New Cryptozoology Documentary: Interview With A Cryptid Hunter

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hello and welcome to an interview with the cryptid hunter in this documentary we are going to showcase and never-before-seen interview with an extraordinary man one who explored the most inhospitable tracts of wilderness on the planet risking his very life in an effort to uncover the shocking truth behind nature's most carefully guarded secrets without further ado here is an interview with a cryptid hunter enjoy [Music] throughout the course of his research the author of this book came across a string of references to a mysterious adventurer named Frank graves this gentleman was a protege of Ivan T Sanderson one of the founding fathers of an unorthodox discipline known as cryptozoology more than fifty years ago he made a historic expedition to a mysterious Valley in northern Canada famous for its gruesome myths and legends he is credited with the discovery of two different cryptids or hidden animals yet unknown to the civilized world and he has an intriguing connection to an elusive photograph for which cryptozoologists have hunted for decades in a few short years he made a huge splash in the crypto zoological community earning himself a place in books and magazines then as suddenly as he appeared he vanished without a trace some men have searched for him in vain others dismissed him as a myth for years the fate of Frank graves remained a mystery until now [Music] Frank graves story begins in Philadelphia Pennsylvania in the early 1960s back then he worked as a heavy-duty mechanic for a truck manufacturing company in 1965 his comfortable 8 to 4 routine changed forever with his introduction to a fascinating character named Ivan T Sanderson Ivan Sanderson was an eccentric Scottish biologist and adventurer educated in zoology geology and botany in England France and Switzerland he began his academic career leading specimen collecting expeditions all over the world on behalf of various British learned societies in 1932 during one such expedition in the jungles of Cameroon he and his hunting partner were attacked by a giant bat which the locals fearfully referred to as Olli T ow this incident sparked Sanderson's lifelong interest in animals unknown to science creatures be getting the field of study which he coined cryptozoology during World War two Sanderson worked as a counterintelligence operative for both the British and American navies after the war he left his old life behind and immigrated to America where he enjoyed a long career in radio and television educating and entertaining his audience in his capacity as a naturalist Sanderson's interest in unexplained phenomena was rekindled in the 1950s when UFO and monster sightings became more frequent in the United States and Canada unlike many of his academic contemporaries Sanderson refused to dismiss these stories out of hand risking his professional reputation in order to give them the attention which he believed they deserved by the late 1950s he was writing essays on UFOs and in 1961 he wrote the first book to seriously address the question of whether Harry Wildmon truly roamed the wilderness of North America in his book Sanderson referenced a wildmen tradition from a mysterious region in northwestern Canada the watershed of the South Nahanni River this remote territory nestled in the heart of the Mackenzie Mountains was associated with strange tales of lost tribes lost gold and a tropical end clave in the subarctic wilderness a string of mysterious decapitations which took place there in the early 1900s resulted in the area acquiring a gruesome nickname the headless Valley well I guess you have to go back to when I met Ivan Sanderson I work for children publishing company children published a lot of Ivan's books and I believe they published that one called Obama wolf Snowman legend come to life I had talked to him a couple friends down there and said I was interested in this abominable snowman thing and their friend of mine said well you the guy that wrote this he said his name is Anderson unusable he comes down to my book division so they said the next time he comes down I'll give you a call I met him II he I went down there he greeted me had a Hawaiian shirt on all bright flowers flowers all over I most of the time he walked around a barefoot either sandals or barefoot and he had this thick grey hair come straight back and you know they're very pronounced a British accent we just hit it off right off the bat right off the bat we we had a really good time and he invited me out to his house in Blair's town New Jersey you've probably seen pictures that I was like a little white house yet even way out and they won't know where to get to it if you've seen that I guess and there's old newsreels where they show the old little house he lived in with his wife Alma going up there was like stepping into another world no Ivan was he was like a one of a kind person he was very outspoken kind of outrageous my parents didn't like the idea that I was friendly with him they said people take Ivan Sanderson with a very large grain of salt nice and why don't I don't subscribe that I think he's a very super intelligent guy and he's very down to earth and I would do anything for him he called me one day and he said you know there's a there's a bunch of people going up to the South mohanty River to the headless Valley get out of globe and look and he says you'll see where it is Ivan connected me with them because he saw a chance for me to go someplace and really look into the Bigfoot question see what I'm saying see I was a very introverted like little guy you know what I mean like I I wasn't into anything like that and I had to make a jump from being just an average everyday you know go to work every day to jumping off into something that was really in many ways extremely dangerous it was extremely dangerous the group to which Ivan Sanderson introduced Frank graves was a team of American University students who hoped to resurrect the dying art of old-fashioned discovery expeditions these young men called themselves the American Expeditionary Society or AES in the summer of 1965 Frank graves and the AES boys equipped themselves at Minnesota State University before heading north to Canada bound for the headless Valley you know once I got there and got to talk to these people was George Boehm Wayne in Britain Michael Ellis Susan and we took somebody at the last minute it was hanging around the school bus what we were painting it red white and blue his name was Bruce sure he lived like across the street and he wanted to go on the trip so we said well if you want to go on the trip what can you do and he said I can cook so we just took him so they were there for the University of Minnesota and waning Brinson collected the birds he shot a lot of birds and preserved them stuffed them to bring them back remember I haven't connected me with these people they they didn't they weren't going there to look for a Bigfoot I was going there to look for Bigfoot we bought out 42 passions or my school bus and we took all the seats out of it and we had a guy come over we painted the bus red white and blue and right on the top white the center and blue on the bottom and we had a guy come over and he professionally wrote american expeditionary society on the side of it we all we all left from Mankato that's right we all put this together in Mankato Minnesota we we had our headquarters and the second floor of the school building you know was the summertime so somehow we got the second floor of the school building and we we put all of our equipment in there all the food everything we had to do was all pack there and outside with the school Buster that we painted red white and blue and then we got all the equipment that can't be equipment everything the outboard motors all that impacted into the bus and we left