What I Found after the Siege at Honobia

0:01 Welcome to the Bigfoot Society. In this episode, I talked to Harold Benny, a zoologist who shares his bigfoot sightings from Honabi, Oklahoma and Mina, Arkansas over the years. If you've experienced something similar to what Harold has, or have more information regarding bigfoot or other cryptids in the same areas, please reach out immediately to me after this episode. Remember, your encounter could be the key to unlocking this mystery once and for all, so please don't hesitate to contact me at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com. All right, Bigfoot Society. We got the privilege of talking to mister Harold Benny today. He's a zoologist from Illinois. He's got a very interesting story. Harold. I'm gonna let you go ahead and take the reins, my friend. Okay, about the summer that I turned sixty and I look at it. This would have been two thousand and seven, and this was when I actually I call it the first Bigfoot that I saw, although I had a couple of strange things that I don't talk about because they are so strange that happened before.

1:10 But this is down in Oklahoma, and you probably heard of Honobia, the locals call it Hornaby. And some of you probably have read a book by Tom Powell called The Locals and the Locals. He spends quite a bit of time and he talks about this little town and some stuff that has happened down there. And I was down there looking around and seeing all the things in the book and everything. But the last night that we were down there, down there with two friends, me and two others had had gone let's say, south of town more or less, and spent some time setting in the bushes and whatever, and we decided to go to Narstown and get into the hills they call them mountains, And we went up a mountain road about ten o'clock at the night, maybe ten thirty that we started up the mountain road, and we had an old pickup truck, and I rode in the back of the pickup truck and the other two just rode in front, and we went up there. It seemed like forever, but when we stopped and figured it out, it was about six miles and maybe seven And we parked the car or the truck and then walked up ways and we crossed the bridge or went across the creek, then up a little hill, and I've got bad legs, so I'm never in a hurry, and I don't mind walking in the dark by myself. Anyway, I was going pretty slow and left the other two just going up ahead. I got up to the top of the

2:44 hill and I had a military grade thermal, and back then these thermals didn't do anything except let you see. Now the thermals will record, and they're a lot less expensive, but they're not nearest as nice and accurate. Anyway, I had this thermal, and I'd been up in this location before, and as i was walking the road to the Tempry Road, I would stopped here and there and panned through the woods with his thermal. And I hadn't gone too far up this hill to the top of it, when I happened to see a head in the bushes moving up and down, and I just froze, didn't move, and I had the thermal on this object, and I just stayed there and watched it for quite a while. He would just head would deck down and then it would appear again above the bushes a couple feet away, and awful being was over seventeen, I know, at least the thing was. It was only about maybe forty feet away from me.

3:51 It was not far at all, and I got a little nervous, a little bit upset that this great, big thing that was right there in the side of the road, almost next to me, and I had to stop and take a couple of breaths, and I thought, Okay, just had my birthday. I made it to sixty. I've always wanted to see something like this my whole life. And it started spending more time out in the woods, and I says, heck, I'm going to watch this. I watched it as long as I could, and then the other tree I was with they came back down the road at me and yelled, and I looked up. And when I looked up, this big animal that I'd been watching and disappeared. It took the chance of the opportunity to get back down the bushes somewhere. So the other two came down and was asked me, and I told him what I saw, and I don't want them, I don't think blade me. But one of another one that had the thermal at a thermal, she looked into the woods where I'd been looking at and she saw the animal also, So I had verification, right there, which so I know it wasn't just my imagination. And but if she watched it for a little bit and it was leaning against the tree, it wasn't hiding anymore.

5:04 And finally a guy away where she couldn't see it either. So I watched it. I'm probably not full minute, but then forty seconds, forty five something like that actually, and I felt that that was quite a while. But it just stayed within a pretty small area, just going back and forth and looking up and down, trying to look watching me, and everybody asked me what it looked like through this thermal. It was just completely bright white and there was no detail ready that I could see except this was big and white. We radioed and we got a couple of other people up there, and actually we sat in the seven minute ditches for a while and just hung around up there, and it was interesting. We used a couple of guys that were backed up in the woods there and they weren't too far away.

5:58 They were camping. I think they were from Kentucky or Tennessee, and we gave them a call on the phone or on the radio because we were on a county road. This county road, though the hunters cut it over and they put gates up. This is this is back in the hills. So there was nobody stopped doing this, and the hunters were told us they were going to close the gates to keep us out the rest of the night. We called these other guys and we told them they better pack up real quick because the gates were going to get locked up. An interesting thing. They packed up, They started up their old truck, and when they did, they got howls from behind their campground and we could hear them. We went that far away, we could hear the howls or the prints and the wood knocks. It's almost like they were communicating and say, hey, we don't know whether where the one side of guys is that these guys here are moving, they're doing something. There was a lot of and there was a lot of sound up there. Now let's see, So that would have been time that all happened. It would have been really close to right around midnight time.

