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June 20, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
57:13
Edition 643 - Gregory Forth

Retired anthropologist and stroke survivor Gregory Forth with his own astonishing story of researching a mysterious ape-like humanoid creature on the Indonesian island of Flores... As told in his new book "Between Ape and Human"...

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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.
Hope that everything is okay with you.
As I'm recording these words, I've got to say that it is really, really hot in London, which is unusual for this time of June.
And I don't have aircon or anything like that.
And my little tiny apartment is like fire at the moment.
So if I sound a little choked, it's probably the reason for it.
Got a great guest for you, though.
More about that in just a moment.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Please keep those coming via my website, theunexplained.tv.
Shout out to Janelle.
Thank you for the stories, Janelle.
I'm going to be looking through those and maybe telling them here.
Larry in DC, good to hear from you.
Barry in Battle Creek, Michigan.
Dan, Paul, and another Paul in Gibbonsburg, Ohio.
And Jeff, Richard, who runs a driving school.
Thank you for getting in touch, Richard.
And Dave, originally from Manchester, now in Perth, Western Australia, who's connected with another driving school, I believe.
And he wants to know if I will do more about time travel.
Dave, there's always the plan to do that.
Of course, time travel is a really difficult topic to do because there are many people who are entertaining about it.
And I'm looking for really good and credible guests to explore the topic.
So, you know, once I find one of those, we're going to do it.
If you have any suggestions, I would be very keen to know them.
Andy in Bristol, thank you for your email about hidden messages in the film Contact, one of my favorite movies.
I believe it was the late and great Art Bell's favorite movie in this kind of genre.
And I believe that it is replete with symbolism of all kinds.
What do you think?
I'm talking to my listener here.
Do you believe that there are hidden messages, perhaps hidden symbology, guidance in the film contact?
You know, so many times we've seen, haven't we, starting with Star Trek, that fiction sometimes later imitates reality.
And so many of the innovations and the things that they talked about on Star Trek that Gene Rottenberry couldn't have known about have come to pass or are going to.
So maybe we were being steered in a particular direction about whether we are alone or not in the film contact.
I tend to believe that maybe we were.
Charles in New Zealand, thank you very much for getting in touch, says he's a relatively new listener, have had a supernatural experience that happened to me recently, and I would like to share it with you.
That means all of us.
He says that I live in an old-style villa built in 1914.
I often hear noises throughout the house, and we've all experienced some strangeness.
This time was much stranger than usual.
I was lying in bed playing a game on my phone late at night.
My two-year-old son was asleep next to me.
I began to hear a soft rustling noise at the foot of the bed.
I thought it might just be things settling down which my wife had recently disturbed.
The noise stopped and then it began again.
I thought it was strange but was quite engrossed in the game, so I ignored it.
It had stopped and then it began again.
Just at that moment, I lost my game, and so I very suddenly decided to check what it was.
I sat up and turned on my phone torch in one movement.
I shot it at the location of the noise.
What I saw was a black and brown upside-down cup-shaped object that lingered for just long enough for me to wonder what it could be, and then it was gone.
It was simply gone in a way that was quite surreal.
I think what happened was my brain failed to perceive what the thing really was, and the cup was my brain's interpretation using what data was available to me.
That's just a guess based on instinct, says Charles in New Zealand.
The thing that had been causing the noise was that it was trapped on a little piece of tape my son had placed as a game earlier.
The tape had been the thing making the noise.
I had a sense of amusement that this thing was trapped like this, but also a sense of horror and dread at the surrealness and the strangeness of it all.
I called my wife from down the hall, and she said my face had gone pale from shock.
All in all, it was a nice little experience for me since I have been so interested in these topics.
Later on, after this happened, I, that's me, I interviewed a guy from Mufon, Japan, who talked about a case of a Japanese boy finding a bell-shaped craft in a field.
I remember that, and I looked it up and the description looked very similar to this cup-eyed scene.
It was a wow moment for me.
And for us, too, Charles.
Thank you for sharing that.
If you listening to this have had a similar experience of a thing hanging there, then please let me know.
You know, usual way of getting in touch, theunexplained.tv.
That's the website.
Follow the link and you certainly can send me an email from there.
Thank you for all of the emails that have been coming in.
Okay, on this hot night, let's get to the guest on this edition.
