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March 7, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:35
Edition 434 - Linda Godfrey

Cryptozoology expert Linda Godfrey joins us from Wisconsin to talk about her decades of research into big cats, werewolves, Bigfoot and much more...

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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.
Well, the good news is that spring seems to be more or less springing, unless, of course, we get snow before the end of March, which is possible, but not looking too bad up here in the Northern Hemisphere so far.
And maybe it's cooling down for you a bit in the Southern Hemisphere, wherever you are.
It'd be nice to hear from you.
Please get in touch.
If you've emailed recently, thank you.
If you've made a donation recently to the show at my website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much from the bottom of my heart.
And please do consider making a donation for this work to continue at theunexplained.tv, the website designed, created and owned by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Thank you to Haley for doing my guest bookings, including the guest on this edition, Linda Godfrey.
I'm going to be talking cryptozoology and other related stuff.
Linda is in Wisconsin.
We'll be getting to her very soon.
A couple of listener stories and shout-outs here I'm going to do.
Not very many, but I want to get to these.
And if you needed a response from me, either here on the show or by email and you haven't had it yet, please let me know and then I will make sure I do it.
But I think I'm up to date.
I'm hoping I am.
Stuart in Scotland gets in touch with some really good stories and we'll try and expand on these on the radio show if we can.
One of them is about a phantom motorbiker.
Stuart was in the police in Strathclyde, Scotland.
The Strathclyde Police covering Glasgow, places like that.
So Phantom Motorbiker, another one about a seven-foot-tall apparent shadow person.
So Stuart will be in contact about that.
Thank you.
Neil in Froome in Somerset says that he really liked the show with Anthony Peake.
The good news is that Neil, Anthony Peake, will be returning.
He's definitely on a roll these days.
He's doing all kinds of stuff.
Who else?
Randy in southern Ohio, U.S., says this.
I'm curious if you've heard anything about a certain phenomena.
I've been an avid reader since I was a kid, and I tend to read before I go to bed or just as I'm going to sleep.
And when I start to lose focus, I know that it's time to put the book away.
Well, here's where it gets interesting, says Randy.
In this state, I sleepily remember snippets of what I just read and may have to reread a paragraph or two.
Every once in a while, what I remember is completely different and totally unrelated to what's on the page.
It's as if, for a moment, I read a passage from a completely different book.
I look at the page and think, where did that come from?
I'm curious as to whether you've heard about this or your listeners have experienced anything like that.
I have to say I haven't.
I've had weird experiences where I've seen things in that state between sleep and waking.
Even visions of whole townscapes I've seen, but I haven't had that experience with my listener.
If you have, please let me know because Randy and I would both like to know.
And from Randy in America to Andy in Denmark, Andy was a listener to the Chris Tarrant show on Capitol Radio in London, which I was on for 10 years with Chris.
Andy moved to Denmark, has discovered my podcast and listens regularly.
Thank you.
Loves the show.
Would like me to have Stephen Greer on the show.
Andy, Stephen Greer has been on the show.
He's been both on the podcast and the radio show a number of times.
He's a very busy man, not easy to book, but we're trying to get him back on.
But thank you for that.
We are trying to get Stephen Greer back.
And if Stephen Greer's people are listening, Stephen, I'd love to speak to you again very soon.
A strange story from Stephen here.
I've told the story a number of times about the apparent apparition that I saw in the St. John's Tower in Liverpool when I was doing a radio show from there about eight or nine years ago.
And I've told it before.
Very briefly, I was doing this radio show filling in for a man called Pete Price on Radio City, which is the radio station where I started my career.
And I went back there in recent years to fill in for presenters.
They're great fun, great place.
And I went to the loo, the bathroom, at one o'clock in the morning, came down the stairs, just as I was about to go back into the studio, nobody else in the building apart from my producer, there is a guy standing outside the studio door.
He is wearing what we would call a workman's coat, a long coat down to his ankles, shiny workman's boots and a cap.
I can still see his face.
He was quite short-ish, you know, medium height kind of, and disappeared before my eyes.
I was not scared and I was told that many, many people have seen that man in the tower and they're still seeing him.
Well, Stephen sent me a photograph of the construction of the St. John's Tower in the 1960s.
This is where it gets interesting.
Because standing in the same position in the tower, which is open because it's still being built, is a guy who looks like this man.
Now, they probably had other foremen and caretakers and people like that who dressed in the same way.
So it may not exactly have been him.
But boy, does it look like him.
He's not facing the camera in the photograph.
But isn't that interesting that there were indeed, as I suspected, people like that in the tower?
Rob in the US, same story as Stuart with you, really.
We're going to try and put you on the radio show when we do listener stories.
You have a motorbike-related story.
Rob, actually, you're in Enterprise in Canada, aren't you?
In Ontario.
Sorry about that.
I said you were in the US, I think.
Rob, thank you for that.
And thank you.
If you've got in touch recently, please know that I see all emails.
And if your email requires a response from me, then you get one.
The website is theunexplained.tv, and you can follow the link from there and send me an email.
All right, let's get to the United States.
Now, the guest on this edition, we will talk cryptozoology and other matters with somebody who you've requested to be on this show, Linda Godfrey.
Linda, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
I'm so glad to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Now, we're recording this, Linda, at the beginning of March.
I've got a beam of sunshine coming across from the park very close to where I live.
How are things in Wisconsin?
Well, we have a fresh layer of sparkling snow.
So, yeah, it just, we usually get snow until mid-March at least, so it's not unusual.
It actually is very pretty to look at while we're talking.
Okay, so spring is a little way off in Wisconsin.
I think we can probably deduce that from what you said.
Yeah, it sometimes lasts way through the end of April.
