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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:10
BR: And welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 88. I am your host, Benjamin Radford, and with me is…

Celestia Ward:Hi, I’m Celestia Ward. Welcome. Welcome back, Ben.

0:00:36
BR: What are we going to talk about this week? So this week I thought we would talk about something near and dear to my heart, which is cryptozoology myths and bogus arguments.

0:00:58
CW: Ah, cryptozoology.

0:00:59
BR: Yeah, so we’re talking monstery things such as chupacabras and Jersey Devils and Bigfoots and basically animals that may or may not exist, probably don’t exist, but might exist, but are thought to exist or said to exist, or appear on really bad reality TV shows.

0:01:17
CW: Things that go bump in the woods.

0:01:18
BR: Yes. There’s lots of different angles we could approach. Of course, we’ve done many episodes on cryptozoological mysteries here on Squaring the Strange, but I wanted to focus on the sort of tired, trite arguments that we often hear put forth by, for example, Bigfoot believers or Lake Monster believers or sort of cryptozoological enthusiasts.

0:01:42
CW: Lately, there has been a little bit of a blowback in terms of a few critics saying that skeptics should put their focus into stuff that really matters, like bogus cancer cures or teaching critical thinking in schools or something, quote unquote, more important than Bigfoot yet again. And I think it is important to do a show like this purely because looking at the arguments of cryptozoological quote-unquote researchers is a great way to teach critical thinking. It is examining pseudoscience with training wheels on it. I mean that sounds really insulting to anybody who is a serious Bigfoot believer but you can shoot down a lot of the arguments for Bigfoot or for Loch Ness Monster a lot easier than you can say, pick out and shoot down arguments about the higher end stuff, the quantum mechanics, the so-called curatives for cancer that have some fuzzy research, but it’s really a bad argument when you look into it. Well, examining these things and seeing how the bad logic for an argument about Bigfoot’s existence or the Loch Ness Monster or a Chupacabra, once you get your head around that, it arms you to sort of look at everything a bit more skeptically.

0:02:56
BR: Yeah, I would say that’s true. And one of the things about the hunt for Bigfoot, for example, as with the hunt for ghosts, is that there’s been sort of a democratization of it. That is to say that TV shows, just to pick one influence, suggest that anybody can go do this, right? You don’t need to, unlike for example UFOs, right? Presumably the number of people that can actually get access to smoking gun information about the existence of aliens here on Earth are people, you know, top secret, you know, people in the army and NASA and things like that. Whereas with things such as Bigfoot or lake monsters or even ghosts, the promise is that, hey, do you have a pair of hiking shoes? Do you have woods nearby? Do you have a lake nearby? Well, go look. I think that’s one of the reasons that hunting for Bigfoot, for example, and ghosts are so popular is because the promise is that anybody can do it and, you know, you need no particular expertise. That often is demonstrated in the results. But that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

0:04:06
CW: And hey, at least it gets people outdoors.

0:04:09
BR: Yes, exactly. Before we go on, I did want to dedicate this episode to a colleague of mine, Mike Dennett, Michael R. Dennett. He was one of the pioneering cryptozoology skeptics. He’s not really well known much these days. I mean, maybe some of the older Bigfoot researchers remember his name, probably being muttered under their breath. But Mike Dennett, he died May 2, 2009 of leukemia. He lived in Washington state, and he was a former Army Ranger.

0:04:40
CW: Did you ever get to meet and get to know Mr. Dennett?

0:04:42
BR: I did. I met him, I think, twice at various conferences, but I corresponded with him quite a bit. He was sort of an all-around skeptic. He wrote about fire walking and psychics and the Rumi to triangle, but he is best known for his skeptical approaches to analyzing Bigfoot evidence and particularly Bigfoot tracks. He was published in Skeptical Inquirer magazine and also in the sadly now defunct Skeptical Briefs newsletter, which I was editor of for many years beginning in the early 80s until about 2009, shortly before his death. So anyway, I just wanted to dedicate this to Mike. The number of cryptozoology skeptics is vanishingly small, and it’s good to remember those who come before us.

0:05:30
CW: Well, maybe we’ll have some listener out there take up the reins and be one of the new skeptics in the forefront of cryptozoological outreach.

0:05:38
BR: Yes, indeed.

0:05:39
CW: Okay, well, now we decided to sort of frame this in terms of bad arguments. We’re going to take each one in turn. So, what’s the first one that popped up on your list of bad arguments you hear probably daily from cryptozoological researchers?

0:05:55
BR: Well, there’s a few. I’ll hit on a couple quick ones. One of them is it’s not unlikely that these creatures are out there, these creatures of course meaning chupacabras and lake monsters and bigfoot, because you know, new animals are discovered every year.

