"ECHOES OF BIGFOOT: RELIVING MY UNFORGETTABLE ENCOUNTER IN GEORGIA!"

0:00 Either your listening to the Big for Society podcast and I'm Jeremiah Bron. Every week I talk to individuals who have experienced Sasquatch in some way or another, so you won't want to miss an episode. Make sure you're subscribed on the platform that you're listening to, and share this episode where a friend does not cost a thing, and it helps the show continue to grow. If you'd like to hear Bigfoot Society episodes early in ad free, you can do so by becoming a Patreon supporter or a YouTube channel member. Links to those are in the show notes in Bigfoot Society. I've taken far too much of your time so far, so let's get on with the show, all right, Big for Society. I've got the privilege of talking to individual who contacted me recently. His name is Philip from the Southeast Georgia area, specifically Savannah.

0:53 And how's it going today, Philip? It's going well. How you doing, Jeremiah, Oh, I'm doing great. I'm excited to be able to chat with you tonight. We're having a nice night in Central Iowa. It's probably one of the last few days where it's going to be up in the seventies and we're just having a great, great day up here, So that's great. I know that it must get a lot more bitter there as the months moved towards winter than it ever does here. Absolutely, it can get viciously cold up here, probably a lot colder than it gets down in Georgia for sure. But yeah, it sounds I have a little bit of info about you, Philip, and it sounds like you have some really interesting stories.

1:40 But is there anything that you would need the listeners to know about you before we start? I have you start talking about your encounter, what you've experienced with Bigfoot over the years. Yeah, give everybody a brief overview. I was born and raised here Georgia. I got interested in the paranormal in general at a very early age, like about eight or nine, and my parents, for all their faults, the one thing they seemed to recognize in me was this interest in that. So I was literally getting gifts of books on things like that by the time I was nine or ten, and so I was interested in a wide array of subjects, from you know, spectral anomalies to UFOs. I remember being so enthralled with the story of Spring Hill Jack when I was a kid, and it just moved on from there.

2:38 For a while. I got taken away from all that as I became a teenager and interested in teenager things. But an event happened in the Okinogi Swamp in my early twenties or well, I should say mid twenties that kind of took me back to that area. Then I stupped it all down again. And in the two thousands. Uh. Interestingly, the big Foot subject was brought back home for me through the Rick Drick Dire hoax of two thousand and eight, which I was fascinated by. I mean, anybody with half of a brain up there would know immediately it was a hoax, but I was enthralled with how this man was able to continually wrote people back in. So yeah, that's what got me back into the subject, and I've been hooked ever since. And and so pretty much there we are as far as this subject. I'm a married father of seven year old. I'm a I've been a chef most of my life, run a hot sauce business. And other than that, you know, a musician if you if you want it, I don't know if you want to mention the name of your your Hot Sauce Company to Okay, it's a mouthful. It's a mouthful, but it should be. The company's name is a mouthful because but it should be easy to remember if you're familiar with the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,

4:12 which took place here in Savannah, the book and then the movie and all that, it's the play on that. It's the Garden of Good and hot dot com and all of the sauces that I designed are the names or plays on things that have to do with that book. So currently the one I'm selling is called Minerva Sauce, and Minerva was like the voodoo priest us in the book in the movie. That's awesome. So listeners, if you're into hotsusses, definitely check it out. Check out that link. The whole you brought up the whole Rick Dyer thing for a minute, and it's it's such an interesting uh maybe we'll chat about that later, but it's crazy. I don't know if you're on TikTok or not. I don't take I mean, I'll watch a lot of a lot of TikTok stuff, but I'm not actually a member. He's on there and he's uh he's starting stuff up again on TikTok because it's a brand new audience. Oh yeah, you should check it out. It's it's wild definitely, I will definitely look that up. It's very interesting. In supposedly is getting a team together and they're going to go out and find Bigfoot again this time. You know, they're going for it, and it's it's very interesting to watch it kind of you know, history tends to repeat itself usually these things. You know, all you gotta do is you got to wait ten or fifteen years with big Foot, and it's enough time to forget. Yeah, that's exactly right. We all have big

5:44 forgetters. Now. Everybody was worried in the future we'd all be thrown under the bus if we which is true. But then within your comeback can come within a year because people were just on to the next victim by that absolutely, And like I mean, take for example, the whole like Justin's Mayhew, like you know, an incident out out in this years I believe, I mean, like no one really remembers that anymore. And it's just it's it's wild, no, and it's amazing how that's not that you know, that's not that far back, but in terms of people's ability to keep things going in their memory anymore, it's it's it's an eon ago, it is. And you know, who knows what's to blame for that. Probably all the stuff we've been gone through the last few years, or maybe it's our culture with w've got so many different things coming into you know, from our devices that we just we forget easier exactly, but our attention spans have been shortened and we're you know, I remember one time I posted something that was literally just on Facebook of my own, just thoughts about a certain subject, and it might have been three or four paragraphs. There were people literally going, good God, how is this think? You know, I think you're right. That has a lot to do with it is where we're going in terms of communications. Yeah, it's pretty wild. It would take me back to the first time that you had some sort of encounter or some interaction with

7:15 Bigfoot. Where does our story begin with what you experienced? Is it okay, Jeremiah, if I real quickly take people back to specifically that interested in Bigfoot, just oh yes, absolutely. When I was you know, a kid, I don't remember, seven or eight years old, something like that my parents took me to this movie. I think it was called The Great Waldo Pepper, which starred Robert Redford, something about a pilot during World War One or some something. It's been so long I couldn't really be sure. But back then we didn't just have movie trailers. They would have cartoons and shorts, movie shorts, and there was a short movie about Bigfoot. I had never heard of the subject ever, of course, not surprising being that age. And I don't think I remember hearing any of the Sierra Sounds vocalizations, though some of them would have would have been recorded by that point obviously, But I remember hearing what now in my memory sounds like like the Ohio screams Ohio House, and seeing the Patterson footage, and I just remember I was just immediately gripped, like part of me was afraid, but I was also so enthralled with this. It just had this dead certainty, even at that age, that there was some truth going on here, even though I'd never been exposed to it. And I remember thinking because that they were talking about the Pacific Northwest. Of course, that's all they ever talked about back in those days, seventies eighties, and I just remember thinking, well,

8:46 there's mountains in Georgia, because I was just thinking in terms of mountains. Then we realized that's not even accurate only you know, but I just kept thinking, there's mountains in Georgia. I bet they're in Georgia. And uh, you know, like I said, eventually that faded away. So I moved to Athens, Georgia. It was kind of doing music thing during the nineties, and I kind of was, I guess, longing for some male bonding, you know. I just I wanted to get a bunch of guys together, go camping, you know, get some beer, try to fish. Even though we were all poor anglers, we had plenty of ground b for burgers because we knew we probably wouldn't be growing fish, and that was very true. It turned out we did this for a few years, you know, I kind of round up a whole troop of guys like that, maybe twelve fifteen guys, and we did for like three years. And if my memory starts me correctly, it was the middle year was nineteen ninety six, and this is down in the Oki Fanoki Swamp. Were you familiar with that, Yes, I've heard of that. Swamp before you. Okay, so far south Georgia, and even part of it goes down into Florida, and it's the only place of its kind in all of the United States.

10:03 It is very swampy, although technically it's considered a watershed. But when you go in there, it's just primordial. You know, it's the black water, the cypress trees, the Spanish moss just dripping off of everything, and you know, huge blue herons. It almost looked like miniature terodactyls flying around. Gators everywhere, there's loads of bear, loads of hog, loads of deer, and anyway, I was the first day. We decided to take all the canoes out, you know, rent these canoes there and just go out of the canoes. And we thought maybe the second day we'd rent motor boats so we can get further up into the swamp. So that first day I was with my I wouldn't eve Hi buy his first name. I have tried to find this guy on social media and have not been able to.

10:50 He was my roommate and a pretty close friend at the time named Bob. And Bob and I got into a canoe and one off on our own and the main Lake down there in the area off of Fargo when you go up to the Stephen Fosser State Park has called Billy's Lake, and it really looks like this very long, just kind of wide river, and then off of Billy's Lake are all these much narrower tributaries and shoot off. And we had gone off, we'd probably gone a mile down Billy's Lake and then gone north of a tributary and been so long, but I'm guessing we probably went. Even though these things get narrow, they just keep winding and occasionally they'll open up again. We went up maybe a couple of miles up to this tributary, and we were coming back down, and we were getting pretty close to where we would hit Billy's Lake again, to which we would have to then take a right to go back to our destination. But before we got there, I would guess that the tributary was probably eighty two hundred feet wide at this point, and we were pretty much dead center and off to the right and ahead of us us and it's a real hard guess about how far ahead of us. We were. Hearing a bunch of commotion off of the bank, splashing in the water and stuff and there's a lot of When I'm sure you've seen this kind of landscape, there's all these cypress trees and cypersneeds, but in this area there's a lot of other thicket there too, including yawpond

12:22 holly and stuff like that, and of course all the moss. And so we're both paying attention. Bob's in the front, I'm in the back. We're looking over there, and I started going through this catalog in my mind of what it could be. My first thought was as an alligator at the bank, you might be catching a fish, and then every other large animal that I can think, I went through my mind, a deer, a hog, or a bear. It sounded too big really to be. I know that small animals can make a big rockets, like raccoons and stuff, and it really just in my to my ears, it's sounded too big to be something like a like a raccoon, and they're typically not out as you know, in the daytime. And we're getting closer and closer, and we so we get to where we're pretty much perpendicular to this area on the bank where the sound is happening, and I guess about forty to fifty feet away from the bank, and this thing just stands up, and as it's standing up, it turns around with it so that it's now like it's turning to turn away from us, so that I get a glance of it turning, and then just moving deeper into the trees. Very I got this feeling overall that we had disturbed it. I don't know if it was getting a drink of water, trying to catch a fish. But the main thing that struck

13:52 me is there were shoulders, and I could see forty feet is not that far. I could see hair, but I could see through the hair to kind of a gray almost like literally like kind of a brownish. It was like the hair was brown, and even the skin looked kind of brown. Slump shoulders, but very you know, very like this thing wasn't like built like Patty. It was more ropey. But to me, I just I just saw these shoulders, and I just you know, bears don't everything has some degree shoulder, I guess, but they don't have these visible shoulders. I never got to look at the face because it turned. The thing that struck me more than anything else was probably that as it moved away from us, it just appeared so smooth, that looked like it was gliding back into the woods. That's forgetting. We were drifting away and having a WTF moment, and uh, somebody and I told him about it much later, said why did you go back? Mike? I had no thought about going back.

15:05 We'll be back with more Bigfoot society after these words from our sponsors. And you know, at that point, it wasn't into the subject to the point because it had gotten away from me and I didn't expect this to happen, so I didn't think, oh, go back and look for tracks, not to mention. I was pretty freaked out, so was he. Bob was super freaked out. So we're trying to talk about what we saw, and then we realized as we get back, we're going back to camp. There is no possible way we can talk about this with the gang because they will rip us to shreds. So it made this agreement we weren't going to talk about it. We're just going to try to do you know, the rest of the camping trip of the guys and have fun. And the thing is Bob and I wrote down there together. It was multiple cards of some of our friends were meeting me from Savannah and the rest of us were coming down from Athens, and so Bob and I had gone down together. I kept trying to bring it back up in the car on the way back up, and he it was just clear that he did not want to talk about it, like you you know, just these pat little short answers like yeah, that was weird, and not going on anymore. Until I got the message it's like he does not want to go there. And from that point forward I tried a few more times as we still were roommates that he didn't want to talk about it. It really upset him. I'm not saying it didn't freak me out, of course. I was more like, wow, you know, this is you know, crazy, And I wanted for so long afterwards, after Bob and I were no longer you know, together as

16:38 roommates, I wanted to. I wanted because you know, memory can do weird things. You would think, well, that's going to be indelible and printed, But there are other things that I have remembered that since I was a child, that I was jed certain were the way they were, and then I would share them with another family member or something. They go no, No, that didn't go down like that. So your members always kind of re editing things, and I needed Bob to be able to verify what I thought had occurred, and I you know, that's never happened. But still it was like, you know, I don't want to say hey because it's been so long. I know I saw a bigfoot, but I know I saw something that was moving upright, was powerfully muscled ropey. It wasn't eight or nine feet tall in my memory, it might have been six six and a half feet tall, and it looked like it was on skates or something moving back into the woods until it just disappeared very quickly. It wasn't running, but it didn't take any time to get out of sight. And the funny thing is how much commotion it originally had made and then it just seemed like it just silently went back into the woods. And that's including stepping on, you know, a foot of water, because that in those swamps, the water just doesn't necessarily disappear at the back, you know, just everything stays really low, so you're still splashing around water for who knows how long where you get on to completely dry land. So that was that.

18:06 But the thing is I had to stuff it down because I couldn't really share it and there wasn't an open community even then like there is now. We you know, I didn't have a computer in ninety six. They were getting started, of course, but there was just nobody to talk with. I had a lot of good friends, but none of them weren't into any of this stuff, none of it, and they were always like, uh, fills that conspiracy guy. They were already laughing about me talking about cattle mutilations and stuff like that back then, you know. So I just had to stuff it down and try to forget about it again. Not that I really did forget about it, but I did move on with my life from that point. When you saw the creature like moving away from you, What kind of emotions did that did you feel inside when you saw that? Well, more than fear, I'll be honest with you. Even though I was overwhelmed, I never felt like there was any kind of I didn't think I would have the guts to go back and try to get on land if I had thought of if I'd even thought about that, But I was just there was this just incredible, like holy crap, this is just landed. I wasn't even asking for this, and it's just landed in my lap. It was this overwhelming emotion of in a way, it was kind of validating the fact that all this stuff, the stuff I've been into, but have never really had any validation for it. I've just known about it through books and stuff, and so it was powerful for me in a lot of ways. Not

19:40 the ultimate fear that I saw my roommate going through, but it and so that was the immediate emotion was just it was just beyond like it's kind of rips your head open, like it's how do you process this? This is nothing in my experience, even if I've ever been into this subject, which is a kid I was, You're just not prepared to have your world ripped open by something you don't understand that completely just you know, comes along out of nowhere. I think possibly too. The only reason it occurred is because the water was glass smooth, and we weren't paddling fast. We were just dripping, so we weren't even making noise. As a matter of fact, if my memory serves me correct, it stood up when we dropped our paddles down across the boat these were aluminum canoes and that made a big sound.

20:33 And that's when all this happened. Because, as I'm sure you're aware of, these things are like the ninjas of the forest and sneaking up on one of them is almost impossible. I've always thought it was Patty just taking off guard. I know a lot of people say she was running cover for young and I don't know the truth of that. I thought that could be the one and ten million chance that one of these things is taken off guard, you know. So yeah, my head was totally blown. And then of course for the rest of the I you know, I did do my best to have a good time, but I couldn't get my mind off it. And to top it off of that, two nights later, I heard this crazy scream how in the middle of the night out of my tent, and I just chalk that up to probably be being a fox. And once again we're going with memory. So it wasn't until years later on the Internet that I started pulling up because I had foxes here and they do a type of bark, but I know they have more sounds of that. Now. I pulled up every kind of fox sound and cry, I could, and my memory of what I heard did not match that. It was way more powerful, way longer. It did sound almost like a baby crying at certain points, but I just kept saying, well, that's a fox, that's just coincidence. I couldn't be another, you know, situation like I just experienced.

