through. And, you know, I, when I was going down there, I'm always looking for fossils and clam shells and, and evidence of wildlife and things like that. So, so that happened. And then later on, I want to say 2001, I should go back and check with my wife on this, but I went camping with a friend of mine who now lives in Seattle. And he was originally from there, with him and his wife and his, his 18-month-old son. And so this, I think, had to be

• 14:17Speaker 04

  the summer of 2001 or 2002. But I think 2001. Anybody who's been to Beaver Creek State Park in Ohio, it's, it's right along the Pennsylvania border. And it's a stone's throw from the Ohio Howl recording, which was, I think, in Wellesleyville. And that was recorded in 1995, I believe. And so I didn't know anything about that scream. I didn't, I hadn't made any, done any internet searches. I hadn't made any efforts to talk to anybody relating to Bigfoot in any way at that time. But, so I remember it was July. I remember we had gotten there just after a rain.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  But things were still dry enough to make a campfire and the air was perfectly still. There was absolutely no wind whatsoever. The campsite was pretty full. There were some people in the camp next to us who were drinking and making noise until quite late and we were kind of annoyed with them, but you know, that was the first night. And I've also been a practitioner of martial arts my, practically my entire life. And so I brought a wooden staff with me just to go practice with. And while, you know, everyone was sitting around the campfire, I went into this grove of pine trees, I think they're red, red, red pines, around the campsite.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  And I went into there, you know, and just started twirling my staff and whacking the trees with it. And I, I had no notion of, you know, Sasquatches communicating with wood knocks and things of that nature. But so unbeknownst to me, I'm, I'm, I'm doing these wood knocks. I'm going whack, whack, whacking the trees, you know, trying different techniques, you know, different postures and, you know, just doing martial arts solo, just free form. And then this, this incredibly foul odor hits me and it's really, it's so foul and so pungent, it was like a punch in the face is how I would describe it. And, you know, my wife and I have talked about it over and over again because as soon as I smelled it, she walked over to me and she goes, "Do you smell that disgusting odor?"

• 16:26Speaker 04

  And I look at her and I go, "Yeah, well, like what on earth is that? I've never smelled anything like it before." And so she thinks it was like, um, you know, so she grew up in China and she says it was like, kind of like those open toilets that they used to have out in the country in China, uh, where there's a hole and there's a lot of, you know, stale waste down there and it smelled kind of like that, but really, really pungent. And, uh, so we weren't sure what to think of it. I, I knew that sometimes there's trees that give off certain types of smells, uh, at night, uh, they're, they're pretty pungent trees. And I thought, is there, is there a plant out here that's doing that? You know, turns out, no.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  We couldn't find a tree anywhere near us that was giving off that odor and, and the odor would have been there a lot longer, but it wasn't there the whole time that we were there. So it was weird. So, uh, so eventually we all turn in. I, I remember the people in the camp next to us were carrying on till about two o'clock in the morning. And keeping us awake. So we were kind of annoyed by them, but you know, we weren't going to go pick with them or, you know, they were just having fun. We weren't gonna, you know, talk to them about the noise. We just settled in.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  And somewhere around 2 o'clock, 2:30 a.m. And, and, and there's no wind whatsoever. We hear a gigantic limb break off of a tree. And you can hear it whoosh through the air and land and hit the ground with an enormous thud. Probably what sounded like, I don't know, 15, 20 feet from us. And I remember the people in the other camp, I could hear them talking. They're going, holy crap, what was that? You know, kind of thing. Um, and I thought, that's strange. There's no wind. I mean, I, I have seen trees break on their own out in the woods when, when there's no wind. So I didn't think it was super strange.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  But, uh, but we did notice it. And, and what was strange about it though, was the, the whoosh sound of the, of the limb as if it had been thrown or something like it was flying through the air kind of sound instead of just dropping on sight and hitting the ground. So that, that put a hush in the, the local campers. Um, and then after that, everything went quiet for a while. The whole, nothing else happened after that, that I could tell. And the whole next day, we go hiking up and down Beaver Creek. We visit, you know, Gretchen's Lock and, uh, the, the old sawmill and all, you know, all that kind of stuff supposedly. Or so I'm told, and I've read somewhere that, uh, that particular park is supposed to be one of Ohio's most haunted places. And these ghost hunters go there all the time.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  Uh, and some of the other big footers that I talked to subsequently told me that the ghost hunters get freaked out when ghosts with red eyes throw pine cones at them. I thought that was kind of humorous. But, um, so the next night, you know, we were doing camp again. I'm pretty sure it was a Saturday night with the intent of going back on Sunday. Nothing, nothing's really going on. We're, we're sitting around the campfire, et cetera, et cetera. And that's fine. And then, um, we go to bed somewhere around 11:30. Uh, the, the people who were drinking the night before were gone. The camp was quieter. And, uh, their boy starts to have some kind of, um, medical issue. Uh, it turns out he had, you know, a gastrointestinal issue. And, uh, he starts crying and yelling.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Like really loud and he's keeping the other people in the camping area awake. And the owls are responding and then a group of coyotes responded. And then there's an equestrian farm.

• 20:03Speaker 04

  Just right next to where the camp is, you can hear horses. Naying and moving around as if something was agitating them down there and I. Didn't really take note of that until after what happened. So I go to my friend, I say, hey. You know, why don't you just take your boy home? It's not a big drive back to Cleveland. I'll pack up your tent for you in the morning. And we'll deliver it to you. So don't worry about just leave everything here. Uh, just go. Um, so they pack up the kid at 12:30 AM or so, they're gone. So my wife and I are lying down in the tent and then she taps me on the shoulder. Not too long after that, I, I, maybe an hour. Maybe a little bit more, not sure, uh, cause you know, it was quite a few years ago.

• 20:48Speaker 04

  And she says, hey, something's coming. And so that piqued my attention. I grabbed my machete. Um, and I think, okay, that's not good. And then, and I thought, should I get up and unzip the, the fly of the tent and step outside and confront whatever it is? And then we, we thought, no, let's, let's pretend we're asleep. So we, you know, we say nothing and we're just lying there. Listening. So on the picnic table, kind of right near our tent, we had a box full of foodstuffs and. The, uh, you know, frying pans and things like that. And, and I thought to myself, oh, stupid raccoons. You know, they go after that stuff.

