All Episodes
Previous Next
July 10, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:09:22
Edition 738 - James Szubski
| 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.
Thank you for being part of my show.
Thank you for your emails.
Please keep those coming.
The web address for the website is theunexplained.tv.
That is where you'll find all of the podcasts dating back to 2006.
17 and a half years now of them.
Plus, it's also the best way to catch up with whatever is going on with the show.
And please also check out the official Facebook page of The Unexplained.
That is the one with the official logo to see the very latest news to do with the podcast and the TV show and anything else that I might be getting up to.
Still boiling hot here in His Majesty's United Kingdom.
30 degrees at the moment, which I think it was last time I spoke with you.
Pretty sweaty, pretty claustrophobic one way or another.
So when I've finished my recording today, I think before I do any editing or any processing, I'm going to take a walk and just have a deep breath of the remnants of fresh air that we have after this long, hot day here in the United Kingdom.
What else have I got to say?
Thank you to Adam for his work on the website and also getting the shows out to you.
The guest on this edition of the show is somebody that you won't have heard here before.
His name is James Shubski.
Now, he is the chief operating officer at Margie's Outdoor Store, which is located deep within the Columbia River Gorge in Washington State.
In 2022, his store initiated a paranormal reporting program, which has now received more than 100 reports of weird activity in that gorge area.
James is a volunteer, former volunteer search and rescue man, wildland firefighter, mountain guide, highly decorated U.S. Army infantry veteran.
This man has an incredible pedigree and he's got some astonishing stories to tell.
So I thought for this edition of The Unexplained, we would take ourselves off to somewhere far and somewhere wild.
And I don't think you can get many places further and wilder than where we're about to go with James Shubski, this edition of The Unexplained.
Please keep your emails coming in.
Don't forget, as usual, when you get in touch with me, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
All right, let's connect.
And I wonder what the weather is like there compared with here.
The British are obsessed with the weather, aren't they?
Let's connect with Washington State and James Shubski.
James, thank you very much for coming on my show.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I know very little about Washington State.
A friend of mine, who is the webmaster for this show, was there at the back end of last year and was very complimentary.
All I can think of when I think about it, James, is enormously, for me as a Brit, incomprehensibly wide open spaces.
Well, that's a pretty accurate idea.
So I'm here in the southern part of Washington state, and we're right on the bank of the Columbia River.
And the Columbia is the second largest river in America, right after the Mississippi.
And the Columbia runs through the Cascade Mountain Range.
Cascade Mountains start up in British Columbia, and they extend down to Northern California.
It's about 80,000 square miles, which is roughly the size of the island of Britain.
So that's a wilderness area.
Most of it is owned by the federal government.
And, you know, I have been an infantry soldier and a wildland forest firefighter and a search and rescue EMT.
And I have worked in just about every type of terrain you can imagine.
And this is some of the most rugged and wild terrain out there.
And so it's a pretty amazing place.
The gorge itself, so I own a store in the middle of the gorge in a little town called Benjamin, Washington.
It's about 60 miles east of Portland, Oregon.
So that's like the closest major city.
And the gorge itself in the 1980s was designated as a national scenic area.
It was the first national scenic area.
And the reason why they did that is because it's so incredibly beautiful here.
Like I said, we've got the Cascade Mountains and the river runs.
It's the only sea level passage through those mountains.
And on the west side of the mountains, it's a Pacific Northwest rainforest.
So it sees over 100 inches of rain a year.
And on the east side, it's a desert because that's in the rain shadow and it sees less than 10 inches of rain a year.
And so the gorge has both climates and the transition in between.
It's an amazing place.
Isn't that astonishing?
What do you call yourself?
You use this acronym EMT.
Can you explain what that is?
That's the emergency medical technician.
And so I was nationally certified.
I was part of a volunteer group that was run by the King County Sheriff Department.
And we would go out and rescue folks who were lost in the woods or injured.
And we would also do things like evidence searches for the remains of murder victims or weapons that had been used in the commission of crimes.
Right.
So that brings me to the point that I think I would be right.
And as, again, as a Brit, I'm not sure whether I'm using the term right.
But would you call yourself an outdoorsman?
Yeah, I've been an adventurer all my life.
And so I joined the military when I was 19 years old.
And, you know, obviously we had significant outdoor training.
But that was just a continuation of my passion for being outdoors that I enjoyed as a child.
It sounds utterly wonderful to me sitting here in a boiling, baking, hot city.
The thought of that great outdoors that you have there and the great variety that you have and the fact that you clearly revel in it and cherish it is a very beautiful thing to me, even at this distance.
Well, we moved down to the gorge about two years ago.
So my wife and family and I, we were living up in the Seattle area, which is a couple hundred miles north of here.
And about two years ago, my mother-in-law passed away.
And she had a couple of thriving businesses down here in Bingen, Washington.
And so when she passed away, we made the decision to come down and run the businesses.
One of them was a store, and it wasn't quite as successful as I thought it could be.
So we changed its format to an outdoor store because that was something that I knew very well.
And it wasn't long before people started spontaneously coming in and telling us about some really incredible experiences they were having in the wilderness areas around the store.
And we're talking about a lot of Bigfoot stories and a lot of UFO stories.
And so I was fascinated by this personally.
You know, I've had a few unusual experiences in my own life.
And so my mind is open to these ideas.
And so we put up a big sign in the window that said, file your paranormal reports here.
And I wasn't sure what we were going to get or what I was going to do with the information.
But I can tell you that we've been doing this now for a little over a year and a half, and we have had over 150 reports.
So the gorge is clearly a paranormal hotspot.
And these people who come in, are they mainly tourists, people visiting the area?
So anything that they experience that is beyond the normal is going to be a bit of a surprise and a shock for them, maybe not for you.
Well, it turns out most of the folks that we get reports from are locals.
And one of the things that fascinated me was that here in the Columbia River Gorge, it's really common to have seen Bigfoot or UFO or to at least have a neighbor or know somebody who has.
And to me, that was the most striking part about this whole situation.
