“The Blogsquatcher” – The Archives

August 28, 2008 6:00 AM

Picking up from where we left off in part 2, here’s the conclusion to my interview with Nick Redfern, author of the new book on the British bigfoot, There’s Something in the Woods. Thanks again to Nick for being so generous with his time and for such a great interview.
Click these links if you’ve missed part 1 or part 2.
Without further preamble, here’s part 3:

DB: There’s another thing I could say about having an area to investigate where many bigfoot sightings have occurred, that’s close enough for me to visit often, and several other researchers who are friends of mine also visit the same place, we have combed that location pretty much backwards and forwards looking for where they could be living and we can’t come up with anything.

Nick: Yeah.

DB: So they’re seen, they are there when you see them, but when you try to look for where they might be living, so they can be close enough to be where they are seena ll the time, you know, you don’t come up with anything. So that’s something that feeds into the thought that they’re not here all the time.

Nick: That’s actually brought up one of the most important issues about the British reports I forgot to mention! And that’s the fact that people see these huge creatures in Britain, lumbering across the road, in the places where you would imagine would be the right place, large woods and forests..

DB: Uh huh.

Nick: But the problem is, when we go into these woods and forests, we don’t see, for a creature that’s seven or eight feet tall, and there’s got to be a lot of them, what we don’t see is massive tree or plant damage.. you know if these creatures are like gorillas, living on vegetation, in Britain, we’re just not seeing any evidence of massive stripping of trees and things like that. If you do a Google search on how much food a day a mountain gorilla has to ingest just to survive.. And then you’ve got something that’s eight feet tall and six hundred pounds, by the looks of it, where’s the evidence of massive ingestion of, not just the one, but if it’s a physical animal, it’s parents, and their parents, and it’s offspring, and etc. etc. That to me is problematic. And also, if it was purely a flesh eating creature, we also don’t get a lot of weird body parts. Occasionally you’ll find a deer or whatever that’s obviously been attacked by something, but a lot of people put these down to the big cat reports because big cats have been seen in the vicinity. But we’re not getting raids on farms every night with ten sheep vanishing or five pigs disappearing.

DB: Right.

Nick: That isn’t happening in Britain. So to me, that’s problematic as well. How are these creatures surviving?

DB: Yeah, we have similar problems here. Well, we’ve recently had an explosion of the deer population in the United States, so if you were to imagine that they were just eating deer now you could maybe think they could survive on that for much of the year. But going back thirty or forty years, when much more of the land was still farmed, the deer population was much lower. And there were fewer places where bigfoot could have been able to hide and find food and keep away from people.[Edit: I'm talking about the situation on the East Coast here.] So you still have the problem, if now you might imagine they’ve got enough food, fifty years ago it would have been much harder for them.

Nick: I agree. I think these are all valuable ideas that need to be brought up. From my research at least, I’ve come across.. most researchers cover all bases, but I have come across some who just collect witness reports, and to me that’s like collecting lights-in-the-sky reports, it’s not answering what’s at the heart of the mystery. After so long, it’s like, “Mr. Smith saw bigfoot cross the road in front of him.” It’s almost like,well, so what? It’s still.. fifty years ago somebody might have seen bigfoot cross the road, and in 2008 somebody saw bigfoot cross the road, but we’re no closer to answering..

DB: Yeah, where was that guy between the time he was seen fifty years ago and now, and not just him, his whole family, where have they been?

Nick: Yeah.

DB: And we can’t find anyplace that looks like they’ve been living, or..

Nick: Yeah, from my perspective, what I would say is, however much witness testimony doesn’t sit well with this researchers beliefs or that researchers beliefs, don’t ignore it. It’s not like I ignore the evidence suggesting it’s all purely physical,and just focus on the paranormal. I think what has happened over time, though, is that, somebody has had a high strangeness type case, and they’ve searched around for the person who might be, sort of, more sympathetic to listening to that type ofstory.

DB: Right.

Nick: And I think that might have something to do with why sometimes, I’ll just get phone calls out of the blue, “Are you the guy who hunts bigfoot?” And then they tell this story which might not sit well with another researcher who might just say, “Thank you very much, I’ll look into it,” and they just file it away or whatever.