7:10 I had the sidings and we had the other people up there, but nobody else saw anything. We had some some smells, but they weren't that strong. And I wouldn't really want to say that the smells were associated with anything else that was right there either, and let me see, we went back down to the truck and we got out of the area before we got locked in. But actually for that sighting, that was that's the main part, and that's about what happened. Just this last fall in October, there was a rise up of that siding that seven almost seventeen years ago. And I did a spoke at the Murphysboro Bigfoot Festival this year and I was interviewed and one of the guys that interviewed me, he wrote to this story that I've just told you. He wrote it up and it was in the Illinois Country Living magazine that is put out by Electric co Op. And that's where I thought that you got the story. But now it's not many. It might not be the best story I've got, but I saw it. There's no doubts about it. It felt like I could almost touch it from where I was standing, and it was probably it was probably as bad as close as i'd really want to get to one I've been any closer I had been in it's lives. But I can see how some people get to get the jitters and they get to feeling funny and they don't know what to think.

8:43 But I consider myself to be really lucky, one of the lucky few to actually see this animals, see it alive, and see it moving. And I was thinking it was dark, so people are going to say it was dark. You didn't really see it that well. I saw a pretty dog gone good. But actually that about takes up next afternoon, I had to leave back drive back here to town, and I was excited all the way back. I still get excited when to talk about it. But let me see, I think that's probably about all what I've got to say about that right now. Harold, do you mind if I jump in and ask you a few questions about that specific memory you have? Yeah, go ahead, perfect, just because it's very rare to be able to talk to someone from that time period in that location for the listeners that might not be aware of it, can you explain what you remember of what you heard about the events of the siege at hoh Nubbi that happened around twenty years ago in Oklahoma.

9:46 It seemed to be it was a pretty hot spot, and I think there's been a lot of stuff that has been closed down. You don't have the people don't have the freedom to go in and out. I don't think I could even get up that road anymore. Of course, you go anywhere, and the locals have seen this these animals or heard these stories, and they take it as just an everyday thing. But there was quite a bit activity. They have none thumbsters brought in, so they had a portable dump, and these animals would get out there and they'd get in the dump. I guess that was pretty common, and they would get into the cattle feeders. They have great big cattle feeders. Well the tops would pull off and they put the feed in them. They would pull off the tops and get in and get the feed out of them, and it was just really real common for everybody now. But right there in the middle of town there used to be a little store, and there was a couple of cabins from in.

10:46 There was a house for rent, and there was a campground, and I think they still have their every fall. I think they had a still had a festival down there, and a couple of my friends do a bunch of the work with it, but I have not been back down there myself for quite a while now. There was just an awful lot of activity. It seemed like all the times I had not just a that area where I was, but all around the town. There was something going on all the time. And there were I don't know, three or four sightings around the week that I was down there. I had been out. Actually I was in Arkansas the week before, and then I was in Hornaby for about ten days, and then all my free time was up. I was still working then, and I had to get back what I shared done. If I'd had any brains at all and had a little bit more time, or I should have made the time, I should have gone back up to where we were and into the woods and really checked it out real well. But I think that I got so excited. In most everybody, I think would get awful excited that you just lose your common sense. But since then, when something's happened, I searched for footprints and hair and whatever and see if there's anything else around there. But I felt pretty lucky that I had another person there

12:18 to cite the same animals, so I didn't. But and that brings up something else. Signing of that animal by just about anybody is so unbelievable that it probably cut me three or four months before I really believed that I'd seen it, and I kept telling myself. Finally I know, I saw it, was right there. It wasn't my imagination and I actually saw this animal. But I've had a couple other times, a couple of other sightings where one of them it took me fifteen years to finally admit in my own mind that I saw it, and another one I really haven't had that I saw it. I don't crust my own mind. I don't think. I'm not sure if what in my own mind is if my mind's making up something or my mind crying too hard somebody. Some people will try so hard and everything they see or everything they hear is a bigfoot, and they don't stop and consider what's actually going on or what could be causing what they're seeing or what they're looking at, and the first thing that pops in their mind is bigfoot.

13:28 And there's a lot of animals in the woods, and some of them are pretty fantastic the things they can do and think, Yeah, you have to stop and consider everything else, and if you can't figure anything that could be causing what you're seeing, then maybe it might be a big foot. And that's why I try to look at it. I don't know if I answered your question or not. I went around around there. I think those are you definitely need to have a discerning mind as what I'm picking up. But going back to Hote a little bit, so you said you went to that area because of some events that happened, and it was talked about in Tom Powell's book. When you went to that area to check things out for yourself, it sounds like did you talk to anyone in the area about the events that had happened, not especially the events from that book. Now, well, they went past. There was one cabin where there was an awful lot of problems, and it was set real close to the main road that came into there from the west, and they were had bigfoot in and around and stealing deer out of the freezer. And I think one of the things that they had done they had for some reason planted peas around there in the garden or in the yard, and the deer came in and like the PE's the deer were eating the peas, and then they were actually shooting at the deer and the bigfoot. See, they thought the bigfoot learned that when they

