Ep:111 Bigfoot Trauma with Rich Daniels

Most of the evening. It wasn't a big deal, just the normal sounds
and everything, and then the wo's really settled down. Then I heard a
call that was kind of weird. It kind of sounded like a coyote,
kind of didn't Then I heard another one and another one, and each one
of them was getting closer. And then about a half an hour later,
I heard footsteps in the forest, clearly bipedal. They kept getting louder and
louder and louder than they stopped. He stomped around my position at about a
two hundred and seventy degree arc and I say stomped because I could feel some
vibration in the ground from what this creature was doing, and I could feel
sound waves hitting me in the face and chest. This thing was directing that
type of energy at me. And the first thing that occurred to me is
this thing doesn't sound happy. And that's when I realized the position that I
was in. It was, Oh my god, what am I going to
do? This is Bigfoot Crossroads. My name is Matt and joining me is
Richard Daniels. Richard, we were sort of set up by somebody. Yeah,
we were Brandon from Tinfoil tells who. I also want to say congratulations.
He's busy racking up podcast awards right now. That guy's amazing. Yeah.
Yeah, I just was texting him a few minutes ago and he was
at an awards ceremony accepting a couple of awards. So congratulations to him,
man. Yeah. And he's not the type of guy to just go out
and and tell you or anything like that. He'll he's a very very humble
guy about what he does. Yeah, he does a great operation, extremely
humble guy. But I've recently befriended him. We talked quite often. I
was on his show, he was on mine, and just a really good
guy and I'm very happy for him. So congrats to him, absolutely,
absolutely. I just I just did a session with him a little while ago.
It'll be on I believe in late May, so that'll tell you how
booked up he is. Oh yeah, it's crazy. I don't know how
he does it, but good for him, man, good for him.
Absolutely. So yeah, let's just you know, start at the beginning the
usual stuff. How did you end up in the big Foot world? Well,
first, I'm going to ask you to call me rich because when I
hear my full name. I think I'm in trouble, no problem, So
yeah, right, you can call me Matt. I'm the same way.
That'll absolutely work. Well. I was kind of indoctrinated into this, uh,
this field accidentally there i'd been January of two thousand was my first encounter,
and prior to that I had never really thought about Bigfoot or anything like
that. I mean, you know, you would see the you know,
the supermarket tabloid headlines and stuff like that, and that was about the amount
of thought I ever put into it, to be honest with you. I
was more into, uh stargazing and astronomy as as a hobby. And uh
then one night in western Maryland, I had one of these creatures literally just
show up in front of me. The young lady I was dating at the
time, we had taken her two kids out that day. It was particularly
warm day for January out that way, and you don't waste a day of
sixty degrees right in the middle of January in the middle of winter, so
we took them out for a bit of a picnic, and then that turned
into a longer evening visiting friends and going out to dinner and things like that.
So we found ourselves coming in a bit late. And her house sits
right next to a wooded area, a large wooded area, and about forty
feet from the woodline. And as once we got out of the vehicle,
we realized that we could hear something big moving in the woods, and there's
not too many things that could be in that region, and we immediately thought
black bear. And you know, black bear in the middle of the night
is not a you know, not a fun thing to have to deal with.
So she hustled her kids inside, and it was my job to get
all the leftover dishes and leftover food from the picnic that we had had earlier
in the day out of the car. And I didn't want to make two
trips with the black bear running around, so I loaded up my arms,
and about all I had left to be able to push the hatchback of her
car down was my right elbow, and I pushed it down and ran inside
and everything was great, And after a couple of minutes, she came back
downstairs and went to look out the back door to see if she could see
where the bear was if it was out there, And what she saw that
was that my right elbow was incredibly inefficient and didn't get the hashback of her
car all the way down on the dome. Light inside was on and she
had to go to work next morning, so we couldn't leave it and you
know, let her battery run down. So long story short, chivalry's not
dead. I told her I'd go out and do it, get the thing
down, you know, And I wasn't real happy about it, but of
course, you know, we've got to do it. So I stood there
at the back door and I turned out the porch light, and I turned
out the light that was inside in the mudroom there, and I wanted my
eyes to readjust to the dark out there, because if there was a black
bear out there, I wanted to see at least be able to see it
coming a little bit and know what I was well up against. And after
a couple of minutes, you know, my eyes adjusted fairly well. I
felt pretty good about it. And then that's when I realized that there was
a decent amount of light out there. I mean, I can't tell you
if it was if it was a full moon or close to a full moon,
but there was a lot of moonlight that was coming down. And then
there was also a lamp post a couple of hundred feet away, and then
what that lamp post did was divide the driveway that went around the house.
It split that went that juncture, and that went up farther up the hill
to where her uncle's house was. And it just was there to light up
that fork in the driveway. So, I mean, I could there was
some ambient light, and I could see decently, and I felt pretty good
about it. So I walked out, you know, and had my eye
on one spot on the tree line, and the tree line there was it
was lined almost completely with bushes and briers, and there was one spot in
the tree line that was open about fifteen feet wide, and that was where
we, you know, we would go back into the woods to go hiking
or take our kids back in there to play. Something she hadn't told me
to that point was that was also the spot where she would take food that
was about to go bad and dump it out out there so animals you could
come and eat it. And that was about fifteen feet wide, and then
the canopy of the trees hung down up to about five feet, so it
was about a five by fifteen hole. And in my mind, if that
bear was coming out of there. He wasn't going to go through the bushes
and briars. He was going to go He's going to take the of least
resistance. I mean, they don't they don't get themselves hurt by trying to
go after you know, whether they wanted to be hunting or not. So
that that made sense to me, And that's where my eyes were as I
walked out to the back of the vehicle and I got to the back of
the car and I put my hand on the hatchback, and my eyes are
still on that spot in the trees. And as I pushed the hatch back
down, and you know, in my peripheral vision, I could see the
light go out, but also in that gap in the tree line, I
saw movement. And this was the first really puzzling thing about that. The
movement wasn't moving across that gap in the in the bushes and briars, and
it wasn't coming out of that. The movement that I saw was straight down,
straight downward, and it kind of caught my eye and I just stared
for a second and looked, and then I could make out the shape that
was there, and it was you know, basically a brownish kind of silhouette
against a black background. I could see enough to see something was there,
and I could make out. I could make out certain details about it.
And the first thing I noticed is that the thing was massive. It was
absolutely huge. The head of it was right at the canopy of the trees,
which was five feet up, and I stared at it. I was
like, man, that's that's a big bear, because in my mind,
I'm looking at a at a black bear. And then I looked at it
some more and I saw shoulders sticking pretty much straight out from where the head
was, and they were big. They were wide. They seemed, my
best guess would be about three feet wide. And the thing is, I'm
standing there looking at it, and I in my mind, I'm looking at
a bear, and I'm saying, what kind of bear has shoulders like that?
Because bears are slope shoulders right and pretty and pretty much. I mean,
when they sit down, it's even more prominent. And I'm looking at
this thing and I'm like, that's the weirdest looking bear I ever ever saw
in my life. And what I didn't understand at the time was that I
was experiencing a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance, and that's where your your brain's getting
input, but it's just not wrapping around what it's seeing. It's just not
not not not processing it well. And as I looked at this thing some
more, I could make out in front of it knees kind of sticking up
at angles away from each other, like a baseball catcher. And I'm saying,
bears don't sit like that, That's just that's crazy bears. You know,
they sit down on them to sit down on their haunches the way a
dog does, or they'll just like so they'll sit down right on their behind
and their feet will stick out right. But you know, I was like,
bear's no crouch. I said, what is this? What is this?
And I was puzzling and just I was dumbfounded by what I was seeing.
I stood there and I stared at it, and it must have been
about a minute or so that I was just staring at this thing, trying
to figure out what kind of crazy looking bear I was looking at. And
at that point my girlfriend had come to the door, and she gave me
the what are you trying to do? Get killed? This kind of thing?
And that's why I snapped right back into the moment in the reality of
it, and I was like, Okay, there's this massive bear over there,
and I've got about twenty five feet to cover to get to the door.
And the last thing in the world you want to do is run with
a bear there, because a bear will chase you. They don't have to
be hungry, the don't have to be interested in you. It's just an
instinctual thing, you know, to them. Their food runs, so they're
geared for them. So I just kind of backed up towards the house.
