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Jan. 4, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:14:48
Edition 509 - Darcy Weir & Dr Jeff Meldrum
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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.
Really good to have you there.
Thank you very much for all of your emails, your questions and comments about the show.
Gratefully received, always noted, and if your email requires a response, it will get one.
I'm a little behind myself on the emails at the moment, only because, and it's a good thing that I've had so much correspondence lately.
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And if you have donated over the Christmas period or recently, thank you very, very much.
It all aids the show.
And remember, as I said a year ago, but it's definitely out of date.
And in many areas, you can't go and do this now anyway.
But if you were to go to one of the well-known coffee in Poria and buy a coffee for, say, £2.50 US, £2.50 UK, just basic coffee, that coffee you may or may not enjoy.
You probably will, but you'll only enjoy it for 10 minutes.
And then it's gone.
With the unexplained, if you donate to the show, well, then you have a whole world of information and entertainment at your fingertips.
Do you like how I did that?
I hope everything's good with you.
We are about, as I record these words, so you will know what they are by now.
I don't know what they are by now because I haven't heard them.
They're happening in a couple of hours, but our Prime Minister in the UK, Boris Johnson, is set to announce the latest on coronavirus, maybe more restrictions coming soon, and it's all too deeply depressing.
Also interesting and potentially depressing is the prospect of some more cold weather coming to the UK, just to add to the rich mix that we've got at the moment.
The only good news, really, is this is, what, the first week of January, maybe looking down the barrel of the second, depending on when you're hearing this.
Winter is only going to last another, what, 10 weeks maybe so?
And then we'll be into the beginnings of spring.
So we've just got to try and tough it out for 10 weeks.
That's how I'm looking at it.
You know, I'm like a kid when it comes to winter with an Advent calendar.
And I'm counting off the days to when this cold weather is at an end.
We have had here in the UK, I don't know what's going on here, very few glimpses of the sun for weeks now.
And it's like this watery grey sky all the time.
Hell, I have to say, I do find it somewhat depressing.
But we plow on, don't we?
Thank you very much for all of your communications, like I say.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, as ever.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests.
And above all, thank you to you for just being there for me.
My Facebook page is going great guns, as they say, storming at the moment.
It's the official Facebook page of The Unexplained With Howard Hughes.
Check it out.
And if you want to leave a comment when you're there, then that's great.
This edition, two really good guests, one of whom you may well have heard of, the other perhaps not.
Darcy Weir, filmmaker, documentary maker, great interest in relic hominids, Sasquatch, in other words, Bigfoot.
And the same goes for the man you may well have heard of, Dr. Jeff Meldrum.
He's been on The Unexplained before.
I think he was on the old radio show years ago.
Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State University.
Teaches human anatomy, but great interest in the whole subject of relic hominids and Sasquatch Bigfoot.
So we'll be talking with both of them, partly about a couple of video presentations that I believe both of them have been involved in, but also about the entire fascinating subject.
And I have to tell you that Jeff Meldrum is very well known, has appeared, I think, on the likes of Coast Coast AM in America many times.
And as I say, I think he did my show once.
So the pair of them, Digital Technology Allowing from the US, should be connecting with us very shortly.
So, like I say, thank you very much for being part of my show over this last year.
Let's look into this year with hope in our hearts.
That's all we can do.
And just to register one thing, I don't know whether this will mean anything to you where you are, but we got some very sad news recently.
The death of a man called Jerry Marsden, who was one of the great characters of Mersey Beat.
He was very much a character in Liverpool, stayed in Liverpool, and his songs included Ferry Across the Mersey and, oh, Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying and all of those things.
And of course, the theme tune for Liverpool Football Club, my father, was an absolute lifelong devotee of LFC.
I was never really that much into football.
You know, I'm always pleased when Liverpool win, but it's not so much my thing.
My father was a fanatic all his life and his dad before him.
And the theme tune for Liverpool was down to Jerry Marsden, You'll Never Walk Alone, which is why in Liverpool they say YNWA.
And that means you'll never walk alone.
And every time I hear that song, it takes me back to my home city.
But very sad news.
And, you know, my condolences to Jerry Marsden's family.
He was 78.
And, you know, another one from an era, a great era of music.
And a great era of the United Kingdom has left us.
Sorry, I just wanted to mention that, just in case you're in a different part of the world and you didn't know that, and you were familiar with this man and his music.
He was also involved to an extent in the foundation of commercial radio in Liverpool.
So, you know, that's one of the reasons why Jerry Marsden is known.
All right, let's get to the United States now and our guests, Darcy Weir and Dr. Jeff Meldrum, on the subject of Sasquatch.
Darcy and Jeff, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Pleasure to be here.
Thank you for having me.
Well, it's good to have you both on here.
Now, we've got a kind of three-way connection here because we've got Darcy Weir in Vancouver, I think.
And Dr. Jeff Meldrum, where are you, Jeff?
I'm in Pocatello, Idaho.
Beautiful Rocky Mountains.
So we really, this is an international hookup.
Here's hoping this is going to work.
Darcy, let's just ask a little bit about you first then, because you are the person in this three-way conversation that I don't know that much about.
Dr. Meldrum's work I'm aware of because I've been doing this show for years.
Talk to me about you.
It's filmmaking and documentary making in this genre, isn't it?
Yeah, you know, I started off actually making documentaries about UFOs, believe it or not.
I was very into the idea that we're not alone in the universe and that the answer to that question is possibly being suppressed by military-industrial complex and governing powers.
I made a couple documentaries earlier on in my career.
I made one on Phil Schneider and underground bases and featured Richard Dolan and Richard Sauder.
And I also did a documentary on alien abduction and stuff like that.