So, you know, this is totally expected and actually pretty nice weather.
Okay, now, let's get into the meat of what we're going to talk about then, Linda, and thank you for doing this.
I've had a number of requests for you from my listeners, so I'm very pleased that we've been able to get this together.
Before this conversation and the research that I did for it, I didn't know very much about you, but I see from your biography, you've got at least 18 books out on strange creatures, phenomena, etc.
And you've done an awful lot of media on these things.
So from what I can derive from that, it seems that your career in all of this cryptozoology I'm talking about has been quite a long one.
Yeah, it dates back to 1991-92 when I happened to land a job as a reporter at a Walworth County, Wisconsin newspaper.
And I wasn't expecting it to be anything unusual.
I really was mostly interested in doing illustrations and cartoons for the newspaper.
And when the reporter job came open, I just happened to take it.
And no sooner had I done so than rumors began flying around this small area of Wisconsin, people saying that there was a creature that they identified as looking like an old-fashioned werewolf running around on its hind legs on this country road outside of Elkhorn, which happened to be my hometown at the time and where I lived for over 20 years.
30 actually, I guess.
And I laughed.
You know, I didn't think there's anything to it.
But it just so happened that I was also working on a story with the county animal control officer about some places in the county where there had been mutilations, found mutilated dogs and other weird things, and where people had been saying, I'd been tipped off already by the time I made that visit to him that day, was saying there was something that looked like a werewolf on Bray Road.
And while we were talking, I asked him, you know, we finished our discussion.
I said, by the way, have you heard anything about this weird animal people are telling about out on Bray Road?
And he said, oh, you mean this?
And he pulled open his file folder and his file drawer.
And mind you, this was the county animal control official.
You know, it wasn't just anybody in particular that we were talking to.
He was the official.
So if anybody was going to know about this thing, he would.
Well, he pulled out a file folder, and to my shock and surprise, it was labeled werewolf.
So when you've got a county official with a file folder marked werewolf, that's news.
And how, look, this is a different era.
And you and I have both seen things as journalists change over the years.
The stories that we talk about, UFO stories, cryptozoological stories, they get into the papers, certainly here in the United Kingdom.
Every day, certainly every week, there are reports of big cats and all kinds of things.
But the era when this was happening was an era when this stuff was definitely in the wacko file, yeah?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
It might as well have said werewolf and then wacko after it.
But he shared the file contents with me.
And I was really surprised to see that, you know, usually it'd be a couple of, typically, if somebody's going to play jokes like that, it's boys in their late teens, early 20s.
And this was a wide variety of people.
There were white-collar, blue-collar farmers, men, women, you know, quite an assortment of them already.
And I started thinking, hmm, if you're going to hoax a community and, you know, risk getting caught and all that kind of thing, do you go and give your county official all of your contact information?
You know, not many people would.
So I thought, well, maybe there's something to this.
And the editor of the newspaper agreed because we had that official file folder.
And I started paying visits to these people and talking to them in person.
And I realized whatever it was that they saw had affected them deeply.
Most of them were still really uneasy about it, talking about it.
They acted frightened.
And it seemed more and more credible to me.
So we ran the story of several of these witnesses on New Year's Eve weekend, 91, 92.
And I remember the editor and I talking about it and kind of chuckling and say, well, you know, local people will have fun with it for a couple of weeks, and then they'll forget about it, maybe tell it around a campfire 20 years from now.
And boy, were we wrong.
It hit the paper that weekend, and on Monday, we started having calls from national TV shows.
Inside Edition came and all kinds of well-known national news, and of course all the local papers, Madison, Milwaukee, which were only an hour away from this whole thing.
And I began to realize that I sort of had a werewolf by the tail, because there was just no way to explain it in natural terms, what people were telling me it was doing.
They weren't just seeing it standing around.
They were seeing what looked like to them a wolf or a German shepherd on its hind legs, often running and bounding and leaping on its hind legs.
And it was doing things like one woman saw it kneeling in the ditch next to her as she drove by in her car.
And it was holding what looked like a dead raccoon or something in its upturned palms and bringing the food to its mouth, which is not how a normal dog eats.
So there was a sort of, I'm going to use the word hybrid.
That's probably not the appropriate term.
But there was a sort of hybrid aspect to this because it was doing something that a human being may do, but was clearly not a human being.
Right.
The thing about it was mostly behavioral.
I mean, it didn't look like Lon Shaney or Jack Nicholson made up for a werewolf movie.
It didn't have that flat human face or really anything human about it.
Those who had to look at its backside said it had a tail, but it reminded them of a German shepherd.
And most of them said it was running really naturally on its hind legs, but the legs were bent backwards.
And that's when I knew I had someone who was making careful observations of what they saw, because most people don't stop and think about how a canine's leg is constructed.
They run on their toe pads rather than on their whole feet, like humans or bears.
Yeah, they spring along, don't they?
Yeah, and what we would think of as the heel is actually partway up off the ground, and we call it the hawk in animals.
And the only time that would show up in prints is if it kind of leaned backwards to then spring forwards.
And I actually have found prints exactly like that, which to me sort of indicate that something is walking around bipedally on the hind two legs.
And since then, when that paper ran, people also began calling me, just regular everyday people, saying, it's not a joke.
I saw that thing too.
I had a man from Michigan, a DJ from the Traverse City area, say, we have this thing in Michigan, too.
We call it the Michigan Dogman.
I had dubbed ours the Bray Road beast because I was very reluctant to use the word werewolf.
There didn't seem to me to be any real evidence for that.
But a beast can be any kind of known or unknown animal.
And it had that nice alliteration with Bray Road.
So I called it that and it stuck.
But they did have the same creature across the USA.
