SC EP:1194 The Journey

It looked like somebody was bent over and had their head in the window of the deer blind. And it either heard me or smelt me. And he pulled his head out of the tent and stood straight up and that that shocked me. They don't make people that that big. The way it moved. Almost as if it was gliding across the beach. I've never seen anything move like that in my life. They were screaming at each other in gibberish. It sounded like a language and they were chunting away back and forth, back and forwards, back and forwards. I know what a bear looks like and there is no way on this planet to what I saw with bears. 911, what are you reporting? Jesus Christ, you better care. See ya. Hello? Get somebody out here. What's going on now, sir? That son of a bitch is about six foot nine. I don't know. Do you see him now, sir? Yes, I'm looking right in. Uh-huh. This is Mr. Rogers from Phoenix, Arizona. And the only podcast we listen to in my neighborhood is Sasquatch Chronicles. Welcome to the show, everyone. Thanks for being here tonight. Got a great show planned for you. We'll be speaking with John. And John is a working professional, highly educated, and he was comfortable in his daily life. He's a great person. He's a great person. He's a great person. He's a great person. He's a great person. He's a great person. He's a great person. He's a great person. He's a great person. And he was comfortable in his daily routine of meetings and deadlines. But as a child, he had this incident that happened to him in the dense woods near this cabin. And many years later, he heard a recording of the exact same thing he heard as a child. It was the Ohio Howl heard on a TV show. Woo! Remembering the event that happened to him when he was young kind of shattered his worldview and his mind kind of flooded with questions. So he started going out with people to find out if Sasquatch was real or not. Tonight, John shares his journey over many decades of looking for answers and his exploration and some of the different things that have happened to him. And again, we're going, this is stretching over decades. But I asked him to kind of come on and share these events. If you've had an encounter and you'd like to be on the show, shoot me an email. My email address is Wes at Sasquatch Chronicles dot com. And if you get a chance, check out Sasquatch Chronicles dot com. You can become a member and get additional shows. Let's jump into it tonight. I want to welcome John to the show. John, thanks for coming on. It's my pleasure, Wes. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you. Yeah. And you had this incident happen to you when you were very young and it kind of stuck with you throughout your whole life. If you would kind of start from the very beginning and walk me into this because I know we're going to span over decades and I'll try as little as possible to interject. But if you would start from the very beginning. Well, the first experience that I think was Sasquatch related for me was probably in 1976 or 77. And it was in Ontario. So the story is that, you know, my father, you know, I grew up in Toronto and my father loved to go fishing up at Lake Superior. It's about an eight hour drive out of Toronto all the way up to an area called Batchewana Bay. So when my dad would go fishing, my mother and I and sometimes my brothers, we would stay behind at this cabin at an old motel that's long gone now. But some of the structures are still there. It was called the Black Forest Motel. And it was a pretty scenic area and it had a couple of really big marshes in the back. And so now, you know, typically we go in the spring and my dad would go fishing for a steelhead trout and rainbow trout at that time. And, you know, my me, my brothers, my mom, we'd go on these old logging roads and go hiking back into the bush. And, you know, we'd find bear tracks, moose tracks, all kinds of things. If we were lucky, we got to see a moose at a distance. We'd find all kinds of birds like ptarmigan. We used to call them roughed grouse. I don't know if people still call them that up there. And, you know, and we'd I was really into bird watching and stuff like that as a kid, I was crazy about owls. And I was always trying to find owls and catching frogs and stuff that we used to do. So one night, one time I was up there with just me and my mom and my dad. I think both my brothers were, I think, going to university at that time. I'm the youngest of three. So we were up at the cabin. My dad had just come back from fishing and my mom was getting ready to prepare something for us. And I said I wanted to go out to the big marsh, which was probably a little less than a quarter mile away. And to go kind of listen to the spring peepers. And if you're familiar with Northern Ontario, I know the spring peepers kind of all over Ohio and other places, but in those gigantic marshes, it's almost a deafening chorus of frogs. And I used to do things that were, I don't know, a retrospect, I think, maybe even daring. I used to go buy these these these kind of these pits that were dug out to make landfill for the highway. And I'd go in the bush and I'd lie down in the ground and cover myself with leaves. Just so my my face was the only thing that was sticking out and I would observe wildlife. And I actually one time saw a wolf that way. And then I realized I'm only 12. This probably isn't safe. So after seeing the wolf, I took off just to make sure, you know, nothing, nothing bad happened. But I would do stuff like that. So I was out in this forest. Well, to be clear, I was walking down this road behind the motel to a bridge and the bridge is right alongside this rather large beaver dam that was there. And some I'm just listening to this giant chorus on the on this marsh and and frogs and the sun goes down and starts to get dark. And I'm looking for, you know, birds and birds of the evening, you know, owls, herons, bitterns, storks, stuff like that. And and then suddenly at the back half of the swamp, all the frogs stop. So I thought, oh, there's probably going to be a moose coming in, because, you know, when the moose comes in that part of the swamp, the frogs all go quiet. And I've seen that before. But this time, no moose, at least there's nothing I could see. You know, it's when that that that twilight stage, when the forest is kind of gray and everything sort of blends together. And way back from the back of the marsh, I hear two really loud bellowing screams is the best way I can describe them. There was a recording on the internet somewhere that sounded a lot like it, but it was kind of like started low and then went up to like a bull. And it got really really like definitely loud. And it would die down and then it happened again. And by the second time, I was thoroughly freaked out. And in the dark, I ran back to the cabin. And by the time I was running down the road, it was so dark, I could barely see my hand in front of my face. So I was I was pretty frightened at that time. And my mother decades later still remembered me bursting into the cabin. Apparently, you could see the whites of my eyes all around very wide eyed, quite frightened. And I told her something is screaming in the forest. So she remembered that decades later. So I never knew what to what to think of that. And decades go by about maybe 15 to 20 years, I think, kind of go by. You know, I go through I went to school in university in Europe. I came back to Canada and I was for about a year. I was living in a place called Kitchener Kitchener Waterloo area of Ontario. And I just married my wife and, you know, and we were sitting down watching TV. And then we watched this program about Bigfoot. And there was a it was I don't remember the name of the program, but the story went that there was a detective of sorts or a policeman of sorts on the native one of the Native American reservations in Alberta. And he had received a report, I guess, over the radio, I think, that there was an angry Sasquatch on a hill kind of above the res. Or where the where the trailers and homes were. And it was throwing oil drums down the hill. I don't know if you've ever heard of that story. I remember I mean, my memory is a little foggy on some of the details. But I remember the the guy said something to the effect of when he got to the site, the Sasquatch had stopped throwing the oil drums. It had gone into the forest, but it was still bellowing and screaming. And he had just come from a deposition and he had a tape recorder with him and a microphone. And so he turned it on and recorded it. And the screams that he recorded struck me. It sounded like it's I suddenly remembered what I'd heard up at Lake Superior. And that got me questioning. I heard that and I thought, dang, you know, was that what I heard at Lake Superior? And, you know, and then after that, I kind of just it was still a mystery to me. I didn't really give it too much more thought. I was going about life, you know, getting into getting a job in the United States and things like that and all the paperwork that went along with it and the visas and everything else that was part of that. So somewhere and I don't remember when that episode came out. It was it was in the lake. Or when I saw it was probably the late 90s, I'm thinking. So anyways, so I, you know, get a job in the United States in 1995 in Cleveland, Ohio. One of the jobs that I subsequently had was in at one of the state hospitals in in the in Summit County, which is just in kind of in between Akron and Cleveland. And it's right next to the Cuyahoga National Forest. It's right on the grounds, actually. So I got a job there and at London, it was a very scenic area around the hospital. You could walk around. So on some of my lunches, I would go walking around in the grounds. And one time I can't help but think this was around. 