So I was already quite out there in terms of my mind going on the periphery in the belief systems, so to speak.
But I was, believe it or not, quite a skeptic when I first came to the Sasquatch or Bigfoot question.
Are we alone in the forest, let's say?
And we know there's quite an extensive range of flora and fauna throughout North America and the world, really.
But in 2015 is when I was introduced to this subject.
I went to a festival in northern British Columbia, a small town that literally has a statue as you're driving into it of a Sasquatch.
And they have a festival, the native Canadian tribe that's indigenous to that region, the Shehalis or Stehalis, sorry, they believe quite fervently that there is existence of a wild man, a Sasquatch.
And the word Sasquatch comes from their tribe.
Its origin was actually pronounced Sasket.
And J.W. Burns, who was a English teacher, an Englishman who lived on the reserve and was teaching to the indigenous people there and kind of bringing them into Western society,
he was also being brought into their society and they told their oral tradition, their legend of the Sasket, and he got the name kind of wrong and called it Sasquatch.
So that's why we all know that word today.
And I found out about all this stuff starting in 2015 when I went to this festival.
I sat down and I interviewed two gentlemen, Thomas Steenberg and Bill Miller.
And eventually I got the guff up to reach out to Dr. Meldrum out at Idaho State University.
And I flew out to his laboratory there, his lab.
And he was quite a gentleman to introduce me even more to this subject because he has pretty much the best data you can find on the most credible sightings and events that have happened in terms of this creature's history.
And I say creatures, definitely not a singular being.
It would be tribes of them is the sort of working theory.
And there is something almost primeval, I think, about Bigfoot Sasquatch, whatever you want to call it, wherever you look in the world, because the stories of these creatures, these relic hominids, appear very much to resonate with the histories of the native peoples of those areas.
The only people who seem to be out of step are those of us who live in societies like the United Kingdom, cities like London, the people who've got long roots and still live in the places where they've always lived are those, it seems to me, Darcy, who understand this phenomenon best.
Yeah, and on top of that, just rural communities, I'd say.
Even in places like northern Nevada, or I think it's, is it southern Nevada, Dr. Meldrum, that, you know, people have sightings of Bigfoot, the other name, the American name for this creature.
You've also got just rural communities throughout Canada.
Northern California is a hotspot.
That's where we got the Patterson Gimlin film of Patty.
And Seattle, you know, just outside of Seattle, you go to areas like the Olympics, the Olympic National Rainforest.
And the Olympic Project, these members, these men who found what seems to be a community of nesting sites, which we hypothesize that possibly these Sasquatch were using to raise young, as wild as that sounds.
And in the documentary, this recent one that I made, Sasquatch Among Wild Men, we interview those men who a logger, a man who works in the lumber industry was excavating or marking out an area in Washington State, the sort of wilderness area of the Olympics rainforest.
And he found these very peculiar huckleberry woven nests.
And he was quite startled by that.
In all 20 years of him doing this, he had never seen or experienced this type of formation.
So he reached out to this local sort of Bigfoot research agency, the Olympic Project, and they Got out there.
Dr. Meldrum's been out there.
And yeah, in a roundabout way to your question, it's just, it seems to be anywhere that's a rural or rainforest sort of area of the world is a possibility that these sort of wild men, these relic hominids, could still exist.
Okay, let's bring Jeff Meldrum into this.
And Dr. Meldrum, thank you for waiting so patiently while Darcy set out his stall as we say here, which I found fascinating.
Obviously, your reputation precedes you.
I'm aware of you on shows like Coast to Coast AM.
And I believe that we talked on an early edition of my radio show years and years ago about these things.
So your name in this field is very well known in academia.
I guess the question I've got to ask before I kind of bring together the commonalities of the work that you and Darcy are doing and the stuff that you've done together is why would an academic, a man from academe, be interested in this?
Well, because it has a very solid footing in the biological and anthropological sciences.
You know, Darcy ended there just barely touching on a very important factor.
He brought up the, you know, you brought up the deep-rooted traditions of these indigenous populations, and then he began talking about the rural setting and then sort of broached the notion of certain types of habitat.
And that's the really important aspect for me is that there is an ecological, a biogeographical basis for the distribution of these types of traditions.
And if, you know, your comment about having an almost primeval aspect, I mean, that's very astute because if we're talking here about relic populations of species that have existed, coexisted alongside the human species on this planet, they are restricted largely because they're not human.
I mean, let's make that very clear.
In my opinion, they are not human.
The fact that they are limited to a particular habitat attests to that fact in my mind.
Humans are capable of colonizing the entire globe because of their material culture, which allows them to modify their surroundings in order to make them, with some exceptions, of course, some habitats, of course, but make their surroundings suitable for their sustenance.
These creatures are at the whim of nature.
They're restricted to areas that are often very difficult for humans to fully exploit.
Very rugged, broken, mountainous terrain, dense forest habitat.
I mean, there just aren't very many people living in the Olympic forest, as was here recently discussed, because of the nature of the terrain that we're dealing with.
But for this creature, it's probably one of their primary habitats, and they're well suited to negotiating that broken and uneven terrain.
So for me, it's a question of science.
And I mean, I'm not coming at this as a cultural anthropologist or a folklorist or ethnographer.
I'm coming at it as a biological anthropologist or physical anthropologist interested in the evolutionary history of not only our own species, but our immediate ancestors and collateral branches that have persisted alongside us for a very long time and it would appear right up into the present.
You said that they're restricted to their habitat, which is what makes them different from us in inverted commas.
Are they masters of their habitat?
Do they fight their habitat or have they really got it completely licked?
Well, just as any other species, I think they are very well adapted to their particular niche.
And we see that in the various aspects of the description of their characteristics.