Down here, it's kind of akin to, you know, seeing a deer in your yard or a, you know, a bear when you're out hiking.
It's not a common occurrence, but it's certainly just part of the everyday experience out here.
So is it something just sorry to jump in, but is it something that, for example, kids who were brought up there, they go to school, is it something that is just ingrained within you, the idea that Bigfoot exists?
If you live there, then it's a part of your reality.
Well, interesting, you should mention that.
So my number one chief co-investigator is my nine-year-old daughter.
And she loves all this stuff, right?
And I have a special 4x4 rig that's kitted out with lights and cameras and gear.
And that's what I drop her off at school in.
And all of her school buddies are oohing and aweing over the vehicle whenever we pull up and drop her off.
And she just plays it off like it's nothing.
But more to the point about how common it is here.
So there are on the Washington side of the river.
So the gorge is about 85 miles long.
And on the Washington side, there are two counties within the gorge.
One is Scamania County, which is where my home is, and that's on the rainforest side of the mountains.
And the other is Clickat County, which is on the desert side.
And my store is just over the edge there.
So we're just at the beginning of the desert area.
But in Scamania County, way back in the 1960s, the county passed a law making it illegal to hunt Bigfoot.
And if you kill a Bigfoot here in Scamania County, you will go to jail and pay thousands of dollars in fines.
So it's to the point where there is actual legislation on the books.
And that's how serious and real it is to the folks who live here.
So does that mean that people come to where you are to hunt Bigfoot?
Or does the law on the statute book there mean that people stay away from that?
When I say hunt Bigfoot, I mean in the sort of photographic and adventurous sense, not the trophy hunting sense.
Well, people have been coming here for decades and decades looking for Bigfoot.
And some of the most significant evidence of Bigfoot has been found here in Scamania County.
There's a very famous cast called the Skookum Cast.
And basically, they found a place where a Sasquatch had allegedly laid down in sort of a like a little dirt hole.
And they could, within this cast, you could actually see the impressions of the fur.
You can see where his hand had pressed into the ground.
And you can see the actual, you know, skin ridges, like fingerprints of the whole hand there.
And so this has been a hotspot for a very long time for Sasquatch, but also for UFOs.
There is a place maybe 20 miles north of my store called the Eseti Ranch.
ESETI stands for Enlightened Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
And James Guilford, famous, the ESETI Ranch out there, people have been going there for decades.
They come from all over the world, and you can camp out on his property, and people watch UFOs fly around Mount Adams all night while they're there.
And so that's been going on for quite a long time.
In fact, the first popular UFO sighting in the United States happened in June of 1947.
It was a private individual, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold, was flying his plane over the Cascade Mountains.
He saw nine saucer-shaped craft flying from the north to the south at speeds that were impossible given the craft at the time.
They flew past Mount Rainier, which is the tallest peak in the Cascades.
It's 14,400 feet tall.
And they headed towards Mount Adams, which is about 35 miles north of my store.
And so this might be a good time to give folks a little bit of a lay of the land of what the gorgeous is like.
Before I do that, though, do you have any questions about what I just said?
I mean, there was an awful lot of it.
I didn't really want to take you back to the Bigfoot, but I need to, and then we'll get into the ufology of it just to round that off.
What do people experience when people come into your store and say, hey, I think I've seen Bigfoot.
What sorts of things do they say?
And what's the weirdest one of those stories that you have encountered in that, what, four years or so that you've been there?
Well, people rarely say, I think I saw Bigfoot.
They say, I saw Bigfoot.
And so we've had folks come in with hair samples, which is really interesting.
There's one gentleman who believes that there is sort of a travel pinch point through his property.
And he has seen them dozens of times.
He talks about having seen pregnant ones, having seen young Sasquatch.
He says the difference between the young and the old is the young ones have fur, whereas the old ones are hairy.
You know, they have hair instead of fur.
He's seen some that are over 12 feet tall.
And so what's interesting is a lot of the folks here believe that the Sasquatch that they are seeing is a biological creature.
They believe that it's, you know, an animal, just like a bear or a cougar or something like that.
And so their reports are really about that.
And that is reflected in the Native American stories we hear.
In the Pacific Northwest, when you hear stories of Bigfoot-like creatures from the Native American traditions, they're often describing a physical animal, like this is the creature that eats fish by the creek.
As you go east of us across America, the stories become more metaphorical.
So it's a creature that's red on one side and blue on the other side and it lives at the edge of the world.
So that seems to be more of a spiritual explanation or a metaphorical explanation of something they experienced.
Whereas out here in the Northwest, very commonly, or more commonly than not, you hear descriptions of what sounds like a physical animal.
But that doesn't really quite tell the whole story.
Many of the folks that we talk to say that the Bigfoot seem to have limited teleportation ability.
And the reports say that the creature is able to move 50 to 100 yards in the blink of an eye.
And so they feel like that is beyond the speed that a physical animal could travel.
And there is some speculation that it has something to do with the ability to teleport.
And what sorts of stories do people come into your store and tell you about that?
Do they say, look, I just kind of, I saw it was there one moment and then it was somewhere else in the next moment?
Or how does that manifest?
Yeah, they see it.
The creature's aware of them.
They see it moving away from them and then like it might walk behind a tree or something like that and then reappear 150 meters away.
And so it's those kinds of stories.
We also hear stories.
There's a place might be 15 minutes from the store.
And on the maps, it's called the Monte Cristo Natural Preserve.
It's government-owned.
And it was deeded to the government, I think, by the private landowners because there were so many reports of strange reports out there.
The locals call it Monster Mountain.
And we've had folks come in and they were up there panning for gold.
And they claimed to have been surrounded by four distinct beings who were communicating with each other.
Each of them seemed to have a different personality and seemed to be communicating about the people who were panning for gold.
And were they communicating with the people who were panning for gold?
No, they seemed to be using a language that wasn't English and consisted of grunts and growls and hoots.
And so, and they could even, they described it as like one of them seemed to be old and a little crotchety and the others seemed to be younger and more curious.
