Bigfoot: Best Evidence

[Music] hello and thank you for watching this presentation bigfoot best evidence i'm laurel westendorf i'm part of the community relations team at the deschutes public library every month we explore a theme through our programming and this month's theme is mystery and it's safe to say bigfoot falls within that category our presenter is cliff barickman bigfoot specialist and cryptozoologist cliff has been doing bigfoot field research since 1994 going on expeditions in 46 states and five continents he was an evidence analyst on the animal planet's tv show finding bigfoot among work on other documentaries and he and his wife own and are curators of the north american bigfoot center in boring oregon which features the largest public collection of bigfoot evidence in the pacific northwest thank you so much cliff for sharing the best evidence available for sasquatch as a real species thank you very much for having me i love opportunities like this to speak to people um in sort of an educational format about sasquatches because sasquatches are in fact real animals i mean i've seen one myself they are real they conform to all the biological rules um and paradigms that we now know of other species there's nothing all that extraordinary about them except that they're large and have somehow remained not discovered shall we say although i think there's a strong argument that the discovery process is currently underway so let's jump right into the presentation because i hear a lot of people who just aren't familiar with the evidence or aren't big footer or bigfoot nerds like myself saying well where's the evidence how come we don't have this where why don't people see them all sorts of why this why that which is reasonable of course because the we live in an age of um misinformation and there's so much garbage out there on television and youtube and everywhere podcasts there's just so much misinformation about sasquatch in particular so i feel it's my job as an educator to put the good stuff out so let me uh share my screen here and i will start my presentation so there we go the name of this uh presentation is bigfoot the evidence because again people are not aware of the evidence and there's so much evidence and it is internally congruent and almost predictable in some ways of what would be expected of a species like this so let's first start off by talking about the difference between evidence and proof okay um basically evidence is something that kind of supports what you think you know like the scientific process which we'll get into in a minute um is a series of steps and evidence supports your hypothesis which we'll talk about in a minute whereas proof is the end-all be-all that is it there is no other way around it this is proof and for us the evidence comes in all sorts of forms and that's what we'll be speaking about today but proof no matter how you cut it will essentially end up being a dead sasquatch now some other evidence might lead to that for example dna evidence if some species like homodenos were discovered solely through dna homodenosovin if you didn't know is an extinct human relative and they were discovered solely through dna analysis turns out we had a bone or two but we misidentified those and it turns out they're homodenisovans but still that led to more parts of the body being discovered later in sasquatches if we do get good dna evidence and we're working on that now but if we do get good dna evidence that's not going to prove it to anybody beyond the dna experts then the scientists will go out and get a dead one i don't advocate for that i'm not a hunter i don't shoot even deer and certainly shooting probably what our closest living relative on the planet would be an upsetting thing for me so i'm not going to go do that i'm not a gun guy i've got a couple farms but i'm no means a gun guy i live in oregon i know some gun guys i'm not one of them um so that's not going to be me i'm just going to educate the public and hope in hopes to soften the blow of discovery but i mentioned the science that science is a process and here are the steps of science um science isn't this body of knowledge that's guarded by academics and these ivory towers trying to mislead us and sway political agendas and stuff that's not what science is politicians sway political agendas not scientists real scientists they start they ask questions that's essentially what they do they ask questions and then they try to answer their question that answer is a hypothesis okay and then then what they do is they go out and gather evidence to see if the evidence supports their hypothesis or not does the evidence say that my answer is right if the answer is yes they try to go out and gather even more evidence to continue doing that but if the answer is no then what they do is they go back and they change their answer they change their hypothesis and then they gather more evidence to see if that answer is right that's what science is really science at the end of the day is kind of like a verb it's something you do so then really boil it down scientists and even amateur scientists like myself are always trying to prove yourself wrong and if you can prove yourself wrong that's a victory and you get to learn something else and you get to change your answer change your model and try to go gather more evidence to see if you can still prove yourself wrong if if you can't prove yourself wrong then maybe you're right but you always continue trying to prove yourself wrong so let's apply this to the sasquatch stuff and we're going to do we're going to do that by starting with some facts i have four points here and all of these are indisputable facts these are not opinions in any way the first one for more than 400 years people have reported seeing large hair covered man-like animals in the wilderness areas of north america this is true there are historical accounts these this is a true statement now mind you the word in there that makes it true is have reported seeing large hair-covered man-like animals i didn't say they saw them i i this fact is they have said they saw them maybe they're lying maybe they're hallucinating that doesn't matter the fact here is that people have reported them the second bullet point says sightings of these animals continue today real or not these reports are often made by people people of unimpeachable character okay today today is uh wednesday what is it thursday monday someone saw one of these things i was on an investigation all day long on monday five o'clock in the morning a gentleman was driving at highway 26 right past the tollgate campground and saw one on the side of the road i went out there spent four or five hours out there it is a fact that people still report seeing these things today okay monday isn't today i get it sue me you get the idea bullet pro bullet point number three for over 70 years people have been finding photographing and casting sets of very large human-shaped