All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 23, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
50:28
Edition 703 - Guest Catchups
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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.
Hoping that everything's hunky-glory with you're as near to it as it can be.
Spring is on the way here in the UK, so I'm happy, but they tell us that we might have some cold stuff before we get the warm stuff.
Let's hope that's not true, and we go straight to spring, certainly where I live.
A lot of the spring flowers have been out for a long time.
Anyway, that's another story, and no more talk about the weather, hey.
If you've been in touch recently, thank you for all of your comments.
If your email requires a reply, you know what I'm going to say, please put in the subject line, response, reply, required.
And then I will instantly see it.
But I do read all of the emails, which is more than you can say for some of these shows, in some of the genres.
But less said about that, the better, really.
So nice to hear from you.
Thank you very much for all of your continued ongoing support.
Thanks to Adam also for everything that he does on this show, for getting the website, looking spic and span and keeping everything cranking over.
Okay, let's get to the guest on this edition.
This is from my TV show recently in a very different and fresh take on the topic of Sasquatch Bigfoot.
Cliff Berrickman, you may know, from the Animal Planet TV series Finding Bigfoot, which was a bit of a groundbreaker for seven whole years in its own way.
And I think they did a special in 2021.
And so far, that's all there's been.
I don't know whether there will be more.
That's one of the questions that we're going to put to him in this conversation.
And thank you for your questions.
Really good questions.
And I managed to squeeze in most of them.
So thank you very much if you were kind enough to send a question.
So Cliff Berickman, the subject of Sasquatch, Bigfoot, Yaoi, Yeti, whatever else you want to call it, and its various variants around the world is the conversation on this edition of The Unexplained, preserved here for posterity.
Quick word for those of you who watch the television show.
Now, I'm recording this before the next scheduled show on the 19th of February at 10 p.m.
It is not going to be on the TV for, I am told, a period of about three weeks.
It will be replaced, again, I am told, by reruns of the shows by Piers Morgan and the politician Nadine Dorries.
I don't know any more about that than this.
So please don't think that I'm hiding anything or I know anything.
That is all I know.
And as soon as I know what the future for The Unexplained, be it radio, television, whatever it might be, as soon as I know anything about that, I will pass it on to you.
I only know those things that I've just told you.
But the show will be on the 19th of February, but only on the radio, on digital radio and online, on talk radio.
So I know that a big chunk of the audience is there anyway, so that's not going to be a surprise for you.
But if you were a TV viewer and that's how you got it, you're going to tune in on Sunday and not see me.
You will see Piers Morgan or Nadine Doris or somebody then.
And that is all I can tell you.
All right, the guest on this edition then from my TV show, this is the complete conversation with the fascinating and interesting Cliff Berrickman on Bigfoot Sasquatch.
Thank you very much for having me on.
And I was just listening to your introduction there.
It's like, well, you have the wrong guy on because I'm the science Bigfoot guy.
You know, that's my main thrust here.
But that's...
You know, Bigfoot is a mix of both of those things, isn't it?
There is a scientific element and there is...
And the paranormality of Sasquatch, I think, is explainable by more of a human characteristic.
From my research, and I've only been doing it for 29 years, so I don't know everything.
But from my research, from my research, there's no reason to think that Sasquatches are anything but a perfectly normal animal.
But an animal that keeps itself in blissful seclusion from most of us most of the time.
Yes, yeah, absolutely.
But just like most animals do.
Black bears are a good example.
Black bears, a fairly common animal here in North America.
And I live in Oregon in the Pacific Northwest.
And I ask people, say, I have a Bigfoot Museum.
And people come in and say, how do Sasquatches remain hidden so well?
And I say, well, let me ask you this.
Have you lived in Oregon all your life?
And they say, yes.
Well, how many black bears have you seen in your entire life?
And hunters say, oh, I've seen kind of a lot of them.
Well, great.
How many?
Would you say a dozen or 20?
He said, probably, yeah, between a dozen and 20.
And I just go, well, that's adorable because there's 35,000 black bears here in Oregon.
And to say that you've seen one-tenth of 1% of them isn't that many of them.
And comparing Sasquatches to black bears, there's probably somewhere in the field of 100 to 200 black bears for every one Bigfoot.
So that has a lot to do with why they're so elusive.
Do you think that they are either misreportings, missitings, or what we're dealing with here is some variant, some kind of breed beyond a bear?
Oh, they're not bears.
They're clearly not bears.
They're primates of some sort, some sort of hominid, a great ape-like thing, like a human or a gorilla or something like that.
That's all one big happy family, one big primate family.
So they are some sort of great ape, but so are we.
So we shouldn't, you know, where are they on that gradient, though?
Between gibbons on one side and humans on the other, and we have all the other apes in between, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees.
All of those are in between.
Sasquatches are some, and humans on one end.
Sasquatches are somewhere on that gradient.
We just don't know quite where yet.
We have some ideas, but we just don't have enough data, honestly.
Now, I use the word paranormality at the top of this.
And simply, I walked into that because you read, and you mustn't know this because you deal with this all the time, you read a million website entries, a million stories about strange, smelly, hairy, bipedal creatures that are like the Will o' the Wisp.