Gregory Forth is the guest.
He is a retired anthropologist, a professor of anthropology, in fact, at the University of Alberta in Canada.
And he investigated some events and some appearances, let's put it that way, some things that were found on an island in Indonesia.
And those things could be a strange connection between us, upright human beings, and the apes.
And there may be something that still exists there.
This is a very strange, multi-level story.
And it is a very strange, multi-level, very well-written book.
And I'm sure that Greg is going to tell this story better than I. But that's what we're going to do.
We're going into anthropology and some high strangeness.
Not something that happened 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago, this.
This is something that happened within the last 20 years or thereabouts, but hasn't really had the coverage that it deserves.
So that's what we're going to do.
A reminder, when you get in touch with me by email, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Right.
In the continuing heat, which even though it's evening time as I'm recording this, has not abated at all.
Thank goodness I've got a bottle of cold, sparkling water right next to me.
Let's get to Gregory Forth in Canada, And we'll talk about this very interesting piece of research.
Gregory, thank you very much for coming on.
I'm pleased to be here.
Now, I am detecting, even though you're in Canada, I'm trying to pin you down exactly where you might be from.
Are you originally Scottish?
No, I was born in about as far south as you can get in England, actually, in Winchester in Hampshire, just north of Southampton.
I know it well.
And when did you choose to make your career that side of the Atlantic?
The choice wasn't entirely up to me.
I moved with my parents when I was about 10 years old, but we kept sort of going back and forth.
I went back to the UK as a kind of a traveler, if you will, you know, on a sort of extended holiday when I was about, what, 20, 21.
And then I completed my first degree in Vancouver, as a matter of fact.
But then after that, I got a place at Oxford where I did my postgraduate work.
And I married there.
My first son was born in Oxford and so on.
We moved back here in, what, 1985, 80, 86, because there was a job in Edmonton at the University of Alberta.
And has it always been anthropology?
It has.
I mean, as an undergraduate, I did what would now be called paleoanthropology as well, and some archaeology and some sociology.
But my major was anthropology.
And indeed, it was anthropology, that is social or cultural anthropology, which I studied at Oxford.
Right.
Now, I've got a little account here that I found online of the particular expedition that sparked the research we're about to speak about.
So if you don't mind, I'm going to read a couple of lines from this.
So it goes like this.
Quote, on September the 2nd, 2003, in a cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia, a team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists discovered a tiny, nearly complete skeleton that looked like it might have been that of a dwarfed-size human being.
Over the next year or so, they recovered more skeletons and some parts of skeletons.
By the year 2009, the count was up to 14 individuals for whom archaeologists had found whole or partial skeletal remains.
Because many stone blades were also found and the fauna population of florists includes no non-human primates, the scientists entertained the idea that the organic remains found beginning in 2003 are indeed those of creatures that were somewhat sentient.
Initially, scientists pronounced all of the skeletal remains as being around 12,000 years old, but the estimate was revised upwards subsequently.
Some say that it could be as much as 100,000 years old.
The youngest remains believed to be about 60,000 years old.
Now, that's a lot of reading, but what that's telling us is that you uncovered something, the team who went there uncovered something remarkable.
Indeed, they did.
I should say I wasn't a part of that team.
But of course, the creature you're referring to has been called Homo pharisiensis.
So not Homo sapiens like us, but nevertheless a member of the genus Homo.
And as regards 100,000 years ago, yeah, that's sort of the oldest dates for the 13 or 14 individuals represented among the fossil bones.
Right.
Yeah, and I forget the rest of what you asked me.
No, I was interested in this account and how remarkable this was.
And I know that you weren't part of the team, but this is the start of your story, isn't it?
Well, yes and no.
It's a large part of it.
The discovery changed my thinking about what various stories I was hearing among Flores Islanders might refer to.
I had, I mean, since I first began my field research on Flores in what, well, 1984 in earnest, I was hearing stories about small-bodied, rather ape-like beings, which nevertheless, you know, stood upright and walked bipedally.
I assumed, I suppose you could say, that these were a product of the local imagination, that they possibly served some symbolic function.
They were social constructs with some meaning for local people and so on.