21:57 But I just remember I couldn't fully be immersed into the guy bonding thing for the rest of the trip because I was just I wanted to know more at that moment. I hoped that my roommate was gonna get all jacked up about it with me and want to find out more. And so that was in the end, it was a huge disappointment. How how far away excuse me, how far away from your sighting was your campsite where your tent was? Okay, so let me picture this, so I would guess that where the sighting occurred. If I went back to Google and just looked at it, I could do some guesswork. I would say that where the sighting occurred before we hit Billy's Lake again was probably maybe a quarter of a mile before we got back to the big border, and then we would hang it right, and I'm just out of memory. Without looking at a map, guessing it would somewhere be between maybe three quarters to a mile back to dock the boats and then from there one hundred yards to the campsite, so a little over a mile maybe, but that's that's that's as the canoe moves, as the crow flies, maybe a little less. So I'm not out of the question. I mean, you're not that far away, no, you know, in that place is it is huge, and so if you look at it from that perspective, this incident was really close to now. It was on the other side of Billy's Lake. But I don't think crossing bodies of

23:29 water is any problem for these things. Absolutely. I do know there's a lot of stories right in the Pacific Northwest of people seeing them swim and like off of Vancouver, but I wouldn't have thought about that at the time. And of course, you know, the other thing that's fascinating to me is what are the numbers like. As much as I respect Jeff melderm and I completely do, and he brings something to the table that nobody else can, and that's his knowledge of the foot, you know, but I just disagree with the numbers. I just disagree with the numbers thing the whole six to ten thousand or whatever it is in all of North America. And you know when you say North America, that means Canada, United States, and Mexico.

24:14 I can't justify the fact that every time I've gone in the last eleven years up to the Appalachian Mountains, every single time I've had experiences or found some type of evidence. If they were that rare, you wouldn't be you wouldn't be coming across it every single time. Oh absolutely. Did you ever look more into see if there's any other thing Bigfoot related incidents that happened in the Okinoki Swamp. Yes, so, I don't remember the year. It was sometime in the two thousands. I think you can find it on the BFRO database, but it's pro believe I don't see. Okay, he's big enough to where there's several different counties mixed in there. Part of it's in Ware County. I don't think this would be Ware County. But anyway, I'll look for it. I can sent it to you, but it pretty much was a couple driving back home, I think, to Florida at night and going down between Homer. I can't remember if it's Homer or Homerville.

25:25 There's a Homerville up in North Georgia, so maybe it's Homer, Georgia. Which that road is the road we take that highway down to get to Fargo to the interest to the swamp. And they were they were driving down the road at night and they saw this thing ahead right off the side of the road. It appeared to be eating road killed and it stood up and it was interestingly the description of its height and all that is I recall, and its look was kind of similar to what I could remember seeing. They didn't they didn't want to stop, though. I think it was pretty shocking. You know. There's another account that you can find it online. It's from like eighteen you've seen it. I've seen it before. It was like it's like a big foot attack or like they see you know, and of course there's no way that could be wild fantasy. But I will tell you one interesting thing in that story. These people apparently trek to what they say is like the very deep recesses of the swamp. Well, I was going over Google one time and look into the area where we would go camping and the general area, and then I moved eastward more into the center of the swamp and there's an island called Bugaboo Island, and bugaboo is a similar word to like booger. Okay, maybe nothing there, maybe nothing at all, but

27:00 I thought it was kind of interesting that word has come up. There's a few times that that word has come up a few times, so not surprising. Yeah, yeah, I think there are a lot of other stories from that area. But I don't know if anything's really logged in with the BFRO, which we know is the biggest database but by no means comprehensive exactly, and it's a thing where half of it you can't see publicly, right. And I also like, I don't know if you have you looked into the Bigfoot Mapping project as well. I think I heard something about this recently, but tell me more about it. Yes, it's another great database that one of my friends, Scott is running up and it integrates things like the BFRO database, but he has a ton of people sending him reports directly to it, and then he's just a really smart guy when it comes to maps, And definitely I would recommend check that out as well. Oh cool, So the big thing I know I've heard about that recently, so I'll definitely look that up. Yeah, definitely, bigfoot map, bigfoot mapping projects. So good stuff. Okay, great, so that you know that I wanted that to get me back into all this, but it didn't because I didn't have

28:30 anywhere to go with it. And as we discussed earlier, it was two thousand and eight when I got back into this subject in the most interesting way. Okay, my twin brother called me up going and he's my twin brother. Hated for me to talk about bigfoot. He tried to micromanage situations where around relatives don't be talking of bigfoot around I stuff like that, because I really embarrassed back. But he called me up one day saying, I've got to put it on the news. They found take foot in Georgia. And uh, you know, being into the subject or not really being back into it, but of course still having it in the back of my mind always, I was curious, but even then just I get skeptical of stuff like that immediately, so I looked it up on the Internet and shure it out there it was. And immediately when I saw this ice box, I was like, this is hilariously bad. And I couldn't believe that my brother was so into because he didn't normally went into the subject, but for some reason, this was proof to him. So then I had to dispel that that's what kind of got me, and it's not kind of. It really got

30:03 me back into the subject and even into the subject of the anomaly of a person like Rick Dyer who could gain this cult following and to some degree, I'm not saying the guy ever made it richerding, but he must have been profiting to some degree off some people's utter devotion to him. We'll be back with more big Foot Society after these words from our sponsors. Yeah, there's definitely a huge allegedly there that we want to throw out. But but yeah, I mean, it's it's a really interesting story if you look into it and just you know you're looking at and that it culminated in that documentary that that guy was like a probably like I think, I'm not sure. I don't. I don't know that he was an award winning documentary filmmaker, but I think he was had some writing and I remember there was a lot of stuff that led up to that. There was that intersection somewhere in Texas where there's basically a wooded area in between all these highways and there's like a homeless encampment in there, and they're talking about a sof squatch being in this homeless encampment, and I guess that's all part of what led up to the documentary.

31:23 Do you remember blair Witch Project. They had like a whole documentary on the on the Sci Fi channel about the Blair Witch leading up to the movie's release, which really gave it this like it made people think this was even though it was being sold as fiction, it was based on a real story. And I think that must have been sort of what he made borrowed from was the idea of interviewing these homeless people and all this stuff. And then once the movie came out, that was the because I remember finding that spot on the you know, on the map, I'm like, well, that's about one hundred yards of woods surrounded by freeways everywhere. So not that I'm not open minded to high strangeness when it comes to in terms of possibilities, I don't embrace anything, but I am not like I am open to very high strangers. I've even experienced a little weirdness myself and as it's come to getting into this subject. But at the time that came out, I definitely would not be open to the idea of the big Foot somehow making it into a little green space that surrounded by freeways on all sides. Sure, so I think the first foray I made it out as the forest after two thousand and eight, so it's five years of me just looking into everything on the Internet, finding some of the dominant personalities and all the big stories like we

32:58 all do. And I made an arrangement to go up to North Georgia in twenty thirteen with some friends. We weren't going to be rough and it we were getting a cabin, but the cabin was in a pretty remote area west no east, northeast of hell and Georgia, about seven miles east and then a little bit north. And you know it was I found some interesting things. I found my first, I will say my first possible It was definitely a footprint. The question is whether it was a human footprint. It was on a sandbank on the Soque River. We left the cabin and then just kind of trek through the woods. There were no trails, but we found a long abandoned logging road, and we started to follow that, and the logging road went right along alongside the bottom of the mountain, and so it was sandwiched in between the Soque River and the mountain. So we knew we can go up as far as this thing stays in between the river and the mountain, because we'll know how to get our way back. So went probably up a mile or more up this road, and eventually I found I found this foot track right on the sand bank by the river. It didn't have any heal impression, It didn't have any tread impression, and you couldn't see

34:31 toes, but if there were would have been toes on this print that there was a lot of sticks and stuff right there. But I did film it, and it was about maybe somewhere between a quarter and a half inch deep in the sand. So the time I may have weighed about two hundred and five or ten pounds. So I put my foot not too far next to it, and not only put my weight down, but tried to actually push into the dirt as hard as I could, which was I'm at sand. It was like a wet sandy bank. I couldn't get more than a couple of millimeters into the sand. So unless you could argue that when the sand was dry, maybe it was easier to make an impression. If it, at the very least, it was probably a very heavy human and so I, you know, I was pretty excited about that. I also found an industry hair not far away from it, which I promptly lost. I put it in a paper football that I made, stuck it in a book, and then years later decided to go out and find and just you knows what I did with it. And even though there were a few other interesting things, that was enough to keep my anter. It wasn't a whole lot.

35:37 There was enough to keep my actress peaked. And then I went to the mountains again in twenty fourteen with my wife and my dog to an area I've been several times out of the Fort Mountain area in Georgia. You know where that is? Fort Mountain. I am not familiar with that one. I'm familiar with the Blue Ridge area, but Not Mountain is literally right below Blue Ridge. Oh, there you go. You know where the Bigfoot Museum is now, this is just west of that. It's called the Cohut of Wilderness. And then there's Fort Mountain, which is also a state park, and we got a cabin down a dirt road. You can still look this cabin company up because I've been there a couple of times. It's called the Wilderness View. And uh, the very first morning we got up, I decided to get up early, let my wife sleep in, go for a walk, take the dog. And we're not we're not an off trailer. And then we're just on a dirt gravel road and we're going up the road and I'm just going around to get a layout and see what I can see.

36:40 And suddenly this And I'm just gonna say, when I say a voice in my head, I don't mean an outside voice, like there wasn't some you know, other spirit in my head. There was just a voice in my head, like myself, telling me you need to look down. And I looked down and there was a triangle right in the middle of the road. And the triangle fashioned out of one stick. It wasn't three sticks. It was a stick that had two breaks in it, but they weren't enough to make it totally snap. That was still part of the stick keeping it together. And it was perfectly formed into a little triangle. And I found it very curious, so you know, obviously I got some pictures of that. It could have, by chance been a stick that broke and formed itself in a triangle and fell out of the forest which was ten yards fifteen yards away onto the road. I don't know. But then other things started occurring at the cabin. I heard my first wood knock in the middle of the night, so the back of the cabin went down. There was a ravine that went fell back from the cabin down into like a little creek area, and every night I'd sit on the porch at night, late till about three or four in the morning. I heard my first wood knock. It was just a lone would not it was loud. It sounded like could have been at least a half mile away, and was reverberating through the ravine, very lonely sounding. And I my first tree structure when we went up to Lake Conna Swega. I've never known how to pronounce that. These are like, assuming all native names, but Lake Conaswego or Lake Conasuage. It's at the top

38:13 of a mountain in the Cohua Wilderness. I film my first tree structure there and got a I got some interesting uh what I thought. Later, I got footage of what I believe are a lot of different juvenile tracks in the mud, and I got that on film. I filmed that. I never I've never had casting material. I'll never go out like my pack stuff on make case I find a track. So I just generally documented if I've got something with a you know, a phone. Once again, a little bit more than went on in thirteen, but enough to intrigue me. And then the next big thing that occurred to me was in twenty and seventeen. We got hit by a hurricane here in Savannah in twenty sixteen, and then we got another one in seventeen, and this time we just wanted to get away from the city. And so my friend owns a cabin up and saluted North Carolina right on the Green River, and we went up there, and like I did at the last trip, the very first, the very first morning, I got up early. It was fairly the sun coming up. The cabin's pretty secluded up in the woods. There are a few other cabins, but this is a place where there are no rentals, and most of the cabins are like vacation owns of the people that own it, and they're not there most of the time, so it's pretty pretty sparse. But I got up and walked what I believe would be east of the cabin into the forest

39:46 and went in about sixty seventy yards. And I am one of these people that, for whatever reason, smart or dumb, I will do tree knocks. I did a loan tree knock and I got I was about to walk away because after about thirty seconds I didn't hear anything, and I was getting ready started walking back in the cabin, and I heard three very loud tree knocks further east of me, and on the third one, I heard that familiar crack when a tree starts to break, and then it came down and crashed and it shook the ground. It was close enough to where it shook the ground where I was, and that kind of spooked me. So I scooed back off to the cabin. And since then, every time I go up to that place that cabin, I have not had any sightings, but I've had what I feel is contact with what might be a family group up there. And I've got hours of field recorder recordings that I need to sift through and isolate the good stuff and get it separated and into a computer.

40:58 It's just still sitting in my field record. Because I would go, I would go up from the cabin a little bit uphill from it. This was an area that I felt, just felt this feeling that something was going on up here, and finding a lot of interesting tree breaks and things like that, and so you know, I started hanging Like on the first night I hung up the tree recorder. I'm one of these people. I'll talk to the woods because I don't know what I'm dealing with, right, I don't know. I don't profess to know what these things are or what you know, what I mean. And I've got some friends that think there are forest brothers that are here to usher us into some new asi of enlightenment. I've got other friends that say these things are just pure evil. And I just don't really embrace anyone thing. And I have to go by the idea that these things could be just mostly want to do their thing and be left alone.

41:46 Some be curious about us, and some of them may be friendly, and some of them may not. So anytime I go into the woods, I pretty much of course, I only have the English language to work with, but I say, hey, i'm here. You know, I'm come in peace. Basically, I'm just curious, and so I let him know. I was hanging this recorder from a tree, and one of the things I did was I wanted to put it on a branch that was brittle enough. It was strong enough to hold this lightweight field recorder, but brittle enough to wear high enough off the ground where no raccoon could reach it. And if they climbed up the tree and had to get on the branch to get to it, they would break the branch. And so I was I have my cell phone going to say I was recording with my cell phone. I turned on the recorder, I sat it down a little bag and tied it off on the tree, and I was talking to the woods saying, I'm just letting you know this is not a camera. This is but it does capture audio. You feel silly saying this stuff, but at the same time, I feel compelled to do it. And so I was with my wife, and you know, it's nighttime. I've got a flashlight, but I'm not aiming it out in the woods. I'm just keeping it down right in the immediate area below me, where I can see what I'm doing. And I said, it'd be really nice if y'all could leave me some sounds, and immediately, almost on the tail of me saying sounds, snap snap.

43:10 It wasn't like branches falling or it was like clearly two sticks that were just intentionally snapped so quickly, almost like almost ahead of what I said, And we heard it right there in real time, and I could only guess that whatever that snap was, it was less than thirty feet from us, And so then I started walking down the hill. And then of course later I viewed itdn't sure enough there it is the two snaps or just it's so I guess somebody could listen to that and say that was just pure chance. But because all the other things on the recorder stuffed, something touching the recorder and apparently it sounds like scratching the fabric of the bag, the woven bag that it's in. And you know, because this has two stereo candnser MIC's on it. You know, do you have one of those kind of field recorders?

44:02 Is like a task cam. It's well, I had a task in for instance, is a zoom Oh yeah, sure, yep, each in one so same same type of same and exact same type of thing. So depending on where the way the MIC's placed, you can tell if a sound is coming, like if you put on earphones, if it's moving, if something's moving laterally through the air, you'll hear it come into one can and then start to fade into the other and then fade out from the first can. Tons of whatever flying horizontally towards the recorder. And you know because you can hear the leaves. That's how you know it's traveling. You can hear the leaves as it's hitting leaves through the brush and occasionally hitting the recorder, and you can see the vu meters totally spike every time. And then the loud tree NOx, I mean big, big tree knox. And then you know, there's one yell. It's the only vocalization I've ever gotten. Is in the middle of all this, in the middle of the night, there's one yell. We'll be back with more Bigfoot Society after these words from our sponsors. And I just don't know what to make of it, because, as I said, this is a there's a few homeowners that lived there year round. This is not a rental place. There is a zipline company not far away, so you can hear the zipliners during the day, but that shuts down before nightfall. This was at nighttime, way into the nighttime,

45:36 and you could just hear this yell, I mean, and it could be a human yell. It's I'm gonna pull the phone away from me and try to imitate it. Okay, all right, so I don't spike up your recorder there, hang on. It's pretty much like that. And it was, but there was. It wasn't a company like if there was a bunch of guys Guslin beer, you think they'd be yeah, you know, wasn't any of that. It was just this one lone yell just and like I said, I need to get in there, hook it up to my computer and get a good editing program and isolate all this stuff, because you know, I've heard tons of it. I've listened to a lot of Christopher Noel's recordings. And when I first heard that, I wasn't listening closely, so I thought he was getting all these knocks that closely together. And then I realized he had just isolated everything and condensed it for the good stuff. So you're not sitting and listening to, you know, just the crickets for ten minutes, because there is a lot of that kind of stuff, and you know, I could go there are other things that I've experienced, as you know, up in the mountains, but I definitely go down here in Savannah.

46:46 There's an area I go right outside of Savannah where I find a lot of tree structures. And interestingly, the other day I went there and there's one spot where because there's pine forest everywhere in the fairy and that's right off the Ogeechee River, but there's an area where all of a sudden, the pine forest disappears and it's just oaks and other types of hardwoods, and and there's no undergrowth. Most of this place, there's a lot of undergrowth, so if you get off trail, you're tangling through a lot of stuff. In this place, there's no undergrowth. The trees are fairly distant apart from each other, so the sun gets in and so in a way it's kind of beautiful, but it also has a kind of dark, ominous feel to it. And I've only been back in there once a couple of years ago, and I got kind of a bad vibe in there, so I got out, but I went back in there a few days ago, and leaning up against a tree is about a five foot oak branch, I mean a pine branch, and there's no there's no pine trees anywhere near the closest pine trees are probably hundred yards away. I've in all the four years I've been going into this place, I have never found another human being going. Matter of fact, very few people that even go to this place. They don't leave the trail. They just walk the trail. They're either doing power walking or they're with their kids. Can you see the flowers? But I've never seen anybody get off trail, and I definitely never see anybody in this weird part of the forest. And so there's this and to me, sometimes it's that cool kind of subtle stuff that you know, most people would walk right

48:21 by and never give another thought to. Now there's some pretty crazy tree structures that are literally right off or by the trails. And I can't say that humans didn't do it, because they're not. They're pretty big, but they're not on a scale that a human couldn't make it. And that's one thing we all have to consider that. As this topic has gotten more popular. You know, we're occasionally getting punked by people. You know, Oh, absolutely some. I mean you go to Salt Fork, you know it's happening in Ohio. Yeah, exactly, really popular places. You know, it's a good chance if you do a tree dock there's some dude like, ah, there's a big foot guy trees on back. And that's something I wanted to ask you about. So to me, the whole tree structure thing, and obviously the Internet probably has a lot to do with it. But in Mike we saw like the in search of documentary or any of the other things that came about in the seventies and eighties. No, there wasn't the internet so that people can share everything they saw, every moment they see it.

49:23 But I never heard talk of structures back then. I may have seen some stuff about betting, stuff that look like betting made out of foliage, but I never heard about tree structures until like twenty ten. And I find it weird, like people always speculating and you know, what do they mean? Like, I don't know what they mean, but I do know that sometimes the fact that you can find them so close to where people will be, are they not put there for our entertainment or is it not put there for for the purposes of gaining our attention so that they can observe us. I've just one guess, because I don't think they're dwelling these TP structures, you know, especially a tepe structure right off of a trail. Of course, that's not going to be a dwelling. So there are the interesting bettings out they found out in washing It. Oh absolutely. So the the nest sites I think are really cool just because you have you have it, so you know, the Olympic Project has brought out, you know, primatologists from different zoos, and the primatologists have pretty much said, hey, those are like what the great apes will make in our zoos, right, And that alone is pretty awesome for me personally. And I mentioned this a few times on the podcast. I have yet to see an example of like a tree structure

50:58 where I'm like, oh, yeah, totally Bigfoot. And it's because of this because when I was growing up, I lived at a summer camp and we had an outdoor skills week and for years I would teach I would teach children and high schoolers how to make what's called bushcraft, right, which is very very similar to like some tree structure stuff. Now, the stuff I can't explain is when you have like these huge sticks up in the air and it's like there's no way at a log could have fallen and lodged itself up between two. I have no way of explaining that. You know, I'm not sure. Yep. Well, yeah, that's a good point. And so my friend John, who knows I'm in the Bigfoot, but I don't know that he is, but he lives up in Maine now, and he went to some area there and he sent me this picture. So you know, a lot of tree will fork off at some point, maybe four feet up, maybe eight feet up. They fork into two still fairly large sections.

52:07 This tree about eight feet up has so many massive broken branches stacked in the fork, going up probably to fourteen or fifteen feet. And I said, has there ever been a flood in that area? And he said, no, there's never been a food air. This is fairly good. So the ones that don't look like structures to me are the more interesting ones. They're not even trying to imitate a structure. Or I found a tree break in this place, and see, because I've gone to this place so much. I pretty much know the trails and what's off of the trails like the back of my hand. Now I don't know the whole forest that way, because I will go off trail into the forest, but there's so much of it you don't know it that well. But the hiking trails I know, and I pretty much I will recognize things that aren't there that were or that are there that weren't there the last time. So one time going down this trail, I literally had been there a couple of days earlier. And this sampling, and when I say sampling, it's I don't want you to think of like this six foot tall tree that's the half inch wide. It's probably three inches wide at the base maybe four, but goes up probably twenty something feet and a good sixteen seventeen feet off It was snapped, and this was not rotten at all. And you know, you could argue, well, there was maybe a wind event, but the thing is I'd just been there and there's been no wind event up to that point. And even more interesting is right next to this sampling is a sampling pine tree that literally is no

53:40 wider than three quarters an inch or an inch at the most just within like a foot and a half off of this other sapling and I pushed it over. My pinky was so dry rotted. Why wouldn't the wind have just totally knocked that thing down? So that's interesting, like a snap tree that wasn't snapped or when you find Now, what do you think about the Colorado Bigfoot stuff? Like I literally remember seeing a video says he's an interesting character. I'm not saying I necessary. I'm on board with a lot of his thinking. Okay, so it's just a sorry to find Colorado Bigfoot stuff because I thought you were talking about the whole train video thing. No, no, no, no, no, no. This guy, I'll just call him Mark. He's been doing it for years. He goes up eleven twelve outand feet. He's definitely an individual a character, but he has you know, he's just trekking. He's not going on any trails. He goes miles in on one day and then finds his way back out. I literally saw him film. It was a whole tree that had apparently been ripped out of the ground by the roots and was woven like horizontally with the ground, woven between other standing trees, and then We're talking a good seventy foot tree. Like there's no machinery up there, there's no like equipment. And when you look at his videos, there's just so much down tree strup It's like there's there's ten times down trees for every standing tree, and so many of them if

55:15 you look at them. That's the one thing I always look for when I find stuff with a down tree is the root ball at the base? Is there a dead root ball right near with the base of the trios? And a lot of the stuff he fails, there is no root balls anywhere. It's almost as if these things have been pulled in and used for later construction. And the arches, the x'es and the arches and the things that he finds are on such a massive scale. I've never seen anything like that here in the Southeast, Like, and they're just so numerous. If you have you may know who I'm talking about. But if you haven't, you got to check out his videos. I actually have, or even just pull up a compilation video. I haven't heard of this guy yet, so I'll have to check him out. Is his user name like Colorado Bigfair or something like that, or is Colorado Bigfoot as the user name, and I just bought Well, his name is Mark with a C I think a marc able ab e e L. He has a lot of detractors because they don't like his theories about what these things are, huh. And it to me, it's like, well, I don't have to agree with him about his theories that I may or may not. But it's just the cameras. It's just what the cameras find it the video footage, it's it's it's insane. It's you know, here, I can't say that like if I tell you I find a structure, like I'm going to say, well, I don't know whether this was human made or not, because everything I've ever found in here could easily be made by a human, you know, right, absolutely, Yeah, I have to check that out. That sounds very interesting. Yeah, it seems like the Colorado and you don't even see this up in at least in terms of the people that I follow. The structure stuff in the elevations

56:49 of Colorado and Utah for some reason or just on a scale that's completely different than almost any other area that I've seen. Somebody film maybe submit and things like that in Arizona and stuff too, though, or New Mexico. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know what to make of it. But it's it's right there on the camera he's filming, and you're watching and you're just so, oh my god. I've never seen this kind of scale of down trees and loops and arches and X structures and X structures on top of X structures. It's just it's absolutely insane. Wow. I mean, listeners, if you've if you've watched this guy, let me know in the comments, what you think about what you've seen on his channel, what you think about the stuff he's filming. Could be some interesting conversation. But Philip, it's been it's been a fun chat. Man. I don't get to do a lot of Georgia episodes, but man, you guys have some really interesting things going on out there. Yeah, I think so. And you know, even though I think it's also happening down here in Southeast Georgia, there is a difference to me, the activity level in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee. To me, it's almost like whatever's there is a little bit more bold. Maybe because you're in the mountains, you're tucked away. If you're living in flat lands, you really don't want to be drawing attention to yourself too much, you know. But you know it's some interesting foot tracks

58:20 and things. But you know, I've only had the one sighting, which I myself now put into question because how long ago it was. I've never had another sighting. You know. I think that's a lucky thing for somebody to literally have that kind of moment. You know, you can only hope for it. And no, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. And Philip, keep me in, keep me in the loop if you ever run into any other interesting stuff, and I'll have your I do want listeners check out Phillip's Hot sauce Dude. I like, I'm a hot sauce guy. I've just started to get cool. I started to get into it over the last few years, just randomly, and like we have some we have some interesting stuff out in Iowa. It's not like the most crazy stuff like you guys have in the South, but dude, I'm a fan of it. So listeners, go check out. I'll have the link in the show notes, so keep up to go. I feel appreciate that and yeah, you know, I'm totally in the hot sauces, but the kind that I make or not melt your face off there enough to get your attention, but I'm really having a lot of strong flavor in there. There you go, there you go? All right, sir? All right, Well, thank you so much, dear Miia, and I'll stay in touch with you you as well. Have a good night, sir. You two, thank you so much. You're a big for society. Our goal is to provide a platform for those that have encountered Bigfoot to share their encounter and

59:53 a safe and respected environment. But we need to hear your story. If you've experience, I mean, it's something that you just can't explain. Please send me an email at Bigfoot Soociety at gmail dot com. Then we can start the conversation. And I know a lot of you have not shared your encounter at all. It's been twenty years and it's time that you get this off your chest and then you can get some well deserved rest because I know you haven't been sleeping. I understand what you're going through and I appreciate every one of you listening