15:00 heard the shooting at the deer, that meant that there were deer and feeding on the pieves in the yard, and they'd come into the house and then into the area then and actually it was a real small area and it was a real small cabin. But I guess that they even got into the figured out how to get into the freezers. But I thought that that was really interesting. They associated the gunfire with food, so it wasn't chasing them away, it was actually drawing them in. Anyway. There was a cabin across the other way where they'd had some things. I'll tell you one thing. There was one night several people had the thermals and one guy called on the radio one night he said he had a hot one. He said there was a big one. He said it was up this tree, back by this other cabin that was to the south of where we were. And so we hawked through it over there, and it was hard because there was a lot of rough ground in this one area. We got over there, and what we found out is that he was sitting back in there and he was looking up a power pole into transformer and he was picking up all the heat off the transformer. And he thought we had a big foot up a pole.

16:10 So that's just one of the things that can happen. I'm mistaken, and everybody jumped to it and figure they had something up there, but they didn't. They were just a transformer. That's just a great example about you have people that are probably extremely amped up about those events you were talking about. That is the siege at ho Nubby that people had probably heard about before. That's what you were referring to you with the big foot trying to get the deer out of the refrigerators that were on the cabin porch. I believe is how the story goes. But do you remember I think there were some investigators that were sent to check it out, and do you remember what happened to the bigfoot at the end? I don't know if the whole story exists in any one location. I guess I could. Yeah, I had to be in this, Tom pout it. You'd be as much as anything for you.

17:02 Did it been the beginning what? I haven't reviewed it or looked at it. I really don't know how it ended up and how it is much later, but I think that they did drive them off. I think I heard on a rumor or not that a truck driver had seen one of the bigfoots that had been shot trying to make it back up the woods and straight south from there was a small hill and again they called a mountain. But I really don't know what I'll finally happened there after that I've suld have tried to looked it up and reviewed that. It's been a long time since I've read that. And like I said, it's been seventeen years since this all happened to me, Harold, Who were the individuals that you were with?

17:47 Do you remember the individuals you were with when you were out in the woods and you saw that head bobbing up and down. Yeah, And I don't really use name one the one girl that saw it also, she's passed away with cancer. She was a girl from a girl from Indiana, real smart gal. And then there's guy from Texas and he still works in the area and he supposedly had a lot of sightings there. And I won't use his name either because I don't want to draw any heat down on them. I don't use names too often. I don't even like to people say, Okay, I respect that, yeah, but and that really one reason is that I get as much information as I get, even right here in Illinois, because people that I I were gonna work with before they know I'm not gonna that I might want to tell I'm not want to tell the story, but I'm not going to say who they were or exactly where they were because we don't need we don't need people running through their fields and the people bothered them.

18:55 So I kind I kind of light away from that, and that maybe takes away from some of some people believe in some of the stories. But then that's that's too bad. I wouldn't have the stories at all if I didn't do it that way, I don't think, and I agree that's I think that's the right way to do it. You need to be respectful of people's privacy. And I've had plenty of stories where the person it gets out they had a bigfoot on their property and then it's reporters and reporters back in the seventies. But yeah, you have to be careful sometimes what info you get out. But thank you for talking about the siege at Honabi and what you experienced after that time for a bit there, Harold, do you mind if we take a little bit step back. And we were talking before the show that you've been into Bigfoot for an extremely long time, and do you mind if we take it all the way back to the beginning and share what you remember from the very early days and then go from there. I was born in forty seven, so I've been around a long time. Man, I hope to be around. Why yet, before I was ten, maybe by the time I was ad, I can remember my dad used to bring home a newspaper, clippings, magazine clippings, things like that. They would talk about somebody somewhere all this caveman or somebody somewhere saw this ape or whatever.

20:18 They didn't they didn't have a name for yet, and of course there's been stories going back to I think the seventeen hundreds. But he would bring stuff like that home, and he was a pretty smart guy. He worked as he didn't have a degree, but he worked as a chemist, and he would just always tell me, then, know this this is true. We don't know anything about this, this is real or what it is, but keep an open mind, because if if you don't keep an open mind, you're never going to learn anything. And so I was brought up that way, keep an open mind, and so he would, I remember, if we threw out Miami triality, he would bring stuff home like that.

20:59 And then finally finally forgot about it. When I got a bit older and got through high school and got through college, and I'm not sure how well I was, I finally realized that, hey, there's with the Internet and everything, there's a lot of people gathering a lot of information. And I figured I would just start looking and seeing what was out there. And I found hundreds and hundreds of books, and so I got back into it. Then there when when I was a little bit older, and like a lot of people, I ended up getting divorced, and then I went paralyzed and I recovered from that, and I started started taking some trips and talking to some people and built up a heck of a library. And this is the thing, is you want to learn anything, or research anything or whatever, you need to read everything that's out there and find out what's been done and what's been done before you start mounching around yourself, because there's no need to repeat everything that's been done. And I learned fight a bit, and then I got hooked up for a few years with the BFRO. I was an investigator for a few years them, and then I started leading some of my own small groups and things in Illinois here and they just build up from there.