In that same area, we've had reports of stones being thrown near folks, landing on the ground near folks.
That seems to be very common, doesn't it?
Whoever you talk to, wherever in the U.S. or in Canada you talk to them, one of their deterrent tactics appears to be throwing rocks.
Yeah.
And so that's really interesting because there are no animals that live out here that have the ability to throw other than humans.
And so that's kind of fascinating.
We also hear stories of stick knocking and so sticks being knocked together.
Again, difficult for animal without hands to do.
And so you'll hear like the sticks being knocked together three times, things of that nature.
So there is an awful lot of those types of reports.
Now, oftentimes in those same areas, we'll get reports of glowing orbs that people see in the forests and other strange phenomenon like that.
So it's a real mixed bag.
It's multifaceted, isn't it?
Yeah.
So, of course, we get stories about Bigfoot.
We get stories about UFOs.
And they typically come in three flavors for UFOs.
We get advanced military aircraft.
We get traditional UFO-type crafts.
So things that look like saucers, tic-tacs, or triangles.
And then we also get a lot of reports of glowing orbs.
And does there appear to be, just before we lose the point, does there appear to be any connection?
I think there might be, but you tell me, between the Bigfoot phenomena, they can apparently teleport.
They appear to communicate among themselves.
They appear to be very unusual, 12 feet tall.
Some people say that there is a connection between UFO sightings and them.
Yeah.
Well, there's a, like I said, there's a really thick paranormal soup brewing out here.
And all these phenomenon are occurring near each other, right?
So, and the glowing orbs are definitely seen in areas where Bigfoot have been seen.
We also have had reports of an Enormous black cat.
We call it the clicketat ape cat.
So we get reports about that, quite a few.
Right now, it's over 60 reports of that creature.
We get reports of portals.
So these appear to be holes that float oftentimes.
And the background inside of the hole, it might be floating near a road or next to a mountain, looks different than the background surrounding it.
Isn't that interesting?
That sounds like that TV show from the 60s, The Time Tunnel.
Just to take you back, because you're throwing so many great points at me here, and I don't want to lose any of them.
You are a joy to talk with because you are full of material, and that is the best kind of guest as far as I'm concerned.
The ape cat.
Now, I can't imagine what an ape cat might look like.
I can't imagine what it might, what kind of impact it might have on those observing it.
And you say you've had 60 reports of this, what is it, Clicket Tat?
Clicketat?
Clicket?
Clicketat.
Yeah, Clicketat.
So Clicketet is obviously the name of the county where the store is located.
But it's also a Native American nation that lived here in the Columbia River Gorge in prehistoric times.
And so the Clicketats are still a viable nation at this point.
So the Clicketat Ape Cat, really interesting story.
One night, a gentleman came into the store.
He was a local.
And his family was friends with my mother-in-law.
So there was a little bit of a family connection there.
And it took him about 45 minutes to get comfortable in order to tell me his experience.
He was orienteering out near Buck Creek, which is about three miles west of the store.
And so orienteering is using map and compass, you know, practicing that type of wilderness navigation.
He said his compass started acting strange and the needle started pointing away from north.
And that in and of itself is not uncommon here in the gorge.
When you look at the government navigation maps, there's bright pink lettering on it that says warning your compass readings will be off in this area.
Like it's a well-known, acknowledged thing.
And the reasons for that, I think, have to do with the apocalyptic geology.
That's a whole nother topic, and I won't go down that side tangent for now.
So he was orienteering out near a place called Buck Creek, and he looked up across the creek, and he saw this enormous, majestic black panther creature.
He said that it had black fur and a long black tail, and that it stood four to five feet tall at the shoulder.
And so as he's describing this, right away, you know, my flags are going up because, you know, as an experienced outdoors person who's lived in the Northwest for decades, you know, of course, we have cougar out here.
And cougar, first of all, they only stand, you know, maybe 24 inches at the shoulder, so two feet tall at the shoulder.
Right, so five foot tall at the shoulder is a pretty damn big beast.
It's not just a damn big beast, it's an impossibly big beast.
Tigers don't grow that large.
In fact, there's only one creature in the fossil record that matches a cat of that size.
It's called the Panthera atrox, and also known as the American lion.
It was a creature that supposedly went extinct approximately 9,000 years ago during the Younger Dryas transition period.
But it was definitely living in Washington state during the Ice Age.
This is a creature they estimate to be well over 1,000 pounds when it was living.
And interestingly, it had the largest brain of any cat ever recorded.
So both in absolute volume of its brain cavity and that as a proportion of its total body size.
So again, we're talking about a couple of things.
First of all, the size is unusual.
There should be no cats of that size in North America.
Its coloration is unusual.
Cougars are typically tan in color.
When they express a darker fur-colored gene, they typically move more towards a redder color.
All of the wildlife professionals we've talked to say that there are no such thing as black cougars.
They're a creature not recognized by science.
Now, of course, there are black jaguars that live in North America, but their range is 1,000 miles south in like southern Arizona.
And so there are really three things that are tipping me off that this is an unusual experience.
One is the size.
The other is the coloration.
And third, the creature stood there and looked at him for more than five minutes.
And so he got a really good look at this creature.
Now, cougars are terrified of the sound of a human voice.
And they will often, if you just have a radio talk show on, they will abandon a kill.
And so for this creature to not be afraid of a human looking at him at that close proximity is also a very unusual event.
And is that the kind of reaction that something that is not used to human beings might give?
I suppose what I'm trying to hint at here is that from what you said, it sounds like this might have some kind of primeval connection, that it might be a survivor species from a deeply previous time.
Yeah, we don't know.
We have a lot of theories about what it might be.
We don't have any real answers.
And then, you know, he paused and he said, and you know, James, the most unusual thing was that it had a face that looked like a monkey.
And I was really bewildered by that.
You know, I had never heard of anything like that.
He described it as having intelligent, ape-like eyes and other primate features.
And so that is obviously, you know, if he had just got a fleeting glimpse of it, that would have been one thing.
But he said that he had looked at it for about five minutes.
