Don't Call Me Bigfoot

Bigfoot, it's name the common Vernacular Bigfoot,

comes from the large tracks that it left.

Early miners and explorers would find

these large tracks in the dirt,

and whoa, Bigfoot, you know, very original.

Kind of like the guy from Texas who's name is Tex, you know?

It's very funny how that happens.

A lot of people in the field of Cryptozoology,

and Cryptozoology means the study of unknown animals,

you know, just like an unknown ape

that hasn't been found yet,

or some class of fish that hasn't been found.

That's in definitive terms,

that's what Cryptozoology is,

but over the years, a lot of other weirder creatures

have been reported that

people have seen Bigfoot type creatures

vanish in a flash of light,

or they'd been seen at the same location,

and time as UFOs, and Bigfoot together.

You know, a lot of people in Cryptozoology

have no time for those stories.

They're just unknown animals.

I've been interested in Bigfoot,

and related subjects since I was a little kid.

In fact, when I went to college, I majored in Psychology,

and anthropology specifically second

pursued a Bigfoot angle.

My mom, when she went to school, she studied Anthropology.

So she is a big Anthropology buff,

and being in the woods eight, or nine, 10 years old,

talking to my mom, all the other kinds of stuff.

Oh yeah, she was very always a proponent of Bigfoot.

My mom's a big believer in Bigfoot,

so it's one of the few things I can talk about my mom with,

you know, it's like, you know, hey, Bigfoot.

So growing up I was always out in the woods camping

while a lot of friends were out surfing,

and gonna the beach,

my family, we were always out in the woods.

I love it all.

I'm always in search of Bigfoot.

So being born, and raised in Washington State,

one of the biggest hotspots

in the whole world is now Adam's area.

Gosh, I listen to so many podcasts

geeking out on that kind of stuff,

because, so I love to climb mountains.

I love to be out in nature,

and do adventure sports, whatever you want to call it.

So I spend a lot of time in the woods,

and there are times where I'm by myself as well,

and you feel when you go in different places in the woods,

you feel different energies as you're going through.

Sometimes the hair will stand up on the back of your neck,

other times you'll feel like total euphoria,

and yet you can't see anything around you,

and you're like, you can't help, but wonder like,

what is going on?

There's clearly something going on here,

but I can't see it.

The first book I even remember having as a kid

was like a comic book on UFO stories,

and monsters, and that sort of thing,

and that piqued my interest,

and then one day "In Search of"

came on TV with Leonard Nimoy,

and they had a Yeti episode,

and that's pretty much what started my obsession.

And a number of years back.

I had an encounter with my brother in law

at my father in law's property in the Sierras,

and we were on that fire road,

and we were hunting, we were coyote hunting.

Now I'm not really a big predator hunter,

but he wanted to go.

So I went with him, and we set up this, we kind of

hide it under this big giant Oak tree,

and we had these rocks, and we were kind of up on a hill,

and there's this big clearing,

and he set out this coyote call,

which is this horrible speaker.

You press buttons, and it does wounded rabbit call,

and Diane calf's call,

and it was echoing all through the Canyon,

and he had these little look like fox tails on a thing

that bounced around to try to attract a predator.

I'd kind of been into Bigfoot before that,

like interested you watch the shows on TV, and stuff,

but we're up there, and we're all camouflaged out,

and we got our rifles, and we're all hiding in the bushes,

and I just remember thinking to myself, predator call, wow,

I wonder if we call in something else other than coyotes.

We're sitting there, it's starting to get dark,

kind of getting really hard to see.

I kind of hear something behind me

coming through the leaf litter,

and it's almost like a squirrel, or like a step,

then a step, but it's pretty far behind me,

and it's faint, and whoosh, a rock,

big old rock flies right over my shoulder,

crunches in the dirt, bounce up.

I start looking around.

What was that?

My brother in law kind of jumps back,

and we're looking at each other,

and we're like, what was that?

Was that a coyote?

He's like, I don't know what, we should get outta here.

So we very quickly just basically got up, and left,

and on the way out he grabbed his call,

and we were on the fire road going back to the main road,

and we could hear footsteps behind us.

We'd hear two, or three steps, we take a few steps,

and we could kinda hear something behind us,

and we turn around with our flashlights.

Hello, anybody there?

Couldn't see anything.

We take a few steps and it sounded like something

was trailing us out,

and every once in a while you'd hear a tree snap,

or something behind us,

and then you'd hear maybe something else.

Come to find out,

there are a lot of Bigfoot sightings in this area.

That particular encounter was very physical, was very here.

I did feel a pretty good sense of dread that day.

Like I said, because I didn't know what was going on.

Something's thrown a rock, and we got rifles,

and we got flashlights, and stuff we can't see.

We know something's out there.

Something threw a rock, there's footsteps.

It's really fascinating when you get in there,

and then you start to think,

well maybe there is more to this Bigfoot thing.

To me, you know, I was always a big animal lover as a kid,

and the fact that we can have an animal

that's very similar to man

that was still around in the world,

that undiscovered just, I've always loved exploration.

I was a kid, I always wanted to go around the corner,

and to me that was like the ultimate corner, you know,

just as a child, and it was like, it was almost,

it was like romantic fantasy in a lot of ways, but it was,

it seems so real.

At age 12 we moved to London for about six months,

and I remember going to a bookstore,

and it had a book on the Lochness Monster,

and I remember asking the lady at the book store,

do you have any other books on these types of subjects?

And she had a general book, and different mysteries,

and it was Bigfoot, Yeti, you know Lochness, UFOs,

and that was sort of my first exposure to Bigfoot,

because all I knew about it was the Yeti at the time.

And for me Bigfoot was always,

I don't even remember when the first time I heard about it,

I mean seven, or eight years old.

You could probably go back in time, and ask me,

you know what Bigfoot is?

Like, yeah, he's a big hairy man.

So I remember seeing Harry and Anderson's when I was a kid,

because they came out in the 80s.

Some of the old "In Search Of" stuff with Leonard Nimoy.

There's always some kind of, and there still is in this day,

but there was always some kind of a documentary,

or special where they have the Patterson Gamblin film,

and my mom, she's not an anthropologist

that she does that for living,

but that's what she got her college degree in.

It's a good filter to put on

when you're looking at the Bigfoot subject,

because when you look at like the stuff that Dr. Meldrum,

and even Cliff Brachman does,

where they look at the morphology of tracks,

the type of locomotion, the weight, the build of the foot,

the structure of the body based on a foot,

the positioning of bones being different

than a human when you upscale,

because you're take a human,

and you upscale them to 800 pounds,

we're not very proportioned for that,

but if you move some leg bones,

and make some things thicker, and some things wider,

you could very easily get a bipedal creature that big,

and have it be very, very fast.

So when you look at the Anthropology section of it,

it gets into that,

and explains a lot of the physicality of these creatures,

and what people report.

Well, so originally the original model

when I came out of school was that

we had the split between us and the apes

7 million years ago, right, theoretically.

We didn't know anything prior to that.

We knew very little about gorillas, and chimps,

evolutionary history past that,

because there aren't a lot of fossil.

You know, the biggest ape we have are Gigantopithecus,

extinct about 300,000 years ago, but all we had was teeth,

and little bit of a jaw bone.