22:22 Let me say, but anyway, I've I've had my mind on whether or not this animal exists for a long time. And my dad passed away in ninety nine, and that sighting was about two thousand and seven. That sighting I've told you about. And I'd just give anything if he was still around, and I could go and tell him about the things I've seen and the things that I know I've seen, and just to let him, just to let him know that there are things out there. But I think he'd really enjoy he'd really enjoy finding out. And I found that over the years, I've had quite a few friends, and I was able to separate out my good friends. I tell them some of these stories to say, you, I saw it myself, and my good friends would say that if you saw it, I believe it now. I talked to school for about five six years too, and now that was before I started doing too much of this stuff. But I've had ex students who tell me the same thing get in touch with me. And they said, I always wonned about that animal, and you actually saw it. I said, yeah, I actually saw it and I know it's there. And they said, I tell them.

23:38 I said, if you want to go out me sometime, I could take you if you want to go, And I said, no, if you say it. So I don't really want to go. And a lot of people are interested, but they don't want to go out at night and set in the field by themselves. And I didn't understand that. If I answered that question or not, either, Rich, I would say you did. We talked earlier that you are consider you went to school for being a zoologist. I'm very curious, so your viewpoint as a zoologist. How does a zoologist look at the creature called bigfoot? I'd say most of them just think it's a bunch of malarkey. Now, I've talked to some just recently from around the country that they're in the BFRO and there's a lot of people that just don't know. And if I hadn't seen it, I'm going to say more than once, I couldn't. I couldn't be with myself. But there's something out there doesn't make any sense. There's a lot of things mostly that don't make any sense about how these animals has lived and reproduced and there seems to be an awful lot of them in certain areas and just biologically, just things just don't make sense. But we're dealing with something here we don't know.

25:00 We don't know what it is really, we don't know where it came from, and there's a lot of theories. We don't know exactly what it is. And there's no experts on this animal. And I know there's some people that think they are, but you can't be an expert on an animal that's not even hasn't been proven to exist. It's just everybody's got ideas and they passed the ideas around and it's just hard to come up with anything, so I any any And Sharrett has said that most of those wild just aren't going to believe in it. And I think even eventually they come up with a with a good body, no matter where they find it or where they put it, they're still not going to believe it. It's going to be one of one of those things, like everything is today, you can't believe anything you hear or see. It seems, but I just tell myself, I saw it. I know I saw it. I have to believe it.

25:56 But I loved people before I pass away. I love to figure out how it does exist, and those are the things that it does. I just don't know. I just don't know. It's a heck of a good mystery. I would wager to say it's one of one of the best. And I hope before the end of my time that there's some sort of definite answer that's finally able to be Maybe there's a type specimen that's able to be taken, or I don't know, whatever it would take. You all, just what do you think it would take for this to finally be proven? Would it take DNA, a type specimen? Like you said, is going to take a type specimen? There have been all this DNA work that there were people talk about, but the DNA works is not worth too much because we use different samples that came from this area and that area in this animal not animal. It's all hearsay, it's all heresay where the samples came from.

26:56 You're going to have to have a type specimen. You're don't have to take the same ap was off the type specimen and run them and find out what it actually is. It's one of the things that really drives me crazy. Just because they've run DNA test, you don't know where the samples came from. You haven't got anything. And I know a lot of people that's going to upset a lot of people too, But that's just how it is. We've got to use science, and then they need to use science and scientific methods to get this thing figured out. But if it even can be figured out, I don't know. It's a lot. Like I said, I've been looking into it a long time now, and about the best we can do is hope to see it now and then. But until we have you on, until we have a type specimen of the type of animal to actually run test on, it's just not gonna nothing's going to count. I guess the way to put it. Sure, so you know where it's coming from. It doesn't mean anything. Harold reminded me, were you actively your relation to bigfoot research? What was it in the ninth teen seventies? Was the existent at all? Not a lot in the nineteen seventies When I mentioned the Bigfoot festival down in southern Illinois that happened fifty fifty one years ago today, And I guess it got a lot of it, got a lot of advertisement, publication around the world and stuff. But I was working as a chemist two miles from whatere, I'm said today, and all through all that

28:29 I didn't even hear about it. I didn't even know about it, Okay, But about to the seventies and whatever. Actually, I was still teaching, doing some things, trying to raise the family, and I had my head a lot of other places. But I'm just just taking up some things here and there. And there's timing in a guy's life that he's got to be raising the family and worrying about that. And I guess I had where I had my head makes sense, totally got it. So we talked earlier. You've spent a lot of time researching Bigfoot in Illinois, which is where you're based out of, and I've been able to talk to a few people from Illinois I've talked to. There's definitely some things going on northeast of Peoria, in the northern part of the state. There's the Shawnee area down in the south part of the state, and you've got a little Egypt and all that good stuff down there. But what has your research been like in the state over the years. Okay, when I go, I've spent as much time in a Shawnee as I can. And basically in Illinois, if you're not in the Shawnee, you're someplace where you probably haven't got permission to be That's a big thing. If you get out of park ground the public around in Illinois, do you just haven't that permission to be there. So I spend a lot of time in the Movie Boo area on that side of the state and the south about as far as you can drive down through down to