tracks most are discovered by chance in remote areas these tracks continue to be found to this day okay i found tracks on monday it's not today but you get the idea this is a fact that people report finding these things people aren't casting these people are photographing them this is a fact and the last one the cultural histories of many i'm going to change that to all native american and first nations people include stories and beliefs about non-human quote unquote people of the wild many of these descriptions very striking resemblance to the hairy man-like creatures reported today yeah every native tribe every indigenous group in north america that lives in suitable habitat has stories of giant hair covered people-like thing things living in the woods outside of town you know that's a fact so being an amateur scientist we're going to ask questions about this what in the world's going on what could be behind these facts that i'm faced with in my hypothesis my answer to that is that there is a real biological animal responsible [Music] so we're going to go gather evidence now and there's all sorts of evidence we could take a look at now mind you none of these are proof none of these are going to put the nail in the coffin so to speak which is probably not the right thing to say considering i already told you a dead one is going to be necessary but you get there's a figure of speech so native accounts historical and settler accounts contemporary witnesses sound recordings photographs these are all things that like a biologist would be looking for essentially and that's way that's the way the subject should be treated sasquatches are not ufo riding shape-shifting interdimensional things they are a perfectly normal biological species they leave footprints they poop they shed hair they do they eat they do things that every other biological thing does and so we need to approach this from a biological manner and see if we can gather evidence let's start chronologically let's start with the native americans in first nations account accounts well it turns out i already said this that pretty much i'm going to say every native group every indigenous group in north america that lives in suitable habitat has stories of these things and you can go back into historical record of various sorts whether it's their oral tradition or whether it's photographs from early anthropologists interacting with the indigenous people and find evidence on the left there is a photo by edward curtis um from 1914 um of of hammy essentially it's a kosukumo uh um traditional belief of hammy which is the uh it's like sonicwa we're gonna talk a lot about zonic one in a minute um a giant hair covered biped with very large hands you see the mouth on that thing it's kind of in a circular shape that's uh because it's imitating the sounds that it makes and also in some traditions it whistles and sasquatches whistle i'd have recordings of it in fact orangutan's whistle so it shouldn't be that surprising um heck cougar's whistle you can look it up on youtube there's a wonderful um clip of one whistling and they're not whistling songs they're whistling for other reasons but yeah look at it's upright it's covered in hair it's a large big hands very very interesting in the center there oh by the way 1914 that photograph of the left that's about 10 or 15 years before the word sasquatch was invented in the middle is a photograph of a large mask it's very large it's about a foot and a half wide in fact i took that photograph it is from the tribe that gave us the word sasquatch up in british columbia the sahala's group um and that animal that that that mask there it depicts sasquatch um on the left on the right here on the bottom of that totem pole is zonaqua the photographs from 1968 obviously the totem poles much before that this right here is the harry man pictograph um it's a little hard to see so i did this i i showed you like the black lion master on the right there i'll just keep this one up i think on the right there is a life-size depiction of a hairy man over to the left the other black line master there is the female and if you can see it just at the left of the female is a small red figure that is supposedly a juvenile i didn't have a black line master to put over but you can see it with your own eyes that is eight and a half feet tall it is called hairy man by the thule indians who live down on the reservation in the southern sierra nevada mountains and this is kind of a rare circumstance because there's archaeological evidence this this pictograph which is essentially dyes painted on a rock life-size depicting a frame of their creation story these particular people these indigenous people are the only group that we know of that have sasquatches as part of their creation story i will tell you a very abbreviated version of the story back in the day hairy man was talking to coyote and if you know anything about native traditions coyote is always the trickster he's always up to something you know he's got a card up his sleeve so hairy man's talking to coyote about how they should create the other animals coyotes saying you know we should create him walking on four legs like me and then hairy man says well no i think they should walk on two legs like me and they were kind of going back and forth about it they decided to settle their dispute with a foot race a running race and so they get ready get ready get set go and then they run and of course coyote excuse me coyote being coyote cheats that's what coyotes do they cheat he's the trickster figure in their in their traditions so coyote wins the race which is why all the other animals walk on four legs well hairy man being the smartest of the animals finds this out he figures it out pretty quick and starts crying and in fact you can even see the tears coming from harry man's eyes hairy man is crying um and out of hairy man's tears human beings are born that's why we walk on two legs not four and then afterwards harry man was so bent out of shape and hurt about it that he decided to leave the the area where he was living and go up into the mountains and live amongst the redwoods and only come out at night and which is interesting because there's a little glimpse into the sasquatch natural history their behaviors they are largely nocturnal they do live in heavily forested areas uh particularly up there amongst the redwoods and that sort of wet climate so it's interesting that a lot of these native traditional stories can give us a little bit of information about the natural histories of the animals themselves just so you know these particular pictographs the the showing a life-size eight and a half foot tall hairy man archaeologists have narrowed down the date these were painted on the wall somewhere between 800 years ago to 1 500 years ago well and do the math you know white people didn't show up on this continent until about 500 years ago where did the native people learn about this bigfoot thing if it isn't a real animal if it isn't already out there as part of their environment skeptics have to explain that away that somehow or another the native people in uh california were talking to the native people in florida who were talking to the native people up in the northern territories of canada and all conspiring describing the same hallucinatory fake animal why how that doesn't make sense unless it's a real biological animal and i think that's some evidence that points to that [Music] then we move on to the early historical and settler accounts this dude here with the i can't tell if that's a cool throat beard or a weird collar but either way um he was a guy working he was a christian missionary working with the spokane in indians his name is elkanah walker he was out there kind of towards spokane in that general area and he was looking at these mountains over to the west we're not sure if he's looking at mount adams or mount st helens really or maybe even mount rainier but one of the big mountains that you can see from you know 300 miles away and he said hey take me there and the native people he was working with said no we don't go there and i'm going to take you there so why not and they told them oh there's a race of giants that live there that work and hunt at night and they steal men and their tracks their footprints are a foot and a half long 18 inches long they steal salmon eat it raw and they've got a small a strong stink to them and they whistle and they throw stones wow those are all perfectly normal behaviors that have been reported in other ape species as well and they're also things that you can discern from reading sighting reports of sasquatches they've been seen doing all of these things at one point or another as far as the behaviors go whistling and throwing rocks and about 10 or 15 percent of the sighting reports have a smell associated with it which is interesting because gorillas also have a smell associated with them sometimes under stressful situations their armpits smell and it's not like human armpits human armpits smell because we have bacteria building up and with the sweat and stuff and that's what stinks but gorillas are different they have a gland in their armpit that they exude this sort of musky stinky smell when they're under under stress like in a antagonistic situation or when they're frightened or that sort of thing territorial and it could be that sasquatches have this as well we need to look at the other rape species to learn about what sasquatches may or may not be able to do but anyway elkanah walker here heard all about sasquatches they didn't have a word for it back in 1840 probably called them wild men or something or giants but uh they were certainly describing sasquatches teddy roosevelt actually wrote about a sasquatch in 1893 his book the wilderness hunter included a story in it told by a gentleman named bauman who he described as a grizzled old woodsman and basically baumann went into this narrow valley where there had been like a group of trappers have been killed the year before but bauman didn't believe it he doesn't believe in all hobgoblins and spooky things in the woods so he and his friends went in there and they didn't they didn't all come out bauman came out and told about seeing a large looming upright figure that left huge tracks that stank pretty bad and whatever this thing was after they shot at it ended up killing his two partners i guess the lesson here is don't shoot at sasquatches and some of you are saying the lesson is don't go into canyons where people were found dead the year before that's probably a pretty good lesson to take away too but nonetheless even teddy roosevelt wrote about these things again he didn't call them sasquatches the word wasn't even invented yet the word bigfoot was still decades and decades in the future but he wrote about a large hairy upright thing that fits the description of sasquatches and of course you can go back into the um the historical record in the form of newspaper articles and read about them there as well in this case this story comes from bangor maine back in 1838 august 4th so that they encountered a strange animal that looked like a small child but it was completely covered in hair and it ran off with great speed whistling sounds like an animal i know here's one from pennsylvania from 1878 this this time it wasn't like a small child like in maine it was a giant six and a half feet tall huge broad shoulders long apis arms with a smooth face which i'm taking is probably meaning not covered in air the funnel-shaped head could that be describing a sagittal crest that pointed sort of head shape to the gorilla and other ape species the body was covered completely with dark brown hair about two inches long it pounded itself on the chest didn't couldn't talk and it ran fast and made a bed of leaves and all that sort of stuff 1878 i want to point out that uh the gorilla was discovered in about 1851 give or take a couple years i can't remember exactly but 1851 so this is about you know 20 25 years after that so there wasn't really a precedent beyond the gorilla though you know as far as chess beating and all that stuff very interesting here's one from oregon uh this animal was seen while hunting it wasn't wearing clothes but it was covered with air it was also seen eating raw deer and then of course it ran off when they saw it from 1885. there is a strong correlation between sas watches and deer deer migration routes for example the track where deer deer migrate that's where the sasquatch reports are there's a they've been seen hunting and killing deer before and here we are 1885 there's evidence not proof but evidence that sasquatches have that behavior and of course the sighting reports continue um here's some witnesses i've had the pleasure of working with in the upper left there's a couple people that uh saw sasquatch from pretty close range up in alaska very interesting they were close enough to notice that the thumb on the hand looked different than ours and of course we have hand cast we'll get to that later that clearly show that their hands are not like human being hands they're subtly different the guy on the right he's a musician he's driving back from a job in montana and saw a sasquatch run across the highway in front of him basically on the continental divide very very interesting sighting the bottom right there's a woman who on thanksgiving on the way home from her thanksgiving dinner saw one cross the road right in front of her probably 15 16 feet away from her they both locked eyes she screamed and it made a noise and ran off into the ditch and of course there's lorraine in the bottom left she's a charmer she was wonderful i love her so much she saw sasquatch very close range i was looking in a window and then it walked down the driveway and she stopped her car and walked right in front of her car she was so wonderful she was just so kind and she spoke like a sailor too which was hilarious to me and she goes cliff i'll tell you what it looked right at me and you know what it was a boy so oh my gosh well yeah so anatomy can be present as well um again these things are perfectly normal animals and we would expect such a thing um there are sound recordings of sasquatches they make all the sounds that uh excuse me that other ape species do and even chatter which might be indications of some sort of language but the jury's still out on that one but there is evidence for that sort of thing and of course photographs there are photographs sasquatches are not blurry but the problem with um photographs like this photograph of a sasquatch running up the clackamas river is that uh sasquatches are largely but not exclusively nocturnal and when pictures are taken at night any photographer knows that the shutter stays open longer and thus introduces a lot of blur into the photograph and this thing whatever this thing is i don't know if you can see my cursor or not on there i think you can so i'm going to outline this see the blur here coming down and it goes down like that there's a blurry thing coming off here and if you look very closely there's a little bit of blur here there's even blur here which i what i'm taking this as is i believe this is the head the back comes down here this triangular part is probably the right elbow it comes down i think this is the leg and there's a little bit of the knee there and that's also an arm well this was taken on a game camera and i went to the actual site and see these dots these little knots on the tree right there these are about six and a half feet off the ground upon our my recreation of this animal actually i think it's seven foot two actually i have to check my notes but i do remember this at the top of what i'm interpreting as the head is seven foot ten inches off the ground so again if this is not a sasquatch if this bipedal i see two legs if this upright potentially bipedal figure photographed behind two lock gates where only rangers have the key if this is not a sasquatch the skeptics have to tell me what else it could be the thing is seven foot ten inches tall i have a whole hour presentation on just the recreation of this particular photograph but again if this is not a sas watch skeptics really need to tell me what it could be because i met the guy he's not into photoshop he doesn't know anything about it he was a mechanic essentially what could this be here's another photograph this one's from vermont um this particular picture was taken by a gentleman named frank i i've met frank i've been to the site frank noticed that his apples were like a tremendous number of apples went missing overnight on his tree and he figured why was doing that so he set up a game camera and within two weeks he got this peculiar picture again let's talk about what i'm interpreting i believe that this is the head of a sasquatch looking down and you can see the left shoulder with the left arm coming down that's the arm right here that would be the right shoulder and then this is over here this is the butt in fact you even see hints of the butt crack the natal cleft is what we call that um right here so that the leg would go down the little the knees kind of obscured but that's what i'm interpreting here and what i don't know what these white spots are that's kind of a puzzle maybe it's leaves maybe maybe it's vitiligo you know the disease that up you lose pigmentation in the skin and then the hair that grows out of that part of the skin maybe that's the situation but look at this there's something else here that's darker in color and to me this almost looks like a hand could this be a juvenile sasquatch grabbing onto the chest of its mother i don't know i don't have an answer for that i've done recreations of this particular photograph i have a few member measurements that i think are interesting for example the crown of the head to what i'm interpreting as a shoulder is 13 inches in length it's pretty long not super big but pretty long intriguing photograph nonetheless not proof by any stretch of the imagination just some intriguing evidence here's another photograph that was taken on a really lousy flip phone um this photograph was taken in uh new mexico and uh basically this part of new mexico outside of farmington i think it's fruitland technically but um those are two communities are adjacent to one another they're both on the navajo reservation around the four corners area and um in this particular part of the country there's a lot of poverty so the navajo nation has taken it upon themselves to grow crops to kind of distribute to the poor members of the tribe and so they they have kind of irrigated the upper levels it's kind of desert in that area um and the sasquatches there are kind of hang out in the river beds essentially um and i've spoken to numerous witnesses in the area and i'm convinced they're there but um they're irrigating the upper levels the flat area the flat ground to feed the tribe essentially you know doing their part to feed the feed the hungry so um and because there's poverty they have to hire security guards to make sure that nobody steals from them you know because that happens um a security guard got this now i haven't spoken to the security guard my friend bobo has but um i've spoken to the security guard's colleagues and co-workers several of which had seen sasquatches on the job and they told me something funny they said oh my gosh cliff we were hired to keep the people out we don't know what to do about the bigfoots so um this security guard saw the sasquatch one day i was walking along the hillside i didn't look um it's walking from left to right it's walking this direction and you can see it's holding like what a 12 foot log or tree or something what in the world is that about i don't know it's an intriguing picture from a native reservation though i think that's really cool because again people tell me there are no photographs but yet here we are here's another photograph the originals on the left and i had to you know photoshop it up a bit on the right kind of increase the contrast and brightness and all that sort of stuff um a 16 or 17 year old dude a guy named ian gill got this photograph as uh he was driving out to his grandmother's cabin outside of in vermont again um about 12 30 at night he thought somebody in a ghillie suit ran across the road and stopped on the side of the road and he goes well that guy looks weird so he took out his iphone 5 and snapped a picture of that now when i first saw it as thinking ah high school kid i don't know man i think he's i think he's probably coaxing probably lying about things but i went out and did the investigation anyway and i was pleasantly surprised to find out that this sign is still there it's a stop sign the very bottom of the stop sign is seven foot two inches off the ground whatever that is it's pretty tall and it was covered in hair i find that intriguing excuse me my little thing in my throat here here's some excellent photographs from silver star mountain in washington my friend randy chase took these he went up to the top of silver star he loves to hike he brings a six-pack and a cigar and goes up and hikes almost every day after work in this particular occasion he went up to the top of silver star in the snow it was in november and uh he got to the top and noticed a rock on the other hillside that he'd never noticed before about 170 yards away silverstar mountain has like two two mountain peaks and he was on one and this thing was on the other and he goes what is that rock i've never seen that rock before and snapped a picture of it and then he turned around and looked at portland oregon because you can see it from up there and took a couple pictures of the portland and the columbia river and then turned back around and in the meantime the rock had stood up and that's the picture on the bottom left and then the one on the right whatever it was that rock you know quote-unquote rock stood up turned around and walked down the hillside in the snow off trail into a place where there are no more trails this total wilderness area well one of the things that we do when we're trying to figure out if these mediocre pictures or sasquatches is we compare them to the patterson giblin film subject which is what i did on that frame to the right because sasquatches are not human beings they have very different proportions than human beings their arms are much longer in proportion to their leg for example their their shoulders are much right much higher on them their neck is put down in front they're just different in in every way basically so when we want to see if something that a blobby picture like the one on the right is a sasquatch one of the things we can do to shed some light on that is compare the limb proportions to a known sasquatch which is the patterson giblin film by the way i want to say this now the patterson gimlin film has never been proven a fake roger the guy who filmed it never admitted on his deathbed that it was fake and set in fact he did the opposite he said that um you know i know people are going to look into my character this like a real film couldn't have couldn't happen to a worse person like me um everything about the film holds up to scrutiny so all those things you've heard and stuff on the news are kind of just bad media and misinformation so you can read more about that in some other books but anyway that thing on the right let's look at the top of the head of the figure where the right the red lines are the top of the head lines up the shoulders line up the top of the butt lines up the bottom of the butt the hands line up everything about it lines up by the way the butt is very important i want to point that out because uh bigfoots have big butts bigfoot got back it's a fact because your butt muscles are the largest muscles in your body and they are used for two things number one they are used for keeping your torso upright over your pelvis in other words an upright posture so bears don't have big butt muscles right and they're also used for bipedal walking that's why gorillas don't have big butts that's why bears don't have big butts that's why humans do because we're keeping our torso upright and we walk around on two legs now considering how massive and large a sasquatch is i mean they are big big animals like sometimes two and a half three feet wide and almost that far from front to back imagine the mass of that imagine the size of the butt muscles necessary to keep the torso upright over the pelvis so all these pictures if it doesn't have a big butt it's not a bigfoot essentially but anyway all that stuff lines up very very well and if you look in the picture in the upper left by the way notice the pointed head that's that sagittal crest thing i mentioned earlier with that historical newspaper account about the cone-shaped head sasquatch is like all ape species that get big enough can develop a sagittal crest it's that it's that crest in the middle of the skull and what that is for is anchoring chewing muscles on when sasquatches or gorillas or australopithecines for example human ancestors when they got into the habit of eating very fibrous foods um they needed more and more chewing muscles and your chewing muscles have to attach to your skull and eventually you need more chewing muscles in your skull can accommodate for so evolution very eventually brings about a sagittal crest to increase the surface area on your skull for chewing muscles and also zygomatic arches and some other features of your skull and so basically we see that here we can see that same feature in large orangutans we can see it in the largest of male chimps and also gorillas as well and presumably sasquatches it makes perfect anatomical sense here's another picture taken in 2017 in pennsylvania don't worry about it it's in there somewhere let's zoom in on it and take a look there it is it's real pixelated i'll go back one it's kind of in that open area in the forest right in this area um a boat crews saw this 17 people saw this thing one person had the wherewithal to take out his cell phone and snap a picture i actually snapped two but one of them you can't see the animal at all in this case it walked into the clearing and this is what you get again blobby but something's there it was moving um somebody else managed to grab a video but they never got the figure on film on camera at least i should say because it's a video it's not film but they never got the the figure on film but you can hear the people reacting to what they're observing they're saying things like man it must be hot in that suit because it was like 80 80 something degrees that day oh my gosh is that a bigfoot no that bigfoot then they laugh no bigfoot's not real but they're all watching something that looks like a bigfoot what's he doing and get closer than people say i want to leave they're getting scared very interesting to hear that conversation going on but this is the only picture we got of it so let's do what i mentioned before let's compare it to the patterson gimlin film and again it's pretty impressive don't you think and again look at the butt i i mean i don't wanna i don't want you guys at all think i'm a butt man of some sort but look at the butt it's it's right there the anatomy is right there and it is congruent with everything that we think we know about sasquatch at this point not proof but i do take that as evidence and of course there she is the sasquatch walking across the the sandbar from 1967 october october 20th we're almost at the anniversary by the way um so there she is that has never been proven false the anatomy is there you can see her shoulder blades moving underneath the skin you can see her muscles flexing um you there's there's breasts on it which is a very peculiar thing to put on a suit if it's fake very impressive film there are numerous books written about it i'm not going to go too into it but another strong piece of evidence here's another piece of footage from the blue mountains not quite as impressive but it's there kind of a strange loping gate this by paul freeman it's actually 1992. i can see i put copyright 1994 there that's a mistake on my part here's another piece of footage taken on a thermal imager thermal imagers don't see light they see heat and in this case um the person who filmed it had it set so the hotter it was it was a black color not a white color so and everything else is kind of blown out i guess if you want to call it that because it had rained earlier so everything was kind of the same temperature except for this large bipedal thing that was following them walking between two trees let's see if i can get that going again here it is they heard it following them they heard knocks and other indications that something was there they heard brush breaking and all that stuff and he happened to have the camera pointed at the right place it was like midnight or two in the morning down in florida it always strikes me about this is that the arm and leg proportions are not whoops um are not what you would expect of a of a human okay but also look at the hands the hands are pretty big which reminds me of that native photograph that we saw from 1914 earlier with the big hands and whatnot on it very interesting i'll let that cycle through the last few and we'll go to the next one and also the head position real real low on those high shoulders very cool now here's some footprints i find the footprints probably be the strongest body of evidence for sasquatches if you had to look at one facet only because really the strongest bit of evidence about sasquatch is how all these things kind of fit together but the footprints are so impressive um we here's three footprints from left to right it's 1963 1970 and then 1982. and what we have here the this is obviously the most clear representation of it police officers took this by the way um in 1982 in grace harbor county washington um a lot of interesting features on this including this crack you notice the crack going down the middle of it where's my cursor there it is this crack going down the middle of the foot is interesting because that is indication of a of a soft fat pad on the plantar surface of the foot the the part of the surface of the foot that touches the ground as the fat pad presses into the ground it expands to the side and then pulls apart the substrate underneath the footprint just like it would in your footprint on the beach and that's what this is for from i should say but also i want to point out a couple other things these bumps on the outside of the foot they correspond to where bones end and bones start in the foot the phalanges go to about here and then the metatarsals are after that and sure enough look over here look really closely in this 1963 sample you can see that same feature you can see the same feature between the phalanges and the metatarsals but anyway the congruence with the footprints are very very interesting and by using really nice clear photo nice clear footprints and casts we can actually get some mar demarcations of where bones are in the foot like the bumps i just showed you and a couple anthropologists have taken a stab at this first dr grover krantz on the left from washington state university he used footprints on the left there from an animal that was cast in the animals footprints that were cast in bossberg washington back in 1969. this particular animal oh i'm sorry wrong way this particular animal had two bumps on the outside of the foot that were different the bumps we just spoke about would correspond to where these bones were but in this case there were two large protrusions and the foot was twisted around a bit he kind of reasoned well there's only three big bones on the outside of the foot so if there's two protrusions there that must be where the spaces between the bones are and he kind of started filling it in like a like a puzzle essentially and what he found was later built upon by this gentleman over to the right dr jeff meldrum from idaho state university um we've ended up we've ended up being good friends over the years i have a pleasure of speaking with them even just this past weekend actually two days ago but dr krantz i'm sorry dr jeff meldrum on the right is literally a phd in anatomy with a specialization in feet and and what led to bipedalism so he is extraordinarily well equipped to analyze sasquatch or any footprint footprint evidence so he's taken what krantz has done and kind of finessed it a bit with his understanding and basically over here on the right you see two feet uh two foot reconstructions i suppose or reconstructions of feet on the left is the sasquatch foot and on the right is a human foot and if the human foot was grown to the same length already there are some differences sasquatches would have a much wider foot that's what we would expect from such a large animal much more surface area to support that weight etc but there's also small little differences that would be harder to notice first of all the ankle bone is moved forward on the foot as compared to the human this is the sasquatch here and this is the human the ankle bone is moved forward and what that does it that functionally elongates the heel bone and that's very important because the way you walk is basically your calf muscles are attached to your heel and with tendons and ligaments and then the calf muscles pull up on your heel and that kind of breath lifts your heel off the ground and and kind of like a wheelbarrow in some ways and that pushes that pushes you forward when you walk in fact your foot is a lot like a wheelbarrow a wheel barrel is what's called a type 2 lever um and you know imagine putting a bunch of stuff in a wheelbarrow right and it's you lift it up and oh it's heavy but i put a bunch more stuff in the wheelbarrow right afterwards i guess i could lift it up again and be even heavier but one of the easiest ways to deal with the increased weight would be if you didn't want to work as hard would be to eat to elongate to lengthen the the wheelbarrow handles right you can imagine oh if the handles were 10 feet long it would actually be easier to lift you would have to lift them further the same amount of work would be conserved but it would be easier it would take less force to lift and that's what the elongation of the heel in the sasquatch foot does by elongating that heel it means that the calf muscles even though they're bigger because they're in a big animal like a sasquatch even though they're bigger they have to do less work to lift the weight of the animal and walk bipedally that was discovered by dr jeff meldrum and another consequence of that elongation of the heel or really moving the ankle bone forward is the metatarsals which are the bones behind the toes is these guys here the metatarsals are also shortened in relation to the foot as you can see these are shorter than these over here and that is another necessary biomechanical redesign of a human-like foot to carry a mass of their size now how do we know where the metatarsals are well based on footprints okay sasquatch what we've now discovered is that sasquatches do not have an arch in their foot they well let me start with us we have an arch it is held stiff by tendons and ligaments and we cannot bend our foot there even though as you can see there there we should be able to here i'm going to get my cursor yeah we should be able to bend our foot here because all these bones have you know they're not solid bones there's joints between them but we can't do it because our foot is held stiff by this by these tendons but sasquatch as it appears have flexibility in the mid part of their foot so when we walk we push off with our toes and then the very front parts the heads of the metatarsals that's where we push off that's where the force is upon stepping off but in sasquatches and every other ape species including most human ancestors they could bend their foot just a little right here so the entire four part of the foot remains in contact with the ground until it pushes off and when they push off it raises a mound of dirt right behind where the metatarsals are we can see this in chimpanzee footprints we can see this in gorilla footprints we can see these in australopithecus afarensis footprints the famous leatoli footprint from africa from tanzania um excuse me we can see these same signatures of the foot anatomy and this picture that i'm circling right now is from the patterson gilman film and there it is right behind where the metatarsals are and remember dr meldrum figured out that metatarsals are shorter and they're pushed forward on the foot this is what he bases that on and sure enough dr meldrum published that and i think 1998 or 1999 before that us bigfooters we didn't know about that we're just nerds right but he's an academic turns out here's a footprint the very very first one from 1958 the very first sasquatch footprint cast that is still in existence and it has that same feature you can see it on the bottom here and then of course this top cast is a cast of this footprint that i have a photograph in the ground over here but you can see the same feature in both now as far as evidence goes okay well this is this is primate anatomy this is primate foot anatomy is what we're looking at here um a piece of evidence could be do we find this everywhere do we find this in all the sasquatch footprints no not all because the shape the shape of the footprint is not the shape of the foot it's the shape of the foot damaged under the ground but we find it in a whole lot check these out okay there's a cast on the left and there's a footprint reconstruction on the right here is that mound of dirt actually this is a cast of that same photograph i just showed you and if we go right across look where that mounted dirt appears right behind the metatarsals because the foot flexes here and then pushes the mound of dirt up it should be right behind the metatarsals here's another one there's the metatarsals there's the ridge right here here's one from 2012. there's the forward part of the foot here's that raised mound of dirt and where is it right behind the metatarsals not in a place that a human would leave by the way a human would leave a raised mound of dirt up here remember because we push off on our toes and the heads of the metatarsals but lo and behold here it is at the base of the metatarsals in a very inhuman-like spot there's another one this is from montana in 2011 right there if i line up the toes right there behind the metatarsals [Music] and of course talking about footprints sasquatches must be very rare animals and what we're finding is that we're finding the same individuals in the same areas even though these casts were made by different people at different times i think we can all kind of see that these are the same animal even though it's a year or so apart this is two years apart essentially same animal same area it makes sense if we're dealing with a very rare animal who haunts a particular territory [Music] sasquatches since they don't have that arch that we were talking about their feet are very very malleable they're almost as bendy in fact as your hands are and look at this we believe at this point these are all the same animals the same individual sasquatch and look at the variation in toe positions and actually i have an entire one-hour presentation on nothing but the sasquatch foot and the various types of prints it could leave so i won't get into that too deeply and of course when you look closely at some of these footprints and even hand print casts you can find dermatoglyphics skin detail in other words primates are the only things that have skin detail dermatoglyphics you know fingerprints essentially but you know they're on the bottom of the feet too i don't know if you knew that you have those sort of prints on the bottom of your feet we can't call those footprints though because footprints mean something else but you get the idea there's other body parts there's some hands there's there's a hand in 1994 this is another hand from 1986 i believe here's just a couple knuckles and possibly a thumb right there pushing into the ground here's a knuckle print with a thumb going off to the side you can even see the thumbnail right there if you look closely yes this is a butt print as i said bigfoot got back um and actually this butt print we can laugh about it because it is funny you know everybody likes a good butt joke i guess but you can see the hair striations on it and the hair flow pattern matches that of all other apes including us because that's our biological family depending on how hairy your butt is your hair flows in the same direction as the hair that can be seen on this cast and down here this brown thing is actually where a sasquatch laid in the mud is called the skookum cast we have a big butt print here and part of a leg and these impressions here are actually the heel i'm hitting the ground several times there's an arm it's a very very interesting cast you have to read about it called the skookum cast [Music] um i mentioned congruency and just from a biological sort of perspective an interesting experiment would be you know like sasquatches and where they live and what they need to live etc sasquatches are large omnivores they've been seen eating meat and plants they're omnivorous well if we look at um another large omnivore that lives here in the united states we probably want to look at black bear and so on the left here i have a i have a i just i found a found one from california where black bears live in california um i believe this is from the department of fish and wildlife or whatever they call themselves down there um and inside this red line is where black bears are known to live in california and over on the right here this is a google map layer of reported sasquatch observations and you can see there's a high degree of congruence between the two because in in my mind sasquatches and bears require the same you know uh resources essentially but if you're a skeptic then i approve of skepticism i really do there's so much garbage on youtube and television and everywhere else you really need to be skeptical when it comes to bigfoot stuff but the hardcore skeptics who throw all this away have to say that the people who live in mountains are more prone to lying than the people who live in desert regions what else can you say about it [Music] now why do i do this well i'm obviously an eccentric individual kind of weird i always have been um but really sasquatches i i know sasquatches are real animals because we're only you know this is the tip of the iceberg there's so much more evidence and you can go into any one of these pieces of evidence as deeply as you would like to um and never get to the bottom i know they are real but again i said earlier that proof is going to come in the form of a bullet or at least a dead one on a slab my effort is to educate the public so these things are not treated as monsters as the gorillas were for a hundred years after their discovery my mother born in 1941 um grew up with the black and white sort of uh you know universal horror stuff frankenstein and you know wolf man and all that stuff and who was a bad guy in those movies and a lot of times and other movies like it gorillas um so i think that if we can avert a tragedy i think by educating ourselves and the public about sasquatches so they are treated appropriately after discovery i'm essentially softening the blow of discovery um and you know i do make my living off it but only because i want you know i enjoy it and all that sort of stuff but here at the north american bigfoot center it's an educational facility i encourage all of you to come by and say hello um i we have a lot of this evidence and a lot more on display so again we're trying to do some good here um by not hoaxing by not lying about things by giving you the evidence as it is by not saying that they're paranormal or anything like that perfectly normal animals waiting to be discovered discovery is coming what can we do about it now we can educate the public and we can protect public land on which sasquatches live other than that i mean i guess i'm just a weirdo who likes bigfoot stuff if you need me for any reason you can reach me at any of these places and i want to thank you very very much for listening and i hope you enjoyed the presentation hello cliff thank you very much um you have a very comprehensive website cliffbarickman.com with a lot of audio files and image files that are really interesting is there any that stand out to you uh that's on the website that people could look at on my website well uh i have some favorites you know for various reasons um i i think that one of them is the the um the siskiyou whistle knock i think that one's really cool it may not be that compelling but i was there you know so it was a little bit different to me um i was there and 2 30 in the morning or whenever that was in the dark with one other person with something knocking bam and then whistling afterwards um very very peculiar behavior if bigfoots aren't real right um there are a couple others stand out one of the the horse creek howl um we actually recorded that while filming finding bigfoot um that was my record it was the early days where the production was trying to figure out this bigfoot thing and who are these weirdos that we're out with and that's what they were thinking at the time so i had to say they weren't doing their job so i re i recorded that with my own recorder um while well some production stuff was down actually almost at the time so there's a couple of them that stand out but for me it's about the experiences that i was having at the time i think that that to me makes them stand out so you know it's kind of like if you look at a if you look at a a photo album you remember the memories that were there and that's what my website is to me is a photo album where i happen to get evidence out of it too i encourage everyone to check them out there's some really interesting stuff and you've talked about habitat in the redwoods british columbia off of highway 26 they're all pretty rainy places and then this new mexico photo that was in it i've been there in the farmington farmville area it's very dry and what does this tell us about the adaptability of sasquatch well i think it uh sasquatches are obviously very adaptable but you know the more rain there is the more citing the sightings there are a guy named john green who first started uh collecting sighting reports and publishing them a long time ago notice that correlation and in some places um like new mexico for example sure snows a lot there and snow counts as precipitation so um in new mexico those mountain sort of islands that they have amidst the desert and stuff those very often have sasquatches located in them as well um they are a picture of sasquatch's you know livelihood is essentially hiding and eating um so the more plants there are the better off they're going to be so the more rain there is the more plants and whatnot are going to be there as well but sasquatches are certainly adaptable and i think that kind of speaks to their intelligence level now they're not using math or you know using fire or watching the golden girls or something like that although that's arguable about the intelligence thing but you know but you get what i'm saying they don't have that level of culture they have the culture much more like the other ape species um but they are strategic they are very good at what they do they've been selected through evolution to be very good at say ambush predators like work you know like uh they've been heard and actually seen working together to kind of funnel deer through a choke points um to try to get deer they so they are strategic thinkers and very smart and very very adaptable but then again so are black bears black bears don't hunt cooperatively like sasquatches do but they are also very adaptable to their environment so yeah you're right yeah black bears are also they live in new mexico and and i was in the steams a couple weeks ago and they're in they're there too and on the east side um and i yeah encourage everyone to check out the north american bigfoot center and look at the resources at cliffvaraman.com thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us cliff and share and all of your knowledge and thank you in the audience and viewers for joining us please check out more free programs to shootslibrary.org forward slash calendar to check out events or go to our youtube channel and see recordings thank you [Music] you

Channel: Deschutes Public Library

Views: 1,553,030

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Id: 5J0n-ezPCCs

Length: 56min 40sec (3400 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021