CLASSICS (Bonus Episode): Sasquatch Bioacoustic Research!

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Big Food and Beyond with Cliff and Bulbo. These guys
are your favorites, so like to subscribe and raid it
lip story, short and rageous on Yesterday and listening, oh
watching always keep its watching. And now your host's Cliff

(00:28):
Berrickman and James Bubo Fay.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Hello Cliff, I've stuck from today's show though, because we
got a legend in the Bigfoot world. He goes with
a nomn deplore Monoga Hala, and he's the leading Sasquatch
vocalization analyst. He's Dave Ellis, who I go to, is
my main guy. It's his mentor, so that tells you something.

(00:52):
And he's been in it for a long time. He's
got the background to analyze this stuff professionally and his
opinion is very highly regarded.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
So welcome to Monoga Halo.

Speaker 4 (01:03):
Oh my god, Bogo, I'm blessing over here.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
That's another reason we do it on radio, man so
nobody can see us.

Speaker 4 (01:11):
Yeah, well, thank you very much. I'm really happy to
be here. And as you said, you know, Mononga Halo
is a Nome deployer. You can just call me Devin.
That's my first name.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
Okay, okay, I'll do that because honestly, I have a
hard time pronouncing Monoga Halo just because I haven't seen
it spelled enough, which is weird, because I'm aware of
your blog. I don't know if you saw the blog
or not, but I know that you had it for
a long time with all amazing research on it, so
I've seen it written a bunch just said, you know what,
I'm not from that side of the country, and it's
just a strange word for me. Although my wife has
it down. She goes, Oh, really, that's a place that's

(01:40):
a national forest out there or something, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah, we've been there.

Speaker 4 (01:44):
Yeah, you guys did a you did an episode there
at at blackwater Falls with Russ Jones.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Oh so it's in West Virginia, then.

Speaker 4 (01:54):
Yes it is, and that's Monoga Halo National Forest.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
When you're on the road as much as we were,
it's kind of at some point you just get driven
to a place you know, and then you don't know
where you are. You don't know how you got there
or how you're getting home. You just assume that you're
not your own responsibility for a while. But blackwater Falls
is a place where I'm I'm familiar with because there
are Sasquatch footprints from there, there's juvenile Sasquatch footprints from
that place, just like you would probably identify various locations

(02:20):
throughout the country based on vocalizations, because that's your main focus. Say, oh,
blackwater Falls, there's a Sasquatch print, a very well documented
one from there.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
And so Monoga Halo probably more people are familiar with
Monoga Halo River, which flows out of Ohio, but it's
big in Pennsylvania, so a lot of Pennsylvania people know
it monogall more for the.

Speaker 4 (02:39):
River, right, I think it flows right through Pittsburgh and
joins the Ohio River.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
That's why my wife knows. That's where she's from Pittsburgh,
and she says, you should call it the Monon, and
that is I guess that's meaningful for people ack in Pittsburgh.

Speaker 4 (02:52):
Yeah, in West Virginia, they actually pronounce it manga.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Hala, manga halah.

Speaker 5 (02:58):
Too many o wins.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
And therefore, yeah, too many ons. The word goes on
and on. Oh, Clare, thank you very much, I'm here
all hour. All right, Well let's jump into this.

Speaker 3 (03:13):
Stevin.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Now, obviously your main focus, or maybe not obviously but
your main focus is sasquatch vocalizations of a variety of sorts. Well,
what makes you uniquely qualified for this kind of analysis?

Speaker 5 (03:26):
Well, that's a good question.

Speaker 4 (03:27):
And originally I was not interested in Bigfoot at all,
other than as a casual observer. Any kid growing up
in the seventies and eighties saw shows on television and
I always thought, yeah, I wouldn't that be cool if
it was real? But I'd never wasted a lot of
time thinking about it. And then in about two thousand

(03:48):
and two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, I
was looking for an interesting new hobby and I'm just
happy to be searching through the internet, and I came
across recordings on the BFR website and I started listening
to those, and I realized, you know, I've got a
particular skill set that would allow me to dig deeper
into this audio. And that comes from my tenure in

(04:10):
the Air Force as a cryptological linguist, similar to Scott Neilson.
I was in the same career field as Scott. He
did a thirty year career in that field. I did
seven years as a crypto linguist. It's still a long time.
That's a lot of experience. Oh, thank you, And yeah,
I definitely spent thousands of hours with headphones on my ears.

Speaker 3 (04:35):
I'd get you a PhD in college seven.

Speaker 4 (04:38):
Years yeah, yeah, it would have been. And since then,
since getting interested in this type of study, you know,
I've spent many thousands more hours with the headphones on,
really just focused on these types of recordings and vocalizations.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
So in your a military job, well, I mean obviously
you have probably classified clearance and all that. There's lots
of things you can't tell us. But Scott Nelson told me, well,
I basically had ear goggles on, you know, ear earphones on,
and I listened and if there was any incoming signal,
then it was my job to record it and maybe
not translated, although I could do that, but like break

(05:15):
it down to this phonetic language I guess, and send
it straight to the state department where they dealt with it.
So he was like an incoming conduit or something for
unknown messages to see if there's any meaning in them.
Is that something similar to what you did?

Speaker 4 (05:31):
Yeah, that's exactly what I was doing. You know, we
have different targets, but I was doing the same thing
for a different target than what he was looking at,
and it was very much listen and write down what
you hear, break it down, analyze it and report it
to the people who were very interested in knowing what

(05:51):
was going on.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
Have you collaborated with Scott Nelson?

Speaker 2 (05:55):
I mean, like Cot there, if you have what have
you guys discovered that you have any same thoughts on
or hunches on things.

Speaker 5 (06:03):
I'm glad to ask.

Speaker 4 (06:03):
And yet Scott and I we didn't collaborate deeply on
his study of the Sierra sounds, but I reviewed his
work afterwards, and I reviewed his phonetic alphabet that he
developed as well, And in going through that, what he

(06:24):
did was an amazing analysis and an amazing accomplishment. And
I can recognize from my training and experience the methods
that he applied, and I can guarantee you they're one
hundred percent above board, very typical of the techniques that
would be used in our crypto linguistic field of studies.

(06:46):
So I have a lot of faith in his actual
transcription of those recordings. I've gone back and played them,
and I can hear what he has transcribed about with
about ninety similarity. Things can become a little subjective sometimes
when you're talking about linguistics, you know, does the vowel

(07:08):
sound more like an E or more like an a?
Those things compary, But in general his work was just excellent,
you know, above and beyond approach.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
Did you find anything like well, I guess you recognize
that female structures and all that, But did you, guys
come with any ideas of anything at all, of what
the meaning of anything was, or like repetitive things you
could identify?

Speaker 4 (07:31):
Not in the Sierra sounds. I did not study them
as closely as he did. I mean, he really dove
into it, and I kind of play the field a
little more broadly.

Speaker 5 (07:41):
But I would.