I mean, they're large, their scale aids them both physiologically and mechanically, functionally, as they interact with the coarseness of the terrain that they're in, which can be very challenging for us.
I was impressed, for example, one of the first times I was in the Olympic forest, the size of those giant hemlocks and so forth, when they go down, they create a rather ominous barrier, one that those tree trunks are six or seven feet across.
And so when they're lying on the ground, you don't just walk over them that easily.
And you read the accounts, for example, in Northern California and the Redwoods forests, the accounts of the early explorers who tried to traverse some of that terrain with horses.
It was just, it was a living hell for them.
And they ended up dispatching and eating their horses because they were useless for them.
This creature, its size, would be a tremendous benefit just simply physically navigating the terrain.
Larger its body size also has all sorts of physiological advantages in terms of the diet and the types of resources that they're capable of exploiting then as a result of that.
And lots of different reasons for animals getting big, protection against other potential predators, for example, and so on.
So yeah, I think they're elegantly adapted.
When it comes to the foot, which is my expertise, the adaptations that seem to characterize the Sasquatch foot that contrast it with the human condition are precisely those which with 2020 hindsight, you know, you can recognize are absolutely appropriate for the kinds of terrain that they're negotiating, a large bipedal primate on very steep, rugged terrain.
The foot Is remarkably well adapted.
Why, though, are they so elusive, or do we think they're so elusive?
Obviously, they live in places that it's hard for us to get to and that we would find it hard to exist in.
But that can't be the whole story, can it?
No, certainly not.
And I think the most principal factor in that question is their rarity, that we're talking about a large omnivorous primate, a primate that if you consider the natural history of the known primates,
things like their longevity, their social structure, their reproductive behavior, and so forth, the demographics of their population, an animal like that is always relatively rare.
And as a result, the opportunity to bump into one is typically a very happenstance, a very serendipitous event.
Most of the credible accounts out there are encounters that have occurred or footprints that have been found purely by chance.
Those of us that spend a lot of time out in the field hoping for a purposeful encounter are often unrewarded for our efforts.
It's just, and quite honestly, that's not that surprising to me.
So, I mean, just to put, without going into a lot of detail, one of the examples I like to offer is, you know, the contrast with another large omnivore, the bears, black bears, in the lower 48 and in Canada, in North America, let's say.
Just very quickly, using the clues that we have, the fact that footprints are found usually as singular trackways of one individual, most sightings are of solitary individuals or sometimes female with offspring.
There are a few well-documented cases of finding tracks of small ones, of infants.
But in any case, using various clues like that and patterns of appearance, recognizable individuals whose footprints are distinctive enough, we can pick them out and note their repeated appearance in a geographical area, and then using just some estimates,
some variables bracketed by those values for known grade apes, I would estimate that there are, say take my state of Idaho here, there's probably only a couple of hundred Sasquatch in this state, even though it's a state that boasts the most square mileage of wilderness area than any other state.
How do you know that?
Well, based on a number of things.
If they're solitary, and I'm pretty confident they are based on the evidence that we do have, then extrapolating from that, if we look at the great apes, those that are solitary, namely the orangutan, it displays a social structure, a unit that we call a noyu.
The male doesn't defend females, a harem, or a cluster of individuals, but rather the dominant male defends a territory, some real estate, and that real estate encompasses the home ranges of a few other individuals, mostly females with potentially with dependent offspring.
We have evidence, too, from these repeat appearances of recognizable individuals that we can guesstimate, and I think in an informed way, their home ranges on the order of, say, 1,000 square miles.
They range over a large area to exploit the resources in an admittedly less productive montane forest than we find, say, in the tropics, where fruiting trees are much more abundant and productive in some areas, not in all.
Anyway, combining all these different things together, we come up with a pattern that if you look at the available habitat that would sustain an omnivore, and so one way we could get at that is look at the current distribution of black bear in North America.
And then within that territory, so say you look at Idaho and got the panhandle and central and eastern Idaho where those habitats exist, how many of these thousand square mile plots can you fit?
And you come up with about, oh, 12 to 15.
You know, it's going to be, and that's just a rough estimate.
Obviously, there's a lot of variation given the topography, given the density of the habitat, the forest habitat, you know, or its fragmentation, et cetera, et cetera.
But you come up with then a dominant male and overlapping, say, two or three females and one or two offspring in tow.
So you talk about five or six.
You know, make the math easy, let's take five times 15 home ranges.
Well, see, that's only 75.
And you might say, well, that's a really conservative estimate.
So let's double it.
Go 150.
There's 35,000 black bear in Idaho.
Up there in British Columbia, for example, where Darcy's speaking from, there's 110,000 black bear.
There's probably only maybe 1,000 Sasquatch, I'd estimate, in British Columbia.
Much more, a much richer area with that remarkable coastline with thousands of miles of probably the most productive habitat for a Sasquatch or any other omnivore that you could ask for.
So, you know, for every 200 black bear out there, there's one Sasquatch.
Well, how often when you're out hiking or backpacking, camping in the woods, do you encounter a black bear?
Find footprints or have a visual encounter?
It's pretty rare.
Well, like most creatures, they would rather get on with their lives and they don't want to have an encounter with you.
So do you think that those occasions when Sasquatch, Bigfoot, whatever you want to call This phenomenon, those occasions when Sasquatch is seen, are the occasions when Sasquatch wants to be seen?
Well, I think sometimes that may be the case in order to display their presence to encourage someone to retreat, which often is the result.
You know, even some very intrepid outdoorsmen quickly find a safer haven after an encounter or hearing a territorial scream or roar attributed to one of these creatures.
I think also, though, there's another factor, and that's the potential level of intelligence.
