You know, so as an 11-year-old, I used to enjoy buying weekly world news from, you know, the drugstore. And I remember one time, you know, in, like, fifth grade, I was, you know, browsing the, you know, magazine aisle and picked up the Week in World News, and there was a story in there about a farmer sighting a flying saucer landing and, like, an army of Sasquatches walking out. So the implication being that these Sasquatches were, in fact, alien. And so that was kind of in the back of my head when Andrew bought Squatch.

So, I did actually study anthropology in college. Anyway, I went from being like a preteen or a teenager who really hardcore believed to, by the time I was 18, I was more of a rational skeptic, philosophical materialist. And I studied anthropology in college, although I did not become an anthropologist in practice.

Reddit actually figured out I was a social worker. There was one Reddit thread that... put the pieces together or they were like speculating or like because someone was like he does sound like maybe he actually works in the field of anthropology and someone else was like No, he sounds more like someone who took four years to be at the college, he has an undergrad, and then went on to some kind of human service field, like maybe a social worker or an advocate or something.

The environmental cataclysm on prehistoric Earth. Was the Toba Catastrophe. That's a real theory about how there was a bottleneck, a genetic bottleneck in the human population about like, I don't know, like in 74,000 years ago or something like that due to massive super volcanic eruptions and, you know, like 99% of humans and human as a genus, not a singular species, almost like it is at the time, you know, got wiped out and, you know, a handful of You know, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and, you know, Flores, Homo floresiensis and other isolated human groups survived that bottleneck and humanity really almost went extinct.

Just to clarify, because we never took her up on the offer to fundraise because we felt that it would have been absolutely wrong to financially exploit her viewers in any way. I would say highly. I didn't even respond to it. I just ignored it when she said that.

Reddit correctly sussed that Lionel Sperlinghetti was named for Ferlinghetti, the poet who wrote Tyrannus Nets.

Now that base was leased to us by the Israeli government. Unfortunately, we came to an end of that lease term. And negotiations to renew the lease were not successful.

This was under the auspices of Project Black Kraken. I was tasked with this mission by my colonel, Lionel Sperlinghetti.

Now, I spent four weeks on that troop ship traveling from Earth to Mars at high but sub-relativistic speed. We did not go interdimensional. We did not use the ship's FTL drive to get to Mars. That would have been a waste of energy. This was a fusion pulse driven spacecraft. We were able to get to Mars in about four weeks.

And I pretty much had to spelunk down there with my gear on my back with my team in order to get to what we called the steles. So there were these pillars with glyphs. Which were being run through a computer matrix to decode them, and they wanted archaeologists and anthropologists to be able to give them contextual cues to aid the decryption process.

And I saw the Water Witches do things that I have no rational explanation for as a scientist. It shook me to some of the elements of my core foundation, and I'm still trying to reconcile with that years later.

I had to do a lot to gain Squatch's trust. A lot of it was involving humor. You know, that was really what worked in order for Squatch, because Squatch is a sapient being. In order for Squatch to really let me in to his mind, I first had to get to Squatch's heart, and I got to Squatch's heart with humor. Can I tell you what I did? Yes. To make Squatch laugh? Please. Yeah, please. Please. I wore a gorilla mask.

There have been times in their past when they have done that on other planets, when they tried to share the benefit of their experience and their wisdom with other planets, but it always seemed to backfire because of the xenophobia. The hatred against them, you know, the fear of them, their otherness, you know, and being different from Pleiadians and different from Dracos, you know, was always held against them no matter how they contributed to the planets where they lived.

I will also say that when I was six years old, E.T. was my absolute favorite movie.