Speaker 4 (07:42):
Concur with him that the patterns that you see there
look to represent speech more so than just unintelligible tibberish.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
It's probably actually pretty hard to produce unintelligible gibberish, isn't it.

Speaker 5 (07:59):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (07:59):
Yeah, I mean, everything would be completely random, and he
was picking out repetitive patterns in there, which become you know, symbols,
logical signals that contain information and are used to communicate.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
Words basically words and in some form or an other
proto words, maybe that's words.

Speaker 4 (08:22):
Nonetheless, they have meaning between the speaker and the listener,
and we may not understand that meaning, but the two
parties in that communication do understand it.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Do you think new AI intelligence would Will that make
a difference or do you just have a starting point
for that a I'd even have a chance to work
on it.

Speaker 4 (08:41):
That's an interesting question. I think it would have I
would say yes to both questions. It would have an
impact with the right kind of algorithm, And yes, you
would need some kind of a starting point, a fundamental lexicon.
Now you can be again by trying to infer meaning,

(09:03):
and maybe you'd get it right. Scott pointed out that
in a couple of lines that he transcribed there he
thought that he heard pigeon English. Now I'm not going
to say I would go that far, but if he
was correct and he actually heard phrases like the word food,

(09:24):
that would begin to be a proto elevant of a
lexicon that could be used. And if you have an
AI type algorithm that can study this sort of these
audio signals and begin to build out the A lexicon,
you might be able to make some pretty rapid discoveries.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
Now you think that there's a like with pigeon English,
him hearing pigeon English. I'm assuming he's had a fair
bit of an experience with pigeon English. And a lot
of sounds sound the same, you know, a lot of words.
Maybe a word in one language might resemble some other
words in a different language. Not how much of an
element of like ural paradolia do you think could come

(10:07):
into play if one wasn't careful.

Speaker 4 (10:09):
A lot, frankly, And if you are not trained in
audio analysis and you're just a layman who's listening to audio,
that is your first go to. Your mind will try
to associate the sound you've just heard with something that
you know, and so that audio paradolia infects just about
everybody's interpretation of what they've heard, and so it's something

(10:33):
that we as practitioners have to work on very hard
to avoid. And you don't inject English into what you're
hearing or any other language you might know. Don't anthropomorphize
what you're listening to. You know, a mode how might
sound plaintive and sad to you. That doesn't mean it's

(10:56):
a big zag bigfoot out there in the worlders. It
could have a compl the different meaning.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
It kind of goes back to one of my mantras is,
don't confuse observations with interpretations. Yeah, I think we've all
heard various accounts in variety of languages, whether it's some
indigenous language or Russian or I don't know. There's probably
a handful of others as well, people saying that Sasquatches
were saying words in a language they understood. In fact,
I literally got a text about that today from a

(11:26):
native reservation up in Washington. And it's not to say
that the Sasquatch, if that was, if that indeed was
what was making the noise, didn't say that, or didn't
make a sound that sounded exactly like it, or imitated
or any number of things. But I think the again,
the danger is humans are always looking for patterns and things
that we recognize, which is what paradilia of course is

(11:50):
in some in some form at least, So it'd be
pretty hard to do be totally subjective.

Speaker 4 (11:57):
Now, there's something that makes it a little more complicated
in terms of our target subject here, and that is
we seem to have really rock solid evidence and observations
of a tendency to mimic sounds in the environment, and
that may even extend to mimicking the human voice. You

(12:18):
read these reports on the BFRO database where witnesses have
heard their child's name called from mountain, the forest, or
things like that. You mentioned David Ellis earlier he recorded
an example of a voice apparently repeating what he had
just said. He was in the forest with his dog, Kaya,

(12:41):
and he called to the dog, he said, come here, Kaya,
And within a second or two after that, you hear
a somewhat muffled phrase in the background, and it sounds
like come here, but it ends with Kaya very clearly,
and so it's it could be a little paradolia going
on there. It sounds like kamir Kaya is repeated back

(13:02):
at him.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
I've said this example before on the show, so I
won't spend too much time on it. But I did
get a report from I think Virginia. Some guy was
also walking his dog, and he always always calling his
dog to come here and that sort of thing, and
he saw a sasquatch in the reserve he was in.
But like a year or two after he saw the sasquatch,
he continued, of course walking his dog. One day he
was in there and he heard his own voice calling

(13:26):
for his own dog, which must have been horrifying, of course,
But again that's just a little tidbit, little suggestion, a
little bit more evidence that there are imitating noises, and
it's one of our favorite topics as of at least
put on my favorite topics as of late. The other
sounds that they do imitate, they always bring up card
doors slamming, because there's a lot of researchers that have

(13:46):
heard card doors slamming where there are no car doors.

Speaker 4 (13:49):
Well, I firmly believe that, and I have a couple
of experiences of my own or observations. One stand court me.
He sent me a clip years ago where he had
made a vocalization like a howl or something while he
was out squatching, and within seconds, an identical howl in

(14:12):
the same tone and timbre as his voice came back
at him from a bridgetop nearby. And I still have
the audio clip. It's really an amazing listen. Then several
years after that, I was in Pennsylvania at a place
called Colonel Deming Park with some other BFRO members and

(14:34):
we were just out squatching there and I made a
loud whoop, and I make a terrible whoop. It's raggedy
it sounds horrible, more like a whoops. Yeah, exactly, more
like a whoops. But I'm not afraid to do it.
And I got out there and I threw went out
and we stood and listened very quietly for thirty seconds.
And we were about a quarter mile from the trailhead

(14:57):
where we had left some of our party behind, and
I heard a whoop come back and it sounded just
like my voice. It was identical. In fact, I recorded it,
and we decided to split. It's like, okay, the guys
at the trailhead whipped at us, and you know, and
we went back and we got to talk to them
and they said, no, we never heard you make a whip,
and we haven't made any whoops. So something in the

(15:19):
forest had whipped back at me and used my voice
and imitated my own whoop as it did it.

Speaker 1 (15:28):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo.
We'll be right back after these messages. Well, let's go
back into the kind of history of your own personal analysis.
You said that you started out by kind of putting
your ears on vocalizations from the BFRO website, and you

(15:49):
probably spread out a little bit from there, but what
were some of your earlier the very beginning of this
quote unquote career. What was where were some of your
earlier focuses and perhaps even hypotheses that you developed at
the time, Whether they bore out the test of time
or not, maybe you think differently now, but tell us
about your early findings and thoughts on the matter.

Speaker 4 (16:12):
What I do when I go into a field of
research that I have no real background in, is I
try to do away with any predisposed ideas and just
go in with a blank slate, and I begin to
collect data, a mass data, and study it and look
for patterns to emerge from that data. That's the fundamentals

(16:35):
of information analysis and development. So I went into this
with no predisposition as to whether they existed or not.
I I've had a couple of weird occurrences in the
forest that could be classified as class BS, but I
never really even thought of sasquatch at the time. And

(16:57):
so when I got into the audio analysis, I thought, well,
let me just keep an open mind, listen to these
audio signals as well as many other audio signals, anything
I can get my hands on, and try to figure
out what is out there in the forest making noises.
And through doing that, obviously, I became very well versed
in the bar howl, very well versed in coyote vocalizations,

(17:22):
basically anything that vocalizes in North America, especially at nighttime settings.
I'm familiar with it and can recognize it.

Speaker 3 (17:30):
Do you see a seasonal pattern?

Speaker 4 (17:32):
Not a seasonal pattern, but I do see periodicity patterns,
such as when I set up a recording project, a
long term recording project in an area, I've seen patterns
of vocalizations occurring over one, two, three days and then
disappearing for two to three weeks, and then coming back

(17:54):
for one two three days and then disappearing for two
to three weeks. It's almost as if and these are
the same vocalizers. It's almost as if they're moving in
a circuit through the area, and they're only around my
microphones for a two or three day period at the most,
and then they're gone. That happens over and over again.

(18:14):
I kind of diverge you from cliff question about your
early stuff.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah, and you know a lot of I don't know
how long are our listener's attention span is either Bobes,
You're doing fine. You represent the public No, But Devin,
you were saying that, like you try to get rid
of all of your assumptions beforehand and dive into the
data and look for patterns. Did you find any patterns
in the early days that either you're still standing firm

(18:40):
on going yeah, that was right, or I always find
it more interesting in some ways to find out what
you think you had wrong. Are there any examples like that?

Speaker 4 (18:48):
Yeah, So here's an example of something that was wrong.
And I had to get together with Matt on this
one to get it off the record. For the longest
time the BFRO was hosting ever I believe is out
of Washington State, like Gray's Harbor or somewhere like that,
and it was a series of these ascending shrieks screams, yes, yes,

(19:12):
and everybody was dubbing it, oh, that's a bigfoot, and
I listened to that, and those screams were unique and
inconsistent with the other things that I was studying that
had a higher probability of being bigfoot. And after a
number of years we were able to capture or somebody

(19:32):
else was able to capture those screams in association with
coyote vocalisations.

Speaker 3 (19:37):
Tomberg.

Speaker 5 (19:38):
Yeah, and then Tom.

Speaker 4 (19:39):
Was able to actually observe a coyote making the vocalization,
and so then we could rule that one safely as No,
that was a revenue.

Speaker 5 (19:46):
It's it's just a coyote.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
Some people say, oh, that was a failure, but they
don't understand what science is all about.

Speaker 4 (19:52):
That's actually a victory exactly. You've ruled something out. No,
don't waste your time listening to this.

Speaker 5 (19:58):
We know now that this is a coyote vocalization.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, because it's ok it's okay to be wrong about something,
but it's not okay to continue being wrong about that
thing when faced with evidence to the contrary. You know,
the rock solid evans that is absolutely a coyote. And
if you're still saying no, no, it's a big thing because
I want it to be it, say, oh man, what
are you doing.

Speaker 5 (20:21):
That's not science, that's wishful thinking.

Speaker 4 (20:24):
So building from that, you know, and really it is
all about amassing data and then wading through it looking
for patterns, repeatable patterns that you can use to rule
something in as a good possibility and rule something out. Now,
from the beginning, you have to start with a fundamental
seed of Okay, what do we want to believe or

(20:45):
what do we believe is the highest probability of being
a sasquatch vocalization. And so at the beginning of my analysis,
I started with two seed recordings. The first was the
Sierra Sounds recordings. I had to assume that these are okay,
these are authentic, not hoaxed, this is real. And the
second was Matt's Ohio Hall recording. Those are the two

(21:09):
seeds of the lexicon and the basis of my years
of analysis. Building off of those two seeds, I was
able to recognize patterns coming in over the months and
years from other recordings that mapped back to those two
seed recordings or mapped onto other recordings that had connections.

(21:32):
And so through that analysis you begin to build this
lexicon of connectivity. You'll see signals in those seed recordings
reappearing and introducing a new sound or signal, and then
you'll see that new sounder signal reappearing, and other recordings
that come in.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
So so in the beginning days, when you're when you're
going through this stuff and you found some things that
you still agree with and still and then perhaps don't
agree with anymore. How long ago was that? How long
have you been digging into the bigfoot thing? Now?

Speaker 4 (22:03):
Oh, I've been pretty much NonStop since two thousand and eight.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
It's a long time.

Speaker 4 (22:08):
And now I've slowed down a bit over the last
few years because well, in the first four to five years,
I was listening to everything, and I was digging very
deep into audio signals that are so faint that most
people simply can't hear them. But with my training, I
know how to really get down close to the sound floor,

(22:28):
listen through the static, and pick out these signals, especially
using a spectrogram which helps you visualize and recognize these signals.
But after four to five years of that, I became
rather jaded in terms of, Okay, I recognize what's going
to be at the noise floor level, and I'm just
not going to waste my time listening to such faint signals.

(22:50):
I raised the bar, and if it's not a reasonably
audible signal, I don't spend a lot of time looking
at it other than to recognize them.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
You basically you're separating the whet from the chaft in
the same sort of way that like a lot of
us have to say that's a blob squatch, whether or
not it has a big foot in it or not.
I don't know. Maybe it does, but that is a
blob squatch. So you have like audio blob squatches essentially exactly.

Speaker 4 (23:14):
And I got to that point because i'd spent Okay,
I've stared at enough blobs of audio and I can differentiate. Yeah,
this is this is probably a potentially good signal, but
it's just so faint that it's really not wor worth
wasting time over. There's much better audio to study out there.

(23:35):
And if I played this audio for anybody else, they
wouldn't hear a thing, So by waste their time and mine.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
You know, speaking of audio, you send us some clips
that you thought were pretty significant, and I listened to those.
I'm sure Cliff listened to them, and those are awesome.
I mean they're just some of those like no one
can deny. I mean, you can take a big skeleuch.
There's no way they could explain it. Besides, you know,
some kind of you know, pokes. If you attributed to

(24:02):
an animal in North America, it's inexplicable if you don't
go with the Sasquatch.

Speaker 4 (24:06):
Agreed, And the reason why I chose those clips is
because there are several one they show connectivity between each other.
There are examples of what I was talking about earlier,
beginning with the prototype seed signals and building a lexicon
from them from those seeds. They're also higher quality audio recordings,

(24:30):
and that's one of the biggest problems with audio is
most people get really terrible recordings. These are almost what
I call consumer grade, which means I could put them
into a YouTube video and people would be able to
hear them and agree or disagree with what they were hearing.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
Well, let's listen to a couple of them.

Speaker 2 (24:48):
And these really good recorders are going to listen to
right now. Were they done with professional recording equipments, just
like with a little cheap and ninety dollars handheld or
a cell phoned You.

Speaker 4 (24:57):
Know, it's a variety. Some of them are definitely cell
phone clips. Others were done with consumer grade not or
maybe even prosumer grade audio recorders, but not super high
end studio type equipment, nothing like that. I'd say the
most expensive recorder here might have been a couple of
hundred dollars with.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
The most which is one of the great things about
trying to get audio is because you can do it
relatively cheaply. You know, thermal imagers are very expensive. Night
vision is very expensive, even like good high quality video
cameras are very expensive. But you can spend one hundred
bucks or one hundred and fifty bucks and get a
totally suitable, totally fine audio recorder and you don't have
to actually be so close to the big for you

(25:38):
have a better chance of getting it because you're casting.
As money Maker says, casting a net of ears. I
encourage everybody to it's fun. I encourage everybody to go
get a one hundred twenty dollars audio recorder and every
time you're in the woods, have that thing running because
you just never know what is going to happen.

Speaker 5 (25:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (25:54):
And another pro tip, return to your recorder on before
you step out of your car.

Speaker 3 (25:59):
Yeah is yep.

Speaker 4 (26:01):
So many times I've stepped out and immediately had a
wood knock as I get out of my car.

Speaker 5 (26:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (26:09):
In fact, this first clip I'll play for you is
a perfect example of that. This is in twenty ten,
Kirk Brandenburg and a few folks were in Morton, Washington,
and they had just pulled up to the campsite and
were jumping out of their vehicles to go squat, and
fortunately Kirk turned on his recorder just as he was
getting out and he captured this. This is a series

(26:31):
of moanhows with a couple of important secondary signals in
it that I'll point out to you.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
Okay, so let's listen to that clip right now. So

(27:06):
let me explain that clip a little bit.

Speaker 4 (27:08):
There at the beginning, there's an initial vocal before the howl,
and it got stepped on by people speaking Kirk group
or speaking. I was able to clean out a lot
of their speech to bring that vocal out, and you
hear that digitization in the recording. It's an artifact of
the cleaning. What's unique about this the triple moanhau clip,

(27:31):
there's one, there's three of them, and that's a recurring pattern.
If you go back and take a look at the
Ohio House, there's three mode House, and in many other
instances of Moonhou's recorded since then, we have three moanous.
So the modehowl triplet is a readily recognizable and recurring
pattern in these mohow recordings. Now that's not to say

(27:56):
you can't have a single, and once in a while
you'll have a double, but more often than not, you'll
get three moon hows, and then following it, more than
likely there will be a subtle whoop or two or
three in response to the moe.

Speaker 3 (28:13):
House from different individuals. Correct.

Speaker 4 (28:16):
Yes, So the mode howler is, you know, let's suppose
it's a leader and it's reaching out to the klan
around it, and what we're hearing our whoop responses to
that original mode howl vocalization. So this pattern occurs over

(28:39):
and over consistently. Sometimes there are wood knocks integrated into
the mote house, or there are response woodnocks after the
mote house, uh, integrated with the whoops or what have you.
But in almost all cases, and this is a good
authenticator of potential saasquats vocalizations, is you'll have the main

(29:00):
actor and then in the background you'll have these secondary
actors responding. And it's to me, in my analysis, it's
those secondary actors and those responses that are even more
important to authenticating the vocalization than the main vocalization itself.
That is to say, if I don't hear secondary responders,

(29:22):
I have a tough time validating or authenticating this as
potentially a sasquatch vocalization. It could easily be a human
out there. Who's to make three moon howls in a row?

Speaker 1 (29:32):
Were there responders in the Ohio.

Speaker 4 (29:35):
How h Yes, a very subtle one there was.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
Do you know what part like which seconds?

Speaker 4 (29:41):
I don't have it up in front of me, but
if you listen to the three howles in the Ohio,
I believe it's between the first and the second howl.
There's a low moan, like a ooh kind of moan
that I believe is a responder responding to the first.

Speaker 1 (29:57):
Hall interesting, and this is one of those examples that
I love so much that you're studying one thing, in
this case vocalizations. I do the same thing with footprints
all the time. But by studying one aspect of the
bigfoot thing big foot phenomenon, you learn a little bit
about the behaviors of the animals themselves. Because I've said

(30:18):
it before, if bigfoots are real is no longer an
interesting question for me. It's how they're real, like how
they go about their business and do their thing. And
by learning about their social structure, like one vocalizer with
some responders, that tells us something, that tells us something
about the way they live. And that's what I think
is the coolest part about studying these animals exactly.

Speaker 4 (30:40):
There's a lot you could potentially learn through the study
of their communications about how they live and move in
groups and stay in touch with each other in densely
forested environments where they may not be able to see
each other as they're moving.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
What would you like to play for us next? Because
this is great, It's like Christmas or something.

Speaker 5 (31:03):
Sure, So you guys.

Speaker 4 (31:05):
Will notice that I put a number in front of
each of the clips so that we could play.

Speaker 5 (31:09):
Them in order.

Speaker 4 (31:10):
That was zero one. Now what we can do is
we can take a look at zero two and I'll
point out some similarities between track one and track two
before we go on, let me just read some a
couple of notes that I wanted to point out about
track one. So there's the three sequential moon howls, just
like the Ohio. How there's an integrated wooden knock after

(31:31):
the first howl. If you play it back, you'll hear
that wood knock. Notice in the howls that there's a
sustained flat pitch. That's a characteristic characteristic we like to
see in these type of candidate vocals. And then towards
the end, we get the two response vocals, those whoops
at the end, and those responses are very important authenticators. Now,

(31:53):
key points here is that if these are authentic, these
types of signals should be reoccurring in other recordings that
we study that come into us over the years. And
I can tell you these patterns do reoccur fairly frequently
for us. We had many examples of them. So those
are the key points about that first recording. Now, the

(32:13):
second recording I'll play for you is from Isabella County
in Michigan, and there's a lengthy BFRO report number thirty
two nine to eighty one that was put together by
Jim Sherman, BFRO investigator up in Michigan.

Speaker 5 (32:34):
Great guy.

Speaker 4 (32:35):
He worked with a witness in Isabella County back in
twenty eleven twenty twelve timeframe, and this clip comes from
twenty twelve. And I'll just let you go ahead and
play it and then we'll talk about what.

Speaker 5 (32:48):
We're here and there.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
Yeah, we filmed an episode there. We didn't identify it
because the people that wanted were in anonymous with that
where these records were.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
We were actually there.

Speaker 4 (32:57):
Yeah, I know they've since moved away from that. Look,
they no longer live there, and I don't think Jim
gets back up there to research that area much anymore.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
All Right, well, let's take a listen to this next
clip from Michigan.

Speaker 3 (33:08):
Here, one of the best ever.

Speaker 4 (33:50):
Oh we've got better than that, I believe me, really, Yes, yeah, definitely,
But you're right, those are some of the very best ever.

Speaker 1 (33:57):
Well, I got asked, now, I mean some of those
sounded to me me honestly, like canine. What is the
differentiators between something like a wolf, which we know are
president Michigan and a sasquatch making a sound that because
it sounds a little canine ish?

Speaker 4 (34:11):
Right, Yes, great question, and it goes back to the
point I was making earlier about those secondary signals. When
you dig into canine vocalizations, you recognize that they have
certain tambres or tones in their voice. There are certain
sounds they can make and sounds they cannot make. There

(34:33):
are execution changes, let's call it a pitch change, that
they're incapable of making that you will hear in these clips.
And now, in this particular recording, I've trimmed out so
much of the additional audio that came with this from
this evening that you don't hear the whoops and the
wood knox and all of that stuff. I just took

(34:53):
it out and just focused on these particular three vocals
to point out some important points. But that is a
great question. You have to look at the bigger picture
and understand how a canine vocalizes versus the differences with
these types of vocalizations.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
But for someone like yourself, you can listen to this
and say, now it may sound like on superficially canine,
but there are things in here that canines are unable
to do exactly.

Speaker 4 (35:21):
Yeah, and I'll point one of those out before we proceed.
I will say that in this second howl, there is
a dog barking over it, but that's that's clearly a dog.
So in the first, the first howl there, what you
hear is starts out sounding like a war You know,
this loud, roaring voice. That that's a broad band vocalization.

(35:43):
It's vocalizing across a wide range of frequencies. Is very
visible in the spectrogram, but it's vocalizing across a wide
range of frequencies. And then a few seconds into its vocalization,
it tightens the pitch on its call, and it narrows
down to a very narrow bandwidth vocalization, which is the

(36:06):
long flat howl that you hear executing. That's not typical
of canines. First of all, the broad band roar is
very unusual for a canine.

Speaker 5 (36:19):
You might hear that in a lion.

Speaker 4 (36:21):
And then but then the transition from that broad band
to narrow band howl. I don't have any examples of
that occurring in knines, and I don't know how many
K nine vocals I've listened to over the years. So
that's a very unique characteristic, and that characteristic appears again
and again in other recordings. The second thing I'd point

(36:43):
out about this is the long flat pitch we know
from recordings capture. But I believe his name is Steve Johnson.
This is back in the early two thousands, I want
to say, up in Washington or Oregon. The fellow is
out there with a cassette recorder and he and his
friends were able to capture some incredibly long flat howls,

(37:05):
and that flat pitch is a pretty important indicator, and
we see that time and again in these types of howls.
You'll also notice the way these holls execute it's an
ooh phoneme, so it's like through most of the howl.
But as you'll see in the next couple of clips,

(37:28):
that phoneme can change to an ah, and that change
is another important indicator. And then at the end of
that clip, what you heard are a couple of broadband
shrieks as I call them shrieks anyway, these are unusual
to hear anywhere out in the forest. And there's a

(37:51):
few more example of these that we'll hear later on,
and they are unique, uniquely associated with these suspect vocalizations.
They nicknamed them falsetto shrieks or a cry, and you'll
hear this. It's an interesting type of response vocal that
we capture from time to time.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
We'll be right back after these messages. Let's take a
listen to the third vocalization you have. It looks like
it's from Minnesota, Is that correct?

Speaker 5 (38:30):
Right now?

Speaker 4 (38:32):
This is just a tiny fraction what is originally a
twenty three minute long recording play. The whole thing will
be our free Bird Dark Star, and it'll blow your
mind when you hear it the full clip. So this
comes from Saint Louis County, Minnesota again in twenty twelve.
Twenty twelve is a great year for audio captured by

(38:54):
Mike Palachek. Now, Mike left a dead drop recorder in
the field going night, and it's early spring or maybe
March or April, and the snow is melting, so there's
drops of water coming off the trees, and you can
hear some of that from time to time. What he
captured is after my analysis. My interpretation is a group

(39:16):
of four potential sasquatchs approaching the region the area of
his recorder, two of them moving very close to the recorder,
probably within one or two hundred yards of the recorder,
and howling very loudly before they move off into the distance,
and it takes them about twenty three minutes to first

(39:37):
be heard un to the point where they're last heard
as they move away. There are also two other sasquatchs
in the distance, maybe a quarter mile away. I don't
know who are responding, and they are calling back and
forth to each other as they move through the night.
This was recorded around four am, four to five am.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
All right, Well, let's take a listen to it then oh.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
Crazy?

Speaker 5 (40:28):
Is that crazy or what?

Speaker 3 (40:30):
That's cool? Yeah, you're my favorite DJ, just bringing out
the hits.

Speaker 4 (40:37):
Yeah, you know, I'll play for a plane ticket, you know,
just fly me out there.

Speaker 2 (40:42):
You have to like coup in your fist like one
of those big DJs, like just rocking to it.

Speaker 4 (40:47):
Yeah, gooding set of turntables, going old school. Okay, so
let me talk about what we just heard there again.
You'll notice there's that long, flat, sustained pitch, but the
something different in these You notice how they end. They
go from ooh to ah right at the end ooh ah.

(41:08):
So that's a phone eme shift from an oo phone
in to an a phony. Canines don't do that, okay. Now,
canines can make ooze and canines can make oz, but
they do them in standalone calls. Like you'll hear coyotes
making this ah like screaming sound, but they don't start
with an ooh and then go to an awe. Or

(41:29):
you'll hear them make an ooh kind of an ooh
like a howl, but it's always distinctly with a canid tone.
You can hear that canine muzzle in their voice. They
vocalize from their nose and from their muzzle. These the
timbre the tone of these are very different from canine.

(41:51):
So you've got the ooh to a phone em shift.
If you pay attention or you play that loop back again,
you'll notice, especially in the first how they're a very
brassy tone to it. It almost sounds like someone has
gotten a trombone or a trumpet out or something. It
hit a nice brassy note on it. That's actually the
voice of this vocalizer that is making that brassy tone.

(42:15):
That's a pretty important indicator, and we like to hear that.
We hear it time and again in other vocalizations, that
good brassy tamber. We call it a metallic pitch. Sometimes.
The third howl in there, if you listen closely to that,
you'll recognize it's different from the two preceding hows. It's
more of a moan howl in execution and in tone.

(42:39):
It sounds like the Ohio hows or like the triple
moan howl out of Morgan Washington. But in that case
it's just a single moaning howl. And then you've got
that crazy vocalization at the end. Now, if you've ever
heard a canine vocalize like that. I want you to
send me the clip because that's just that's so unique

(43:00):
and so unusual. The closest we come to hearing things
like that is out of apes, and I don't know
of any apes in Minnesota out in the forest at
four or five am. But that unique vocalization is just
a great capture. Now that brings up an interesting new

(43:23):
feature that we look for. This is also part of
the lexicon Sasquat's vocalizations. While we start to see these
recurring patterns, we also recognize that they do some really crazy,
freaky sounding vocalizations from time to time, just far beyond
anything that you hear any other animal doing, and they

(43:46):
involve things like these human like shrieks that we heard
in the last clip, or this other of the previous clip,
or this crazy sounding loopy loop whoop or whatever that
thing was. They're just so unusual, and that's actually a
characteristic that we love it when we can capture that,

(44:08):
and we do hear that quite often.

Speaker 3 (44:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
So in this fourth clup that says status lass is
that Statslaus National Forces was that from the strains.

Speaker 4 (44:17):
Cliff will have to tell us where this one came
from because he said.

Speaker 5 (44:20):
It to me years ago.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
Yeah, this is actually my first vocalization ever recorded. It
was on I was out on expedition with the Strains.
It was a BFRO trip. Actually, Bob Strain was there
and Kathy of course, and this is before they're married,
so she was still Kathy Mosquitz and Tommy Ameron was there.
All sorts of people were there. Really, it was only
a little bit after that trip. I met you on actually, Bobo. Yeah,

(44:44):
I met you of course in Humbles And this is
just a few weeks or a month or two later,
I think at the most. And I had a mini
disc recorder out at the time with an omnidirectional microphone,
and I put it about one hundred and twenty one
hundred and fifty yards away from where camp was, and
it wasn't even dark at the time. It was actually
just before dusk. It was late late in the afternoon

(45:07):
or early evening at least. It was still pretty much
daylight though. And of course I put it on the
wrong side of camp because the vocalization came from the
opposite side of camp, which is why you hear talking
over the vocalization, because people were between it and the recorder.

Speaker 4 (45:24):
And let me give you a little setup for this
before I play it. The talking I was able to
minimize through some editing software, so you'll hear some of
that digital artifact at the beginning of the clip. But
what I want you to listen for in this one.
You'll recall from the last clip that I described the
oo to a phoneme transition. See if you can hear

(45:47):
something similar in this clip.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
Okay, let's take a listen. Then. Yeah, basically sounds like
a dude yelling kind of you know, yeah yeah.

Speaker 4 (46:06):
But what's important it's similarity to similarity to these other clips.
You've got that flat, long howl with an ooh phonyme
that transitions in a pitch break to an a phonyme
at the end.

Speaker 5 (46:22):
So that ooh.

Speaker 4 (46:23):
Ah combination is becoming very important. In fact, it's become
a very significant indicator and authenticator. Also in this clip,
if you play it back and you listen closely, there
are two secondary signals that help to authenticate this. Right
in the middle of the ooh part of the howl,

(46:43):
there's a whoop in the background. It's subtle, but if
you use a spectrogram you can see the whoop as
you're playing the audio, and then after the howl ends,
after the awe portion of the howel ends two seconds later,
there's a deep percussion which has a strong possibility of
being a wood knock. It's deep in the stereo field,

(47:05):
it's not part of your camping group, it's not close
to the microphone. It's often the distance in the stereo field,
so that has a good chance of being a wood knock.

Speaker 1 (47:15):
I had no idea those things are in there, and
I've been sent on this vocalization since I got it.

Speaker 4 (47:19):
Well, this is a good example of where you need
some skill with audio analysis software to clean up audio
and bring out these subtle vocalizations that are being stepped
on by conversation and things like that. Before anybody jumps
to the conclusion that hey, you're manipulating the audio and

(47:40):
creating these artifacts and things like that, I woulday that
to rest. We have a very cautious approach to cleaning audio.
We know exactly what type of noise to eliminate. We
have a very prescribed methodology for eliminating that noise. We

(48:03):
use that methodology consistently from clip to clip, and when
we do something such as minimizing voices. We're very clear
about it and upfront, so if anything emerges after the
cleaning of the audio, we pointed out, just as we
have here, the whoop and the wood knock are in

(48:24):
there in the original audio. They're just very hard to
hear if you don't clean some of the noise out
of the way first.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
All right, well, let's go on to the fitth recording
that you have for us. So this recording, these are
called the Bruno Howls.

Speaker 4 (48:38):
They came out in twenty thirteen from the town of Bruno.

Speaker 5 (48:44):
West Virginia.

Speaker 4 (48:46):
You'll hear a howl in progress at the beginning of this,
but as this plays out, you should hear characteristics of
the howl that we've already heard in other house and
again this is an example of relating these signals from
one recording location to another recorded location, separated by thousands
of miles and by years of time. And towards the

(49:10):
end of this clip, there's a very unique vocalization in here.
I referenced it earlier. I called it a shriek or
a cry. I've actually looped that cry in here three
times just so your ear can hear it.

Speaker 6 (49:22):
So let's go ahead and we can play that one.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
Wow. It was obviously raining too.

Speaker 4 (49:53):
Right, Yeah, it was wet conditions, And so the lady
who recorded this on her cellphone was standing on her
front por which you hear, you know, water coming off
a roof.

Speaker 5 (50:03):
And pouring into a puddle.

Speaker 4 (50:05):
So what we have going on there is because she
was with her cell phone, there was already a howl
in progress when she got the recording started, and so
we hear the tail end of that howl at the
very beginning of the clip. What we hear after that
are two more howls. There's a rooster in the background.
The cruise a couple of times, and then at the

(50:25):
very end, I've looped that descending cry vocalist like ah,
that vocal is it's that falsetto shriek that I mentioned earlier,
or the cry vocal that's a responder, that's a second
vocalizer responding to whatever is making these long I think

(50:47):
he use the word mournful, but these long, mournful sounding howls.

Speaker 3 (50:51):
It sounds like a crow's like sound of response to me.

Speaker 4 (50:55):
Yeah, yeah, if you hear just one example, I did
understand that.

Speaker 2 (51:01):
I don't think it's a crow. I'm just saying that
I've heard that sound where it sounds like a crow.

Speaker 4 (51:05):
Yeah, And I've heard other examples of this in different
recordings where it's even more emphatically like a shriek or
a cry, and it can be a little unnerving.

Speaker 5 (51:18):
To listen to it.

Speaker 4 (51:20):
Now, about these howls, what I'll point out the similarities
you should see in these are again, this howl starts
with a broad band howl, you know that roar in
the beginning, narrows down to that tight, narrow band oo
phoney howl, and it does that twice. Both howls have
that pattern of execution. So we've already heard it up above.

(51:44):
We're hearing it again in Bruno, West Virginia in twenty thirteen,
so recurring pattern. And then we get the shriek of
the falsetto shriek or the cry at the end, which
is a responder. And again it's the secondary vocals that
are very important to showing us that this is a

(52:05):
form of communication. It's a transmitter or a receiver, and
then the receiver is responding to the original transmitter.

Speaker 1 (52:13):
It kind of does away with this whole idea that
Sasquatches are largely individual solitary animals.

Speaker 5 (52:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (52:19):
Well, if you study communications theory, the whole purpose of
communications is to transmit information. If you're a loader in
the woods, you don't need to communicate. You keep your
mouth shut.

Speaker 1 (52:33):
Are they out there talking to themselves? I doubt it.

Speaker 4 (52:35):
No, that would be dangerous. I mean, think about the
way they live. They're cryptic. They want to stay unseen.
Why bring attention to yourself by vocalizing needlessly?

Speaker 3 (52:46):
I guess the finalment we go is the Kentucky sounds.

Speaker 4 (52:50):
I wanted to end with this one because it kind
of ties together a lot of what we've seen in
all of these other clips. This is much more complex.
It has some of the unique weirdness that we've come
to expect from potential sasquatch localizations. You'll hear the flat pitches.
You're going to hear pitch breaks in here, which are

(53:12):
strongly correlated with potential sasquatch vocals. There are whoops in here,
but they're different kind of whoops. They're like a newer
type of whoop. There are falsetto shrieks at the very end,
which are very unusual, and you may be able to
In the first long howl, there are three integrated wood knocks,

(53:33):
so the howler is possibly making these three wood knocks
at the same time, or it could be somebody else
making the wood knocks at the same time as the
first howl. But let's go ahead and play this and
you should be able to recognize things in this one
recording that we've heard in many of the preceding recordings,
and then pick up a few new signals and keep

(53:55):
your ears open for the whistles.

Speaker 1 (54:36):
It's a lot going on in that one, and the
audio quality isn't as good as the other ones. I
guess it's further away from the source. Was there a
lot of background noise in that one as well?

Speaker 4 (54:45):
Yeah, this was a really challenging recording to work with.
This was a paranormal group and this comes from the
year twenty ten in Kentucky. This paranormal group went out
into the forest where there's an old abandoned house. They're
trying to pick up ghost signals or paranormal activity of
that sort, and they took the recording into the house,

(55:06):
left it in the kitchen, I guess, on a counter
in the kitchen, and now fortunately in the house most
of the windows were smashed out, and then they walked
back out onto the front porch. The digital sound effect
that you heard in there is where I had to
scrub their voices out because they were talking about the Bigfoot.
How while the howl was occurring, they could hear it,

(55:27):
but the recorder was able to pick up enough of
these vocalizations through the window that through a little amplification
and noise filtering, I get cleaned it out. Unfortunately, the
signals are a little over amplified, so you hear some
clipping in there. It's not the greatest quality, but in
terms of complexity of signals in it, it's a really important,

(55:48):
valuable recording.

Speaker 1 (55:50):
I've got everything in the kitchen sink in that one. Yeah,
stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Bogo will be right back after these message.

Speaker 4 (56:00):
Is the way this would starts. There's a vocalizer that
makes two whoops, and they're fairly typical. They start low,
they ascend, but then they end with these three beats
or three notes like whoop, and that's just an unusual woop.

(56:22):
It's the only time that's ever been recorded, but it
does it twice and it's a fairly soft voice. You
might speculate it to juvenile, who knows. But then shortly
after that, this loud howling vocalizer with a long, flat
pitch kicks off, and in that first howl is where
we also get three deep knocks. Hard to hear, but

(56:47):
you can see them on the spectrogram and once you
see them, you can loop that section and they're much
easier to hear, and so they're integrated into the howl. Apparently,
the second howl kicks off early flat. This one's descending
a little bit, and that's when the if you listen
to the original recorder, you can hear one of the

(57:08):
speakers out on the front porch say that sounds like
a bigfoot. Second howl ends, there's a slight pause, and
then something else responds with three woots. It goes wood wood.
It's a deep sound, but they're in there, and just
before the third howl begins, you'll hear these three woots.
So the third howl kicks off long flat pitch, but

(57:30):
towards the end it gives us a pitch break. Pitch
breaks are really hard for canines to do. Canines can
slide their voice up and down in pitch, but a
clean pitch break. It's even difficult for many humans to
go from one pitch to a higher or lower pitch
without any break of air or time in between those

(57:52):
two pitches. Is really challenging. So it takes a trained
voice to do something like that.

Speaker 2 (57:57):
How often do you get that circular breathing, you know
like those and monks style inhale and excel and make
vocalizations on both of them.

Speaker 4 (58:04):
We don't really get that. I don't have any examples
that we've Yeah, there's been a theory of something like
that going on, but while I've studied, you know, Mongolian
chant and things like that, just to learn how to
recognize it, that's a that's a biphonic vocalization, I don't

(58:25):
have any solid examples of it, and I'll be honest,
I've got audio submitted from at least two hundred and
fifty people over the last fourteen years.

Speaker 1 (58:34):
What's the longest howl that you've personally heard a recording of,
or you know, in real life if you've heard it,
I've heard I've heard these stories of ten to twenty
second or more howls.

Speaker 4 (58:45):
Among the recordings. I wish I can remember his first
named Johnson. I want to say, Steve Johnson. He has
a clip in there and he only got part of
the howl, I believe. But the longest howl in his
recording was about fourteen.

Speaker 1 (59:01):
Seconds, which is an awfully long time.

Speaker 5 (59:04):
Yes, very long.

Speaker 4 (59:06):
And you'll see most of these howls are longer than
what a human would typically be capable of doing. A
well trained human who's done this kind of audio analysis
could teach themselves to mimic some of this stuff. But
most people don't know this, and I'm certainly not advertising it.
In fact, we're giving away a whole lot of secrets here.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
Nobody listens to the podcast.

Speaker 4 (59:27):
You're safe, Yeah, I mean, there's always the potential that
people are going to study vocalizations like this and do
their best to go out there and try to hoax
and make a fool out of those bigfoot researchers.

Speaker 3 (59:38):
I filled Dave Ellis.

Speaker 2 (59:39):
He said he was listening one time he thought for
sure it was a big foot, and then it turned
out to be me.

Speaker 1 (59:44):
There's a fine line there anyway, Bobs, you.

Speaker 5 (59:47):
Have a good monow.

Speaker 3 (59:48):
Thank you, That's what she said.

Speaker 4 (59:50):
But there are ways that we had to differentiate between
humans mimicking potential a bigfoot and an actual potential bigfoot.

Speaker 5 (01:00:00):
There's at least two levels.

Speaker 4 (01:00:01):
There's the audio capture level, where we can spot evidences
of hoaxes just in the way the thing is recorded,
and then there's the actual execution of the vocal itself.
I've never heard of human make anything better than a
convincing moan hell or a whoop. And even in the

(01:00:23):
moan hell, I can spot things that tell me, no,
that's a human, that's that's not a that's not a sasquatch.

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
I run across this a lot because people say that,
you know, all these aspects about footprints are out there,
written in books. Doctor Meldrem's written about them, there's these
papers that are published. Who's to say these aren't fake? Well,
just well, when you have so many of the characteristics
together in one place, especially in repeated circumstances, whether it's
a track line or number of vocalizations out of the

(01:00:52):
same area, it just becomes such a diminishing possibility that
these would all be fake. And something that you point
out early that well, if these are real animals doing
these things and their sasquatches, we should find many if
not all of the same characteristics no matter where they're
recorded throughout the country, and the same does go with
footprint casts. You mentioned, of course, Scott Nelson's work on

(01:01:14):
the chatter. Have you done a lot of work with
that sort of chatter? I'm sure, I'm not sure, but
I would imagine that the Sierra Sounds represent probably the
longest unbroken string of that sort of thing. But do
you have other examples from other places that maybe resemble
that or better, or not better but longer, or what's
your experience with chatter?