I was. I was just backstepping all the time. My eyes were on
this thing, and I made it about ten feet and it hadn't moved,
So I said, okay. I just turned around, walked back to the
house, went inside. All was done, and you know my girlfriend that
she said, wow, did you see it? I was like, yeah,
I saw it, you know, I mean I had that tone of
my voice like it was weird, but you know, that kind of thing.
And we stayed up for a while to make sure nothing went you know,
nothing happened or anything like that. And that's you know, nothing that
the incident was pretty much over, nothing went on, and then from there,
you got to fast forward five years to two thousand and five. I
was no longer seeing that young lady. I had met the lady that became
my wife, and we had moved to Orlando, Florida. One of the
things I deal with, you know, all too often, is insomnia.
And so I was fighting insomnia one night, flipping through the channels at about
three o'clock in the morning, you know, just trying to find something to
you know, get my attention on. And there was a documentary on Bigfoot,
and I distinctly remember saying to myself, this will put me to sleep,
and yeah, and started watching this program. At about fifteen minutes into
it, there was a fellow on there from the state of Washington who got
on there to describe what he saw, and he had there's some commotion going
on outside of his house, and he ran outside onto his deck and turned
to look at something that was at the corner of the deck where adjoined the
house, and something was crouching there. And what he described what he saw
was about a ninety five percent match to what I had seen five years before.
It immediately triggered that memory in my mind, and at that moment,
I could feel a cold chill run down my spine. I could feel I
could just broke out into a cold sweat. My hand started to shake,
and you know, I went into the bathroom to try and splash the water
on my face, and all the color had drained from my face. And
what even just a thought of what had been about forty feet from me and
what it could have could have easily done to me had it wanted to just
absolutely shook me up, you know, I just I mean, it was
like when people describe being stunned by something that hit me hard that way.
And what I came to understand was I was having what was called a stress
response, and it's your body's response to a perceived threat. And what it
does is that your brain, the amygdala, the part of your brain that
handles those kind of things, releases a chemical called cortisol. And the best
way to describe cortosol is that what adrenaline does for your body, cortisol does
for your brain. It fires your brain up and gets it going and gets
it in a totally different gear, basically in self defense mode to be able
to deal with a perceived threat and then be able to handle it and it
fires you into a stress response is basically a condition similar to ADHD where you're
hyper vigilant of minor details and things like that, and it's hard to concentrate,
and you're easy to confuse, and you're irritable and all those kind of
things. And that usually lasts for about thirty to thirty to ninety minutes for
most people. And what happened, what I kept experiencing, was that every
time the memory of what that thing was came back to my head, I
went into it again. And I later learned that it's not uncommon for that,
It's not uncommon for people that have experienced some sort of perceived trauma to
be able to bring that back up and get and be reaffected over and over
again. And as luck would have it, later on, when I moved
to New Mexico, I began working in as a para professional in the mental
behavioral health field. And I got into that and after a while, I
realized working with kids that were dealing with behavior challenges and they were trauma victims,
they were emotionally you know, emotionally unstable kind of people that were just
that had been traumatized. I started to realize that some of the things that
they were they were describing that they experienced, like sleep deprivation and night terrors
and nightmares and a whole different kind of thing. I started here that I
heard that on an everyday basis, but it was similar to a lot of
the things that I was hearing from Bigfoot witnesses. They were tell me,
man, I haven't been the same since that encounter. I can't sleep,
but I'm can get memories of this all the time. And I started to
notice the correlation between the two. And that's when I started looking into this,
into this aspect of the Bigfoot, the Bigfoot research community, and I
started working on that in twenty sixteen, and man, that's been it's been
quite a ride learning about the trauma connected with you know, with Bigfoot and
other crypt encounters along the way. That I mean, the whole thing is
just fascinating to me, not only just from the standpoint of speaking to you
as a Bigfoot witness, but that facet of a Bigfoot encrypted encounters to in
my opinion, doesn't get a lot of the spotlight. Highly underserved, Yeah,
highly underserved. It's definitely something that is more prominent in the field of
UFOs and UAPs. There are a lot of professionals that have, you know,
taken note of it and started working with experiencers because of all the stuff
that you're talking about, you know, the psychiatric aspects of it, and
the emotional responses and the stress responses. You know, because you're right,
a lot of these people suffer the same as anybody does from experiencing a traumatic
event. They're going through trauma. Yes, it is, because you know,
having a big foot encounter for most people is a very jarring thing to
go through. It's a reality changer. Right, here's this creature that's not
supposed to exist everybody. I mean, it's the punchline of jokes. It's
it's lampooned and cartooned and everything else in popular culture. And it's not supposed
to be there, right, and then there it is. And then on
top of that, the thing is massive. These things are always so huge
when people have these encounters. And you can tell somebody, yeah, it's
eight feet tall and you know, probably about six or seven hundred pounds,
and they'll go, wow, that's big, But they don't understand the scale
that you're talking about, the massive nature of these creatures. I mean,
and I mean that's the first thing I noticed about it when I had my
first encounter was that how big the thing was and it was crouching. It
was impressive that way. Yeah. I mean you're talking around the five foot
mark in a crouched position, so that was easily a creature to run nine
feet tall. Yeah, So I mean, I mean that that and then
you realize you get a creature like that, and you realize, Wow,
that thing could walk right over here and pull my arms out of the socket
of their sockets and there's nothing I could do about it. So in between
the time of your initial encounter and the night that you were watching the documentary
on television and it all kind of clicked for you. Had you mentally revisited
that night trying to figure out, like, you know, did it mess
with you subconsciously that you hadn't seen a bear or was it just not even
on your mind. Yeah. From time to time, I would, you
would, it would cross my memory, and usually when there was, you
know, a big bear or something in a TV show or a commercial or
something like that, Oh yeah, you know, and but in my mind
it was a bear. It was a very weird bear, very odd looking
bear and I, you know, and and after I had had that encounter,
I'd talked to some friends and mind that were out there that were hunters,
and I told him, look, I saw this huge bear the other
night, and they just sort of laughed at me. It's like, there's
nothing that big, you know, and there's not around there. I mean
a big black bear in that in that in the foothills of the Appalachians is
about three hundred and fifty pounds. And the thing that I saw was way
bigger than that. And I told him that. I told them so,
and they were just like, okay, whatever, you know. And after,
you know, after a couple of years, you know, it went
to the back burner where you didn't really I didn't really think about it a
whole lot, right, I was reminded of it from time to time,
but it was prominent enough. It was just odd enough a situation, you
know, a situation to have who have to have been a part of.
To have that description by that fellow on that TV show just click it all
together in my head, and it's been a different world for me ever since.
You really just did something that I believe is a typical response from people
who aren't into bigfoot and an encounter. I think a lot of times people
maybe run into these things while they're you know, on vacation, camping with
their family or something, and they just get a glimpse, they don't get
like a good look at one, and it just clicks in their head,
Oh that's a bear or oh that's a deer, because that's what it has
to be. There is no area of oh, that might have been a
bigfoot, because Bigfoot's not real, like you said, it's a joke.
It's just something you see on television commercials. Whenever I had my first sighting,
I was out there looking for them. I was relatively new to the
field, but that was my sole purpose, and I was looking through a
night vision scope, So you had that sort of that separation, you know,
because you're looking through a scope and you're not seeing it with your own
two eyes, and you take the scope down and you can't see it anymore.
So I definitely went through the separation, you know, where my mind
just could not compute what I was looking at. It could it didn't register.
I couldn't recognize it, and I was searching for the answer and couldn't
find it. My friend who was completely a non believer, completely skeptical,
who was just going with me because he was concerned about my well being of
going out and looking for this imaginary creature with all these strangers. He had
a siding with me there and had a completely different reaction. He immediately freaked
out, panicked, screamed, locked himself in the car, started I mean,
he just went hysterical and he had a flight response exactly because in his
mind, this thing's not real and doesn't exist, and then he sees one.
So I think a lot of you know, your own preconceived notions of
Bigfoot, in the state of mind you're in and the situation that you're in,
I think all those things come into factor, and so you can't really
approach each and every witness the same, not in the least. No,
there's no way you can. The most sightings are so random and so unexpected
that it just strikes people in very different ways. And I see all the
time, you and I are both the same. We kind of prowl,
you know, these social media groups, you know, looking for stories,
looking for information, looking for people we can talk to, And you often
see that question, oh, what would you do if you saw Bigfoot,
and being in the position that I am, having studied, you know,
this type of stuff since twenty sixteen, my answer is, you have no
idea. You have no idea whatsoever how you're going to react to that situation.