He said that he felt like he was in the presence of something special or spiritual or magical was the term that he used.
And then the creature turned and disappeared into the forest.
So, when I heard this story, I thought, wow, this is incredible.
And, you know, I have to say, one of the most wonderful things about this whole experience is that, you know, a couple of times a week, a new Scooby-Doo mystery walks through our front door and people tell us about some type of incredible thing.
And it has really been, you know, of course, you know, I've been an outdoors person.
I've had some really just beautiful spiritual experiences in the outdoors.
But now that we're getting all these reports here, I mean, it's sort of like, for me at least, the world is filled with wonder again.
And, you know, there are all these amazing things going on here.
Well, I can absolutely get that.
You've got 60 reports of the Clicker Tat Ape Cat.
Within those reports are the details, because clearly these people, I'm assuming this, and you should never assume, but I'm assuming that the people who bring the reports in don't know each other, are unlikely to know each other.
So you have 60 reports of this cat.
Are they all the same or similar?
They're very similar.
So after I got that report, I told my employees about it the next day.
And one of my employees said, oh my God, I've seen that thing myself.
She was driving down Clicketat Canyon at dawn and she saw this enormous creature on the side of the road, an enormous black cat.
She didn't get a good look at its face.
When she described it to her family, and this is really common, they tried to tell her that she didn't see what she thought she saw.
And oftentimes when people have an unusual experience, you know, those around them want to normalize it.
And we even do this ourselves.
When we have an unusual experience ourselves, we try to rationalize it.
And what we're doing in the store is when someone comes in, we don't do that.
We allow the story to be what it is.
You know, we treat them with respect.
We ask intelligent follow-up questions.
And we don't try to impose our reality on their experience.
And when Missy told her family about this cat, they told her that she had probably seen a cow.
And first of all, it's ridiculous to tell a grown woman that you can't tell the difference between a cat and a cow.
But the other thing that's fascinating is that the creature she described was big enough to have been a cow.
So just imagine how enormous this animal is.
So once I got these two reports, and to me they were credible, you know, this one was a friend of the family, the other was an employee that I trust who had no reason to lie to me about this particular topic.
We started putting up flyers at the local trailheads.
And with the radio advertising budget we have at the store, we started putting out radio ads.
It says, has anyone else seen this creature?
And the reports started flooding in.
Like I said, we've had over 60 reports.
Many of these stories are pretty mundane.
You know, I was driving my ATV down a trail.
This big black cat jumped out and bounded into the forest and I never saw it again.
So it's not someone who's trying to sensationalize it.
It's just like a strange encounter.
We've had senior law enforcement officials tell us they've seen the cat.
Some of the stories go back 30 or 40 years.
We've had one individual said that they saw this cat in their driveway and it had a young kitten with it.
So an offspring, a black small cat.
And so we've had, like I said, numerous reports.
I would say about half of the reports describe the creature as being four to five feet tall at the shoulder.
And so there's a variation in the size of the creature in the reports.
And it's really only a handful of the reports that say the creature has a monkey-like face.
And so either we're dealing with similar creatures that are different, or we're dealing with shape-shifting of some sort, or we're dealing with mistaken reports.
Now, every once in a while, like as this information is coming into me, like I'm trying to make sense of it myself.
And I will get a, we'll get a lot of reports in and we'll have, we'll go for a string and no one will describe the monkey-like face.
And I'll, well, maybe that's just an anomaly, you know, a reporting anomaly or something like that.
And then, you know, I had a Wildland, a forest fighter crew chief come in and he wanted to know about this ape cat that people were talking about.
And he said, yep, my crew saw that in between Mount St. Helens and Mount Adams.
We were fighting a forest fire up there.
We were dropped off.
We had a three-day mission and the crew saw this cat with an ape-like face.
And we didn't know what it was or what we would do if it came back into camp.
Now, having been a wildland forest firefighter myself, you have to be one of the most competent outdoor professionals to be a wildland forest firefighter.
I mean, you're dropped off in a remote area.
You really have to have your wits about you.
And then not only that, you're dealing with an inherently dangerous situation, right?
And so these professionals know what they're talking about.
They have seen all the different kinds of wildlife that there is.
And when I get a report from a fellow firefighter, and there's a way that you communicate on a professional level, you know when someone is BSing you and when someone's real.
And this individual clearly saw a creature with an ape-like face.
And as we talk to more and more folks about it, they seem to describe it as a face being more flattened.
So if you think about like the difference between a German shepherd and like a pug dog, it's the same kind of creature, except one snout is more flattened than another.
So it may be some type of mutation or something like that, or it may legitimately be a creature with a face that looks like a monkey.
At this point, I can't say for sure.
Now, if this was me receiving these reports, easy for me in London.
Not that we would get creatures like that in London, I don't think.
But, you know, I would be able to toggle off down to the Natural History Museum here or one of the academic institutions, and I would be able to say, I've got a whole heap of reports here.
They appear to be credible from credible people.
They have some commonality about the detail.
Can you help me with possibly identifying or helping me in my investigations with this?
Where you live, are you able to do that?
You know, I've talked to some wildlife professionals.
There's very little interest from that group in chasing cryptids.
And part of it, so even with Bigfoot, there are literally thousands of sightings of Bigfoot in Washington state.
And all of the rangers, you know, the federal workers and the state workers who manage those lands are sort of warned off from pursuing that.
And if you think about it from an academic perspective, there's little career value in chasing down cryptids.
Like you can lose funding, you can be scorned.
And if there's already a sort of an academic consensus that this creature doesn't exist.
You just don't go there.
Yeah, you really don't.
And it's not to say that these people have been hostile, but they've got all of their programs that are funded.
And to go off on a big investigation is no one really has the appetite for that, right?
There's really like, who's going to pay me?
Why would I do this?
Why would I risk my professional or academic reputation on these kind of things?
And so, you know, I wouldn't say that people have been hostile, but it's just sort of there's a momentum behind it.
And we don't have, you know, some really hard evidence.