I realized it was not a localized phenomenon.
It was very widespread.
So did you think, and I'm sorry to interrupt here, did you think then at that stage that those occasional reports you'd get in America, certainly in that era, of the so-called dogman and this werewolf that you'd had reports of, did you start to believe that they were perhaps one and the same species, one and the same thing?
Well, I was actually, I think, one of the first after Michigan to call it the dogman.
And I didn't think that it was a real werewolf, you know, changing shape or anything like that.
I still don't, although I do believe that there are certain drug-related and supernatural practices that can create the illusion of one.
That's a whole kind of different part of this subject.
But back in those days, I just started keeping notes on things people sent me.
I worked for 10 years at that newspaper.
And during that time, I think I wrote only four kind of update stories about sightings that I had gotten.
And then it occurred to me that after 10 years, the interest in it was still so high that, and people were continually writing and asking me about it.
I was doing more interviews than my own writing.
And I thought, well, I should just write this down, write it all in one place so people could know what happened, get it straight.
There wouldn't be a lot of sensationalism because this was a story that did not need sensationalism.
When you have something that looks like a werewolf running around out in the wilds and all kinds of people are seeing it, you know, that's quite sensational enough.
So I wanted it to, you know, be the same as witnesses had told me.
And so I thought, well, I'll write a book.
It'll be all done.
And then, you know, I won't have to bother about it anymore was honestly my thought because I had other things that I was doing.
I'm an artist.
I was doing, I had an art rep in Milwaukee.
I was busy doing that.
And it just happened that when I wrote the book, it all exploded again.
And that was in 2003.
So it just continued.
And your website shows that this is a very long-lasting phenomenon, many people having these sightings.
One of the things I printed out from your website before we did this was a quote here.
I never heard of the Bray Road Beast until 2007 or 2008, wrote a northern Wisconsin man called Nick Bluckman, who lived in southern Woolworth County until 1994.
Quote, I thought I was the only person to see it until I heard about it on TV.
The minute I heard Elkhorn mentioned, I felt exonerated.
And I'll just read another line here.
I've only told maybe four people what happened, and you can imagine the responses I've got.
I was 34 when this happened.
I'm now 65.
I figured I better tell my story while I'm still above ground.
And he was by no means alone.
That's right.
That's right.
And the thing is, even though a lot of people were reporting first in 91, 92, many of the incidents they were telling me about happened 20 or 30 years before that.
So then right now we're talking about six decades at least.
So you're talking about something that's in the area and is clearly breeding.
It would have to be because, let's say, it was some kind of wolf that had evolved a way to walk on its hind legs or adapted to walking on its hind legs.
They don't last that long in the wild.
And there were more than one.
There were instances where people would see several of them together.
So there had to be, and my first attempt at a different name for it was the indigenous dogman, because my explanation was maybe, you know, there's absolutely no human in it, but that at some point some of them found out that, see, they are concentrated, they occur all over, but they're concentrated around the Great Lakes, where there were once great wide prairies.
And if you're a carnivore walking through those prairies with very tall grasses growing, you want to be able to see what's coming, whether it's a big deer for dinner or something that you might have to fight with.
So it would be an advantage to be walking bipedally.
And I thought maybe this was some indigenous Wolf creature that I was thinking the timber wolves would probably be the best candidate that had just through natural adaptation found it advantageous to walk on its hind legs.
And so that, The Indigenous Dogman was my title for that.
And I did a sketch that first appeared in that book, The Beast of Bray Road, which was the title of the first one that I wrote on the subject.
And it's been all over the internet.
It got commandeered so that you don't, you know, I don't even almost have my copyright on it because so many people have used it.
And there was one man who was printing an online magazine.
And I discovered he had put that on his site headline and all through it.
And I said, you know, you need a copyright for this.
And he said, well, but it's the one, it's what everybody says it looks like.
So, you know, I know that I've got the looks of it down pretty well.
And there's nothing human about it except for its behavior because I had person after person start telling me that, you know, they said it looked like a wolf or a big German shepherd, but when it stared in my eyes while I was sitting in my car, I felt that it was sending me some sort of communication, not in English, you know, not in the king's English, but something like, I know I could, you know, I could get you if I wanted to.
I could jump on top of your car if I wanted to.
Don't tell anyone or I'll find you and get you.
So it was almost telepathic.
Yeah, you know, people are really reluctant to use that word telepathy, but they'll say, I just felt it was telling me this specific message and I got it and got out of there.
Boy, that is a hell of a story.
Now, there are a few things that flow from this.
In your researches, and you've become the go-to person on this story, and you still are.
In your researches, is there anything, was there anything unusual in the way that this thing hunted, caught, and then dissected prey?
I don't know that it would be considered any different than most canines, except there are a few incidences.
One of the best-known stories was, I call it the Maine PAC, M-A-I-N-E, meaning our state of Maine, because that's where it happened, where there was, and this was probably 10 or so years ago,
but a woman and her husband who were renting a very nice farmhouse and property in Maine had a habit of sitting outdoors on their porch and watching this pond that they had lit up because deer would come and drink from it during the night, and they'd sit on their front porch and drink coffee.
And I always ask people if they were drinking alcohol or, you know, having drug hallucinations or something.
Because that can have its own effects, yeah.
Right.
And, you know, this was a very straight, middle-aged couple just having their late-night coffee, washing their own property.
And one night, she said they were sitting there, and they usually had the lights off so the deer wouldn't be afraid to come to the pond.
And all of a sudden, they both got this uneasy feeling.
And her husband flicked on their large mag light, and there they could see not just one, but several of these creatures coming toward them.
There were a couple on one side, a couple on the other, and they were flanking them, which implies an organized strategy.