And the only thing that I've seen at all that moves the needle even
a little bit in those situations is the background of training for confrontational situations like
combat or you know, police officers, things like that, and they're used
to or they're more accustomed to some crisis situations and some confrontations like that.
But again, the experience is so overwhelming. I've seen combat veterans that froze
or closed or squeeze, their eyes shut and turned away what we call fawning,
you know, at the sight of these things. And then I've interviewed,
you know, seventy eighty year old grandmas who picked up a tree branch
and were ready to go to war. I mean, there's hardly any way
to predict it at all, because everybody's individual life experience number one is so
vastly different from somebody else. And then you have to go by the situation
that you're in. The context of the situation you're in there's the variables are
in the tens of thousands when it comes down to trying to predict just some
what somebody's reaction is going to be. And the one thing I'll tell you
is that the more people encounter these things, the more predictable their reaction becomes.
Well, you didn't just casually look into this or research it. Now,
you actually did a study. Yes, could you talk about that,
like how that came to be in the process and everything. Well, I,
you know, when I started to notice this, you know, the
correlation between the people I worked with on a daily basis, you know,
in the mental behavioral health field and the big Foot witnesses. I started talking
to people, and I started talking talking to people on both sides of it.
And I'm talking about you know, people that had pieces of paper hanging
on the wall from Harvard that that I that I worked with, it worked
alongside every day, as well as some seasoned researchers that I do. And
you know, you approach a clinician who has a practice and a reputation and
you start targeting. Look, I think I've noticed a new type of trauma
victim. But I don't think you're gonna believe me. And that's how you
that's how you have to approach it. And see what the advantage I had
is that most of the people I worked with knew that I was a Bigfoot
researcher. It's kind of hard to keep it, keep a lid on it
when you're when you're you know, when you're around folks sometimes and so I
had a couple of couple of people that I trusted there or say, look,
you know, if you're seeing these things, these are legitimate reactions,
these are these are things that can be documented, and you know, this
is something you should try and keep track of. And then I would talk
to researchers and they would say, yeah, you know, I mean you
talk to you talk to these people and you can tell they're shook up and
tell they're affected. And you know, after talking to a bunch of people
and you know, and one fella that I knew, he told me,
he said, look, you're uniquely positioned to be able to look into this,
and you should really do something to document this. And that's when the
idea of a study was brought up. And initially, you know, I
told myself, look, I want to get five hundred cases that I want
to be able to put in the study and be able to analyze all this
data and document all these effects and everything. And that's when I started in
on it in twenty sixteen and really just sort of scoured these Facebook groups and
social media groups and talking to you know, getting referrals, you know,
witness referrals from researchers that I knew and I taught and conduct this study.
I ended up talking to four hundred and eight people over three years, and
just about all of them I talked to at least twice, and then there
were some that I talked to three and four times that were included in the
study. And you know, after three years, I was thinking, oh,
man, I got you know, I mean all that time, I'm
thinking I got to get to five hundred and after three years, and I
was just like, man, this is this is exhausting work. Because it
was all the time I mean, I was talking. You know, there
were some cases like on Saturdays and Sundays when I talked to five or six
people in a day. Wow, And it was I mean, but it
you know, it became this real, you know, fanatical dedication that I
had to because I was learning so many fascinating things and hearing so many stories
from people, and I look at I talked to four hundred eat people and
I was like, you know, I think this is enough to let me
get into this and because it was time to really analyze the stuff. And
that was early nineteen and as I got into it, I started to vent
some of the people that I talked to, simply for the the the purity
of the data. I didn't want anything to be able to affect the d
anybody'll be able to point to going, oh that's that. You know,
you kept that in lyric so that your study can't be worth anything. So
unfortunately, I had to eliminate people that had either a personal or family history
of mental or behavioral health diagnosis. It didn't make them any less believable from
from their standpoint, but for the purity of the data, you would have
to eliminate that. And it just I mean, I mean, having worked
with folks like that for over twelve years, I can tell you it was
very painful for me to do that, but it had to be done for
the sake of the validity of the study and other people. I mean,
I had to get into I mean, while I was doing this, I
was into interrogation techniques. I took a course on micro expressions, that was
I took that in relation to the work that I was doing on an everyday
basis, so I kind of was able to cross over on that and through
it all, I was able to vet everything down to one hundred and forty
eight cases, and the data was absolutely fascinating when it came down to it,
I had, you know, one hundred and twelve men and thirty six
women that were part of it, and every last one of them was absolutely
sure of what they had witnessed, you know, very big, hairy,
bipedal creature, you know, not a bear, not anything else. There
was no mistaking what they had seen. Some of the people that I had
weeded out of the study it had, you know, initially said well,
you know, I saw a big foot, and then they were like,
yes, described to me what you see, and then it was kind of
ambiguous. They weren't sure. And you know, again, it's not the
believability of that, you know, the validity of that person. It's that
story you can't include in a study like this, right, It's a probably
so it's not right, right, So you know, you had there had
to be a standard set for the data that was going to be used,
and so, you know, getting into it like that. Uh, it
took me about three weeks I think it was to get through all the data
and really start to categorize things. And the biggest thing that I learned was
that I needed to ask better questions because I hadn't had any idea what I
was doing, and I came up with the best questions I knew. And
then I can't tell you how many times I go, I wish I had
to ask this, I wish I how to ask this person that, And
so you know, again there's a lesson learned. And when it comes to
my interviewing techniques these days, that you know, the one thing you have
to do is really think about the questions that you're going to ask. But
yeah, it was it was fascinating stuff to get into. And you want
to get into some numbers. Twenty two of those people out of the one
hundred and forty eight mental or behavioral support afterwards, they went to they went
to to see if they can get some professional help, and only seven of
them ended up keeping in a program for six months or more. So the
majority of folks that went for mental health support didn't last with it. They
didn't stick with it very long. Was that due to their own personal reasons
or the reaction they got? Mixture of the two that you know, there
are some There are some folks that told me they didn't really think it was
helping them, because you know, when you get into that situation, mental
health professionals are bound to help anybody that asks for help, you know,
they they do that and when you say, well, you know, Bigfoot
scared the crap out of me, that's when they go, huh okay,
you know, and then there's always that undertow in their minds about who they're
dealing with. And some of those cases were handled really badly. There are
four people that were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Unfortunately they made diagnoses of these people.
One person was one person was bi diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and then
there was one that was said they had early on set dimension. This was
a lady who was thirty eight years old. Wow. So yeah, I
mean that's I mean, I would chalk it up to some of these folks
not really knowing what to do, not really having you know, much of
experience with these things and really in a rush to conclude, and it was
bad. And there's there were five of these people that got referred to other
facilities before they got any treatment, and one person was just flat out denied
treatment, which is unheard of in the mental behavioral health field. And that'll
tell you how strong the stigma that Bigfoot witnesses space can be, you know.
And I don't want to cast any aspersions or anything, but the state
where that happened, its name rhymes with hexas, So yeah, so's it's
kind of tough. It's kind of tough that in that respect. But that
person did end up getting some support somewhere else, so was good. But
you know, there's you know, it breaks down, and this breaks down
for any trauma experience that you have. These stress responses that I spoke of,
these stress reactions, they happen in five categories. Everybody knows fight or
flight. A fight or flight, you hear it all the time. Sure,
there's also one that a lot of people know about. It's called freeze,
where you just freeze in one spot. There's another category called faun or
flop. Fawning is averting your eyes and turning away and flopping is literally just
dropping to the ground, and there are people that do that. And then
there's a last one. It's called friending, and it's a very complex response
where people believe they have some sort of intimate connection with what's going on with
the stress or involved. And in this case, there's people that think they
had they made some intimate connection with the creature during their encounter. I mean,
we see it all the time in the bigfoot world. Now, yeah,
yeah, people will talk about it. You know, the phenomenon of
mind speak there, I think, I think this, this, this has
the friending response as a foot in the door to mine speak. There are
a lot of people that think they that they have this telepath telepathic connection with
them. And you know, in my time, in almost twenty years of
research now, I can tell you I've seen so many weird things and encountered
so many weird things that I can't call anybody crazy. I can't sit there
and say, no, you didn't you know, And I've heard some wild
stories, but these stories come from somewhere and it's really going. It's not
the story itself. You have to get to the motivation and the experience of
the of the person that's involved. And it's I think that's something that a
lot of researchers aren't aren't really equipped to do because they don't understand that it
can be this complex and this challenging in what they're doing. Oh, they're
not equipped for it at all. You know, there's no standard to be
a bigfoot researcher. Yeah, it's a it's definitely a personality driven field.