But to cut a very long story short, after the discovery of Homo Florisiensis, I realized that, and especially after the reconstructions were done, and there have been several of these as to what it might have looked like,
I realized that there was a remarkable similarity between Florisiensis and what I call the eight men that I was hearing about from people well before, I should add, this is an important point, so well before the discovery.
The discovery was, well, as you said, it was September the 2nd, 2003.
Interestingly enough, September the 2nd is my birthday.
I don't mention in like that in my particularly relevant, but yeah, no, sadly before the find was publicly announced in the, what is it, October, I think, of the following year, 2004.
So there's no possibility of local ethnic groups on Flores getting the image, stealing the image, as it were, from whatever newspaper reports they might have had access to.
And they didn't usually have access, most of them, most highland villagers, to anything like modern media.
I would also say, I just this I may be anticipating you here, Howard, but the discovery site in Western Flores, which was initially dated to 12,000 years ago, 18,000 for the type specimen, the hollow type of the species.
And since, of course, there's been a geological revision there to 50 or 60,000 years ago is the earliest date now.
But we're talking here about a single site.
And the fact that very small hominin pheriziensis lived on the island, survived on the island for tens of thousand years, maybe even hundreds of thousand years, but I'm digressing a bit there, suggests that they didn't just live in that one cave.
They were elsewhere on the island, quite possibly, quite probably in all parts of the island.
So, you know, when it went extinct, we don't really know.
Okay, and that's the intriguing thing about the book, isn't it?
Now, I've had to do a speed read like journalists do, you know, skipping across 300-odd pages of the book, and that's not really doing it justice.
So, you know, if there are blanks, you need to help me fill them in.
However, the elements of the story seem to be that there is that discovery in 2003.
You'd already been there, and you'd already heard the stories, contemporary stories of people telling of an ape-man-like creature, either in their own past or currently, right up to date, I understand.
So those things, there are two elements to this, aren't there?
There is the discovery of the Homo Florensis, I'm going to mispronounce this, Homo floresiensis.
Very good.
Or a Flores man, which is probably easier for me.
So that's one thing, which sort of lends a kind of credence to the stories that you'd already been hearing.
Before we talk about that, I think I've probably jumped ahead of myself very slightly.
So talk to me about this place, because it obviously has got something.
Yeah, you're talking about Flores Island as a whole.
Yes.
Yeah, well, it's a very, very beautiful island for the most part.
It's long and thin.
I think it's about 14,000 square kilometers is the figure I mentioned in the book in area.
It's long and thin, very, very mountainous.
One thing to say about that is that the population is not evenly spread.
I mean, it's found largely in lowland areas and near the coast.
So, you know, averages don't mean much there.
The area I speak about, the region I focus on in the book is called Leo.
This is Leo country inhabited by the Leo people.
That's one of the most mountainous parts of a mountainous island.
And indeed, the ape men, as I call them, live in high mountain forests.
They had a name for this ape man, didn't they?
Lai, is it Lai?
I'm going to mispronounce this too.
Lai Hoa.
That's very good.
That's as good as you'll get.
Lai Hoa.
Yeah.
You even got the gluttal stop there, right?
Yeah, very good.
That's right.
I do discuss the possible meaning of that term or of the two component terms because it's two words put two together.
I don't reach a definitive conclusion, but in regard to certain possibilities of translation and also in regard to the way Leo people describe these creatures, which they say still exist in very small numbers, the term eight-man fits perfectly, despite the fact that it's a little bit politically incorrect, as is Flores Man, of course, because the type specimen was female.
It's been determined.
Right, so in fact, it should be Flores person, really.
I suppose it should, but that sounds so contrived, doesn't it?
How similar are these stories, do you think, to the many stories, some of them apocryphal, some of them interesting, and, you know, they may well be real, but we can't find the evidence, the many stories around the world of so-called Bigfoot or Sasquatch or Yowie in Australia?
Well, there's a certain very general generic similarity, isn't there?
Of all these, I suppose I'm most familiar with the Sasquatch or Bigfoot because their territory supposedly is, well, it takes in Alberta and the Rocky Mountains, but they're supposed to be more common in British Columbia, which is our next province, our next province over.
The creatures are different.
I mean, for one thing, Bigfoot is supposed to be supposed to be very big, you know, two and a half, three meters tall, this sort of thing.
Whereas with the eight men, they are, well, about a meter or smaller.
The heights mentioned by informants were average around a meter, as indeed did the Floresiensis, or do the Floresiensis remains.
So there's that physical distance.
I think a difference.
I think the consensus, if you will, nowadays is that among those who reckon that the Sasquatch or Bigfoot is a surviving creature, is that it is a kind of giant ape,
whereas the Laihoa or ape man is, according to interpretations of different reports, is more human-like or is intermediate between humans and apes.
So is this the missing link then, so-called?
Most Which one?
Flurisiensis.
Either one, no, neither are any kind of missing link, if by that you mean something ancestral to ourselves.
See, Flurisiensis, just to speak of that, is a parallel hominin species.
Where the common link with modern humans might be is not clear, but it's got to be well over, certainly well over a million years ago.
Perhaps, you know, we're looking at two million.
It's hard to say anything.
It is a floresiensis is something that is very different, not just in size, but well, in terms of brain size as well.
It has a brain about the size of a chimpanzee, about 400 cubic tentimeters.
Also, the anatomy is quite different.
It was bipedal.
It moved in a different way, it seemed.
And that was interesting to me, I must say, reviewing that material, because there are certain statements I recorded, some by reputed witnesses, eyewitnesses, of eight men moving in what could be construed as a similar way to Floresiensis.
So that's more grist for my mill.
Is Floresiensis, though, connected to what people have been reporting, what people were reporting to you before they even discovered what they discovered in 2003?
Well, my conclusion, I spent a lot of the book looking at other ways that one might explain what people, especially Leo people, were telling me.
One of these is that we're talking about some kind of fantastic, maybe even spiritual, supernatural sort of being, something basically imaginary.
Another is that they're mistaking monkeys for something else.
Another thing is there's an undiscovered species of ape and several other hypotheses besides what I conclude is that the best explanation, according to the evidence available, and according to the laws of logic,
the best, the most parsimonious explanation is that people there are seeing something, or at least some of them that I spoke to had definitely seen something, and that that something resembles nothing quite so much as the reconstructions of Homo Florisiensis.
So, you know, people can, as incredible as it seems, people can draw their own conclusions.
Now, the great mystery about Bigfoot stories and Sasquatch stories and Yeti stories and all the others is the notion, not only the supernatural element to it, but the notion that something could exist parallel to us and most of us not see it.
Most people find that that stretches credulity.
By the sounds of it, you're willing to give a lot of the people who've made these accounts the benefit of the doubt?
Yeah, I think a little more, perhaps a little less than that.
I mean, I know something about their, what I call their folk zoology generally, what they say about other animals, animals that are more definitely established in the scientific record.
Yeah, I mean, I discussed the possibility of their fooling me, of problems with memory, language, and on and on in the book.
I try to anticipate most criticisms.
And I find no reason to disbelieve most of the people I spoke with.
And that goes for secondhand accounts to some degree, as well as first-hand accounts of sightings.
So, yeah, there you are.
But as I may have suggested by the way I phrased my conclusion, I do, I personally find it difficult to believe, but that has something to do with my education and upbringing.
It's what I argue, in fact, in the book.
There is no definite reason that something like the ape man should not still cling on or have survived until quite recently, certainly well into the modern era on Flores.
Well, I would guess there would be places.
I mean, look, I don't know Flores.
I don't know this particular region that you know so well.
But I would assume there would be wooded places and caves that if something was wily enough, then theoretically it could hide.
Yeah, no, it could be way up there on the mountain slopes, which is where people say it is normally.
That's the habitat of these creatures.
I would stress as well that people, for the very most part, people describe Laihoa As completely natural beings, in terms of what they look like, what they behave, the fact that they reproduce, give birth, die, they have to eat, and all the rest of it.
So, in that regard, they're quite different from the spirits they recognize as having some existence, which are normally invisible, can only be seen by certain people, if at all, are immortal, consist only of soul, as they say, to use their own translation of their own phrase.
So there is, yeah, they're talking about something more like, you know, a monkey or a deer or a wild pig, or indeed, you know, an ordinary human being than a forest spirit.
But what makes the stories of Bigfoot and Sasquatch and the others so interesting is that there are many accounts of very elusive creatures that you just see in the distance and they disappear and they shamble away because they're bigger than these creatures, so they have a sort of shambling gait.
I mean, you can talk to me as well about their characteristics, but I'm wondering if there are stories of specific encounters where the creature appears to be aware of the viewer and maybe to some degree intrigued by the viewer.
Yes, I would say there are.
I've recorded over 30 citing accounts.
Some of the most representative ones of all types, some of the most credible and the least credible, I summarize and analyze in the book.
So, you know, chapters, about four chapters in the middle are taken up with that endeavor.
Yeah, no, one thing I was always determined to try and find out was, you know, how far away was the thing that you saw, you possibly, you being plural in some cases rather than singular.
And, you know, we tried this.
People in Florence are pretty good these days at the metric system.
I sort of tested them on this, but you can also get to, well, you can look at the sites, you can look at comparable distances between things.
And yeah, no, they're all at distances, or most of ones I can think of immediately, were all at distances where the thing, the creature, the ape man, could see the observer, at least at some point during the encounter.
So it wasn't just a, you know, one-sided, one-way relationship.
So there was awareness.
And in most of these instances, did the creature make its retreat or what happened?
It did.
Some of the best accounts, by the way, concern observations of corpses, of dead specimens.
Now, that's very rare.
I mean, that's something that you tend not to hear about when you're talking about Bigfoot.
There are people who claim to have observed corpses, because that's one of the things that always runs against those who believe in Bigfoot and Sasquatch and those creatures, because people always say, well, you know, where is the evidence?
Where are the hairs?
And where are the corpses?
Where are the bodies buried?
Yes, indeed.
And something I can recall being mentioned, some critique of Bigfoot existence is, you know, that given all the logging activity that's been taking place for a long time, especially in British Columbia, northwestern U.S., you know, why has one never been hit by a logging truck or some other vehicle?
And indeed, one of the cases I mentioned for the eight men did involve a specimen that was knocked over and killed by a truck or lorry, as it would be called in the UK.
So that's a difference.
I mean, another point, of course, is that we have no fossil record in a place where Bigfoot is reported.
We have no fossil record which fits with what people see or claim to see in the same way as we have for Homo Florisiensis on the one hand and the ape men on the other.
But the accounts that you have where people have seen bodies, what has happened to those bodies?
I mean, if a carcass is lying somewhere, are we implying here that they may become, they may be, you know, as a group, they sense that one of our team is missing or down or dead or in trouble, and we will go and collect that example.
Or what happens?
Because if people have seen these things, then surely there should be remains.
Okay.
Yeah, it's a fascinating topic and a very good question.
Well, the two accounts that concern corpses, in one case, the accident, so I'm talking about the one knocked over by a truck.
This happened way up on about the highest part of the Trans-Flores Highway back in the early 1970s.
So a long time ago.
There were no settlements nearby at the time.
It happened in the late afternoon because a building crew was in the truck.
So several people supposed to have seen this thing.
I was able to speak to only one of them, the man who says he saw it first.
And they were heading to the coast to a town called Ende, and they were late.
It was about four o'clock in the afternoon.
They wanted to bury it.
Now, why would they want to bury it?
that would take me too long to explain, but I do go into that in the book.
They were due to come back that way the following day, and they were they were going to bury it then.
Um, what happened was when they got there, they found the corpse gone, uh which is not surprising.
Um, feral dogs could have dragged it off, a wild pig, some other animal, you know, so or indeed, as you suggest, maybe there were kinsmen, relatives of that particular victim that carried it away.
In the other case, the observer himself got rid of the corpse.
And there's an awful lot to say about that, but he took it to the coast, he said, and he let it float away at sea.
That's not as incredible as it may sound.
Okay, well, I mean, that sounds very convenient, though, doesn't it?
Well, it does, but at the same time, there are, while I said these ape men don't sound anything like spiritual or supernatural beings, at the same time, they do have a supernatural aspect, as do many more familiar animals for the Leo.
And in particular, a contact with an ape man can be dangerous for a human in a mystical kind of a way.
And it's very unlikely that anybody would bury one on their own land or within their own or near to their own settlement.
I know the Leo well enough to come to that conclusion.
So in that specific instance, that person had wanted to give, because of potential consequences, had wanted to give this creature a proper send-off?
That was right.
That's right.
He was very sympathetic to this dead creature.
It's quite a poignant little tale that's found in my chapter seven, where I go through some of my most credible reports.
It did occur to me, I can't remember now if I mentioned it in the book, it did occur to me that he may have buried the body on land, you know, somewhere closer by, but he may have been concerned that I would want to dig it up.
Ah, so he might have told you a story in order to preserve the lying remains.
That's quite possible.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, everything I know about Leo suggests that either of those interpretations is correct, that he did actually take it to sea for reasons I've already mentioned, or that he didn't tell me where he'd disposed of the creature.
I mean, I should underline that most of these people, most of the Leo, they're intelligent people.
They know a lot about the local environment, including the animals that inhabit it.
But they, and this is another issue I discuss, they wouldn't know the biological significance of finding something like this.
And I say that with all respect.
Right.
So we're talking about then the way local people regard a living thing.
Not just that.
If I just add, Howard, I mean, this is something which is for them very ambiguous in regard to its humanity.
Is it a human or is it an animal?
They regard eight men as animals.
That's, you know, in their local zoological classification.
At the same time, as they say, they're uncanny looking because they, especially in the faces, that they, you know, they look a lot like human beings.
So, yeah, you know, you can draw certain conclusions from that as well.
Now, I think it's important, though, to say, isn't it, that there's that account where the man and I have, you know, I'm not going to question him.
I don't know.
He was doing what he felt was right.
So he told you a story about how he disposed of the body, essentially, but that may not have been the correct story.
He was trying to do the right thing.
And the guys who were workmen, now, you know, they said we left the body where it was.
We were going to go back to it and dispose of it later.
Now, you know, I find that odd, I have to say.
And I think a lot of people would say, well, why didn't they just collect it there and then?
But there might have been reasons for that.
A lot of this, and that goes for both of these accounts, will be down to the credibility of the people telling you the stories.
What did you think about them?
Well, I did discuss in each case the circumstances under which I came to meet these people, what I could discern of their general situation, general character, and so on.
As for the man in the truck, for a number of reasons, I found him quite credible.
He was, of course, quite old by the time I talked to him.
He was well into his 60s, although he was about the same age as me.
So I hesitate to call him an old gaffer or anything like that.
But I also, on the first occasion I met, I met him on a number of occasions.
The first occasion I met him, I was with a young Catholic priest.
The man, Volo, his name was, the informant, he volunteered this story.
So it wasn't as a result of my questions.
I did initially ask him for a particular reason if he knew anything about Laihoa, this category of eight men.
My companion was a priest.
He was a devout Catholic, a Volo.
And there's no reason he would have lied, particularly with a priest in attendance.
He could simply have said, as many people do, that particular kind of creature or whatever.
That's a very good point.
There was a religious man there.
That would add, I think, maybe some credibility to this.
So you are on the side of believing these accounts.
Believe is a tricky term.
Accepting these accounts.
Yes, I don't simply dismiss them as nonsense or people telling me a story for some hidden motive or what have you.
I think they, and I say this generally of ordinary folk like myself, that what they say about natural things they see should, some credence should be given to these kinds of reports.
At the same time, you need to analyze them and discuss them critically.
One also needs to see these statements, these propositions, through a cultural lens, which in this particular case is the lens of LEO culture.
So I, you know, I've been working in LEO for a number of years now, and other people have as well.
So I can read what they've written about Leo culture.
So I'm able to take the cultural context into account.
And indeed, for that reason, sometimes I dismiss accounts I recorded as being improbable, to say the least.
There are several sighting reports, which I concluded were sightings of usually poor lighting conditions and so on, of large monkeys.
What was the strangest of the reports you took of the 30?
Well, I just mentioned a couple.
Maybe one was the one I've mentioned about the man who found the corpse on his land.
Actually, he was alerted to it by his wife and his sister, one of whom I was able to speak to.
Yeah, and indeed, as you mentioned, the method of disposal and also what he thought that the corpse was were a little strange.
An informant in that case was a man of 50 years who had spent a lot of time on Java attending an agricultural college.
So he was far better educated than a lot of people around and about.
It's interesting the way I came to hear about him.
Again, this was quite by accident.
And yeah, there was no possibility of prior communication between the person who told me about him and he himself.
So no possibility of collusion.
In fact, in that case, you have potentially four or five eyewitnesses to the thing.
Your word was, was it fascinating or peculiar?
Well, I think you can probably attach any of those to that particular case.
There was another one, which in fact was the most recent report I heard about and recorded.
And that was concerned a sighting that was supposed to have taken place in 2017.
And I was able to speak to the main witness, who was a woman, a fairly young woman, about three weeks or so after she saw the thing.
And I've never known, I do group it with, you know, at the more credible end, but at the same time, I've never known exactly what to make of what she told me, because in certain particulars,
the creature didn't sound, you know, like most of the other reports or the general popular descriptions of what ape men are supposed to look like.
How did she come across it?
She was standing at the edge of a field, far away from any human dwelling.
There was a hut on the other side of the field.
Her side of the field, where she was, adjoined a stream.
And then beyond the stream, you had elevated woodlands.
She was chopping firewood near the stream.
And she had something moving in the bush on the other side of the stream.
She called out a kind of conventional cry, you know, when you want to establish if somebody's there, which is sort of who or woo kind of thing.
And she received a similar cry back.
Now, this fits with other things people in popular accounts of eight men.
But anyway, soon the thing, I think it threw something, it threw a rock or a piece of wood or something for some reason.
Anyway, shortly after that, it actually appeared on the other side of the stream and made its way across towards her on a tree branch.
It kept its distance from her, but it continued on into the field and apparently stood there for some period of time.
Anyway, according to what she told me, She was quite close to it.
It didn't seem frightened of her, which was unusual.
She said she wasn't frightened of it, which, as she pointed out, she was holding a long bush knife.
And she was a pretty bold sort of woman.
She struck me in that way.
Yeah, anyway, certain features, as I said, physical features of the thing.
The chest was hairless, mostly hairless.
Well, it was on the small side for one thing.
It could have been a juvenile, I suppose, but it was, I think, about 65, 70 centimetres was the highest estimate she gave.
It's not that small.
But as I was saying, she describes the creature as being, well, not particularly hairy, but that's fine.
But the chest, she said, was a light colour.
But what that represented, she was unable to say.
Whether it was some sort of skin ailment or something like that, I don't know.
I mean, generally, the eight men are said to be dark skinned.
That kind of caught my attention.
I suppose the fact that the thing didn't particularly run away and actually at one point seemed to be coming towards her rather than away from her.
At the same time, it was quite late in the afternoon, which was another feature of the account which made me wonder a bit, how visible, even though she and her husband were quite close, how much they saw of it.
On our first meeting, she claimed that her husband hadn't seen it.
He was in the hut at the time on the other side of the field, that only she had seen it, but later she changed her mind about that.
And indeed, I got a separate account from the husband.
One feature of both their accounts, which rather intrigued me, was that they claimed that at one point, when the creature was in the middle of the field, it nodded towards them, which was something that another eight men did in another account of a sighting by two people, which I record in the same chapter.
So some kind of communication then.
Well, yes, indeed.
That's one interpretation, certainly.
Okay, now look, we can't, in a conversation like this, do justice to the entire 300-odd pages of your book, but I think we've had a good stab at it.
The question to ask you as we come to the end of this, then, Greg, is why did you write this?
Did you want researchers to descend upon Flores and start trying to find this creature?
Why did you write the book?
What did you want to happen?
Well, I think I should say straight away, I'm not particularly fond of the idea of hordes of researchers or whatever descending on Flores.
I think, well, to have any success, people would have to know how to go about further research.
And they, or at least, if we talk about teams, some members of the teams would have to have their relevant qualifications in primatology, field zoology, anthropology, whatever.
Why did I write the book?
Well, I had all this information.
I mean, to some extent, well, let me just first say that ever since I've worked on Flores or on Flores, let's just stick with that.
I've been investigating a number of topics quite continuously, many of which have absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the book.
But I did, when I was in Leo, I was getting this fascinating material, which I could hardly ignore.
And I decided, well, some years ago indeed, that I wanted to write a book on this.
I also, I mean, I've written other things on this sort of topic before, and I've certainly written a lot in the field of folk zoology, but I wanted this one to be a general interest book.
So I didn't go to an academic publisher.
In fact, I engaged an agent for the first time, and he fixed me up very nicely with Pegasus in New York, who, of course, accepted the proposal.
And here we are.
Well, indeed, I mean, that's a big publisher.
And I know that you've done, in print, you've done quite a few interviews.
I think you did one with Forbes.com, didn't you?
I wasn't interviewed by Forbes.
Somebody read a review of the book.
Right, okay.
Well, I wish you well with it.
There are, in terms of cryptozoology or, as you call it, folk zoology, you know, the same thing, Howard.
Folk zoology can be about, you know, mice and rats or water buffalo or local knowledge of any animal and knowledge of any sort of any right, so they are distinct things.
Yeah, yeah.
But of course, cryptozoology can come into it indeed.
And the two fields are relevant to one another, I suppose, as this book aims to show.
If somebody, I don't know, somebody starting out on their journey of research wanted to go to Flores and do some more research, would you wish that person well?
Or do you think, as you hinted just a little while ago, that perhaps there's a thought that perhaps we need to leave well alone here?
I won't disagree with that.
I would say, though, if we're talking about a junior person in anthropology or zoology or whatever, that they're not going to get very far, I shouldn't think with administrative support, funding, grants, all that kind of thing, if they say they want to go off and discover an ape man.
So, I know, I'll be frank.
I talked to some of my students.
I'm retired now, but when I was working, I talked about this kind of research with some of my students and I said, in effect, you know, don't try this at home.
It's, you know, I can, could I possibly phrase this as I can get away with it?
You know, as a senior academic, as someone of a certain standing and so on.
Even so, I have at times been, you know, a bit reluctant to discuss some of these possibilities because, well, as you will know, with cryptozoologists often, you know, run into resistance, you know, flack.
There are many views of everything, and I believe that everybody is entitled to take a view, and if they've done research, then they need to express that research.
And some people ridicule it, some people question it, some people say it's all fake science, and some people say this is the story of the age that we're missing.
You know, I think I kind of lean in that direction.
That's why we're having this conversation.
But I think it's all fascinating.
Can I ask you a very indelicate question?
And you can tell me to go away if I ask you.
How old are you now, Greg?
Oh, I am 74.
I'm going to be 75 in September.
Okay, and do you plan to...
Well, that's no age at all.
Are you planning to go back to Flores?
I would like to, but there are difficulties with doing so.
The last time I came back from there, I had a stroke in the middle of the Pacific Ocean between Taipei and Vancouver.
But I'm fine.
I mean, well, it hasn't affected me cognitively, I'm sure.
But that's not a good thing.
Yeah, that's not a good thing to happen to anybody.
And there are members of my family who went through that experience a couple of times, in fact, in my father's case.
to have that experience in the middle of nowhere is a problem.
But I was just interested I could certainly go back to Indonesia, but as long as I take it fairly easy.
I mean, I am in discomfort most of the time, but I tough that out.
I'm at no great risk in taking preventive medicines.
So I'm pretty, if I went to the But you're not going to have me scrambling up any mountainsides.
And of course, if you want to get to the heart of it, as you said, the high ground is where it's happening.
Yeah, but I'm perfectly willing to let others take over in that respect.
Can I just say, Howard, thanks very much for talking to me.
With regard to the book, whether people find the thesis credible or not, it should get them thinking.
And I think, if I do say so myself, that it is an enjoyable read.
I mean, that's what I was aiming at.
So that's all I can say.
Well, you know, as a journalist, I have to read things quickly and make notes fast.
But I thought it was very methodically put together.
And I think that is a very, I mean, that's your academic background for you, but that's a very good thing.
I would heartily recommend it.
And it's Sam Pegasus, the publisher, isn't it?
That's a one.
And the book is called Between Ape and Human, which is an intriguing title to get you into this thing.
I wish you all the very best.
Thank you for giving me your time, Greg.
You're very welcome.
Bye-bye.
Well, you've been hearing Greg Forth, Gregory Forth, retired anthropologist and a man who has done what they call primary research, which is quite a rare thing in this day and age.
That means he's actually been to a place and the accounts that he's given are the accounts that he personally has received.
I found that, and I know I keep using the word fascinating, but I did find it fascinating.
There are a lot of Bigfoot researchers out there, and I find Bigfoot stories gripping at all times.
Of course I do.
But there's a story and a set of stories and a set of accounts that you won't have heard before.
And I'm not aware of anybody else who's done research quite like that.
So I hope you enjoyed that, and I hope that you found what Gregory IV had to say interesting.
I certainly did.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained online.
So until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
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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