That's When I Knew It Was a Real Thing!

0:00 Welcome to Big for Society. If you have bigfoot activity to report from the same areas discussed in this episode, please reach out to me directly after this episode. And if you'd like to be on the podcast to discuss a personal bigfoot encounter, please reach out to me directly at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com. Do you wish there was more big for Society to listen to you every week? Well there is now. If you become a supporting member over at Patreon, you get a special members only episode every single week on Wednesdays, and sometimes even more episodes. Head on over to patreon dot com. Forward slash the Bigfoot Society and now let's get on with the show. All right, Bigfoot Society, You've got the privilege of talking to mister Chester Moore today. It's privileged to have him on the show. A few things to know about Chester right off the bat. He is the host of the Dark Outdoors podcast. He's an award winning wildlife journalist and an investigator and author of the Bigfoot South book, which is coming back in an expanded edition.

1:03 Correct Chester, It's out right now Bigfootsouth dot com. And I've been getting some good feedback on that book, and it was something I did a long time ago to tie in with some conferences that I was doing at the time myself, and we had a limited run and people kept asking about it, so I brought it back with a vengeance. I love it. I love it. So when I have individuals like yourself on the show, I love to start the show out by going into that first question, which is what got you into the Bigfoot field? To begin with. My initial entry into having an interest in this goes back to very early childhood, when I was probably four years old or so, my dad showed me pictures from the Argacy magazine that had the Patterson gym One creature in it, and I was mesmerized, you know. And you couldn't be born in the late seventies without hearing about Bigfoot.

2:01 I mean, the six million dollar man battling Andre the Giant is Bigfoot and Ted Cassidy's Bigfoot and all that. And then I'd heard that my dad went to see the Legend of Boggie Creek at a drive in and I was too young to go, but I was. I was being wheeled into surgery at Texas Children's Hospital. They put me in a waiting room. They had early cable, and on early cable was the legend of Boggie Creek. So I got about the first hour of that and I was just blown away. So that really was I interested in it. But I've always been deeply interested in wildlife. I've always wanted since I was a little boy to work in a profession that tied in fishing, hunting wildlife somehow, And to me that was just like an addendum to wildlife.

2:42 It was just part of it, but a mystery. And so in terms of an interest in the topic, that's where the topical interest comes from. That's fascinating. It's always fun when you talk to people where they were influenced at such a young age, like myself, by the Bigfoot media in a way, it's you've had those classic movies and TV shows and it's just it's a good time when you have that connection. But was there was there a time then when you found yourself actually going out into the field and okay, now now it's a little different. I'm out in this area actually looking for whatever this thing is.

3:27 Well, that's I kind of went backwards, kind of weird deals. So my father and I had an encounter with something in Newton County, Texas, and my aunt owned eighty three acres in the middle of hundreds of thousands of acres of forest, and we were rabbit hunting one night. And if in Texas rabbit hunting is little headlamp on, by the way, it's perfectly legal. And you put a little headlamp on, and we'd go walk the fence line of for eighty three acres down into this creek bottom and out with the headlamp looking for rabbits with shotguns. And we got down to this creek bottom this one particular night, and I'm not sure sure exactly the year, but I was eleven or twelve right in there, and this thing started going crazy and it was a deep, gutteral, like evil sounding growl, and remember, Daddy, what's this? And my dad's best reply was, I think when Uncle Bill's bulls got hung up in the fence down there, and I'm like, let's go help it. He goes, Noah, I think it'll get out on his own, and so we kind of back out of there, and me, being the already budding investigator journalist kid, kept pestering my dad, and the best answer he could come up with that I bought for a long time when it was a bear, because the black bear had been extrapated from East Texas, but Louisiana, which was only, you know, ten miles away from US, had a remnant pair of remnant population Louisiana black bear.

4:45 So then I got to work with black bears in captivity for two years in college, and they made no vocalization that started remotely like this, but something interesting happened. I got a couple of things happened on the same property with some relatives that had some strange sounds and things, and it brought back memories, and I got to I kind of started thinking that Bigfoot might not just be a specific Northwest thing. And I had reached out to Bobby Hamilton, who had fund of the Gulf Coast big Foot Research Organization, and he asked my dad and I to go out on an investigation with him one night in poult Kenley, Texas, about two hours away from where we were when we had this thing happen at this point fifteen years earlier, and nothing really happened. About ten o'clock we heard like we're sitting around a campfire listening for vocalizations what we're doing, and we heard a weird like moan, like a oh, off to our left, and about midnight it was dead center of us. In about two or three o'clock in the morning, it was over to our right and it's sod of like something had circled our encampment. Interesting, but nothing, you know, like we could say that's a bigfoot. So about four am, we had a two hour drive home. Bobby had to go to work the next morning, and we were getting our stuff together, had shook hands and we're about to part and all hellbro clues. This sound is guttural, evil sounding, dark sound, growling came out through the thickeadatus. And I get to feel thinking about it now because my dad was with me then, and he was with me when we heard when we heard fifteen years ago in Newton County, Texas.