DB: Yes.

Nick: it’s a difficult area at the best of times when you’re talking about bigfoot, without bringing in anything else as well! (laughing) So as I said before, I can only go where the evidence leads me, and it would be dishonest of me to throw out something that I think is weird. Unless I can prove it’s a hoax.

DB: Yeah. That’s my attitude too, like I say, I think I’ve been near a bigfoot at least three times, and nothing that I would call paranormal happened during any of those times.. well actually, there was one thing. This was in Kentucky. We thought there was a bigfoot that came right up to the edge of the woods, it was pitch black dark so Icouldn’t see anything. The guy I was with was a dedicated nighttime hunter, and he had excellent night vision, so he thinks he’s seeing it and he starts stammering.. I never saw anything but I definitely smelled something, and I heard the footsteps as it walked away. And then, where it would have had to have gone was behind a house where these three very large dogs were chained up. And about the time when it should have been crossing behind there, the three dogs set up a terrible howling, they all laid down in the most submissive poses.. I’ve never seen dogs do what those dogs did that night. I’ve read it described, but usually in cases where there’ssomething paranormal going on.

Nick: Yeah.

DB: Where the dogs will lay down and cry like they think they are about to die. And it was one of the most unnerving things I’ve ever seen. Now that might have been paranormal. I really don’t know. But like I say, I’ve never seen dogs behave that way.

Nick: It’s one of those things, where you do find that, there are a lot of reports of dogs and bigfoot where the bigfoot reacts, sometimes in a hostile fashion to them, and the dogs likewise, but there’s always a significant response I think between dogs andbigfoot. Whatever it is, it’s like there’s something going on between them.

DB: Yeah. Now, I have wanted to know whether in your active researching if you have ever run into anything that you thought was a bigfoot.

Nick: Well… there’s been a couple of weird things. I’ll tell you one thing that happened. Me and a friend of mine, Ken Gerrard, I don’t know if you know Ken but he wrote a book called Big Bird, about these mystery birds in the United States. He lives in San Antonio and we meet up every so often and do some expeditions. In the Summer of 2005 we went out to Lake Worth, Texas. Lake Worth is the name of the town but there’s also a Lake there by that name as well. Back in the ’60s there was this creature that was seen in the area which became known as the Goat Man.

DB: Right.

Nick: If you look on the internet you’ll find that a lot of states around the US have Goat Man legends, about these cloven-hoofed creatures that almost, in some ways, sound kind of demonic. But we went out to this area where the creature had been seen, back in the woods, in the late ’60s. Of course we didn’t expect to find anything in 2005, 30-something years after the main rash of reports. But we went out to this one part of Lake Worth called Greer Island, where a lot of the reports emanated from. Greer Island, for the most part, is very often closed, but we were lucky enough that we were able to cross the land strip and we had access to the island. While we were out there we found a couple of weird things. We found in this area of flattened ground the remains of a half eaten fish. Right next to that we found what looked very much like one of these so called bigfoot tipis.

DB: Uh huh.

Nick: You know, these pyramid, triangular type formations that you often find in a lot of these reports. And we got a weird feeling, you know that feeling when you turnaround and somebody is watching you and you know they’re watching you.

DB: Right!

Nick: It was like that feeling, as if something was almost taunting us and playing with us, if you like. I had a distinct feeling that we weren’t alone. There was this weird silence and the hairs on the back of your neck would stand up.

DB: Yeah!

Nick: Also, I’ve heard on several occasions in the woods just outside of Decatur,Texas, where there are a lot of reports there in heavily wooded areas.. a couple of times a very loud grunting. That actually happened twice, and my wife was with me once, and she jumped out of her skin. I don’t know what that was, but it was like avery loud.. if you can imagine an animal grunting in a way where it wanted to sound hostile — that’s the best way I can describe it, it was almost as if it was like a challenging, echoing, hostile grunt. So there have been things like that, where I’ve felt that, you know, you are in the right area, and there’s something around, but equally, it’s like it’s one step ahead of you. You become almost like the hunted instead of the hunter. Or, it stays one step ahead of you in the sense that it’s evading you all the time. But maybe it just wants to taunt at the same time — it’s not like it’s making haste and getting out of the area at high speed. It’s almost as if it’s cunningly intelligent and watching you as if it is as interested in watching you as you are in finding it.