2000 when I just started working there. I was walking down by a creek called Sagamore Creek. And I came across a really large footprint. It looked about 16 inches in the mud. And it was deep and it had toes. And I remember looking at it and going, that cannot be that here. What, you know, I was confused. I was, you know, just befuddled by this thing. I was looking at it and going, no, no, no, a big foot here. No. And I, and I made a mental trick on myself, so to speak, and just dismissed it outright, saying it's not possible. Some, some big tall guy was walking out here barefoot and left that footprint. And I didn't find any others. It was kind of just crossing the path. And it was in a very deep, scrubby area that's actually quite hard to walk through. And, you know, I, when I was going down there, I'm always looking for fossils and clam shells and evidence of wildlife and things like that. So, so that happened. And then later on, I want to say 2001, I should go back and check with my wife on this, but I went camping with a friend of mine who now lives in Seattle and he was originally from there with him and his wife and his, his 18 month old son. And so this, I think, had to be the summer of 2001 or 2002. But I think 2001. Anybody who's been to Beaver Creek State Park in Ohio, it's, it's right along the Pennsylvania border. And it's a stone's throw from the Ohio Howell recording, which was, I think, in Wellesleyville, and that was recorded in 1995, I believe. And so I didn't know anything about that scream. I didn't, I hadn't made any, I'd done any internet searches. I hadn't made any efforts to talk to anybody relating to Bigfoot in any way at that time. But so I remember it was July. I remember we had gotten there just after a rain, but things were still dry enough to make a campfire and the air was perfectly still. There was absolutely no wind whatsoever. The campsite was pretty full. There were some people in the camp next to us who were drinking and making noise until quite late. And we were kind of annoyed with them. But, you know, that was the first night. And I've also been a practitioner of martial arts, my practically my entire life. And so I brought a wooden staff with me just to go practice with. And while, you know, everyone was sitting around the campfire, I went into this grove of pine trees. I think they're red, red, red pines around the campsite. And I went into there, you know, and just started twirling my staff and whacking the trees with it. And I had no notion of, you know, Sasquatch is communicating with wood knocks and things of that nature. But so unbeknownst to me, I'm doing these wood knocks. I'm going whack, whack, whacking the trees, you know, trying different techniques, you know, different postures and, you know, just doing martial arts solo, just free form. And then this incredibly foul odor hits me. And it's really, it's so foul and so pungent. It was like a punch in the face is how I would describe it. And, you know, my wife and I have talked about it over and over again, because as soon as I smelled it, she walked over to me, she goes, do you smell that disgusting odor? And I look at her and I go, yeah, well, like, what on earth is that? I've never smelled anything like it before. And so she thinks it was like, you know, so she grew up in China and she says it was like kind of like those open toilets that they used to have out in the country in China, where there's a hole and there's a lot of, you know, stale waste down there and it smelled kind of like that, but really, really pungent. And so we weren't sure what to think of it. I knew that sometimes there's trees that give off certain types of smells at night. They're pretty pungent trees. And I thought, is there a plant out here that's doing that? You know, turns out no. We couldn't find a tree anywhere near us that was giving off that odor. And the odor would have been there a lot longer, but it wasn't there the whole time that we were there. So it was weird. So, so eventually we all turn in. I remember that people in the camp next to us were carrying on till about two o'clock in the morning and keeping us awake. So we were kind of annoyed by them, but, you know, we weren't going to go pick with them or, you know, they were just having fun. We weren't going to, you know, talk to them about the noise. We just settled in. And somewhere around two o'clock, two thirty a.m. And there's no wind whatsoever. We hear a gigantic limb break off of a tree. And you can hear it whoosh through the air and land and hit the ground with an enormous thud. Probably what sounded like, I don't know, 15, 20 feet from us. And I remember the people in the other camp, I could hear them talking. They're going, holy crap, what was that? You know, kind of thing. And I thought, that's strange. There's no wind. I mean, I have seen trees break on their own out in the woods when there's no wind. So I didn't think it was super strange. But but we did notice it. And what was strange about it, though, was the the whoosh sound of the of the limb, as if it had been thrown or something like it was flying through the air kind of sound instead of just dropping on site and hitting the ground. So that that put a hush in the local campers. And then after that, everything went quiet for a while. The whole nothing else happened after that, that I could tell. And the whole next day we go hiking up and down Beaver Creek. We visit, you know, Gretchen's Lock and the old sawmill and all, you know, all that kind of stuff. Supposedly, or so I'm told, and I've read somewhere that that particular park is supposed to be one of Ohio's most haunted places. And these ghost hunters go there all the time. And some of the other big footers that I talked to subsequently told me that the ghost hunters get freaked out when ghosts with red eyes throw pine cones at them and thought those kind of humors. But so the next night, you know, we were doing camp again. Pretty sure it was a Saturday night with the intent of going back on Sunday. Nothing, nothing's really going on. We're sitting around the campfire, et cetera, et cetera. And that's fine. And then we go to bed somewhere around 11 30. The people who were drinking the night before were gone. The camp was quieter and their boy starts to have some kind of medical issue. It turns out he had, you know, a gastrointestinal issue. And he starts crying and yelling, like really loud. And he's keeping other people in the camping area awake. And the owls are responding. And then a group of coyotes responded. And then there's an equestrian farm just right next to where the camp is. You can hear horses naing and moving around as if something was agitating them down there. And I didn't really take note of that until after what happened. So I go to my friend and I say, Hey, you know, once you just take your boy home, it's not a big drive back to Cleveland. I'll pack up your tent for you in the morning and we'll deliver it to you. So don't worry about just leave everything here. Just go. So they pack up the kid at 12 30 AM or so. They're gone. So my wife and I are lying down in the tent and then she taps me on the shoulder. Not too long after that, I maybe an hour, maybe a little bit more. Not sure because, you know, it was quite a few years ago. And she says, Hey, something's coming. And so that piqued my attention. I grabbed my machete and I think, OK, that's not good. And I'm and I thought, should I get up and unzip the fly of the tent and step outside and confront whatever it is? And then we thought, no, let's let's pretend we're asleep. So we, you know, we say nothing and we're just lying there listening. So on the picnic table, kind of right near our tent, we had a box full of food stuffs and, you know, frying pans and things like that. And I thought to myself, oh, stupid raccoons. You know, they go after that stuff. Well, we hear something walk out of the forest side, not the, you know, when the camp, there's a road that accesses the camp. And then behind the camp, there's a forest and there's a cliff over there. It's a pretty steep. It's a good, you know, 40 feet, 35 feet from an old iron mine, I guess, is what I'm told. And and, you know, to come from through there is actually quite difficult because full of thorns and brambles. We hear it coming from that side. And then you can hear it touch the box. I say it because I, in retrospect, I'm really not thinking this is a person anymore. But at the time I thought it was a person is touching the box in just kind of running its hand on the cardboard. So I thought to myself, oh, this thing's not trying to be very discreet, this person. And then it walks to the head of our tent, which was facing my friend's tent, which was turned sideways two hours. And underneath their tent was a big tarp that stuck out from the bottom of the tent with a bunch of little toys on it, like little construction trucks and stuff like that. And we hear this thing pick up the tarp and touch it and move it. And it's making a big, loud crackling noise of the tarp. So I thought, no, that's really strange because that's really not discreet at all. And, you know, I'm getting kind of eager at this point to see what's going on. But this thought kept nagging at me like, what if it's somebody and they have a gun and I'm just sitting here with my machete, they'll have the jump on me. This is not safe. So we decided to just let them poke around. And then they kind of poke around the tent a little bit. And then they go off to this pine tree back towards the forest side again. And then the thing takes a leak. You can hear it urinating by the tree, which I thought was very strange. I thought, like, who on earth does that? Just but I didn't hear