6:17 Now we're two hours away in Polk County. He literally grabs me and goes, that's what we heard when you were a kid. It was the same sound. So that's the moment I knew Bigfoot was the real thing. And so a very interesting part of this that hooked me into investigating in the field was that I had been to South America eight or nine months earlier, in December of nineteen ninety nine, I've been to Venezuela. I was peacock bass in Pyara, fishing in the jungles of Venezuela in a place called Lake Guri, and I had we had several monkey encounters, including a spider monkey that came into our house boat and stole food. But multiple days we had howler monkeys everywhere making these This sound I was hearing had a very holler monkey esque tone to it, so it sounded very primate like to me. And when I was in this COVID one particular howler monkey, I growled at it and it growled back. I did two grouse.

7:15 It growled two grouse. So for whatever reason, instinctively I did that to this thing. I growled, it growled. I did two growls. It did two growls. Then I did three growls, and it built itself up into a frenzy, released a high pitched stream that sounded like it was a stream within a growl, And it obviously wanted us to know it was leaving because it broke stuff on the way. I could hear it breaking branches and stuff on the way out, and that is exactly what a howler monkey did in South America like eight months earlier. So when that encounter happened, I went with some kind of primate there that we don't know for sure what it is, but that's primate like behavior and it matches the exact sound of her. When I was a kid, and at this point, I was already a professional wildlife journalist.

8:05 I already been in the field doing this seven years eight years go that point. So I decided to take a little part of what I was doing as a wildlife journalist and start investigating this phenomenon. That is absolutely fascinating. The sounds that you were hearing back from whatever was in those bushes. Was it very similar to the same sounds you were making as well? So I'm really I'm pretty decent at making animal sounds, right, So I was trying to mock it. So it wasn't like it tried to mock me. I was mocking it. If that makes any sense. I could. It was like a So I had never heard the Sierra sounds at this point in my life, okay, but a year or two later when I heard them, and I'm not talking about what's called the Samurai chatter and all that. There is a very gutteral growl within the Sierra sounds that is absolutely some of the sounds this animal made, This creature made that stuff. We heard it. So I did something similar to that, and that's what made it respond to me. But the part that I've told the three before that I usually leave out for whatever reason I shouldn't.

9:13 It's a freaking kind of scary detail. You know. Right before I decided I'm going to be you know, mister mock the animal and it's growling at us, I grabbed the flashlight and I'm about to go into bushes, and I heard another one behind this one. So there's one growling one goes with it. So there were at least two of these things in there, but one of them was like going butth while And it was the same kind of response we have when I was a kid two hours away to the east and east Texas. So it just connected a lot of dots for me. You know, that is fascinating. It sounds like chester that you are an individual that knows all the wildlife in Texas.

9:54 Oh yeah, this what you heard that night. It sounds like it's not even and close to anything else out there. The closest thing I've ever heard in my life of holler monkey in the wild of Venezuela, right, and this was it was the holler monkey. It was one with like Arnold Schwarzenegger kuhnn, the barbarian level steroids. I mean, it was. It was big, and it was intense, and it also, like I said, there was a scream at the end with the scream sounded like it was a scream within a growl, like there were two different sounds happening at the same time. It was really crazy. So that's interesting. That's a thing that comes up all the time where people will in their account still say, well, it sounded like this and like this at the same time, and it's very very interesting. It's like, how is it even able to do the two sounds at the same time?

10:47 And I know there's a few different theories about that, But would you recommend individuals, if they're out bigfooting to do the same thing that you did that day where you're like kind of throwing stuff back at it, And what are your thoughts about that? So let me tell you a kind of a funny version of that. So we had gotten access to. We were there because Bobby Hamilton had talked to someone who owned this little parcel of property where there was a camp house because they had had encounters over the years. Right well, we had ended up talking to the people who live It was just a set of little camp houses in the middle of nowhere, and it was surrounded about thousands of thousand acres. Before us, there was the guy who was a bounty hunter the next property over, and we had talked to him, got access to the creep bottom on the back of his property. So we decided that would have been August of two thousands, so probably like February oh one. We went back into the bottoms out there and tried to camp out, and we're sitting in the tent at about the same time we had finally crashed out, about four o'clock in the morning, and we hear a green branch snap I mean pah, right by the tent, and then you hear footsteps by Pedle, absolutely by Pedele, and you hear a low growl, like a very similar growl we heard her like the you know months earlier, very low, and Bobby yells at me, don't you blank and growl at this one chester as

12:18 we're cocking every gun that we had in the tent. But anyway, I never saw anything there, but that was But I don't know, man, I I wouldn't recommend someone do that necessarily. I just did it because I was so taken with what was happening. There was so much like what happened to me in South America with the Holler monkeys. It was as far as the vocals and stuff. So I'm just gonna growl at it, you know. And so what happened happened. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that, but you know, I'm still here. You know, true, true, So you know, use your own discretion, guys, when I would assume you probably are taking reports from Texas quite a bit.