Even though these are not people, in my estimation, they are potentially intelligent, at least on the order of known great apes and maybe early hominins like Australopithecines.
So they're brainier, more intelligent than any other mammal that's out there.
And with intelligence, often comes curiosity.
And so I think sometimes there's a tug of war between caution and curiosity.
And so that's why you have these reports.
You know, someone steps out of the side door of their cabin to grab an armful of firewood only to encounter a Sasquatch standing on the edge of the light coming from the picture window as he peers in, viewing the activities going on inside.
So it's the kind of who's in my backyard.
Right, yeah.
Exactly.
I mean, most animals have some level of curiosity about something new, something different in their environment.
And I think human, the sights and smells of human activity are known to draw.
Just watching a video of an interloping bear visiting a family barbecuing in their backyard, intent on sharing in the steak that was on the grill.
And it was obviously the smell of cooking that drew him in overpowered his normal caution when it comes to human contact.
And I think that happens with Sasquatch as well.
Right.
It's the kind.
Yes, I can imagine if they've got hot dogs down there.
I've got to find out what this is all about.
I've never asked, and I've interviewed many people who research this field, Jeff.
I've actually, this is a great, I think this is something actually I should have done.
It's something I've neglected.
Do you believe that they are hierarchical?
You said that there's a dominant male in these communities.
Is it a hierarchy like you would see in a pride of lions?
Is there a strict succession as far as you know?
Well, again, we can only base on limited clues from observations of witnesses and so forth and patterns of data.
But yeah, I think that there are examples that have come to light that we've considered.
One comes to mind, for example, down there in Northern California in the 60s when the Patterson Gimlin film was captured.
There were her tracks, and actually what drew Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlund to that site was the description of long lines of multiple trackways.
One that I think is attributable to Patty, another that was probably one of her offspring, still affiliated, maybe a young female that left a 13-inch print.
And then there was reports of an 11-inch print, which doesn't always get, it's pictured in a couple of photographs, but some have thought it might be a human that took their shoe off to compare sizes with these tracks.
But in any case, in addition to, and her track, she's clearly a female if we're to accept the film as genuine.
There were other tracks that were found in that area that were 16 to 17 inches in length and much more robust, much broader, more flaring shape than the more gracious, slender shape relatively of the Patterson-Gimlin film subject.
So it's kind of, and there were other tracks that had been seen in that area in the range of 13 to 14, 15 inches that may have been other individuals.
And so it's tempting to speculate that there was this large dominant male, actually the original Bigfoot, the cast that Jerry Crewe brought back to town and was emblazoned on the front pages of newspapers, and whose footprint was seen repeatedly by different individuals over a good 20-year period in that area.
And then these several others that are suggestive of females and their offspring.
So, you know, I think that there is reason to consider that possibility, at least.
And I don't think it's just plucking it capriciously out of the ether.
I think that there's some good evidence to suggest this.
Grover Krantz suggested that some of the out-of-the-way and unusually located sightings might be what he referred to as rogue males.
That is, as a young adult male came into his maturity, the dominant male would no longer tolerate his presence in his region.
And he gets kicked out.
Exactly.
And they have to strike out to find their own turf, you know, or bide their time until such time as they're big enough, strong enough to usurp the resident alpha male.
But starting to jump in, Jeff, that suggests that if they have this kind of organization, which other creatures have, I mean, even humans fight for supremacy in every aspect of life.
But, you know, I live not very far from one of Her Majesty's royal parks.
Those parks are full of deer.
And they compete.
I mean, October or so, it's rutting season, and that's when the guys fight for whoever's in control, and you'll see the results of that.
And yet, we don't, as far as I know, and maybe I'm wrong, we don't see the evidence of any of their conflicts, of Bigfoot Susquatch's conflicts.
Well, it's interesting because, again, referring back to Dr. Krantz, who did spend some time discussing this and considering this in his book, he even went so far as to suggest that footprints, that they may be fully aware of their own sign, in other words, and use that sign as a form of display.
And he described a period of time when he was considering evidence that was coming out of the Blue Mountains of southeastern Washington and northeastern Oregon, a location where my first experience with footprints in the ground occurred.
And as he had accumulated representation of the footprint record of this region, there were some blips sort of in the calendar, as you consider the chronology of this data.
There were some blips where there seemed to be an inordinate amount of these large footprints.
And he interpreted this as the possibility that, and some of them represented individuals that he was unfamiliar with.
I mean, he'd seen enough examples of footprints from this region that he could, as any good anatomist, worth their salt, should be able to differentiate and recognize individuals.
And there were a couple of interlopers, it seemed, maybe a little cohort of males, young adult, newly adult males that were trying to lure away a female or two, perhaps, and challenge the resident male.
And he suggested that some of these large or very conspicuous rather trackways of large footprints and a plethora of broken foliage, broken trees at considerable heights and sometimes impressive diameter were all displays trying to intimidate one another with their size and their strength.
And as so many animals do, rather, you know, they would prefer to avoid direct contact or conflict, which may result in injury to one or both of the individuals and compromise their survivability.
And it's wasteful of resources.
Exactly.
And so one way to demonstrate is through loud vocalizations, to broadcast your, you know, I'm the big bad guy on the block, your size and strength through the volume and impressiveness of your vocalization, or by other means.
And tree breaks, footprints, very obvious footprints at junctures where they are very likely to be seen by the other individuals.
I mean, these are all speculations, but I mean, they're real possibilities.
And I think the interesting thing is, whether you lend any credence to credibility to these hypotheses, there are all these clues that are very clear.
I mean, individually, they're clear, even though they're not conclusive in constructing a theory to account for all of them, perhaps.