from Mankato we went up to International Falls into Canada we drove that right up into cow that we drove across the provinces you know Saskatoon Edmonton all over the place you know red white and blue bus with the American Expeditionary Society we'd have any no problems with it but people you know asked what we were doing where we were going and we had to break very nice time I believe stopped in Edmonton we would actually live in the bus you know we are our camping equipment there smoothly woods leaving the bus it's a miracle really that we actually got there I mean it's a long trip and that was an old bus that we just put together and George and I got it running you know what I mean we got it mechanically sound and tuned up and everything so uh we drove across there all the provinces then we went up through a Peace River and there's a there's a all-weather highway there see I understand now that highways probably paved where we went there it's like a 3 or 400 mile highway with nothing there there was nothing but a gravel just gravel it was like driving the bus it was like it was like a abuddin them in the war you know what I mean it just kind of swayed back and forth in there in the gravel and we've do all all the way up to a place called pay river when we got to Hay River we live with curry and a slave the Indians it was just like the Old West no wood sidewalks people fighting in the streets I mean it was really rough I would have never stayed in Hay River believe me I would rather go into Vietnam and stay in Hay River 32k river was a tough place hey River was the end of the road we had to leave our bus there big for motor airplane we packed all our equipment and we flew to Fort Simpson they let me sit because I was a photographer the pilot and the co-pilot let me sit between them and the little seat between the pile and the copilot while I was flying and then I shot a little film from there and then in landing you know and I'd look down I said you're going to try and land down there nothing but woods and they see this little little landing strip dirt runway in the woods and this plane went down and they landed it and we all got out we were in Fort Simpson the first time I saw the Mackenzie River I didn't pay much attention to it until George looked that he was looking at it like fixed and he says look at the current on this river and it was so wide it was you couldn't see the other side but the current was like 18 miles an hour and I didn't you know I didn't even think about it until he brought to my attention look how fast that current is and he said the South Nahanni is going to be a loft and sort of not two of the people on the trip George Boehm and Wayne ingress and they were farm people and they were very tough outdoor people but hello Susan Michael susan bruce shore and myself we were kind of like city people you know we were all kind of new to things like that we had the Indians build us a 30-foot a very well built beautiful flat bottomed boat but it was too small so we had to make changes so we swapped that boat which is brand new for an older boat that some Indians had it was a 40 foot long boat not 40 foot about a 30-foot boat flat bottom there are different kinds of boats but the kind of boat if we went up there and it's a flat bottom scale without board motors on it we had to 14 horsepower motors everybody up there had in those days like 30 horsepower was like the minimum to attempt anything and we had to 14 horsepower McCulloch engines and it had a lot of free more debt so we did load everything we totally packed in steamer trunks we had five steamer trunks that packed into the boat everything else was around us that and we all sat on top of them of the trunks and we left from fort simpson's we went up the liard river the Arbor is very Placid nice wide river tailed up went up through there took days and the next stop was not on a butte the honey Butte is about a 6,000 foot mountain right at the confluence of the lis art and the south my River that's where we met the Turner the Turner's were very good people they ran a thing called Nahanni safaris limited and they took hunters up to Virginia Falls the Turner's they had a big house built there like a log cabin house it was the Don Turner was the son Don Turner was a young guy it's about our age there was a daughter the father was hard as nails he was a big big tall man ice ice all things up there I didn't like you know there was a there was a dog there that was very emaciated bony and I went way out of my way to get food for it I was trying to feed it and the old man came over to me and he said pardon your heart to that he says you just doesn't even do about it I said well as long as I couldn't do something about I'm gonna try you know why is his dog starving to death here you know with all this food and he just said that's the way things are up here you know he's harden your heart to it so I didn't get along with him that well but the son was good there's another family there that we became very friendly with and that was the Rutgers John Rucker John Brucker worked for nany safaris limited he worked for the Turner's and Brucker was a very tough I guess he was a french-canadian he lived at Ananta butte and Brucker was like a jack-of-all-trades he was a hunter a mechanic very good man on the river with them with a boat so brunker was a very good guy and very loud outspoken guy you know talk loud he was so small man but very very tough you know very broad shouldered but small and very close his head was always shaved and he used to say to me all the time why don't you talk very much you know but everybody else would be talking doing things I just be kind of sitting there listening you know and every now and then he'd look at me and he'd say why don't you talk why don't you talk about the back thank you I'd say I'm okay I'm fine you know I liked him but it was kind of a brash person you know I mean as I told you originally I came from a little little guy you know going to the store for his mother to take him off on a trip like this you know what I mean it was a gigantic change in my life you know what I mean so I did spend a lot of time sitting there quietly watching people when we went there it was like you know the Wild West there was there was no police the RCMP would come maybe once a month they would fly in and ask everybody how things were going to fly away and other than that there was no it was a long order I mean it was really you really were going back in time if people carry guns you know I carried a gun wherever I want now remember this is 1965 and it's probably a little different up there today with the advent of all the different types of communication we the only way we could talk to anybody up there we had to go into the town and get to get through a phone there and call somebody you know there was no there was no other way to do anything during his stay at Nahanni butte graves decided to ask some of the locals about the hairy Wildmon said to haunt the region in doing so he came across stories of an entirely different sort of creatures known to the natives as the nook luck became friendly with various people the Indians there ladies the Cree Indians and once you get to where they trust you and they'll talk to you that's when they they talk to me about these things when I got really friendly with the Indians at nya Butte there's a place called the Twin Buttes that that I couldn't get to it wasn't that far away but you it was an arduous trek to get there and they told me that there were people living there and these were like subhuman people they weren't like Bigfoot they were like little small people that were closed not closed but you know there's like clothes that they made from from skins and things and that they were very hairy and they lived at a place called they D Twin Buttes [Applause] graves wrote about these sub Arctic pygmies in a letter to Ivan