Right now, it's a lot of folks telling us they've seen these things.
Well, exactly.
That was the point I was going to get to.
And sorry for jumping in again, but it's an important point.
I think, you know, the problem is always with anything to do with cryptozoology, the lack of evidence.
And I would have thought if these phenomena are so regular, 60 reports of the cat, many, many reports of Bigfoot, this is an era where, you know, everybody's, I'm looking at my phone now.
My phone here has quite a nifty camera on it.
Why is there no photographic evidence?
We did get one video, and it's actually on our website.
If you go to margiesoutdoorstore.com and you go to the paranormal section, we've got pictures, you know, artist renditions of these things.
And there is one video.
This is an individual who was working out in some, I want to say there were sort of like workshops in a very rural area.
It's actually pretty close to Buck Creek where that first report came from.
And the person had this long, drawn-out encounter with the cat, and they pulled out their phone to start videotaping it.
Unfortunately, the video only captured the creature's eyes and some vocalizations.
But what happened was within seven seconds of pulling out his camera, the battery in his phone and his headlamp died simultaneously.
Well, now, that doesn't sound so wacko to me.
That sounds like a lot of reports where sometimes these creatures that have a paranormal aspect to them also have the ability to drain energy.
I use that term advisedly.
It's not just power, it's energy.
So that sounds very credible.
But the other thing that you said was that some people have been bringing in Bigfoot hair.
Where is that and have you had that analyzed?
So the individual who brought that in has sent it into several universities and they've always either lost the samples or not returned a report or told him he was crazy.
And so again, there's that sort of academic resistance to sticking your neck out.
And, you know, you can't blame them.
I mean, if your livelihood depended on your reputation and you're going to go off on a, you know, a flyer for some random guy who may or may not be, you know, credible, like, why would you do that?
Right.
And why would you go through the expense of doing that?
Well, why would you?
No, I'm with you on that.
So this comes back to you then, I think.
You know, I think so, James, that this is almost crying out for you.
And I don't know how feasible this is.
And maybe you're planning it already.
Who knows?
It's almost worth, I don't know whether there's any one particular season that is more prevalent for this, but you getting yourself ready to go out on a big adventure, a big investigation.
take all the recording equipment that you have at your disposal and then see if you can finally prove these things in a way that those skeptical scientists and others would accept.
You know, so like I said, I've got a...
And I was driving up an old forest service road.
This is a gravel road.
You need a 4x4 to get up.
And I spotted a black bobcat.
Now, black bobcats are extremely rare.
There's only been 20 documented sightings in the United States in history, right?
And I quickly fumbled with my phone and tried to get a picture of it.
But by the time I got all that organized, it had slipped off the side of the road.
And it was in that moment that I went on this mission to soup up my rig.
And so now my rig has got, you know, spotlights and five different cameras, a drone, and all that kind of stuff.
And so when there is a report, we do go out and investigate.
But I will tell you that I am an amateur investigator.
You know, I'm an old adventurer and that's, and I, you know, I own some stores.
And part of the reason why I'm going on these interviews with folks like you, Howard, is to invite other more experienced investigators to come to the gorge and take a look at some of this phenomenon.
And we have some of those people in this.
I mean, some of them are British, but there are people all over the world who do this kind of stuff.
I would be very surprised if they were not beating a path to your store door.
Well, we would love to have them.
And you know, they can contact me.
We've got an email address, staff at margiesoutdoorstore.com.
Send me a note, and I will, if you're a legitimate investigator, point you in the right direction and show you where a lot of these things are happening.
But it is, like I said, there are so many phenomenon.
And, you know, just to circle back to the cat for just a second.
So I researched big cats, and it seems like in every culture around the world, there are stories about big black cats.
Some of them are human-animal hybrids.
Therianthropes, I think, is the scientific term for them.
And in every culture, they're seen as protectors.
In the Great Lakes region of America, there is traditions about a race of underwater panthers called the Meshepashu.
And these are creatures, when the Native American traditions talk about things being underwater or in the sky realm or in the earth, they're talking about a being that straddles both the spirit realm and the physical realm.
So something that has a foot in both worlds.
And what's interesting about the Meshepeshu is in some descriptions, they look like a panther with the face of a man.
And to me, that's really fascinating that there are already traditions about such creatures.
In fact, here in Clickotet County, maybe about 20 minutes east of the store, there is a huge collection of petroglyphs, so images carved into the rocks.
One of them looks like a cat with wavy water lines underneath its head.
Interestingly, this particular petroglyph where the wavy water lines are, there's a crack running through the rocks.
And it looks as though whatever magic or spiritual tradition that bound that creature to the rock, when that rock cracked, it was released.
Those petroglyphs are in an area near a place called Horse Thief Lake, which has got like a desert mesa called Horse Thief Butte next to it.
Now, Horse Thief Butte looks like a classic desert mesa.
You know, it's got steep cliff walls and a flat top.
But what's really neat is when you get up close to it, it is riddled with a labyrinth of hidden passageways and canyons and amphitheaters.
There are petroglyphs on the walls in this place.
For centuries, people, Native Americans have had vision quests there.
You get to this place and it is profoundly powerful.
You get the sense of that when you're there.
And you can climb up on the top of this thing and see the Columbia River spanning in either direction for miles and miles.
I was up there one day.
It was actually right at dusk.
And I was looking down into Horse Thief Lake, which was probably about 500, 600 yards away.
And I saw an enormous creature swimming in the water down there.
I could tell its size because there were ducks and waterfowl on the water.
And it was larger than a man, but smaller than a car.
And it was sort of swimming and patrolling in the middle of this lake.
It would submerge for 10 or 15 minutes at a time and come back up.
And I was not close enough to really get a look at exactly what the creature was.
But it couldn't have been a bear or an elk or something like that.
And it couldn't have been a sturgeon because it was on the surface.
We do have enormous fish here in the Columbia River area.
The largest freshwater fish in history have been caught here, over 14 feet long.
But it clearly wasn't that either.
So at the time, we hadn't had any reports of the Clickatet Apecad.