DB: Yeah..

Nick: I’ve found those tipis on several occasions — another one was at a place called Lake Ray Roberts, which is North of Dallas, probably about an hour or so’s drive away. And there have been various bigfoot reports from the area of Lake RayRoberts over the years. Me and a friend went out there in February and we trekked through the woods about forty minutes, and it’s quite a thick area of woodland to be able to trek through for that long, and on one particular hill where there had been reports we found probably five or six very weird formations, which I can send you a picture of..

DB: Oh, I’d appreciate that.

Nick: Sure, it’s no problem. And they don’t look like the trees and branches had just fallen down. Now, are they territorial markers? Who knows what they are. But whenyou are looking for bigfoot, it seems often you find these things. And it’s things like that I come across where you feel, ok maybe I haven’t seen anything definitive, but you get this weird sort of feeling.. an atmosphere.. that there’s more going on around you that you are not seeing.

DB: Yeah, we find those stick structures — that’s what we like to call them, “stickstructures”– we find those often and we have no idea what they are for either.

Nick: Here’s the thing, though, you get those in England.

DB: Really?

Nick: There was a case in early 2003 at a place called Bolam Lake, in the North of England, where this creature that became known as the Beast of Bolam was being seen. And it had these brightly lit eyes and was tall.. and Bolam Lake is a wooded area, but it’s not a huge forest. It’s actually not far from the city of Newcastle. The idea that there is an eight-foot yeti wandering around there is almost implausible. And yet the CFZ, the Center of Fortean Zoology in England, they sent a team up there in early 2003. And they came across a number of these structures and formations in the woods. So quite clearly there’s a trend at work, where it’s not just something that’s being seen in Virginia, or Washington state. Not only are the creatures the same in Britain, we’re also seeing these weird formations as well.

DB: Well that is interesting. And it’s in Australia, also.

Nick: Oh, yeah, you get them here, there, and everywhere. So I don’t know what to make of it all. As I said, the most.. I won’t say troubling because it’s not troubling –puzzling, the most puzzling aspect is the fact that you get some reports.. there’s a collective body of evidence that in some respects suggests that bigfoot is purely physical, and other ones that veer toward paranormal. So are we looking at something that can straddle both realms? It’s not like it sits comfortably just in one area. If we didn’t have the paranormal aspect, it’d be easy, perhaps, to resolve. Equally, if we didn’t have any straight-forward evidence of flesh-and-blood reports, like footprints, we’d be more inclined just to say, well, it’s paranormal. But bigfoot doesn’t seem to fall into one category. That’s the problem I think, it remains insubstantial but substantial at the same time.

DB: Yeah. My own experience in researching into this has.. you know I started out thinking that certainly it’s just an actual animal. But the farther I’ve gone along, the more stories I’ve heard, the more I’ve looked where I think they have to be and I still can’t find evidence that they actually live there, rather than just pass through from time to time from who knows where, you know I’m starting to entertain these other ideas.

Nick: Yeah, well I think it’s one of these things, for me at least, where.. it’s like thec ase of the penny dropping, where I suddenly thought one day, hey, this isn’t what Ioriginally thought it was. Now some people don’t go down that path, and I respect that. They are fully convinced it’s a physical animal and that’s their right to think that, to conclude that. They are not keen on the high strangeness cases, and I respectany body’s opinion if they’ve looked at the evidence and come to a conclusion based on the study of the evidence, that’s great. But I still think there’s a time and a place to discuss everybody else’s theories. Even if it’s UFOs or whatever it is, let’s not try to get too tied into a belief system, on anybody’s part.

DB: Right.

Nick: Because we still don’t know what bigfoot is. Is it an ape, is it some sort of protohuman,is it gigantopithecus, is it paranormal? We just don’t know. So I think for that reason we should come together as a community, share ideas, share theories, and not throw evidence out because it’s not within our mindsets.