Sanderson the natives told him that one of these creatures had actually been seen on three occasions the previous year this particular specimen was said to be rather short in stature and to be quite strong with a beard usually wearing simple clothing the name given s creature was nook luck or man of the bush or as told to me by one old man bush man the first knuckle exciting took place in April 1964 in the woods near Fort Laird according to graves an old amirite named John Baptist came upon a man-shaped creature who was rather strong and sported a long dark beard he wasn't wearing any type of clothing and carried no weapons he was said to be rather shy for his the band of trapping a Marines advanced upon him in a friendly manner he uttered a low growl and fled the second sighting took place at Nahanni Butte in May 1964 one night at dusk while weaving a birch bark basket a slavey woman was made aware of a presence outside of her cabin when she looked out the door she saw nothing but little later she looked up the window and there saw a face this vase was identical in every respect to the one seen earlier that month the woman and her two children went outside to look for the little creature but by that time it had retreated into the bush now we go to my favorite tale this was told to me by a boy of about fourteen whom I knew only as Jerry he was recommended to me for my purpose by the schoolteacher there this little boy saw Kreacher identical to the previous mentioned one except for a few exterior differences this sighting is said to have occurred last fall right outside of Fort Simpson one evening at about 9:00 p.m. the little fellows dog began to bark this event is not unusual for his home is located right at the edge of the city dump and a dog can pick up the scent of many different night scavengers during the passing of one night especially in that country on this night however the boy and his father went out to the dog to find out what was the matter when they got out to the dog it was quiet and standing most still at first they detected nothing of unusual interest but when the father turned on a flashlight for a little extra investigative work they heard a slight noise as they turned the light in the direction of this sound they were surprised to see a rather small dark creature this creature is said to have remained where he stood for several minutes at about that time the dog again began to bark with that the creature departed at speed he was seen by several bystanders who gave slight chase but upon their entrance into the picture the creature quickly headed for the bush he was not pursued the crows hot springs lie on the South Nahanni about sixty kilometres up river from Nahanni Butte back in the early 1900's they helped inspire a legend of a tropical Valley hidden away somewhere in the Canadian subarctic in order to get there the american expeditionary society had to pass through an obstacle known as the splits a deadly labyrinth of islands and long jams that had claimed the lives of many canoeists [Music] [Music] you [Music] we had a camp at dodge Springs we actually had a big tent and all set up and that's where we we spent a lot of time at the hot springs the men named Gus Krause and his wife Mary lived there Gus Krause at the time was about 77 I'm almost out all myself now but he he did things like he was in his 20s he was very very tough outdoor guy and cut down big trees drugged them all through the bush Gus was the kind of guy if he would light his pipe he would reach into the fire and pick up hot coals and his fingers and light his pipe he was very very good nice guy very nice guy to talk to his wife was an indian woman named Mary kind of a short woman or my glasses actually Mary had shot Gus and the when they they all lived at the honey Butte and before they moved up to the hot springs it was in the wintertime that I saw the video movie of this when we were at the hot springs they showed us a a millimeter movie of something swimming in the hot springs in the winter what's the matter what happens the hot springs are always there and they would go back to the hot springs and go in the water even though it was like 30 below and at some point there was a problem between Gus and Mary and Mary shot Gus in the head with a rifle a 22 rifle and the bullet went behind hit him right behind the ear and it went around his head and came out the other side only 22 you know would be capable of doing that and I never really found out what that was about and nobody got in trouble for it but it was a very well-known thing that happened there the people whose talk about about Hail Mary shot Gus and Gus would show me they look see where the bullet hit me right here and he say to her you're a bad shot Mary you know she just laughed I don't know what that was about nobody ever really explained why she did that but that happened before we got there and they had a son named Mickey Mickey was about I guess loved her as well we actually got playing with and wheezed we used to play tag with him we did this for days on end up there we really we ran around playing tackle for days on end we have a lot of fun doing that I mentioned something about wolves and the McKenzie Timberwolves are the largest wolves in the world they're bigger than anything in Siberia and Mackenzie Timberwolves when I first started to see their tracks I could put my my whole hand in the track and the footprint was bigger than my whole hand with my fingers spread out they have very odd feed their feet are very wide and they're very lanky they have long spindly legs and they used to say up there the Indians would say they weigh 180 pounds but they're all skin and bones I'll just imagine like you know a typical German Shepherd maybe 7,500 pounds and these these wolves typically weighed 180 or more when they were very skinny and lanky with very large heads they were very very odd-looking wolves were these were the hardest thing to say you you very so nervous all and the only time you see a wolf is you have to go out at night and you'd have to sit someplace very quietly along the river and then the wolves would come out and I'm down to the river of the drink you would never see them ever but they were all around you I there was an experience where I was out with Mickey and I used to Eastern long walks and we would we went off one day and he was always afraid of wolves you would say I was his mother in one day she that Mickey we've taken a walk and she says Mickey don't don't go too far because the wolf would jump up on you Jesus a long time the wolf would jump up on you and we were about two or three miles away from the hot springs well this one day we were out walking just a nice day and something was running it they had things called nice ass nice I Cal it'll Inlet off the river it doesn't move which is like a little body of water and Nicki and I were walking along and thus knives down below us and something was running through the water and Mickey said there's something down there I said the path came up in front of us about 50 60 yards he came up from the left of the hill to the main path and I just caught a glimpse of something gray coming up the hill and he got up to the top it was a wolf and it looked right at us and I never see I don't I don't shoot things I don't are they I'm a very prolific person as far as guns go I my hobby is guns on target shooting all that but I don't shoot animals and but Mickey was scared and this wolf came up and he was about I guess 20 yards away and he he looked at us and now animals up there they shun people they they run from people and this wolf looked eyes and he started to come directly directly toward us and Mickey was scared me so the wolf's gonna jump up on me and I had a shotgun and I didn't want to do it but I I I fired a shot around it and the foliage around it you could see where this shot hit the foliage and he didn't he didn't react