There were several coming from one side and several from the other side.
And they walked under a particular shed door that they knew was seven feet tall, and that was about equal with the, or level with the tops of these creatures' heads.
And they looked just like upright walking wolves.
And the couple backed into their house after turning on the floodlight and seeing these things close up and waited for the creatures to go away, but they did not.
They stayed all night.
The couple was asleep most of the night, or excuse me, was awake most of the night.
And the creatures were just there as far as until sunup, and then they just sort of melted away into the morning light somehow.
But they were terrified.
They actually moved because of that.
And when they went back some time later to see it, that pond had been filled in so that the deer would no longer come there.
And they figured that was probably due to whoever had moved in after them.
So there was something there, and it was operating in an intelligent way.
In any of the reports that you had of the Bray Road creature, or indeed any of them, to be honest, was there ever any indication that any person felt under threat, any human being felt under threat at any time?
Did one of these things...
Any indication in any of the reports that this thing ever did that?
Oh, sure.
Yeah, quite often, especially people who are walking park trails or just out in the wilderness having their daily constitutional or if they live in a wooded area or their property abuts a wooded area and they may come face to face with it outdoors with nothing between them and it, they are usually terrified because they feel that it could easily get them.
Some have run and could hear it running after them.
But here's the interesting part.
Back in the medieval European days, and I think in England too, there were thought to be real werewolves.
In other words, men that somehow turned into these wolf-like creatures.
And these creatures were doing great damage.
They were killing and eating people and livestock to a great deal.
Now, this creature, whatever it is, it's been now, Oh gosh, going on close to 30 years that I've been tracking it.
And I've only had during that time two slight injuries reported.
One was a man in Canada who was walking a trail near Quebec just, you know, on a kind of a holiday.
He didn't have a gun or anything like that with him.
And he said that he came face to face with what looked like a timber wolf walking toward him upright.
And he said he looked at it, it looked at him, and then he lunged to kind of get out of its way.
And I liken it to, you know, when you're in a supermarket and you meet somebody coming with a basket from the other direction, one of you, it takes a couple of passes before you each go on the right side.
That's kind of what happened.
He said he tried to lunge past it, and it ended up as it was trying to jump past him, leaving like toothmarks, fang marks on, it ripped open his shirt and left kind of a gash on his side.
And he had to go to the hospital and get stitches.
He sent me a photograph he took of that scar, which isn't proof in itself, but physicians I showed it to said it was compatible with what you'd expect for some type of a tooth tear from a large canine.
And he said he knew that it could have had him if it wanted to, but it just went off into the brush.
And that's what people will say.
They'll say, it just looked at me as if establishing its presence.
It almost seems like a territorial act, like it's scaring people off rather than trying to have them as prey.
Right.
So that indicates or certainly suggests a degree of, which not all wild animals have, a certain degree of almost human-like thought and deliberation and almost a kind of respect for human beings or certainly an appreciation that we both have our territory and I would rather not have a confrontation with you if I, you know, if I really don't have to.
And that makes them elusive, but it also makes them smart.
It does.
And people will say that directly.
They'll say, you know, this thing was smarter than just an animal.
You know, they'll feel that it had human-like reasoning and knew who they were and that the creature is as fascinated with us as we are with it.
Right.
Which makes this an extraordinary phenomenon.
So as you're gathering these reports, and you wrote a book, and you thought maybe it would all go away then, then the reports, just as we know, right up to the present day, they kept tumbling in.
Did you speak to experts?
So on the scientific side, as a journalist, what were you doing?
Yeah, I've talked to wildlife officials, wolf specialists, wherever I could find them.
There's a wolf and moose program going on Isle Royale in Lake Michigan that's been going on for probably 20 years now where they have an isolated pack of wolves and monitor them closely.
And I talked to the director of it personally and said, have you seen any indication where the members of your wolf pack are showing bipedalism?
And they said, no, we've never seen that.
I've talked to other ones who said, no, they just, they don't do that.
They might rear up on their hind legs momentarily to kind of look at you, but then they drop back down.
They aren't chasing people.
And I even developed this theory that perhaps they were canines with hip disease, where it was more comfortable for them to shift their weight by walking on their hind legs, because sometimes I've seen dogs make that adaptation.
They'll just have such pain in their hind quarters that they'll walk upright to just shift the muscle use.
And nobody has ever said anything.
Again, I did meet a couple of trappers in the wilds of the UP in Michigan and asked them that because they had trapped wolves.
And they said, no, they agreed that they will momentarily rear up and look at you, but then they drop down to run or anything else.
So I haven't found any scientific backup at all that it's a phenomenon where wolves will actually run bipedally.
And sometimes it's just, you know, they're not chasing people or anything.
I had a couple of brothers in Upper New York State that saw two of them running along a highway with the lake on the other end.
They weren't chasing anything that could be seen.
They were just trotting along that way as if it were very comfortable for them.
Okay.
The question I guess is on the lips of many of my listeners at the moment, and it's certainly on my lips right now, is how could something of this kind with such power and such savvy be so elusive and not give over all of these decades a clearer indication as to what it is and where it is?
Well, one answer to that is that they have this on their side.
They can drop down to all fours at any time and run around.
And if you saw it doing that or you found a dead one, you just say, well, that's a real big timber wolf.
Or, hmm, that looks like a wolf-dog hybrid.
You can't see, there's no outside indication that they do this.
You have to see them in the act of running on the hind legs in order to know there's something strange, which is different than Bigfoot because Bigfoot also has this great elusiveness to it.
But if you saw Bigfoot standing right in front of you or one was chasing you, and many people have, people actually began reporting Bigfoot sightings to me back at the same time they started calling me about the dogman.
But if you saw the Bigfoot, you would know that was not a human or a different, people recognize it if they get to see the whole thing.
And they are also very elusive.
And I've been comparing it lately with the big cats that are around.
Mountain lions, jaguars, leopards.
Have you got a spate of those things in the U.S. as we have in the UK?
Because I can tell you, because obviously I do the radio show and this podcast, I have to look at the reports.
And these reports appear to me to be getting more frequent, and there seem to be hotspots for it in the United Kingdom.
The southwest of England is one.
The area to the north of London, Bedsharts and Bucks, that's another area, Gloucestershire.
These things sometimes seen in Yorkshire.
There are various, and even in East Anglia, in the UK, various reports.
One even that I'm going to do on my radio show about somebody who had a big cat actually going to, well, apparently going to her home in the southwest of England.
These reports are getting more common.
Is it the same in the U.S.?
It is because our mountain lions were very nearly exterminated in the early 1900s.
And the few that were left went westward down to Arizona, that area, where they kind of commingled with the jaguars and leopards that were already there.
But there is now in central Wisconsin, near an area known as the Driftless Area, because the last glacier missed it.
And so it looks like a landscape from somewhere else.
There are deep valleys, rock cliffs, all kinds of things that you wouldn't picture in Wisconsin, but it's ideal cougar habitat.
And about five years ago, an area writer and former newspaper editor from that area tipped me off to the fact that he'd been collecting reports.
People had started calling him when he joined the newspaper and reporting not only tan cats, but black panthers, which aren't supposed to be a thing at all.
And that over the past several decades, he had well over 150 reports from an 18-mile radius of this one little town called Hillsboro.
And they were still coming in very, very steadily.
Now, that's a lot of sightings.
Some of them may have been the same animal seen twice, but even so.
The weirdest thing was that well over half of them were this black color, which again is not supposed to exist.
And in fact, I have a documentary film that I made with my son, who's a filmmaker, that is debuting this weekend.
And it goes through this whole scenario that's in Hillsborough and interviews a lot of the witnesses.
Okay.
And so it sounds like a similar kind of phenomenon.
And are the explanations, potential explanations given for what you have in the States, the same as the ones that we're given here?
Whenever we talk to experts about this, people say, well, maybe this is something that has been kept in somebody's private collection in the days when people very wrongly kept animals of that kind in private captivity, maybe even in their homes.
For all I know, there may be some people in the world who still do those terrible things, which it's illegal.
But in that period, some of those creatures got out, maybe bred with other things in the environment, and what people are reporting are that.
Is that likely?
And is that the way that they're being explained in the U.S.?
I think that some of the sightings are likely to have that explanation.
And especially that area was close to a town that was known for its circuses.
So there certainly were big cats in that area.
But the ones that are being seen, many of them, have been tracked by the DNR by their spore and other hair things that they leave behind, carcass marks.
And they are then having to admit that these were some type of mountain lion, which they do very reluctantly.
It's very hard to get any official to declare it.
It has to be one where it's blatant.
But it's obvious to see that when they follow the track, they can follow its DNR on kills that it's made across the country.
Some of them seem to be coming back from that Arizona area.
They cross the Great Plains.
They go down through Minnesota, through Wisconsin, and I might add through directly the neighborhoods I've lived in myself.
My husband got tracked by one in our own backyard.
And then down around Lake Michigan, one got killed in Chicago.
Another made it to Connecticut before getting shot.
But then we have these others that there are too many to be explained by just that.
And the difference between the dogman and the Bigfoot is that this thing, these things, the great cats that are not supposed to be here, do show up on trail cameras.
There are pictures of them.
We can take pictures.
We have their spore.
It's hard to find, but people do find it.
They can be radio-collared, and that's a different thing than we have with Bigfoot or the dogman.
And it doesn't sound like there's the same mystical element in the big cats.
Well, there is, because people still do see them seeming to vanish into thin air, having these other types of experiences with them.
And the Native Americans of the area that I've interviewed, and we have one talking at length about this, explains that the tan mountain lions are usually normal animals, but the black ones, like that are often called black panthers, may be and probably are basically spirit animals that can go from one realm to ours, from what they would call the spirit world to our world and back.
And this is the same thing that protects Bigfoot and the dogman, too.
And it was part of their, we have a lot of ancient mounds and things like that in southeastern Wisconsin.
And you can find these effigy mounds built in the shape of the mountain lion and representing the mountain lion.
And its place was, they called it the Water Panther.
And they believed it would go down into Fresh Lake Springs, have battles from that water advantage with the Thunderbird to keep the world harmonized and balanced.
So you have this whole stock of native lore that goes with it.
So there's a backstory, just like with the Weir Wolf Dogman.
There's a big backstory with these.
And those people who try and dismiss all of these as being escaped, you know, exotic creatures from private collections or circuses or zoos or something like that, then they're wrong.
Right.
And we give quite a lengthy bit in the film to a man who runs one of these big cat shelters.
And he's had mountain lions, he's got black leopards, and he also has, people say, well, maybe it's a hybrid of the species.
Well, he's got what they call a liger, a lion-tiger hybrid.
And the ligers are supposed to be infertile and unable to reproduce.
Well, he also has what they call a liliger because their liger mated unbeknownst to them with another great cat and ended up being this liliger, which is very rare to find.
And they've got it right there in their shelter.
Right.
So these things can breed.
They can become hybrids.
They can be different.
But as you said, there's also this mystical element to them.
And also there's this same elusiveness, if that's the right word, that goes along with them.
Right.
They're so elusive that, you know, when I started researching this, I was trying to find articles in science magazines.
And the scientists themselves were calling them ghost cats.