And so that wasn't in my mind when I saw it.
But clearly, we have something unusual here.
Interestingly, those folks up at the Eseti Ranch, the Enlightened Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, they say that one of the races of ETs that they are in regular contact with are a race of feline humanoids who, in fact, when you look at their logo, they've got a big lion on their logo.
And so there is clearly, we may be dealing with a biological creature, or we may be dealing with something that does have some type of spiritual or paranormal connection.
So a lot of this seems to me.
And what do I know about anything sitting here in London in the baking heat?
Not much.
But it seems to me almost as if the peace and tranquility, the topography and the geology of that place seems to be arguably opening doors or portals or whatever you want to call them.
And maybe, just maybe, there is some kind of ability in that area to communicate with things that are there all the time, but we just don't see them.
But because of all of those things I've just mentioned, those doors open.
That's just a thought, because I'm thinking about that area.
It's an area that is very isolated and lonely.
It's an area with tremendous variation.
And of course, you mentioned Mount St. Helens, because that's a volcano.
It's been in the news.
I think you're onto something.
And your intuitive sense about the area is more profound than you know.
So this place, so the river itself has been running for 20 million years.
And so that's an incredibly powerful current of energy, right?
And that river now has 14 hydroelectric dams on it.
It produces 44% of all the hydroelectric power in the United States.
It's enough energy to power a city the size of Seattle seven times over.
And so, you know, you can talk about energy flows in sort of a woo-woo esoteric way, but quite literally, the energy of this river is being converted into an energy source that we understand, know, and utilize, right?
And every major tech company has a server farm out here, whether it's Google or Facebook or Amazon or Microsoft.
They all have enormous server farms out here because they are taking the energy from the river and converting it into electricity.
There are high power lines all over the place around here because of that.
And so there's that fundamental piece.
And when you're here in the gorge, you have the absolute sense.
Like if you can just sit and calm your mind for a moment anywhere in the wild areas, and they're not hard to get to.
I mean, they're minutes off the road.
You definitely feel this energy flowing through here.
There's this very distinct, you know, a sense of energy movement.
But that's not the end of the story.
About 15 million years ago, an enormous fissure opened in the earth near the Idaho-Washington border, which is on the east side of the state.
This fissure was 100 miles long, and trillions and trillions of tons of lava spewed out of it over the course of millions of years.
That lava was 10,000 times the amount of lava that's ever erupted out of Mount Kilauea, and it flowed 300 miles all the way to the ocean through the ancient Columbia River Gorge.
There were, they estimate over 300 different eruptive events.
If that lava was spread out evenly over the United States, it would have buried the United States 60 feet deep all the way across.
And so these lavas, sometimes those eruptive events were hundreds of thousands of years apart.
And each time the lava cooled, the magnetic grains in the rock were oriented towards the Earth's magnetic field at that time.
And so now we've got this layer cake of over 300 different layers, each of them with a different magnetic orientation to the rocks.
And so that creates a really unusual electromagnetic environment.
Then about two to three million years ago, the mountains started rising up.
Within 40 miles of my store, there are three strata volcanoes that are over a thousand feet tall, and they're all active.
We had earthquakes on Mount Hood, which is just 25 miles south of the store, just a month ago.
Of course, at Mount St. Helens, you mentioned, erupted in 1980.
And so you've got this very strong vertical energy literally pushing the earth up tens of thousands of feet.
And it's counter to the horizontal flow of the river.
And then 15,000 years ago, we had these great Ice Age floods.
You might have heard Graham Hancock or Randall Carlson talking about the channeled scab lands of eastern Washington.
These were floods, the largest floods ever recorded on Earth.
These are floods that started in Montana, washed across Washington State.
They estimate the volume of water was equal to all of the rivers on Earth combined times 10.
We're talking about floods that were 300 feet deep until they got to the gorge.
They had backed up at a place called Welula Gap, and then they rocketed down the gorge at 60 to 70 miles an hour, in some places over 1,000 feet deep, completely scouring all of the surface material off of the rocks.
And so those layer cakes of basalt, which is now formed and when it cooled, formed into columns, sort of like the Giants Causeway in the UK.
Those are now all exposed.
And so what we have out here is this really unusual energetic landscape.
You know, if you look at all of the magnetism out here and the flow of the energy of the river and the cataclysmic floods and how that ripped through and exposed all that, you know, for me, you know, with all of these traumas to the earth, the veil between worlds has been worn very, very thin out here.
And I think that it's our unique geology, topography, geography that is what's contributing to making this an area of such high paranormal activity.
And wouldn't it be fascinating to have, I don't have it, and maybe you don't have all of it, to have the expertise to understand and to begin to scientifically and systematically investigate that.
Just one quick point, and this is taking you down another path, but I think it's probably a path that you'll be familiar with.
I've just been looking, just before we started recording this, at missing person statistics, and I don't think I've scientifically crunched the data.
But if I'm right, if you look at a state like Florida, there is a certain number of missing people.
I think it's something like 1,300 or thereabouts at this moment, reported missing people.
Your state, where I'm assuming there will be significantly fewer people living than Florida, has about half the number of people missing in Florida.
Now that, and look, this may be a completely spurious connection to make and conclusion to draw, but it looks like statistically you have a high proportion of people who go missing there.
It's true.
And, you know, for us at the store, you know, we have asked folks to come in and file paranormal reports.
And when a person goes missing, the first thought is not this is a paranormal event, right?
It's, you know, there's been a murder or an accident or someone's been lost in the woods.
And so our store itself, we have had no missing person reports come to us.
So I don't have a lot to say about that simply because I think that there's a reporting anomaly based on what we're asking for and what people perceive happens when someone goes missing.
Now, I can't say that the Pacific Crest Trail, which is a trail which extends from Mexico to Canada, does run through the middle of the gorge.
It crosses at a place called the Bridge of the Gods, which is just a few miles from my house.
And over the years, people have gone missing in mysterious ways on the Pacific Crest Trail.
And so there is data about that.