Yeah, it's a one step process to get accepted as a big foot researcher.
It's called want to Yeah, you know, if you want to do
it, you go out there and you do it. And that's what I
think. Uh, you know a lot of a lot of researchers do what
I call rushing the creature. When they sit down and they talk with the
witness, that they will immediately go, okay, tell me your story.
How big was it? You know? What color was it? Did it
smell? Did you what did it do? What was it? Help?
You know? And they'll just sit there and talk about the creature over and
over again, asked, firing these questions at the witness. And of course,
you know, a researcher is excited to talk to somebody that's had an
experience, you know. I mean it's a natural it's a natural thing for
them to do that, and in that excitement, they lose that perspective that
they have on there, and the witness comes out of the experience feeling kind
of like a dish rag that's just been wrung out, and you know,
it's you know, they say, oh, well, you know, thanks
for talking to me, bye, and that's it. I mean, it
happens in the podcast world all the time as well. You know, witnesses
are used for content, which you know, I have a witness driven show.
I have witnesses come on and share their experiences. My personal goals with
that is to help them. But at the end of the day, there
are a lot of cases. I've talked to a lot of people who have
said I went on such and such a show and as soon as the show
is over, they wouldn't talk to me anymore. They unfriended me, and
I never heard from them again. I was just used. And you have
the same situation in the research world. Yeah, and that's that's the thing
that I try to emphasize her researchers out there, or even people that even
people that know someone that's had an encounter or it claims to have had an
encounter. And the example I'll give you is my wife at the time.
She's since passed away, But in two thousand and five, when I realized
just what it was I had encountered that night, and I went into that
stress response that state I told you about the like ADHD. I was stumbling
around in that state for about three days, and I was very difficult to
talk to. I wasn't focused on anything that was going on. I was
really I was really out of touch. I was distant and she saw that
and she, you know, I had a third day. She kind of
confronted me and said, look, there's something wrong, what's going on,
And that's when everything came to a head in my mind, and I spoke
to her what I call the words, and it's it's either it's a it's
a phrase that every bigfoot witness has to get past in order to talk to
somebody. And the words are, I just don't think you're gonna believe me.
And if somebody truly cares about you, that's not going to matter.
They're going to want to listen to you. And you know, my late
wife brother, bless her heart, she ended up working for the United States
for Service out here in New Mexico. And she never ever admitted to me
whether she believed in Bigfoot or not. She never would never, would never
say anything to me about it. And this is the lady who worked on
the executive level of the US War Service. But she understood the impact that
it had on me. It changed my life completely, and I mean just
turned around and all of a sudden, I was interested in going into the
woods. I was interested in tracking. I wanted to talk to everybody that
she worked with about what was going on in the woods and how things worked.
And you know that's because I wanted to go out and do field research.
I didn't have any experience with that. And she never judged me.
She never told me one one way or another, you know what she thought
of my research, but she always supported me in doing it. She always
allowed me to do it. And everybody should have somebody like that. And
most people are not lucky when it comes to that, because, as I
said before, the stigma is powerful and it's real. There's there is a
lot of ridicule, there's harassment, there is even there are even people that
get assaulted for it because just what they say. And there's some people.
I don't know why the reaction is such that people want to get angry at
somebody for saying they saw bigfoot, but it happens. Oh, absolutely,
absolutely there. There's one person in the study that lost his job because he
talked about his encounter at work and his boss got angry and fired him.
And I mean, you know, honestly, what are you going to do
when it comes down to the owner of the company says you're out and you're
just speaking of the situation or you know of an experience that you had that's
greatly affected you. And the stigma is powerfully, powerfully the strongest force at
work with witnesses. You know, I've taken all this research and everything in
the study and the study and everything, and I'm just now getting the point
of publishing a book about it. And I've used one of the stories from
the study about the fella who witnessed, you know, uh, you know,
saw Bigfoot, encountered a very angry one when he was twenty three years
old. He didn't talk to anybody about it for thirty six years. He
didn't talk to anybody till he talked to me. Because I was just this
stranger who wasn't going to judge him and was actually interested in his experience,
in what it was like. And that's the only reason he saw me on
a Facebook group. That's the only reason that he even agreed to talk to
me. And this guy had changes in his life. He had his encounter
when he was hunting on a friend's property. After the encounter, he never
went back to that property. To this day, he's never been back there.
That friend always had to come see him or meet him somewhere, but
he never went back to that area. That particular property was on his way
to work. He changed his route to work that would have made it twenty
minutes longer each way. And he did that for over twenty years. So
that'll tell you what it's like for these people when you get scared like that,
when you get I mean, it terrifies you right down to your core.
And this guy spent more than thirteen thousand days reliving this experience in his
mind. Every time he encounters something, he saw something or heard something that
reminded him of that day, it triggered the memory. And these memories are
vivid and detailed. I mean, to this day, I can tell you
really minute details about any of my foreign encounters that I've had. And that's
just the way it is. It strikes you so hard, and it imprints
in your mind, you know, so vividly, and the amigdala of your
brain is what does that? It marries, you know, it marries trauma
with memory, and those memories become haunting at times. And this is a
fellow who still today experiences problems with that. He's he's pushing forty years,
you know, ago of having this experience, and he still experiences it.
It's a powerful thing. Let me ask you this, is it possible for
someone to have these same responses based on something that they've created in their own
imagination or that they believed happened that may not have happened. It's you know,
again, I used the phrase perceived perceived trauma, perceived threats. And
it can be solely that you thought in your in your heart and in your
soul that you that you saw what you did right. And there are there
are false experiences like that. It happens, and that's where the conversation with
the person on multiple occasions comes in and you can talk to them about it
and you really start to you know, it's the people that keep coming back
at you over and over again with the exact same story, the exact same
details, and even if you ask, even you ask them about it and
you know, something in a different from a different direction, from a different
way, they would describe it just the same because they're describing that powerfully vivid
memory that they have of those experiences. And you know, that's that's the
hard part when it comes to witness testimony. You know, you would think
that a witness testimony is so valuable that if you threw it out, you'd
have to empty the jails. And that's not the case. That's not the
case. Witness testimony can be very shaky, and it can be you know,
if you don't get into it, like you, as I mentioned before,
you talk to these folks, oh, I saw bigfoot, and well
tell me exactly what you saw. Well, it was furry and there was
this noise, and it had to be bigfoot, and that's It can be
as simple as that, or it can be a lot more complex to be
able to get into it. And hoaxers are everywhere. You have to be
able to read those out. And you know, but I'm to the point
now in my in my research where somebody will come on a Facebook group or
social media group and talk about their experience and I'll ask them questions about it.
And this has happened about five different times with me. Somebody will direct
message me outside of that of that group and say, you just asked me
questions about something I've never told anyone about. And the reason being is I
understand what it's like to experience what they do, you know, and and
to be able to get into it. One lady that I included in my
book was like that, you know. She had she had a group take
up residence on her property, and her property was basically divided by a fence.
One half that was woods and there was a gully down in there and
there's all kinds of stuff, and then the other half was her yard and
everything a little bit of farming area for a big garden that they had and
stuff like that. And she was having nightmares, and she was having headaches,
and she couldn't sleep, and she was being bombarded, it seemed.
With just all this bad things happening, I got to a point where she
was sleepwalking, and she never had sleepwalk before, and that's when the specter
of infrasound came into my thought and I started asking her about things that infrasound
can cause and the different things that do, because it's why they believe that
these creatures use infrasound and the ultra low frequency sound waves. And when I
asked her about those things, that's when she disappeared from that group and direct
messaged me and said, you just I've never said anything about any of this,
and it's just these physiological effects that come along with exposure to end for
sound. And we've gone from that point with with her situation and we've gotten
to her to a point of coexistence with it. What seems to be a
family group that lives on the part of her property that she doesn't use.
It's a very you know, wooded area, it's very secure. There's a
water source on it, and so they you know, and she periodically leaves
things out for them and things like that. That's funny. She you know,
in the middle of the winter, very harsh winter that was going on,
she left blankets out for them, and they took everything but the blankets.
