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June 25, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:00:28
Edition 351 - Beasts of Britain

This time Andrew McGrath - London-based cryptozoology researcher...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your feedback and emails and guest suggestions.
I'm working my way through the emails at the moment and if your email demands a personal reply, know that unlike a lot of the mainstream media, when you get in touch with me through theunexplained.tv, my website's designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
I will get back to you directly.
And, you know, some of you will have already received replies from recent emails.
The plan is that I'm going to do a lot of shout-outs probably on the next edition of this show, but not right now for a whole variety of reasons.
Number one, the topic that we're going to be dealing with in this edition, which is something, you know, that I didn't even know existed until very recently.
The whole idea that there are cryptozoological creatures in the British Isles.
I don't know where I've been, but I've always assumed that real cryptozoology is done in the Rocky Mountains of North America, is done in the far-flung wilds of Russia, is practiced in South America, is Chupacabra, is Bigfoot, is yaoi in Australia, but not here in the UK.
And apparently, according to the man who's going to be on this edition of the show, Andrew McGrath, I'm quite wrong because there are a whole variety of phenomena of various kinds, not only on the ground, but also in the air, in these Britannic, majestic British Isles of ours.
So I'm about to learn a great deal from Andrew McGrath, the author of the book Beasts of Britain.
Great title in this edition of The Unexplained.
So thank you very much for the person who suggested him as a guest.
Your guest suggestions, once again, we're proving here that they are vital to this show.
Now, just a little bit of my story here.
I decided after seven years with no kind of holiday and no kind of break that I needed to take one.
So I went down, I found myself a cheap flight and went down for nine days, nearly 10 days, to South Africa.
As ever, it's always a mind-opening experience.
You don't have to do anything very much.
You just have to drink in the country.
It is a remarkable place and there are remarkable, varied and friendly people there.
Now, the story is that, of course, it is winter time in South Africa, and that is flu season.
And I went down there with absolutely no resistance to anything.
So within days, I was suffering a severe case of the South African winter flu, which I still have.
I've been to the doctor in the last couple of days because I'm having trouble with breathing and it's affecting my voice to an extent.
And she just said, it's one of those things.
Antibiotics will not help.
They gave me antibiotics in South Africa, but they're really not for this kind of thing.
And I've just got to go through it.
And whatever it is may sit on my chest for the next four weeks.
So, you know, that is just one of those things.
So I hope I'm sounding reasonably like myself.
But I certainly struggled through a radio show last night because of this.
And I've just been to a pharmacist locally and asked the guy there behind the counter if there was anything they could give me.
And he said, absolutely not.
It is something that unless it really turns into complications that time will fix.
Well, I'm hoping that time is short because I have a very, very short tolerance of anything to do with illness.
But that's my story.
If you think I sound a little bit different on this edition, that's it.
So I'm catching up with life and everything.
Here in the northern hemisphere, we're entering a heat wave.
Temperatures, depending on whether you're in the US or the UK, 27 degrees Celsius and upwards.
That's in the lower 80s Fahrenheit and upwards if you're in America.
That's the way you measure temperature, I know, because we used to do that here too.
So it's going to be a hot couple of weeks here.
And, you know, I love the summer.
And I'm just hoping that, you know, it persists for as long as possible.
We've been through the longest day of the year here, the 21st of June.
The shortest day down in South Africa, of course, with it going dark at about 4.35 p.m. down there.
I come back up here and it's not getting dark until 9.30 or 10 p.m. in London, which is astonishing and just part of our summer.
Anyway, enough talking from me.
If you want to get in touch with me, I would love to hear from you.
And one thing I just would like to say, if you've made a donation to this show recently, thank you very much for that.
The donations seem to have dropped off for some reason.
I'm not sure whether you have decided that perhaps the show is not worth contributing to, which is a shame, but we do need the donations to keep this going.
And I have deliberately over the years stopped this from becoming a subscription show, even though I heard recently that one of the subscription shows is turning in more than $40,000 a month, which is a staggeringly eye-watering sum.
I don't even think I would know what to do with that amount of money, but the subscription shows certainly make a lot of your money.
I've tried to keep this show free and running on donations, so if it is possible for you to make one, then please do.
And of course, if you can't, then I understand, just enjoy the show.
But let me know what you think of it, whatever, because I'm always grateful for your guest suggestions and your thoughts on the way that the show is being done.
Let's get to Andrew McGrath now in the UK, and we're going to talk about the cryptozoological beasts that inhabit these British Isles.
Andrew, thank you for coming on my show.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
All right, let's get some of the basics established first then, Andrew.
You know, what exactly, your title is cryptozoologist, but how does one become a cryptozoologist?
What brought you into all of this?
Well, I mean, 48 years of age now, and I've actually just been a fan, you know, since I was a young teenager or pre-teenager.
And I don't describe myself as a cryptozoologist because I'm not a zoologist to start with.
So I don't think I deserve that title.
I'm a cryptozoology enthusiast.
So I'm basically a fan who's just taken it a bit too seriously and got involved in writing books and research and now giving lectures in the US and places like that in the UK as well.
And with the, I guess you could call them the big books, the bigger names in this industry, which is entirely accidental on my part.
I just kind of decided to write a book about what could be here in the UK because nobody was doing that.
And it just got away with itself.
It just left it away.
I'm still doing it.
I mean, we are the Cinderella nation, aren't we?
Really?
I was saying at the top of this show that I was not really aware of very much cryptozoology here, which was a little silly of me to say because, of course, we have the Loch Ness monster, which is being reinvestigated at the moment.
A man has arrived from New Zealand called Neil Gemmel, and he's doing DNA testing of the lake to see if there are signs of anything anomalous there.
So, of course, we have a quotient of cryptozoology.
But tell me I'm wrong if I say that the best stuff is not happening in this country.