13:02 Yeah, I mean I don't like real super actively seek them out, but I get them a lot, you know, I do get them a lot, especially speaking engagements, and then when I do a Dark Outdoors podcast it has a cryptied element. I do get reports quite a bit. And I'm not only in Texas though, but quite a bit over because I'm on the Louisiana border here too, so I get quite a bit from Louisiana to. So if you've taken reports from down there, have you gotten some that are close to what you experienced during your time out? There are other people saying, yeah, I've kind of what I experienced was very similar as well in the same area. Or that's a great question. Actually, let me think. So I've had okay, actually on the same property, so the property where we had the encounter when I was a kid. Okay, So going back to that same piece of property later on, after we kind of figured out there was probably did fut in these axis, we went back to my aunt's property and started doing it because at this point she had least like ten thousand acres for a hunting club and they sold hunting club membership, so they owned the eighty something acres in the middle and then they leased they ran around it from a timber company. Very common practice in East Texas for people to do that. And we had access through a lot of land around there at this point, and she kind of thought we were crazy about bigfoot, but she told me there was a coon hunter who went out one night kind of in that same spot and he had a growling happened to him that told that he said, I'm no longer going

14:34 to be coon hunting here that my dogs got scared, and I don't know what that was, but it's nothing that's supposed to be in East Texas. So that happened in the same literal, same piece of property. I've had several people tell me that they had really scary growls happen, you know, in East Texas at there were areas they had really really scary growls, and that they had really intense vocalizations come at them and stuff like that. But you know, in terms of East Texas reports, and this is in my book Bigfoot South can get a Bigfoot South dot com. This book, this, this is the one that I think, out of everything I've ever like and covered, is the is the most interesting thing by a long shot. And it ties into the same thing.

15:16 Big for society. Who will be right back after these messages. So I'm a journalist and you're you're asking me, basically, have I found patterns similar to what I experienced? And so once again my aunt thought we were kind of crazy for the bigfoot stuff. And she told me the story and let me give my dad the story about the guy with kuon hunter. But she also told us about the spot where I had a deer stand out down there that one of the one of the one of the rabbit hunters went out one night down there, like the year previous or so and saw a silver bear on the on the highline right away, and I said, a silver bear. She goes, yeah. It was squatted down like a man, and when he shined his light on it, it stood up and looked at him and walked across this highline on two legs. And I went, silver bearh First off, this highline right away is like fifty yards wide.

16:23 There is no black bear that's gonna walk fifty yards on across there on two legs. Period. Secondly, there are whitish phased black bears, but they're in one area of the planet in British Columbia. Okay, all right, so I said, so I knew that was definitely not that was probably a sasquatch. So I just kind of filed that in my records. And this was all very early on in doing this. So around two thousand or so, well I did a radio appearance on the topic as a guest in the same station that my show was on. A guy wanted to talk about Bigfoot with somebody in East Texas, and I did a show and then I had a guy called on the air, but he reached out to me after the show, found found found my number, and he told me that he saw what he said was quote a light gray colored bigfoot crossing the road and in front of this sign on Highway eighty seven and East Texas says Nichols Creek. Well, that Nichols Creek he's talking about is about four or five miles from where the silver Bear crossed the highlight. So I'm like, oh, nobody knows. This is before social media. This is no there's no corro there's no there's no corroboration here. You know, this is two completely different things. And I went, wow, Well I did another I did another appearance on another program, and I had someone reach out of I had said

17:55 that one. I actually had several different reports come in from different areas of these Texas, but I had someone else reach out to me and say, hey, I was driving through Highway eighty seven one night, right at Nichols Creek and I saw what like what was like a bigfoot, but it wasn't real big. It was maybe like spot six feet tall, and it was slumped over in gray and kind of long a shere crossing the road, and they mentioned it being in front of the Nichols Creek sign. So now I have within a four or five mile area three bigfoot reports of a gray colored bigfoot pre social media in one area, and that actually at this point is expanded within about a seven mile area to five reports of that.

18:37 Oh man, that's the stuff I love. Just you know, you start to narrow it down, and you've got such a small, relatively small area, and how over how many years would you say those reports span that you've taken? All right, So the latest one that came up came up last year, but it was a report from nineteen ninety six. They remember the year and everything, so I would say the actual activity extended roughly from nineteen ninety six to around two oh three right in there. Okay, that's fascinating. So is this the kind of things that one can expect to read in your book Bigfoot South then? Or Oh yeah, yeah, I mean that's kind of like my That was really the inspiration for me to do the to really go deep with or redo of the book because I had new information on some of those reports, you know, so I was like, man, I got I got some cool stuff to add, So that's definitely in the book, and it was you know, that to me is just really intriguing because number one, especially this is before really the Bigfoot renaissance on television and the internet happened.

19:46 No one would have given you a Bigfoot report being gray trying to fake it back then. You know, that wasn't like you know, so that that to me is a little detail there that I think is fascinating. And also to the reports distinctly say it was really tall. It was like maybe sixty tall and slumped over. So that's interesting too. You know, it already sounds like an amazing book. Can you share maybe one other highlight that you always find yourself going back to when you're looking through your vote? Yeah, yeah, yeah, And this is the completely opposite side of thing. But it goes like I said, I worked in Bigfoot backwards. So this once again goes back to my childhood. But we have every year and it still exists.

20:32 A South Texas State Fair, one of the largest fairs in Texas, and it was I can't for sure narrow down the year, but I've talked to my mom about it was either eighty four or eighty five, and I'm pretty sure it was eighty four. We walk in the area where they have like the games and the sideshow stuff, and there was a big trailer set up and it says, see the body of Sasquatch. So this was like a moth to flame here like through the rest of the fair as what I'm going there, you know what I mean? It was like this is so we walk in me and my mom, My mom had taken me to the fair that night by ourself, and my dad was working, and there's this glass case and you know, thinking back to this, this was very well done. It wasn't cheap.