• 21:30Speaker 04

  Well, we hear something walk out of the forest side, not the. You know, with the camp, there's a road that accesses the camp. And then behind the camp, there's a forest and there's a cliff over there. It's a pretty steep, it's a good, you know, 40 feet, 35 feet. Uh, from an old, um, iron mine, I guess, um, is what I'm told and. And, you know, to come from, through there is actually quite difficult because it's full of thorns and brambles. We hear it coming from that side. And then you can hear it touch the box. I say it because I, in retrospect, I'm really not thinking this is a person anymore. But at the time, I thought it was a person.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  It's touching the box and just kind of running its hand on the cardboard. So I thought to myself, oh, this thing's not trying to be very discreet, this person. And then it walks to the head of our tent, which was facing my friend's tent, uh, which was turned sideways to ours. And, um, underneath their tent was a big tarp that stuck out from the bottom of the tent with a bunch of little toys on it, like little construction trucks and stuff like that. And we hear this thing pick up the tarp and touch it and move it. And it's making a big, loud, crackling noise of the tarp. So I thought, now that's really strange, um, because that's really not discreet at all.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  And, uh, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm getting kind of eager at this point to see what's going on, but this thought kept nagging at me, like, what if it's somebody and they have a gun? And I'm just sitting here with my machete. Uh, they'll have the jump on me. Uh, this is not safe. So we decided to just let them poke around. And then they, they kind of poke around the tent a little bit. And then they go off to this pine tree back towards the forest side again. And then the thing takes a leak. You can hear it urinating by the tree, which I thought was very strange. I thought like, who on earth does that? Just, but I didn't hear any, I didn't hear any zippers or anything like that. I just hear something, a bit of breathing and, and some urinating. And I thought, wow, that's, that's really weird.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  And then it takes off back into the forest again. And so my wife and I thought that was very strange. We thought even for a human being, that's very strange behavior. Uh, the following morning, when we went out to the tent, the tarp that had the toys on it, the corner of it was neatly folded over in a triangle.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  Which was very strange. Um, and then, so we didn't know what to think of that. We packed up the tent. I took it back to my friend. And so he unpacked it on the lawn next to his building where he lived to dry it out in the sun. And he found a ball of pine pitch, like rolled up into a ball with little broken needles and stuff into it, but rolled up into a ball stuck to his tent, as if somebody had taken pine pitch, rolled it in their hands and tossed it at the tent. And he found that. And I don't know how long he kept it, but I know he had that. So after that, um, we thought that was very strange as well. Sometime after that, in the news, and I don't remember exactly how far afterward,

• 24:43Speaker 04

  I read some kind of news item. You know, I was reading local news. There was some kind of a story about a Sasquatch seen crossing a road near Beaver Creek State Park, um, probably just 10 miles from where we were. And that got me thinking. I thought, that's really weird. Um, so I was mulling that over and I started looking into Bigfoot on the internet. And back then, the internet didn't have as much information. Uh, and there was probably fewer hoaxes back then as well, I'm guessing. So at some point around 2005, maybe six, I reached out to the BFRO. I called them. I saw they had an office, I think it was in California, and I called them.

• 25:28Speaker 04

  And I got a call back from Matt Moneymaker. And he had somebody else with him at the time, and they were on speakerphone, I remember. And I told him what, they said, we heard that you had, because I had left him a voicemail. They said, we heard that you had an, an incident at Beaver Creek State Park. Matt told me he'd, uh, he'd been in Ohio, uh, and he saw something uh, similar, or a similar experience at the Berlin Reservoir, which is really close to where I live and very close, well, reasonably close to where I worked. And that struck me as, wow, that's interesting that they come so close to major civil, quote unquote civilized areas. And, uh, and he said to me, well, you know, we're going to be doing a trip

• 26:11Speaker 04

  out there, uh, to investigate, uh, Bigfoot activity. And you're welcome to join us. So I joined them in 2006 and in 2007.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  In 2006 was when I got kind of introduced to this idea of doing wood knocks and of, you know, doing whoop noises and hiking around in the forest at night to see if you could elicit activity. We talked about, you know, the sound broadcasting and things like that. I think that's when I met Cliff Barakman. I think he was either at that one or the one in 2007. I'd have to look back. But I met some of the local Bigfooters as well, some of whom I'm still in contact with to this day. And so, you know, that was, and I remember when I went out on this experience, I said to myself, I feel like a complete idiot. This is, this can't be real. I'm on some kind of wild goose chase.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  There's, there's no way, you know, these things exist. But after listening to stories from a number of people that were quite, sounding quite sincere, I started to reconsider my position on that. And in 2007, during that episode, when we went out, I think it was in April. Yeah, it was in April. That's when the East Central Ohio Bigfoot Chatter was recorded. What, what happened on the first night there? We, we broke up into separate parties and my party was with a good friend of mine who's an author.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  And he was interested in writing potentially some material on Sasquatch and he brought along his son. And so it was him, myself and his son, James, came along with us. And so we were hiking the Upper Vondergrind Trail and the Lower Vondergrind Trail follows the Beaver Creek itself. And we were up on this ridge. And we're, and we were sitting at this, on this gigantic block of limestone, I remember, or sandstone, that was still warm from the sun. And I was there with my, my typical martial arts stick whacking on trees again. And we were just talking about, I don't know, a whole bunch of things. And after it got dark, somewhere around 9:30,

• 28:28Speaker 04

  maybe 10, we got the radio signal, okay, we're all gonna go hiking. So we start walking down this trail, down to rendezvous with another party walking the Lower Vondergrind Trail. So we're hiking and my friend Rick says to me, he goes, hey, something just crossed the trail behind me.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  And I thought he's playing tricks with me is what I thought. I thought that's not we're 10 minutes down the trail and already something is happening. So I didn't give it much credence. So we keep walking, moving on. And we get down to the bottom of the trail where we're supposed to rendezvous. We're almost at that point. And we see some deer in the bush. And instead of bounding away like deer normally do, they're skulking, they're hanging their heads down. And they're moving really, really quietly in the underbrush. And they just gently moved away from us. I thought most of the time when I encountered deer, even at night, unless they're really used to humans, they bound away and you see their little, you know, their white fluffy tails as they

• 29:35Speaker 04

  as they bound away from you. And I didn't see anything like that. They just slowly walk slunk away from us. And I thought that was a bit weird for deer behavior. But, you know, again, not making much of a mental note of that. Other than just observing it. So we get to the bottom of the trail. We're supposed to be at the rendezvous point. And just as we're about to, like, we're literally 20 feet from the trail junction. We hear this incredible sound of thumping right behind us. And it was in rapid succession of

• 30:09Speaker 04

  And I thought, and it was very powerful and loud and I kind of felt it in my body. And, and we all looked at each other and thought, what on earth was that?

• 30:22Speaker 04

  And, you know, I thought it was something pounding its foot really rapidly into the ground, but later I couldn't help thinking this was chest pounding. And we were, we were a little bit freaked at this point.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  And so we get to the junction and we look for the guys who are supposed to rendezvous with us and they didn't even stop. We could see their little headlamps way down the trail. They didn't even stop for us. They just kept on going. So we were a bit chagrined by that. We were kind of like, damn, not what we wanted to be left behind.

• 30:55Speaker 04

  And then we hear across the creek, something walking in the tall grass. And this is where there's a little bend in the river and an island. And people who know this area know this little island really, really well. On the opposite, opposite bank, there's an old farm wall made of stones. It's probably like way over a hundred years old. Probably for orchards or some sort of thing where they were moving rocks from the ground. But anyways, we hear one to our left and then we hear one to our right. And then there's something behind us. And then there's the one on the right starts walking into the river. And you can really hear that it's bipedal. And I thought, this is really freaky.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  You know, we're either being stalked by some people who are trying to frighten us. Or we're dealing with Sasquatch. So we all have flashlights. And so I say to my friends, I said, well, why don't we just go back to back? Hold our flashlights to our chest. And when these things get really close to us, we'll just turn them on and we'll be able to see what's coming at us. So the sounds keep happening and whatever it is, is approaching. And, you know, the tension gets really high and we flash on the light. And nothing. The sound stops, there's no activity. We're just illuminating branches and grass.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  We see absolutely nothing. So we go, okay, let's get out of here. So we go back along the lower Von der Groen trail along the river. Cause that's where we were. One guy at the front of us and I was at the front and my friend was at the back and we had our flashlights on the whole time. And I said, you know, we were told that if you shine your flashlights, they don't like that. And they'll stay away from you. So we're shining these flashlights all over the, all around us in a really paranoid fashion. And as we're going along, we cross this bridle trail. And just so happens that our flashlight beams kind of converge to the right of us, right where this, this bridle trail is. And we see way up high off the ground, these two eyes.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  And I, they were kind of greenish blue, almost. I'm not entirely sure, but greenish blue. And when the light hit the face, and we didn't get a really good look at the face because it turned away immediately. But what we did see was the eyes got really wide and like, like, almost like surprised, turned away to its left, and then it took off. And then it didn't bother us anymore after that. We, we, we got to the, the village. We crossed the old iron bridge and we got to the village and then we, we were very unnerved by that experience because it was, we were clearly being stalked. And, and it was frightening. So that happens. Um, then, uh, the following day, we do a day hike.