to it and he came closer and this time my I shot at him and the foliage all around him was affected by the shot but the wolf did not wasn't affected by it and it just turned at that point it turned and it just quietly shot off the path in Milly undergrowth and I don't listen we didn't say ting and we went to try and find it there's no blood nothing but I know I didn't miss the war there was no way I didn't want I didn't want to shoot out at all but he was afraid and I might have been a little afraid myself back in 1965 Frank Graves described this harrowing experience in a letter to Ivan Sanderson an enormous white thing that I had first thought must be a polar bear sort of wandered out of the trees it wasn't a bear it looked more like a gigantic dog it stood straight up on rather long legs more like a dog or a wolf I had seen plenty of wolves and some of them are enormous enough up there but this thing was 20 times the size of any wolf I had ever heard of by a sort of reflex action I fired it and it was less than 20 paces away and only partly screened by little bushes I hit it with two barrels of ball shot it didn't even jump it turned away from me and just walked back into the forest I reloaded and fired again and I know I hit it in the rear but it just kept on walking grave story reminded Sanderson of another tale that a friend had told him years ago while prospecting in Alaska in the 1950s this friend had come across huge solitary white wolves deep in the Arctic wilderness after hearing grave story Sanderson suspected that these colossal canines might constitute another species of animal entirely his theory prompted him to write an article which was published posthumously in the October 1974 issue of the magazine pursuit in this piece Sanderson remarked that the enormous wide headed doglike creature that graves encountered in the Nahanni valley of a particular species of ancient canine believed to have gone extinct several million years ago perhaps Sanderson surmised descendants of this ancient animal still survived in remote corners of the Arctic Sanderson dubbed this hypothetical creature the guajillo and thus a new variety of cryptid was born [Music] talk to me about was he said that he thought it was what they call her ghost wolf meaning that it is really there I mean there's a lot of room for this you know what Ivan had he wrote a lot of books about the Bermuda Triangle and everything that pertains to that you know like time differentials on the fourth dimensional and he thought because the D as I say I did not want to shoot this this wolf I didn't want to shoot anything I when it became apparent that it was it could have hurt us I shot at it and everything around it was affected by the shot and it wasn't and then it that's when it turned and it ran into the write off the path to the right of another bush and this bush is very very heavy plus the carpeting of that type of forest is moss about a foot thick it's a foot thick it's like walking on a sponge everywhere you go once you get off the game trails you're walking in these sponges they're like a sponge and so once he's once any animal gets into that you can't hear them and when once it went off to pass the I only heard it because it was in the water and it came up the path which was a dirt path and when I got to the top is when I saw it so but once it once it decided to leave it jumped off the path into the woods to the right and then you couldn't hear it anymore and so anyway but Ivan's personal opinion was he said he thought it was what they call ghosts ever since Sanderson's article there have been several ideas put forth as to the identity of the strange animal some have drawn parallels between it and another mysterious canine from the Great Plains others have attempted to connect it with a monster of Inuit myth Frank Graves has his own thoughts regarding the nature of the WHA Gila which he shared for the first time in this interview well there they are established a variety of timber wolf that's exactly what I'm talking about there was a very long legged with big feet Lord large heads kind of skin and bones but averaging 180 to 200 pounds and they stand higher than three feet at the shoulder a much higher so they I mean it's an established variety of wolf in that area while we were at the at the hot springs an interesting thing was George and Bruce Shores were trying to make wine but they were using something other than whatever do you make use to make one we have to brine it and let it sit and all this anyway it makes us smell you're not supposed to do that kind of go out there was outlawed and the they were doing this and it takes weeks for this to get to a point where you've been drinking some kind of mash you know it was in buckets well it wasn't in a camp it was maybe a hundred yards away while we were there the RCMP came to RCMP guys they flew in an airplane and they landed right by our camp and we went down they tied this thing off they came up and they visited with us and it was just a physic you know they just talked to us and we made a mistakes and we had a good time nobody mentioned this right and time time went on and when they were they were safe with us maybe two or three days and they visited with Gus Krause and they brought news you know and talked about what was going on and this had the other thing they also made some interesting comments about airplanes they said that they saw these are the RCMP they said that they saw jet fighter planes up there and he said it wasn't a Canadian plane he said he thought it was a Russian so but he said those things happen up there in that area make a long story a little longer when they were getting ready to leave and we did everything we had knife-throwing contest we put up targets on the other side of the river and shot at them and they were about ready to leave got down to the airplane and they said oh listen guys in about a week they dumped about two pounds of sugar and that and you'll have really good news nobody was we were scared to death because you could smell this all over and it was illegal that and then we all just kind of looked at each other like we're talking about but you have to understand that the the the underlying reason for the whole trip was to investigate reports of Sasquatch omma in that area there's what they call the sasquatches it's kind of a name that's Banyon around up there but they up there they refer to them as oma which is the same as Sasquatch they're all they're all basically the same creature the oma is basically the same type of a creature as sasquatch and actually there's another variety they're called hillside gougers hillside gallinger's and to give you an idea of how people are up there like we hadn't mentioned anything about Sasquatch or anything and we were up there with the Turner's you know just having a visit with them and they're sitting around drinking the Canadian beer and things like that having a nice talk and George boy him just said well you know kind of casually said how many Sasquatch have you seen and when he said that everything changed the people climbed right up it leads you to believe that there's a lot to it you know what I mean that they don't want these things exploited that once that was said then we had to kind of work our way back into why we were there you know to collect mosses and things like that we had to get around that you know once we brought that up they became a little bit defensive about things the people up there except when you got to talk to as I did I talk to young Indian beef young Indian people and they're the ones would open up the older people would not talk to you so in my opinion of course these things are there they they got to exist during his time at the hot springs graves made several excursions into the wilderness accompanied at all times by an Indian guide on one particular outing he and his companion made a fascinating discovery which graves related in a letter to Ivan Sanderson we made several successful for race up side valleys and canyons during the days while we moved up river and we got our food quite fast but then one misty day we set off up a canyon that the Indian said he did not know personally but which was not lucky and in truth we did not spot a living thing in three hours so we started back to the river then suddenly my pal stopped and pointed at the soft wet ground in a little clearing and actually gave one of those grunts that moviemakers love to have their Red Indians make he was a bit rattled so was i for their most clearly marked in the mud were three footprints of what appeared to be a barefoot man who would have had to take a shoe with an internal measurement of at least 16 inches my friend gave this thing a name but I never really did catch up with that as we went down to the valley had no dog trot I can tell you there's a thing in Canada if you have your picture taken riding on a moose you get ten thousand dollars from some organization and we almost did it when we left the hot springs and we were about to enter the first Canyon and a moose was swimming across the river and we went over to it and this is almost God's truth now I was going to jump off onto the moose and try and ride on it and they were gonna make a movie of it I was afraid that if we jumped on it and we drowned we changed our mind we didn't do it beyond the hot springs the South Nahanni runs through what is known as the first Canyon a channel of whitewater flanked by two towering limestone cliffs it is here that the American Expeditionary Society encountered the first of the new Hani's many Rapids for which the river is notorious there's two or three places on the south honey George's riffle and the Lafferty riffle that are very very very tough and seasoned people get killed there George's riffle is the hardest place to navigate on the river you know the current coming down about 80 miles an hour then it runs in the very narrow areas and it's very it's all whitewater and you have to navigate up through that and a lot of people get hurt during it killed their boats flip over and we we made it up there the first time went right through all that ruffle and then we got into the real trip we went up to the Headless Valley [Music] [Music] and we that was our main campus in the headless Valley we stayed in the head of this valley for over a month there was a cabin built there by the by the government and it was just put there for anybody who would visit Derek Lee stay in the cabin do some kind of shoulder and directly across from that was what they call the Prairie Creek Delta and the way it looked it was deceiving to look at it looked like it was very close but it was very far away and these the trees that were that lined it with their sheer walls and they lined it all the way up to the top and down but the trees it looked like grass these trees for 100 feet tall and if they look like they look like little little little pieces of confetti the scale once you explained it to people these trees or a hundred feet tall then they realized how fast everything was and how large it was the game up there is so plentiful I would liken it to Africa I mean every single day you saw loose use every now and then you saw a grizzly bear when you've got up a little bit you see doll sheep caribou I mean this was all day every day see that the thing about Canada is everything is bigger there the I've seen Ravens here the the Indians they like to they like to catch these Ravens and keep them for pets and you know they catch them they take a a fly line a fly rod and they put a little piece of jerky on it and a little hook and these Ravens get up on the on the top of their their cabins and things and they'll they'll throw the new line up there and the Raven will pick up the end of the line to get the piece of jerky and they'll cook them and they'll catch the the hook in their beak and they're very very easily reel them in and they catch them and they keep them as pets but the Ravens up there have like four and five foot a wingspan they're very big when there were we used to see them walking around and they'd be like maybe three feet tall I'm serious and I've seen Ravens in other places upstate on there the Ravens maybe 18 inches high these were like three feet tall and they were all over everywhere but everything up there was was big it's once you get in there it's actually a primeval I mean you could in my opinion runnin anything I mean you could run into literally anything I remember George said one day we were up on a little trip walking around he said this is primeval he said we could run into anything here I mean this is he was a college guy you know and he had he was a biology guy and he knew he knew a lot and waning Brinson was a biology guy they studied all this innate they had a firm grasp of what they were looking at I didn't but I remember George said to me one day said this is a primeval forest air he said this is really anything can be here meaning Sasquatch or anything you know could we could even find a dinosaur but prior to that they had found a herd of a woodland bison they were seen from the air by either the RCMP or somebody and there's some kind of a phone clip of that somewhere and that's how they were identified and they were supposed to be extinct I haven't talked about that a lot but right in that area where we were and uh the one thing what nobody ever talks about are the insects up there the bugs they have whole seasons of bugs there that really really really tax everything you run through when you first get there you have gnats and people walk around with with these screens over their heads and you have to have your mouth will fill up with nuts I mean your affiliates of nuts and there's a whole season for nuts and this goes on for weeks the air hummus with nuts and then they go away and you get what they call Bulldogs these are these black flies and these flies are so nasty they will land on you and they'll start biting you and you know you just just fly away they don't go away they they're biting you and you're you have to pull them off and there's a whole season of Bulldogs that lasts for a week or two then you get mosquitos this fall in the spring early summer you get the mosquitoes mosquitoes are big and the air is alive with them and you you find yourself bathing and all this this bug repellent and of course the Indians have their own stuff and you put that on and nothing bothers you because the stuff you take up there you know bug spray all doesn't do anything Albert faily was the the big name up there and he always wear this gray outfit with the gray hat and he had a beard of a thin old man at the time he was probably 80 years old barely had some point been up there by himself and he he was injured he broke his back and he managed to survive a whole winter up there in the headless Valley with a broken back and survived it and made his way back to the hot springs on the haunting Butte where he was nursed back to health but that he became like a folk hero up there everybody's new out there fairly fairly was we spent a lot of time with him and we would you know give him food you know we cooked all of Diamond give him big thick steaks T you know and catch fish for him yeah Albert fairly was one of these very austere percentages that you you held in reverence you know I mean like you didn't just pop down next up and say how you doing you know you approached him very carefully and how are you sir you know that kind of stuff you how do you feel today and what's going on you kind of worked into it and then he would if he liked you then he would he would he would talk to you and he he told us about a cave that ran from the hot springs to the Headless Valley 14 miles he said there's a cave that runs from behind the hot springs it runs through the mountains and it comes out in the headless Valley oh that was very interesting to us but I'm not much for caves I don't like doing the caves and I kind of turned that idea down but it's a 14-mile caves he talked about that's a long cave much of Nahanni country especially the area surrounding the headless Valley is pockmarked with deep caves that lead into the rock legend has it that these caverns are haunted by some sort of sinister presence from evil spirits to Neanderthals to hairy red-eyed Giants during his time in the Headless Valley Frank graves stumbled across one of these caves and made a shocking discovery inside Valley we would take walks a gorge and I would we go across the river across the Nahanni and we put the boat up over there and then we would go on a walk across the Prairie Creek at Delta this is like 2 3 miles until you get to the mountains I was always carry a rifle you can't carry handguns up there would have been so nicer if you could carry a handgun but I always carried a rifle and made everything tougher because the rifle I took with me was a rifle that my father gave me it's a big heavy gun and I always carried it around with me and this one time we got split up and the Prairie Creek Delta Area and we just we just did things she just didn't think about it you just did them we would be going up in this area and there would be water coming down right well you would just walk right through it and if it turned out to be 12 feet deep you just went right through you just kept going and to get where you were going to go and it was actually very dangerous because if it rained this whole area was flood I mean with flood in a matter of minutes you would have you know big big trouble we got the little split up and I did some climbing and I don't mean you know like climbing up like walking up something we're talking about and I'm no you know I'm no climber or anything but I actually climbed up a rock face and I'm talking maybe several thousand feet I'm climbing up because once you start doing these things you can stop you have to keep going you can't you can't come back and I climbed up climbing up and I got probably close to the top and I found a cave I stopped for a while I was getting a little nervous because I was wondering how I was going to get to the top you know cuz you were talking you're climbing up these these rock faces and I found this cave but I say cave they went in about ten feet it was like I don't where there was a naturally-occurring Fault in the rock but if you went in about ten feet and I got in there and I found a spear not knowing anything at the time being a novice at all this I picked it up and held it and it felt like it was made of stone but you could see that it was a spear that somebody had unit and it was probably very very very old and it had apparently turned to stone and I remember trying to figure out how I was going to get it down because I had this rifle over my shoulder and I had a pack on my back too and I had this fear and at the time I really didn't think about it being important but I wanted to try and get it back and you could actually see where somebody had sharpened this up you know and it was had a point on it and the I was maybe and it in diameter that it was about six feet long and as you could see it wasn't just a naturally occurring thing and I tried to get I had to tuck it behind me and put it in this and in the rifle he's like between the rifle on my back in the pack and I actually climbed the rest of that climb with all that on my back and I got almost to the very top and I had to make up it was just like in a movie you know when you at this point you've got to go to the top and I had to I had to reach up about three feet to where I could see was the very top the very last place I could grab ahold of and I I spent a minute or two thinking about it and I just lunged up and Ike managed to grab ahold of it just like in a movie and I pulled myself up and I pulled myself up and I got one leg up on the top and I started to pull myself up and the spear fell I dropped it and it went all the way down I at least a thousand feet or more down into the into the into the rocks into the war and I was very lucky I could have died right then because if I hadn't made that last grip I would have I would have fallen I wouldn't even be here now it would have been interesting to bring that back a lot of people would have liked to look at that it wasn't wood I mean you could see where it had been wood you could see where it had been uniform something like a fairly straight limo from a tree or something but it apparently was very old and I mean it wasn't shopping with tools it was just like you know they say somebody getting along on a rock or something you know and got it to where it was a fairly sharp point I don't mean sharp enough to like you could stick it through something but it was it was sharpened when I talked him ivan about later he said cause you bring it back I said I I tried to access this and I as I was trying to get purchase on that last little ledge before I fell I I've lost it I don't even know whether we could have found that udana me so it was interesting I think that would have been interesting to bring back there's three canyons on the river the first Canyon the second the third after the third Canyon you get to Virginia Falls which is the highest waterfall in North America it's about 400 feet twice as high as Niagara and that's when it got really hairy because the river gets really rough up there and we just took the boat up with nothing in it we just packed ourselves in it unpacked the boat at the headlands Valley and we just took a boat trip up to Virginia Falls and once we got up there we stayed up there for about a week or so we met four or five people that had come over the Continental Divide in canoes they came across the Rocky Mountains in canoes these are really tough people there were young guys from some University and they were really really really tough guys and they did the trip we did in a canoes then we spent we spent a couple weeks with them at the headlands Valley first at the Falls and then at the headless Valley and we had what's called the it's written on the walls up there we had an eating contest in which we pitted ourselves against their group and we had an eating contest and we made pancakes we made bean so they don't made all kind of stuff and we carefully catalogued the whole contest that lasted a few days I I was supposed to be the best eater there I 5 I think 35 big pancakes and one of their guys ate like 50 pancakes I mean these are big pancakes well I think back well now I don't know anybody survived that we were all sick for about a week after that we ate buckets of beans and it was all written on the side of the doorway of the cabin when we did it it was it was noted on the on the on the cabin George shall a moose a small moose like a young moose and we had we ate very well there I mean we ate steaks all the time you know and we had moose meat every day the Turner's when they came up there the from the nani's re they shot a adult sheep and they quartered in me when they stay with us they we all had that had meat for a while and the fishing was I'm not a fisherman and I don't really care for it but George was the first man that he would go out in the morning catch like twenty or thirty trout in like five minutes and there was when you looked into the water the water was like this green beautiful emerald color and you could see the fish in it I mean you could see thousands of fish I'm talking thousands of trout it does like a foot longer or bigger and George caught a one of those on lake trout he caught a trout that weighed about thirty five pounds and we used to make all these really nice dinners you know I would use a trout and then we made of course you have biscuits we have enough to make biscuits for an army up there and we had so we had biscuits and trout and of course we took tons of rice and we would make you know like still from from trout and rice and we'd have biscuits with it and then if you wanted a steak you just went up cut off a big piece of steak and cooked it and we actually made what's called a dried meat the indians showed us how to do that you have to hang it all up and smoke it and you make all these little strips it's like my jerky I mean it's the same thing but we made our own a jerky and then the jerky of course you know once you put that into water it turns right back into meat it dries up like like leather and keep that in your pocket all day when you get hungry you just take a piece of that and chew it up but if you want to cook something you just boil water and drop the jerky back into it and you have meat so there was a comments made about the moose you know and somebody said well this moose tastes wild you know and one of the guys said this this has a wild taste and George says it doesn't have a wild taste it tastes like moose you know moose is moose mutton is mutton venison is venison it doesn't taste like steak you know what I mean each each one of those meats is an entirely different animal we ate very well up there we had a little bit of a time problem because the trip was kind of put together quickly at the last minute and we will ended up up there and we only had so much time to do do what we're going to do because we weren't prepared to stay for the winter everything changes when it gets cold and the only reason we left was because one morning all the mountains around this were looked normal the next morning they were all white and they said that's gone that's when we had to leave when we came back we we got down to port Simpson and we had to get back to the school bus at Hay River so what we did was the they have tugs that run up and down the Mackenzie River and we got on a tug called the whitey whitey Huckabee they pushed flat-bottomed barges up and down the river we were sitting there on the dock with no place to go nothing to do with all this equipment and the barge pulled in but the tugboat and we went up and talked to the captain and he said just stole your stuff on them on the one of the barges and come up on the tug and live with us it took three or four days to go down to Hay River they took us down there and we had a really nice time on the one knee a tugboat with those long talk but we helped them a little bit and that the tugboat brought us down - hey River about a year after his adventure in the Nahanni Valley Frank graves developed an interest in a new sort of unexplained phenomenon Thunderbird sightings the Thunderbird is a winged monstrosity of First Nations and Native American mythology from the Pacific Northwest to the Maritimes this avian Colossus features in native folklore all across North America legend has it that the Thunderbird was endowed with the ability to create storms lightning shot from its eyes when it blinked and thunder boomed when it flapped its wings native artwork often depicts these creatures carrying off enormous prey such as whales and bison every once in a while Canadians and Americans report seeing giant birds eerily evocative of this monster of native lore in 1966 Frank graves and a young man named Jay blick decided to investigate one such report in northern Pennsylvania on behalf of Ivan Sanderson and apparently at some point an airplane or something had been had been knocked down somewhere and they found tissue on the only aircraft that that was from from a bird but because of the the way that the tissue was the amount of it had to be a very very large bird and this plane that apparently hit a bird in the air and crashed and he got him off on this Thunderbird thing and there's an area called Renault beau it's up in central Central PA and they had sightings of Thunderbirds out there and I Corson was immediately intrigued on this see Ivan had meetings he would have meetings he would rent places and all of his his big people would come to these meetings like Oliver Swan and Joe Hebner these are like publishers people that were involved with newspapers and New York and they were on his board and he would have meetings every now and then and I was always invited to those there was one of the area hang house up in and huh where we would all go up there and have dinner and then they would have a meeting at these meetings we would talk about all these different things and when they got about Thunderbirds so this is something I can look and do because it's in central Ti so I had a little meeting with him and he said I would love you to go up to Renault Voe and investigate this we have people that have never seen these big birds so I immediately said fine and I went with a guy named I think was English was a Jay Blake or something like a heavyset guy and he had one of Ivan Sanderson's old Plymouth station wagon a to Plymouth station wagon when he traveled all over the country on well this Jay black he met me up there and I I had a 58 Plymouth at the time beautiful car that I got from my grandfather's like brand-new and I met him up there and we went to the town of Renault Voe and we went to a man named bill House bill Hess was the historian for the town and he's the one that came up with all this information about the Thunderbird and he talked about he gave us names of people there's an old man he lived in a house outside of town but we went up and talked to him and he had actually seen a Thunderbird and at the time he might have been 80 years old and he lived out in the woods we investigated that and then we spent three or four days up there we went up into the mountains and we found a couple perches where we could sit and look over everything there's a place called the Overlook up there we can see for like 20 miles we went up and sat up there and that was our investigation was and we talked to people that had seen them said they'd seen them we talked to mr. Hess who was the historian out of town and this was all documented I did writing on it and so did like we we got along fairly well on the trip and we actually camped out we didn't we didn't stay in a motel we went up in the up in the woods and we set up a camp you know made a campfire and we stayed there a couple days but we were mainly looking for these birds who they love at night look but they were supposed to only be seen at nighttime they very rarely nobody ever saw him during the day and we went to a place where you could overlook the whole area and we sat up there and watched and watched and watched and actually a game warden came along and he said what do you guys do up here we had guns and everything brightful he said you have permits for that rifle I said oh no he said you have a permit for that shotgun elavil what are you doing after him we lost them looking birth under birthday feast I saw Thunderbirds ok alright he said you know he kind of like left the whole thing off something happened to blick on the trip I forget what happened and he all of a sudden didn't stay there he wanted to come back we were there for maybe three four days and then we came back and I I gave my material to his band erson told him what happened and just on the other thing that that's kind of up in the air thing to me I'm not sure about any of that but two people I talked to seemed very genuine very genuine and I don't know why they would come up with a story you know what I mean they're up in the middle of nowhere they didn't profit by it in any way according to legend an American sharpshooter killed a Thunderbird in the deserts of Arizona sometime in the late 1800s he and some of his friends later posed for a photograph with the birds carcass which they had nailed to a barn wall thousands of people have sworn they've seen this photo in some old book magazine or newspaper yet despite a thorough and concerted search for it no one has been able to find it again some sights this bizarre case as an example of the so-called Mandela effect a phenomenon characterized by a collective false memory others propound more exotic theories involving alternate realities and extra dimensions in an effort to make sense of the strange state of affairs whatever the case the missing Thunderbird photo remains one of the most perplexing crypto zoological mysteries to date one man who claimed to have once owned a copy of this photo was ivan T Sanderson in an article for the magazine pursuit he claimed that he had given this photo to frank raves and jay blick prior to their Thunderbird expedition in upstate Pennsylvania the photo never returned to his archive and its fate remains a mystery fortunately Frank graves saw this photo prior to its disappearance I do remember a picture of this would have been like in the 1890s or something a picture of the big black bird on the side of a barn and there were people standing around across it I do remember that now but I don't remember the circumstance I do remember that see something spurred me to go there you know what I mean like I am I'm very into doing things like that because it's interesting to me and I believe that these things for the most part are real I don't believe people make these things up and I'm trying to remember I think it was that picture I think Ivan Sanderson showed it and I think that's why one of the reasons I went on the trip I remember something there was a bird and its head the thing about the picture was you couldn't see the head the head was was hung over and the way you could see with the wings Blackbird and there were people standing in front of it like across it to show how long it was it was like maybe 20 feet 30 feet across but the thing about it was you couldn't see the head the head had been was hanging over you know what I mean like nobody held the head up or propped it up so that's what was wrong with the picture you couldn't in other words anybody couldn't fake feathers and things or whatever but the head would be hard to think and this you couldn't see the head because the head was hanging down in the front you know what I mean I read I recalled us the bird was it was a black bird on the side of a barn see I didn't think about you said nailed to a barn and there were people standing in front of it and all you could see was was these wings and the head was like slumped over so you couldn't see if it had a being or what it was you know what I mean I do recall that and I don't remember what happened to the picture you're saying that we took it to we took it with us if that's what it says I guess that's what happened I don't really I don't recall that I recall the picture I just don't remember the incidentals you know I'm sure that mr. Hess has probably passed on by this time he would know for sure his name was Bill Hess and he was the town historian for Renault Voe he had all kinds of information there in his in his files so it could have been it could be that we weekly gave him the picture I don't know I don't I don't recall the thing about the picture I do recall seeing a picture ivan ivan showed it to me and it was a black bird on the side of an old barn and there were people standing in front of it with their arms outstretched and but you could not see the the head of the bird dick really couldn't tell what kind of a bird it was you know what I mean was a black bird like a raven or something the Thunderbird is really supposed to be a raven a giant raven that's really what Thunderbirds are supposed to be did you know some of the current thinking is that they are a type of an eagle that's you know this is not not seen very very readily there's you know the ocean eagles and there's a lot of eagles that are very large the biggest seagulls I think of maybe a 9 or 10 foot wingspan but I think from my from my knowledge is this I think Thunderbirds are all Ravens they're disjoint Ravens hey I'll tell you something very quickly just for the hell of it I Drive a truck and I was go over in New Jersey five or six years ago over on 295 and I was coming up in this little area and I saw what looked like a paper mache Swan I thought it was a paper mache Swan that like like was on a flute you know what I mean like I'm gonna prayed and maybe it fell off a truck and it was on the side of the road and uh and I was coming up on it and I thought boy look how big that is you know and I'm just me telling you this it was a beautiful white swan but I thought it was paper mache it was dumping it was it might have been five feet long and the bird was down like like sitting down on on the girl on the ground but it was a swan long neck up and it was just sitting there and I thought it must have fall off a flatbed you know and somehow it didn't get broken up and as I came up on it it got up it read raised up well into its feet and I thought god it's it's alive you know it's not and I was coming up on it I was in the left lane it's a three lane road there and I moved over far as I could to the right and he got up and it started to look like it was going on trying to walk and it was on the shoulder by the guardrail was on the left side and that impressed me so much I went up I was first going a hit and I went up to the next accident I got off with the tractor-trailer and came all the way back down just to see what happened to it I thought he's going to get hit you know it's gonna wanna be on the road and get hit because I've seen geese wander across the highway and get hit but this was when I say big it was huge and it was a swan it was absolutely unreal how big it was and when I came back it was gone so I must have flown away and that bird as I'm telling you right now it was at least five feet long and sitting there was about three and a half four feet high and the neck of course then had the Swans neck which was one up and like a swan would do and it was maybe another three feet up and I really thought it was a paper mache impression of a swan you know from a float and when I got up to it it got up and started to walk and it was absolutely huge and I told you I went up to the next exit Turner because I thought I was gonna get hit I should have stopped right then but I couldn't stop and I I went up to the next exit which is about two three miles I came all the way back down turned around and came all the way back up and it was gone I expected to see feathers all over the road of blood you know and carnage but it was gone so apparently it was able to fly away I just mentioned that for the hell of it because we're talking about large birds he once Ivan passed away everything kind of fell apart you know a lot of my connections were broken at that point well Ivan was alive he was I was going to do a lot of people and once once he passed away everything kind of just went quiet you know I kind of miss the summer I miss Ivan Sanderson he was a kind of a one of a kind guy and I had a pretty good relationship I I miss him thank you for watching an interview with a cryptid hunter if you enjoyed this video and would like to learn more about Frank graves and the American Expeditionary Society please check out the book legends of the Nahanni Valley available on Amazon [Music]

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Channel: Hammerson Peters

Views: 495,085

Rating: 4.6865754 out of 5

Keywords: nahanni, south nahanni, south nahanni river, sasquatch, bigfoot, mystery, mysterious, headless valley, nuk luk, waheela, thunderbird, thunderbird photograph, lost footage, cryptozoology, cryptid, northwest territories, canada, canadian, thunderbird photo, mandela effect, omah, ivan sanderson, ivan t. sanderson, documentary, cryptozoological, cryptids, cryptozoologist, cryptozoological documentary

Id: enpq9OrfQF8

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 77min 49sec (4669 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 31 2018

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