And they'd say, well, not that we think they're real ghosts, but they behave like a ghost.
You know, they appear, they disappear.
They almost never show up unless, you know, they mean for you to.
And they are spreading all over the state.
As I said, my husband was stalked by one, very luckily, escaped, was not killed, but he could have been easily.
It was nighttime, and he had no flashlight with him.
He was just seeing it like three feet away from him, and he had to walk backwards across our acre of yard.
Boy, he must have been, I would be, he must have been scared.
Was this a big one?
Yes, this was a large one.
And I was in my house with my headphones on doing a podcast, just like I am with you right now.
So he was back there yelling and waving his arms and walking backwards across the yard.
If it had taken him down and our house bordered on a deep ravine, it would have just knocked him down in the ravine, and I never would have known where he went until it was too late.
So that was really frightening.
But they are all around, and it's many more than people will even report.
And it's a problem for the scientists and the experts, isn't it?
Because they would have to take on board the idea, as you and I have taken on board the idea, and people listening to this show have taken on board the idea, that there's a whole class of creature, and I include the werewolf and Bigfoot and the cats and the others, there's a whole class of creature that we don't understand.
The cryptozoology aspect of it.
It's very hard for the experts to accept.
And if they won't accept it, then I guess that makes research into these things even more difficult.
Well, it does.
And the thing is, the best equipped investigators don't do any better at getting images of it than people who just go out in the woods with their cell phone, you know, and take pictures that way.
I have done a lot of personal work setting out bait and things like that, using trail cams, working with a colleague.
We've used up to four to five trail cams on one.
And it's as if the big cats know enough not to touch it if there's a trail cam or anything electronic around it.
We've used it in Bigfoot reporting areas.
And they have the ability just to either somehow get behind the camera and turn it around.
I've had one twist a camera that was super tightly fastened on a tree branch and twisted and bent the tree branch so that the picture that resulted was looking up in the sky and then it was put back in the position and the bait was gone.
So you're saying that they have some sense of not wanting to be recognized.
Yeah, yeah, they do.
And with the big cats, it seems to be just natural.
To me, I've theorized that it's not only the smell of humans, it's somehow they seem to have this knowledge, Bigfoot particularly with this, this knowledge that if someone is carrying electronics, they're either giving off a signal that the animal can sense or,
and I say animal loosely because we're not positive that they look like animals, so they can either sense that signal or with the Bigfoot or the dogman, I think bears have like a 2,400 times the smelling ability, scenting ability that humans do.
So anything surviving in the woods would have to have that same thing, and they would smell an electronic device most likely, or a gun.
They'd be smelling the oil used to clean it, all kinds of things that we would never even imagine.
And that's going to make them even more elusive then, because if they are sensing these things and avoiding these things, getting information on them is going to be really hard.
But as you say, for you, the reports keep coming in.
They do.
They do.
And it's a little different now.
Those first 10 years that I was at the paper and then maybe the next 10 years that I was writing, it took hold very slowly, this idea of the dogman.
But it's really kind of burst out into the open the last maybe five or six years since all the cryptozoological sites began appearing on the internet.
And people began to see with a number of reports that there were differences.
At first, when I started talking about the dogman and the Beast of Bre Road, and then the next one was Hunting the American Werewolf, and then the Michigan Dogman.
Those were the first three.
People were insisting that there couldn't be such a thing as a dogman, and that people were reporting what investigators were kind of haughtily calling the snouted Bigfoot, which Bigfoot is almost never reported as having a dog-like snout.
And so that was their way of dismissing the dogman.
But when the preponderance of reports just gets so much that you can't ignore it, you have to, and then the difference of the legs and the way they walk and the bipedalism, you're dealing with a different animal.
The weirdest thing is I have started getting from different parts, especially the West Coast in the Americas and a few other places, the American Southeast, but people are calling dog cats, for lack of a better term.
They'll say it looked something like a lynx.
It had those lynx-type ears and the cat type of face, and it was walking upright and was really big.
So I don't know if somebody's designed a new hybrid somewhere, got out of it.
I don't know where these things are coming from, but they're slowly.
You just said a really interesting thing.
And again, I apologize for jumping in here, but you said somebody's designed.
Are there theories?
Is there a chain of thought that says maybe somebody is almost in a sort of Frankenstein way engineering these things?
Sure.
You know, and I mean, the days of Frankenstein, he had a very primitive lab, even if it was just, you know, in literature.
But the things that people are working on today in modern genetics are just the real parts, the real materials, the real procedures they're using are way beyond that idea of just some fuzzy magical monster.
They're things that are being creative, hybridization.
We have the genetic code of just about everything, including ourselves.
Surgery, I ended my latest book, I Know What I Saw, with some stories about how fast the science of transplants, it sounds so grisly, but head transplants.
Wasn't there a scientist, a doctor in Italy who was going to do one, I think.
There was one in Russia, I know for sure.
And at the time that book went to press a year or so ago, he was saying that he had performed this with animals and was waiting for permission to do it with humans, too, to just transplant somebody's heads to an older body.
And I have one really chilly story in that book.
I know what I saw about a man who was running on one of those rubberized walkways and saw this group of four men running toward him in perfect formation, except they looked like they were sort of clumsy, like they didn't really know how to run.
And when they got up close to them, he said he saw, he could see their, they were just in t-shirts or something.
They looked like great physical specimens, but one turned and looked at him, and he said it was like the head and face of a 70-year-old man.
And this is the same place where he also observed large wolf-like dogs trotting along in perfect formation too, as if something, almost as if they were robotic, but they weren't acting like dogs which run all over the place.
And there was nobody with a leash.
They were just trotting in perfect two-step around that, on all fours around that track.