any. I didn't hear any zippers or anything like that. I just hear something, a bit of breathing and some urinating. And I thought, wow, that's really weird. And then it takes off back into the forest again. And so my wife and I thought that was very strange. We thought even for a human being, that's very strange behavior. The following morning when we went out to the tent, the tarp that had the toys on it, the corner of it was neatly folded over in a triangle, which was very strange. And then so we didn't know what to think of that. We packed up the tent. I took it back to my friend. And so he unpacked it on the lawn next to his building where he lived to dry it out in the sun. And he found a ball of pine pitch, like rolled up into a ball with little broken needles and stuff into it, but rolled up into a ball stuck to his tent as if somebody had taken pine pitch, rolled it in their hands and tossed it at the tent. And he found that. And I don't know how long he kept it, but I know he had that. So after that, we thought that was very strange as well. Some time after that in the news, and I don't remember exactly how far afterward, I read some kind of news item. You know, I was reading local news. There was some kind of a story about a Sasquatch scene crossing a road near Beaver Creek State Park, probably just 10 miles from where we were. And that got me thinking. I thought, that's really weird. So I was mulling that over and I started looking into Bigfoot on the internet. And back then the internet didn't have as much information. And there was probably fewer hoaxes back then as well, I'm guessing. So at some point around 2005, maybe six, I reached out to the BFRO. I called them. I saw they had an office. I think it was in California and I called them. And I got a call back from Matt Moneymaker and he had somebody else with him at the time. And they were on speakerphone, I remember. And I told him what they said. We heard that you had, because I had left him a voicemail. They said, we heard that you had an incident at Beaver Creek State Park. Matt told me he'd been in Ohio and he saw something similar or a similar experience at the Berlin Reservoir, which is really close to where I live and very close, well, reasonably close to where I worked. And that struck me as, wow, that's interesting that they come so close to major civilized areas. And he said to me, well, you know, we're going to be doing a trip out there to investigate bigfoot activity. And you're welcome to join us. So I joined them in 2006 and in 2007. In 2006 was when I got kind of introduced to this idea of doing wood knocks and of, you know, doing whoop noises and hiking around in the forest at night to see if you could elicit activity. We talked about, you know, sound broadcasting and things like that. I think that's when I met Cliff Berwickman. I think he was either at that one or the one in 2007. I'd have to look back. But I met some of the local bigfooters as well, some of whom I'm still in contact with us to this day. And so, you know, that was, I remember when I went out on this experience, I said to myself, I feel like a complete idiot. This can't be real. I'm on some kind of wild goose chase. There's there's no way, you know, these things exist. But after listening to stories from a number of people that were quite sounding quite sincere, I started to reconsider my position on that. And in 2007, during that episode, when we went out, I think it was in April. Yeah, it was in April. That's when the East Central Ohio Bigfoot Chatter was recorded. What happened on the first night there, we broke up into separate parties. And my party was with a good friend of mine, who's an author. And he was interested in writing potentially some material on Sasquatch and he brought along his son. And so it was him, myself and his son, James, came along with us. And so we were hiking the upper Vondegren Trail. And the lower Vondegren Trail follows the Beaver Creek itself. And we were up on this ridge. And we're and we were sitting at this on this gigantic block of limestone. I remember our sandstone that was still warm from the sun. And I was there with my my typical martial arts stick wagging trees again. And we were just talking about, I don't know, a whole bunch of things. And after it got dark, somewhere around nine thirty, maybe ten, we got the radio signal, OK, we're all going to go hiking. So we start walking down this trail down to Rendezvous with another party walking the lower Vondegren Trail. So we're hiking and my friend Rick says to me, he goes, hey, something just crossed the trail behind me. And I thought he's playing tricks with me is what I thought. I thought, no, that's not we're 10 minutes down the trail. And already something is happening. So I didn't give it much credence. So we keep walking, moving on. And we get down to the bottom of the trail where we're supposed to Rendezvous. We're almost at that point. And we see some deer in the bush. And instead of bounding away like deer normally do, they're skulking. They're they're hanging their heads down and they're moving really, really quietly in the underbrush and they just gently moved away from us. I thought most to the time when I encountered deer, even at night, unless they're really used to humans, they they bound away. And you see their little, you know, their white, fluffy tails as a as they bound away from you. And I didn't see anything like that. They just slowly walk slunk away from us. And I thought that that was a bit weird for deer behavior. But, you know, again, not making much of a mental note of that other than just observing it. So we get to the bottom of the trail. We're supposed to be at the Rendezvous point. And just as we're about to like, we're literally 20 feet from the trail junction. We hear this incredible sound of something right behind us. And it was in rapid succession of Bop, Bop, Bop, Bop, Bop, Bop, Bop, Bop. And I thought it was very powerful and loud. And I kind of felt it in my body. And and we all looked at each other and thought, what on earth was that? And, you know, I thought it was something pounding its foot really rapidly into the ground. But later I couldn't help thinking this was chest pounding. And we were we were a little bit freaked at this point. And so we get to the junction and we look for the guys who were supposed to rendezvous with us and they didn't even stop. We could see their little headlamps way down the trail. They didn't even stop for us. They just kept on going. So we were a bit chagrined by that. We were kind of like, damn, not what we wanted to be left behind. And then we hear across the creek, something walking in the tall grass. And this is where there's a little abandoned river in an island. And people who know this area know this little island really, really well. On the opposite opposite bank, there's an old farm wall made of stones. It's probably like way over a hundred years old, probably for orchards or some sort of thing where they were moving rocks from the ground. But anyways, we hear one to our left. And then we hear one to our right. And then there's something behind us. And then there's the one on the right starts walking into the river. And you can really hear that it's bipedal. And I thought, this is really freaky. You know, we're either being stalked by some people who are trying to frighten us. Or we're dealing with Sasquatch. So we all have flashlights. We all have flashlights. And so I say to my friends, I said, well, why don't we just go back to back? Hold our flashlights to our chest. And when these things get really close to us, we'll just turn them on and we'll be able to see what's coming at us. So the sounds keep happening and whatever it is is approaching. And, you know, the tension gets really high and we flash on the light. And nothing. The sound stops. There's no activity. We're just illuminating branches and grass. We see absolutely nothing. So we go, OK, let's get out of here. So we go back along the lower Vondegren trail along the river, because that's where we were. One guy at the front of us and I was at the front and my friend was at the back and we had our flashlights on the whole time. And I said, you know, we were told that if you shine your flashlights, they don't like that and they'll stay away from you. So we're shining these flashlights. All over the all around us in a really paranoid fashion. And as we're going along, we cross this bridal trail and just so happens that our flashlight beams kind of converge to the right of us, right where this bridal trail is. And we see way up high off the ground, these two eyes. And they were kind of greenish blue almost. I'm not entirely sure of a greenish blue. And when the light hit the face and we didn't get a really good look at the face, because it turned away immediately. But what we did see was the eyes got really white and like almost like surprised, turned away to its left and then it took off. And then it didn't bother us anymore after that. We got to the village. We crossed the old iron bridge and we got to the village. And then we were very unnerved by that experience, because it was clearly being stocked and it was frightening. So that happens. Then the following day, we do a day hike. And during the day hike, we're on the other side of the river. We my friends and I thought, let's go see, let's go walk where these things were and see if we can find footprints. So we go through all this bush and tall grass and and we didn't find any footprints. But what we did find was a deer that had been clearly ripped in two. So the front legs and head were one piece. And the hind quarters with this tail and everything else were the second piece. And they were about 40 feet apart from one another. And one of the one of them, the head of this thing had been like picked clean by birds or something. But nothing had really cannibalized it. Like nothing like no coyotes tore it apart or anything else. The bones were not scattered. They were intact and it was sitting there kind of like a Sphinx. It was a very bizarre sight to see this thing like it was. So that was another weird thing. And we reported that as well. I remember the next night I said to the group, I said, I'm not going. I'm not going out on that trail again. That was a bit too frightening for me. I'm going to stick around the camp with you guys. And this is, I believe, Saturday night. And so, so, you know, they said, well, we're going to do some call blasting down by these dumpsters, which was pretty much, you know, 50 yards from where we got stocked. Just a little bit upstream, but on the opposite bank. And people had been barbecuing all day long and with their kids playing in this grassy area. So we were we were in a cul-de-sac and there was a big dumpster there. And I had my bionic ear. I had bought this bionic ear at Radio Shack. I still have it. It has a directional microphone and these little headphones. And it amplifies dramatically everything you're hearing. So if you hear, you can hear your own footsteps, your own breathing, you know, your coat, crinkle, everything. So we're there. We're in a picnic table and kind of the humorous part of it is somebody brought out some jack links and we were eating those. And we were just talking in the sun was setting and starting to get dark. And we were supposed to do some call blasting. We started hearing this. This what sounds like an angry gorilla. Really, you know, grunting at us from the woods right next to the river. And I remember thinking, oh, are they call blasting already? I said, hey, are you guys blasting? And they go, no, they're running towards their tape recorders. And hitting the record buttons. And that's when the the chatter was recorded. I think there was eight, eight of us or so there at the time. And the recording that you hear there is only about the last 30 seconds or so of it. It had gone on for probably about an additional 30 or more, maybe 40 seconds before they hit the record button. So so then there was this this this noise. And then and then I hear one walking. And it's you can hear it. I have my my microphone and I'm listening to the woods. And I hear this bipedal creature walking through the forest. And it goes up the the very, very steep bank. Like there's about 100 feet, maybe a little bit more, almost a cliff, but it's like covered in trees. So it's steep, but it's not like a rock face. And and it's climbing up there. And I can clearly hear it stepping. It goes behind a tree and it's observing us. And I could see a faint silhouette and I could see some very faint reddish orange eye shine poking out from behind the tree. And I watch this thing for about 20 minutes. And then it just kind of took off after that. So that experience really started to solidify things for me. You know, I thought probably thousands of times, you know, have we been hoaxed? Did somebody do that? Did somebody, you know, broadcast some angry gorilla noises? But I don't think so. And then subsequently, I was told that those sounds were caught the attention of Ron Morehead or or his associates, I'm not entirely sure. And there was an initial suspicion that we had taken some of the Sierra sounds and rebroadcast those and then claimed to have our own big foot sounds. And that is actually, I know that that's not true. And then I guess they were subsequently analyzed and compared with the Sierra sounds and found to be distinctive. But there was something about and I don't know how they do this, but when they have an oscilloscope, you're able to tell kind of the size of the vocal cords. Things like that. There's some data that you can get and also about the sound range. So it turned out to be a completely independent vocalization by a Sasquatch, we think. So that really was kind of a life changing event for me. I my world started to started to change on me. And I'm a scientifically trained person. I've studied the sciences my whole life. I'm generally not particularly superstitious in any way. I have my spiritual leanings and so on. But I also don't walk around this world thinking that I know things or that I'm right about everything. And this opened my eyes. And I started to talk a lot about it at home to almost to the point of making my spouse sick of me talking of it. So subsequently later in the year, when I think it was later a month or two later, I took some of my martial arts students in the same year, 2001, to the exact same spot. We went camping at the State Park. And then we went hiking and we were training in martial arts at this spot. And of course, the method to my madness or the madness to my method was, I don't wonder how these things would react to watching humans doing martial arts. So we were practicing with sticks and ropes and chains and bats and, you know, swords and all kinds of things. We were really quite enjoying that. And there was a grove of, you know, when they plant rows of spruce trees and they're in straight lines. And in between the spruce trees, there's all these dead branches and stuff. So we were training there and I started to get a creepy feeling that we're being watched. And so what happens is I started loading all the equipment back into my CRV at the time. And the guys are going like, are we going back to the camp? Like, why are you loading up all this? And I just said, I'm just getting ready a bit at a time so we don't have to waste time after dark. And so we do all that. And then we decide to take a break and we go sit on the very same picnic table that was there when we heard the chatter. And we're sitting there looking at the river. And across the river, there's a large branch of what looks like an old apple tree, maybe crab apple or something. And we can see something, a silhouette of something dark moving under there, but you can't make it out. It's just too dark. And then one of the branches shakes kind of violently. I say to the guys, I go, like, you think I should try to vocalize that? And you want me to yell at it? Or I go, yeah, well, why not? Like, what's it going to do? I mean, we don't even know what the hell that is. And so I do a big loud, you know, whoop, but a noise like that. And unbeknownst to us, there was something behind us in the pine grove. And it started running towards us. I don't have no idea how fast, but you could clearly hear it running towards us and growling. And it was breaking those little dry twigs off the spruce trees as it was running. And to me, it sounded like a cow running through a forest. It was big. And I got very freaked out by that. And I just ran towards the vehicle, hopped in. All the other guys hopped in. We peeled out of there. And then at the end of the road, I turned the vehicle around and shone my high beams down just to see if anything was following us and we could see nothing. And I remember getting nightmares after that. And I was freaked out so much so that I actually couldn't go back in those woods or pretty much any woods by myself for almost a year. I remember driving out there in the middle of winter. I got kind of mad at my own fear. I drove out there in the winter by myself and I forced myself to walk into the woods to get over my fear. And that worked. I was no longer afraid after that. But we did a subsequent camping trip where we met the guy on whose property the Ohio Howell was recorded. And he passed along some footage that he had. I'm not allowed to. I was under agreement by the BFRO not to show the footage or try to profit off of it, but it's a very grainy, overexposed footage of a Sasquatch sniffing some apple butter on a tree on his property. And you can you can see the creature. He had to watch 12 hours of footage just to get these few seconds of footage of this thing. And what you what you see is the thing walks up to a tree. First, you see its hand grabbing the tree and then it pulls itself sort of so to speak towards the tree. It turns its head and sniffs the tree. And you can see its ear. You can see the silhouette of its face and you can see the conical shaped head and these enormous, enormous neck muscles that go down to the shoulder. And and then it turns its head one more time and walks away quietly with making no sound. And later on when I lived in Oregon, I actually mentioned it to Jeff Meldrum and he knew of that footage. He said, oh, yeah, the overexposed thermal was not thermal. Oh, what's it called again? Oh, not ultraviolet. But anyways, it was a heat a heat footage, a heat signature footage. And he remembered it. And so one thing I did was I had the little piece of footage I have enhanced by a guy in Toronto. And I have a skull I bought at a fossil fair. It's not a real skull. It's a cast of the Australopithecus from Boise, 1958, Alduvai. And I froze the frame and I held up the skull to to the frame on my TV set, a big TV set. And it's a dead ringer for an Australopithecus in terms of structure. An Australopithecus, when you look at it, if you, you know, it looks prognastic, like its teeth, its face sticks out at the jaw when the head is tilted back. But if you tilt the head forward, the sagittal crest sticks up and the face starts to look flat. And that's what you see with the patty film, is that the head is kind of slightly tilted forward. And that changes the appearance of the thing a little bit when you're looking at it. So I started to have this idea that that Sasquatch might be somehow related to Australopithecus, or something along those lines, or there's another one called Georgicus and a few others that I'd seen online that made me think these could be somehow related to