Imagine that. Imagine that. Okay, it's kind of weird, but
you know. But you know, that's that's another thing that we're getting you
that that my research is getting into. It's starting to be able to understand
not just the reactions of people have to these creatures, but to understand a
little bit of the motivations behind the actions of the creatures themselves, you know,
kind of reverse engineering their behavior a little bit. And what this lady
had done, one of the things that I told her to do was to
fashion some symbols. Just I said, use natural you know, natural items,
sticks or whatever to from write that area and make at least two items
that are the same shape. And she ended up making four, and she
made half moon shapes out of twigs and stuff. I said, okay,
hang one of them on the side of your house, and then hang the
rest of them. I'll cross the tree line to your property. And what
it does it states, Okay, here's the boundary that we would like to
have. This is ours over here, and everything after that is yours.
And she did that, and the very next morning she went out there to
check them, one of those half moons on the tree line was gone and
had been replaced with a bow of holly, which was you know, again
fascinating. Yeah. It went from them antagonizing her and trying to drive her
away to like saying, okay, peace offering here we are, Yeah,
we'll take this over here. You have that, And they still walk around
in her yard at night. She just reported to me the other day that
she thinks there's an adolescent that comes to her bedroom window and stares in her
bedroom window. And what it's staring at is that she has an aquarium on
the far wall from the from the window, and the thing will sit there
and stare at the aquarium. Wow. And it's all it's fascinating stuff when
you get into this, you know, the behaviors on both sides. You
know, I hadn't really thought about reverse engineering any you know, the behavior
of these creatures before, and then I started to notice these things and I
started to ask people about these situations and say, okay, try this and
try this. And that's the second time that I've had reported any degree of
success with the you know, with the boundary symbols. So it's it's it's
this is going no matter what you get into in this field, it can
go in any direction. You have no idea where it's going to lead.
You I've talked to a lot of witnesses, and that's one of the things
that I think a lot of people don't really think about is the times where
you have witnesses who might just have a chance encounter and they end up thinking,
oh, yeah, I saw a bigfoot that's really neat, and they
have no issue talking about it. But there are cases where the person did
not enjoy the encounter and it did cause trauma, and then you ask them
to come on the show and share that story, they have to relive it.
Yep, retelling is retelling is reliving? Yeah, it takes them right
back to that instance. Yeah, it's that way across the spectrum in the
mental behavioral healthfield. And it's a really hard part about understanding that out of
the five different types of responses, in what order were they, what was
the most prominent response? The most prominent was flight. The amazing part was
I mean, that didn't really surprise me. There was some form of flight.
Was that seventy two people out of the one hundred and forty eight,
almost half partook of some form of flight then leaving the vicinity right away,
and some of them ran, some of them walked, some of them would
walk and stop and look and then walk some more, and there was all
kinds of different things, but it was that form of vacating the scene and
that was the flight response there, So that didn't really surprise me too much.
And then the next largest group were the freeze group, people that froze.
That was thirty one people that just frozen place, and some of them
frozen place for almost an hour. There was a couple of them that reported
that, and then most of them were within about five minutes or so they
would you know, unlock their muscles and start breathing again and then walk away
or get out of there, some form of that. And then what was
quite unexpected was the group that was the third ranked, and that was the
faun or flop group, and there were twenty seven people in that group.
I didn't expect as many as there were, but you know, you're talking
thirty one for the freeze group and then twenty seven for this group that either
averted their eyes and turned away or flopped right down on the ground. And
I was expecting something around you know, ten or twelve people out of out
of almost one hundred and fifty to do that. But you know, again
it speaks to the impact of the experience. You know, the encounter is
just you know, it just hit hits people in ways they don't expect.
And you know, when you've got when you've got a guy who's a police
officer, who's been a police officer for twenty, you know, twenty odd
years, and he tells you, I couldn't look at it. I had
to I had to close my eyes. I mean, you know, these
police officers see a lot of traumatic things, horrible things, yes, And
when that individual tells you, I just couldn't look at it. I had
to close my eyes. And when you close your eyes, you're utterly and
completely vulnerable. And he said, when I opened him back up, it
was gone. The thing had left. And you know that the the impact
that that guy felt was incredible. He was I could feel the tension dripping
through the phone line when I was talking with them. And that's another thing
about, you know, interviewing these people, you can tell, you know,
you you more than most people would probably be able to know. You
can tell when somebody's really feeling it, when somebody has really been hit hard.
And it's it's at those times where you know, we as researchers need
to understand how to approach these folks and how to best support them. And
there's and and there's there's more than one reason to be able to do that
the first way. The first reason is because that person needs somebody. They
need somebody to support them. They're in a very vulnerable state and it's they're
talking about something that's really shaking them up. And then you know, I
don't think any of us really are callous enough to sit there and not care
about that when you realize that about somebody, And as a result, what
I do is I tell people, don't rush the creature. Do this.
And when I go to interview a witness and I'll say how are you doing?
I mean, how are you handling this? What's you know, what's
going on with you? And immediately the guard comes down, because, wow,
somebody cares. Somebody's talking to me about this, because they've talked to
most of them have talked to multiple people, and they all focus on the
creature. When you do that, people relax a little bit and they become
a little more casual in their in their way too, a little more comfortable
and their way to communicate with you, and the results are phenomenal. One
lady I talked to she had told me that she had had so many people
just sit there and wring her out for information and walk away. And I
said, oh, I said, that's awful. I said, that's awful.
I said, I know what it's like when people do that, because
I've had interview I've been interviewed by people that did the same thing when before
I became or even thought of going on podcasts or anything. And you know,
when we talked about that mutual experience. And then one part of what
I do when people are experiencing trauma because of these encounters, I say,
first thing I tell them to do is sit down, and I said,
write it out. Grab a pen, you know, paper, get on
a computer, open up a word document, and just write it out and
give me every detail that you can remember, whether you think it's relevant or
not. And it takes some time, you know, some of these some
of these folks will work on it for a week or two. This particularly
eighty six days later sent me a document that was eleven thousand words long.
Wow, and it had so much data in it. I mean I ended
up going over that one encounter. Uh, probably about I was about four
times to be able to be sure I was picking up everything and trying to
trying to glean all the information trum that I could. But it opens up
that you know, that that part of the brain that wants to hold back
and protect itself and it it's just this data dup that you get from folks
like that, And it's all about the approach. If you don't rush the
creature and you show true concern for somebody who's struggling with their encounter and things
like that, you gain that trust and you gain that ability to be able
to get access to everything that they know. They'll tell you everything. And
the reason for that is this the one thing. The only reason that I
had one hundred and forty eight people give me or that they didn't want to
tell somebody, was that they were afraid of being ridiculed. They were afraid
of the stigma. And I've identified something that's very different about people that have
had trauma from Bigfoot and other crypt encounters then you would get from people who
had experienced more common sources of stress and trauma. When somebody is in a
traumatic car accident, or they witness an act of violence or they've been abused
or severely neglected or things like that. That's that trauma is real and it's
hard, and they don't want to talk about it. Like you mentioned before
that you're retelling is reliving. They've got to go through it all again in
their minds, and they just don't like talking about it at all. When
it comes to people that have had bigfoot encrypted encounters, they absolutely want to
tell somebody, they want to talk about it, but they can't. They
feel they can't. They're trapped in this condition to where yeah, they would
love to have they would love to be able to unburden themselves of this experience,
but they're terrified. The only thing more powerful than the experience is the
fear they have of their people that they love finding out and being laughed at
and ridiculed and you know made the made the you know, the class just
made the dunce or whatever you want to call it. And I've identified this
and that's why I you know, I'm pushing to have these people considered for
a different mental behavioral health condition called cryptid encounter syndrome because that I know of
and if somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, that I know of it's
only people that have had these experiences that want to talk about it but feel
they absolutely can't. And you know, I mean there's some similar parallels in
people that have that have undergone sexual assault, rape, things like that.