Obviously, as a search and rescue EMT, I've been out on many missions where a person is lost and they're never found, unfortunately.
And so I can tell you that I don't have the expertise to speak on missing persons in relation to paranormal activity.
But it's certainly something that happens out here, without a doubt.
And I think it will be worth looking into because there are people like David Paul Leidas with his missing 411 books.
He talks about a lot of these things, and I think some of the cases that he's got in his books are within your state.
Sometimes people go missing, and for bizarre reasons, even if it's cold, extreme cold, they will discard their footwear and they will discard items of their clothing.
And those will be found, and maybe the person may be found or may never be found in many cases.
And it is utterly strange.
And I just kind of made that connection.
I suspect that you might find a few more of those cases there if indeed you were looking for them.
But I appreciate that people come into the store and they're reporting other things.
Yeah.
And, you know, what we have had in the store is folks reporting missing time.
And so they've gone into some of the caves nearby and thought they were gone for, you know, minutes or an hour or so and find they've been gone for hours.
So that to me is really fascinating.
You know, and I think it is related to that.
We've had reports of little people, so small humanoids, anywhere between 12 inches to 36 inches tall.
And so to me, that is very akin to some of the fairy lore that is more common in your stretch of the woods.
Very, very prevalent in the UK.
Yeah.
And what's interesting is how similar stories of UFO abductions and fairy abductions are, and how that also overlays with Native American traditions related to little people.
In fact, I just recently came across an ethnographic report where there were some Yakima Indians who are part of the Gorge culture, and they say that the petroglyphs were carved by little people, perfectly formed humans, but only 18 inches tall.
And so, you know, there may be some of that type of experience going on out here.
You know, I had talked about this idea that there is this extremely complicated, energetic landscape out here.
And there is a fellow named Dr. Michael Persinger who he was out in Ontario, an accredited professor at a university.
I'm forgetting it now.
And he had done studies with inducing electric fields around the brain, very small fields.
And these induced visions.
Basically, people were seeing things that are commonly reported in UFO reports or FAE reports, also religious experiences.
And what I think was happening there was that our senses are pretty much tuned to everyday normal reality.
And so we're perceiving the things that are, you know, part of the everyday regular world.
And under certain electromagnetic conditions or chemical conditions, your physical brain has the ability to shift its perceptive capabilities to see things that are in adjacent perceptive worlds.
And so what may be happening out here is that the electromagnetic landscape is affecting people in ways where they can perceive things that they normally can't.
And so that may be what's going on out here.
And also, there's not all of that maelstrom of stuff going on around you that I have here in London.
You know, so I talked about the Cascade Mountains.
80,000 square miles, that's roughly equivalent to the 10 smallest states in the U.S. combined.
When you look at the population density of those 10 smallest states, it's 4,000 to 5,000 people per square mile.
Out here in the Columbia River Gorge, in the thin ribbon of humanity that's along the river, we maybe have 10 people per square mile.
And you get outside of the river and a few roads that head into the wilderness, and you get to zero people per square mile.
There's an area out here, we call it Broke Lake Barrows.
It's an old 8,000-year-old lava flow.
Now it's like from Lord of the Rings Amon Wheel.
It's sort of like an impassable labyrinth of razor-sharp rocks.
It's an area the size of Manhattan, and there are no trails, you know, the island of Manhattan, no trails or roads within it, and no one lives there.
And, you know, in Manhattan, it's 70,000 people per square mile.
And this is a place that's, you know, maybe 20 minutes from the store.
And, you know, it's so easily conceivable that something could be in there.
And we would never, never even think to find it.
I mean, people have no conception of how rugged or how remote the wilderness gets out here.
And the idea that there's less human infrastructure interference, very real, very real, very astute observation.
And I think that will make an enormous difference.
If you haven't got the human clutter, the emotional clutter, and if you have a completely different geology, topography, etc., then that's going to, I would think, just as somebody who analyzes these things from the outside, but I'm no expert whatsoever.
I just talk to people.
I would think that would make an enormous difference.
I don't think I've ever quite felt the pull when doing these conversations to go and visit a place that you have given me to go and visit that place.
I've always been fascinated by the idea of Washington State, but now I'm intrigued to the point of wanting to come there.
It is astonishing.
Now, listen, there's one loose end in this conversation, and I know that I jumped in as you were starting to talk about the various categorizations of aerial phenomena there, and I apologize to my listener for doing that.
I just wanted to bring you back.
You were firing all kinds of great stuff at me, and I wanted to bring you back to the cryptozoology and then get to this.
So let's tie up that loose end before we're done.
You're telling me about the three different categorizations, Including what may be experimental aircraft.
I mean, what a great place to try secret stuff out.
But also, because you've got that Eseti place there, you know, also other really inexplicable, unexplainable stuff.
Yeah.
So we have had reports of, you know, transmedium aircraft, so craft flying through the air and then diving into the river itself and, you know, continuing on their journey that way.
In February, we got a picture of a tic-tac-shaped object over Mount Underwood, which is maybe three miles west of the store.
The picture was taken from 11 miles away.
They didn't realize they had captured it until they were looking at their pictures afterwards, and they sent it into us.
And so what's amazing is that on Underwood Mountain, we've had reports of glowing orbs.
One person said that they saw some type of craft in the sky.
Two red orbs descended into their field and started sort of leapfrogging their way towards the observer.
The observer then reported that they had like as though a switch had been thrown in them.
They were overwhelmed by fear and they went into their home and got their shotgun.
And when they came back out, the glowing orbs had disappeared.
So this is exactly under where a physical photograph was taken of some type of strange craft in the sky, tic-tac-shaped in this particular case.
We did some image analysis on it.
No wings or rotors.
The thing must have been at least 100 feet long, maybe 200 feet long from the scale of things.
Hard to tell in a photograph like that.
And so we have those kind of phenomenon where it seems like people are witnessing craft.
We've had several reports of triangular shaped vehicles, and they're always, in those cases, described as vehicles.
Then we've had also a lot of reports of glowing orbs.
And my wife and I have seen these ourselves.