21:20 It was thick glass, nice display. They even had like metal signs of frame three fifty two, the Patterson Gilwan creature in there, you know. So it was like done really nicely. And I remember looking at this thing and just being transfixed. And what I remember distinctly about it were a couple of things. Its body was like it looked like to me it could have been six and a half to seven feet tall, but the body was kind of curled up a little bit, like it was curled up a little bit. The arms were curled up some and the face was round, a very round face with deep set eyes. I remember thinking initially like, I wouldn't think that that is what a big foot might look like up that close. And I remember my, well, I'll never thinking up that close and it had mailed, which as a kid, I was like, I don't think the tax ermist would have done that, you know what I mean, Like I was thinking my ten year old mind, eleven year old mind. And so when I rewrote the book, I had never talked about this publicly before. I went and talked to my mom about it, you know, because instead of being eleven, my mom was, you know, like thirty five. And she said, I said, here's the way I remember it, mom, because we live back. Like my mom said at least ten times that night, like I thought I wanted to go do was look at that, and she I said it was either really good special makeup effects are fairly bad tax at Ermy it wasn't.

22:49 Just remember a few years ago when those dudes put the Chebacca coftume on ice and went shouldered everybody and sip it was a dead bigfoot. Oh yeah that that toward the country. This looked ten times better than that, and so I'm actually continually looked this was a major some dight fake or not. Somebody spent money on it, so I know other people saw that and it wasn't just for that fair. So if anybody remembers in the mid nineteen at early to mid eighties seeing a bigfoot creature at a fair, especially in Texas, please reach out to me Chester at chestermore dot com. I would love to connect with you and maybe someone knows who has this if it was a fake, maybe still somebody still has the case or the specimen or whatever. Maybe it wasn't a fake. But that was something that I thought was really very interesting because it was set up like it was a big deal. And you know everybody knows about the Minnesota Iceman. Well we had the Bigfoot of Texas at the Touth dept To State Fair.

23:45 Oh wow, So I was just going to ask you, so it's it wasn't the Minnesota Iceman. Then no? Oh no, No, it wasn't on ice. It was like a it was almost like a mounted specimen, but it was laid in glass case. It wasn't the Minnesota Iceman. Nope, this is the whole deal. Oh man, so my audience is great with stuff like I hope someone knows what Chester is talking about, and hopefully you can put stuff in the comments. But if you really know, email me or actually Chester, how can they email you? Yeah, they can email me Chester at chestermore dot com, Chester at chestermore dot com. And yeah, you know, I would just like love to know. I mean, it was, you know, for a ten year old, I was suspicious of it being real, but it was cool either way.

24:31 It was cool to see and it was like the old But it wasn't the Minnesota Iceman. They didn't present it as the Minnesota Iceman. It was not in Ice. Wow. That that is gonna bug me for a while too. I hope we could figure this out. Well. I had someone message me on I mentioned it on something I did last year, and someone said, in the late seventies they saw a bigfoot carcass at affair in Dallas. So you know, that would have been a five or six seven year spread between then. But other people, thousands of other people have had to have seen this. So I'm very intrigued by it, and it's something that I like to tell because this is the kind of little rabbit trails and make all this a lot of fun.

25:12 Can you tell us a little bit about what people can expect to hear when they listen to the Dark Outdoors podcast? Oh, man, I appreciate you asking. So the way I described Dark Outdoors, that's true crime and terrifying encounters in the great outdoors. I kept running into very scary situations involving people in the outdoors, including getting chased off a mountain with my father the first time I visited the Willow Creek area up on a mountain by what was absolutely people in the drug trade. We got chased off a mountain and literally they were trying to push us in their vehicle off the mountain. It's a wild story. And I told that story on the air on the radio show I did for a long time, and I said, anybody ever had anything like that happen? And I couldn't take all the calls. So the first episode deals with I did three years ago with a lot of people don't know. Ted Bundy did a lot of his horrors in the outdoors in Utah. He took women into the outdoors to do some of his stuff. But it also deals with strange encounters and it deals with crazy bigfoot stuff.

26:12 The episode that got everybody's attention last year is when I talked about a potential lost tribe people people see what they call primitive Indians up until the nineteen eighties in the area of Texas. And then also the kind of tied into the feral human issue a little bit, and we do animal attack stuff. I mean, actually, the most downloaded show I did was about feral dog attacks and it was terrifying show. And so it covers all of the dangers in the outdoors. But it's a positive program as well, because I say we're shining light into the dark outdoors. Because I have a section each show has a missing person that's fairly recently missing in the wild somewhere, trying to raise awareness they're missing. We also do a defense segment and tell people how to defend themselves and stay safe out there. But it's stuff you want to tell around the campfire, but not if you want to sleep that night.

27:04 Oh that's awesome. So it's not just Texas stuff. It can be from all over them. Oh it's all over the place. Yeah, it's all over the place. Yeah. So the episode that goes live, the next episode that will be up is it's about wartime and animal attacks that soldiers have faced around the world going back into the First World War. And it is crazy stuff, I mean like wild stuff. So it's all around. There's no limits on where it's at. It's all around. But it's everything from true crime to strange, strange feral human encounters and Bigfoot and everything else. And Dark Outdoors is on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all podcasts and platforms. If you want to help my work, that's one of the main thing to go subscribe to that program because we're trying to really grow that and that's something that's really is an independent media content creator. That's a big focus in mine right now.