30:00 Jonesboro and even further. And then I go over to Harrisburg and south from Harrisburg, and I've got a little private park down there that I use. It's Williams Hill Pass. I use that a lot and always have something really strange and really something really stands out every time I go down there. And sometimes an awful lot of stuff happens down there. A lot of stuff happens at Murphysboro. I cannot sometimes decide when I have a few days where I want to go, because both those areas are good. And the thing is, there's a lot of ground down there that you can you can get on.

30:47 Now. I've brought ten, fifteen to twenty BFR investigators right up here to Montgomery County to Hillsboro and try to do some things up here too. I can't keep them off the private ground. I'll have ground, but I have permission to use. But I don't know. Maybe they're just not used to keep the people being protected whether they have their ground. You just you've got to treat these farmers nice. They've got to lunch them. Maybe sometimes you got to shoot a few coyotes to get permission to get on there and do anything. Except if they think they've got something, they'll call you and ask me to come down and look. But the big thing is who owns the ground and do I have permission to get on it? And now, like I said, I'm in Hillsboro and I have a lot of sightings.

31:44 Day's lot, an awful lot of them, which is funny. And do all that go back maybe thirty five years all around this town. From where I'm sitting right now, I could go six seven miles north or south and be in areas where there's been three or four sidings. I could go east and west and not quite as many sightings The thing about Hillbroy here is I think that makes it so good. We've got the Shoal Creek that's called and it's three branch creek, and Hillbrow sets at the top of the branches between the east branch and the middle fork. The middle branch, and then Lynchfield is eight miles to the west, and there's another branch with it's Sharper and it joins into the middle branch after just maybe ten miles. The thing with me, we've got again being it's all privately on ground, but we've got water and lots of food, and with these three creek branch, I think it's really it's just ideal for something like this. And I guess I'm lucky that I was raised and brought up here, and you've got a few living relatives, and I know a lot of people, and I can get on this ground and the people help me, and people will cooperate with me, and the people that don't even know me know of me. And when something happens, I get telephone calls, and for I don't use any computer communication

33:21 of any sort or whatever really anymore, and I just don't I just don't get involved with that. I just use regular old telephones and what business cards. And I'm really surprised that the number of people that do get a hold of me. And a lot of people, well, there's two things. A lot of people I want to know if they've got something going on in their property and think, man, there's something scrange out here, and they call me and I go out and I try to look inside what I think from what I can see, if they have got something that strange on the property. And then there's people that don't really want you on the property, but they've been scared of something. They say something's not right in the woods, so I try to help them. Then it's plus maybe the biggest thing, if they've seen something or had something going on, they're afraid to say it, to tell anybody. I've had guys that wouldn't even tell their wives that they've seen something. But if they call me time they call me, they know that, like we already said, I'm not going to be giving up their name or where they live or their property or what they've seen so they can be identified. And between those two things, I think that makes a lot of difference. But down southern Illinois, you've got an awful, an awful lot of ground, but it's in the Shawnee. It's botty.

34:51 You have to be careful. But that's the thing. I respect everybody's ground, everybody's property. And if I'm with people, I back there and I do one people, I say, don't cross those senses and bother anything to take care of this place, just like if you want it. And if they do that, we're fine. But I have had some people get in trouble because they just don't think they have to worry about getting on anybody else's property. But anyway, that's a big difference between between north and South available property over the years. Did you ever do any research up in Iowa? Just curious. I've been to Iowa a couple of times. I had a friend that I can't think where he is now, But I haven't been there for years now, and I've gone up there to a couple of park areas.

35:44 I'd have to get out the map and see it and into some old notes to see where I even was now. But I have cast one or two prints in Iowa in one of the park I remember that. But one of the guys that I used to go up with, he was kind of every everything's a bigfoot, sure, and I don't. I'm my actually the other way. There may be something there, but it probably not a big foot. There's a lot of animals in the woods of all sizes and shape. And of course I hunt and fifth and a hunt and ski and about any outdoor sport you can do. You'll say, I'll be seventy seven in a couple of months. I felt my life doing all that kind of stuff, tiled hunting and just about it. Everything. So I've been in the woods a lot and seen a lot, and people, a lot of people in some of the bigfoot organizations say if you're if you're a hunter or you look like a hunter in the woods, you're not going to see anything because you're going to scare it all off. And I tell them, if you're a hunter or a real outdoors many you know what's in the outdoors and you don't jump in every single thing and say it's a big foot. And that's that is a difference. And you know what what you're looking at, what's around. It's the things that you don't know that you can't figure out that really spook you. Like I thing I watched it forty feet away from me

37:15 in the middle of like that. That kind of spooked me. If you ever get the chance to look through your notes and you happen to find where you cast those tracks at in the wherever it was in Iowa, I'd be curious to know. I'm from just outside of central Iowa myself to the west, so trying to find all the historical info about what's happened in the state. But I think I was more more northern. It's marked on It's at least marked on a map or something somewhere. And I used to a lot of times keep a notebook for almost every trip. I took like a three leagues book. And it's back when I was making those trips, I had I was sick. I had I went through a period where I had bad pancreash infections and and I had I had three times, three types of cancer.