But nevertheless, these are all clues that point to this being a biological species and not just some paranormal phenomena.
But there are aspects that people regard as paranormal.
Some people talk of almost telepathic communication, strange, piercing, illuminated eyes in some instances.
Right.
Well, if I can jump in on that one, Harry.
I made my first sort of expose into this phenomenon and to this existence of these creatures with a documentary called The Unwounded Sasquatch.
And we covered an individual in that named Bill Merrill, who he said Sasquatch was a interdimensional being that had this ability almost like a dial on a TV.
This was back in the 80s, so they still had dials on them.
Remember, you could change the channel like that.
And he said they could use this dial in themselves to phase in and out of dimensions, jump into our dimension and jump back to where they normally are.
And they have enemies that are like these little dogs that chase them that are evil.
And, you know, he sort of created a almost Lord of the Rings type creature.
And people believed it, believed it back in the 80s.
And then you have on top of that, the psychic ability.
You know, there's people that say that they can communicate psychically with Sasquatch.
And, you know, even further to that, there's a huge belief system that there's a wolf, sorry, not a wolfman, a dog man that's out there that's very close in size and stature to Sasquatch or Bigfoot.
And it has been seen by people.
And, you know, apparently on YouTube, there's some videos.
But they're not very convincing.
They look like CGI.
What I think all of this equates to most of the time is either misidentification or people that have a belief system that they want to bring to an already credible subject that can be proven by trace evidence, by science.
We have footprints, we have hair samples, We have vocalizations.
We have interactions that include tools like rock throwing and wood knocks and howls and all that type of thing.
So we have pictures and videos in a plethora around the world from different encounters.
And this all proves to me that certain folks see something that is credible and they like to sort of glom on to a subject.
They kind of want to attract attention to themselves and expand the theory in a more exciting way.
So you think some people, not all, layer on this idea of paranormality, where perhaps that may not exist.
But what about the people who say that there are connections in some places, rare though they may be, with UFOs?
Sure, I don't discount that.
And I believe in UFOs.
You know, I'm quite sure that they exist.
But it could be, who knows?
Maybe the UFO has had interest with these creatures existing from the dawn of time right alongside human beings, Homo sapiens.
Right.
So if there is an ET, ET may be as interested in Bigfoot Sasquatch as we are, as human beings are, natural curiosity.
You want to know how this creature works.
And from accounts of ETs, they want to know how we work.
That's all fascinating and certainly ties into accounts that you might have heard this one.
I think I saw this on a video or heard somebody talk about this.
But there's a bunch of guys, hunters they are, outdoors people, who go back to the same place, and they have been going there, I think, for 40 years, every year because there is this eerie presence, the vocalizations, and stuff that those guys cannot work out.
When they first discovered them, they terrified them.
You know, they'd gone out to enjoy hunting and the wilds, as we call them here in the UK, and they'd come away absolutely transfixed by this presence.
So, you know, what we do know, or we think we know, is that even if it isn't paranormal, Sasquatch has a kind of presence about him or her.
And that's reflected in that story I've just told you.
And also things like the video film that appeared a couple of years ago on the internet is still going around of a couple of guys who are out in the snow.
I think it's in Canada.
It might be in the northeastern U.S. But they're looking down into a snow-covered valley.
It's very, as we say here, inclement weather.
It's very bad.
The place is absolutely covered in deep snow.
And yet down in the valley is this tall, hairy creature lolloping, you know, the gait that goes from side to side at great speed through the snow, as if, you know, it is wearing snowshoes.
But it isn't.
It's just a very big, hairy creature moving at staggering speed.
So I suppose what I'm coming to, and this I'm sure is what attracts you as a filmmaker, Darcy, although I don't want to put words in your mouth here, but part of this is about the mystique, isn't it?
Yes, absolutely.
And, you know, just the fact that something could exist that's on the periphery of our existence that we don't often get a chance to see, but many people have reported seeing, that's fascinating to me.
You know, a cryptid that people may note supposedly was a cryptid, just a creature or legend, a myth, was the giant squid.
You know, people thought, oh, that's the kraken.
That's just men at sea that have been at sea too long and have become paranoid and are delusional.
But we started seeing trace evidence of it.
Whales were washing up on the shores with large tentacles inside of their stomachs.
And lo and behold, in 2016, we had our first full-blown video of a 26-foot-long giant squid at the bottom of the ocean floor near Chichi Island off the coast of Japan.
A team lured it with some, I think, a carcass of some fish, and they used a special type of light not to scare it away.
They figured out that if they used infrared light, which this creature apparently, its eye couldn't pick up the infrared light, but every time they went into the deep submersible submarine, they would use normal lights.
It wouldn't show itself.
So they finally used this different type of light that even the human eye doesn't usually see, and they were recorded for quite some time.
That was published on Discovery Channel.
And you can Google that.
It's out there.
So what I'm saying is we have trace evidence for this creature.
We have thousands of accounts from around the world.
And the information just keeps getting richer and richer.
And in the documentary that I just released, we talk about the theory.
You know, Dr. Meldrum was speaking earlier in the program about bear, how we have bear in North America and the population, you know, is of black bear, grizzly, brown.
You know, you go up north into Alaska and beyond, you've got a white bear, the polar bears, right?
So people kind of take for granted that at one point, our continent, North America, was connected to Asia, Russia, that whole area of the world.
And they have pretty much the same bear population there.
In China, they have the sun bear.
And, you know, Dr. Meldrum points out in the documentary that the bear population we have in North America originated from this part of the world.
It didn't originate in North America.
It came from Asia and the area of Eurasia and used what was the Bering Land Bridge, that ice bridge that connected our two continents to migrate across and then evolved locally, you know, had some local adaptations over the years here.