• 33:53Speaker 04

  And during the day hike, uh, we're on the other side of the river. We, my friends and I thought, let's go see, let's go walk where these things were and see if we can find footprints. So we go through all this bush and tall grass and, and we didn't find any footprints, but what we did find was a deer that had been clearly ripped in two. So the front legs and head were one piece. And the hindquarters with this tail and everything else were the second piece. And they were about forty feet apart from one another. And one of the, one of them, the head of this thing had been like picked clean by birds or something.

• 34:35Speaker 04

  But nothing had really, uh, cannibalized it. Like nothing, like no coyotes tore it apart or anything else. The bones were not scattered. They were intact. And it was sitting there kind of like a sphinx. It was, it was a very bizarre sight to see this thing like it was. So that was another weird thing and we, we reported that as well. I remember the next night, I said to, uh, the group, I said, I'm not going, I'm not going out on that trail again. Uh, that was a bit too frightening for me. Uh, I'm going to stick around the camp with you guys. And this is, I believe, Saturday night. And, uh, so, so, you know, they said, well, we're going to do some call blasting

• 35:17Speaker 04

  down by these dumpsters, uh, which was pretty much, uh, I don't know, fifty yards from where we got stalked. Uh, just a little bit upstream, but on the opposite bank. And, um, people had been barbecuing all day long and with their kids playing on the, in this grassy area. So we were, we were in a cul-de-sac and there was a big dumpster there. And I had my bionic ear. I had bought this bionic ear at Radio Shack. I still have it. It has a directional microphone in these little headphones and it amplifies dramatically everything you're hearing. So if you hear, you can hear your own footsteps, your own breathing, you know, your coat crinkle, everything.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  So we're, we're there and we're on a picnic table and kind of the humorous part of it is somebody brought out some Jack links and we were eating those. Uh, and we were just talking and the sun was setting. It was starting to get dark. And we were supposed to do some call blasting. We start hearing this, this, what sounds like an angry gorilla. Really, you know, uh, grunting at us, uh, from the woods right next to the river. And I remember thinking, oh, are they call blasting already? I said, hey, are you guys blasting? And they go, no, they're running towards their tape recorders. And hitting the record buttons. And that's when the, uh, the chatter was recorded. I think there was eight, eight of us or so there at the time.

• 36:46Speaker 04

  And the, the recording that you hear there is only about the last 30 seconds or so of it. It had gone on for probably about an additional 30 or more, maybe 40 seconds before they hit the record button. So, so then there was this, this, this noise and then, and then I hear one walking. And it's, you can, I can hear it. I have my, my microphone and I'm listening to the woods. And I hear this bipedal creature walking through the forest and it goes up the, the very, very steep bank. Like there's a, it's about a hundred feet, maybe a little bit more. Uh, almost a cliff, but it's like covered in trees. So it's, it's steep, but it's not like a rock face.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  And, and it's climbing up there and I can clearly hear it stepping. It goes behind a tree. And it's observing us and I could see a faint silhouette. And I could see some very faint reddish orange eye shine poking out from behind the tree. And I watched this thing for about 20 minutes. And then it just kind of took off after that. So that experience really started to solidify things for me. You know, I thought probably thousands of times, you know, have we been hoaxed? Did somebody do that? Um, did somebody, you know, broadcast some angry gorilla noises? Um, but I don't think so.

• 38:15Speaker 04

  Um, and I, and then subsequently I was told that those sounds were, uh, caught the attention of Ron Moorhead or, or his associates. I'm not entirely sure. Uh, and there was an initial suspicion that we had taken some of the Sierra sounds and rebroadcast those and then claimed to have our own Bigfoot sounds. And that is actually, I know that that's not true. And then I guess they were subsequently analyzed, uh, and compared with the Sierra sounds and found to be distinctive. But there was something about, and I don't know how they do this, but when they have an oscilloscope, you're able to tell kind of the size of the vocal cords, uh, things

• 39:00Speaker 04

  like that. Uh, there's some data that you can get and also about the sound range. So it turned out to be a completely independent, uh, vocalization by a Sasquatch, we think. So that really was kind of a life-changing event for me. I, I, my world started to, started to change on me and I'm a scientifically trained person. Um, I've studied the sciences my whole life. I'm generally not particularly superstitious in any way. Um, I, I, I have my spiritual leanings and so on, but I also don't walk around this world thinking that I know things or that I'm right about everything.

• 39:40Speaker 04

  And this opened my eyes and I, I started to talk a lot about it at home to almost to the point of making my spouse sick of me talking of it. So subsequently, uh, later in the, in the year.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  Well, I think it was later, a month or two later, I took some of my martial arts students in the same, the same year, 2001, to the exact same spot. We went camping at the state park. And, and then we went hiking and we were training in martial arts at this spot. And of course, the method to my madness, or the madness to my method, was I don't wonder how these things would react to watching humans doing martial arts. So we were practicing with sticks and ropes and chains and bats and, you know, swords and all kinds of things. We were, we were really quite enjoying that. And there was a grove of, you know, when they plant rows of spruce trees and they're in straight lines?

• 40:40Speaker 04

  And in between the spruce trees, there's all these dead branches and stuff. So we were, we were training there. And I started to get a creepy feeling that we're being watched. And so what happens is I started loading all the equipment back into my, my CRV at the time. And, and the guys are going like, are we going back to the camp? Like, why are you loading up all this? And I just said, I'm just getting ready bit, bit at a time. So we don't have to waste time after dark. And so we do all that. And then we decided to take a break and we go sit on the very same picnic table that was there when we, when we heard the chatter. And we're sitting there looking at the river.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  And across the river, there's a large branch of what looks like an old apple tree, maybe crab apple or something. And we can see something, a silhouette of something dark moving under there, but you can't make it out. It's, it's just too dark. And then one of the branches shakes kind of violently. I say to the guys, I go like, you think I should try to vocalize that? Or you want me to yell at it? Or? I go, yeah, well, why not? Like, what's it gonna do? I mean, we don't even know what the hell that is. And so a big, loud, you know, whoop, but a noise like that. And unbeknownst to us, there was something behind us in the pine grove.

• 42:05Speaker 04

  And it started running towards us. I don't have no idea how fast, but you could clearly hear it running towards us and growling. And it was breaking those little dry twigs off the spruce trees as it was running. And to me, it sounded like a cow running through a forest. It was big. And I got very freaked out by that. And I just ran towards the vehicle, hopped in, all the other guys hopped in. We peeled out of there. And then at the end of the road, I turned the vehicle around and shone my high beams down just to see if anything was following us. And we could see nothing. And I remember getting nightmares after that. And I was freaked out so much so that I actually couldn't go back in those woods. Or pretty much any woods by myself.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  For almost a year. I remember driving out there in the middle of winter. I got kind of mad at my own fear. I drove out there in the winter by myself and I forced myself to walk into the woods to get over my fear. And that worked. I was no longer afraid after that. But we did a subsequent camping trip where we met the guy on whose property the Ohio Howl was recorded. And he passed along some footage that he had. I'm not allowed to, I was under agreement by the BFRO not to show the footage or try to profit off of it. But it's a very grainy, overexposed footage of a Sasquatch sniffing some apple butter on a tree

• 43:34Speaker 04

  on his property. And you can, you can see the creature, he had to watch 12 hours of footage just to get these few seconds of footage of this thing. And what you, what you see is the thing walks up to a tree. First, you see its hand grabbing the tree. And then it pulls itself, so to speak, towards the tree. It turns its head and sniffs the tree. And you can see its ear. You can see the silhouette of its face and you can see the conical shaped head and these enormous, enormous neck muscles that go down to the shoulder. And, and then it turns its head one more time and walks away quietly with making no sound.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  And later on, when I lived in Oregon, I actually mentioned it to Jeff Meldrum. And he knew of that footage. He said, oh, yeah, the overexposed thermal, was it not thermal? What's it called again? Not ultraviolet. But anyways, it was a heat, a heat footage, a heat signature footage. And he remembered it. And so one thing I did was I had the little piece of footage I have enhanced by a guy in Toronto. And I have a skull I bought at a fossil fair. It's not a real skull. It's a cast of Australopithecus from Boise, 1958,

• 44:57Speaker 04

  Old Dubai. And I froze the frame and I held up the skull to, to the frame on my TV set, a big TV set. And it's a dead ringer for an Australopithecus in terms of structure. An Australopithecus, when you look at it, if you, you know, it looks progton acid, like its teeth, its face sticks out at the jaw when the head is tilted back. But if you tilt the head forward, the sagittal crest sticks up and the face starts to look flat. And that's what you see with the Patty film, is that the head is kind of slightly tilted forward. And that changes the appearance of the thing a little bit when you're looking

• 45:40Speaker 04

  at it. So I started to have this idea that Sasquatch might be somehow related to Australopithecines or something along those lines. Or there's another one called Georgicus and a few others that I'd seen online that made me think, these could be somehow related to Bigfoot, but I really don't know, obviously. So I continued looking into this and I also had some strange experiences by the state hospital. I have photographs of these. I would go out for hikes and I didn't believe that there was going to be Sasquatch out there, but

• 46:18Speaker 04

  I always remembered that footprint. And I remember it was February 14th, it was Valentine's Day, 2007, we had a huge snowstorm in Cleveland area. And it was almost two feet of snow. I remember the following Day, can't remember what day of the week that was, following day or two or something. I'm hiking, I'm just walking around and there's this trail where people walk their dogs. It's an old road, access road to, goes by the hospital and then goes to this baseball diamond and all this stuff. So I'm walking through the snow and, and I see these really, really large footprints among the tracks of people and dogs.

• 47:03Speaker 04

  And they're really, really big. And I went, I measured them and they were about 17 inches long. And about seven inches wide and you could clearly see toes in them. And you could see that mid tarsal ridge where the snow got kind of flipped up.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  And this is in almost two feet of snow, but I was walking on a trail that was padded down by people. So it wasn't as hard for me to walk along there. The distance between each footprint was over four and a half feet. And I got really freaked by that. I went back to the hospital and I got one of my, one of my friends who works there. I said, hey, because I had a crappy flip phone at the time that couldn't take good pictures. I said, do we have the hospital camera or do you have a camera at your disposal? I got these footprints. I gotta, I want to take some pictures of it. He gets curious about that. And we take the camera out there and so he saw the footprints fresh, but the camera didn't work. And I tried to follow the footprints around that time.

• 48:06Speaker 04

  And I followed them, I looked on Google Earth and I followed them for about point six of a mile before they disappeared by going onto a road. And then I completely lost track of them. So the following, I think that was a Friday and then the following weekend it rained. Went back on Monday and there were only two footprints left, but one of them was still relatively good. And I took a picture of my foot next to it and it was still 17 inches and you could still see the toes a little bit. Subsequent to that, we, I found other footprints, I have pictures of, and a handprint from the Cuyahoga Valley that were in these little muddy creeks. And there was one spot that was really interesting was, it was a log going over a small creek, and something

• 48:51Speaker 04

  had crouched down on this log, reached its arms down into the mud, and you could see fingertips from both hands scraping the mud, as if, you know, like, you would touch something and then smell your fingers, kind of thing? Like, you know, a kid sticking a hand in a chocolate cake, kind of idea? I found that, and then I found more footprints, and it went under the log, put one of its hands into the muck, and then leapt. And some distance away, like six feet away, I found another footprint. And I have casts of those footprints, and I have the handprint as well. And the hand is not particularly big, but the footprint is thirteen inches or so. And I thought, that's a pretty athletic feat. I tried to replicate

• 49:36Speaker 04

  it myself, and I was not quite able to do it. I kinda came close, but, but not quite. And subsequently, when Hurricane Ike blew through, I'd have to check the dates on that. That was in the fall. I found some more very large footprints. Again, two sets, the smaller one, the bigger one. And I followed the bigger set of footprints into the woods, not realizing how dangerous that might be at the time. And whatever it was that I was following, I think had circled around behind me. And I could smell, a smell that made me nervous. And the footprints disappeared in this grove of eastern white pines. And I decided to

• 50:19Speaker 04

  bail out at that point. But in addition to that, I had also walked up in that area, and I can't remember the date when this happened. But I was walking up on the grounds of the state hospital. And I wasn't necessarily looking for Bigfoot or anything like that. But I remember walking up and I got to this ridge. And I had an incredibly powerful feeling of being watched and I was by myself. And I actually just hit the deck, actually jumped down to the ground and crouched because something was staring at me. It was very intense. And I looked back over my right shoulder and you know, there's these tall grasses.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  They're kind of like, you know, the grasses in South America, you know, these pumpus. Type of grasses with these big feathery seeds on them. And clearly something had parted them. And then just as I looked over it, let it go. And just that was the only thing moving was that. So there was that experience and a variety of others. Subsequently, I moved to Oregon in 2008, in the fall of 2008. I'm not saying everything in chronological order, but I went in 2008. I moved to Eugene, Oregon for a job. And I promptly got in touch with a local BFRO investigator.

• 51:41Speaker 04

  And we went out to this area repeatedly, this place near, what's it called? It was near Cottage Grove, you know, where Buster Keaton's film, The General was made.

• 51:53Wes Germer?

  Yeah, I know that area of Oregon very well.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so there's a sign, there's an exit there called Goshen. And you get off there and there's a road that travels east about, I don't know, 15, maybe 20 minutes tops. And there's a small lake there. And then this mountain where they had had a report of somebody who lived out that way. A guy who was jogging down a road from his home. Had seen a Sasquatch cross the road ahead of him. And it scared him and he went back home and he reported it. So we started investigating that area. And, you know, we had a couple of nights where we heard things, but you know, nothing special going on. I don't remember exactly how many times we went out.