38:09 And so I've been really lucky. And the knock on what I need to go in for another cancer test here real soon, and I hate to do it, sure because I don't want to find anymore. But yeah, that was I was. I remember the last time I went to Iowa, I was sick. But I'm pretty sure I know. I was with north of Ceedar Rapids. Yeah, that's a really squatchy area up there. Yeah. Yeah, when you get up in there. I was Martha there and maybe I was a little bit west of there. Yeah, but yeah, if I run across it, I'll do that. Now I have got one of these days I need to get with you. I've got another story that I don't talk about. It happened before this one I was talking about tonight.

38:59 It's more or less gets you into paranormal bigfoot, sure, which being a scientist, I've always tried to stay away from that. But what I've learned is, overall these years, say you really can't stay away from it. I don't pay that much attention to a lot of the really strange things. But when I was with the BFR. See, BFRO has a special file. If somebody mentions in their bigfoot story get into a paranormal type things, or says where they got out of a spaceship or something weird, We've got a file that we just put them in, so there should be all saved, but it's full of really weird stuff. I gave you a name one day we were talking. Carter Bochard did you ever get a hold of him. He's on the list of people I know he's got multiple books that are supposed to be very good reads, but he is, and he's writing another one right now. And he started BFRO. I was already with him for a while, but he started with him, and he was one of the guys that would come up here to Illinois and do some things. And we haven't been together for a little bit, but he's had so much I don't know what I called paranormal. I've just called for so much stuff that he's That's where he started spending time. Instead of just throwing him out,

40:31 he started going more and more into this stuff, and that's where all his books have pretty much come from. I guess the book that he's finishing up right now, it's basically about habituations, but the others and actually the others he wrote three books, but he wrote but one of them that he wrote, he went back into it and added a bunch of stuff. So there's a new volume of under the same book. But yeah, he lives all by Kansas City, and you get ahold of get a hold of him and tell him where he got his name, and he's he does a lot of He does a lot of podcasts, and he's not like you said, he writes some good books and stuff. So now I got off of whatever I was talking about. Where was I? It feels like a few times during the interviews so far, it feels like there's something that you've experienced that you want to share, but you're very I don't know if I want to share it, but it feels like you want to share something. That other story that I just mentioned that happened down in Mina, Arkansas, and like ten days before that one I talked about. But I don't know how long it would really take for me to tell that story. I've only really told it once and it's at least it'll be seventeen years ago too. You have only told it once and I put it. You say you found this story on Facebook. It's on Facebook also, and I told it even a couple of

42:06 my friends. I said, I'm having trouble leaving that story. I said, that's why I've never told you anybody were all these years because strange. And I don't know if you want to do it another time or it's up to you. But I do have the time now and it might be one of the things where we're both on the same call now and if you've got a few minutes, but up to you, I want to respect your time, of course. Yeah, I don't even know what time is. It's nine thirty, is it okay? About nine thirty? And you usually run the ten, don't you give or take? But I would love to be able to have you share your story if you're cool with that. Yeah, let's try it. Like I said, it's even with some of my friends may just have trouble with it, but we're getting into the paranormal stuff here.

42:57 Yeah, no judgment here, harold you. Yeah. Yeah. There another like a couple of big foot guys making fun of flying saucers or anything. Nothing work, some big foot guy making fun of each other. This was I think it was south of Mina, and of course act just the hopskiff and a jump from where I was in Oklahoma. I started out at Mina, me and some other people and the strangers dogone deal. Didn't really have any plan or whatever. But one of the guys were in Walmart and most of us were just sitting in the parking line, and one of the guys went in to get something in Walmart at Mina and ran into this gal there was talking bigfoot. So we got hooked up with her, and she had a little bitty place down I think it had to be south, tucked back in there at the base of the mountain. And she said she even had was an old school bus in a woods, and the Bigfoot a lot of the time stayed in the school bus for should in the winter. That's okay. Anyway, This one night, me and a guy from Kentucky and a woman from north then northwest of Kansas City. He had a van, and we're all old. They're both old. Me I was about sixty then, and we went down by her place back in the woods. And this