Bigfoot, but I really don't know, obviously. So I continued looking into this and I also had some strange experiences by the state hospital. I have photographs of these. I would go out for hikes and I didn't believe that there was going to be Sasquatch out there, but I always remembered that footprint. And remember it was February 14th, it was Valentine's Day, 2007, we had a huge snowstorm in Cleveland area and it was almost two feet of snow. I remember the following day, can't remember what day of the week that was, following day or two or something, I'm hiking, I'm just walking around and there's this trail where people walk their dogs, it's an old road, access road to, it goes by the hospital and then goes to this baseball diamond and all this stuff. So I'm walking through the snow and I see these really, really large footprints among the tracks of people and dogs and they're really, really big. And I went, I measured them and they were about 17 inches long and about seven inches wide and you could clearly see toes in them and you could see that mid-tarsal ridge where the snow got kind of flipped up. And this is in almost two feet of snow, but I was walking on a trail that was padded down by people so it wasn't as hard for me to walk along there. The distance between each footprint was over four and a half feet and I got really freaked by that. I went back to the hospital and I got one of my friends who works there. I said, hey, because I have a crappy flip phone at the time that couldn't take good pictures. I said, do we have a hospital camera or do you have a camera at your disposal? I got these footprints, I got a, I want to take some pictures of me, he gets curious about that. And we take the camera out there and so he saw the footprints fresh, but the camera didn't work. And I tried to follow the footprints around that time and I followed them. I looked on Google Earth and I followed them for about 0.6 of a mile before they disappeared by going on to a road and then I completely lost track of them. So the following, I think that was a Friday and then the following weekend it rained, went back on Monday and there were only two footprints left, but one of them was still relatively good. And I took a picture of my foot next to it and it was still 17 inches and you could still see the toes a little bit. Subsequent to that, I found other footprints I have pictures of and a handprint from the Cuyahoga Valley that were in these little muddy creeks and there was one spot that was really interesting was there was a log going over a small creek and something had crouched down on this log, reached its arms down into the mud and you could see fingertips from both hands scraping the mud as if you would touch something and then smell your fingers kind of thing. Like a kid sticking a hand in a chocolate cake kind of idea. I found that and then I found more footprints and it went under the log, put one of its hands into the muck and then leapt and some distance away like six feet away, I found another footprint and I have casts of those footprints and I have the handprint as well. The hand is not particularly big, but the footprint is 13 inches or so and I thought that's a pretty athletic feat. I tried to replicate it myself and I was not quite able to do it. I kind of came close but not quite and subsequently when Hurricane Ike blew through, I'd have to check the dates on that, that was in the fall. I found some more very large footprints, again two sets, the smaller one, the bigger one, and I followed the bigger set of footprints into the woods not realizing how dangerous that might be at the time and whatever it was that I was following I think had circled around behind me and I could smell a smell that made me nervous and the footprints disappeared in this grove of eastern white pines and I decided to bail out at that point, but in addition to that I had also walked up in that area and I can't remember the date when this happened, but I was walking up on the grounds of the state hospital and I wasn't necessarily looking for bigfoot or anything like that, but I remember walking up and I got to this ridge and I had an incredibly powerful feeling of being watched and I was by myself and I actually just hit the deck, I actually jumped down to the ground and crouched because something was staring at me, I could, it was very intense and I looked back over my right shoulder and you know there's these tall grasses, they're kind of like you know the grasses in South America, you know these pumpas type of grasses with these big feathery seeds on them and clearly something had parted them and then just as I looked over it let it go and just that was the only thing moving was that. So there was that experience and a variety of others, subsequently I moved to Oregon in 2008 in the fall of 2008, I'm not saying everything in chronological order, but in 2008 I moved to Eugene, Oregon for a job and I promptly got in touch with local BFRO investigator and we went out to this area repeatedly, this place near, what's it called, it was near Cottage Grove, you know where Buster Keaton's film The General was made? Yeah, I know that area of Oregon very well. Yeah and so there's a sign, there's an exit there called Goshen and you get off there and there's a road that travels east about, I don't know, 15 maybe 20 minutes tops and there's a small lake there and then this mountain where they had had a report of somebody who lived out that way, a guy who was jogging down a road from his home had seen a Sasquatch cross the road ahead of him and it scared him, he went back home and he reported it. So we started investigating that area and you know we had a couple of nights where we heard things but nothing special going on, I don't remember exactly how many times we went out, now I realize in retrospect I probably should record stuff like this, but one particular night it was very interesting, we were out there, I think it was, let me see, there was one, two, three, four, five of us and we parked our cars on this old logging road in a clear cut and we thought we would use any means possible, we were pretty amateur at this and we got some cologne that had been bought at Walmart, it was like some cheap awful men's cologne and we doused a rag with it and stuck it up in this tree and then we started making noises, wood knocks, yells and this went on for probably an hour or an hour and a half that we were doing this and nothing was really happening and we were starting to think okay we should probably pack it in, nothing's going to happen. I remember the night, it was Mother's Day 2009 I think, in May, it was really really intense bright moonlight and you know as you're familiar in Washington, the Douglas Furs and the Redwoods and stuff, in this area it's all Douglas Furs but they're really big trees, I mean they're very wide around and at the edge of this cut the trees were really quite illuminated by this intense moonlight which was to our backs and down along the tree line we saw what looked like eyeshine but you know there's a lot of elk in the area and we were kind of like eh, not sure what to think of that, we you know we kept watching and I went towards the tree line along with one of the individuals and to try and get a better look and on our way to the tree line we started to smell that smell similar to what I had had in Ohio and we both got nervous and decided to go back to our cars so we started walking back to the cars and then on the way back there was a windfall, a big tree root that was sticking up out of the ground, it was covered in grass, it's pretty old, I stood up on this thing and I started looking down and scanning the tree line and I see a big black blob turns out later we measured it was 60 yards away and it's on all fours clearly and it's swaying back and forth pretty rapidly so I call the guys, come over let's look at this, this is really weird what is that? One of the guys had binoculars I remember and so we're all looking at this thing and it goes behind a tree and it comes out again, goes behind a tree, comes out again, we're watching this thing for a good minute and then at some point it seems to realize that we're all staring at it and it decides to stand up and when it stood up and I should note there was a, and I did a drawing of this later very soon after to depict what I saw, there was this thing stood up and I couldn't see it from the knees down but we could see pretty much the arms, the shoulders and the head and it was enormous and the moonlight was intense enough that you could just barely make out a kind of a sheen of light reflecting off of its shoulders and it was really nicely silhouetted by the trees behind it and clearly broader than two of these trees side by side and we watched it almost in disbelief, I remember holding my breath and really forcing my eyes to stay open because I didn't want to close my eyes and then have it gone and we were watching this thing and then it kind of sort of seemed to get bored with us or something and then it turned and as it turned it did this, if you ever watch orangutans they look clunky but they're really really graceful and it turned and very gracefully it just walked to its right and you can see the left arm swing and just quietly it just walked off into the woods and that was our sighting, that was as close to a class A I think or about as close as I would get to actually visualizing one directly and you know I got home at three o'clock in the morning told my wife and she just didn't want to believe me so I was pretty much really hooked after that. We went about a week later maybe 10 days later because it was hard to get our schedules together, me and one of the investigators and so we did a laser measure and it was 63 yards and at the spot