• 52:38Speaker 04

  Now I realize in retrospect, I probably should record stuff like this. But one particular night, it was very interesting. We were, we were out there, I think it was, let me see. There was one, two, three, four, five of us. And we parked our cars on this old logging road in a clear cut. And we thought we would use any means possible, you know, pretty amateur at this, you know, and we got some cologne that had been bought at Walmart. It was like some cheap awful men's cologne and we doused a rag with it and stuck it up in this tree.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  And then we started making noises, wood knocks, yells. And this went on for probably an hour or an hour and a half that we were doing this. And, you know, nothing was really happening. And we were starting to think, okay, we should probably pack it in, you know, nothing's gonna happen. And I remember the night, it was Mother's Day, 2009, I think, in May. It was really, really intense bright moonlight. And, you know, as you're familiar, in Washington, right, the Douglas firs and the redwoods and stuff, in this area, it's all Douglas firs. But they're really big trees. I mean, they're, they're very wide, round. And at the edge of this cut, the trees were really quite illuminated by this intense

• 54:04Speaker 04

  moonlight, which was to our backs. And down along the tree line, we saw what looked like eye shine. But, you know, there's a lot of elk in the area and we were kind of like, eh, not sure what to think of that. We, we, you know, kept watching and I went towards the tree line, along with one of the individuals and to try and get a better look. And on our way to the tree line, we started to smell that smell, similar to what I had had in Ohio. And we both got nervous and decided to go back to our cars. So we started walking back to the cars. And then on the way back, there was a windfall, a big tree root that was sticking up out of the ground. It was covered in grass, pretty old. I stood up

• 54:49Speaker 04

  on this thing and I started looking down and scanning the, the tree line. And I see a big, black blob. Turns out later, we measured, it was 60, 60 yards away. And it's on all fours, clearly. And it's swinging back and forth, pretty rapidly. So I called the guys, said, come over, let's look at this. This is really weird. What is that? And one of the guys had binoculars, I remember. And so we're all looking at this thing. And it's, it goes behind a tree and it comes out again, goes behind a tree, comes out again. We're watching this thing for a good minute. And then at some point, it seems to realize that we're all staring at it.

• 55:32Speaker 04

  And it decides to stand up. And when it stood up, and I should note, there was, and I did a drawing of this later, very soon after, to depict what I, what I saw. There was, this thing stood up. And I couldn't see it from the knees down, but we could see pretty much the arms, the shoulders, and the head. And it was enormous. And the moonlight was intense enough that you could just barely make out a kind of a sheen of light reflecting off of its shoulders. And it was really nicely silhouetted by the trees behind it, and clearly broader than two of these trees side by side.

• 56:17Speaker 04

  And we watched it almost in disbelief. I remember holding my breath and really forcing my eyes to stay open because I didn't want to close my eyes and then have it gone. And, and we were watching this thing. And then it kind of, sort of seemed to get bored with us or something. And then it turned, and as it turned, it did this. If you ever watch orangutans, they look clunky, but they're really, really graceful. And it, it turned and very gracefully, it just walked to its right. And you could see the left arm swing. And just quietly, it just walked off into the woods. And that was our sighting. That was as close to a Class A, I think, or about as close as I would get

• 57:02Speaker 04

  to actually visualizing one directly. And, you know, I got home at three o'clock in the morning, told my wife, and she just didn't want to believe me. So, so, so I was pretty much really hooked after that. We went about a week later, maybe 10 days later, because it was hard to get our schedules together, me and one of the investigators. And so we did a laser measure, and it was 63 yards. And at the spot where it was, I stood. And when I saw the picture of me standing where it stood, that freaked me out really badly. And I started to have second thoughts about following these things around in the woods because my head, I'm 5'8", and my head was at its elbow.

• 57:45Speaker 04

  So this thing was a good three and a half, four feet taller than me. It was really big. So we did a calculation roughly. It had to be approximately nine and a half feet tall. And there were some weathered footprints left behind. They were indistinct, but they were 19 inches long. So that really scared the living crap out of me. I did subsequently go back to that area a couple of times with friends and found some treetops ripped off and thrown on the road and stuff like that, but never any evidence again in that area that was, you know, clear cut to me like that. But that, that thing really gave me a lot of second thoughts about what I was doing.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  But, you know, I, I had sort of this belief that, oh, these things are pretty benign, you know, nobody, there's no, there's only old stories about them, you know, attacking people and killing them. And I thought, it's not that aggressive. I can go out there and investigate this, but seeing that really gave me some serious pause. Anyway, so some time goes by, let's see, that was 2009. This would have been, I left Oregon at the end of 2011. So I'm thinking either 2010 or early 2011. I got invited to an investigation with some BFRO guys at a place called Bumping Lake in Washington.

• 59:16Speaker 04

  But I went up to that place several times, but on this particular occasion, and in each time, by the way, I did find evidence of various degrees of quality, including footprints, that there were squatches in the area. But on this particular expedition, this was the first time I went with my same friend whose kid had attracted the Sasquatch in Ohio. He's now living in West Seattle. So I went up to join him in Tacoma and we drove through Cuyahoga Pass and down the American Valley and into Bumping Lake. And we went to this camp and on the drive in, we come across a pickup truck and these guys stop and they want to talk to us. So really, I think we wanted directions or something.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  And they go, what are you guys doing? And so we're going on a, my friend says, we're going on a Bigfoot hunt and they all burst out laughing. The guy in the backseat, though, we talked to him, he said he's a journalist. And so we say, hey, did you guys encounter anything strange or unusual while you were there? And the sun was setting at this time. And they go, uh, no, no. And oh, yeah, there was something. And so, so what was it? And they said, well, you know, we were fishing and, uh, and this disgusting odor, uh, got so bad that we packed in our stuff and left. So I, we took that as a sign that, hmm, okay, this is good. Good for us.

• 1:00:38Speaker 04

  So we went down there and I remember people were hanging out orangutan pheromone chips and really disgusting smelling things like that. And, um, the, we broke up into teams again and somebody gave us a FLIR, uh, night vision. And, uh, my friend and I, we hiked up and down the logging roads for probably two to four hours and heard and saw absolutely nothing. Um, and then one of the, uh, ladies on the trip from one of the other groups through the thermal had seen a Sasquatch and it was doing the same behavior that we saw in Oregon. It was swaying back and forth and, and then going into the trees and coming out and looking a little agitated and she, she had tears in her eyes. She was so ecstatic at what she had seen.

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  Uh, I was, I was envious of that. But, uh, so we go back to the tent, uh, and it's like almost two o'clock in the morning and, uh, we quickly pass out and fall asleep. And, um, I get woken out of my sleep at somewhere around 3:30 a.m. I remember because I went a glowing watch, a glow in the dark watch. Uh, down by the lake, something had screamed, a big, loud, bellowing scream. And, uh, I thought, wow, you know, I, I better stay awake and I, I tried my darndest to stay awake and I just couldn't. I passed out and fell asleep. And sometime about 15 minutes later, I heard another scream and it woke me up as well, but this one was much closer.

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  And my buddy, he's just sleeping through the whole thing. He's not even wakened up at all by this. And, and, and this, this time I'm more like, oh my God, this thing is getting close. And we were separated from everybody else. We were a good distance from all the other tents because all the campsites were taken. And we found a little niche where we put our camp. And we didn't have a fire or anything, just a tent. So I hear that and I was like, oh, I better stay awake. I'm trying to stay awake. And again, I fell asleep and I snore. So I wake up realizing I'd just been snoring and, and there's enough ambient light coming through the tent that right in front of my face, there's a hand pushing on the tent material.

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  I, I, I was, I was kind of, well, there wasn't anybody to talk to because my buddy was sleeping on the other side of the tent. This is not a very big tent. I'm, I'm, I'm just kind of freaking out and in, in this thing seemed to be trying to touch where the snoring was coming from through the tent. So I, you know, my, I withdraw my head from the tent because it was very, very close to the material I, I withdraw and I was like, what the, what the hell is that? I'm thinking, you know, bears and elk pushing its nose into my tent or something. And I don't think elk do that. Bears, you can really hear them. Plus they, they, you know, they make special, I've heard bears up close and they don't sound, this thing didn't make any noise like that.