44:30 was the darkest place I think I ever saw, or ever was at. And maybe it wasn't that dark, it was close to it. This place was dark. So we went down the road, passed her place, and we pulled off and took the van, took it back in a little bit, and then me and the older guy we got out, and she says, I don't really feel good about getting out here, think, oh, lock the doors of the van here, and I'll stay in the van and wait for you guys. And so that's what we did, me and him. We walked back down the road the direction we'd come from, somewhere between that a quarter and a half. We went too far down, but we walked down and we were in this gatherled inviterers down. We were in her driveway and the man, it was dark and we weren't there too long, and this horrendous stream come from the mountains just off the road to our Belboti Street would still be in to our south, and it wasn't too far away, but it was so loud and so scary. I still never heard anything like it in the woods or whatever. This was an awful screen. We both we backed up maybe twenty feet into her driveway to get away, because you seen, boy, something was going to pop out of the woods and it was going to be awful. So we stood there as long as we could. And I'm looking down the road back towards van. I can't I'm far and afway, I can't see the van, and it's dark. I

46:04 see this great, big white thing across the ditch, come out of the woods on the mountain side, and he gets in the road and he starts walking towards us. Like I said, we're a little bit back off of it, though, And I tell this this other friend mineus. His name was war I don't even know. I don't think he's alive anymore. I said, hey, that's going to almost run into us. It's coming straight at us. And he says what I said. It's big and white and it looks like a big foot to me. And he says, I don't see nothing. He said, you're imagining. And I said, arty, it's coming right at us. And this was scary from my point of view.

46:45 I'm watching this and what do we do? So we backed up a little bit more and before it got to us, I'm chattering away about this thing coming at us. For it got to us, it turned, jumped back across the ditch and started walking up the mountain, and I sa, oh man, and he still didn't see it. He finally convinced me that I was half crazy and that there was nothing there. But back then I still had pretty good eyesight and pretty good hearing, and he was out. He was finding the bad and death too, so I don't know. Anyway, We stayed down there quite a while and we finally walked back to the van and here'y word really gets crazy. I was excited about seeing this thing, and I tell the gal been setting in this van, start to tell her about what I saw, and she jumps in. She says, I gotta tell you. I got to tell you what I saw. He says.

47:47 I'm sitting here in the van, in the back seat, and all of a sudden, this white bigfoot materialized or appeared, setting in the front seat. It was sitting there, and I said, look out the window, and there's a little bitty one and it's white also, and it's running around outside of the vans. And here's where you think about the whole thing. It really gets funny. I hadn't told her my story about it. I saw a white one down there. I saw the big white one too. Anyway, we started making fun of her. We made food, guys making fun of each other, and she got upset, really got upset, and we quit and I forgot about it. This guy was good, and she's straight, she wasn't drinking, she wasn't on drugs. But she saw this thing materialized right in front of her and sat there for a while, kind of looked at her, and then it just disappeared. And I wasn't making fun of her. Wasn't really heavy about it, and so she's a real nice gal and I like her. And we were actually sitting there making fun of each other and what we saw. And it was a couple other guys around, and they heard about what I saw this and that the other night, and I did, and I denied it. I didn't rest of the time. I was wrong anybody. I said, now, if I had seen that, I just well, Walt says, I'm just seeing something else. And these guys, I was telling them this too. They said,

49:19 if you say you saw something, and Walt said you didn't, we'll believe you for blake walk because we think you could have. Well, like I said, I was still a little bit younger, still could see and still could hear anyway, bluffed at that, and I just more or less denied it. It was probably a couple of months before I was setting down one day and I just happened to think, I saw why one coming down the road she saw why wouldn't materialize in the van. I wonder what's going on here? And like I said, I thought about it. It was sixteen seventeen years I thought about it, And it's one of those twenty five stories that I put on Facebook, and it's just when I just I just forget about it because Walt told me I didn't see anything, and I don't know. I don't know the fact that what she saw was white and what I was seeing was white. Now, I did not see a small and a baby or whatever, coddler or whatever you want to call it, but I don't know. Nere in mind, that's got to be one of the weirdest bigfoot stories you ever heard. It's up there, Harold, and it's awesome. So the way I think that is, I have my personally, but we haven't proven what it can do or what exactly it is yet.

50:37 And the end of the day, your friend saw a white bigfoot materialize inside that vehicle, and that's wild, and I don't know how you can explain that away. Right. No, she's not, like I said, she's not crazy at all or anything. And I haven't seen her for quite a while. Far as I know, she's still alive. She does puts and stuff on Facebook now and then does see why I don't talk about it, Sure you know too much. It's but that's an example of three bigfoot people making fun of each other, which is funny in itself, But sure, is this something where you're and I know you said it's south of Mina, Arkansas, just because it's interesting when listeners hear something and then maybe someone else has experienced something to do with the white Bigfoot materializing in that same area.