They appear and they are gone.
It's not surprising that they have a paranormal wrapping or mystique to them, is it?
Not at all, not at all.
And again, I think that's a human condition, because when you look at worldwide Stories of the large charismatic animals, things like crocodiles or brown bears or even tiger sharks.
Wherever you go in the world, that there are these large charismatic animals.
Without exception, those large charismatic animals have folklore wrapped around them and paranormal attributes.
Tigers, for example, are a wonderful example.
They have been given the idea, there's an idea that they can turn invisible at will, that they can shape-shift into other animals and flee.
Are we to believe that?
I don't think so.
And I don't think we need to believe that about Sasquatches either, especially in the context of looking at human cultures and how all big charismatic animals worldwide have these paranormal attributes ascribed to them.
And so I think Sasquatches are just another example.
But the difference is we fancy ourselves to be in a modern Western technological culture.
And so, well, we would never do such a thing.
That's a thing of the 1700s of undiscovered tribes and that sort of stuff.
And that's not the case at all.
We are human.
We are genetically programmed for that kind of thought and that kind of, frankly, superstition and mythology.
We create stories and wrap the world in it to make us feel better in a lot of ways.
And that's the part of the oral tradition that humanity has had for hundreds of thousands of years.
I mean, mass media was invented 500 years ago with the printing press.
Before that, most information was shared around a campfire, and we're still kind of subject to those urges.
So, Cliff, what is it that brings you to this study then and to that series that you did so successfully, still being repeated originally on Animal Planet, and I think it's found its way to a lot of other digital portals and clips online.
What is it that brought you here?
Well, you know, I've always been an eccentric individual, I'll say that.
When I was a little boy, I was growing up in the heyday of these schlockumentaries, I call them, in the 1970s, you know, In Search of and Mysterious Monsters and a lot of stuff that I would watch as a little boy.
And I had a love for monsters when I was a little boy, Godzilla and Frankenstein, you name it.
I loved monsters.
And at the time, Bigfoot was just another monster that intrigued me and scared me.
But when I was in college, I had a few hour break between classes.
So I would go to the library and basically pick books off of the shelf and subjects that I was interested in, mostly science, because I'm kind of a science nerd.
And I remember going through the anthropology section, and I ran across a couple compilations, books that were compilations of scholarly journal articles that had been peer-reviewed on Sasquatches.
A lot of them were from the perspective of cultural anthropologists, but there was stuff in there from physical anthropologists as well.
And once I started reading about the evidence that supported the idea of Sasquatches being real animals, you know, after a few books of that, I kind of like, it seemed far more fanciful and fantastic that Sasquatches were not biological animals because all the evidence pointed to that.
So from a scientific perspective, you were fired by the idea of wanting to be the person who cracked the code or solved the mystery?
Not so much.
And it hasn't really been about me necessarily.
It's been more about them.
If I find a subject fascinating, then it's about the subject itself.
I don't need to be the one thing, really.
I'm just happy being able to learn about this subject.
The TV in particular.
There are many clips on YouTube.
I was watching some of them today from the TV series, and many people have interviewed you about the TV series.
The TV series, I think, ended in 2018.
There was a special in 2021, which was a sort of look back, as far as I'm aware.
I found this online, and I think this is kind of illustrative of the way that you do your investigations.
It's great.
Let's just watch this.
Oh!
Oh!
What about you?
You smell something?
Let's check it out.
*Ding*
Want to hear something?
Bolo.
The money's squatch sensor went off and she's never wrong.
Gee, well, wherever that was, you had that place well and truly staked out.
Well, you know what?
What you're seeing there is just a little slice.
There's a little bit more to it than that.
And certainly the television stuff, you know, television is, you know, junk food for the mind, essentially, in a lot of ways.
And so we're really kind of trying to capture the audience's imagination.
We do a lot of night investigations because the data, when you crunch the numbers and look at the statistics behind this all, SAS watches tend towards nocturnalism.
And that's based on the number of sightings versus the day and night and how many people might be out in those areas during day and night, how far they can see and that whole thing.
So we focus really on some night investigations, trying to get sounds because it's a very common hunting technique in some ways.
Now, like if you're a critter hunting, like if you're trying to kill a coyote, a pesky coyote, a lot of the times you make their noises and they respond back.
The same is true for elk and other large game as well.
And we found through the years that if we make sounds that Sasquatches are reported to make, sometimes they answer back.
Right.
This was you and your team trying to bait, well, I say bait in the loosest possible way, the Sasquatch with a call that it would return in similar manner.
And that happens.
You know, there's a story.
I'm sure you're aware of it.
I can't remember where it was.
But a bunch of guys who I think went out hunting in the 1970s and they returned for decades to this same place because they encountered something that they believed was incredibly strange that made noises like that and would actually reply to them.
So this is a common experience.
Yeah, yeah, actually.
You're talking about Ron Moorhead.
He's a good friend of mine.
He was up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.
And I've recorded vocalizations, like strange calls that sound like humans in places that were absolutely confident that no humans were.
But Ron Moorhead, his recordings represent something even more astonishing, possible speech or faux speech, as some groups like to call it.
It sounds like jibber jabber.
And to me, it sounds like jibber jabber.
But one gentleman named Scott Nelson, who's a retired naval crypto-linguist, his entire career was devoted to cracking codes and basically what sounds like nonsense to us, but the military has high interest in that sort of thing, to listen to other countries in the world and what they might be up to.
And that was his whole gig.
When he started examining these vocalizations that Ron Moorhead and his friends got out in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, he started noticing repeated patterns of phonemes.
Now, phonemes are just sounds.
Like my name, Cliff, has four phonemes.
Four phonemes, four sounds.
He started noticing repeated patterns of phonemes.
And well, repeated patterns of phonemes, those are words.
That's what words are.
So the question is, do they have like some sort of representation for the Sasquatches or not?
We don't really know, but there are some people who definitely think they do.
And Scott Nelson's one of them.
And there are those who believe that they have some relationship with us or to us that might be closer than perhaps we think.
Oh, I think I'm one of them, actually.
Yeah.
When you look at the possible ancestry for Sasquatch, there's a couple of culprits that kind of jump out first.
One of them is Gigantopithecus.
That's a very, very common one.
But another one is Paranthropus, which is a type of Australopithecine.
We know they existed.
We know that they basically looked like Sasquatches already.
They were just four or five feet tall.
Now, I am one of these people that think that the most likely predecessor for Sasquatches would be Paranthropus.
It's just that they radiated out of Africa, went to colder climates, and then this thing called Bergman's rule would have taken over.
Bergman's rule is simply stating that animals that live in colder areas get bigger.
It has to do with heat retention.
That's why polar bears are the biggest bears and sun bears, the tropical species, are the smallest.
You know, when the animals live in colder areas, they get bigger.
Well, if Paranthropus radiated out of Africa into the Himalayas and Siberia before crossing the land bridge, they would have gotten larger over generations.
And I think that that's a very simple explanation of what Sasquatches might be.
And if that's the case, then we are looking at a hominin.
Hominin is a fancy word that means anything on the human family tree since chimpanzees and humans shared our last common ancestor about 6 million years ago.
But if they're related to us in that way, and the gate would suggest that, and we actually rolled a little prematurely a little bit of the famous 1967 Patterson Gimlin film, which we will bring in a little bit later into this.
But that was supposedly one of the definitive films of something in the forest that moved like that.
But that would explain how they have a kind of walking style that may be similar to us and also might be using language and have feet that are like an elongated version of our feet, 16 inches long in this case.
Yeah, yeah.
And actually, when you look at the feet and the gait, they do superficially look human.
But frankly, because there's nothing else that really walks in a bipedal manner like us, and the only other habitual bipeds are kind of birds, and they don't really walk like us.
But when you get down to the nitty-gritty, it turns out that the Patterson-Gimlin film subject doesn't really walk very much like us at all.
It has something called a compliance gate, which would be a necessary biomechanical redesign of their gait to accommodate a weight of that size without doing serious damage to the joints, tendons, and limbs.
Since we brought it up and brought it in, let's roll it now and let's just take a look at this.
This was 1967, a very famous piece of film.
A lot of people think that they have debunked it, but the questions continue to be asked about it.
So this is a clip from the famous 1967 Patterson Gimlin film of something walking in the woods.
And there we see it.
Now, I don't know whether that's been tampered with in some way to make it more stable.
It looks like it has.
I've seen various versions online that have been jerkier than that.
But, you know, that could almost be, you know, somebody, a human being, going out for a stroll in the woods.
That could be me.
You know, but for the fact that whatever that is is very tall, has a bit of a gate going on there, and has those other attributes that you can see.
Now, I watched you being interviewed about this today somewhere on YouTube, and you were talking about this.
And I thought that your line about this would be very dismissive.
In fact, you're quite accepting of this as being possibly genuine, aren't you?
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I think that's one of the, it is the best piece of footage we have of a Sasquatch.
There are a handful of others that I think are legitimate.
But that one, despite seven or eight different people at this point saying that they were the person in the suit, none of them know where the film site was.
None of them can reproduce the walk because, as I mentioned, it does not walk like a human being at all.
And also, nobody could fit in a suit.
Like literally, no one can fit in a suit if it was that big.
And she's not even really that tall.
The animal, and I call it a she because it's a female.
You can see its breasts.
But the animal in that film is only about six and a half feet tall, give or take a little bit.
But even at, which is a very human height, of course.
But at that height, the shoulders are 32, 33 inches wide, and the arms are longer than any human on the planet, especially in relation to its legs.
And whoever is in the suit, if that is indeed a suit, has to have arms as long as are shown because you can see individual fingers moving frame to frame in the film.
Now, the most recent and loudest person, a guy named Bob Hieronymus, who said that he was the guy in the suit, he doesn't know where the film site is.
He gave two conflicting locations for The film site, both of them were wrong.
And he does not fit in that suit.
He said that he created the elongated arms by having extensions on his hands to make the arms.
But the problem with that is that it's not just the forearms that are longer, the elbow is appropriately placed in the middle of the arm.
So there's all sorts of problems about the anatomy and then the suit.
I mean, you can see actually there's something called pyloerection, which is hair standing up on end.
You can see that in the film.
You can see her foot flex in the mid-tarsal joint in the film.
And you made a point in this interview that I watched with you about, as you're saying, I think here, the relationship of the skin and the hair to the bone structure within.
And I think you mentioned about the shoulders, the relationship between that.
If it was a man in a suit, then it wouldn't be possible for the skin and hair to relate to the bones in the way that it does there.
Yes, no human, not even American football players, can fill out that suit appropriately, let alone the fluidity with which it walks, the change in gait that it has, because it doesn't walk with a stiff knee gait like human beings do.
It walks with a compliant gait, which would be a necessary redesign of their gait to carry a mask like that as a shock absorber.
And then you get into the whole problem with the footprints that were left at the scene being consistent with other footprints cast in other places and times by other people, showing the same non-human characteristics and morphology that other ape species and many human ancestors have.
There's just a whole slew of problems when somebody comes out and says, ah, that's an easy film to fake.
Well, no one today, including the BBC, has been able to fake the film convincingly or even come with a suit that looks half as good.
That's a point.
That's almost like offering up a challenge to somebody to try and do it and see if they can.
There was another piece of, just briefly before we take some commercials here, another piece of video that I saw last year that looked very atmospheric and very convincing.
It was two guys.
You might have seen this one.
I can't remember where it was.
I think it may well have been Alaska, somewhere in the cold north, northeast probably, northwest rather.
But these guys were on a ridge looking down into a valley that was piled with snow.
It was deep winter.
And in the far distance was a creature.
And if you were to consider the scale of it, it was rather like the one in the Patterson Gimlin film, walking through the snow at speed.
And this thing, because the guys were there to give it perspective, so it hadn't been speeded up or messed with by the looks of it.
But whatever it was down in that valley, packed with snow, was walking like that and was going through deep snow at a hell of a pace that a human being would find very hard to manage.
I'm not sure if you're aware of that, but that piece of video blew my mind.
Yeah, I know of one that fits that description pretty well, and I think they were in British Columbia in Canada.
And I've always been impressed with that one as well.
Even though you don't see a lot of detail in the film like you can in the Patter or in the creature, like you can in the Patterson Gimlin film, that one has always been impressive to me.
And there are certainly some good, pretty decent or at least interesting pieces of footage that probably show real Sasquatches.
And there's a whole ton of fakes.
And that's unfortunate because people like me, we have to separate the wheat from the shaft in a lot of ways.
And it's so difficult to do, especially when so few of the pieces of footage show enough information to be able to hang your hat on.
We're talking about Bigfoot with Cliff Berrickman, the man from Finding Bigfoot, and many, many other things.
Cliff, if it's okay with you, the way I wanted to do the rest of this is I wanted to talk about the way that you do your investigations, some of the places that you've been with your investigations, and then I've got for the third and final segment a whole bunch of questions from our viewers, listeners.
Is that okay?
Does that work?
Whatever you'd like, whatever you'd like.
As we say here in London, top man, thank you.
When you go out to do an investigation, we saw that you had the night vision camera there very impressively.
What do you take with you?
What kind of technology?
It depends on whether I'm doing daytime stuff or nighttime stuff.
The stuff you saw on the television show, we mostly went nighttime because it's part of the TV and spookiness of it all.
And, you know, Sasquatches, as I said earlier in the show, they tend towards nocturnalism.
So when I go out at night, I always take an audio recorder because I like recording the sounds that they make.
And, you know, sometimes I need to go back and re-listen to them and that sort of thing.
But I also take a thermal imager.
I really like thermal imaging technology, which sees heat.
It basically sees infrared, which is heat that anything warm radiates.
And SAS watches are mammals, and so they radiate heat and they kind of stand out against the background quite dramatically.
In fact, my only decent sighting of a SAS watch was through a thermal imager.
So I'm glad I had it on me that night.
Other than that, GPS, in case you get turned around up there because it is dark and there's not a lot of landmarks you can put your eyes on in the middle of the night.
And kind of, and I think probably the most important piece of equipment that I bring is a journal.
So after I'm done with the night, I can take notes, take field notes about the weather, temperature, things I did see, things I did not see, whatever else I could write down.
So I think those are the main pieces of equipment that I bring out at night.
And when you're on an investigation, how do you first cotton on, discover, find out that you're onto something?
In other words, is it a smell on the wind?
Is it perhaps a distant call or cry?
You know, what is it that generally gives you the first indication that there might be something there?
Well, data is the first thing that we do.
Before we go out at night, no matter where it is, we make sure that the site has viable habitat and there's a history of reports in the area.
On the show, sometimes that history of reports isn't public knowledge because we had Matt Moneymaker with us that runs the BFRO, which is the largest public database of Sasquatch reports anyone ever collected.
But a lot of the stuff on the BFRO site, the Bigfoot Field Researcher Organization site, is behind the scenes and isn't publicly available.
So we had some of the best intel and the best data driving our research and pointing us to the right direction.
But really, and also a lot of times he has a nationwide network of researchers, And maybe they were getting activity recently.
So it's not so much like throwing a dart at a map or anything like that.
We used data to drive our research, whatever possible.
And you mentioned the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.
Something that I saw online today said that there had been, maybe it's increased by now, 708 quotes, credible sightings.
Oh, more than that.
Certainly more than that.
Now, I'm not a member of the BFRO.
I mean, Matt's my friend.
I work with them and he throws me reports and stuff, but I don't really join groups.
I'm not really that kind of guy.
I was kicked out of Boy Scouts.
You know, I'm just not that kind of guy.
I don't do groups well.
So, but gosh, back in, I think last time I talked to Matt, he said there were something like 74,000 raw reports, raw reports.
Now, even if one tenth of that is real and credible, which they probably are because Sasquatches are real animals, that's quite a few.
That's quite a few.
And I personally, in my own files, have gathered over 1,200 reports.
So certainly, I think that number is very, very low.
And I would suspect that there's probably tens of thousands of very good, credible reports over the last 10, 20 years at the most.
And where are the hotspots in the United States?
You know, I've got here Oregon, Missouri, Illinois are places that are particularly favored by these things.
Well, you know, they're kind of, again, kind of like black bears, a lot like black bears.
They don't look like black bears, but some of their behavior resembles that because black bears are the other large omnivore that they share the continent with.
So they're going after the same food resources and have the same needs.
So the hotspots, that kind of information is a bit skewed.
And here's why.
Sasquatches there aren't very many of them.
They're not plentiful.
They're very rare animals that are thinly spread across suitable habitat in North America.
And there's a lot of it.
There's a lot.
If you've never been to North America, there's a lot of land here that nobody lives on.
But the hotspots are the places that get a lot of sighting reports.
But that is dependent on a local Bigfoot researcher who's looking for reports.
Because there might be tons of Sasquatches in the middle of British Columbia, but no one's going to hear about it because there's no Bigfoot researchers in the mountains.
So when the media give us these tabulations of, you know, this is a place where we get many of these things, actually that may not be true.
It may just be that there's a greater concentration of search resources in those places.
Well, yeah, yeah.
And as far as the media giving us that stuff, media is kind of tabloid in a lot of ways.
They're always going for the hook and the clicks, you know, at the end of the day.
So we're just kind of victims of poor journalism in a lot of ways.
I said I was going to do questions in the next segment, but I've got this in that kind of works here when we're talking about the techniques of investigations.
Carol in Canterbury, thank you for this one.
She says, why is there not more exploration of caves where Bigfoot would be, mainly be, as seen so rarely out and about?
Why concentrate on forests and not underground where they must live?
I am fascinated by this.
Me too, Carol in Canterbury.
Well, because the data doesn't point to them living underground, Carol.
So that's the bottom line.
Because check this out, inside caves, if there are places where footprints can be left, there is no wind and very little water erosion inside caves.
Those footprints will still be there, even if they were left years ago.
And we know that because we have Neanderthal footprints from inside caves.
But to my knowledge, there have been almost none, almost no footprints found.
I'm going to say none, but I might be wrong.
I'll say that almost none, no footprints found inside caves.
There have been very few sightings of Sasquatches inside caves, and it's always inside the mouth of a cave.
So the evidence isn't there that they use caves.
Okay, well, I think Carol would want to know this too.
I do.
If they're not in caves, if they don't live somewhere like that, where do they live?
They live, well, they live in thick forests, basically.
Much like mountain gorillas would.
And where on the hillsides are they?
I suspect they're not at the bottom and not at the top.
I think that they're about halfway up or maybe a third of the way up or down these thickly wooded, rugged mountains that we have here in the Pacific Northwest.
And even in places like Illinois, where they don't have the mountains that we do here in the Pacific Northwest, but they have a lot of hills and they have a lot of deep ravines as well.
They are built very much like the other apes, kind of halfway between the other apes and as far as arm length and humans.
And that indicates that they live in very rough, uneven terrain.
That's part of the reason they would have longer arms like that.
Their anatomy reflects their behavior.
And they've been seen climbing up and down cliffs.
They've been seen jumping great distances.
All these observations seem to be pretty accurate, it seems.
They fit very well with the other data.
And so they probably live in some very inaccessible areas that humans just simply don't go a lot.
And when people do see them, that's because a Sasquatch wandered into an area where a human might be.
Usually not the opposite, although lots of times the opposite.
One question for me that I've never asked anybody in all of the conversations that I've had about Bigfoot over the years with various people, people who believe that they've cited them and people who've investigated them.
Presumably, if they're part, which they will be, of the food chain and they're part of nature and they're out there coexisting with black bears, etc., there must be occasions when they have fights or conflicts.
But from what I am aware, and what do I know, I haven't read anything about there being signs in the forest of conflicts or fights.
I'm talking about blood and skin and hair, that sort of thing.
Yeah, well, if they are, you know, most of the other great apes, they don't get in a lot of conflicts anyway, unless they're trying to figure out the pecking order.
And the way we have so little data on Sasquatches at this moment, there's almost no information about their social structure.
Although what little data we do have seems to be pointing towards an orangutan-like social structure, where there's a female and maybe an offspring or two occupying one area that's adjacent to another territory Run by a female and maybe an offspring, or maybe not.
And then the males basically kind of cruise through and do booty calls, essentially, at the end of the day.
So we have so little data at this point, I hesitate to even bring that up, but that's what it's looking like at this point.
Now, having said that, Dr. Grover Krantz wrote in his book, Sasquatch Bigfoot Evidence, that his interpretation of the data in the Blue Mountains of the Oregon and Washington borders indicates that there was a big male around, and then another one came in and left a lot of footprints and stomped around, and there were a lot more broken branches and all that sort of stuff.
Maybe a territorial display.
Maybe they're an actual interaction or a fight, as you're referencing here.
We don't know.
But that's the only case I can think of off the top of my head that has some sort of suggestion of them being so competitive with another of their kind.
They do show some aggression and encouragement from us to get the hell out sometimes.
They do bluff charge.
They throw things at us.
They do that sort of stuff, but not within their own species that we've observed.
I've heard of them throwing rocks and objects at people.
You've actually experienced that.
Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure.
Yeah, I've had rocks thrown at me a couple times.
I've seen them come in.
I've heard them land mostly around me, that sort of stuff.
And I've been screamed at from very close range in the whole nine, but I've been doing it for a long time.
And I have one mediocre sighting to my name, maybe two, but that other one, I'm not sure what it was.
But I've tracked them.
I've smelled them.
I've been screamed at.
I've had things thrown at me.
Have they been friendly to you ever?
No, no, they're pretty neutral at best.
Like, I'm not so sure friendly is a good term for what I've experienced.
One rapid question before we get to more commercials here.
I understand that when you came to the UK, and you brought your show to many countries, but when you came to this country, there were 16-inch footprints on Cannock Chase in the English Midlands, which we were talking about earlier on this show, which is a center for ghost sightings and all kinds of weirdness, UFOs, you name it.
Is that so?
Well, I didn't see that.
The footprints that I saw or what were claimed to be footprints, I think could be left open to interpretation.
Maybe they were, but I am inclined to think that Sasquatches are not present in the UK.
There are lots of people who think they are and some good folks over there doing the work.
And I just say, hey, you know what?
I'm way open to evidence.
Prove me wrong.
Show me what I'm missing here.
I have been contacted by one or two people, particularly up in Scotland, actually, who claim to have seen these things.
A colleague of mine, Adam Davies, who's from London area, he investigated it for me.
He says, they don't seem to be lying, but I don't know.
I don't know.
I just don't see how they would get there and stay there.
And because, you know, most of the Harryman carvings and stuff in cathedrals, those were brought over to the UK during the Norman invasion of 10, whatever it is.
And I do think Sasquatches are the mainland in Europe, like Far Eastern Europe at this point, but they're probably much more widespread at one point.
This hour has been all about Bigfoot.
Cliff Berickman in the United States, the man behind that TV series, Finding Bigfoot, and many other things here.
Guy who's given a long portion of his life to this investigation in a systematic and scientific way.
Questions now for Cliff.
Stand by.
Darren in Northumberland contacted me earlier this week with this one.
And, you know, there is also an anonymous text that I've got here asking something similar.
It's been said that the U.S. government have been aware of the existence of Bigfoot-style creatures for many years, but have no real idea what they might be and will never admit to their knowledge or knowledge of them or the existence, primarily so as not to panic the public.
In other words, is there a great big cover-up here?
Because rather like UFOs maybe, the U.S. government and other governments don't quite understand what this is, so they don't want to scare people, hence they don't confirm anything.
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
And that's partly because I don't have a lot of faith in politicians themselves.
I don't think that they pay a lot of attention to things unless they have something in it for them, you know, lying in their pockets or doing something like that, honestly.
I'm a little jaded in that sort of way.
But I also have word that a couple of pretty high-level folks in Congress are witnesses.
I know for a fact, I've got a friend in the House of Representatives.
His name is Tim Burchett, represents Eastern Tennessee.
We had him on the show two weeks ago.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I think he's part of the UAEP thing.
Yeah, he's a friend of mine, and he's interested in Sasquatches.
He's never seen one.
He's not a researcher.
But I don't think that those sort of folks really care much about the Bigfoot thing until it affects their bottom line.
And certainly a discovery of a species like the Sasquatch here in America would cause some economic turmoil, I think.
But what's the best way to handle that without spending any money?
Because that's what politics is really all about, and politicians especially.
What's the best way to handle the potential Bigfoot problem without spending any money?
Well, don't do anything because Sasquatches are doing a very good job taking care of themselves.
And also, the very loud voices of the tinfoil hat wear and paranormal crowd, they're the ones coming forth and making ridiculous claims about Sasquatches.
So nobody's taking it seriously anyway, because that's what the media loves.
The media loves to pick that stuff up and run with it instead of presenting the subject in a level-headed, sober way.
And so the Bigfoot community and the Bigfoots themselves are doing a really good job making sure that Bigfoots are going to remain in the shroud of mystery.
So they are part of our planetary ecosystem.
They know where they fit into it.
They have their lifestyle.
They have no interest in making themselves more available or amenable to us.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
And the fact that there's a mystery about that is something that we construe.
Nothing to do with that.
Yeah, and the mystery is because they're large animals and they look a lot like us.
And a lot of people have resistance to that sort of thing.
People get angry at me by saying that we're apes, that we're like related to apes.
People get upset at me about that and say, well, I'm a science guy.
We're a weird ape, but we're an ape.
And I think that the mystery thing with the Bigfoot is partly because of their form.
They're hairy, human-like things.
And also, it's also hubris on our part.
We would have known about them by now is very often what I say.
In fact, in the 60s and 70s, anthropologists were saying they can't exist, therefore they Don't before looking at the evidence.
They didn't have to look because we would know about them by now.
And that's a very unscientific perspective, in my opinion.
Yeah, I mean, it's almost arrogant, isn't it, really?
From John, question.
He says, and I think we kind of cover this off, but let's just do it because it is a fundamental question.
We always see you hunting for Bigfoot in the dark.
And you said that on the TV, that's what you do because it looks good that way, and you might get better results that way.
But I think essentially, John is asking why you don't look in the daylight.
He thinks that Bigfoot would run a mile with all the noise and the lights at nighttime.
Yeah, yeah, that's actually two comments.
Very quickly, if you look at all the Sasquatch sightings, about 60% of them are during the day, 40% at night.
Now, let's just say that's 50-50, and you'll see why in a minute.
Okay, it's close enough.
Let's just pretend it's 50-50.
How many people are out at night versus during the day?
One-tenth, maybe?
And how far could those people see at night?
One-tenth the distance?
Well, using those very rough numbers, and I admit they're rough, doesn't that indicate 100 times more Sasquatch activity at night?
It kind of does.
It points that direction.
So Sasquatches statistically have been determined to be largely, or they tend towards nocturnalism.
And also, as far as running about with lights and making noises and whatnot at night, there's a couple different ways to approach the hunting of anything.
And we're not, of course, we're not hunting with guns or anything.
We don't do that.
But there's a couple of different ways to do it.
And one is to draw attention and a smart animal like a Saswatch might say, what is that?
And come in to take a look.
And there's another one sitting in a tree stand wearing camouflage with descent on you for eight hours at a time.
Which of those makes better television?
Which of those is going to keep the viewers watching longer?
Obviously, it's the one that the scene, making a scene is going to be better for TV.
I think in so many ways.
Gail asked a number of questions.
One of them is this.
Will there be a new series of Finding Bigfoot?
No, I'm afraid not.
I'm afraid not, which is, you know, okay with me because eight or nine years is a long time to do that sort of thing.
Right now, I'm mostly focused.
I own a Bigfoot Museum in Oregon outside of Portland, and I do a podcast with Bobo if you're interested in hearing what we do.
So those are the things I continue to do and my own fieldwork and stuff.
But as far as making a living on a TV show, it's kind of a young man's job in a lot of ways, and I'm not getting any younger.
Well, that makes two of us.
Bobo, by the way, is the other guy in that piece of video that we saw at the top of this.
Anthony in Bradford would like to know, please ask Cliff what his thoughts are on the connection, supposed, between Bigfoot and the UFO phenomenon, as a lot of sightings of Bigfoot seem to include sightings of strange lights in the sky at the same time.
I don't think you can deny that.
I've had a lot of people on this show who've said exactly that.
Yeah, it's actually not a lot.
You'd be surprised.
Those are outliers, statistically speaking.
I've spoken to thousands, literally thousands.
I'm not exaggerating in the slightest.
Thousands of people who claim to have encountered Sasquatches, and very few of them have any lights associated with them, and almost none have any sort of UFO activity.
And the lights that are associated are sometimes phenomenon like there's a place in the Sierra Nevada Mountains that people have seen lights in association with Sasquatches.
And that is simply because the Sasquatches happen to be in this area.
And there's this thing called earthquake lights that like under high pressure and like certain geological situations.
I'm not a geologist, so you'd have to go somewhere else for that.
But look up earthquake lights.
And actually, they can create spheres of light that move.
Really a phenomenal phenomenon at the end of the day.
And I think that a lot of the times that people see orbs or whatnot associated with in areas where SAS watches have been seen before, it's actually a perfectly normal phenomenon.
But as far as SAS watches being seen in conjunction with UFOs, it's very, very few reports.
Stan Gordon out in Pennsylvania, he's done a really good job collecting what he could find, but it really seemed to be isolated in that part of the country and it's remarkably few.
So few that at this point, we can say that they're outliers statistically.
Two questions related here, Guy and another, John.
Guy asking why no remains or bones have been found.
You know, when they die, something's got to happen to them.
John asking, every creature has some kind of nest.
Why are these never found?
So, you know, no bones, no remains, and no home.
I very often get, if Sasquatches are real, where are the bones?
And then my reply is, if bears are real, where are their bones?
And the fact is, we do not find naturally dead bear bones.
And I'm going to repeat this, naturally dead bear bones.
We find bear bones from bears that have been poached or hit by cars and that sort of thing, but we do not find naturally dead apex predator bones at all.
Mountain lions, bears, even bobcats, almost never, ever found.
I've never found any.
I've never run across any.
I've been asking for almost 30 years now.
I found one person who say they think they found a naturally dead bear and it was underneath a log with the legs sticking out.
And here's why.
Animals get sick and one day they die, but they haven't died before.
But what do you do when you get sick?
You hide yourself away because you're vulnerable.
We go to bed.
If you're living out in the wild, you would put yourself in a safe place so you won't be killed by another animal and eaten.
And then one day they die instead of getting better like they have every other time in their life.
So right away, they started out by hiding their bodies.
Now, within a few hours to a few days, scavengers will start moving in.
The meat will be eaten away and a leg will go that direction 200 yards and an arm will go that direction 500 yards.
And the meat will be eaten away.
The hair will be eaten by moths and the bones will be eaten by the most plentiful animal in North America by biomass, which is the deer mouse.
Deer mice eat bones.
So do porcupines and wood rats and coyotes and even deer and elk eat bones because calcium is a very rare commodity here in North American forests.
And that is actually where the deer and elk get their calcium for their own antlers by eating bones.
You can look it up on YouTube.
There's wonderful videos of deer eating even human rib bones at these body farms where forensic scientists study how humans decompose.
But if a Bigfoot died say on Tuesday this coming week, right?
And it's a very sad event, but it's part of the natural cycle of life.
How long would it take for that Bigfoot to be picked clean and recycled effectively?
In other words, would there be a golden period where if somebody happened upon that site, they might find some still existing trace?
Yeah, sure, sure.
There's about a two-month period probably.
I have not looked too deeply into this, but someone who spends a lot of time in Asia told me that wherever an adult Asian elephant dies, there will be no trace of that elephant in two to three months.
None whatsoever.
Okay, so certainly that's very much smaller than that.
It's strange and unfortunate that it seems that nobody has happened upon a site like that during that winter.
That was by far the most desirable way to prove the species, because proof will come in the form of a dead one, no matter what.
And that is by far the most desirable way.
But considering that we, I'm going to say, virtually never find black bear bones, and there's 35,000 of them in my home state of Oregon and maybe 300 Bigfoot, well, we shouldn't really expect to find naturally dead Bigfoot bones either.
Laura messaged me to say, do they hibernate?
And if they do, where and how?
Probably not.
They're probably less active during the wintertime.
I am.
They would probably be so as well.
And they certainly would change their diet to what's available during the wintertime, probably lichens and probably a more carnivorous diet than during the summer months when there's more plant life available to eat.
But there's no indication that they hibernate.
And the data, the sighting report numbers do fluctuate.
And there are much fewer, many fewer of them during the wintertime.
But that's almost certainly a human factor because there are fewer humans out at that time of year as well.
I've got a questioner here.
I can't find his name, but he knows who he is.
Your views, Steve, your views on the Idaho footage.
Now, I'm not aware of the Idaho footage, so you have to explain what that is, but your views on it, if you are aware.
The Idaho footage.
You know, there's several pieces of footage from Idaho.
The first one that jumps out to my mind is the Mink Creek footage outside Pocatella, Idaho.
And there was some concern about that one being faked because high school kids are the ones who got it.
But Dr. Jeff Meldrum, who also lives in Idaho and has a son who's, I guess, a friend of these guys, kind of had a conversation with one of these guys explaining the legal liability they would have for faking such a thing.
And apparently the young men involved in this stuck to their story.
And Dr. Meldrum seemed pretty convinced that they were telling the truth.
The footage itself doesn't show a whole lot, but the footprint that was found at the scene is interesting.
It conforms to some of the things we think we know about Sasquatch feed.
So yeah, maybe it's real.
Maybe it's real.
Or maybe it's a high school prank if you're talking about the Mink Creek footage.
But the jury's out and we probably will never know.
But I lean towards that one being authentic.
We only have about a minute or so for this one, but I don't think you'll even need the minute based on where we've been before now.
Tony asks, is Bigfoot interdimensional?
A lot of people suggest that Bigfoot, because of its elusive nature, appearing at one moment and then seemingly disappearing?
No, no, no.
They're not interdimensional.
They're just perfectly normal animals.
People who see them disappear, generally, they lose them in the foliage.
There's a very small number of reports that say that they had a predator-like shimmering or something to them, but that is so rare and such an outlier that we don't even pay attention to that.
And that's not to say that other paranormal things are not real.
Paranormal stuff is real.
Ghosts are probably real.
UFOs certainly are.
Weird stuff happens in the universe.
It just turns out that Sasquatches are not one of those weird things.
They're a perfectly normal species of bipedal ape somewhere on the gradient of apes between humans and gibbons.
We don't know where yet.
Do you know something, Cliff Berrickman?
That's a perfect place to park this for now.
Thank you so much for being so generous with your time on a Sunday.
If people want to know about you, have you got a website they can go to?
Yeah, CliffBerrickman.com is about my personal research.
You can go to my museum's website.
I own a Bigfoot Museum in Oregon, North AmericanBigfootCenter.com.
And if you want to listen to my podcast with Bobo, it's BigfootandBeyondpodcast.com.
What a truly amazing and informed guest, Cliff Berickman.
And the subject of Bigfoot, we will return to again.
You know we will.
Thank you very much for supporting me for all of these years.
Very nearly 17 of them.
The anniversary, I think, coming up in March.
17 years of podcasting.
Until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection