A Flash of Beauty: Dr. Jeff Meldrum Interview

[Music] my name is Dr Jeff meldam I'm a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University in Pocatello Idaho there are competing hypothesis about what Sasquatch is what its nature is and I've approached this subject from the perspective of an anthropologist an anatomist biologist and so the evidence that impresses me that uh suggests the existence of this creature points to it being a large bipedal primate uh it's particularly interesting to me due to my interest in the evolution of human bipedalism and sharing that habit with another species of primate living alongside us is a a unique and interesting opportunity of comparison and contrast of that adaptation the uh conventions of scientific classification of of uh animal species depends upon the possession of a type specimen a uh a specimen a physical specimen that establishes a set of diagnostic characteristics that distinguishes that particular species in the absence of that there really is no basis for scientific acknowledgement of the existence of a of a creature we simply have anecdote innuendo and and suggestive evidence I think the fact that they have remained unrecognized or un established as a species simply rests on their Rarity and other aspects of their reported Behavior their nocturnal they're solitary they're far ranging they're very generalized those are characteristics of any animal species that render it very difficult to uh study let alone uh trap or uh obtain a specimen in the water well for example there there is a lot of convergence a lot of overlap in the apparent uh bioclimatic factors that determine the niche of a Sasquatch or a bear another large omnivore that has similar habitat requirements and yet uh it's interesting to compare the population densities the estimated population densities of course we don't know what the numbers of Sasquatch are precisely but we can infer based on a number of hints of Clues that such as the fact that they're only seen as solitary individuals their tracks are of solitary individuals um an animal of a given size would need a certain amount of area a certain amount of terrain to um subsist that that says a lot a large um animal that has no natural predators that is the top of its food chain will uh live out its life barring accident or disease and and die a natural death animals that die natural death secrete themselves off into some out- ofthe way place and uh their remains are rarely found one of my predecessors Dr Grover CR from Washington State University used to routinely ask his audiences how many of you have ever seen uh bear skeletons in the wild have ever stumbled upon a skull of a bear and in all his asking of that question not once did he have a person uh identify themselves as having found a bear I've I've asked that a few times here and there over the years not routinely but in all of my asking I've only had three instances of be skulls found by outdoorsmen or people hiking in the woods and so it just speaks to the the unlikelihood of finding remains in a of animals out in nature nature has a way of recycling those resources in a very efficient in very uh prompt manner I'm often asked what's the most compelling evidence from my perspective and expertise as a student of human and primate Locomotion it's the footprint evidence that that Drew me in and and likewise many of my scientific uh predecessors Dr Grover CR Dr John Napier it was likewise the the composite data set uh of the footprints that uh compelled them to take this uh matter seriously something as Dr Napier said something is leaving Footprints and we should be able to distinguish between uh hoaxes and misidentifications and The Real McCoy I find that hoaxes are really few and far between and most of the chaff that I wiow through is um in the form of of overimaginative inter interpretation misidentification of of say Bear Tracks or simply uh interpreting a pot hole or a divot or scuff that is vaguely footprint shaped as an actual footprint so uh yeah I think the footprints by far are uh uh stand or beg to be accounted for as compelling evidence so in what direction is the search for Sasquatch going where where are new technologies taken it's you know for a long time we've relied on uh the standbys uh like U camera traps and uh uh broadcasting vocalizations in Hope of uh attracting a reply uh more only more recently uh were things like uh uh night vision and thermal imaging more available to the general public and those have been important tools but still they are limited by our ability our our Mobility or lack of Mobility let's put it that way we have a limited sphere of interaction on foot and especially those researchers that limit themselves to nighttime foray uh very restricted uh field of vision and and uh sphere of interaction with the surroundings I think the next step given the Rarity the presumed Rarity of these creatures with very low population densities and and wide ranging um habits and behaviors I think the next step uh will be technologies that allow us to extend our reach so I see that as uh on on one prong um aerial surveillance with the combination of of Fleer and and uh night vision and now even more interesting I think is the potential for liar uh the radar because the challenge of using thermal imaging has been the inability to uh penetrate the canopy and detect Wildlife beneath the cover of uh of the forest and Shrubbery whereas lar can do that there's recently been some studies that have actually um shown that lar can differentiate large mammals beneath the canopy the uh other approach which is also casting the net more broadly taking in the the effects of the movement of animals through a wider range of the environment is uh environmental DNA the ability to test soil and water samples even air samples in some instances and um and uh do a kind of a shotgun approach to make a a laundry list of all of the animals of that community that have contributed DNA in some form so I think those are the two directions that uh will take the search around the next corner and uh hopefully produce some positive results the Patterson gimin film clearly stands as the most compelling photographic evidence that we have to date even in this age of of uh iPhones and uh digital cameras and so forth it it still has set the mark So High uh and not only do we have the film but we have a remarkable track record associated with it the cast that Roger Patterson uh executed himself on on the day of the filming but also some uh number of days later Bob titmas a researcher from Canada came to the scene and uh made a series of 10 footprint casts that provided a remarkable record and a few examples additional examples have come to light of individuals who visit visited the site subsequently and they've turned up in in various circumstances but combining those two makes a really compelling if I just had the footprint evidence alone I would be uh largely convinced that of The credibility of this film but having the uh image of the track maker combined with the tracks as an anatomist as a functional morphologist it is it it is so compelling I'm as convinced as I can be short of having stood there on The Sandbar on that that afternoon and witnessed the event myself um it uh this is a piece of evidence that stands up under remarkable rigor that um couldn't have possibly anticipated the technologies that we are applying to it today and also anticipated numerous aspects of of what is now conventional wisdom in anthropology which in 19 in the 1960s uh actually uh cont contradicted cut across the grain of what was considered Orthodoxy or the existing paradigms that that aspect in itself fascinates me you know you could allow Roger to have maybe guessed about one thing uh and gotten it right just or or simply by pure coincidence but a half a dozen different items that line up perfectly with what we now uh Envision an early bipedal hominin to look like that's Pat I mean she epitomizes our current concepts of that stage of hominin evolution and in that regard it's a remarkable uh piece of evidence so in 1967 the concepts of anthropology were were were rather different and uh uh the human Niche was SE to be rather exclusive evolution of uh the human lineage was seen as a single file March one species being succeeded by another we now have thrown that concept out the window as the discovery of hominins has has really burgeoned we have this remarkably bushy tree with multiple species coexisting uh across the landscape for millions of years and in fact many of these lineages have persisted until much more recently than than ever suspected before uh one of those could certainly be Sasquatch and uh so we find that the the paleontological and anthropological context of the possibility of something like Sasquatch actually finds uh finds context it it finds it it accommodates the notion much more readily now than it did back in in the early late 60s the public impression of Patty's behavior is somewhat constrained by a very selected edit that iconic stretch where she's walking essentially perpendicular to Roger's line of sight and looks back gives that look back that that has produced that iconic classic image and uh and some have interpreted that as being a rather nonchalant Retreat well first of all be in mind this is a creature that uh by my estimate was right around 7et t tall in between 700 and 800 lb in weight it's a massive muscular powerful creature that really fares nothing in the woods uh and depending on how much experience she may have had with human uh would have no concept of what a rifle was for example um it's interesting that when you look at the entire film at the beginning the portions that rarely are are shown because of the uh gyration of the camera as Roger ran across the creek approaching it at that point she was walking rather nonchalantly she her arms are pretty much hanging at her side she's rather stooped forward and she's uh retreating in a fairly casual manner as Roger ran across the creek he uh his his Mount had fallen on its side he extricated the camera and ran across the creek swiftly um instructing Bob to cover him Bob subsequently rode right across the creek behind him and dismounted from his horse pulling his rifle from the Scabbard with the intent of self-defense about that point once they crossed the creek Patty's Behavior changed and then her stride uh picked up pace her arms began swinging I mean she was really kind of reaching as she was swinging and um even Bob commented at how rap rapidly this massive creature covered the ground and and put put distance between her and them so uh I think her behavior was uh was quite natural some have even looked at the film and commented that that they're struck by the fact that she might have been um leading them away from another Sasquatch say there is a suggestion that her Footprints were the same were were those of a set of tracks that were found a month earlier in which she was in company with two other smaller Sasquatch a 13inch footprint and an 11inch footprint given the fact that she's a female obviously a female it's it's not out of the realm of possibility that she had dependent young with her but they weren't immediately evident or weren't present right there on the SandBar at least uh no investigation subsequently turned up any sign of additional Sasquatch but one can imagine that she may be uh leading them in the opposite direction of u a couple of youngsters sequestered the out of sight one can one can argue uh both sides of the point of the significance of the breasts of Patty I mean that establishing her as a female it's interesting I I remember um uh Al Hodson was the uh owner and operator of the meranti in Willow Creek and he was one of the first people that Roger and Bob uh saw Upon returning from the field after filming this and I remember one comment I actually interviewed Al Hodson at length about his Recollections of that of that moment and and I remember the way he said the way he described Roger uh um noting and he goes he said something like and you know Al it was a female I mean it was like he was surprised they they obviously noticed the anatomy and the significance of it and uh and made note of that now The Devil's Advocate would turn around or the skeptic would say Roger was influenced by um the descriptions made by uh um Albert Osman and William Ro two stories that have become somewhat Classics in uh in Sasquatch lore and especially of Canadian Sasquatch lore um William row uh who has a really stunning uh account of an of an observation of a young female Sasquatch and uh he described the uh prominent breasts that uh uh confirmed to him that it was was indeed a female Albert Osman made comments and he you know he was obviously observant and made uh note of the female um Sasquatch breasts and uh made made a comment that she would have benefited from some of those modern uh um ladies underwear that are available out there it was just I mean funny only in the sense of his noting it's not only the presence of the breasts but the anatomy the appearance of the breasts so the skeptic would look at the influence of that and then also argue that you know the uh estimates of Sasquatch size varied up to you know nine or 10 feet in height and so if you were looking for a human subject to fill a costume it would be easier to fill a female costume that would maybe only be about 7 feet tall if even then in 19 67 you could find someone just off the street that was 7 feet tall and had the other bodily Dimensions that that Patty uh evidently exhibits um I you know all of those things I think fall to the Wayside from my perspective uh the convergence of Patty's appearance on the description the anecdotal descriptions of of William R and Albert Osman just confirms the the uh consistency and continuity of the phenomenon and uh the suggestion that you'd work around the challenge of finding an oversized human male subject by portraying a female falls to the Wayside when you scrutinize the specifics of of what would have to be a a fur suit um and someone to fill that fursuit which is just virtually impossible possible uh especially given the uh Technologies available in 1967 so that's a convoluted description of uh of what often is an off-the-cuff sort of knee-jerk skeptical response but uh but I mean it just shows the answers to these questions are difficult to put into a single sentence soundbite these are are complex questions that don't have simple answers and they but yet they stand up under the scrutiny of and specificity of of a detailed analysis I I'm frequently Asked should I be afraid should I be worried about Sasquatch being out in the woods with me and um generally my answer is no I mean we don't have headlines of Sasquatch killing people uh eating people and yet uh uh the TP typical Sasquatch encounter is often Sasquatch sees witness witness sees Sasquatch or vice versa and they go in opposite directions having said that it's interesting to note that many Native American and other uh indigenous peoples around the world where wild men have been described be they Sasquatch like or neander tall like or whatever but especially the those that are are quite um consistent with the Sasquatch um two themes that are very common throughout are abduction and cannibalism I that is consuming humans and it's interesting the consistency of that the Native Americans around here in my home state of of Idaho one of the names uh roughly translates to the Eater of children and uh at first blush one thinks well these are just so stories they're just Boogeyman stories stories that are told around the campfire so that uh uh kids behave themselves and are in before their curfew well um not too long ago uh an acquaintance of mine who worked for the Peace Corps in Uganda uh ended up as a U game warden working for the park service in Uganda and one of their tasks was they were working very closely with chimpanzees they were trying to develop an ecotourism industry uh to General generate revenue for the conservation efforts and an uh an incident occurred which he had been previously reluctant to talk about because of its potential chilling effect on potential tourists and that is they had a woman who was working in the fields had parked her infant under a bush nearby in the shade only to have a large chimpanzee come by and snatch the baby and make off with it now this was during a period of extreme drought when resources were limited and the animals were very stressed but the field hands dropped the what they were doing and and pursued but weren't able to U retrieve the child before it had been um killed and partially consumed it turned out that over a seven-month period there were 12 instances of infants and toddlers having been abducted by chimpanzees and eaten so suddenly now a just so story told in the American Inner Mountain West which is uh assumed to be a boogeyman story turns out to have a parallel a precedent in the natural behavior of great apes so isn't that interesting you know it's uh in the case of the U story that I'm most intimately familiar with in the Idaho NADA region it goes back a couple of generations and during a very severe winter it was reported that the crying of a baby apparently attracted uh saitz as it was called reached underneath the Tepe border and snatched the child and made off with it and so from that well that from that point it was called saitz the Eater of children and uh I've had students who have told me um from the tribe who have shared with me um stories uh their Granny's would shake their fingers and say when you're coming home from your friend's house after dark don't whistle well you're you or you will attract the suitz and they'll snatch you away we won't know what's happened to you what will be the consequences once science officially recognizes the existence of Sasquatch you know will Hunters run out and and and shoot them up uh will uh you know will it close down all the forests uh as we set aside reserves to protect the Sasquatch you know we'll be the mother mother of all spotted owls as some have suggested um I don't know what the consequences will be I mean as as from a scientific perspective we can simply kind of roll back the uh uh time uh and uh examine the implications of the consequences of the uh discovery of the gorilla and in fact it's quite interesting if you if you substitute the the word Sasquatch for gorilla in some of the narratives of the early explorers and discoverers describers of especially the mountain gorilla which it was thought there couldn't be anything else there couldn't be another ape out there it sounds remarkably like the uh unfolding history of the uh recognition of Sasquatch the discovery and recognition of Sasquatch whether it's officially authoritatively recognized by science or not so it won't overturn all theories of human evolution it won't rewrite the textbooks it will add a a very significant chapter I think and uh it will be a bit of there will be a bit of Reckoning how could something like this have existed right under our noses um there'll certainly be that implication as to the economic and social and spiritual you know each of those has its own sort of set of parameters uh I think it's no more threatening to anyone's religious beliefs or Faith than than the discovery of for example the gorilla another manlike creature I mean it's that if it turns out to have other aspects to its character if it is has any paranormal qualities or other worldly connections or entanglements then certainly those implications will will have to be sorted out but my the the simpler explanation at this point that the data justifies is is uh is that it's a biological species it's just an unrecognized very rare and Elusive species of primate as to the nature and character of Sasquatch I approach the subject as a scientist specifically as an anthropologist and biologist and so uh in step with the methods of science the application of of parsimony which compels us to deal with the the simpler most more straightforward explanation first before elaborating I have yet to experience personally anything that falls outside of the realm of what I would expect for a biological species for a large primate you know one of my colleagues the late Dr John Bender Nagle did a marvelous job in in his treatment uh in his book entitled North America's great ape the Sasquatch uh not being a primatologist he still navigated that literature very deafly and showed the remarkable parallels and consistencies in the anatomies and behaviors of Sasquatch with that of known great apes and and those continue to converge as we as we discover new things for example tradition has always uh uh attributed to Sasquatch a taste for fish uh you know a preference for salmon and um and yet no known great ape has been described as eating fish well then there was a an episode on a television program about these uh orangutans that were being uh repatriated and their little island habitat was inundated by a flood which stranded some catfish in the in the puddles and they promptly came down and scooped up these catfish and were eating them and I went to every book of on my shelf I Googled the literature and there's not one as far as I've been able to determine previously not one printed uh reference to fish being uh within the diet of a great ape mentioned this to one of my colleagues who's worked with bonobos in zier and he's oh yeah the bonobos will go into the shallows and they'll her the little uh fingerlings you know up into the shallows and just scoop handfuls of them up onto the beach and then pick them up and eat them I said why hasn't anyone published this you know so it's interesting that there's you know piver the eating the eating of fish is another feature that sasquat shares in common with other great apes now I've I'm uh happy to be proven wrong I mean I have no vested interest in one hypothesis over another but I've been invited into the field by individuals who claim based on their personal subjective experiences to have witnessed orbs and uh you know Vanishing cloaking Sasquatch and um Sasquatch stepping through portals and so forth and yet when I attend those events nothing happens so either I'm a wet blanket or I have a bad Spirit about me or uh I've been accused of of being motivated out of money and greed and ego uh I mean you name it it's it's been uh it's been uh hurled at me so um until those phenomenon can be documented they remain anecdotal they remain personal experiences we saw it with um Don's uh presentation where you can be standing right next to someone and and they turn their camera supposedly if we were to believe his story they turn their camera and here's a a person standing there that they can't see and the other person can't see but the camera can see somehow so I mean you know how do you uh how do you document that and and subject it to uh repetitive uh experimentation

Channel: A Flash Of Beauty: Bigfoot Revealed

Views: 113,530

Keywords: Sasquatch, Bigfoot, Footprint analysis, Primate locomotion, Physical anthropology, Evolutionary primatology, Idaho State University, Field research, Eyewitness testimonies, A Flash of Beauty: Bigfoot Revealed, Scientific approach, Myth vs. fact, Elusive creatures, Evidence and findings, Cryptid research, North American folklore, Dr. Jeff Meldrum, Cryptozoology, YouTube exclusive, Bigfoot debate., bigfoot evidence, bigfoot is real, bigfoot proof, patterson gimlin film

Id: MMtm21DZv6E

Length: 30min 18sec (1818 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023