27:54 Absolutely, I mean yeah, I would. I would say listeners. It sounds like if you're listening to this, you're gonna love that one too, So definitely head over to any of those places where you listen to podcasts, look it up and then subscribe. Reviews are important too, same for this show, but sure leave a message like hey, Big for Society sent me or something that would be cool. That'd be great, that'd be killer man, you know, and Big Society ask good questions. So you guys are listening to a great program. You know, if you're if you subscribe to this, promote this program, because he's asking questions. I don't get asked a lot around here, So good stuff. Oh that's that's great to know. Do you do you investigate Bigfoot related things just in Texas or have you found yourself in other states as well?

28:38 Oh? I've done stuff in Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, in California. Okay, okay, okay, okay. So what part of California are you are you going into? Well? I I did, I haven't been in years. Oh right. We went straight for the we Witch, straight for the Jugular Bluff Creek, you know, yeah, which was like amazing, you know, to be there, and so that was really cool. And I've done a lot of stuff in Louisiana, and I mean, the people will get the idea I'm like constantly outlooking for Bigfoot, which I'm not, but I do. I've done a fair amount of in the field research and I get a lot of reports and stuff and I just like the log interesting cases and reports and things.

29:21 And it's interesting to me to to like hear subtle differences and reports in different states or similarities, you know, those who those are very interesting things for me as a journalist. Absolutely over the years going to all these different states. Do you have a place that has been a favorite that you're like, Yeah, I would easily go back there. It was just it was just crazy. Well I didn't go up to the Bluff Creek area up but that would be a definite, just because the historical part of it, and it's so beautiful and I love the mountains. But you know, more in the Arkle of Texts region here, you know, I love all of that area and falc in southwestern Arkansas. There's there's still a lot of stuff that goes on. My good friend Lyle Blackburn has uncovered a lot of stuff there, and I like that whole Sulfur River Bottom area, that whole area up in there is pretty fascinating.

30:13 Yeah, I would agree. I mean I get I get some just absolutely wild reports from that area. Big for society who will be right back after these messages? Actually, I mean, any any of East Texas is just a wild ride. Do you have any thoughts about why this area just seems to have a ton of Bigfoot activity in it?

30:54 It's very and it's a very interesting question. So when I first started doing this, you know, when I was like twenty five years old, twenty five years ago, there were very few people that would talk about Bigfoot. Kind of had to change my approach. When I ask people so, and I really feel do this, I don't go going, hey, guys, anybody down here in the campsina bigfoot lately? You know, I'll just ask you know, what kind of wildlife are you seeing? Have you ever had anything this unusual happened down here with wildlife you can't explain, And then people will talk about stuff. So I would hear the term booger a lot. That was used quite a bit. I had someone's I don't know about no bigfoot, y'all believe in.

31:34 But when my buddies saw a booger down on the Sibbing River, and he described this friend of his who went out because something was in his garbage. He lived on the edge of the river in a can and he brought us twenty two out and the head lamp things about to shoot a coyote. And he goes out there and this seven foot tall, dark brown hair colored booger stands up and looks at him and walks off down by the river. So there are places like Devil's Pockets. You know, I think we're names come from people talk about swamp devils and bush apes. So there was more of that kind of thing. And then as the Internet grew and people there's definitely was a disconnect between people thinking.

32:15 Even if like Legend of Boggy Creek, you look back at that bigfoots mentioned like once in one section of it, I remember that one guy is this maybe one of them soft squatches or something on there is funny, but you know, it was looking at something else. So the Internet rising and shows like Finding Bigfoot getting popular kind of showed that there was a similar kind of sighting happening in different parts of the nation, and so that really changed the dynamic of people opening up and sharing stories. But that's a long winded way, but there are a lot of reports historically that go back and people having strange things happening around their camps and things like that.

32:56 But one thing I want to say when I filmed with Animal X twenty years ago was my good friend doctor Natalie Schmidt and Daniel Searle who also was there. They were surprised, being from Australia, the forest that we have you know, there are sixteen million acres of forests in East Texas, so that's the size of multiple southern states. You know, So there is plenty of forest, and there are a fair amount of these dense creek and river bottoms. And once again going back to legend body Creek, what does it say he always travels to creeks right, Well, that I believe is true. If you look at these reports, they pretty much all come within close proximity of a river or a creek bottom. And I think all of that together makes it a good area of for analog. Plus, the game is abundant. There's huge populations and faral hogs, good populations and white tails, a lot of beaver, a lot of nutria, a lot of small game. And so there's food and there's cover, and there's these creek river bottoms to allow, you know, good travel corridors or something like that to stay sort of, you know, to travel into areas but burmain and remain for the most part unnoticed.

34:11 That makes that makes perfect sense, thank you. You know, having these connections within from what I can tell you you you have interactions within the wildlife community down there, definitely. Oh yeah, yeah, that's that's my real that's what I really do. It's just cool. Cool. Bigfoot's like a fun little side part of what I do. But I really involved in wildlife conservation work. So my my heart if Bigfoot was proven, like okay, we've definitely proven Bigfoot don't exist. Okay, it was fun. I had a good time, all right, what did I hear? I don't know, but whatever. But I'm still a wildlife fanatic and my heart is for the conservation of our land and resources and things like that.

34:51 So I look at things as wildlife first, like I go and look at it like if this is a real thing that really is flesh and blow, which I do believe it's got flesh and blood, maybe extra abilities. I don't know that. I'm a wildlife journalist. I don't cover that. I cover what crosses into the wildlife world. So I have to look at it from what would benefit For example, something I've really been digging into is faral apes and primates in the United States. That was my seminar series that all across the Bigfoot venues last year. It was faro Apes and Primates and is there is there the kind of land and foods and things that would that would you know, make them thrive in certain areas?