DB: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think it’s going to be hard to get a good number of bigfoot researchers to agree! But I think that’s the way to go from here.

Nick: Even if they don’t agree, don’t throw the paranormal reports out, don’t ignore them, give them to somebody who is willing to look into them.

DB: Well that’s where I think we might have some trouble, I think some of them have a definite.. prejudice is the right word but it has not really got the right slant to it — I mean some researchers really are prejudiced against the paranormal aspects of some bigfoot reports. But it’s more like.. I think it’s like there’ s a closed door and they don’t want to open that door.

Nick: Yeah, and I think one of the reasons is because, if you look into some of the cases, they can be a little disturbing. Whether consciously or subconsciously, yes, a flesh-and-blood bigfoot is a fantastic thing, if it exists. It would be incredible if we could prove that it really exists. But — it’s a secret of nature. It’s an animal that hasn’t been classified. So if you’re looking for a purely flesh-and-blood physical mystery, that’s intriguing, it’s interesting, it’s fascinating, but it’s not disturbing.

DB: Uh huh.

Nick: But if you go down the other path, towards the paranormal aspect, and all that implies, then I think, as I say whether consciously or unconsciously, some people do perceive that, even if they don’t necessarily accept the theory, they do see it as potentially causing problems.. it’s dark and disturbing and what’s it going to get me involved in? And I think possibly that keeps some people away from it. For example,there’s a case in the new book where somebody saw this hairy man-like creature in their bedroom the night after they had been playing around with the Ouija board.

DB: Uh huh!

Nick: At the time, they were teenagers and they were literally just messing around. And then one of the girls had something that was I guess similar to a sleep paralysis-type situation, but it scared the life out of her. You have to ask the question, “Why did it manifest as a large hairy man?” It’s things like this that could possibly make some people reticent to really get involved in the paranormal aspect because of these dark overtones that surround it.

DB: Yeah.. And I’m not even sure I’m going to have the guts to put the last little bit of our conversation on the blog! It’s likely to turn off some of my readers..

Nick: I always say this: I never judge people on their beliefs, because I don’t — none of us has the answers. But I would say that, regardless of whether or not bigfoot researchers agree with me or not, I think the one thing they most would agree with me about, is that at some point, pretty much every bigfoot researcher has come across at least one case of the type that I’m talking about. I would defy you to find a bigfoot researcher who has never found a case that has even the smallest aspect of weirdness to it. I think in everybody’s files you’re going to find one like that. Either it was seen near a Native American burial ground, or it had glowing eyes, or something weird happened. I’m not saying they make up the majority of most people’s files, I’m sure they don’t. But I’ll bet for every hundred, most researchers have got one or two that just doesn’t sit well with the rest of the material.

DB: Yeah, definitely. Everybody that I know has plenty of strange stuff in their files that they don’t know how to explain.

Nick: I realize from my perspective that I’m going out on a limb a little bit, but for me, that’s what I have to do because that’s where the evidence has taken me. You have to have a tough skin, and if somebody disagrees with you, fair enough. I’m not going to let that get to me because I feel it’s valid to investigate these types of cases, and it’s worthy. You have to have tough enough skin to take the knocks as well as the praises and if people disagree, well, that’s research. We’re all human at the end of the day and we’re not going to agree, whatever the subject is. So I would say to everybody, whether they take a physical approach or a paranormal approach, just have the strength of character to do your research and don’t be worried about ridicule. If somebody asks you what you’re doing, tell them. If they laugh at it that says more about them than it does about you.

DB: Well I think that’s good advice!

Nick: (laughing) That’s the lesson from Nick!

DB: Nick has spoken..

Nick: Some people would say that doesn’t mean anything! I just try to follow the evidence where it goes.

DB: Yeah, and by trying to do that, following the evidence and also the lack ofevidence that I was talking about, you might start to feel like you are getting backed into the corner, even if you didn’t want to go there, if that’s the only place you haven’t looked yet.. Pretty soon you have to turn around and look at it.

Nick: Yeah, exactly. I think, whatever it is, the worst thing we can do is ignore it.

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