Well, you are wrong, actually.
I was hoping you would say that.
Well, I mean, as a British person, one British person to another, you would appreciate how hard it was for me to say that to you.
But I do, you are unfortunately wrong.
And when I started writing the book, I was always a Lake Monster fan, you know, Loch Ness Monster and Lochmora and other things around the world, like Lake Champlain.
And so I started searching for the reports.
What could be here?
I found so much.
I found there were British Bigfoot reports in the hundreds.
I found that there were dogman or werewolf reports of some unusual things like that in lesser proportion.
Strange animals like the mystery big cats that we all hear about on the news from time to time.
And also odd, unusual flying creatures, anything from the owl man of mourning to alleged pterosaur-like animals being sighted in the Yorkshire world.
So it just spiraled.
The more I dug, the more I found.
And I was shocked to actually fill up an entire book full of sightings and stories about this.
And I did really, when I started, I thought I was going to be reaching very, very far to find something.
And I found a lot of curious aspects about our country, especially about its habitat that we don't really think about or realize, in fact, as British people.
Well, compared with America or many other parts of the world, of course, we have very little in the way of territory.
And the kinds of places that I would assume anomalous phenomena exist are places like Loch Ness, because it's large, deep, and wild, but also Dartmoor Exmoor in the southwest of England, maybe the Brecon Beacons in Wales.
But, you know, we have very few, maybe I'm wrong again, habitats for anything that may go, you know, unreported, unremarked, or minimally remarked.
So again, I'm really sorry to discuss.
Done it again.
This bit that I'm going to tell you about now, this was actually a huge surprise to me when I first found these facts out.
And since doing a lot of expeditions or investigations, if you like, since then, it's become more real to me.
But I discovered something called the UK National Ecosystem Assessment 2012.
So what they were surprised to discover then was only 6.8% of the UK's land area could be classified as urban.
Now, that does include rural development and roads as well.
And when they broke this figures down amongst the four primary nations of the UK, what they found was 10.6% of England was urban landscape, 1.9% of Scotland, which is a tiny amount, 3.6% of Northern Ireland and 4.1% of Wales.
So there was actually a huge amount of habitat.
Now, there is an argument that a lot of that is farmland, but actually only one-third of that remaining portion of untenanted land is arable farmland.
That's an eye-opening statistic because we are forever being told by politicians and others with an axe to grind that we are a country with no available land and every square mile that could be occupied has been occupied.
And those statistics suggest completely the opposite conclusion.
They really do.
And yet, Howard, we drive down our motorways and take our railroad trips and see these miles and miles of countryside stretching out into the horizon.
And we don't associate one with another.
We just think, well, this is the road or motorway siding.
I'm sure there's more habitation than this.
But we really, really do have a lot of space.
And after dark, it's completely black.
If you've gone out on these night expeditions like gone out on, you can't see anything.
You could walk for miles and miles and miles, hours even, without seeing another person or anything in front of you, which I've done, you know, to my disdain from time to time.
And it's amazing.
And I just think once we conceptualise outside of a busy place like London that we both live in or just outside of, even the quiet areas we live in are very busy, then we see a larger picture of a very wild country with very few people or very little footfall in the rural places.
I have to drive to Berkshire to do a radio show once a week, very early in the morning on a Saturday.
And it's a beautiful drive.
I drive out of London and come off the motorway, then go on the A4 and then go through Sonning.
And for a few weeks, about a year or so ago, I was regularly seeing, at a time when nobody else was awake, I was literally on the road at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning when any sensible person is asleep or just preparing to get up.
I saw a very big cat.
And I mean, bigger than a cat, I would have thought.
Very black fur, moving very, very quickly, darting into a bush near Caversham Park.
And I've seen this a few times, and I've always assumed that it was just somebody's very well-fed cat.
Looked at from your perspective, though, it might be worth investigation.
What do you say?
Well, there are a lot of big cat sightings in the country.
I've just received one from Yorkshire just a few days ago by a motorcyclist who often frequents these areas.
And he was shocked, really, to see a very large cat that he described as possibly looking like a panther or a melanistic leopard or jaguar, whichever one it could be, climbing over a fence in that area.
And it's near the North Yorkshire Moors between Pickering and Goatland.
And he was shocked.
He came to me and said, I think I've seen a really big cat here.
What could this be?
Another horse breeder in Rusba, Which I believe is in Hampshire or just on the borders, saw a panther last November in a farmyard when she went to pick up her hay consignment.
And herself and a friend drove in late at night, half past nine, had the floodlights on, popped out to pick up the hay, and 25 yards ahead of them, there was, she said, a four-foot-long animal, waist height, she's five foot eight, with a three-foot-long tail, sauntering towards them very casually.
And she got a good enough look at it in her own words to notice that it was male.
You said this thing was waist height.
That's big.
Waist height.
Yes, very, very, very big.
And at least, I mean, four feet, but you know, seven feet long with the tail.
And there's hundreds, hundreds upon hundreds of big things.
The usual newspaper explanation for anything like this, and we get a rash of these stories every year that appear in the popular press.
Of course we do.
The usual explanation is that it's something that has escaped and or maybe bred in the wild from somebody's exotic animal collection.
And I sometimes wonder when I read these stories, can that really explain all of them?
There is a kernel of truth in that report.
Now, the kernel of truth being in the late 1970s, we had the Dangerous Wild Animals Act that was put into place to stop people keeping animals like large panthers or crocodiles or whatever else in conditions that were deemed unsafe.
Many of them, by the admittance of their owners, were let go.
And I think what we're seeing now is some of the descendants of these animals 42 plus years later roaming around the countryside.
Now, the Dangerous Wild Animals Act is still in place.
So if somebody here did have a panther or a lion or a jagger or a big cat of any kind, that would be registered and so would its disappearance.