Speaker 5 (01:01:34):
Another great question.

Speaker 4 (01:01:35):
I'm glad you asked that one, so that the Sierra
Sounds are probably the best and longest example of audio
that could potentially be interpreted as speech and transcribe that way.
There are other examples that have come in over the years,
but all of them are shorter, of almost all of

(01:01:58):
them are not of such good quality, definitely not a
similar duration. The real challenge with getting chatter is it's
not allowed long distance vocalization like these howls and knocks
and moms and whoops. It's an up close personal type
of vocalization, and you have to have your microphone close

(01:02:21):
enough to be able to capture that. That's exceedingly rare
to get those types of captures. I think over the years,
I've probably had a half dozen clips that were close
enough to pick up something like potential chatter. One of
them came from again Washington State. I forget the fella's

(01:02:42):
name at the moment, but he was sleeping in a
shed and had his recorder going, and he captured what
sounded like two females speaking a guttural foreign language right
outside of his shed. And that's probably one of the
bests I've heard since the Cira sounds. But yeah, speech

(01:03:05):
like vocals are very hard to find just because they're
you got to be close to capture that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:03:12):
Are you completely convin this is going to put you
on the spot now? Are you completely convinced sasquatches are
real at this point based on the vocalization studies that
you've done.

Speaker 4 (01:03:21):
Yes, it was the vocalizations more than any other evidence
you could show me. You know, photographs, videos just not
convincing enough because I don't have the skill set to
break them down and analyze them. But I can for
myself analyze this audio, and I can go out into
the field alone and experience the same vocalizations. I can

(01:03:46):
induce these vocalization responses from the forest. I was doing
this in twenty ten. As I got into this, I realized, Okay,
I have to prove to myself whether these things are
really out.

Speaker 5 (01:03:58):
There or not.

Speaker 4 (01:04:00):
So I went to the most remote part of western
Virginia in Monongahela forest that I could find had been
there many times since I was a kid, and I
camped solo. Nobody knew I was there, nobody within miles
of my location. And I walked around and I made
wood knocks, no vocals, just wood knocks as the sun
was going down, and about ninety minutes later, my recorder

(01:04:22):
picked up five wood knocks responding or just coming out
of the forest. And when I heard that, I realized, Okay,
there's got to be something out there making these knocks.
And I continued doing that solo camping trips on my
own for about a year year and a half, and
I got to where I would go out and I

(01:04:43):
would make a whoop in a knock because it's a
signal pattern that I'd come to recognize in vocals in recordings,
and I would go out, I would make a whoop
in a knock and listen for three seconds. I'm sorry,
for three minutes. I'd keep my e recorder going obviously
the whole time. If I heard nothing, i'd repeat the

(01:05:04):
whoop in the knock, and normally by the third time
I did the whoop in the knock, I would get
a response.

Speaker 3 (01:05:11):
How long a gap in between? You said you'd wait.

Speaker 4 (01:05:14):
About three minutes, stand real silently, listen for three minutes.
I totally freaked myself out, and I kind of stopped
doing this when I went to a great location.

Speaker 5 (01:05:27):
In Virginia.

Speaker 4 (01:05:29):
It's kind of a natural trap that deer passed through,
and you could just picture a sasquat sitting on the
ridge watching these deer come through this funnel. And I
walked into the funnel as the sun was going down,
and by the time I made my first whoop knock,
waited three minutes, made my second whipnock, waited three minutes,
and I made my third whoop knock, and immediately something

(01:05:53):
just yelled chattered back at me out of the woods,
almost like shut the hell up, but it was it
was not a human voice at all. It was just
something yelling at me in the distance, and it made
a wood knock as well, and it just scared the
crap out of me. So I had to hike out

(01:06:14):
in the dark on my own. But that was the
best response I had gotten up to that point.

Speaker 3 (01:06:19):
Did you encounter it on your hike out at all?

Speaker 5 (01:06:22):
No?

Speaker 4 (01:06:22):
No, Fortunately it was not between my truck and I.
It was deeper into the forest that I had already hiked,
and so I was able to hike away from it.

Speaker 3 (01:06:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:33):
You don't go knocking unless you think the door might open,
so careful that you do.

Speaker 3 (01:06:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:06:37):
Yeah, Well that was when I was still trying to
prove to myself that there was something out there, and
that was the night that did it for me. It's like, Okay,
I not only heard the knock, I heard the voice
as well, and I just trudge on with the research.
I make amazing interesting discoveries along the way and share
it with the folks who are doing similar good work

(01:06:58):
stand and als and you know, several others out there,
and I enjoy it. You know, it's a great pastime
and I love sharing it with people who are similarly
interested in the subject.

Speaker 3 (01:07:12):
That's great, and we're going to have you on the
next two episodes straight.

Speaker 1 (01:07:16):
Yeah, they're not busy for the next six or seven months,
but it's.

Speaker 5 (01:07:19):
Been a great conversation. Guys.

Speaker 1 (01:07:20):
Yeah, this has been yet another in the seemingly endless
line of really good podcasts we've been doing lately with
fantastic guests. Devin, thank you so much for coming on
and telling us what you have discovered for yourself by
doing studies in your area of expertise on sasquatch vocalizations.
I found it very enlightening. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 5 (01:07:42):
Thank you, Cliff.

Speaker 4 (01:07:43):
I've really enjoyed the conversation, and I just encourage others
who if you feel like you have any interest in
this subject, any angle that could help you understand this
mystery that.

Speaker 5 (01:07:55):
We're all pursuing and trying to learn about.

Speaker 4 (01:07:57):
Get engaged. Don't worry about what others have to say,
use your talents, go out there and prove it to yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:08:02):
Well, thanks so much, Devin, and I hope everyone out
there listening learned as much as we did. This is
very enlightening, and you got an open door invite to
come back anytime you got something ready for us.

Speaker 4 (01:08:12):
Well, thank you, guys. I really enjoyed myself. I look
forward to coming back.

Speaker 1 (01:08:15):
You take it easy man.

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
Thanks.

Speaker 1 (01:08:17):
That was fantastic, Bobo. And by the way, people who
are listening, Devin has a website. He has a blog
that you can listen to a lot of these vocalizations
on and read about his analysis of various Sasquatch vocalizations.
It is a Sasquatch Bioacoustic dot blogspot dot com. And
if you can that's too crazy of a title or whatever,

(01:08:39):
just look in the show notes. There is a link
in the show notes you can go straight to the
website and check out what Devin's been up to.

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
Yeah, that's a great webs His blog is awesome. Check
it out and he'll be back. So keep tuning in
to Bigfooting down with Fifth and Bobo. Thanks so much
for listening, and until next week, keep it squatchy.

Speaker 1 (01:09:00):
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond.
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(01:09:23):
hashtag Bigfoot and Beyond.