We were driving down Highway 14, which is on the Washington side.
It's pretty much the highway that runs parallel to the river.
And there are a number of tunnels out there.
And we've had numerous reports of orbs in the sky.
But then we've also had reports of orbs at the ground level.
And these seem to be smaller and more like the will-o-the-wisp tradition.
People see orbs in the forests and in their orchards in the area as well.
And what's interesting, you know, like I said, there's not a lot of people that live here.
Probably in the gorge, there's maybe 70,000 people.
And so because of my interest in this, and, you know, we're very public about welcoming these stories and not ridiculing people, people now stop me on the street or in the grocery store and they tell me their stories.
And just the other day, I had a couple come up and tell me that they had seen UFOs near Mount Hood and their friend had seen the Apec and wanted to file a report on that.
So it's really fascinating to me how it's just a part of the culture out here.
And my mission is sort of to raise awareness and to reduce the stigma so that when people do have unusual experiences, they don't feel like they're alone, that there's a place that they can come talk to and people that will listen to them and take them seriously.
And really, that's been one of the most rewarding parts about this is that connection with folks who seeing the relief on their face when their story is believed.
It's very liberating.
Very rewarding, too, you know, to make that kind of human connection.
Okay, last point.
And you know, I mean, I come from a journalistic background and a lot of those people that I worked on news desks with, it used to drive me crazy because they were inbred skeptics.
It was inbred into them.
You know, it was bred into them that they were skeptical about anything, even if it had a load of evidence to back it up.
They didn't want to believe anything like this.
So that was what I was up against.
There will be people, and you must have heard from them, who would either suggest that you're putting us all on or that the people who come to you are putting you on.
What do you have to say to people who might suggest that?
I'm not interested in proving anything to people who don't want to believe.
And the thing of it is, is that, so first of all, when you think about science, science is always the last to know.
You're always going to get field reports first.
Before anything is researched and confirmed and believed, you're going to have people in the field reporting it.
You know, I talked about the incredible geology out here.
There is a guy named J. Harlan Bretz who in the 1920s had identified that enormous cataclysmic floods had washed across Washington state.
And the geologic academic community mercilessly ridiculed him.
They made fun of him.
They, you know, tarnished his reputation.
They were just cruel and incredibly mean-spirited in their skepticism, because in their minds, they couldn't conceive of floods.
They said, well, if you don't have a source for the water, there couldn't have been a flood.
He said, well, there's evidence, you know, these giant potholes and these, you know, these incredible features in the channel scablands, nothing could have done it except enormous volumes of water.
They said, well, you don't have a source for the water, so it can't have existed.
And for 80 years, he was, I should probably say 60 years, ridiculed, maligned, and then they finally found a source for the water.
And he eventually won the Penrose Medal, which is the U.S. Geologic Society's highest award.
And so what that tells me is that there are ingrained beliefs.
Science as an idea is great.
Science as a practice by humans is a social construct, right?
And so you're always going to find people, even the experts, who will disagree.
And science will be the last to know.
You look at a guy like Ben Franklin, who in 1750 is flying kites and lightning storms with wire strings and keys, he must have seemed like a total whack job to his neighbors.
But he uncovered the secrets that led to our understanding of electricity, which now powers our entire world.
When I talk about the paranormal, I'm talking about things that seem to defy the laws of nature as we currently understand them.
And when you have reports that date back from, you know, you look at cave paintings in Europe or carved figurines in Germany that are over 40,000 years old, and they are depicting impossible creatures, human-animal hybrids, things that can't possibly exist by the laws of biology as we currently understand them.
But yet they are part of the human record for as long as humans have been recording their thoughts.
And they exist on every continent and in every culture across time.
You can either say, well, the scientific, to me, like these folks that have that skeptical attitude or who are instantaneous deniers of any phenomenon, they're sort of like adolescent teenagers who think they know everything, right?
And to me, there's a bit of arrogance going on there.
And, you know, I think it's a much wiser and humble position to say science has taught us a lot about the physical world, but there may be things that we don't know yet.
And when you look at the vast evidence that indicates the model of the physical world is incomplete, it doesn't encompass all of the range of phenomenon that people experience, I would say that if you shut something down, well, there's many mysteries that humans haven't solved.
And, you know, for skeptics, it's understandable.
You want the world to be known.
You don't want to have to rebuild your model of how the world works just because some random person has.
It kind of needs to fit your paradigm, I think.
Yeah.
I'm thankful that the U.S. government is recognizing UFOs or UAPs as a phenomenon.
And once they did that, and the Pentagon actually set up teams to investigate these things on a legitimate basis, more and more pilots are coming out and saying that they've seen things.
So I think the first step is really reducing the stigma.
And that's part of what we're doing.
My businesses are successful.
I don't need to do this.
To me, I enjoy it.
And to anyone who's skeptical, you have a choice.
You can live in a world filled with wonder and beauty and joy and have a happy life, or you can shut things down and say there's no mystery left in the world.
And it's just a grind of atoms banging against atoms, and there's nothing more to it than that.
And James, the world becomes a very sad place if that's the case.
Sorry, you were saying that.
Yeah, it's just an impoverished worldview.
And to me, it's far more interesting to investigate these mysteries than to shut them down before you even begin.
I couldn't have summed that up, even if I tried all day and all night better myself.
Thank you so much, James.
I think the world needs to do some catching up with Washington State.
My listeners will no doubt concur, I suspect.
James, thank you so much.
It's really been my pleasure, Toward.
Thank you so much for having me.
Well, some pretty wild stories from a pretty dang wild place, Washington State.
My grateful thanks to James Shubski.
Please tell me what you thought about him by going to my website, theunexplained.tv, following the link and sending me an email from there.
And if you'd like to make a donation for the continued operation of The Unexplained and all of those 738, nearly 740 shows, you can do that too at the website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much for your moral support and in some cases where you've made a donation over the years, your financial support over these years.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
As they say, you know who you are.
More great guests here in the pipeline here at the boiling home of the unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
Above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection