Anthropologist Encounters Sasquatch on Maryland’s Seneca Creek Ridge and Faces Pure Terror

0:00 You're listening to bigflet Society, and I'm Jeremiah Byron. In this show, we go beyond the campfire stories to bring you first hand encounters from people who say they've seen something impossible. From backwoods trails and remote mountain haulers to quiet farms and crowded highways. The stories come from everywhere, and each one leaves us with more questions than answers. These are the voices of the people who've lived it. To settle in, because today you'll hear another account that just might change the way you see the woods forever. So stay with us, all right, Big for Society. You've got the privilege of talking to Kenny Jahulski today. Kenny is a trained anthropologist who has had experience with Bigfoot in the past. Is a pleasure to have Kenny on the show. How's it going today, sir?

0:46 Thank you, Jeremiah, thank you for having me on. Absolutely it's going to be I feel from what I know so far, is going to be a very interesting conversation. Get your viewpoint about things because of your background, but Kenny's right into it. What side of the country are we starting with in our conversation today? We're going to start. My first encounter happened in October of twenty fourteen in Maryland along a ridgeline where the Seneca River meets or Seneca Creek meets the Monocacy. And it was a part of an area known as the Black Rock Mill Quarry, which is also a historic property and protected wildlife refuge in Maryland. And I'll set you off by how this all happened. Several years prior to this, I was in this area hiking and noticed some very strange structures, tree bends and things that I could not identify.

1:46 And as I began hiking in this area more and more and chatting was some indigenous friends about what I was seeing. They were recommending that this could be an area of where their sasquatch activity. So I was very skeptical of this, but I began to continue to hike this area. It's a very beautiful area, and on this particular evening in October, I decided to go for a late afternoon hike and then it turned into sort of a night adventure because what ended up happening is I did have some basic camping equipment with me, but no tent, so I basically had what would be like a bedroll.

2:27 And so in this area where I decided to hike, Prior to that, I had seen tracks, I had heard howls and whistles. And in one afternoon I was hiking in this area and a tree was pushed down from a ridgeline above me, down facing me, coming down the ridge, and I was able to scoot up the ridge quick enough to see that the tree, which was a juvenile, a small tree, It wasn't an elderly tree or a sick tree that would have fallen on its own accord. You could actually see where it had been split, bent and deliberately pushed down. Whatever had done that was gone, and I saw no footprints. One of the things about the Maryland topography and soil in this area is it's highly acidic and there's a lot of dense leaf litter.

3:19 So footprints are in general hard to come by, so when you do come by them, they stand out. And so I had seen an area where there was a lot of mud going up this one ridge, and there was very distinct footprints that were not human, and there were the splaying of the toes and the wists and breast of the footprint, and the depth of the footprint was not human, and it was going up this ridge and I only saw two of them. I had no casting material with me, which was my unfortunate error. But as time went on, I began to hike more in this area and it can get very remote. And this afternoon in October where I was there, I come in up this trail. I parked my car in the parking lot by the forest preserve, and I began walking. And as I'm walking up the trail, it begins to ascend in elevation. I'm walking up this trail and I'm going up to an area where I picked out a ridge line where I would be where I would sit for the evening. Now to paint a picture of this, the ridge line where I'm at is about seventy five to eighty feet above the creek and it just falls right out, So there's no once you're there in this particular part of the ridge, you're up against a wall, so there's no leaving the area once you're there, and you could trip,

4:51 you could fall, you could hurt yourself. And I'll explain why this becomes significant later in the story. So I'm going up the ridgeline and as I'm going up the ridge line to my left and to my right, I feel like I'm being paced or that there's somebody following me, and so I stopped. And as I stopped, it stopped or on both left and right side. And as I'm climbing up this elevation, there are these the trees become pines, so they become like this deciduous forest, and it's very thick. The tree, the tree foliage becomes very dense and dark. And of course as the as I'm going up this ridge, the light is fading, so there is no real there there.

5:36 The light's coming to a dim and so I was wanting to get to where I was going to be camping. I'm going up the elevation of this and it's ascending and going up and ascending. And I quickly turned to my left and I hear it like a snap of branches, expecting to see a person to So the middle of the ridge line, the pathway, there's a ridge above me, and then below me is the creek. So I turned to my what would be my left, and I look up where I'm hearing the snap break, and right in front of me is a seven and a half foot tall gray sasquatch with a grin of blocked teeth grinning at me, and I look up at it. Of course, I'm completely shocked. And it then moves to my left a little bit, and as I look down, coming up from the base of the creek towards me as a much larger, darker creature that, of course, the light has faded, so this larger creature is completely in profile and shadowed out, so I don't see its face, but I do see it's a men's structure. It's a men's stature, and it's coming up the creek bed towards me. And this thing is much more resemblant of the Patterson gimbling creature as far as heights and size and wid goes the one above me. So the one above me was much more lanky,

7:07 and to me, I'm only making an assumption as to what it could be as far as its age, but to me, it looked like it was a juvenile. So it was like and once I turned to look to my left to see where this creature it was, and it had moved off behind the bushline, the one below me then moved behind the sticker bush line, so I'm entering the evening, having seen two of these creatures. I go up to the upper ridge where I'm going to be camped and put my stuff down. I'm completely white and I'm a Type one diabetic. My heart's raising, i feel my blood shugars dropping, and I'm like when you have a shock like that, you start to shake. And so I'm sitting down on the ground and I immediately realized that it's now completely dark, and so I'm not in any way able to really leave this area without My fear would be that I would fall or that I would not be able to get back because I hiked quite a bit end to get there. So as this is going on, I'm setting up my camp, I'm drinking water, I'm trying to get myself together. Was thinking about completely leaving at that point, but as all this is going on, this is where it gets very interesting.

8:31 The way Seneca Creek works. It's like almost like a holler or a hollowed area where that you have it's surround The creek is surrounded by these ridges which then lead to out to the Monocacy River, and so it's this was at the wisest point of the Seneca creek, so the creek, the way the creek was running, I could hear other creatures echoing down, calling and calling to each other from up and down the creek, and there was an echoing of larger which to me sounded like larger individuals. And the sound was like was this giant echo going back and forth up and down. And I could hear several of these individuals, which to me sounded like there was more than the two that I saw, and they kept calling back and forth. And what was really horrifying was having hyped this area previously, trying to figure out where these calls were coming from and what part of the creek way it was coming from. To my very far left down the ridge where I was, where I was at, there was the most blood curdling scream.

9:42 It sounded like a woman being stabbed. And this went on. It just froze my blood cold, and I sat there and I never got a glimpse of what that was, although I could hear it, and throughout the evening, throughout the night, this particular sasquatch continued to make that awful howling sound, while there were others that were equally that were going back and forth and the sound of the calls kept getting closer and closer, which is why I didn't leave. I stayed where I was at and understand while all this is going on, it was happening so quickly.

10:24 The only thing I could explain it as if I were being surrounded and being watched. So the elevation of where my little ridgeline camp site was, I could hear the sounds of the callings getting closer and closer, and I sat there and began I was waiting for either wanting them to step out of the bush. But the rest of the evening, when all this was going on, I never They never came out of the woodline. I could see eyeshine, and parts of the night they were throwing rocks and tossing stone owns at me. But the most extraordinary thing two things happened that night that really stood out as being the most interesting looking back, One of which was throughout the evening, these creatures continued to make their presence known vocally or through tossing rocks or screaming.

11:20 But the most amazing thing was they would one of them would break from the group and run circles around the ridge that I was on. So the ridgeline that I was on was right above a smaller ridge below me. To think, it was like a bluff with a circle on top of a circle. So this thing, one of these things would run and begin to run circles around it. Now I was above where they were running, so I could hear them run but not see them. So this went on, and then that would stop, and I would sit there, and then another one would do it, would do it, and it was going on sporadically all a while.

12:01 The calls from the down the creek up and down continued, and then they moved up closer to the ridge where I was at, and to me, what it felt like was my position was being triangulated. Obviously they knew where I was at, and what I felt very much so was that I was invading their territory or completely unwelcomed. This was unexpected, and so the most disheartening thing about my entire experience is I did not have equipment with me. I did not have the proper gear with me to record this. So this is all anecdotal, still life changing and terrifying, but very much an experience that when this was going on and throughout I'm trying to give you a timeframe. This wasn't like a five minute encounter or a twenty minute encounter. This went on for several hours.

12:59 I was unable to leave because if I had gotten up with the fear that was going on and with these creatures around me, I was afraid if I got onto to the pathway, which was very narrow, going to go back down the ridge towards where I was parked, that I would have fallen and hurt myself. I was trapped in this area as all this was going on, and so then the second most extraordinary thing happened. And from an anthropological perspective, I kept this to myself for a very long until several years later when I heard an interview with another big clot eye witness on a podcast where they described very similar vocalizations. So about midway through all of this, two would sounded like two individuals came down the ridge right next to where I was camp.

13:56 Now it's completely blacked out. I don't have a fire going it's a cold camp, so I have no fire going on. There's no lights, so we're in a dense forest. I'm trying to give you the mental picture of what this would be like, so these two individuals come down the ridge near me. I can hear their footsteps and they stop. But what begins to happen is this, These two individuals begin to click talk to each other. So I'm talking like but a much higher rate. And they're going back and forth, clicking to each other, back and forth and a very high rate to speak. Now, what makes this very significant and in my mind as this has happened, I was completely blown away. But what in my mind when I'm familiar with this is this occurs in human language. So the Hansa people of Africa, the Sun's people of the Kolhari all use polidal and lateral clicks between their phonemics, between their and their language. But human language and even in the Athabaskan native languages they will use. You'll hear click sounds and things in between the words, and this occurs in several languages throughout the world.

15:15 It's very rare, but it does occur, so that immediately grew my attention. But so imagine that with no phonemes, with no works, with no sounds other than the clicking, and to me, it was like a language, and they were going back and forth at a very high rate, and then it stopped. It completely stopped, and then I could hear them walking away. This went on for about five or six minutes. But I sat there listening to this, completely blown away by this, and with an understanding that what I was hearing was not human, and the rate of speed of the clicking going back and forth between these two individuals was in such a way that it was almost as if that in itself was a language.

16:06 And I had never ever heard this before. And when this happened, I talked to some friends about it and was trying to bounce ideas off of my friends about what exactly could this be. And I kept this to myself. I never talked when I talked about the sasquatch encounters, the howling, the grunting, the rocks throng, and things like that. But it wasn't until several years later I was listening to another podcast and an individual began to describe this clicking language going on, and I totally dropped my pen out of my hand or I was completely blown away by this because I had never ever heard anyone else mention this. Now more and more people talk about this, but back in twenty fourteen. When this was happening, I had never heard of this part and it completely blew me away. And originally I'm thinking, to myself, are these humans?

16:58 Is somebody just trying to scare me out of here? And it was like, but I knew that wasn't the case because I had seen these two individuals earlier in the day that completely scared me to death. I was unprepared. I tell people, you want to see a sasquatch, you want to see, you want to find a sasquatch, be prepared for what you could see, because I think a lot of people aren't. And when you have class a encounter or visual encounter with these creatures, whether it be close or far away, it's it can be stunning. That is that's extremely intense. I've just been listening this whole time. You have definitely a few questions for you.

17:41 The two main sightings at the beginning, the one to your left and the one down at the creek. How far away from you were both of those. My estimation, the one the what I'm going to call the juvenile gray white one, which is right above the ridge, A Bobby was no more than about eighty five feet for me, the one coming up the ridge line was maybe maybe two hundred to three hundred feet from me, so we're talking close. And what I found terrifying and scary the whole time this was going on is when you're seeing this, your mind is not comprehending what you're seeing.

18:25 And I was at one point felt like I was going to black out from this and being on a ridge that high up and then having to go up another incline to get to where my campsite was. This was absolutely not something I was expecting. And then when you have when you have these experiences, Unfortunately I did not have any equipment with me and I could when I've talked about my setting with people are like, did you have a camera with you? Did you have a video camera? Did you? And I'm like, no, I didn't. I was not. This was not something I was anticipating, but it was life altering for me because it was for me a vindication of the fact that I've always suspected that these creatures were real and having seen the evidence and my little research area that this happened. Now, also keep in mind that along this ridge line about a mile to my north, less than a mile to my north was a farmstead that was adjacent to the ridge that had a huge corn field and they were growing tomatoes and other vegetable that a vegetable garden, but it was like a corn field that backed up to the ridge. So my thoult was maybe these creatures and it being October and this is when people are harvesting corn and they're harvesting for the winter. I was very curious that were these creatures there because of the food resources, Because this area of black Rock Mill has an abundance

19:58 of deer, has an abundance of fish, and then you have these outlying farms that have corn and other food resources. Obviously there's an abundance of things for them to eat. So maybe I was just at the right time, at the right place when all this happened, because I wasn't when I initially went in to do this hike, was not anticipating to have an encounter like this, whereas prior I had a tree pushed down. The tree pushing down in front of me was extraordinary. And one time along one of the ridges that I was hiking one day, I was grunted at by one of these creatures, and I kept looking where the grunting was coming from, and I couldn't see where it was coming from. I could hear the direction, but there was a divot along the base of the ridge where it may have been laying down and grunting at me that I couldn't see. Because these creatures, for whatever reason, they have an agility to not only hide, but they're running ability. And the very fact that this creature was running in circles around the base of where I was at at such a high rate.

21:10 It was like listening to a deer run, you know. I mean, that is how quick it was. And then it would stop, and then it would do it again. But this is by pedal running, not quadrupedal running. This was by pedle running, and it was just and then to intersperse this as this was going on, there results of vocalizations coming up and down the creek bed. The creek I want to call it like a holler, but it's very steep the way the creek runs, and so the echoing effect was that was in itself fascinating but chilling at the time. In retrospect, looking back at this experience and everything that was going on, it was something that was terribly you don't know how to respond emotionally to this, and unfortunately, again this way, did not have equipment with me. So I'm very much this is an experience that will definitely change me. But what I've also realized is that these creatures must have a complex social organization because just the two that I saw, and then they were joined by their friends later in the evening coming up the ridge, and they were obviously curious about my presence. They never injured me. They obviously had multiple opportunities to charge me to injure me. There were a few times at night where I was I had my bedroll laid out, so imagine there's no tent going on here.

22:38 So I've got like a makeshift bedroll against a tree, and there are these high trees that are like juniper trees with mountain laurel growing around it. So they were about seven to eight feet in height, and they were in front of me like a curtain, like a stage curtain, imagine. And throughout the night I would look up around on the seven to eight feet level. I saw two eyeshine milky white eye shines looking down at me, and I would look up and then they would blink their eyes and if they blinked their eyes, they were gone. At one point in the night, I had to get up and relieve myself. So I'm walking. So if you can imagine, this ridgeline has smaller hills adjacent to it going down towards the creek. So I went to my right to go relieve myself. And as I looked to my left, right near my camp, I look and I see these large circled eyes at around the seven to eight feet level looking down at me again from behind this mountain, whorl tree bush tree area, and I and then I look over at it and it closes its eyes and it's gone. I'm like, and so I look back over and then I slowly turned back and walked back to my to where my bedroll is and my makeshift camp, which was essentially a backpack and a walking stick. I

24:10 had no I think I may have had a pocket knife on me. A Swiss army there wasn't. I had no firearms. I'm in Maryland. We don't We don't really have them as far as your ability to carry, conceal carry whatever, open carry. So I had no protection. So this is one of the reasons why you know I tell people when you're out in the woods. I don't know if they're aware enough to know what firearms are. I think they are. But it's like I was never hurt, I was never injured. I was scared. I'm pretty sure they tried to scare me. Obviously they I feel like I was in the wrong place or they were trying to hunt, and maybe I interrupted their ability to hunt. But this is something that I will never forget, this encounter my entire life and have and having shared it with a handful of people. But it's this is something that I immediately when and I'm going as an after effect of all of this, I'm thinking to myself, what is it that these creatures are and what is their level of social organization, because ultimately, these creatures have probably been going through this area for decades. I have no idea for a long time for them for this to be a base for them of some form, and maybe they're seasonally gathering and hunting in this area Maryland where I live currently, I'm in what's called the Piedmont region.

25:31 So if you go on a map and you look at the Appalachian Mountains, the sugar Loaf Region, the Piedmont region of the Appalachian Mountains sits right here in where the area of Maryland that I live in, and it has one of the largest courts deposits of all of the Appalachian Mountains. And so the indigenous peoples would come here and quarry their courts to make their arrowheads. So it's always been a settled it's always been an active area as far as native peoples, and then during the colonial period. I've actually done archaeology in this area, so I know the history of what goes on, what has gone on historically in this area. But what's intriguing is that the piedmonts if you go from where my where I was camped and had my sighting, and you follow it north the Monocacy as you're going into Pennsylvania the Susquehanna River, and you keep going north into Pennsylvania, and you can actually pick up if you go the c and O Canal, which is a part of this region.

26:36 The Cino Canal actually runs from Washington, d c. All the way to where I'm at, where there's a place called Edwards Ferry. You can pick up the c and O Canal take that to point of Rocks in Maryland, and then from there the Appalachian Trail goes all the way up to me to the White Mountains of me So you literally could walk from Marsh DC to the White Mountains of Maine and never see a person and never get on a road. And so this is what's fascinating about this area. Yeah, and so I'm of the opinion that these creatures use this as a byeway. Maybe I was at the right time, at the right place for this to intersect, but literally there have always been sightings along the Appalachian truck. I think there's actually an organization that tracks bickfoot sightings along the Appalachian Trail. That's what they do. And I'm often wondering if this is what's going on, is that they're using these natural resource corridors that actually run from where I'm at in the Lower Piedmonts through the Sugar Loaf all the way through the Susquehanna into Pennsylvania, or they're just taking the Appalachian Trail all the way up to the main And there's plenty of sightings between Pennsylvania going into of course upstate New York, the Atarandak Mountains, the algalon this whole area into into into the main regions and down back and forth.

28:08 I did my field work in upstate New York, so I'm very familiar with Western New York and having been there and having been in very remote regions in Western New York, this is there. There is plenty on the east coast to cover these creatures, and of course in Northern Maryland, central to northern Maryland, there have been sightings for decades in this area. This is it's it just blowing my mind. So a real world example for listeners. So the juvenile that he was able to see eighty five feet away, a real world example that would be like the size of a full sized swimming pool. So it's really not that long a distance, which is incredible to see it that close.

28:55 To ask you about that a bit. So what you were seen had no clothes on it at all. Correct, This was hair covered. Like I said, it was lanky, It was not robust. It was very lanky, and it was white gray in color. But what was striking was I could see some of the facial features and the eyes were dark. The brow ridge and the zagomatic arches which is the cheek under where the cheekbones are were sunken and swollen, I should say sunken in and where the lower jaw meets the lower jaw was a little bit protruding. The nose was flat than a human nose.

29:38 It was a little bit flatter than ours. It wasn't projecting, and it grimaced at me. And when it grimaced, it showed its teeth and they were blocked. They were blocked like teeth. Did not see canines in this individual, and they it was like grimacing. It was not smiling, but grimacing. And I don't know if it was a shock response to seeing me or if it was a threat response, which in primates usually you would see the canines. But this was to me a grimace that I could see its teeth. And then then I heard the individual below me coming up from the creek bed, so the trail was in the middle, so there was a ridge above and then below coming up just to give it some perspective.

30:22 And this happened. I'm saying this happened like within ten to fifteen seconds. So seeing the one above, seeing the one below coming towards me, and then then completely moving off into the underbrush, and then that started. This is what I tell people like, that's how I started my evening, and then this other aspect happened, and I've contemplated going back. This experience was so altering for me that to try and put it into words, and I've tried to articulate my experience is the best way I can to give as much detail, because really I really need a forensic sketch artist to come and sketch what I saw, because I can like this happened in twenty fourteen. I literally could if somebody I could draw, they could draw it if I described it for them, the facial features of the juvenile and how I saw them in the grimace and the teeth, and I saw it long enough to be able to make a very good sighting of it.

31:22 And it was really your mind just you can't wrap your mind around it. And it did not Neither of these creatures during this encounter vocalized at me. They didn't hoot, they didn't scream. It was a very interesting encounter with no vocalization. It wasn't like they roared at me to get me off the trail. They looked at me and they just moved into the bush. And and the fact that the one coming up the ridge. I later went back to make a comparison to the tree that it was standing next to, and it was well over eight feet This creature was well over eight feet tall, and that one I'm assuming and making the assumption that it was a much older creature, was a more mature creature.

32:06 It was. The shoulders on this thing were massive. And the only comparison I can give it to is if you've seen the Patterson Gimmelin footage, which most people have, and the massiveness of Patty's shoulders. That was the size of this creature, and that was massiveness of this creature. I'm making the assumption that it was a juvenile and that the one coming up was an older adult. But then there's this whole concept of sexual dimorphism. Do these creatures have extreme sexual dimorphism between male and females? And so that also is a whole other evolutionary question about what these creatures could be. I have some ideas. I'm actually currently working on a theory about what would explain the divergent appearances of the sasquatch around the United States and in Canada, and why they're so behaviorally aggressive in certain parts of the United States and others. So I'm working on a theoretical model currently using microevolutionary theory to explain this, and so it'll eventually become a paper. But I really want the application of science to apply to this, and that includes my setting. Although I was terrified and thought I was gonna black out, and believe me, I'm a Type one diabetic and so I felt as if my blood shuggars were dropping. So I had food in my backpack. Thank god. I thought that I was just going to lose it.

33:31 Oh my goodness. So one to the side, I would recommend you reach out to a lady. Her name is Sybylla Irwin, and I believe you know who she is. Yeah, okay, cool, So yeah, she's your best bet for something like that. Who would be able to draw what you saw. I would recommend talking to her also, so you have so much knowledge when it comes to what different human ancestors, different types of apes look like. I would imagine what you say saw in the face of the juvenile. Did it ring a bell in your knowledge base of anything else? Did it come close to anything?

34:11 Interestingly enough? Looking at the robustness of the skull as far as its facial features, go and looking at the creature that, of course I only saw in profile coming up to me, this is just my assessment. I've often said this, the fact that these creatures have spent their entire evolutionary history avoiding humans or only having close encounters with us, and usually among First nation and indigenous peoples. When we go into the Pacific Northwest and we look at qua qua Quakutal people, these are the people we get the appearance of Genaqua from. And this is on the totems. They actually have a clan, the Hamasah, which are a shamanic clan among the Dheniqua clan, which is where we get the open oval mouth of the Sasca, of the Bigfoot, the Sasquatch. They have a ceremonial and ritual complex centered entirely around these creatures. And to me, the fact that there is that either there's a going up back and forth between cultural complexes and then interactions with Western European peoples throughout Canada and throughout the United States, to me, these creatures are probably a form of relic commoned of what variety is of still of debate. I'm not a big camp believer. In the gigantipithesene. I think a lot of that has fallen out. I don't think that we still are arguing whether gigantopithec Is Blackie was

35:42 actually bipedal. We knew that they were large and enormous, but we only have roughly several hundred teeth and the reconstruction of a lower mandible from these creatures from excavations and China and von Koning's vault, who was the rough Unconing's vault, who was the anthropologist that discovered the gigentiphysis and teeth prior to World War two, before the Japanese invasion into what was called into China. Then Coningsvald was working at the School of Medicine in Beijing and he was an anthropologist there, and they would go to apothecary's and look at fossil teeth. And he began to see these fossil teeth and collecting them and recognizing that they were from a species, an undescribed species. I could go on and on about evolutionary anthropology and how this because there's so much about these creatures that are intriguing enough, but to me, in my opinion, and this is just in my academic opinion, and that is is that we're probably dealing with a relic hominid and not an anthropoid, whereas Giganipithecus was an anthropoid, was a giant anthropoid. Although, as a side note, there was a German anatomist named Franz Weidendraka and he examined the same teeth that konings Halt did, and in his assessment Giganipithecus was of a hominid form, a giant hominid form that was bipedal. Now how he came up with this assessment from examining the same fossil material that Koningsvald did is interesting, But they

37:16 both published papers and conings Vault's paper is available and Viideddika's paper is available, and they came to two separate conclusions from examining the same fossil material. I'm going to just make the basic assessment here that what we're dealing with is probably more than likely a coevolved relic commented that has lived alongside modern humans. Now keep this in mind too, we have never in our evolutionary history as Homo sapien sapiens. We have only in the late Holocene period the modern period been alone as a species supposedly, and I put that in big quotation marks, because throughout our history we've always had our hominid cousins living alongside us Homo erectus, the now described Denisovans or Denisovins, however you're gonna pronounce the Denievans, I say Denisovans, which we do have some fossil remains from, but we don't have a lot. But the fact that we're pushing back the calendar on the evolution of humans, but also pushing it forward and to how long they may have continued to survive, because we know that the Neanderthalis continued in southern Spain and in Siberia much later into the Pleistocene and obviously encountered us modern humans and bread with us as well.

38:41 So there was ind of breeding going on, that this was going on for thousands upon thousands of years from the Pliocene all the way up to the modern Holocene to the modern period, that this interaction was going on to all of a sudden say oh, we're it, and these other I don't know, these people sing these hairy hominids and Alberta, Canada or or Vancouver. These people are crazy, but the fact that they're found all over South Southeastern Asia, South Asia, I could do an entire show on relic comonids in Southeast Asia as opposed to Siberia. As the fact that these creatures are so widely diversely seen, we may be dealing with multiple species. We may be dealing with relic anthropoidal creatures, and we may be dealing with relic cometed creatures that persist among our modern human populations throughout the world. So there's so many questions around around what we call bigfoot in the Canadians called sasquatch. I do want to put a little side note in here about the word sasquatch, so most people may know or may not know that the stot e Looss, the Shahalless people of Harris and Hot Springs, British Columbia, the Fraser River Valley where a man named J. W. Burn, who is the Indian agent for this area, did his research at being collecting these stories. He was actually a school like a school teacher, began collecting these stories and publishing them.

40:11 And the word sasquatch comes from the shahalas the thought you lost people their word for bigfoot, and it's stuck. And so throughout all of Canada it's generically known as Sasquatch, but its origins are the Fraser River, Parris and Hot Springs Valley. Okay, it's extremely interesting, so much information, Mike Guinness, So I want to make sure that we do have time to talk about your second experience as well. Do you mind if we start moving on to that. Yeah, absolutely, and I'll go through this. So this is this is a probably a pretty well known sighting at this point, since it did appear in a documentary already.

40:54 But in January of twenty seventeen, I went to visit my friend my friends in Canada and Vancouver, and we decided to take a to take a visit up the up into Harrison. And I had never been to Harrison before, nor been to the areas that make up what is also known as Sasquatch Provincial Park, which is where Harrison peaks at this area, and so it was I was there at a weird time of year because it was winter and January Vancouver, and in that part of Canada, the weather's unpredictable. So we decided to get in my friend's car and drive from Surrey, Surrey, Canada, which is a suburb of Vancouver, all the way up to Harrison.

41:45 And as you go into Harrison and you enter into these areas, the elevation picks up it becomes more remote. But then there's this place called the Sasquatch Inn which is very famous and they sell food, they sell books and t shirts, and we went to visit and act. So when we were there visiting, they were redesigning the building, so it really wasn't open, but we were there. We were able to go into the gift store and buy a few things and look around and everything, but we didn't eat. So we continued on up to go to to go into Harrison, and we stopped off on the way up to the Shahalis Reserve and got a chance to walk around the reserve and talk to some of the locals and visit. And so we continued on again.

42:29 This is late afternoon, so the temperature dropped significantly as we began to go into this area, and we got to describe this area of Harrison. As you're going up in elevation, you come to a gated entrance which was open at the time it was off season, but you enter into what's called Sasquatch Provincial Park. And at the gate, which is a yellow gate that was open, we stopped our car and we were deciding do we want to go down into the camping area where the lake. There's a lake there and the lake oversees the mountain ridge, and so we were sitting there there was a lake, late was fading. It was late afternoon, say around four point thirty, and we get out of the cars, stretch our legs and we look up the ridge and there's a ridge right above the yellow gate and we're looking and we see this very large shadow like figure picking behind a tree. Now my friend John, who had never had a sasquatch encounter, was looking up going He pulls us all aside and go what is that? Because we're looking up at it, and this thing begins to sway between the tree and these trees in Harrison, these huge spruce pine trees. They're very thick, they're very wide, and we're looking up and we're like or pointing to it,

44:01 and we're looking at it, and it keeps swaying and looking at us, going in this peaking, going back and forth. And his wife Wanona, who's a lifelong friend of mine. Wanona looks up and she's Native and she's first Nation, and she looks up and she does a wave at it, like waves at it, and this creature raises its right arm and waves back and you can see the string hair coming off of the arm, and it lowers its arm back down again. And of course at this point we all know what we're seeing, and we begin to go up. We leave the roadway and we go climb up the ridge towards where and of course understand the steepness of the ridge. We didn't have climbing equipment and it was it was it had rain, i think the night before, so it was a little slippery, so none of us had any gear with us. So we're trying to make our way up to where the tree line we finally do. Of course, we don't see any tracks, we don't see anything, but we all saw what we saw, so we come back down the hill. John calls one of his good friends who's a saucequad treacher in Canada and as a member of the British Columbia Cryptusiologic Society, which I'm also a member of, and John calls this guy up and so he shows up, knows where the location is, shows up, and if you remember back in the day when the Ford looking infrared, the flour cameras

45:33 were huge. They're not like they're a very portable that and they were much larger. So this thing was in the bed of his truck, his pickup truck. So he drives up and of course he had We're in John's Toyota, so we don't. So we park the Toyota on the side of the road, We hop in his truck and we go up the mountain side. Now we get to such an elevation. The idea was that we were going to go up and call down and see if we get the scene to call back up or possibly even catch it. Coming up the mountain side, the snow was so thick we had to stop. It was up to when we got out of the truck. It was up to our knees. So there was no snow at the lower elevations, but it was so called outside. None of us had the proper the proper coats or gear to stay the night, so we cut. This is where it's really interesting. So we decide, okay, we can't go any further in the truck. So we turned the truck back around come back down the mountain side to where we were originally where John's car was parked, and so we parked the car there, and we're telling the gentleman who owns the truck and the car, We're like, this is where we saw him, and we're pointing up towards the ridgeline.

46:49 So he then takes his flour camera and works it around so it's pointing up at the direction where this creature was and and behold, it had come back, and it was watching us, not realizing it was being filmed and watching us as we were looking up and talking and describing, and we actually did a few calls to see if we get a call back. We did a few bigfoot POWs, and all of a sudden, the guy in the truck goes, it's right there, And so we're seeing this creature moved down the ridge from in front of the tree as it's sneaking around the trees to behind a boulder, so it's now peeking over the battle so we can see the crest of its skull and its head on top of being able to see this thing moved down and it moved back up, so it did it twice. So we got about two minutes of this and the rest of the evening, this thing then moved off entirely and it moved away, and so we stayed there for another hour, maybe two hours, seeing if it would come back, and all we got were rodents in the underbrush. Going back, we caught wildlife moving, but this thing never came back down. I don't know if it realized it was being filmed, but we got it.

48:14 We got it for about a minute and a half, two minutes we got this thing moving, and so it was freezing cold, realizing this creature wasn't going to come back, and of course we didn't have equipment with us to camp out, and it was it had to have been maybe twenty degrees outside and maybe colder than that with the wind howling and everything. And so we then pack up leave go back to their condo in Surrey, and then the next day we go right back up and we're looking for cass. Now. Winona, having lived on Alexis and Stony Plains and Alberta in the First Nation Nakota community, she was a trained tracker, so she began to look for tracks and lo and behold where this creature had moved down from the tree line near this large rock boulder, which is what we were able to get up to.

49:10 We had three tracks, three clear imprints, and we had casting material and we casted them. I photographed them. I have them. I photographed the length between the footstep between the three tracks that we were able to cast. There probably would have been more, but they were not castable. But we were able to cast three clear tracks and they were over seventeen and a half inches long and about five and a half inches wide, with a huge end step, clearly a large individual. That same day we were able to visit one of the leading Canadian researchers, Tom Steinberg, who is a well known Canadian researcher, came and took our reports, took our eyewitness report and was able to then interview us. And then when I came back to the States, Tom called me back and was able to interview me further about my sighting. And so, yeah, so that was my sighting in Canada and still I think one of the best mass sightings ever of a sasquatch, citing probably in the last decade or so, and so to be a part of both encounters, although would I jokingly say is my encounter in Maryland was terrifying, life altering, but I had no equipment with me. The one in Canada was seen by multiple eyewitnesses, photographed, plenty of evidence to show what this creature was dealing with both ends of the spectrum here. It's Bigford experiences. I jokingly say, lightning does strike twice, but those were my two experiences.

50:44 It's absolutely incredible. You said that, is that in a Small Town Monsters documentary that that's called out? Yes it is, and it was a part of the series. I think that was just recently released. But John will say we had an Emberic friend visit. I was the American friend, so I've never done for a very long time, and they're the old friends and I'm very very happy to be a part of the British Columbia Cryptozoologic Society. Had been for a number of years. Unfortunately I don't get up to Canada as much as i'd like to, but yeah, those were some really incredible times and I would like to go back to Harrison, into the same area and maybe spend a lot more significant time because it's an act area. There's a reason why it's called Sasquatch Provincial Park, obviously because it has been a feature of many Bigfoot sightings over the decades and it's well known.

51:38 And the really cool thing about the Harrison sighting was, with great fortune we had the right people, the right equipment and everything there. Although it was more of a long distance sighting, we could document it my Maryland sighting, which again was very scary and terrifying, but I don't have it's anecdotal, but having had both experiences, one in twenty fourteen and then in twenty seventeen in Canada, this is I think these creatures are much more vibrant of population than we give them credit. And I think that they're closer to civilization as well, probably to habitat loss.

52:19 I would actually maybe a different show, but I would love to go into some of the possible evolutionary theories about why we have such disparate when people describe bigfit in Texas, when they describe them in Maine that described it in the Pacific Northwest, why that is, and the evolutionary mechanisms behind the behavioral differences and the morphological differences. That is something that I've become very attuned to in a theoretical way that I would love to do, either an academic paper or a presentation, is to explain how do we apply evolutionary biology to to these incredible sightings in both Canada and the United States.

53:04 Part of this encounter is extremely interesting because it's a pattern that's started to come up in my interviews over the years different places. And yeah, it's the part where Whenona was really able to have a form of sign language back and forth. This has come up. There's an interview I did with Ernie Devereaux with Ernie out of western Massachusetts where there was this present and there's also a researcher in the Mount Hood area that had many times where sign language was used back and forth between themselves and individuals. And do you have any thoughts about sign language or hand motions being used between Sasquatch as an anthropologist.

53:56 Yeah, I do. Actually, I think that when you combine this year sounds and what's going on in the analysis of the Sierra Sound, which of course are very famous now, and when you look at reports of people having non verbal sign language going on and how it's used. A lot of the First Nation peoples in Canada will talk about the use of sign language and their encounters with the Sasquatch throughout Canada, whether it's Central Alberta, whether it's in the Mountains of Canada, the Canadian Rockies, or along the Northwest Coast. What's been studied more and I again, there's so much more I could go into detail with as far as cultural goes. The Northwest Coast people have an entire ceremonial and cultural complex around their interaction with these creatures, going all the way up the Fraser River Valley, and then you go into central Canada, the Canadian Rockies, you go into Alberta, in Saskatchewan, in Ontario, some of the earliest documented European encounters with Sasquatch and Canada come from Ontario, from French Canadian encounters with these creatures. But then the ethnographic research and the actual field work done by anthropologists going back to Franz Boas in the eighteen nineties he talks about what we now call Bigfoot and Sasquatch.

55:20 There is a written record from both anthropologists in the Northwest Coast and then European descendant peoples in the Ontario region of Canada that document these creatures going back two hundred years or better. This is what really French Boas is doing his work in the eighteen nineties through the nineteen twenties and thirties, and I've studied Boas's work extensively. And then there were other Canadian anthropologists doing field work among the Quakutal people and the Height and the Clinkett the coast of Clinkett and Alaska, which have Alaska, their indigenous cultures have a major bigfoot culture. This is something that is intriguing and to me, I have always said this from day one. To me, the biggest evidence for the existence of these creatures is the ethnographic and ethnohistorical evidence.

56:16 To me, that speaks more widely of the existence of these creatures than the footprint evidence, the sightings. They're all very important, incredibly important scientifically to examine the foot tracks, but the ethnohistorical evidence is overwhelming, not just in North America, not just in Canada, but in Southeast Asia, in Central Asia. You're going back centuries at that point with human interactions with relic committed populations. This is just something that you know, it needs much more attention from academia, but much more attention when we're all in the field. We need to be acutely aware of what's going on when we have these things, and I know it's hard because they can be terrifying, But to record as much as you can the data, what you're witnessing, the behaviorally, as well as what you're seeing as far as the creatures go, there's just so much. There's just so much.

57:16 What kind of data should one be capturing. What's the most important data to capture when you're in that situation. I think if you can get visual evidence, that would be the best. I often have held that if people have been putting out plot watchers. I know that's been a thing now for a number of years. But the audio evidence at a tape recorder that night, that will never leave my memory. What I heard and that I kept it to myself and for a long time until I heard another person being interviewed on a podcast that mentioned this, and I about dropped what I had in my hands because I'd never heard anybody mention that before. But the audio is I think as important as the visual, and of course the footprints. If you can cast footprints, do you. I think there's a lot of mistaken between bear tracks double steps with certain species of bear and sasquatch.

58:10 I think that I think there are genuinely great casts out there. There are hundreds of them, but I think some people are seeing I've looked at people that say, oh, that's a sasquarech. No, that's an omipad and claws. That's a bear, that's a large it's a grizzly or a large brown. It's not a sasquatch. But I've seen what I saw on the ridgeline when before I had my encounter that was clearly not a human track. I unfortunately did not have casting material with me. It's all about being in the right place at the right time, with the right equipment, and really do those things ever come together. What if you're let's say you're out in an area you're wanting to do the Jane Goodall method and you're like, I'm gonna spend one thousand hours in this area. I know it's active, and just be there and observe. All you have is a journal and a pencil or a pen What are the most important things things to be writing down?

59:01 Would you say I would write down first of all, when you're doing field work like that, you want to be consistent with not only where you're at, but consistent to be there all the time at the same time of day, but also to note things like what is the weather like, what is the temperature like? What time of day are you there? And if you're getting activity like calls rock clacking, which in my area is much more common than wood knocking. I've discovered that with rock clacking, when is this occurring, what part of the areas is occurring? And then going there. And we have this concept in anthropology it's called being a visual presence. So even if you're an other and you're not from a culture, the nature of both intelligent human beings and I would assume also intelligent primates or well a common is your presence and your visual presence. They're ware that you're there. There's no reason to put a gillies and suit on or camouflage.

1:00:06 They know you're there. People. I see this all the time. People are going in with camo and they're putting like football cane on their face. I'm like, they know you're there, so be there. Do normal things, Sing songs, be a visual presence so that they're curious, they will come to you. You don't really need to look for a sasquatch. They will come to you if they're in the area. If you're there long enough and you're willing to put in the time, they will eventually make themselves known to you. And so that would be my recommendation. But keep notes about what you're doing, what works, what doesn't work. Were you're leaving food if you are, what kind of food? How often is it being taken? Is it not being taken?

1:00:47 Are you not leaving food? Are you just hanging out? When I had my terrifying encounter, all I had was like a bedroll, a backpack and a walking step and a hat on and that was it. And I think I had my insulin with me and some food. I didn't. I was not anticipating this, and that often is the case. I was thinking, Okay, I'm in an area where I know they're at. Let me just go hiking in this area. I was not anticipating this level of activity. Now I know after the fact that you know what I need to bring when I go back out there. But to your point exactly is to be a visual presence, but to be non intrusive, so you're there observing, you're sitting there.

1:01:29 I know people that have brought in musical instruments. If you play a woodwind instrument like a flute or a harmonica to get just or a lot of people who have encounters are having picnics, they're just camping, they're singing camp songs. I will have to say I know two other anthropologists that have done research in this area, but because they're not they're still teaching at universities, they're not out about their research. But both of them had encounters as chill children and boy Scouts in northern California. So one of them was on a camping expedition in northern California as a boy Scout or a cup Scout or whatever, and one of these creatures walked into their camp at night and they could see it through the campfire that was going that they could see the outline of this creature walk through their camp. And he was a young boy, and of course later years later he became an anthropologist, and he had an encounter many years later. But because they're both still teaching, they don't want to to jeopardize that.

1:02:35 There's still is a lot of prejudice in the field of anthropology around the subject matter academia, and so Jeff Meldrum was an amazing man somebody spoke to on the number of occasions, an incredible person and great loss to our field. Jeff Meldrum was the exception to the rule and not the normally people that teach anthropology at universities and colleges. You can mention bigfoot and sasquatch no graphic context in an evolutionary but you can't bring you You couldn't just say I'm going to keech a course on sashquatch studies, although I think that might be changing in certain parts of can. Yeah, someday probably hopefully, I really hope. So so I want to clarify, just something to make sure I heard it right. So are you saying that multiple anthropologists have had encounters while researching in this one Maryland area.

1:03:24 No, not in one was in one was in another part of the United States. But they're both colleagues and friends of mine that I've known for years. And I said, why don't you come to conferences? You're like, I can't. They literally can't. But this is something that when you have somebody of a professional area that you know, would be like having a medical doctor being in the field, or a surgeon that has an encounter and is seeing a sasquatch, or a p diatrist, you know somebody you know who works in the field of medicine that is trained and then has an encounter. I would be curious to get a group of diatrists together to who are not Bickfoot enthusiasts, to actually seriously look at the known, really good casts out there from a scientific perspective, totally adjacent from the Bickfoot field. That would be a real interesting study.

1:04:16 No, I agree one hundred percent, and I believe there could be a few out there. Have you gone out to Do you still continue to go out to the Maryland area or was that a one time do? I was actually out there, ironically. I was out there about three weeks ago. I was up early in the morning and I could not sleep, so I got in my car and it was around three or four o'clock in the morning, and I drove to the area where I had my sighting, parked my car and went up the river, and I was there to try and get the morning light. I was actually going to try and do some photography, which I actually did, but the entire time I walked into that area, parked my car, was walking along the river. I didn't go up to the ri because it was I was walking along the river trying to get the sun coming up over to get good shots of the area, and the entire time the ridges were above me. And as the sun came up, I swore I was being watched, that ceiling of being watched, and I was like, I got really uneasy because the foliage is so thick in some of these areas. You literally during the day it's so dark you almost need a flashlight. So I'm going through this area as the sun is coming up. I knew the sun was going to come up very soon. And I was walking through this very bench foliage along the river, along the Seneca River, and I looked up towards where the ridgelines surround the river,

1:05:50 and I was like, I got the very strong sense that I was being watched, and I took my picture. It's like a few flower photographs, some pictures of the river. I did put my camera up and take pictures of the ridge just to see if maybe I could get something like a shadow of something. I didn't, of course, but I was just very it was very eerie. But I do plan on going back and doing a nighttime investigation with the right equipment. That's awesome. What a fascinating conversation there's I would say the last question that I'll ask you today, Kenny, and this is this is a hypothetical. So let's say your viewpoint as an anthropologist. Let's say that an individual, we're in a really active bigfoot area and then you stumble upon something that looks like it's a tool making or tool using station. There's picked ferns, there's piles of mud, there's pieces of bark that are ripped off, there's a handprint in the mud. Are there anything? What would you recommend to do as an anthropologist in that situation and to capture evidence.

1:07:01 If you come across any lithic technology, two things call me no. No. One thing would be photograph it n C. Two. Don't move anything. Photograph as much as you can as it's placed. Then if you can do that and even measure the distances between what looks like a tool and any other pile of rocks or anything that looks very suspicious, do measurements. Photograph everything in place before you pick anything up. Then if that's the case, I would be more than willing to look at whatever's found and to see if it's actually something that is been made by a human or otherwise, because all indigenous peoples in these areas have a tool technology, but usually it's not surface. So if you're finding unusual things at the surface that look like a tool, again, photograph everything as you find it in place, we call it and seek you. Photograph it and seat you and then measure to your best ability the art.

1:08:10 What's there. Put tap measures, but give it some scale. If you have a tape measure, that's the best thing. I tell everybody. Carry tape measure in your backpack, or a ruler or a pack of cigarette something to give it, or a pen something to give it scale. Measure everything in relationship to one another. And if you do know somebody a professional qualifications, call them and have them come out. If you don't, it's better to gather the material then lose it. So if you can gather it in plastic bags or whatever you have, and then call somebody who is credentialed to look at it. And like I said, if anybody wants to contact me, if they do come across this, I'd be more than happy is to look at the photographs or even meet them in person and look at the artifact in person.

1:09:00 That's really great advice, I think. So that actually leads me into is there a way that people could reach out to you if they had questions? Yeah, this I think. I'm I can give you my I think I gave you my email address. Yeah, so they can contact me via my email or I'm also on Facebook. They can reach out to me on Facebook through Messenger, or they can email me if you want to put my email up. And I'd be happy to talk to people about this. I'd like again, I'd like I said, I would like to see much more work done in evolutionary biology around theoretical modeling around sasquatch and around what the differences are. Like I said, I'm currently working on something around that right now, and so I would like to actually get to maybe present that at a conference at some point or publish it academically.

1:09:57 My goodness, this is just man. I love doing interviews. Some of them are extremely fascinating in addition to some great encounters, and this is one of those interviews I think where it is just been a great one to learn from. But also a highly engaging one as well in my opinion. But Kenny, thank you so much for coming on the show. Definitely keep me in the loop with if you are able to one day get that paper out, I would love to know about it and so people can check that out. Great. Thank you again for having me on Jeremia. Before we wrap this episode, I want to say something directly to a very specific group of listeners. If you're in the military, any branch or forces, and if you've seen something that no one can explain, or if you're a National park ranger or forestry worker who's been told to stay quiet, if you're a pilot who's seen something strange down on the ground, or if you're with the FBI a federal agent and see or working intelligence and you stumbled upon something you're not allowed to talk about.

1:11:05 And if you're a firefighter, paramedic or search and rescue responder who's heard screams or found tracks that didn't make sense. If you're in the logging industry on a remote oil field or a trucker with government contracts and you've had something happen that you've never told a soul, And if you're a biologist a wildlife specialist or a field researcher under contract who has found evidence you're not allowed to report. If you're a pastor, a missionary, or someone on a spiritual retreat and you saw something that shook your faith, or if you work in the shadows, CIA, NSA or anything with clearance and you've seen what the public hasn't, then I want to talk to you, even if it's anonymous.

1:11:50 You can reach me at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com. The world needs to hear what you've been forced to carry alone, and you're not alone. You've got the story, We've got the mic. See you in the woods. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Bigfoot Society podcast. Every encounter we share reminds us that the world is bigger and stranger than we think, and that the truth is often hiding just beyond the tree line. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the channel on YouTube, hit the bell so you don't miss the next episode, and share this with a friend who's into mysteries, monsters, or the unexplained. And if you're listening to us on Spotify or Apple podcast, please follow the show there and leave us a five star positive review because all that helps more people discover the show. And remember, if you or someone you know has had a Bigfoot sighting, please I'd love to hear from you, so email me at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com and let's start the conversation. If you haven't gotten a chance yet, check out our membership community over at www dot Bigfoot societypodcast dot com and that's where you can hear tomorrow's episode today early in ad free and members only episodes every week. Also, it's a place to connect with other people that are into the Bigfoot subject as much as you are. Thanks again for following along with the Bigfoot Society until next time, Keep your eyes open, trust your gut, and never stop asking what else might be out there? And see you in the woods.