But even if it wasn't something that was native to us and we just have missed for all these years, which is a possibility, I'm sure, especially given the fact that we have more available land than I believed we had, and I'm glad you've put me right on that score.
The fact of the matter is that if something was released in the 1970s, it could have mutated, bred, become something completely different.
There are stories of some of these cats looking like a strange mix between different types of cats.
But for the large part, most sightings either represent something that's similar to a puma or a cougar, a beigey, tawny type of fur, or a melanistic leopard or jaguar, black in colour, rounded ears, so to speak, and quite large in proportion.
It's something that's been going on for a long time.
There has been a lot of organizations set up over the years to look into this phenomenon, but they seem to be largely nocturnal.
And we're not finding them.
We're not finding where they live.
And they're very conspicuous animals.
So I think that's a testimony to the possibility of there being a little space out there.
Well, yeah, but that second case that you told me from Hampshire, and I know Hampshire very well, if something is waist height, seven feet long or more, then it is, does it not defy credulity to believe that that thing does not show itself more frequently and that there are no clues as to where it might inhabit?
Well, this is something that puzzles me really.
Now, I think when you look at the footfall in the British countryside, and even if you live in some of these yourself, you say you drive out to this job, you don't walk.
And very few people are cycling in those areas as well.
And I think a lot of it has to do with we drive in cars and they're noisy, they can be easily heard.
And the occasional sighting that people have, such as this horse breeder, that was late at night, remember, the farm was closed.
There wasn't supposed to be anybody there.
And she drove in with her colleague.
Now, the animals seem to show no fear of herself and her friend, which is quite concerning, really.
And yet, there have been no reported attacks in all this time.
And does that strike you as unusual?
It strikes me as unusual.
If something is that big and that confident, then why are we not hearing reports of people perhaps being chased or mauled or whatever?
There are a few reports of people being followed or intimidated, and there was one or two reports of people being struck by these animals in an escape to an attempt to get away.
But I think we have lots of wild animals here.
We have lots of game birds.
We have lots of rabbits.
We have lots of deer.
There's even a lot of sheep and lambs available in certain seasons.
So I would suspect that it's really because they're at the top of the food chain and there is no need to prey on humans.
And even in cases, in countries where these animals are native to the landscape, human attacks are very, very rare.
So you're saying that there could actually be existence here, and I'm warming to the possibility, I have to say, of a complete ecosystem that we are simply unaware of.
I think so.
In terms of the big cats, which aren't cryptids per se, but they're out-of-place animals.
They shouldn't be here, but they seem to be.
I would say that what we will be looking at in the next 15 to 20 years is a significant issue with these animals spreading across the country and perhaps coming into clashes with people as they become bolder.
That's just my personal opinion on it, but these sightings do seem to become more and more frequent.
What about Bigfoot?
There are people who say that Bigfoot exists here.
There was, I seem to remember probably six months ago, a reported sighting.
I think Gunny even created some kind of fuzzy video, but I might be wrong about that.
Being reported in South Wales or West Wales recently.
I'm not sure about the West Wales sighting recently.
I know there was some sort of sighting from a train on the way to Bristol where somebody saw a very large dark figure walking along a hedge.
And then a few seconds later, they saw a couple walk along the other side of the hedge and were tiny in comparison to the figure, which is not really an established sighting.
There are hundreds of sightings, descriptive sightings, however, across the country, which are normally collected by the British Bigfoot Research Group headed by Deborah Hatswell, who herself had a sighting in Salford in the 1980s as a teenager.
In Salford, that's part of Greater Manchester.
That's a city.
It is.
It is.
There's a country park just on the outskirts, the Breil Hill Park Estate.
And she claims at that time that she was playing truant from school with a friend and saw a seven foot plus tall bipedal, monkey, man-like creature lean out of the bushes and look at them.
And she's very comical about it.
I asked her what kind of experience it was.
Was it enlightening anyway?
And she claims that she shoved her friend to the floor so it would get her first and ran away all the way home.
When you take sightings, these small bits of honesty, mundane facts that people wouldn't normally include in a hoaxy kind of sighting are very important.
They're very telling.
They are.
I'll give you one particular sighting, actually.
Somebody sent another one to me today, but this particular one is not far from us.
This is in Box Hill in Surrey.
And it's a sighting that took place in 2012.
And there's, I'm not sure if you're aware of the hill there in Surrey.
There's what they're called the steps.
There's great earthen steps that lead, I think it's about 300 feet in elevation at the ceiling.
I mean, as you get out of London, you go down towards Surrey and you get around Ryegate, Red Hill, the land rises very steeply.
It really does.
And this particular area, it's heavily forested.
It's a beautiful, it's a National Trust Park, I think.
And somebody was running the steps in the summer of 2012, and they stopped to rest on the steps.
And if you walk them, I've been there, they sort of curve around.
So they're heavily forested.
Every little curve blocks off the next section of the steps.
And so they'd heard a few knocks, wood knocks or something in the woods.
And this person sat down to take a rest.
I heard some footsteps coming behind her and moved aside, thinking it was one of the dog walkers, only to see nobody pass.
Now, she looked behind her to see what she guessed was a creature on two legs that looked sort of like a monkey of some kind, but with a flat face, about six or six and a half feet tall, heavily muscled with brown and grey fur.
And she described this animal just staring at her about 10 or 15 feet away and then slowly turning around and walking up the steps away from her, constantly looking over its shoulder to see where she was, I guess, as it left.
And one of the significant things about this that comes up time and time again, apart from the description, is that she said it left a stale farm animal type of smell behind it, what it left.
And this comes up a lot in the United States as well, a skunky type of smell, some people described it as.
And she was convinced.
She saw a man-monkey.
What encourages me about this sighting in others is she didn't say a Bigfoot.
She didn't say a Sasquatch.
She's not obviously somebody that's into this genre.
Right, so we're talking about somebody who literally is making an innocent report and isn't particularly clued into these things.
Not clued in and also doesn't know the terminology.
And that happens in the UK time and time again.
I saw a large orangutan crossing the road, but it was on two legs.
Or as we saw in Stoke, sorry, by Charlotte Castle in Staffordshire in 1986, a couple saw, they said, a giant chimpanzee chasing a stag across the road and they stopped their car to avoid crashing into them, only to be bluff charged by the animal several times over 20 seconds.
And my favorite part of this sighting is that the husband, in a rash attempt to get away, floods the engine and can't stop the car.
Of course not.
He stuck there and the animal charged them several times over 20 seconds, looking very angry.
And as they described it, this large upright chimpanzee then bounded off in the direction of the stack and it is just sighting upon sighting like this.
And it was a surprise to me.
I never really conceived of such a thing being here in this country.
And that is true wild behavior.
I had the experience 20 years ago of being in South Africa in a wildlife park, driving with my then-girlfriend to see the elephants, as you do.
Oh, yes.
And the elephants deciding that they were not particularly happy with the presence or proximity of this Volkswagen golf car.
And I decided discretion was the better part of valor, and it was time to get out of there.
The car, of course, they always do, actually stalled.
And I found myself staring down the barrel.
We found ourselves staring down the barrel of a charge.
Fortunately, we were able to get out of there pretty quickly, and it was a very scary thing.
But that's classic real wild behavior.
That is what a wild creature would do.
Now, it really is.
And there's a few bluff charges listed here in this country, actually.
Also one in Dorking, Deep Jean, not so far from Box Hill.
And that was as recent as 2017.
And there are some railway tunnels there.
And certain people, they go out and they explore them and look at these old railway tunnels that were used during the war.
It's like a hobby of sorts.
And this particular chap and his brother, they'd gone to explore this tunnel at night.
And there was some heavy forest on the other side.
And they thought they could hear somebody in the tunnel.
So they waited.
Their dogs became a bit agitated, started barking.
And suddenly, they hear a huge creature come crashing through the trees, breaking branches and throwing them and roaring and stamping.
And they didn't know what was going on.
He says he didn't see anything, but he heard something walking around on two feet.
And the commotion, the destruction that was going on behind this layer of woodline was enough to make them leave the area permanently.
So there's plenty of things like that.
And that's what this book, Beasts of Britain, my book, that's what it's about.
And also the pending TV series, if we ever sell it, read a little part of that.
That's what it will be about.
We're just looking to validate these stories if we can and shed a little light on some of the unusual things that may be happening here.
I mean, the law of statistics and probability Would suggest that if you get enough of these reports, they can't all be misguided.
They can't all be wrong.
There is a phenomenon, whatever that phenomenon might be, to be investigated.
I wonder when these things are reported, because, you know, this is the UK and people tend to do these things, when they're reported to the emergency services, in particular the police, how are they taken?
How are they regarded by the people to whom it's being reported?
I think it depends on the police force.
For instance, the big cat reports are normally taken seriously.
And some particular forces, I think there's been one or two Freedom of Information requests in the past that have yielded quite a few big cat reports.
They're not particularly hidden.
I think one of the things that's keeping it off the radar, and I think this is a very British thing, I'm not sure what you think about this, Howard, but instead of denying things in a governmental sense or a societal sense, we just ignore them.
So ignoring the big cat phenomenon is enough to make it not official.
In the hope that it will go away.
Yeah, it'll go away, or people will say, well, the government haven't said anything.
So, I mean, maybe you're seeing a large tabby.
I actually saw a Bengal domestic cat called a Bengal the other day.
Now, it looks like a silver tabby, but it's orangey beige, and it has leopard-like spots on it.
If you saw a large version of that, a big male perhaps from a distance, you could be convinced you'd see the jungle cat, perhaps, something like that, or an ocelot.
If you were untrained and there was enough distance between you and the animal, it looked different enough to stop me in my tracks in my local park, but it was clearly a domestic cat.
That's very different to seeing something that looks like a cat, but it's Alzatian-sized.
Or is it seven and a half feet long and is up to your waist height?
Getting back to Bigfoot.
From the sightings that you've collated and you've heard about, what are the commonalities between Bigfoot, Sasquatch, whatever in the United States and in South America?
Are there similarities between these creatures around the world, the Yeti, the Yaoi, whatever else there may be?
Yes, very much.
They do seem to be versions of the same kind of creature, you know, in the same way that a lion and a tiger and a leopard are the same type of animal.
They're cats.
But I would say the differences are less.
Now, the Sasquatch of Canada, of the United States, seems to be very, very large.
We don't generally get reports here that are that large, maybe between five and eight feet maximum.
Now, that is big, but they do get bigger reports in some other countries.
The Yeti too seems to be a little smaller overall, but they do have these ape-like qualities with this bipedal aspect.
Now, I was talking to my most recent witness I've been talking to actually is a primate keeper.
And he had a sighting in Abernathy Forest in 2012 with his brother.
They were hunting rabbits or something up there.
Sorry, where is Abernathy?
I should know.
Where is Athena?
Abernathy, sorry.
Now, Abernathy is in Scotland and it's part of the Strathbay area.
So that's what used to be the Caledonian Forest near Loch Garten.
Now, they were there, they were hunting rabbits and camping out and doing brotherly things.
They used to spend every summer doing that together.
And he is a primate keeper.
He's worked in several zoos dealing specifically with primates.
And he saw an animal there that was seven foot tall, eating blackberries from a blackberry bush.
And as it turned around and he saw the face, he said it was all black and it was almost like a bonobo chimp.
But the face was flatter with a near separation of nose and lips, not quite, still a small muzzle, but it looked different in that sense, having this flat face, whereas an ape, as you would normally see it, like a gorilla chimp, has a muzzle that sticks out, right?
And that flat face is fairly common around the world, isn't it?
That's common in almost all Sasquatch or Bigfoot type reports around the world.
And here we're talking about somebody who is a professional observer, somebody who would know.
He works with primates every day.
So that's his thing.
He knows the different types of animals.
And I said, if you could compare it to one the most, what would it be?
And he said, in the face, a bonobo chin, like an aged thing.
In fact, he even described the thing receding, bolding, so it looked older.
And he sent me a picture of this bonobo chim that was aging.
He said, this is kind of like what I saw if you could flatten the face out somehow.
So what did he, as a trained observer and somebody who works in the field, believe that he'd seen?
Is he a convert to the idea that we have a form of Bigfoot in the UK?
He is.
He is now.
And he believed it was a type of ape.
Now, I believe it's a type of ape.
There's a lot of discussion in these Bigfoot circles around the world that it's a type of hominid, an ancient form of man or some missing link.
I don't believe that.
I just believe it's a type of ape.
If it's one here in this country that we have not discovered in all this time, it would have to be reasonably intelligent, I think.
Well, it would have to be reasonably intelligent, and this goes for the international phenomena, too, because they seem to be intelligent enough to evade detection.
They seem to.
They do seem to.
There are several claims to have caught them on camera effectively, but of course those are disputed.
And I wouldn't like to say which ones I think are real and which ones aren't.
Suffice to say, in this particular business that I'm involved in, it's the strength of the anecdotal report that's most important.
The corroborative elements without the reports, without the person knowing about them, do they have any interest in the subject?
And the mundane details of what they're talking about.
You know, somebody says, as I was walking through the forest, I noticed that there was a broken branch and the stream was running like it always used to run.
And then suddenly I saw this thing.
When you have a traumatic or a strong experience, small details that are really solidified into your mind, you can't forget it like you with the elephant.
You probably remember the entire interior of the car you were driving in, but never forget it.
Yes, I do.
I remember Thinking to myself, I don't believe this is happening because you read stories.
And sometimes I think, you know, guides in parks like that fake engine stalling and that sort of thing to build up the tension, but this really happened.
And, you know, I was witnessing nature in the wild, whether it was some kind of threat charge and whether they weren't actually going to crush the car if they got to it.
I have no idea.
And I wasn't keen to stick around and find out.
Well, they do occasionally, don't they?
I mean, they do, especially if it's a male in, I forget what the Bigfoot is called.
Yeah, it must be.
Yes, yeah, rage, whatever.
Yes, that was quite dangerous.
And this is, you know, this was all interesting stuff.
There is no scientific evidence yet, especially on the British side for Bigfoot.
I'd say we're probably generations behind the Americans who have a lot of scientific know-how and a lot of experience in this area.
But even so, footprints are quite rare.
Hair is quite rare, although in North America these things have been found.
One of the things that is an indication is said to be a kind of encampment that they produce in the forest.
You know, there are sticks that are laid down and that sort of thing.
That's pretty common.
Do we see anything like that here in the UK?
We do.
We do.
Now, there's a big discussion going at the moment.
I was actually in a small forested area in Esha.
There was an Esha, a Yor Road sighting quite a few years back.
So which again, just for our international listeners, is a very pleasant, you can't really call it a suburb of London, but it almost is.
It's in Surrey.
But it's a high net worth area.
It's a very nice place to live.
A lot of people who are in the media and that sort of thing, if they can afford it, live there.
So that's just, and it's semi-rural.
It's semi-rural, exactly.
So in fact, you could follow the green, there's a green pathway or a green route from the motorway in Easter all the way down to the Surrey Downs and then onto the Sastan.
So you could really walk all the way through if you went the right way.
So there was a small forest there called Littleworth Common and I had a few reports about some noises and bits and pieces there.
So myself and a friend, we got there at night and we looked through the forest for these types of signs, stick signs and things like that.
Now there was some bushcrafting in the forest, which for me is always a big warning sign.
So bushcrafting is people making little huts and structures or practicing making them.
It's a big hobby here.
A lot of people are interested in that.
But what we also found was two large X's made out of trees and behind them, what I would call a log jumble or a stick pole where big sticks and logs and trees have been jammed in in every direction, some of them quite large.
And then later we, on the way up, we found something that's normally referred to as a pinned arch, which is a tree that's been bent over all the way and pinned down with another tree.
It was a small one, but it was even propped up by some sticks.
It was very clearly made.
We heard some strange noises.
We've got a bit of eye shine on one of the pictures that I took, although that could have been an owl.
But we see lots of these things around.
The big debate is, are they bushcraft?
Are there people out there practicing bushcrafting or forestry workers piling sticks all over the place or kids messing around?
There's no real proof that it belongs to the Bigfoot or the Sasquatch, but it is a phenomenon that is recognized in all of the places they're supposed to live around the world.
Is anybody academic undertaking research, as they do in other countries, undertaking research into this?
I mean, you are an amateur, but somebody who knows more than most people about these things.
But are there any institutions that are involved in this country, in this kind of research, or do they just not think it's worth it?
No, there aren't any institutions involved.
And part of my reason for doing these talks, so I'll be doing the international cryptozoology conference with Lauren Coleman and Jeff Meldrum in the US in September and also CryptidCon with the finding big foot guys is to meet other people and to learn from their experience.
Even in cryptozoologists themselves in this country, there's a big disbelief in this phenomenon and there's a lot of conflict that goes on even in its discussion.
Okay, you used a word at the beginning of this and I wasn't going to halt you then, but I'm going to bring you back to it now.
And that word is dogman.
What is dogman and what sort of sightings of dogman do we have in this country?
So we have a few, not as many as the Bigfoot.
Now I recently wrote a blog called Dogman Rebranding the Werewolf.
So I think the dogman sightings are a less embarrassing way to refer to what people would commonly call werewolves or bipedal animals with wolf-like or dog-like heads.
Now there have been recent sightings here that the most significant one you probably recognize is the Hull werewolf, which was disguised, sorry, it was seen in 2016 in East Yorkshire, in the city of Hull.
And that was seen by several people and that was described as being something tall and hairy that was first seen eating an Alsatian dog next to a drainage channel.
Eating an Alsatian dog.
An Alsatian dog that was clearly dead and as it was spotted by the first couple that saw it, it jumped over an eight-foot high fence with the dead dog in its mouth.
Another woman was walking, her dog spotted something she called half dog and half human along the path, same time period.
And in August of that year, a woman described the moment she came face to face with a werewolf, in her words.
And she was an animal rescue worker.
She was driving through the East Riding village of Halsham.
she saw a creature in all fours, which then got up on two legs.
And she said, as it was on all fours, it was the size of her car, and much, much bigger as it got up, covered in green Size of a car on all fours before it stood up.
And covered in cream and grey-coloured fur, but with a human face, she said.
So that's a bit of an odd one.
We also have one of my favourites, which is the local one here, which is the werewolf of Camberwell.
This was where a man was attacked in the Camberwell Old Cemetery.
He was taking a cut through there to get to a friend's house and he felt something very big grab him by the arm and push him onto the floor.
Looked up and he saw a creature with a German shepherd-like head, but a man's hairy body holding him down, slobbering, sniffing him up and down.
And he said, shortly after the attack started, the dog or the dog man sniffed him up and down, it suddenly ran away, left him alone.
Now, significantly, very strangely here, he in his own words says, I believe I was spared because I suffer from a disease that dogs can smell, and that's probably why the creature left me alone.
I don't know what the disease is.
That's a hell of a story.
It's a hell of a story in an odd detail.
I'm really tired to the end of that.
So it's a strange one.
I have a lot of trouble swallowing the stories of the dogmas, but I admit that's really just because of personal prejudice.
They're just as valid as the Bigfoot sightings.
They're just as detailed or believable, some of them, at least.
Anyway, I find it hard to reconcile what that could be.
I've never told this story on this show or anywhere else before, but maybe this is the time to tell it.
And it suggests that there may be some strange hybrids out there, which is a whole other subject.
I was about 11 years of age.
This is some years ago.
And my dear grandmother, who's no longer with us, Edna, took me to the fair in Southport.
It was always a beautiful day out, and it always seemed to be a permanent sunny day.
And there was always the procession of people from the fairground in Southport, back along towards the train station and the railway line that took people to all stations towards Liverpool.
Now, on this particular summer evening, I think it was in August, it was a beautiful day, and we were all processing back towards the train station, all these people who'd been out for the day.
And my grandmother pointed at a man next to me and said, don't look.
And I, of course, the first thing you do if you're 11 years of age is you look.
And I saw, and I swear to this day, a man who had cloven hooves and apparently the legs of some kind of animal.
And it scared the bejabers out of me.
And I know what I saw.
I may well have been 11 years of age, but I know that that's what I saw.
Do you get reports of anything like that?
Because that particular sighting has disturbed me for all of these years.
And I suppose I'll never know what it was.
This was in a public place?
This was in a public place, but I can remember that the man or whatever this creature was was wearing an overcoat, so it was partly covered up.
But the hooves and the legs of an animal with fur were absolutely clear.
And it wasn't some kind of costume.
It was like I was looking at an animal, but it was in some way crossed with a human being.
And it was, for a child, it was very disturbing.
And I can understand why my grandmother said to me, don't look, but of course I did.
Gosh, I mean, that's, I've never heard anything like that.
I think that's quite amazing.
Of course, you know, some of that kind of sighting might remind you of something like Spring Heel Jack, right?
But I'm not really sure.
I mean, for my personal preference in sightings, I've mainly looked at things that are animal-like or possible undiscovered animals in origin.
There is a big paranormal site in the UK with other sightings like Black Shook, the mystery demon dog that's said to roam certain parts of the country, which I've mostly left alone, and things like that too.
I unfortunately haven't heard of anything like that, but there are some strange bipedal man-like descriptions of flying creatures.
So there was one called the Batman of Sight Hill Cemetery, and this was seen by a driver returning home at 4.30 one morning, so it must be in the night shift or something, and Sight Hill Cemetery is just outside of, just in Glasgow, sorry.
And he saw what looked like a cloaked person, jet black from head to toe, standing in the shadows.
And he drove towards it to wonder who this person was.
And it started to run away from him until finally he was driving at 40 miles per hour to try to catch up with this person, still not making it.
Now, as he got to the end of the road, there was a 20-foot fence on the edge of the pavement there.
And the creature, the man-like creature, suddenly unfurled the cloak, as it were, and leapt 20 feet over this fence and was gone.
So there are strange bipedal man-like descriptions, but as to cloven hooves, apart from the obvious.
Well, meanwhile, I've repeated a few things that you said in amazement during our conversation.
You said leapt 20 feet.
If we think about 20 feet, that's roughly seven meters in metric.
That's a huge leap.
That's flying.
That's not leaping.
It is flying.
That is flying.
I mean, he says it jumped vertically up in the air and cleared a 20-foot fence.
I would imagine that's taking off, but then landing directly behind it.
Lots of strange mystery flies in this country.
Those kinds of reports are a lot thinner on the ground, but they are there and they're quite unusual, really.
I mean, if you look at the Owl Man of Morningland, that's the famous one in Cornwall in the southwest of England.
And first witnessed by two children, 9 and 12, in the 1970s.
A strange five foot to six foot tall owl-like creature with brown feathers, 10-foot wingspan, that had red glowing eyes and emitted a screech more crackling, static noise.
Seen several times by several people in that area during that time.
And of course, there's the famous John Downs book of the CFC, The Owlman and Others, about that particular creature.
Even pterosaurs, which that was something that really shocked me when I first read about that.
Even in September 2017, Witcher, Shropshire, we've got a witness who claimed that she heard a strange screech, saw two large, she called them pterodactyls, Flying side by side, passed through some trees and flew off before she lost sight of them.
Now, that's quite a rural area, but you know, are we talking creatures from prehistoric times?
Well, is it possible, I wonder, and I know that you're not a scientist and neither am I, that there could be some kind of genetic throwback to a period prehistoric, as you said.
I think it's all about philosophical conception.
So one person says, well, these creatures died a long time ago, so they couldn't be around anymore.
But then we look at things like the coelacanth and the horseshoe crab, and we just kind of brush them aside.
I mean, these are veritable dinosaurs that should not have been here.
And yet, there they are.
We even exclude the crocodile, if you think of it.
That's an animal that's been here allegedly since that time.
And we still have it amongst us.
So there are many examples, not only animals, but trees and other types of flora and fauna that are still around that were supposed to have become extinct in the time of the zinosaurs.
And I think really things that live in deep water or things that fly and only come out at night or live in heavy forests, these are the most likely animals to still be around and stay undiscovered.
And yet they are stunningly elusive.
You've only got to look at the Loch Ness monster and the number of photographs that have been taken over the years and dismissed and the number of investigations that are ongoing.
I had on my radio show recently twice.
Professor Neil Gemmel from New Zealand, who at this moment is camped out by the side of the loch taking samples of the DNA, I don't think this has been done before, taking samples of the DNA within the water to see if anything anomalous is thrown up.
So there are people who are taking this phenomenon seriously, but the problem with all of these things is that they are so characteristically elusive.
I mean, by definition, something that is cryptid would have to be elusive.
But what's encouraging, now we've just discovered a new species of grass snake in this country, haven't we?
It's always been here.
We've only just discovered that it's a separate species.
And that encourages me because, you know, suddenly it's not as cut and dry as we thought.
That's a small thing if you think of it.
Oh, we actually discovered that there are two distinct species of grass snake instead of one.
But if this country is really exhaustively catalogued and scientifically regimented, then we should have known that a long time ago.
My personal view is that we put all that stuff to bed in the 19th century.
Everything was discovered, at least in this land, and catalogued and put into the encyclopedias.
And that's how it stayed.
And there are still a few animals, of course, with things like the Loch Ness Monster and all the other Lochs, let's not forget, and coasts around the UK that have lots of sea monster and lake monster sightings.
It all adds up to something.
I mean, there's a reason it gets a lot of newspaper time is because people think there's something in it.
Now, not all of those newspaper articles are very good.
I think there's one in the Isle of Sky just recently about a bubbling monster moving through the water.
And that to me really looks like a very popular fishing lure called a popper as you drag it through the water.
And that brings us to another point, of course.
There are so many opportunities for things to be mistaken.
And so, you know, I would imagine that, you know, you can put any figure you like on it, but for every hundred sightings, maybe only two or three of them have any great substance to them.
Yeah, I think that's reasonably plausible, especially in Loch Ness, where people are...
I said, it's estimated that 260,000 people visit the Loch Ness area every year, allegedly.
And all of them want to see the Loch Ness monster.
And yet, in 2017, we had 11 sightings.
And so far, we've had three or four sightings now this year.
And if they're all mistaken identity and everybody wants to see one, surely with that amount of people, we should be seeing a lot more mistaken identity cases.
And sort of flip it around there.
Surely there should be more of these things, especially when you go to Loch Ness and you see the way the water moves.
It's very strange.
Have all these weird undercurrents.
And of course, it's pitch black in there.
It's the worst research area in the world.
If you really want to discover anything, you're far better going to Lochmor or somewhere else where you can at least see what you're doing.
And that's why it's still worth asking the questions about the possible existence of the Loch Ness monster, because for those who have not been there or seen it, and those who don't know the geology, geography, topography of Scotland, it is incredibly deep.
And if ever there was a place where something could hide and breed, then this would be it.
It really could.
I mean, it's heavily forested around as well.
Now, when I visited Lochness in summer of 2012, one thing I did to you, and I was staying at the Loch Ness Lodge, and we had a very wonderful wife that let us have a second honeymoon there at the lodge.
So she's very interested.
That's dedication.
It really is.
I mean, she's not really into this kind of thing.
I say, you know, to my wife, they're real, you know, they're really real.
She says, I know they're real, but I don't care.
Which is a good wife response.
So I was standing there anyway, and I was at the pier, the Jacobite Pier near Drumna Drochet, and it was 11.30 at night, and I stood out on the dock.
What I realized was I could not see anything apart from the occasional far-off twinkling light of a hotel.
Couldn't see anything on the water, couldn't see anything in the woods.
And this is a perfect environment to hide an animal, even though we have lots of visitors, if it's primarily nocturnal or if it has some ability to breathe underwater for long periods of time.
Just like what's being nicknamed the butt-breathing turtle in Australia has a special function, and many turtles have this, where it can stay underwater for days.
And certain aspects of its skin convert oxygen into the animal's system.
Now, we don't have any evidence that plesiosaurs could do this, and that's my personal opinion, all I think is one stuff, but it's a possibility, it's a possible explanation that and the you know the never-ending darkness of the rural Scottish night.
Okay, so there is the possibility, and the jury has to be out, that something may exist in the depths of the water.
What about the idea that because we understand what is on the surface of our planet, but we don't have huge understanding of what is beneath, what about the idea that some of these cryptid creatures could actually be existing at lower levels than perhaps we've explored?
I think as far as deep sea is concerned, that certainly would be a lot of animals that we haven't discovered before.
And that's one of the areas where they make lots of new discoveries every year, or a dense, you know, dense rainforest, lots of incredibly heavily forested areas that we don't see.
As to creatures living beneath the surface of the earth and somehow escaping our attention, I think that's more to do with our own ego, in that we think because we haven't found them, there must be some special supernatural or special habituation situation taking place.
I just think that, especially with things like the British Bigfoot or lake monsters, for instance, nobody's really looking.
Not in a scientific sense.
Professor Neil Gamel went up there with his DNA test, but he's the first guy in a long time to do anything serious at the loch.
And we're still getting sightings year in, year out.
And that's one of 31,460 lochs and lochens in all of Scotland.
So you're suggesting if we looked a little more scientifically and a little more diligently in this country, we may well find?
I really think that we could find something.
Now, one of the bits in the book I've written about basically is about the, you know, following the shoals, it's called, and is about following food sources.
Now, it's not particularly a new idea, but what I discovered when I looked at Loch Ness is that most of the sightings were near the Inver villages, Inver meaning river mouth.
And of course, this is where a lot of fish enter into deep water and become vulnerable, especially when they're spawning and they're moving through the loch and the rivers.
So if you're the Loch Ness monster, these are the places that you will be because it's a supermarket of food for you.
It's a supermarket of food.
And in the southeast end of the loch, where there's no rivers, there's actually a big sparsity in sightings.
There are no sightings there.
And we also made a correlation between the sightings in Lake Windermere with Bonesi, which were all and mostly in the north end of the lake near the River Rotay, which is also near a trout fishery.
So again, finding these animals through their feeding patterns, it's a possibility.
Nobody's really looking.
I went and I did a whole pilot documentary in Lake Windermere and I didn't see any of the researchers there.
It's not really a phenomenon.
This is a tourist phenomenon.
People go, you get your little camera out, you hope you see the Loch Ness monster.
But we don't have teams of scientists year in, year out.
So we need to be devoting some more resources to these things if we really care about them.
And perhaps we might get somewhere.
Of all your years of research, and maybe this is an unfair question to ask at the end, but let's do it.
What is the thing that has surprised you, shocked you, amazed you most?
Which creature?
Witch creature, I think it would have to be something I labeled the Sultan Cove chameleon in the book.
And it was actually a sea monster sighting of the plesiosaur type in Salton Cove in Paynton.
It's Southwest England again, sorry, yes.
So this animal was actually seen for over half an hour.
It was photographed several times and it was observed to change colour by one of the witnesses who watched it.
So this animal was watched and photographed chasing bait fish, mackerelfish perhaps in the shallows, which were beating themselves to get away from it.
The photos show sort of a long neck with a small head and a little bump.
It's completely black.
There's no description in the photos, but they are quite tantalizing.
And one of the witnesses said it came out onto a bank of seaweed on some rocks and changed colour.
It turned black while it was waiting to go back after the fish.
And then, as it left this little patch of seaweed, it went to sort of a greeny-brown color again and made its way off.
He also saw the animal's back arch whilst on the seaweed.
Now, there's been a lot of talk about these Lochness monsters and other types of monsters, these humps that are seen sometimes, or this boat-like hump or this strange arch that's seen from time to time.
Does this animal have a lot of flexibility in its spine and its neck?
And he saw an example of that.
He saw it take place.
The animal got out, it arched up into almost a, I suppose, an upside-down U kind of shape, and then made its way back out to sea.
And that, to me, is the most extraordinary sighting because even though it was reported in 2010, not one person picked up on the fact that the witness clearly described an animal changing color, having a chameleonic ability of some kind, which is amazing to me as these.
And power is astonishing, and not only for this country, but very rare.
Yeah, very rare.
I've never heard any report like that before.
Boy, well, listen, more power to your elbow, more power to your research tools.
And I hope we get the chance to meet face to face.
And maybe if you want to come on my radio show sometime, we can talk around these things and maybe take some calls from people.
Maybe they've seen something.
Chances are they might.
So what is your next project then?
You've got the book out at the moment.
Are you working on a volume two or what?
There's the beast of series.
So it's going to cover different areas in the world.
I'm working on two others right now.
I'm also working, I've just recorded a TV pilot or a teaser, if you will, that I'm meeting people and trying to pitch that at the moment.
So for any of your listeners out there, if that's their business, I would love to speak to them.
Well, if you need a narrator, here I am.
Oh, yes, that would be fantastic.
Yes, unfortunately, although I do intend to present the show, and there is a little on my channel, on my Facebook page, there is a little teaser trailer of the Beasts of Britain.
Well, good luck with that.
You know, it's the kind of thing that I think people will be interested in.
You've just got to find the right executive, the right production company, and I think you're away.
I think so.
I really do.
If people want to read about you and your work, where do they go?
What's your website, Andrew?
So you can find me actually at the moment.
The website's been built.
So if you find me at facebook.com forward slash beasts of or twitter.com forward slash beasts of Britain.
I also have a blog under the same name and a YouTube channel.
The book is on Amazon, Beasts of Britain, on Kindle and Paperback.
Great.
Well, I've talked to people all over the world for the unexplained, people in Sydney, people in Christchurch, New Zealand, every part of the United States, South America, just about everywhere, Japan.
Never have I done a show with somebody who's two miles down the road from me.
So nice to speak with you, Andrew, and I wish you luck with your work.
Let's stay in touch.
Thank you.
Thank you, Art.
Andrew McGrath talking about those beasts of Britain.
Not only on the ground, but also in the sky, it seems.
I'll put a link to him and his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
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My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained and please stay safe.
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