So it was as if someone was trying out finished products on this rubberized walkway.
What a horrific thought that is.
In the Bigfoot cases, in many of them that I've looked at, spoken to people about, there's been almost on occasions a sort of ufological twist to them.
Some kind of link to, well, strange lights in the sky were also seen when Bigfoot was seen, or the thing appeared to appear and disappear at will.
That's why they don't leave very many traces of themselves.
In the cryptozoological cases that you've looked at, is there anything that connects to maybe UFOs and that sort of thing?
There are some reports, and it seems that some of them were more early on, you know, in the 50s and 60s.
But what I did in my second previous book, Monsters Among Us, was wherever I had a good report on something, I was reporting on all different kinds of creatures, wherever I had a good date and physical locality, I would look up a certain list of other attributes, like were there solar flares, were there nearby UFOs, were there any other indicators that you could start making associations between these things and how they appear.
And one of the most interesting ones was the creatures.
And I did find that there was some indication that they might be in the same general area, but not necessarily appearing with one another.
I had a great story of a Bigfoot sighting from a man who was a retired math teacher in Chicago.
And he was in a park about a mile east of Chicago's O'Hare Airport and was actually attacked by a Bigfoot, which waded across the river and was hurling river rocks at him because he was acting, I think he was probably acting in what they thought was an intrusive way.
And he had to run back along the trail park.
And yeah, that was scary.
But when I went to look this up in the database, I found that there was also a very strong, unknown, and these were unknown to one another, sighting of a UFO by two young men who saw one very clearly maybe a mile or so away at the same time that this man was having, or close to the same time that this man had his experience, that seemed to be riding along the top of power lines as if absorbing power from the electrical lines.
And this is a really common thing that goes with UFO observations.
So, you know, it was interesting to me to find these correlations because I find it much more thought-provoking than just talking about monster-like animals to scare people, which is fine.
You know, scary stories are kind of fun.
They can be horrifying too.
But to me, it's more interesting to see if there is a way they all associate with one another and perhaps with some other realm or some other force we don't really realize.
So that's where I've been going with my own research, and that's where I'm really fascinated.
How can you proceed with that research, though?
What direction would you go in to be able to firm that up and get more information?
Well, one of the best ways is to just sort of chart the things that come into you, you know, so you can see where the hotspots are.
The late, great John Keel called these places window areas, where you had all different sorts of creatures coming out in the same spot.
And central Wisconsin, into southern Wisconsin, is a definite one.
The areas you mentioned in the UK would be window areas.
And then what I always do is check out the surrounding habitat, what man-made artifacts are there, what natural mineral concentrations there might be, that sort of thing.
And I think if enough people did that and could somehow get together and charting it, that we would begin to see more concrete realizations of where these areas are.
And then you can start forming some hypotheses.
And not that there aren't plenty of hypotheses now.
But to me, that's where my thoughts and research are going.
And does there seem to be some connection, as from just interviews that I've done, conversations I've had, some connection with ley lines, for example, as indeed crop circles seem to be connected in some way to areas of energy, that sort of thing.
Does there appear to be a big pattern that might emerge?
I've noticed certain things that occur again and again, especially with the upright canines, which is my preferred term for them.
One would be military installations, especially in Europe.
I had several.
One would be ancient sites where you may have the ley lines leading from one to another.
Sometimes they're the same as the military installations.
They're usually on high hills.
And also connections to waters, especially fresh waterways, like spring-fed lakes, that kind of thing, rivers.
Those are all places where these creatures tend to emerge and find habitat and disappear when they want to.
Bigfoot, of course, is for many people the daddy of them all.
Maybe Bigfoot is why they got involved in or interested in the research into cryptozoology.
And there are more and more videos and reports and sightings and all sorts of things appearing about Bigfoot around the world, and especially, of course, in North America.
There was a recent video that I saw, and I think I saw this on television, but maybe I saw it on YouTube.
You know, all of these things these days blend into one.
But a couple of guys who were out exploring, and I think they were in the northeast of the U.S. It was maybe Alaska, it was maybe Washington State, it was maybe somewhere like that.
I can't remember the exact location, but a huge snowfield.
They were up high, and then there was a large, and you may have seen this video, valley of ice and snow.
And moving at tremendous pace, tremendous velocity, speed, with a lolloping gait, as they call it, was this distant, very dark creature that looked like the archetypal sort of eight foot, nine foot tall Bigfoot.
Now, this snow was deep, and this thing was making a hell of a headway through the snow.
There was not another human being around, apart from those guys who were well away from it.
There were no other creatures around there, but there was this thing making fantastic, speedy progress across this deep snowfield.
Reports like that are astonishing, aren't they?
And I'm guessing maybe with modern technology and the fact that people are exploring more places, that there are more and more reports like that coming in.
There are.
And, you know, it sounds easy to think of, you know, seeing a creature and then just holding up your cell phone camera and snapping a shot of it.
But in fact, you know, I've been in that position and it's really quite difficult if you're not ready and you're not walking around with your camera set and ready to go to shoot something like that.
But I've had several Bigfoot sightings.
It took 20 years or more from the time I first started back with the Beast of Bray Road until I actually saw some things themselves.
And then it wasn't the dog man, it was Bigfoot.
But it was because I lived in an area where there had been reportings of Bigfoot for the past 20 plus years.
And so it wasn't just me thinking out of the blue that I've seen it.
But I did have a really terrifying encounter that there isn't time to go in here, but if you go to lyndagodfrey.com and go to the search button up on the top right, you can put in Bigfoot branch, and it will tell you how I watched from in daylight by myself with no camera from about 100 feet away as what couldn't have been anything other than a Bigfoot snapped and twisted a 35-foot-long, 8-inch oak branch off of a living tree.
The foliage was so thick that I couldn't see the animal itself, but there's more to it, and hurled it Down this ravine about 40 feet.
That was terrifying.
That was my first Bigfoot incident.
And then it seems like after you have one, if you're still in the area, other ones may happen.
So I'm not seeking it anymore because you realize the power and there's a difference.
There's something very different about the way these creatures are and natural animals.
It's hard to describe.
And there are, of course, the periodic videos that appear and the reports of people who go back.
Some of them go back to the same site year after year to see what they may encounter.
Of this strange at dusk or in the early darkness, howling.
But it's not a howling.
It's almost...
It's almost like there was a toy that kids played with in the UK, and I'm sure they had it.
It probably came from the US.
It was like a piece of piping, and you'd swirl it around your head, and it would make a sort of noise like that.
If you take that down in pitch a little, that's the kind of noise that people are reporting.
There was one of those, a video like that, on one of the British newspaper sites recently.
So there's more and more evidence, if evidence you can call it, coming in all the time as people are feeling that they can report these things.
Right, right.
Well, you've got footprints.
There's a really good tape called Sierra, S-I-E-R-R-A sounds that you can find on the internet.
I've actually heard one that I couldn't pin down to any other animal that was like a long, gradual moan that ascended in its, it went up high and then it came down low again.
And it silenced, there had been a bunch of coyotes yapping.
This was again heard from my own yard, which was surrounded by this state forest, by the way.
And there were lots of coyotes yapping.
There was this big moan that totally silenced the coyotes.
Didn't hear them again.
And then it was over.
It was like, okay, I'm taking over.
This is my territory.
You know, you twerps, get out of here.
So, and that happens.
I've heard other people have successfully recorded that.
And the recording equipment is getting better and I think shows more evidence lately than any of the video things because you can now, now that we have recorded sounds for just about every species, you can play something that's recorded and then put that against any other known species sound and see if you have something different.
And I think at least one of the recent Bigfoot, Finding Bigfoot, I think it's Bigfoot Expedition, had a pretty good example of that recently.
One of the things that you address in your new book is something that occurred to me while I was having a conversation with a guy you might have heard of in the UK called Charles Christian.
Is that name familiar to you?
He's in the north of England.
I've heard the name, but I'm not familiar with really with his work.
Okay, well, I thought he was a great guy to talk with.
But Charles Christian was telling me, among other things, about something called the Old Stinker.
Now, the Old Stinker is a werewolf reported quite often, and even in recent years, around Hull in the north of England.
And the thing that occurred to me, which is something that you've addressed in your book, because it is a big question, is there's mythology around these things, maybe for years, and then there are actual sightings.
And you deal with the crossover between the mythology and the sightings, and you ask the question, which comes first?
In other words, does the myth grow up around the sightings or do the sightings grow up around the myth?
Right.
And it's really hard to know.
You know, I jumped into this thinking, well, if I look at enough examples, it should start to feel like it's one way or the other.
And what I really came away with is that whichever way it is, these creatures aren't new inventions.
You see the same, some people call them therianthropes, some people might call them hybrids, of animals that either have human features or are behaving like a human or walking bipedale.
And you see this going back to ancient Egypt, probably the best-known one that people think of would be Anubis, because it's the jackal-headed god of the dead, one of their gods of the dead for the Egyptians.
And it has that sort of dog look to it, and it's pure black with the very tall ears.
And I do get that description from people sometimes.
And it's usually not observed in the woods.
Usually when people liken it to Anubis, it's either an incident that has very marked otherworldly connections, shall we say, that it behaves in very marked, like it'll appear in someone's bedroom, is one oft-repeated example.
Or in a cemetery, I had one reported from the U.S. Naval Base just north of Chicago that three different service people saw.
But it shows you that it goes all the way back to Egyptian times and before that, the Sumerians, there's almost no civilization where they don't have art developed, where they don't also have humanized animals or animalized humans displayed somewhere in their culture.
Where will you be taking your research next?
Well, I am hoping to do a little more filming.
I have such a good place to go in the Kettle Moraine because there are things going on there that I place a lot of my time.
But I've been, in the past few months, I've been to West Virginia, Point Pleasant, where the famed Mothman was seen.
And I'm heading out west on a trip this summer that I really can't talk too much about.
So I'm exploring other areas where they present themselves and I can get to them.
Can you give me a clue as to what you're going to be doing in the summer?
Or is it so secret?
No, I can't.
I'm sorry.
Hey, listen, we're going to have to talk again then in the summer because I was going to say, I've absolutely loved speaking with you, and I'm glad that my listeners recommended you, and I'm glad that we were able to connect in this way.
I would love to do this again because we've only scratched the surface, really.
I greatly enjoyed this.
If people want to know about you, your various books, are there 18 books now?
Is it 19 books?
I've lost count here.
Where do they go?
Online?
Well, a good place to start is just lyndagodfrey.com, no W's or anything.
And you can find a homepage.
There's an about page where there's a place you can write me with your own experience if you want.
Then there's also Linda S. Godfrey on Facebook is my author site.
And those will take you.
I'm on Twitter and several other social media.
As we say here in the UK, you are a delight to speak with Linda.
And thank you so much.
I've really enjoyed this hour.
I hope you have.
I enjoyed it tremendously.
Thank you so much for having me and thanks to all of your listeners.
And I hope that you enjoyed Linda Godfrey.
Please let me know.
You can drop me an email through the website theunexplained.tv.
And if you can make a donation for the show while you're there, please do know that it's vital for this work to continue.
And if you've made a donation recently, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
My website is theunexplained.tv.
It's the one-stop shop for this show.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained as we get into spring.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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