35:34 And if there are something that can make up three or four hundred pound primate thrive, then maybe there's something can make these things thrive as well. That's extremely interesting. Being someone who's who's very into conservation, then have you ever had the thought about, Okay, so what happens? You know, science proves that yes, Bigfoot is one hundred percent real, then what is our responsibility as the people who are super into it? Okay? Are we we're going to have to stand up like crazy for conservation for this or do you have any thoughts about this? I actually have deep thoughts about it. It's in my book, all right. But back in two thousand and I think it was four three or four, I put together a loose group of people and we were calling ourselves, we have we didn't. We just kind of said, if it's proven, we're going to have to get together and advocate for conservation, not in like a way we do land grabs and all that kind of stuff, but like to let people know, look, this is a species. It's important. We've got to know more about them. We got we got to figure out what kind of habitats or important habitat connectivity, all those things we talk about the news now and we called it the North American Primate Conservation Alliance, and it was me and my friend Chris Stevens and Scott Marlow who passed away, and Ken Garnhart was involved, and you know, it just traded away as we all had different interest takeaway.

37:02 And I thought at that time there might be some proving of it happening, which never happened. But I do think this. I think let's just take the South right now. I travel a lot, like I was in Cape Cod filming last year with white sharks, and then I was in Texas and then I was in Montana last year, So I'm over a lot of different places, and the amount of development happening right now is unprecedented, unprecedented, and we're losing land and we're cutting off travel routes for wildlife at an alarming rate. I mean frightening for me as a wildlife lover, and so we got to look at things like travel corridors. But I think in the South in particular, the thing that's going to be the big issue that's going to hurt a lot of wildlife is going to be water, and all the water in America is in the South. I mean that's where most of the water is, right the South, a little bit in the Northeast with the Great Lay and all that of course up there in that part of the country.

38:02 But in the South we have major reservoir construction projects on tap, and there's multiple reservoirs they want to put here in East Texas and Louisiana that if they do, we'll take up many hundreds of thousands of acres a while I've habitat that will never come back, and so I think looking at issues like that is important, not just for Bigfoot, but for. Everything that's extremely interesting. I have these episodes sometimes where it's like, you know, the individual will see Bigfoot on the outskirts of a city or something like that, and I get a lot of feedback like, Okay, that's kind of ridiculous. But then it's like, guys, like, look at what's happening. We are just going going, and we're going to run into Bigfoot eventually.

38:49 So I'm glad you brought that up. I think, going back to what you ask about East Texas and all these reports, I think a huge reason for what seems to be other than you know, we have communications vastly improved with the Internet. But I think the other reason there's a lot more reports is because people are running into them more. There is vastly more highway and roadways and development and housing developments, and it's like everything else, there's a lot more human wildlife conflict going on. You know, there's a lot more people getting attacked by animals. I mean, the Dark Outthers podcast has tons of shows on that because of this habitat clash. And let me say this, it's not ridiculous for people to think there could be a big foot on the edge of the city. Why would that be ridiculous? I don't I've heard that people say that it's not ridiculous at all. I mean, there is a mountain line up until these recent fires lived behind the Hollywood sign in Hollywood. Okay, wildlife adapts and these things adapt to. And the other thing is I believe people see them a whole heck of a lot more than they report. I believe people see them and say, oh, that was a person or that was my ma nation and they don't want to admit what they saw. And so I think even around some of these urban and suburban centers where there's good tracks of land. All of them have drainage ways to go in and out of perfect area. As matter of fact, some of those areas are treaded on less than some of the national forests we have. People don't go in the cities around the

40:21 wooded areas much in cities. A whole whole lot was the Central Park in New York. Maybe a hiking trail. There's a lot of green belts and stuff that are on private land. No one goes into. That would be an even better area for some. It's proven a huge boon to faral hog populations, for example. So you know, huge boon and they're like sanctuaries for hogs. You can't go kill them in there, you know, you can't take your you can't take your ar at night and go in the middle of downtown house and start busting a cap on some you know, some faral hogs, you know, but they're all over. So I think there's opportunities even for things like this to take advantage of some of this areas. So you have Farrell hogs in the middle of downtown Houston.

41:03 Oh, there's farrel hogs in downtown Houston. I've seen them own eyeballs, but they're there. There's Arrel hogs and sands all over San Antonio areas. There's Charol hogs and Austen Cherrell hoggs. There was a four hundred pound hog caught a couple of years ago at a bus stop in Tampa, Florida for kids. My goodness. Oh yeah. There is actually a number to call in Austin when you see a hog. So they're all over the place. And so animals adapt more. You know. People watch these documentaries and they're like, you know, whatever, But wildlife adapts, and there's a point where you know, there's only so much peering capacity of land, you know, but it's just because there is some development doesn't mean that something can't live there. However, the chances of encountering what lives there goes radically up.

41:52 Wow, I'm I'm going to be thinking about Farrell hogs hanging out in the middle of big Texas cities. That's that's good. The article I did on one I've had. I've had my own encounters, like I've got game cam photos of some and the biggest hog I ever saw in my life, and I've seen probably ten thousand Farrell hogs in my life. Was outside of a seafood restaurant one night in the parking lot, you. Know, Oh, my goodness, was like a multiple or a few hundred pound hog too, Like. Oh, it was more than a few hundred. This is the biggest hog I've ever seen. So we're talking a hog. This was one that was in the five hundred plus category, which I've only seen in my life three hogs. I think that would have tipped the scales bigger than that's category.

42:43 And oh yeah, I've got I've got barrel hog pictures in the city. They're all over the place. Man, They're like and they're real smart. So they're like, what happens is all of these cities have drainage systems, and what is on the edge of all these drainage systems acreage? It might be open grass, it might be brushed and these things. Where do they go out to a river, a bayou which has travel corridors riparian areas. Hogs love, they love to be around the water, so they just travel up and down these things, and they'll go in the city and hang out. If they get hunting pressure on the edge of the woods. Le'll just go back into the city. Is this Do you think this is also the same case. Just I don't know if you're familiar with San Antonio area at all.

43:23 Oh, yeah, I'm a Santonio a lot. Oh wow, Okay, so that makes so I've gotten a lot of reports from San Antonio and there's a green space that goes right through the middle of San Antonio. Tons of bigfoot reports. And I mean if you've got yeah. That's interesting that they're bigfoot reports from inside sentence. On Yes, a ton that's interesting. I'm a San Antonio a lot. My favorite Mexican restaurant there is called Meti Era. As we go there for twenty four hours. When I love I have to go if I go through Santuni, we gotta go to Metiers. But I love San Antonio. And yeah, there's a lot of hogs around parts of San Antonio too, and uh a lot of There is a lot of riperian like areas within the drainage of like the San Antonio River and all that part with creeks that flow through that because I fly fished that before several times. And that's interesting.

44:11 Funny thing about San Antonio I didn't know there was some legends a donkey woman, mm hmm something they called something called. And this wonderful young girl had these really cool decals she had done of different like crypto legends, and one of them was the donkey Woman. And I laughed for four hours looking at this picture thinking about the donkey Woman. So I had to buy that thing. And I haven't found a good place to stick it yet, But I'm just when I'm runned to smile, I'm gonna think about the donkey Woman. Of San Antonio, you know there you go absolutely. By the way, just for the record, I would be far more frightened with seeing a donkey headed human in a dress than I would a big foot. Yeah. I don't know. It might be a toss up for me, but I think i'd be I'd be freaked out by either one. Yeah, going off of your your connections. Yeah, And if you can't answer this is no problem. But have you ever had any interactions with you know, law enforcement or forestry or park rangers about bigfoot down in Texas?

45:12 I have never had forest service. A friend of mine, Rob Riggs, who passed away about ten years ago, did he had some good sources in the forest Service. Very legitimate journalist. He's a newspaper man years. I have had police though. I've had a couple of police officers tell me some pretty cool stuff. That's awesome, good good stuff. You know. It's it's something we might not talk a lot, well really never. But so you mentioned that you were up filming a thing on Cape Cod about some sharks. Yeah, I was not doing some work the media work with the great white sharks. Yeah. So yeah, I am working on a project right now, and I have a blog called Gulf Great Whites dot com and it is all about the return of the great white to the Gulf.

46:02 And I've been covering this story for twenty years. It's a passion of mine. My favorite animal of the world is a great white shark and I was the weird cut saw Jaws. I want to get in the water. So we have a very special project coming up this June that coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of Jaws. We'll be releasing about sharks. So I'm pretty excited about that. And if you want to tune in some really interesting stuff in the Gulf, my blog has a database of sightings, anecdotal sightings, and then there's really cool things out there you can contact. There's the Sharktivity app of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy that shows satellite pings of satellite tag whites. Is also the shark Tracker app by o Search. Those are free apps, so people can check that stuff out.

46:44 And I just love all that stuff. That's awesome. Something I've been asking people that are you know, investigators, researchers and things of that nature, is so if you're going out, let's say you're going out to look for bigfoot, do you have a do you have anything you follow about? Okay, first, I'm going to do this or or are you one of the people that you know you're more going to start knocking on trees or maybe you have a different approach. There's a couple of things. Number one that I make sure and not do, which I think is more important. Okay. Number one thing is I don't announce where I'm going ever, you know, me and a friend or two that we go.

47:27 I don't recommend people going alone, you know, the too many creepos in the woods, and plus you know there are a lot of people that think these bigfoots are like hippie peace snicks from the sixties and stuff, but like, we don't know what they are. And there isn't an animal on the planet, including white tailed deer, that hadn't killed folks. So let's not treat a potential eight foot tall primate as if it's a piece snick. We don't know what we're dealing with, so be careful, you know, just use the common sense, you know. And so I don't help, I go, never go alone, and I don't announce where I'm going. That does a couple of things. Number one, your safety numbers. But you don't want people to come in and mess up your area and fake things.

48:08 So if you're trying to have integrity about tracks and calls and stuff, someone wants to go out there and mess you up, which people would do these days. Keep your area quiet doesn't make any sense. You know that, That makes perfect sense. Yeah, And that way you got integrity about I've got I've got spots to be found of like tracks and things before, and no one had ever mentioned bigfoot there, you know what I mean, It wasn't like So that to me is a lot more apt to be real than if you put something out I'm going to go out to the big ticket nets reserve in the Turkey creeking that this weekend and you announce whatever. Vlahlah, there's a big line of tracks there. Huh. Really, I don't know, you know, So that's something I definitely don't do. And I think the best thing to do is just go out there and set up and find walk out, look for tracks and stuff. You look for tracks. Look on the edge of trails. If you see game trails, I would you almost never would find a track in the middle of it. I find them on the edge of it.

49:06 Walk in the edge also, look, you know, look all over. Look for areas where like you know, we have a ton of in the summer, in the late spring, we have a ton of banana spiders and they're just jillions of them in the woods. You know, if you've seen an area where you know, these banana spiders might have a web to three feet tall, up to eight feet tall, and you have a whole area that's a giant trail that's not a hard hoofed animal tracks like deer hogs or even humans walking through, but a light trail that goes up seven or eight feet cutting through the banana spiders. Something's walking through there. So look at little details like that, And the best thing to do, I think is just to go out and in at night, sit in the spot, make you a campfire or something like that, get some good audio requarterers, and just listen. I think listening is the best thing to do. And I think you're more likely to have them come check you out. Did you ever go out and find them?

50:03 I agree? I agree with that. Man, Texas is sounding wilder and wilder. You're talking about huge spiders and huge hogs, and. I take about snake shit. Oh no, not not a fan. That's crazy. We have rattlesnakes up here in Iowa, but they're they're few and far between unless you go to certain areas. But we got a lot of cotton mouse in East Texas and a lot of copperheads, and cotton mouse are really nice. We got timber rattlers then in South Texas around San Antonio. All that. Of course, Western diamondbags, but you know, it's just part of the gig. I brought a friend of mine down here hog hunting one time, and he went out. He was from New York and when he went back home he called me and said, when you come deer hunting with me. You don't have to worry about two things getting cold and falling out of your tree stand. He goes. In Texas, I had to worry about killer bees, giant feral hogs, rattlesnakes, cotton mouse.

50:56 I didn't know what's way to look, you. Know, crazy stuff, but it is. It's a state with a lot of really cool accounts coming out of it, for sure. Yeah, man, something I do want to I'm pretty sure you had said that a white tailed deer has killed a person. Is that right? Oh yeah, many times, many times. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Matter of fact, a white tailed deer, a captive white tail deer, when I was probably twenty years old started out my career, killed a guy about five miles from my house. Oh my goodness. Yeah, with their hoods, with their antlers.

51:37 Oh oh yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so when they're in there, when they're in the rut, a white tailed deer is very, very very driven. It's driven of an animals exist on the planet and if someone gets in their way, or you know, you happen to be in a park and think, oh it's this deer locked up fighting. Let me walk up and get a selfie. You know, you know, one of those bucks gets loose, may come get you, you know, so you know nature, you just got to respect nature. You know, makes makes total total sense. Chester. It has been just a pleasure chatting with you today and thank you for coming on to the show. But I want to make sure that we take some time at the end if you want to share again, how people can you know, keep up to date with you and you know, listen to your podcast and where the best place to pick up a copy of your book is as well.

52:32 Thank you so much. You can catch me at v chester More. That's th V chester More on Instagram. I'm on Instagram all the time. Higher Calling dott Net is my blog. But Dark Outdoors the podcast on all major podcasts and platforms. Please go subscribe everything from true crime to terrifying cripet encounters on Dark Outdoors and you can go to Bigfoot south dot com. Also, I have a big foot YouTube channel, Global Bigfoot that I've developed, slowly developed, but it's getting some good constant Global Bigfoot. But I also my heart is I have a ministry outreach for hurting children. I love wildlife, but I love kids even more and we have an outreach that grants wildlife encounters for kids to everything from a terminal illness to parental loss.

53:13 And if you know of a wildlife loving kid that might want a wildlife encounter, a special wildlife going to give them a boost in their life, please reach out to me and go to Chester at chestermore dot com or go to Kingdom Zoo dot com from more info in that and we have done neumerous Bigfoot expeditions for kids in that category. That is amazing, what a cool thing to be involved with. Chester. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll definitely stay in touch with you and see where things go for you in the future and I maybe even do it an update down the road. But thanks again. Man. Hey, Matt, I tell you we thank you for having such amazing questions and you have a wonderful program and it's an honor and privilege to be on it.

53:57 Just wanted to take a few minutes to say thank you to you all my listeners for listening to the podcast. Please take a minute to help out the show by subscribing on YouTube, making sure you hit the bell so you don't miss any notifications, and share the episode on YouTube with a friend. Also, if you're listening to us on a podcast, thank you so much, make sure that you're subscribed. Share the show with a friend. Really, it's all about sharing the show wherever you can. If you've had a Bigfoot encounter related to the following or know someone who has, please reach out to me at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com or pass on my email.

54:39 Here's the list. The Subtle Lake area of Oregon, Rainbow, Oregon, McKinsey Bridge area, Sweet Home, pretty much that entire area, the north part. If you get what I mean. I'll see you back next time. Listeners. SASA Summerfest this year July eleventh through the twelfth. It's going to be fan fantastic July eleventh through twelfth in Greenwaters Park and Oakridge, Oregon. And listeners, if you're going to go, you can get a two day ticket for the cost of one if you use the code b f S like Bigfoot Society, but BFS it'll get used some off your cost. Priscilla wasn't nice enough to provide that for my listeners. So there you go. I look forward to seeing you there, so make sure you head over to www dot Sasquatch Summerfest dot com and pick up your tickets today