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  And, and then it starts running its hands over the tent, like swishing back and forth, like swish, swish, swish, two, three times like that. Oh boy, that's, that's really, really weird. Um, and there was a Coleman logo written into, embossed in the material right above my, my left side. And it starts touching that, playing with that.

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  And I thought, you frigging, so I, I hit the tent material, go boom, boom, boom on the tent. And it, it hits back. Boom, boom, on the tent. And then it walks off. I can hear it walking off into the bush to the left of me. I, I was speechless. In the meantime, I was trying to kick my buddy, like kicking, like, wake up, wake the fuck up, wake up. Again, I'm sorry, I swore. Wake up, wake up, wake up. And, uh, and he, he didn't wake up through the whole thing. He, I kicked him like three times and he, and he was still just grunting and snoring and I, I couldn't believe he slept through all that. So, um, as soon as the thing walked away, I unzipped the fly and then I looked with the thermal, it was long gone. As soon as it was daylight, uh, the beginnings of daylight, about 6:00 AM or so,

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  I got out of the tent and I immediately started scouting the area. Found no footprints whatsoever, but I walked off in the direction that it went. And turns out there's a little ridge up there. And then I walked along the ridge and I found a bunch of pine trees, kind of all pulled into a grouping of sorts. They were kind of woven together, if you will, these, I don't know, they're balsam firs, or they were small cedars or something. And they were all like woven together and it was just made a kind of a shelter. And I went inside of the shelter and there was nothing around. And from inside that little shelter, and it wasn't super little, I mean, it fit me, it could fit another person, you could pretty much see all the camps from there.

• 1:05:25Speaker 04

  Cause it was high up off the ground and above some of the smaller, again, the trees up there are not that tall, um, cause they're pretty high elevation. And, um, you could see quite a few of the tents and camps from there. And I don't remember the names of the old guys, uh, who were camping there who had more, a lot more experience. And, uh, so, um, me and my friend, we walked up to one of their camps, uh, and we asked him, I said, hey, do you think anybody here would have been trying to hoax us by swishing their hands in our tent and poking at our tent in the middle of the night? And they go, not if they don't want to get shot. So, oh, so yeah, we're all armed here. We said, you know, we, I never, I don't have guns, you know, um, I'm thinking of getting one now, but, uh, back then, I, you know, I was really, uh, not in owning a gun and,

• 1:06:10Speaker 04

  um, and they said, no, no, no, if you do that kind of stuff to people out here in Washington, there's a good chance you'll get, you'll get shot. So don't ever think of hoaxing anybody that way. And I said, well, do you, what kind of activity do you get? So, well, we found footprints and, uh, see, sometimes you'll hear them, uh, they'll throw them pine cones at you. Um, they said that they hear them chuckle, uh, kind of a laugh, uh, they hear them sneeze. Uh, they told us stuff like that. So that was another defining experience for me was to have that happen. And then, you know, on the drive out, uh, we, we packed up another CRV, we packed up all our stuff and we're driving out, not the way we came in, but further down the same

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  road, which is supposed to go back to the main, uh, road. And, uh, the road was blocked off, three trees, small ones, had been pushed over and completely blocked the road. And we had to do like a 16-point turn, cause it was so narrow, uh, to be able to turn the vehicle around and go back out the way we came. I went back subsequently to that place the following year with a couple of friends. And we found some interesting tree structures like what some people call a pinwheel, some Xs. And we went up to, there's a place, a lake, Swamp Lake? So there's a hike, we did a whole long hike. And I remember my daughter was, gosh, she was about,

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  what was she, about six, maybe seven? And we hiked all the way up to this lake from, from the Bumping Lake campsites. We went as far as the, the road would take us. And then, and we did this big, long hike and all along the hike, I'm doing wood knocks just because I'm in the habit of doing that now to announce to, this is my belief, I'm announcing to them that I am here and you, you know where I am. Just to, out of, almost as a courtesy to any local Sasquatch that we are humans and we are on your territory is my, my thinking on it. And we, we're, we're doing this hike and, and as we're hiking back out, you know, nothing happened on the hike.

• 1:08:19Speaker 04

  I have all the photographs and stuff. On the hike back out, we're getting to the point where we're about to cross the river. And there's a big log and, you know, I was proud of my kid. She managed to cross the log all by herself without losing her balance and cross over the river and everybody, and, and me and this other friend of mine who I knew from Eugene, Oregon was with me. And as we were heading towards the river, we were in the back watching our families. Cause you know, you always stay in the back for security. And we hear a big, loud wood knock behind us. And he clearly heard it and he says, oh, he says, you're right. Something is back there. There is something in the woods. And so we let the families go a little bit ahead. We're the last ones to cross the river.

• 1:09:03Speaker 04

  As we get to the other side, a gigantic rock gets thrown from pretty high up. There's a, a kind of a small cliff, a budding up against the, the river. And this big rock hits the water, just this loud right 30, 40 feet from us. And we looked at each other and thought, okay, there's something behind us. We never saw anything, but that was yet another experience. Finally.

• 1:09:32Speaker 04

  Somewhere in between 2010, 11, uh, me and my wife would go hiking up the Mackenzie River in Oregon to this place called, uh, Blue Pool. It's a very beautiful place. The, the pool is cobalt blue. It's, it's really gorgeous. People go swimming there and basically a lava flow blocked off the Mackenzie River, I think from Mount Bachelor or something. And, um, the river goes underneath the lava flow and then wells up there. It's, it's really beautiful. So if you hike past this thing, there's a couple of waterfalls. There's Kusa Falls and another waterfall. So this was in, uh, in the spring and as my typical mode, I'm, I'm whacking on trees every few minutes. Um, and, and I would hear occasional thuds coming from the woods, but I really wasn't

• 1:10:16Speaker 04

  sure if those were actually true wood knocks or some other noise. I, I, you really couldn't tell, but you could hear a boom, kind of coming from the forest. So anyways, we get up to these waterfall and you know how in the, in the bush where especially with this volcanic rock, uh, you, you get these pools left over, uh, that are iced over. Um, and you know, that's where the frogs are in the spring, but it's, it's still icy. And you know, at that time, my kid was really into, uh, ballet on ice and she's, you know, doing her, her Disney thing and playing around with her mother on this ice. And I'm on the, I'm on the road and I'm just like watching them and taking a picture or two. And then behind them, about 50 feet in the woods, we hear this big branch break, this

• 1:11:01Speaker 04

  branch just crack. Um, and of course that got my attention. I start, you know, angling in, trying to figure out what, what made that noise. And I could see a vertical silhouette, uh, behind these trees, uh, that looked kind of light brown. There was some sun on it, I remember. And it started walking off to my right, towards the, the highway, uh, along the Mackenzie River. I keep thinking it's highway 26. I can't quite remember. Uh, there's a bunch of hot springs and stuff up there. Um, and this thing is walking in that direction. So I, I, I run in the same direction, trying to get another view of it. So I tried to get ahead of it, which retrospect, I realize is stupid, but I, I ran as fast

• 1:11:46Speaker 04

  as I could to get ahead of it. And when I got there, there was absolutely nothing going on. I couldn't see anything. Uh, it was dead, dead. And then I realized, ooh, I left my family unattended and that was dumb. So I ran back to my family and, uh, and then we walked out of there together. But that was another experience where I believe what I saw was probably a Sasquatch, but I don't know for sure. So there'd been subsequent experiences when I came back to Ohio here, uh, again, training martial arts, um, along the Cuyahoga River down in the Cuyahoga Valley. Um, one night in November, uh, we were training on this hill. Look,

• 1:12:27Speaker 04

  a lot of kids go up there to smoke pot and stuff. You find all kinds of bongs and paraphernalia up there. Anyways, I, I was up there training with my guys and, um, we just hear this incredible howl, just loud. It scared us so bad that we walked out of there and we started training next to our cars. But, uh, we got very, very nervous with that. But that sums up most of my experience. I mean, in between these experiences, I found the occasional footprint. Uh, I still investigate to this day, mostly by myself. Uh, but I'm very cautious. I don't get aggressive like I used to.