So essentially coming across from Siberia.
Yes, and we're looking at data that suggests there's lots of sightings that have happened throughout the years in places like the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia.
And we cover the Yerin in my documentary, which in China is their wild man, which directly translates the word yerin means wild man.
And it's reported to be seven to eight feet tall.
It's covered in thick brown fur, and it has feet with a mid-tarsal break.
They're quite large feet from the prints.
There's plenty of casts that have been made.
Dr. Meldrum's been over there and he's worked with a researcher, independent researcher, that's also, you know, traded his information and showed the prints to Dr. Meldrum.
And so, you know, and then you go to Russia and they have their Yeti, right?
They call it the Yeti, but that's kind of a mistaken term.
In the original Yeti, everybody may note that's listening to this program people think comes from the Himalayas, which that term is also used, but its appearance seems to be more gorilla-like and has a divergent big toe when they looked at those footprints that were, you know, originated in ice in the peak areas there.
And then you have also in Russia the Olmisti, which is a short, stalky-type creature, wild man creature that people say looks more like a Neanderthal, but is covered in fur from head to toe.
So this may be a result of their evolution separately in different places, but they're all connected, you think, via this sort of arcing link that goes through China, perhaps up across into Siberia, and then across the bridge, effectively, into the northeastern U.S., you know, Alaska and Canada.
Yeah.
Or rather the northwestern U.S., rather.
Yeah, but even out east in the United States, where there seems to be, you know, clinal rainforests or just a habitat that could support these types of creatures, you know, people even say in West Virginia they've had plenty of sightings.
And you look at those mountains, there's all kinds of sightings and vocalizations and just a long history of that, even in their native tribes that originate from this area.
You've got researchers in Northern California.
They have a forest area there where there's plenty of sightings that have been happening even still today.
But if they're all related, and just before I go back to Jeff, if they're all related in this way, although they've evolved differently to suit their separate circumstances in different places, how come there is the yowie in Australia and there is a creature reported in New Zealand?
How come, I mean, they're separated by great ocean barriers?
Well, how come there's human beings in Australia and, you know, all these different remote places?
I would say that if we look at Australia, for example, it might have been a place that wasn't always remote and there might have been a migration to that landmass as well.
I've heard of Yahweh reports and they seem to be credible, yes.
But, you know, even in England, there's ancient tales of wild men and battles in the forest.
Indeed, there are.
So literally, if you go back into history, of course, we have to try to remember that the continents will not have looked, if we're going way back thousands and thousands of years, they won't have looked quite as they look now.
And there was a bridge, wasn't there, from Asia down into certainly Indonesia, Australia, that may well explain how this happened, which, you know, I'm just trying to construct that view of the world.
You know, the view of the globe and the continents being separated as they are now, that's how we see it.
But it wasn't always like that.
So when we think about these things and how could there be a yaoi in Australia, then this could be the reason that all these creatures are in some way connected, but as we say, they've evolved differently.
I want to go back to Jeff now, if I can, Darcy.
Jeff, thank you for waiting so patiently while we were talking this.
We've alluded to the fact that there are different gradations and different types of Sasquatch Bigfoot, Yeti, yaoi around the world.
You did some research, as Darcy was saying, in China.
What was it like to work in China?
Were you allowed to roam free and discover as you would?
Oh, no, not at all.
We had our keepers who were very gracious hosts, very polite, very congenial, but we could only do certain things and go certain places.
And we could only, with a great deal of persuasion, were we permitted to sleep overnight in the Shenandia Nature Reserve.
And then we had a contingent of chaperones that accompanied us.
So it was an enlightening experience and the opportunity to interact not only with some of the academics like Dr. Jogu Jing, who had been on the forefront of this research from clear back in the 70s,
to also be able to visit with some of the local witnesses and hear their accounts and sit with identa books, identikit books that I put together with various upright bears and monkeys and the apes of various colors and postures and so forth.
And to see them, as well as also artistic reconstructions of early man, early hominins and so forth, to see them thumb through and remark about particular characteristics, whether it was hair color or whether it was the overhanging brow or the smell, I guess.
That's one thing people around the world report.
Exactly.
So it was a very enlightening experience.
And as Darcy alluded to, the mid-tarsal break, the characteristic, the one piece of data that was so compelling for me was to see the footprints that had been cast by a park ranger, Mr. Yuan,
who had an encounter, who had a visual encounter with a Yarin and subsequently discovered its footprints and made a pair of casts of two remarkable footprints that exhibited this dynamic signature of the flexible midfoot in such a stunning, providing such a stunning example that confirmed the interpretation and examples here in the United States, in my mind.
I mean, there was no question left that we're dealing with a species with a circumpecific distribution.
You know, and I wanted to follow up on one point, too.
And you used a term that I think is important to draw attention to when you mentioned gradations, because sometimes people, I think, look at this question of what are these different forms from the wrong point of view.
And instead of, sometimes it's more useful, I think, instead of looking backward from our current present state of affairs, both in terms of evidence, trace evidence, as well as native traditions in various parts of the world, be it New Zealand or Australia or whatever, is to go back to the opposite perspective.
That is where we see the evolutionary history, this adaptive radiation.
By radiation, I mean diverging branches on an evolutionary tree of hominoids generally, both ape-like ancestors as well as those that are particularly unique to our family lineage, you know, since the divergence from a shared common ancestor.
And we see that these individuals, it's not so much a question of, you know, are they just variants of one thing, one phenomenon, but rather see them as separate divergent lineages or separate divergent branches on this family tree.
And that in the past, the rule has been, rather than the exception, that there were multiple species coexisting, I mean, coexisting in the sense that they were present on the landscape simultaneously throughout time.