51:30 Are there any other things you can say about the mountain or do we have to keep it very vague as to its somewhere self. That's one of those things. I would have to sure do some research on it too. I hear you to find exactly if she's not too far off one of the main highway down there, and I think you south, Amina, I'm pretty sure that. But I talked to her. She had a son, to a teenage son, and I talked to him about what was going on with a big foot that she said stayed in the school bus and he says, yeah, they do. And he says, I guess they'd also been feeding them and they would come along and they hit the house and hardenoughod that would knock stuff off the walls and things one food and so she's had a problem around there. But most of the people out with were associated with with the bfr BFRO and she hated the BFRO and that's it was just a strange deal that we that she ended up inviting us over there to take a look. I guess that's when you get people that will listen to you and believe you.

52:36 It doesn't make a lot of difference. That's one of the neatest things we do is as investigators, do everything we can to believe people. Now, those are the two best stories I've got. And and like I said, that last one, I just haven't told the heck the lost. Maybe I can figure out where that is so I could come real close. I'm not sure what they call those men mountains if those are the I was sinking the White Mountains, but I don't know. But yeah, that story there I love. So it took me fifteen years to even think about telling at all. It didn't lose me any friends or whatever, but they maybe shut their brief in me a little bit. But anyway, that's some kind of junk that my friend Carter is in two of those first three books, some Things, and he comes over here. There are some spots down around Jonesboro and the Trailer Tears Park that we've hit a few times, and there's there's one spot down there south for the trailer teers Park area, and the locals down there say they won't go into it after dark, and we haven't been into it too much, but when we've been in if there's something strange happening there.

53:47 But again, you don't know. I didn't used to be afraid going into the to the woods or by myself, and that's usually how I do. I go by myself and in the dark. I didn't used to be but I've seen some things over the last few years and I really is someplace I really don't want to I don't feel good about going into. Like I said, basically, by myself. I don't know that. David Ladies is book four one one make you think once in a while, and imagine you've probably read them right, Oh, yeah, you definitely want to be cautious and aware, especially if you're going in the woods by yourself and let people know where you're going and all that good stuff that you know. But it sounds like you saw some weird stuff and that made you think twice about going into the woods that sometimes. Yeah, And I've had that even around here, some spots that I've been to an awful lot. One of them just a few miles from here. I went down one night and I couldn't make myself get out of the car. I couldn't get out at all. And I said in the car there probably twenty minutes and I finally left, and it spoo me that wasn't just all in my mind was there's something telling me not to get out. And I've been down to the same spot. And the one time I remember and got out of my car and did a wooden knock and got a wood knock. I'm on an old road that ends of that dead end. I had a bridge that's been torn out, and I got out of my car, did some wood knocks and got answers right there,

55:22 almost in top of me. And I waited awhile and did some more knocks, and I got more answers, maybe two or three times further away, and I said, wow. And I'm down here by myself. So I don't know, Like I said, I didn't used to be afraid at all. My dad was. He was, of course, a World War Two veteran, and I didn't dare tell him if I got scared in the woods or at dark walking home or whatever. Because he let me know is there's nothing in that woods that can hurt you. And he was wrong. I know he was wrong. Yeah, but yeah, he's something else. What else you got for me, Harold? It's been a fantastic conversation and I just want to I just want to thank you for coming on sharing your stories. I know some of them you haven't really shared before, and I appreciate you being able to share them. I hope that someday you're able to get your book written. I'd love to get a copy of it, and I'm sure my listeners would as well. But it's just been a great time chatting with you. Harold. That's good. That's good. I just wanted to take a few minutes to say thank you to you all with 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

56:52 about sharing the show wherever you can. If you've had a bigfoot encounter related to the following or know if someone who has, please reach out to me at big for Society at gmail dot com or pass on my email. Here's the list. Bush pilots in Alaska that have seen something from their plane. Retired law enforcement officers who department had a large file for bigfoot encounters. Individuals that have had bigfoot encounters on their family property through multiple years and generations. Individuals who've had a face to face encounter in the state of Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, Alabama, or Mississippi. Individuals who've had a face to face encounter in the state of Oklahoma or Arkansas in the Washita National Forest. Individuals who've had a face to face encounter on Prince of Wales Island or surrounding area in southeast Alaska. Any encounter in Franklin County, Texas.

57:45 Hunters that have never shared what they saw in the woods due to fear of ridicule. Individuals that have had a bigfoot tried to enter your house in the Honabi, Oklahoma area. Any encounters that happened within a twenty mile radius of Northfield, Massachusetts, and twenty five mile radius of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, encounters in the Enchanted Circle, encounters in the Yosemite National Park area or any national park for that matter. Individuals that have lived a long life don't care what people think about them now and want to share what happened to them fifty to sixty years ago. I'm your guy to share your story. Individuals that live in remote wooded property and feel like they're under attack by Bigfoot after clearing their land, and lastly, any Bigfoot encounters where the individuals saw what seemed to be an orangutan, please reach out to me at big for Society at gmail dot com if any of those fit what you've experienced, and for those where it doesn't fit, please feel free to reach out anyways. A special thank you to all the Big for Society, Patreon and YouTube channel members.

58:47 It's your support that helps keep the show going and I extremely appreciate it. I'll see you back next time. Listeners, new shows on Mondays and Fridays. I see you and