• 1:13:06Speaker 04

  And, um, and I've, you know, I still find anecdotal evidence, but I haven't had anything that compares with those experiences since then.

• 1:13:14Wes Germer?

  I really appreciate you going through the timeline, John, because I know it's kind of hard to cram decades and decades of you looking into what you heard as a little boy, essentially. And looking for this thing, realizing that noise was what you heard as a kid and now you're going to look for it. You know, being a professional and in your line of work, I mean, how did it kind of affect your life searching for this thing?

• 1:13:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, um, I, I, it's hard to explain, um, but it, it was like something opened up, uh, either in, I don't know, my personality, my mind in some fashion. And I started to look at the environment around me very, very differently. You know, I'm, I'm a, again, I'm still a very scientific person, but I, I'm very open minded when I listen to people now. Not like, I mean, I used to be something, something of a cynic for a long time. I'm no longer cynical. I, I listen, when I talk to people, I give them credence first. I, I realize that people lie, or that they embellish, or that they make mistakes. Uh, you know, I make mistakes too.

• 1:14:29Speaker 04

  There's probably things in my narrative that I'm not remembering accurately and things like that. But the, the, the highlights generally are, are accurate as I, as I narrated them. But it, I became obsessed with Bigfoot. Some people would say I still am. Um, but I became kind of obsessed about Sasquatch and I, I just can't go in the woods without thinking of it. It's, it's impossible for me. Um, and, and it's almost impossible for me kind of not to talk about it. It's kind of like, like I, I collect a lot of fossils too. So whenever I'm around a rock out crop, I'll go stick my nose into the rock out crop and look for fossils. It means it's that

• 1:15:10Speaker 04

  kind of thing. I've, I've talked to many, many people since then, sometimes, you know, as part of an expedition, but at other times, uh, just colloquial, just kind of people. I remember I bought Meldrum's book, uh, at a bookstore and when Borders book still existed in Eugene, Oregon. And, and I did meet, uh, Dr. Meldrum there and I met, um, uh, Bob Gimlin there as well. I spoke with him too. And I also met, uh, the gentleman who did the, the Crypto Linguist. Um, and, uh, so I listened to a lot of people and it was really funny. One of the, one of the ladies I worked with in Eugene, Oregon, she was, you know, there's a lot of kind of like hippie type folks that worked there and they're pretty cool. Like they, they, they're really open minded and very

• 1:15:51Speaker 04

  philosophical. And one of the ladies there who'd lived there forever, you know, she says to me, "Yeah, nobody believes it, but everybody's got a story."

• 1:16:01Speaker 04

  And it was true. You know, when I bought the book at the bookstore, this big, tall gentleman, clearly, you know, a guy who lived down in the country, very serious kind of countenance. So if you put a cowboy suit on him, he'd come right out of the Wild West at you. And a really nice man came up to me and he points at that book and he goes, "You believe that?" I said, "Well, yeah." He says, "Well, I got a story for you." And he proceeded to tell me about some incidents that had happened around London, Oregon. And he mentioned how a relative of his had seen one while hanging out laundry on a wire back many decades ago, I guess.

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  And, you know, he said, and I said, "Well, why don't you, you know, go ahead and submit a report? We'd love to, you know, hear your story and then put it out on the BFFR website." And, because I was still talking to them a fair bit. He goes, "No, no, no." He says, "I'm not going to do that. I'm just happy to tell you and leave it at that." And that was it. But I've run into quite a few people and it's amazing to me how reticent they are to tell anybody what they've experienced. And, and what I've also noticed is that because I talk about it freely, because I'm used to doing that now, I wasn't at first, but I'm so used to talking about it that people think I'm making up stories and that I'm lying because I'm just talking about it as if it's normal.

• 1:17:29Speaker 04

  And, but to me, it is normal now. But my worldview has dramatically changed. On a couple of nights, I've seen UFOs as well. I'm looking for Bigfoot and I'd see a UFO, but not necessarily in association with a Sasquatch, but I'd see UFOs. And I'm not saying they're necessarily occupied by aliens, but I mean, there are definitely strange things in the sky. And with all the information that's coming down now, you know, I'm, I do believe it's quite possible that, that there may be evidence that is getting covered up or misinterpreted. You hear enough stories about that kind of stuff that really make you wonder.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  I do admit, though, that I'm troubled by the whole notion of Dogman, but man, those stories are pretty compelling and pretty scary at that. So I hope I never run into one of those, but I'm really trying hard to stay open minded about that one. And I mean no disrespect to people who've seen one when I say that, because I think they also realize how hard it can be for someone who's not familiar with this material to wrap their minds around it the first time you hear it. When I first heard that Sasquatch had a language, I think I offended the guy who did the research because, you know, I approached him and asked him a question. I don't remember what exactly I asked him,

• 1:18:55Speaker 04

  but and I clearly had this skeptical sort of tone about me and he seemed kind of offended by it. But in retrospect, I mean, you know, this was the first time hearing this, but when I heard his analysis and I subsequently listened to it again, I had to conclude that he's probably right. These things are some kind of hominid capable of, of, you know, language and and of complex communication. And they clearly have strong emotions. They have strong feelings about us. They know what guns are. You know, I have to say that I feel really, really lucky in my life or blessed in a manner of speaking of having

• 1:19:39Speaker 04

  had these experiences, although it's kind of weirdly almost a curse too, because, you know, you know, you get thought of as not credible when you say these things to people who seem to be jaded by thinking that humans know everything about the world. And I firmly believe they don't.

• 1:19:57Wes Germer?

  Yeah, I struggled for many years when it comes to Dogman. I was like, you know, people must be mistaken. There's no way. I mean, this sounds like a freaking werewolf people are running into. And I remember the very, one of the very first encounters that I think I really aired on the show was from a famous hunter here in the States. And, you know, he was a very no nonsense guy, very direct in what he said. And he described seeing one. And this guy had spent like 60 years hunting. I think he was in his 80s. And he described seeing this creature. And as he's describing it, it, I mean, everything about it sounds canine to me.

• 1:20:41Wes Germer?

  And I'd asked him, well, what do you think it was? And he was like, I have no idea. It was a canine that got up on two legs and took off like a man running. And it ran so quick, I'm not sure that I could have actually shot it. And I've talked to so many eyewitnesses over the years, including cops that have run into this dog man. I'm pretty convinced it's out there. What it is, I don't know, but I'm pretty much convinced it's out there. And he kind of alluded to it earlier with regard to what you think Sasquatch is. I know you mentioned the Australopithecus and Cliff Berkman actually has that same theory. While I disagree with them, he brings up some, some pretty good points that that's hard to argue.

• 1:21:26Wes Germer?

  But what do you think that they are? What's your take, John, on what Sasquatch is?