But in the end there's they you know, those folks end up wanting that
one of the information to get out there so that their assailants can be can
be caught right in this in this particular instance, you know, there's just
there just seems no way around it, and they want to talk. They
would build off to you for four hours if you if they'll let if you'll
let them, but they don't want to they're afraid to do it. And
you know, I told you before the one fella, the only reason he
talked to me is because I was I was somebody he didn't know and somebody
who showed interest in the right way, I guess. And you know,
it's it's a powerful thing that these witnesses go through. Just to be clear
in case somebody wasn't paying perfect attention. We are by no means comparing a
person having a big foot sighting as the same thing as a person who is
sexually assaulted. Absolutely not, absolutely not the only the only my own my
reference was only to the parallels that there are in reporting right right, people
have gone through and that's it, which is really interesting. I had never
even thought about that before, but you're absolutely correct. Uh. The main
factor being in those type uh situations is the victim having that preconceived notion that
they're not going to be believed exactly or that they will be in turn attacked,
which happens unfortunately all the time. The victim becomes the person put on
trial for it, and the and the same thing does happen in Bigfoot and
cryptids and everything else. And ultimately what what ultimately brings out that information is
that witness being you know, feeling a sense of trust and a sense of
safety and security with the people they're dealing with, because you know, and
and and it really it really makes a big difference. That's where that's often
where the where the information where where they decide to reveal and be able to
talk about it more is that they feel safe and then they feel secure and
they trust the people that they're with. And that's and that's and that's really
what we're doing here with the Bigfoot witnesses. You is somebody they can count
on, somebody who's not going to you know, you know, uh,
bring them out for what information they have, and you know, they become
a click bait and you know, you know, the researchers or whoever move
on to the next person. And we got to understand the deeply personal experience
that these encounters are. I know, I've had four encounters and two of
them scared to live in daylights out of me. And you know, I've
been through these stress responses a couple of times myself as well as helped people
work their way through theirs. And it's it's just it's a as we said
to begin the show, it's a very very underappreciated part of the experience.
Well, if you don't mind, could you talk about some of those encounters
that you had that did scare you and kind of of your own thoughts and
analysis looking back on it as to why you had those responses. Oh.
Yeah, first encounter again was in January two thousand, had another one in
twenty eleven that was kind of it was exciting, but it wasn't you know,
that big a deal because it wasn't our visual encounter. But the third
encounter that I had was in twenty thirteen and was here in New Mexico,
and I had spent a couple of years tracking down this particular area where there
was some activity. And what had alerted it to me is I saw a
newspaper report that a town in northern New Mexico had experienced an unexplained spike in
missing dogs and cats, and being a researcher, that clicked in my head.
You know, domesticated animals are easy pickings for, you know, for
bigfoot and for predators. And this town sits adjacent to National Park, you
know, not much not much space between the two at all. And I
got the idea to go up there and start checking it out and checking out
the ground and checking out, you know, the area between this park and
this town. And after a couple of years, it became pretty apparent to
me that there was there was a group of of these creatures in this park
that we're coming out at night and going to this town to forage at night.
And I tracked down activity to the southern end of this park. And
I'm not going to name the park because it's illegal to be there. In
the middle of the night, they closed the park down at dusk, and
I kind of walked in at dusk. Yeah, so I'm you know,
I don't know what the Statute of Limitations is, but I've never got a
challenge it, you know, on this one. But yeah, so,
I mean, anybody in New Mexico probably knows what I'm talking about anyway.
But so I tracked it down to this one area and there was you know,
I want to call it like a box canyon, but I don't know
what else to call it, because I don't know what the geological term is.
It's basically this huge, long depression in the ground, maybe a couple
a couple of hundred two hunred and fifty feet long and about forty feet deep.
And it's not this little tiny canyon. But it's right on the border
of this park. And I was pretty sure that they were using this as
a way to get out of the park and not be seen. It was
natural cover to be able to just get down in this thing and walk all
the way through it and get through the you know, get through there.
It was close to the link of a football field that this thing was,
and it's good cover. So I set up on the edge of this thing,
you know, I walked in there and got up a and I gathered
up a bunch of a bunch of dead fall and built a blind to be
able to sit there blind fit. You know, the blind facing the interior
of the park. And you have to know the mindset that I was in.
I had been doing research since it was twenty thirteen. I've been doing
research since two thousand and five. I'd only been doing field research for about
three years. And in my mind, I was so excited because this was
my first experience tracking things down for myself and really doing my own solo research.
And I was going to be the man. I was going to be
that guy who got really famous for proving these things exist and everything like that.
And so I walked in. I walked into this situation about as unprepared
as you could expect. First off, I had nothing with me to protect
myself except a can of bear spray and a camping knife, which was idiocy
because in this national park people get attacked by bears sometimes, so it was
just absolutely stupid to be able to do that. I was going to do
a nighttime listening post with no night vision gear zero, you know, And
to be honest with you, I was so excited about it. I can't
remember even thinking about night vision gear until I got there, and I was
like, Wow, this is really dark and you're going to surround yourself with
raw meat. No, well that's the one thing I didn't do, thank
god. But yeah, I mean I was, I mean I was utterly
and completely unprepared to be out there. And then about I mean, you
know, it's most of the evening. It wasn't a big deal, just
the normal sounds and everything, and then the woods really settled down, you
know, as they do at night. They really quiet down. And then
I heard a call that was kind of weird. It kind of sounded like
a coyote, kind of didn't and you know, we get a lot of
coyotes down here. And then I heard another one and another one, and
each one of them was getting closer. And on the fourth one that I
heard, it sounded like it was maybe a mile a little bit more away,
and I got really excited. I started to get really pumped up.
And then about a half an hour later, I heard footsteps in the forest,
you know, clearly bipedal, clearly two steps coming through the forest,
and they kept getting louder and louder and louder. Then they stopped and I
just sat there listening. And I'm sitting behind this blind. I'm sitting on
the top of a five gallon bucket. I had found one of those lids
you can put a five gallon bucket that has a seat cushion on it.
Yeah, And I was just sitting there, you know, listening, and
then I started to hear some growls. I started to hear some barks,
some sounds like that. And the first thing that occurred to me is this
thing doesn't sound happy. And that's when I realized the position that I was
in. It was, Oh my god, what am I going to do?
And you know, I could see a little bit, you know,
the starlight and the moonlight and everything. I could see a little ways and
I had this big, powerful flashlight and I said, Okay, if I
hate this flashlight, I'm going to be dependent on it all night. I'm
not going to be able to, you know, have any night vision or
anything like that. I want to be able to see and I'll use this
if I have to. Well, this thing's proceeded to bark and growl and
do everything he can to, and I my perception was that he was trying
to scare me away, scare me away, excuse me. And he stomped
around my position at about a two hundred and seventy degree arc from all different
angles. And my best guess is that he was about twenty to twenty five
yards away. And I say stomped because I could feel some vibration in the
ground from what this creature was doing. And my just ab I would say,
about five inches or so underneath my chin down onto my chest. I
was exposed above this blind and I could feel sound waves hitting me in the
face and chest. This thing was directing that type of energy at me,
and it just continued and continued, and the only thing I could think to
do at that point, I was just so freaked out. I knew I
was in over my head, beyond belief. The only thing I could think
to do was when this thing moved, was to pivot and keep facing it,
because you don't want to let an angry animal behind you. That was
all that it was in my head. And I just kept going back and
forth and pivoting around and facing them. You know, in my mind,
it seemed to work. And you know, this went on for about forty
minutes, just this thing trying to drive me away. It was angry.
And then I heard this thing snap off a tree branch. It was distinct,
this pop, you know what it sounds like. And the thought crossed
my mind was he's going to come over here and beat the daylights out of
me with that thing. And about ten seconds or so later, this branch
lands about seven or eight feet to my left, a big thud hitting there,
and that's when these barks and growls and everything started to get They started
to lessen. They were not as loud, and I could tell this thing
was moving off and it was headed back in the direction that it came.
And after about ten minutes or so, I couldn't hear anything, and there
was nothing going on in that forest. I'm telling you, there was no
noise whatsoever. And I just sat there and I glanced at my phone and
it was about three forty I think it was, and I wanted to run.
I wanted to get out of there, but I couldn't see, and
I didn't want to rely on a flashlight because you know, the you know,
trying to get out of there with a flashlight was going to be so
clumsy and then I said, what am I going to do? What do
you do? And I sat there. That's all I had to do is
sit down, and I'm going to wait till first light and get out of
here. So's if I really have to go, I will, But I
didn't feel safe. I thought I was going to run right in the side
of a tree or something. And I sat there and sat there and sat
there waiting for first light, which was, you know, around five thirty
or so. And I started to see some light and I was like,
oh, you don't know the relief that it felt to see the light starting
to come into you know, it in from the sky. And then it
got light enough to see enough to be able to operate. So I just
started packing up my stuff and getting in everything ready to go. And I
glanced over where that branch had landed and I looked at it and the butt
end of that branch was about six inches wide. Wow. Yeah, And
the branch was about eight feet long or so. This thing. I was
guessing that that branch weighed fifty or sixty pounds, and this thing he did
about seventy five feet with some decent accuracy. So that'll tell you the physical
capabilities of these things. It'll tell you the vocal capabilities of these things that
they have with driving those sound waves at me the way they did. And
it was I mean, I saw that my you know, my blood chilled
in my body. And I took everything gathered up and the forty five minute
hike in was reduced to about a twenty minute jog out. And I got
to my car and put everything in and sat down with the key in my
hand in the driver's seat, and that's when all my emotions let go and
I cried like a baby for about ten minutes. I had held it together
that long to get myself out of there, but I just I couldn't.