where it was I stood and when I saw the picture of me standing where it stood that freaked me out really badly and I started to have second thoughts about following these things around in the woods because my head, I'm 5'8 and my head was at its elbow so this thing was a good three and a half, four feet taller than me, it was really big so we did a calculation roughly, it had to be approximately 9 and a half feet tall and there were some weathered footprints left behind, they were indistinct but they were 19 inches long so that really scared the living crap out of me. I did subsequently go back to that area a couple of times with friends and found some tree tops ripped off and thrown on the road and stuff like that but never any evidence again in that area that was clear cut to me like that but that thing really gave me a lot of second thoughts about what I was doing but I had this belief that these things are pretty benign, there's only old stories about them attacking people and killing them and I thought if it's not that aggressive I can go out there and investigate this but seeing that really gave me some serious pause. Anyway so some time goes by, let's see that was 2009, this would have been, I left Oregon at the end of 2011 so I'm thinking either 2010 or early 2011, I got invited to an investigation with some BFRO guys at a place called Bumping Lake in Washington but I went up to that place several times but on this particular occasion and in each time by the way I did find evidence of various degrees of quality including footprints that there were squatches in the area but on this particular expedition this was the first time I went with my same friend whose kid had attracted the Sasquatch in Ohio, he's now living in West Seattle so I went up to join him in Tacoma and we drove through Cayuse Pass and down the American Valley and into Bumping Lake and we went to this camp and on the drive-in we come across a pickup truck and these guys stop and they want to talk to us so I think we wanted directions or something and they go what are you guys doing? So we're going on a big foot hunt and they all burst out laughing. The guy in the back seat though, we talked to him, he said he's a journalist and so we say hey did you guys encounter anything strange or unusual while you were there and the sun was setting at this time and they go no no and oh yeah there was something and so what was it and they said well you know we were fishing and this disgusting odor got so bad that we packed in our stuff and left so we took that as a sign that okay this is good, good for us so we went down there and I remember people were hanging out orangutan, pheromone chips and really disgusting smelling things like that and we broke up into teams again and somebody gave us a fleer night vision and my friend and I we hiked up and down the logging roads for probably two to four hours and heard and saw absolutely nothing and then one of the ladies on the trip from one of the other groups through the thermal had seen a Sasquatch and it was doing the same behavior that we saw in Oregon it was swaying back and forth and and then going into the trees and coming out and looking a little agitated and she had tears on her eyes she was so ecstatic at what she had seen I was I was envious of that but so we go back to the tent and it's like almost two o'clock in the morning and we quickly pass out and fall asleep and I get woken out of my sleep at somewhere around 3 30 a.m. I remember because I went a glowing watch or glow in the dark watch down by the lake something had screamed a big loud bellowing scream and I thought wow you know I better stay awake and I tried my darnedest to stay awake and I just couldn't I passed out and fell asleep and sometime about 15 minutes later I heard another scream and it woke me up as well but this one was much closer and my buddy he's just sleeping through the whole thing he's not even waking up at all by this and and this this time I'm like oh my god this thing is getting close and we were separated from everybody else we were a good distance from all the other tents because all the campsites were taken and we found a little niche where we put our camp and we didn't have a fire or anything just the tent so I hear that and I said oh I better stay awake and I'm trying to stay awake and again I fell asleep and I snore so I wake up realizing I'd just been snoring and and there's enough ambient light coming through the tent that right in front of my face there's a hand pushing on the tent material I I was I was kind of well there wasn't anybody to talk to because my buddy was sleeping on the other side of the tent this is not a very big tent I'm I'm just kind of freaking out and it's and this thing seemed to be trying to touch where the snoring was coming from through the tent so I you know I withdraw my head from the tent because it was very very close to the material I withdraw and I was like what the hell is that I'm thinking you know bears and elk pushing its nose into my tent or something and I don't think elk do that bears you can really hear them plus they you know they make special I've heard bears up close and they don't sound this thing didn't make any noise like that and and then it starts running its hands over the tent like swishing back and forth like swish swish swish two three times like that oh boy that's that's really really weird and there was a Coleman logo written into embossed in the material right above my my left side and it starts touching that playing with that and I thought you freaking so I I hit the tent material go boom boom boom on the tent and it it hits back on the tent and then it walks off I can hear it walking off into the bush to the left of me I was speechless in the meantime I was trying to kick my buddy like kicking like wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up and and he didn't wake up through the whole thing he I kicked him like three times and he was still just grunting and snoring and I couldn't believe he slept through all that so as soon as the thing walked away I unzipped the fly and then I looked at the thermal it was long gone as soon as it was daylight the beginnings of daylight about 6 a.m. or so I got out of the tent and I immediately started scouting the area found no footprints whatsoever but I walked off in the direction that it went and turns out there's a little ridge up there and then I walked along the ridge and I found a bunch of pine trees kind of all pulled into a grouping of sorts they were kind of woven together if you will these are balsam furs or they were small cedars or something and they were all like woven together and it was just made a kind of a shelter and I went inside of the shelter of there was nothing around and from inside that little shelter and it wasn't super little I mean it fit me it could fit another person you could pretty much see all the camps from there because it was high up off the ground and above some of the smaller again the trees up there are not that tall because they're pretty high elevation and you could see quite a few of the tents and camps from there and I don't remember the names of the old guys who were camping there who had more a lot more experience and so me and my friend we walked up to one of their camps and we asked him I said hey do you think anybody here would have been trying to hoax us by swishing their hands in our tent and poking at our tents in the middle of the night and they go honestly don't want to get shot so no so yeah we're alarmed here we said you know we I don't have guns you know I'm thinking of getting one now but back then I you know I was really not an owning a gun and and they said no no no if you do that kind of stuff to people out here in Washington there's a good chance you'll get you'll get shot so don't ever think of hoaxing anybody that way and I said would you what kind of activity do you get so well we found footprints and see sometimes you'll hear them they'll throw them pine cones at you they said that they hear them chuckle kind of a laugh they hear them sneeze they told us stuff like that so that was another defining experience for me was to have that happen and then you know on the drive out we we packed up another CRV we packed up all our stuff and we're driving out not the way we came in but further down the same road which is supposed to go back to the main road and the road was blocked off three trees and small ones had been pushed over and completely blocked the road and we had to do like a 16-point turn because it was so narrow to be able to turn the vehicle around and go back out the way we came I went back subsequently to that place the following year with a couple of friends and we found some interesting tree structures like what some people call a pinwheel some x's and we went up to there's a place a lake so there's a hike we did a whole long hike and I remember my daughter was gosh she was about oh was she about six maybe seven and we hiked all the way up to this lake from from the bumping leg campsites we went as far as the the road would take us and then and we did this big long hike and all along the hike I'm doing wood knocks just because I'm in the habit of doing that now to announce to this is my belief I'm announcing to them that I am here and you know where I am just to out of almost as a courtesy to any local Sasquatch that we are humans and we are on your territory is my thinking on it and we we're doing this hike and and as we're hiking back out you know nothing happened on the hike I have all the photographs and stuff on the hike back out we're getting to the point where we're about to cross the river and there's a big log and you know I was proud of my kid she managed to cross the log all by herself without losing