• 1:21:31Speaker 04

  Well, so this is, you know, I contemplated that question a lot because I've heard you ask it many times to different people and it seems to me that people's answers are, I don't mean this in a disparaging way, are preconditioned by the belief systems that we bring to these encounters. So, you know, when, when you, when you encounter something like this, you already have your personality has developed you. You have a belief system about the world and, and this belief system that we have about the world

• 1:22:02Speaker 04

  is, is the lens through which we interpret this experience. So, you know, some people reference it as an angelic or demonic or somehow, or, or biological, right? The more this, a lot of the scientific folks, you know, they, they lean towards it's a biological living creature. I am in that camp, but here's the interesting thing. In my years, I've, you know, I've looked into a lot. I've investigated a lot of things, including some of the weirder aspects of martial arts and stuff like that. And I've, people seem to think that Sasquatches can't be just biological creatures because they have supernatural elements to them.

• 1:22:48Speaker 04

  But see, I don't ascribe to that, and the reason I don't is because I think humans also have supernatural or spiritual elements to them. They may not be as developed as these animals, because Sasquatches are wild. They live in the bush. If you spent time living in the bush, and I've done this, you know, like I spent two weeks in the forests of Ontario, drinking out of streams and living like a dog and smelling like a wolf when I got out of there too. I'll tell you, if there was a human being within 500 yards of you, you smelled them. And you could hear noises, and you could start to get really used to the forest, and you become kind of athletic. I mean, you get strong, living out in the woods.

• 1:23:31Speaker 04

  You know, eating, you know, the bulbs of roots of leeks and things that grow in the marsh, you eat frogs, you eat fish, you know, you do all these things, you get kind of wild. And I noticed after doing that, that I had a high level of mental energy and physical energy, and I started to feel myself sort of becoming like a wild person. I remember just getting glimpses into it, you know, from that. And I think that people who really, you know, rough it out in the woods could probably relate to that to some degree. Now, if you're starving, that's different, that'll wear you out, and you'll, you have to get out because you're gonna die if you try to live too long in the bush like that. Not to mention the flies and bugs make you miserable.

• 1:24:14Speaker 04

  But I've seen some things and heard some things, and you know, and there's a lot of people who investigate ghosts and stuff like that, and you know, I have an open mind now. And I think that we share the same supernatural and spiritual mental capabilities that these things have. So when they emit infrasound, we experience it. We can't emit it ourselves, but we can do other things that Sasquatches can't do. So, in my view, it's normal for a biological animal entity to be able to do things and to be so good at stealth as to be able to disappear in the forests and to play tricks on us.

• 1:24:57Speaker 04

  Me personally, I think that that's a natural ability. So that does not lead me to differentiate them from other biological animals, because biological animals are capable of so much more than what we understand. That's my perspective.

• 1:25:13Wes Germer?

  Yeah, well, I appreciate your perspective, John, and kind of your insight and thought on the whole thing. And, you know, I appreciate the amount of thought that you put into it. And coming on and sharing decades and decades of events that happened to you. And it all kind of started when you were a little kid. And going back to bumping Lake for a moment, I've had so many people contact me who've been run out of that area by these creatures. It doesn't shock me one bit that you had the experiences there or in Ohio. One last question I want to ask you, you know, the Ohio howl, this is something that's always bothered me. And I thought I'd ask you what your take on it is. And again, I know that you don't know, and I

• 1:25:56Wes Germer?

  don't know. But what's your take on that particular vocalization? You know, if you want to give yourself away, as far as where you're at, that would be the howl to do.

• 1:26:07Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh, I wish I knew. Well, some howls are clearly to intimidate us, like the loud screams, like the one I heard in the Cuyahoga Valley. Other people have heard that, by the way, I know one guy, I don't think he wants to be named at all, but who has post traumatic stress disorder from being yelled at and chased by one of these things, a stone's throw from where I was. But the Ohio howl, my, my, my take on it is just my belief is that it's territorial.

• 1:26:38Wes Germer?

  Yeah, I guess it could make sense that it would be a territorial thing. Because I always thought, you know, when he, when they do that, it's like, well, now we know exactly where you're at. But it could be more territorial. It could be more of like, hey, get the hell out of here.

• 1:26:55Speaker 04

  Possibly. But the other one is, interestingly, there was a recording in 2015 in the Cuyahoga Valley of the same kinds of howls. It's on the BFR website. They're almost identical to the Ohio howl. And there's two of them. And that's what we always find in the Cuyahoga Valley. There's two Sasquatches. They're not there all the time. They migrate in and out. They'll be gone for years, and then suddenly they'll show up again. But you clearly hear one, and then you hear another, and they're howling to each other. So you may be right. That that's just, hey, I'm over here and I'm over here and they're just communicating that way. And by the way, the other thing that has been the big enigma, I know we, I don't know how much time we have, but the other big enigma for me has been the glowing

• 1:27:37Speaker 04

  eyes. And I did see that one time in fog on the other side of the river at Beaver Creek. And a bunch of us saw that. That was the time we were there with the guy who had the Ohio Hall on his property. And we clearly saw these orange eyes on the other side of the river. They were kind of dull. They weren't, you know, starburst, but they were clearly glowing and they were reddish orange. And we saw it run up a slope and it kept its eyes on us the whole time it ran up the slope. And I don't have a good biological explanation for that. But I do think it's some kind of like low reflective, a reflective membrane in the eyes that's very specialized and can reflect even low light back. That's my belief,

• 1:28:22Speaker 04

  but I, you know, I don't know.

• 1:28:25Wes Germer?

  Yeah, it could be. I'm, I'm not so sure that there is a scientific explanation for half the things that have been reported to me, but I like your idea. And, you know, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and share decades of your life of looking into this and trying to find answers. Really enjoyed chatting with you.

• 1:28:48Speaker 04

  Well, it's, it's been kind of a highlight for me to be able to do that. And listening to your show, oh my God, so many things I heard that I thought, oh yeah, I've experienced that. Or now I'm actually a little bit frightened of Sasquatches after hearing some of these harrowing stories that you've, you've listened to. I mean, some of these are just really frightening. So I'm, I've got a new respect for this whole thing.

• 1:29:11Wes Germer?

  I appreciate it, John, and be safe while you're out there. Thank you again for coming on.

• 1:29:17Speaker 04

  Well, thank you, Wes. It's been, this has been a real highlight for me to be able to do this. I very much appreciate it.

• 1:29:24Wes Germer?

  Thanks again, John. 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.

• 1:29:54Speaker 05

  The lights on My wheels untold go along The lights on Baby you should know that you're gone When the lights on This is my home This is where I own Memories of you dear Untie your eyes Close at the sky I'll mesmerize Memories of you dear

• 1:30:27Speaker 05

  I saw a moon as a human and lighter The lights on And it power grew wider The lights on So I put my spear a little wiser The lights on To do something a quieter When the lights on This is my home This is where I own Memories of you dear Untie your eyes Close at the sky I'll mesmerize Memories of you dear

• 1:32:34Speaker 05

  Say that you're still here in my mind And that's my little feeling 'Cause I found the key to my heart

• 1:32:45Speaker 05

  So I hope you're dying in my mind And I'll make you stay in my mind Don't miss it away in my mind

• 1:32:56Speaker 05

  Say that you're still here in my mind And that's my little feeling 'Cause I found the key to my heart

• 1:33:07Speaker 05

  You are the custom in my mind And I'll make you stay in my mind Don't miss it away in my mind

• 1:33:16Speaker 05

  Don't miss it away