And so even when, you know, as Darcy alluded, humans dispersed and scattered themselves to remote places, they took with them probably memories and traditions and the folklore that develops around those experiences with them.
So I'm not surprised that people in New Zealand, this isolated island habitat with no primates, that they do have stories of wild men.
They have stories of a being that is, I don't even want to say extra or pre-human, but say extra-human, parahuman, if you will, a lineage that was alongside them,
that their ancestors may have interacted with and had stories about these remarkably human-like creatures, just as natives today have a mythology or a folklore that embellishes their experiences with great apes, which are quite common to us now, like the gorilla or the chimpanzee or the orangutan, where they consider them people.
And I think that's important to keep in mind when trying to account for some of these things or varieties, if you will, that don't seem to quite fit the mold.
I have to admit, I kind of avoided wrangling with the question of what exactly is the Yowie.
There are such biogeographic hurdles to overcome to explain how a bipedal primate made it to Australia when even...
Well, sure, except for that very narrow strip, the Blue Mountains and so forth, and other ranges down on the east coast where most of the Yaoi sightings seem to concentrate, it would seem.
But it's always struck me the question, why is there such a dearth of trace evidence for the Yaoi?
And I know people will come forward with some examples, but there's a lot of shenanigans that muddies the water, quite honestly.
But there is a man there who I'm sure you've come across called Tony Healy, who I've had on my show a couple of times.
He will talk to you about evidence of hair and that kinds of thing.
But that sort of evidence.
But then if you look at Sasquatch, Bigfoot, whatever you look at, Evidence, as we would call it, is rare.
Evidence of these nests or settlements, very rare, but people claim to have it.
One question that I've never asked anybody about all of this, and I'm sorry if just apologizing to my listener if I'm derailing the conversation, I don't mean to.
It's just that time is short, and this is something that's fascinated me.
And maybe, Jeff, it's fascinated you too.
If you think about the way that mankind, us, we lived 700 years ago, 800 years ago, maybe more.
At that time, we lived a very primitive existence.
We had primitive tools.
We tilled the land.
There was a certain amount of communication.
But as far as we know, compared with today, there is not a lot of comparison.
Look where we've come in 700 or 800 years.
We're going to Mars next.
Elon Musk is telling us that could be fairly soon.
And yet, as far as we know, these relic hominids have not progressed in that way.
They're not developing technology or tools or things like we've developed.
Do you see what I mean?
They've tended, as far as we're aware, to stay very much as they would have been a thousand years ago.
But look what we've done.
How come?
Well, the same question could be asked of any other species of animal out there or our own antecedents who utilized that one particular technique of napping a blade off an obsidian core for two million years with no change introduced at any point.
So our own history is punctuated with these staccatos of surges of innovation and elaboration, but interspersed between by long periods of stasis where the same thing was done over generation after generation after generation.
So it's just the way you hit a point where it's our culture.
I mean, really, that's the bottom line.
It's the combination of our intelligence, but also our culture, which has enabled this geometric increase of knowledge and technology.
I mean, if you pluck any one of us out of that circumstance and drop us back into the wilds, and how well do we fare?
Well, we'd do a lot worse than Sasquatch, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's a popular avocation over there in England, the bushcraft, you know, to go out for the weekend and try to recreate some of the skills that our ancestors used when we were in nothing more than an Iron Age.
We've got a guy on TV here called Bear Grylls, who you may have come across, who's a great survivor.
I'm sure his shows have been shown around the world.
I'm a big fan of his, but he knows how to survive in completely wild environments like nobody else.
Does it, let me just take you onto this, if I may, Jeff.
Does it gratify you or frustrate you that most of the people who make the headway in this research, the people who are out there doing the legwork, are amateurs, are happy amateurs.
They're not academics.
They're not scientific researchers like yourself?
Well, it's gratifying when they attempt to hold themselves to high standards of objectivity and careful documentation, careful observation and documentation.
It's challenging when those who take on a personal investiture, if you will, in their own evidence and in their own participation.
And I should point out that even professional scientists are not immune to that tendency.
But one of the challenges I have is that people who are not familiar with or trained up in the practice of peer review, when they'll send me something and ask for my opinion, and if I provide an objective critical opinion, they take it as a personal affront, a personal attack on them, rather than a critical review of their data.
And so that, you know, you have to tread very lightly and be very empathetic of that position, that attitude.
But the notion of an army of citizen scientists out there who are deftly scrutinizing and identifying and documenting and critically differentiating useful data and then making it available in a useful way.
Even the simple act of placing a scale next to a footprint before taking a photograph is a huge step forward for many individuals and it's a very important habit to cultivate.
So yeah, it's a combination of frustration and gratification, but I'm absolutely, completely beholden to those people who, you know, and I always kind of shy from using the term amateur because so many individuals who are not professional scientists,
but nevertheless bring remarkable skills to bear, whether it's photography or tracking or, you know, outdoor savvy and hunting and so on, wildlife and photography and so forth.
And that's great.
And if we can put that to a productive use because of all these things that we've been talking to up to this point, the rarity, the elusiveness, you know, the difficulty in gathering this data, by its very nature, I can't just go out there and systematically collect data as a typical field biologist might do.
And many animals, you know, again, this is not to be taken as mysterious or cause to resort to paranormal explanations Because there are many species out there that have evaded our study and observations for generations because of their elusivity and their rareness.
And only with modern techniques have we begun to catch a glimpse of some of these animals.
It is a fascinating thing.
I mean, I will be eternally fascinated by this subject, as you are, Jeff.
I'm not going to go out there researching.
I admire people who do.