I couldn't contain it anymore. It was just overwhelming to be able to feel
what I did. And to this day, I don't go into the woods
unarmed, and I don't go into the woods alone. I won't do it.
That had to have been absolutely terrifying. I I will tell you,
I think I'm very lucky to be here. Do you think it was alone?
Yes, I'm pretty sure that it was alone, And I'm pretty sure
that it was probably a young one, probably a young male that maybe maybe
just not that that far off of being off on his own, you know,
because I think because an older, more experienced creature would have seen me,
would have detected me in some way this one. Maybe not paying attention,
maybe not you know, doing other things, you know, not having
you know, because everything's been so easy for it, walking out of this
walking out of this this park, and it just walked up on me like
that, and all of a sudden it was like, oh, there it
is and just immediately got angry about it. And so it seemed it seemed
to have the signs of youth on its behavior, and so I'm I'm guessing
it was. I think it was a young male that happened up on me
and wasn't real happy about it. This is a tough one. This was
a tough one for me because you know, I'm spending a lot of time,
uh, you know, basically putting myself out there saying, yeah,
I was an idiot, and here's here's how not to be an idiot,
you know, and that's that's that. That's the end game of this of
this encounter. The other encounters that I've had have been all, you know,
very sensible, and you know, I I I think the first one
the creature found me, and the the you know, the the others I've
had that you was with a group in Colorado where we had a we had
an auditory encounter where one of these things where we could hear something on two
feet moving really fast through the woods and everything around us. And you know,
that was you know, an association with somebody who really knew what was
going on. And you know, that was my first time to really go
out there and and in a research you know, atmosphere and be able to
encounter one of these things. I've been out more more than a few times
before that, so it's you know, it's it's a very unique thing.
But but again, these are very it's a very unique experience for anybody.
And that's why I don't like, you know, the people and organizations that
categorize these, uh, these encounters, because it it takes away from the
real the you know, the the grit, the the detail and the personal
experience that you have with these you know, you want to sit there,
Oh, it's a class one encounter, as you know, you just you
know, you said, when you start to codify these things in that way,
it just really takes the impact out of it. It takes the significance
away from it for me, especially from the witness side. I mean,
we started talking because I made a post on Facebook, and in that post
and one of the responses was someone asked, are you talking about Class A
or Class B. I was like, I don't use the class system.
I have my own personal encounter that impact of me more so than my actual
sighting. And I never saw anything in that encounter, but it was still
just as impactful and completely blew it out of the water without having to see
anything. Yeah, so I absolutely agree that the class system really does a
disservice to the field of research in my opinion. Yeah, it can.
I mean, you know, it's and it's I think it's purely for the
convenience of the researchers to categorize things and to make sure everything works and everything
like that. But you know, I don't know if you can take an
encounter from North Florida and compare it too much to an encounter in you know,
the Sierra Mountains in California, I don't think you can do it right.
You know, there's there's a certain amount of similarity. Maybe it's like
thirty or forty percent, so you can count on things. But man,
I mean, just think about how things are different regionally for people, for
humans, even in just the food that people eat regionally, and just focus
on that one difference, how different it would be from Florida from to California,
and then how different the people are and everything. You know that the
regionally, even regionally within the same areas, there's differences. So yeah,
you're yeah, your experience is going to be different. And what you're finding
out, what we're finding out more with the experience of dealing with the behavior
of these creatures is that it changes region and region. It changes even through
thurse seasons. The story you just shared coming from that region and everything,
and you were talking about the Box Canyon and how it was using that to
navigate through that area. I mean, that's the same behavior in a region
here in Oklahoma, especially out west. It's riddled with canyons, but the
majority of the land is flat. I mean, you go out there and
you're looking around, You're like, there's absolutely no way that bigfoot lives out
here. There's hardly any woods other than the creek bed systems and things like
that. But then once you spend time in the area, and you see
that it's riddled with all these canyons where what you think you're looking across a
field and you think you're seeing bushes and hedges and things, it's actually the
tops of trees that are down in these canyons, and that's how they navigate
around there. And it's actually one of the most active areas in the entire
state of Oklahoma, possibly even in the United States. Yeah, and what
you'll see is that a lot of the waterways there are sunken away from the
surface of the land around them, right. And it doesn't take it doesn't
take a lot to hide, you know, to hide these creatures, and
they're aided by the fact that people just aren't looking for them, you know.
So the seclusion that they need, the security that they need, isn't
that hard to find in that area, right. And you're also talking about
them coming in at night time and actually going into the town and you know,
raiding it. The same thing here, same exact thing here. But
if you go into say southeastern Oklahoma, where it's a mountainous region and huge
pine forest, completely different behavior typically. I mean, of course you have
similarities, but the way that they travel through areas and everything. They use
the geography masterfully, and it's entirely different. You definitely have different behaviors in
different ways that they navigate and interact around people and human society. While we're
on the subject of behavior, you're talking about the lady who you know,
you had her basically mark her territory using symbols and things like that. Then
you have this situation where you have what appears to be some sort of adolescent
getting angry, you know, you're not supposed to be here, kind of
throwing a little mini tantrum and then stomping off. Everybody asked this question,
and I hate it, but I have to. I mean, what are
these things? What are we dealing with? I mean, this is an
entirely different type of intelligence, yes and no, and that you know,
And oddly enough that leads into, you know, with all the work done
on my first book and it's getting ready for publishing, I'm already at work
on the subject for my second one, which is a you know, and
it's flushing out a hypothesis that a friend of mine and I started talking about
in twenty seventeen. And you know, some some people may recognize the name
Craig Sulk. He's a guy in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan who actually appeared
on Finding Bigfoot in their second season in twenty twelve, and he got a
pretty nice trailcam picture of one of the creatures that was stalking some deer on
his property. And his property eighty acres that he has are there that are
that are on his property up there. He's got that, you know.
He and his wife had set that up as a hunting retreat and a retirement
place for them to be in. And there are just you know, lanes
of you know, for for shooting lanes for hunting where they would date one
end and they'd be down in that blind at the other end and be able
to do it. And I forget at one point he told me how many
miles of shooting lanes there were on that property. And he would just bait
things out there for deer and that would draw the deer, the presence of
the deer would draw the bears. And it was one of these bait stations
where he had a trail cam that he got the picture of one of the
creatures stalking them. Anyway, he and I kind of ran across each other
by accident, and he ended up inviting me. I had never really thought
about public speaking about any of this or anything like that. The idea of
public speaking didn't bother me. It was I had never thought about sharing my
research with anybody, because it was it was something I was just doing for
me and you know, for my satisfaction trying to figure out what was going
on, you know what I had encountered. And he talked me into coming
up to the Upper Peninsula, Michigan and speaking at his very first conference that
he was putting together up there. It's called the Marionette and No Nominee Bigfoot
Convention, and it started in twenty seventeen, and I was the keynote speaker.
And up until then, I mean, you know, he and I
kept in touch, and unfortunately, after I was there in twenty nineteen and
at the convention in twenty nineteen, I released my study at that convention that
year, and after that, unfortunately, Craig fell ill with throat cancer and
passed away soon after. But he and I have we talked to extensibly about
an idea. It just seemed that bigfoot was a creature that matched the description
of metafauna during the ice age, right, And we started to pursue this
and talk about it and talk about it and looking more and more into it
and shared notes and got everything. And you know, I had to get
through my research with the you know, the emotional impact that people have from
encounters. But this was always something that was on the back burner working and
now I have the opportunity to bring this to the front burner. And you
know, the hypothesis basically comes down to that this is another form of human
that we didn't we haven't really identified yet. And if you look at it,
just the physical traits will tell you. You look at the footprints,
which is largely the physical evidence that we have, and you look at the
footprints, the footprints are not only perfectly adapted to upright walking, they're perfectly
adapted to upright walking carrying a great amount of weight, not only with a
mid tarsal break, with a flexible midfoot that allows them not to put all
the stress on the metatarsal bones that are in the foot, but it also
has the wide heel that enables to give a broader base. Because when you
think about it, if a creature this big is walking upright, half of
the time they're walking, all of their weight is on one foot, So
you can't you can't have a narrow heel and be able to keep you know,
the serviceable balance with that. You have to have a broader heel to
be able to match that. So if you've got a foot like that that's
adapted to upright walking the way it is, there's no opposable digit to it.