her balance and cross over the river and everybody and me and this other friend of mine who I knew from Eugene Oregon was with me and as we were heading towards the river we were in the back watching our families because you know you always stay in the back for security and we hear a big loud wood knock behind us and he clearly heard it and he says oh he says you're right something is back there there is something in the woods and so we let the families go a little bit ahead we're the last ones to cross the river as we get to the other side a gigantic rock gets thrown from pretty high up there's a kind of a small cliff a budding up against the the river and this big rock hits the water just as low right 30 40 feet from us and we looked at each other and thought okay there's something behind us we never saw anything but that was yet another experience finally somewhere in between 2010 11 me and my wife would go hiking up the Mackenzie River in Oregon to this place called Blue Pool it's a very beautiful place the the pool is cobalt blue it's really gorgeous people go swimming there and basically a lava flow blocked off the Mackenzie River I think from Mount Bachelor or something and the river goes underneath the lava flow and then wells up there it's it's really beautiful so if you hike past this thing there's a couple of waterfalls there's kusa falls and another waterfall so this was in the in the spring and as my typical mode I'm I'm whacking on trees every few minutes and and I would hear occasional floods coming from the woods but I really wasn't sure if those were actually true wood knocks or some other noise I you really couldn't tell but you could hear a kind of coming from the forest so anyways we get up to these waterfall and you know how in the in the bush where especially where there's volcanic rock you get these pools left over that are iced over and you know that's where the frogs are in the spring but it's it's still icy and you know at that time my kid was really into ballet on ice and she's you know doing her her Disney thing and playing around with her mother on this ice and I'm on the I'm on the road and I'm just like watching them and taking a picture or two and then behind them about 50 feet in the woods we hear this big branch break this branch just crack um and of course that got my attention I start you know angling in trying to figure out what what made that noise and I could see a vertical silhouette behind these trees that looked kind of light brown there was some sun on it I remember and it started walking off to my right towards the the highway along the Mackenzie River I keep thinking it's highway 26 I can't quite remember there's a bunch of hot springs and stuff up there and this thing is walking in that direction so I I run in the same direction trying to get another view of it so I try to get ahead of it which retrospect I realized is stupid but I ran as fast as I could to get ahead of it and when I got there there was absolutely nothing going on I couldn't see anything it was dead dead and then I realized oh I left my family unattended and that was dumb so I ran back to my family and and then we walked out of there together but that was another experience where I believe what I saw was probably a Sasquatch but I don't know for sure so there have been subsequent experiences when I came back to Ohio here again training martial arts um along the Kuyahoga River down in the Kuyahoga Valley um one night in November uh we were training on this hill look a lot of kids go up there to smoke pot and stuff you find all kinds of bongs and paraphernalia up there anyways I was up there training with my guys and um we just hear this incredible howl just loud it scared us so bad that we walked out of there and we started training next to our cars but uh we got very very nervous with that but that sums up most of my experience I mean in between these experiences I found the occasional footprint I still investigate to this day mostly by myself but I'm very cautious I don't get aggressive like I used to and um and I've you know I still find anecdotal evidence but I haven't had anything that compares with those experiences since then I really appreciate you going through the timeline John because I know it's kind of hard to cram decades and decades of you looking into what you heard as a little boy essentially and looking for this thing realizing that noise was what you heard as a kid and now you're gonna look for it you know being a professional and in your line of work I mean how did it kind of affect your life searching for this thing yeah um I it's hard to explain um but it was like something opened up either in I don't know my personality my mind in some fashion and I started to look at the environment around me very very differently you know I'm again I'm still a very scientific person but I I'm very open-minded when I listen to people now not like I mean I used to be something something of a cynic for a long time I'm no longer cynical I I listen when I talk to people I give them credence first I realize that people lie or that they embellish or that they make mistakes uh I you know I make mistakes too there's probably things in my narrative that I'm not remembering accurately and things like that but the the highlights generally are are accurate as I as I narrated them but it I became obsessed with Bigfoot some people would say I still am um but I became kind of obsessed about Sasquatch and I I just can't go in the woods without thinking of it it's it's impossible for me um and and it's almost impossible for me kind of not to talk about it it's kind of like like I I collect a lot of fossils too so whenever I'm around a rock outcrop I'll go stick my nose into the rock outcrop and look for fossils it means it's that kind of thing I've talked to many many people since then sometimes you know as part of an expedition but at other times just colloquial it's just kind of people I remember I bought Meldrum's book uh at a bookstore when Border's book still existed in Eugene, Oregon and and I did meet Dr. Meldrum there and I met um Bob Gimlin there as well I spoke with him too and I also met the gentleman who did the the crypto linguist um and so I listened to a lot of people and it was really funny one of the one of the ladies I worked with in Eugene, Oregon she was you know there's a lot of kind of like hippie type folks that work there and they're pretty cool like they they they really open minded and very philosophical and one of the ladies there who'd lived there forever you know she says to me yeah nobody believes it but everybody's got a story and and it was true I you know when I bought the book at the bookstore this this big tall gentleman uh clearly you know a guy who lived down the country very serious kind of countenance so he if you put a cowboy suit on him he'd come right out of the wild west at you and a really nice man came up to me and he points at that book and he goes you believe that I said well yeah he says well I got a story for you and he proceeded to tell me about some incidents that had happened around London, Oregon and he mentioned how a relative of his had seen one while hanging out laundry on a wire back year many decades ago I guess and uh and you know he said and I said well why don't you um you know go ahead and submit a report we'd love to you know hear your story and then put it out on the BFRO website and because I was still talking to them a fair bit he goes no no no he says I'm not going to do that he said I'm just happy to tell you and leave it at that and that was it but I've run into quite a few people and it's amazing to me how reticent they are to tell anybody what they've experienced and and what I've also noticed is that because I talk about it freely because I'm used to doing that now I wasn't at first but I'm so used to talking about it that people think I'm making up stories and that I'm lying because I'm just talking about it as if it's normal and but to me it is normal now um but my worldview has dramatically changed uh on a couple of nights I've I've seen UFOs um as well I got looking for Bigfoot and I'd see a UFO but not necessarily an association with the Sasquatch but I'd see UFOs and I'm not saying they're necessarily occupied by aliens but I mean they're definitely strange things in the sky and and with all the information that's coming down now um you know I'm I do believe it's quite possible that um that there there may be evidence that is getting covered up or misinterpreted um you hear enough stories about that kind of stuff that really make you wonder I do admit though that I'm I'm troubled by the whole notion of dogman but man those stories are pretty compelling and pretty scary at that so I hope I never run into one of those but uh I'm I'm really trying hard to stay open-minded about that one and and I mean no disrespect to people who've seen one when I say that because I I think they also realize how hard it can be for someone who's not familiar with this material to wrap their minds around it the first time you hear when I first heard that Sasquatch had a language I think I offended the guy who did the research because you know he I approached him and asked him a question I don't remember what exactly I asked him but uh and I clearly had the skeptical sort of tone about me and he seemed kind of offended by it but in retrospect I mean you know this was the first time hearing this but when I heard his analysis and I subsequently listened to it again I had to conclude that he's probably right these things are some kind of hominid capable of of you know language and and of complex communication and they clearly have strong emotions they have strong feelings about us they know what guns are you know I have to say that I feel really really lucky in my life or blessed in a manner of speaking of having had these experiences although it's kind of weirdly almost a curse too because you know uh you you know you get thought of as not credible when you say these things to people who seem to be jaded by thinking that humans know everything about the world and I firmly believe they don't yeah I struggled for many years when it comes to dog man I was like you know people must be mistaken there's no way I mean this sounds like a freaking werewolf people are running into and I remember the very one of the very first encounters that I think I really aired on the show was from a famous hunter here in the states and you know he he was a very no-nonsense guy very direct on what he said and he described seeing one and this guy had spent like 60 years hunting I think he was in his 80s and he described seeing this creature and as he's describing it it I mean everything about it sounds canine to me um and I had asked him well what do you think it was and he was like I have no idea it was a canine that got up on two legs and took off like a man running and it ran so quick I'm not sure that I could have actually shot it I've talked to so many eyewitnesses over the years including cops that have run into this dog man I'm pretty convinced it's out there what it is I don't know but I'm pretty much convinced it's out there and you kind of alluded to it earlier with regard to what you think Sasquatch is I know you mentioned the austral lopithecus and Cliff Berkman actually has that same theory while I disagree with him he brings up some some pretty good points that that's hard to argue but what do you think that they are what's your take John on what Sasquatch is well so this is you know I contemplated that question a lot because I've heard you ask it many times to different people and and it seems to me that people's answers are I don't mean this in a disparaging way are preconditioned by the belief systems that we bring to these encounters so you know when you when you encounter something like this you already have your personality is developed you you have a belief system about the world and and this belief system that we have about the world is is the lens through which we interpret this experience so you know some people reference it as an angelic or demonic or somehow or or biological right more of this a lot of the scientific folks you know they lean towards it's a biological living creature I am in that camp but here's the interesting thing in my years I've you know I've looked into a lot I've investigated a lot of things including some of the weirder aspects of martial arts and and stuff like that and I've people seem to think that Sasquatches can't be just biological creatures because they have supernatural elements to them but see I don't ascribe to that you know the reason I don't is because I think humans also have supernatural or spiritual elements to them they may not be as developed as these these animals because Sasquatches are wild they live in the bush if you spent time living in the bush and I've done this you know like I spent two weeks in the forests of Ontario drinking out of streams and living like a dog and smelling like a wolf when I got out of there too I'll tell you if there was a human being within 500 yards of you you smelled them and you could hear noises you could start to get really used to the forest and you become great you become kind of athletic I mean you get you get strong living out in the woods you know eating grimy you know the bulbs of roots of leeks and things that grow in the marsh eat frogs eat fish you know you do all these things you get kind of wild and I noticed after doing that that I had a high level of mental energy and physical energy and I started to feel myself sort of becoming like a wild person I remember just getting glimpses into it you know from that and I and I think that people who really you know rough it out in the woods could probably relate to that to some degree now if you're starving that's different that'll wear you out and you'll you have to get out because you're going to die if you try to live too long in the bush like that not to mention the flies and bugs make you miserable but I've seen some things and heard some things and you know and there's a lot of people who investigate ghosts and and stuff like that and you know I have an open mind now and I think that we share the same supernatural and spiritual mental capabilities that these things have so when they emit infrasound we experience it we can't emit it ourselves but we can do other things that Sasquatches can't do so in my view it's normal for a biological animal entity to be able to do things and to be so good at stealth as to be able to disappear in the forests and to play tricks on us me personally I think that that's a natural ability so so that does not lead me to differentiate them from other biological animals because biological animals are capable of so much more than what we understand that's my perspective yeah well I appreciate your perspective John and kind of your insight and thought on the whole thing and you know I appreciate the amount of thought that you put into it and coming on and sharing decades and decades of events that happen to you and all kind of started when you were a little kid and going back to bumping lake for a moment I've had so many people contact me who've been run out of that area by these creatures it doesn't shock me one bit that you had the experiences there or in Ohio one last question I want to ask you you know the oh howl howl this is something that's always bothered me and I thought I'd ask you what your take on it is and again I know that you don't know and I don't know but what's your take on that particular vocalization you know if you want to give yourself away as far as where you're at that would be the howl to do oh gosh I wish I knew um well somehow's are clearly to intimidate us like the the loud screams like the one I heard in the Cuyahoga Valley uh other people have heard that by the way I know one guy I don't think he wants to be named at all but um who has post-traumatic stress disorder uh from being yelled at and chased by one of these things a stone's throw from where I was but the Ohio howl my my my take on it is just my belief um is that it's territorial yeah I guess it could make sense that it would be a territorial thing uh because I always thought you know when he when they do that it's like well now we know exactly where you're at but it could be more territorial it could be more of like hey get the hell out of here possibly but the other one is um interestingly there was a recording in 2015 in the Cuyahoga Valley of the same kinds of howls it's on the bfr website they're almost identical to the Ohio howl and there's two of them and that's what we always find in the Cuyahoga Valley there's two Sasquatches they're not there all the time they migrate in and out they'll be gone for years and then suddenly they'll show up again but you clearly hear one and then you hear another and they're howling to each other so you may be right that that's just hey I'm over here and I'm over here and they're just communicating that way and by the way the other thing that has been the big enigma I know I don't know how much time we have but the other big enigma for me has been the the glowing eyes and I did see that one time in fog on the other side of the river at beaver creek and a bunch of us saw that that was the time we were there with the the guy who had the Ohio howl on his property um and we clearly saw these orange eyes on the other side of the river they were kind of dull they weren't you know starburst but they were clearly glowing and they were reddish orange and we saw it run up a slope and it kept its eyes on us the whole time it ran up the slope and I don't have a good biological explanation for that but I do think it's some kind of like low reflective a reflective membrane in the eyes that's very specialized and can reflect even low light back that's my belief but I you know I don't know yeah it could be I I'm I'm not so sure that there is a scientific explanation for half the things that have been reported to me but I like your idea and you know I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and share decades of your life of looking into this and trying to find answers really enjoyed chatting with you what's it's been kind of a highlight for me to be able to do that and listening to your show oh my god so many things I heard that I thought oh yeah I've experienced that or now I'm actually a little bit frightened of Sasquatch's after hearing some of these harrowing stories that you've you've listened to I mean some of these are just really frightening so I've got a new respect for this whole thing I appreciate it John and be safe while you're out there thank you again for coming on well thank you Wes it's been this has been a real highlight for me to be able to do this I very much appreciate it thanks again John and that's it for tonight everyone remember if you've had an encounter shoot me an email my email address is Wes at Sasquatch Chronicles dot com and if you get a chance check out Sasquatch Chronicles dot com you can become a member and get additional shows until next time everyone this is my this this You did it, too Say you're still here in my mind You miss my living mind Cause I found a kid to love me Say I hold your diamond And I'll make you stay in the room And we'll slip away in the room It's so just in the end And it's not the way for me As I found the key to the room You are the customer And I'll make you stay in the room And we'll slip away in the room And we'll slip away in the room And we'll slip away in the room