But when you think that amateurs or, let's say, unremunerated people are responsible for a lot of the groundwork in this, and when you also take into account that academic investigators like yourself are few and far between, where do you think this research is going in the years that are to follow?
It's 2021 now, in the next, say, 10 years, 20 years, and how do we get there?
Well, as I contemplate that, you know, looking ahead, it seems that, and from my own experience, doing lots and lots of field work using some of the, well, I was going to say tried and true, but they've been tried but haven't always been true, I guess, because, or at least not productive.
You know, the camera traps, the hair snags, the, you know, whatever, night vision, thermal imaging, all these, they've produced bits and pieces of sometimes titillating, sometimes very inconclusive and ambiguous results.
I think that the next step, taking it further, I see two directions.
One is environmental DNA, e-DNA it's called, where a sample of soil or water can be tested for the contributions of fragmentary DNA by any and all, sometimes, of the residents of that habitat.
That still poses some challenges, even if a non-human DNA is identified, primate DNA is identified, given the potential close affinity of this species or species,
these species across the globe, to our own, it may be very challenging, require extremely thorough and exhaustive comparison of gene sequences to identify those distinguishing features.
The other direction I think that in order to cast the net more broadly to extend the reach of observation is the advances that we're witnessing in drone technology and thermal imaging technologies,
that the combination of those with drones with longer air time and the ability to survey much larger areas in a very systematic fashion with thermal imaging that allows penetrance of some of the cover, the foliage, I think that will give us, there's still our problems and challenges.
There's no silver bullets yet, despite the existence of some of those technologies today.
Flying a drone at night is a real challenge and being able to penetrate dense, coniferous forest canopy is a huge challenge.
But I think those are the next steps.
Those are the only things that really are available, unless there is something to the paranormal and the paranormalists are able to have more meaningful conversations.
That's always something that I find a little frustrating is when someone lays claim to having these experiences of mind speak and telepathic communication when pressed on what is the transfer of information taking place.
There's precious little useful information or even what one might expect, intuitively expect from a being with those capabilities.
It's a pretty dull conversation.
So there are administrative challenges, in other words, pooling information and getting information across, accurate information.
And there are also scientific challenges in the future, too, I think which makes it all massively interesting, but I think is going to make this a long process.
I think it's going to be a lot of years before we see a Sasquatch appear on Ellen DeGeneres or Conan's talk show.
I think it would be nice to think that that might happen, but I think it's not going to be in my lifetime.
But that's just my idle speculation and what do I know about anything?
I want to thank you both very much, Jeff and Darcy.
Really kind of you both to come on here.
Darcy, I want to bring you back in then.
Are you two, both of you, really?
Are you going to be working together again on documentary projects?
I hope so.
I'm definitely working on another documentary in the same field.
So I've interviewed a friend and researcher, Thomas Steenberg, quite extensively on his over 20 years of research in this field.
And I think I'm going to work again with the Olympic Project guys, the guys that found the Nest sites out in Washington State.
Yeah, and I'm working on other documentaries too.
I'm working on UFO-related documentaries, some stuff with Stephen Bassett, who's fighting for disclosure on the UFO subject.
I spoke to him last night as I record this on my radio show.
As you know, Steve Bassett, I've known him for a very, very lot of years, 20 years or so.
He's very excited at the moment, thinks that this is going to be the year of the big hearings into this subject, and this could be the year when we discover perhaps we really aren't alone, which I've suspected for most of my life, and many other people have Too, so it's a real big time in that field.
I wish you luck with it, Darcy.
Thank you.
If people want to see your work online, have you got a website they can go to?
Sure, they can check out my full catalog of films at www.ocultjourneys.com.
A lot of my films are available on Amazon Prime in the UK, so you can check out the Unwanted Sasquatch.
That should be up there as a director's cut with some extended interview footage and some more content.
And then Sasquatch Among Wild Men, I think you can see in the UK through Google Play, YouTube Red, or maybe iTunes.
But I don't think it's hit Prime yet there.
And my older films, Beyond the Spectrum, I feature Jaime Mao San and Stan Friedman, some of those folks.
The late and great Stan Friedman, yeah.
Yep.
You can find those on 2B TV, Amazon Prime.
Happy to hear people's thoughts on my different angles that I'm exposing on UFOs, Bigfoot, all that sort of research.
Well, we're going to have to talk again, Darcy, and thank you for giving me your time in Canada.
And back to the United States, Jeff.
I know that you've got a website.
I've been looking at it for years, but what is the address for my listener?
Well, I would rather than a personal website, I'd direct people to the Relic Hominoid Inquiry.
It's at www.isu.edu forward slash R-H-I.
And there's some great peer-reviewed, published manuscripts of research articles, reviews, commentaries, et cetera, that people will find very interesting.
Of course, my book, Sasquatch Legend, Meet Science, which is also available on Amazon.
Jeff, a pleasure to talk with you too.
Both of you, thank you very much for giving me your time.
And isn't technology amazing that we can do a triangular three-way hookup between the U.S., Canada, and back across to London and back again like this?
I think it's just fascinating.
Happy New Year to you both.
I don't think it's too late to say that.
And I hope that, you know, individually we talk again.
So Darcy and Jeff, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me on.
It's wonderful to speak with you and happy new year to you too as well, Howard.
Thanks.
Jeff Meldrum, Darcy Weir, the subject of Sasquatch, your thoughts about this show and all of my shows.
Welcome.
Please get right now to my website.
Sorry to make it sound so urgent.
It's, you know, at your own pace, in your own time.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
The first sign of madness, you know, is when you're sitting on your own, in the quiet, in your solitude, and you're laughing to yourself, which is what I've just done there.
I don't know.
This could be a symbol of something very serious or just one of those things.
More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, wherever you are, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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