It's a foot adapted a lot like a human foot. You can't have
just that adaptation to the foot. That's not going to guarantee upright walking.
You have to have matching adaptation, corresponding adaptations to the ankle and to the
knee and to the hip, to the lower back and to the neck,
all of that. Okay, you have to have all that. So you
take a look at what we know for sure in science these days. The
only creatures that you can talk about that have had that particular set of adaptations
all belong to the human family of evolution, and what anybody who thinks evolution
is a line as a continuous line is in error. Evolution was I mean
the species that we have, some of them one came from another, but
to a great degree, there's twenty one of them that have been identified,
Homo netalie being the most recent one, just a couple of years ago.
But they are they're not a line of species, they are adjacent species in
most cases. So, yes, the evolution towards modern humans, the form
of modern humans was happening, and it was happening in a lot of different
places, and it's that human family of evolution that has led here and they
have a lot of characteristics like that. Now you can go just from that.
I'll give you this as well. Part of what this research has revealed
to me was comparing the physical traits that are reported in bigfoot encounters. You
take those and compare them to physical traits of humans that have gigantism or acromegaline.
And what got me to do this is that I once saw, you
know, I mean, once you start your research that you start looking at
giants stories, you know, stories about giants, and I was watching I
was watching a documentary on gigantism and they showed the foot of one of these
people, one of these folks that had you know, had been dealing with
that condition for a long time. And I looked at that foot and that
went wow, that looks awful, like a kind of foot that would make
a footprint like you'd get in the forest with bigfoot. So that looks very
similar, and I started getting into it, and there are a total of,
I believe fourteen different physical traits that you see in bigfoot encounters and descriptions
of from bigfoot encounters that commonly happened to folks that have gigantism and acromegally and
large hands and feet, elongated limbs, you know, that kind of stuff
right down to odor, because there's a you know, a lot of folks
which identism and acromegaly end up having excessive sweating and that causes odor, you
know, excessive odor right down to darkening of skin there. You know,
some folks with that condition have to deal with what's called mcune Albright syndrome.
And part of that mcune Albright syndrome is a darkening of the skin in patches
around. There's a connection to a lot of this stuff, especially when it
comes to the facial features, the pronounced braw, the pronounced cheekbone that you
have a lot of times. Sometimes you know, in a number of folks,
the head, the forehead can recess and the head starts to look a
bit conical, and there's I mean, you know, and there's a lot
of people who don't want to touch that because it's it seems very insensitive to
compare these folks that are dealing with a serious medical condition to Bigfoot. But
you can't ignore the fact that these traits are the same. They're very,
very similar in moost cases. And that's what tells me, that's what leads
me on that path to say, yeah, this is probably a different type
of human that we just haven't been able to identify yet. And then you
get into what I call behavioral evidence, and you think of general behaviors that
Bigfoot has. They hate being found by us, They don't want to be
around us in that type of way. They keep their distance, they keep
their security, they isolate themselves away, excuse me. And then you get
into some of the reports that you have some Native American and First Nations peoples
about there was there have been outright wars with these creatures. They you they
have you know, First Nations peoples have over three hundred names for these creatures,
and almost all of them include their words for man or people or tribe,
and they've had contact with them, their ancient contact with them in those
ways. There's there's all kinds of these of these things that kind of they
converge when you really think about it, they isolate themselves away from us.
Why, well, obviously we were in some heavy duty competition with them at
some point when it came down to existing, you know, just literally existing.
And that points to you know, you got to say, when was
that, When would this be? When would we not have an advantage over
them that we have now? And then I learned about what's called the Younger
Dryest Impact hypothesis, which says that about twelve eight hundred years ago, parts
of a comet came in and impacted North America during the Ice Age, and
these different impacts melted a lot of the ice that was there towards the end
of the Ice Age, and that influx of water went right into the oceans,
and ocean levels rose a couple of hundred to four hundred feet all at
once. And we're talking within a day or two that they think that may
have happened, and they're starting to find evidence of that. All of a
sudden, there's you know, where do human populations and to gather coastlines?
Well, there's there's twenty seven million square kilometers of ground level that were there
during the Ice Age and now are underwater, and those are all coastal areas.
Those are all areas that were right there. So it's not hard to
hypothesize that there was a great dying, there was a great conflagration, and
we were reduced down to from probably what they're they're finding more and more evidence
about of an advanced human civilization at that point that was absolutely devastated and they
went from whatever level of civilization they were at to rubbing two sticks together to
make fire and then a matter of days and that's where the that I you
know, I think Bigfoot was, uh, you know, that very small
population of a competing human line that had been driven right to the brink to
them, and the only reason they're still here is because we got reduced to
the same area and it became an immediate competition between us and the Neanderthals and
them. And you know, there's more and more information that comes down there.
But I think when you factor in the form that the physical form that
they have, when you factor in the tendencies that they have, the behaviors
that they have, when you look at you know, their situation. Why
would they still be the same now as they were thirteen thousand years ago,
because they've isolated themselves so much. Their isolation. Sure, it's preserved their
survival, it's preserved their existence, but it has also arrested their development and
to be able to go along with what we do. But you look at
them, and they have a natural fascination with humans. They will sit and
watch human beings. We are their television. And you know there's only I
mean, we have to figure out someday just what learning just what they're you
know, what they're doing. They they are smart enough to live on our
in betweens, you know, we are daytime creatures. They become they're very
active nocturnally. They they come out when there's far fewer of us than there
than there usually is. They live in areas where not too many humans live
in the first place. They've learned to stay away from us, to avoid
us, to be able to look for us. And I think that's a
cultural memory that they carry with them, and it's probably very close to their
exact thing that they have to the one thing that they have to go by
in order to survive, which is avoid us, you know, and only
only come near us on their terms. Where have you been rich? Where
have you been? I get that a lot. I get that a lot.
But you know, it's only until you know, the last few years
that I've really been, you know, realized that. But you know,
there might be some people out there that want to hear what I you know,
what I what I've found or you know, things that I've come across,
and you know, at this point, you know, it's getting that
information out there. You know, my first book is gunning out. It's
called Footprints in the Mind, the Bigfoot Witness Experience. Anybody who has never
experienced these creatures and wants to know what it's like, what's the little taste
of it? That's what this book is about. It's one hundred and thirty
pages of stories and analysis and examples, and you know, hopefully we'll be
able to get the publishing done very soon and then have it available for people.
But it's it's you know, I've always been that person who just personally
involved trying to find out the truth. And that's all I've ever been concerned
with with this. I mean, you know, I learned my lesson on
trying to be famous, and I started that that made me far more sober
and serious researcher. And that's what I'm about, you know, and I
hope it helps people. But these things need to get out there. We
need to talk about these things. Everything I just described maybe utter and total
chicken fried crap, but come out and tell me that it is, and
tell me why. I don't care if anybody say you proves me wrong.
Prove me wrong. At least we're advancing the research and we're getting closer to
the truth every day, and that's fine by me. But I'm telling you
the best things that I know, the things that I've found, and I
would hope that there's a lot of people that would do the same and start
sharing their information too. Rich Daniels, thank you so much, sir for
joining me. I have to have you back sometime anytime you like. I
appreciate the opportunity. As you can tell, I kind of like to talk.
Hey me too, me too, but I also like to listen.
I also like to listen. And yeah, there's a thousand things I want
and need to pick your brain about. Let's do it. I'm up for
it at any time, so I mean, you know, the more we
talk about this, the more that the more discourse there is about this subject,
the farther along it goes. And there's far too much people that are
playing everything too close to the best in this field. If we really want
to find out what's going on, we really want the truth, we need
to start sharing information and we need to start doing good science. And if
you are one of those people that has been fortunate or unfortunate enough to have
an encounter with Bigfoot or something else you can't explain, send me an email
at Bigfoot Crossroads at gmail dot com. If you get a chance, check
out the website Bigfootcrossroads dot com. You can find links to past episodes,
social media, merchandise, everything you need all in one place. And until
next time, remember there's something in the woods.