0:06:09
CW: That’s not wrong.

0:06:10
BR: No, no, that’s not wrong. I would encourage people who make that argument to take a closer look at what sort of animals are being discovered every year. They tend to be tiny animals, maybe the size of your thumb. They tend to be in deserts, for example, in China and in Africa, or in some cases deep in the jungle. Oftentimes insects, small things like that, occasionally they’re something in the ocean. I would posit to you that finding an insect the size of your thumb in the Namibian desert is a bit different than finding, or rather not finding, a group of hundreds or thousands actually of say 12-foot tall humanoid creatures across the United States and Canada. There actually is a difference there. So it’s true that new animals are discovered all the time. The animals we’re discovering are getting smaller and smaller, not bigger and bigger. And they’re certainly nothing like what we would think of as Bigfoot.

0:07:12
CW: I’m reminded of that famous quote by, who was a biologist, the creator seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles. It might have been Darwin, it might have been J.B.S. Haldane, but yes, a fondness for beetles, indicating that there’s like 30 million species of beetles. And how many primates? They’ve got us vastly outnumbered.

0:07:38
BR: And the corollary to that, I’ll just lump it in with that, is that, okay, well, yeah, but these, for example, we’ll just take Bigfoot, because it’s an obvious one, they’re not seen more often because they’re in remote regions where people don’t go, which makes sense if you don’t look too closely at the sightings, because the sightings are actually often in populated areas. There are sightings in Pennsylvania, in Texas, in every state.

0:08:03
CW: I read, I just read that like every state except for Hawaii has a Bigfoot sighting.

0:08:10
BR: I know that was true a while back there. Somebody may have imported a Bigfoot to Hawaii at one point. But the point is that it’s simply not true that, well, the reason we don’t see more of them is because they’re hiding and they’re not near people. They are near people. That’s how you get a sighting. By definition, that means that they’re near people. It just doesn’t make sense. What about you? What’s on your list there?

0:08:35
CW: Well, the first one that I decided to tackle was the argument. It sounds like a logical argument on its face. You know I get into symbolic logic and the intersection between language and math and all that. The statement, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence tends to come up a lot when you’re looking into cryptozoological arguments. Yes. And it’s kind of an offshoot of the argument from ignorance logical fallacy, namely that if we don’t know something or we don’t have evidence, we haven’t found evidence against it, then X is true because we haven’t yet proven X false. And therefore we just don’t know. So we are assuming X until we find evidence completely against X and that is a misappropriation of logic. It pops up among religious believers too who are arguing for something that is by definition undisprovable. You can’t disprove a deity. You could always special plead different characteristics into a deity so that disprovability becomes moot. And so we always have a reason to believe it if you go by that that logic in quotes. So basically, whether or not this statement is true and relevant depends on the breadth of your situation. Like Wikipedia’s example is that you can examine your car’s backseat for adult kangaroos. And if you don’t see any adult kangaroos in your backseat, you can proclaim that the absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence there.

0:10:04
BR: Right. You looked and there are demonstrably and provably no adult kangaroos in your specific car. That doesn’t mean that there might not be a full-size kangaroo in the Mazda next to it, but in your car, no.

0:10:19
CW: Yes, yes. And moving on to landscapes that are larger than your back seat, it gets a little bit murky. And this is where the cryptozoological researchers get their angle in, saying, well, the vast wilderness of the Pacific North is a lot bigger than your car’s back seat. So how could you possibly? And taking it just one level up, this quote was famously spoken by Donald Rumsfeld in regards to the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. We’re still talking about a subset of area that can be poured over quite carefully by inspectors who are trained to look for certain things. It can be argued that, you know, an occupying force of Americans with extremely well-trained people looking for weapons of mass destruction, if they don’t find anything, that’s good evidence for me that it’s just not there.

BR: Or you can make the argument that they have this special magical cloaking device. So it’s there. The fact that you haven’t found it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

0:11:23
CW: Or the weapons of mass destruction are psychic and they psychically manage to convince people that they aren’t there even when they are.

0:11:31
BR: Right. Right. Or like Nessie, they hide. Literally the weapons themselves hide when they know they’re being looked for.

0:11:39
CW: Yes, but taking it further in scope, actually beyond the size of a weapons depot, or even Loch Ness or Lake Okanagan or the Pacific Northwest, if you apply the statement to outer space, the vastness of our universe, that’s where I agree with it. Carl Sagan actually used the phrase saying that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence when talking about alien life forms in the vastness of our universe. And Neil deGrasse Tyson sort of used it in a metaphor saying that if you take a cup of ocean water and look at it and proclaim that there are no whales in the ocean because you’ve just looked, that’s kind of what it’s like to say there’s no aliens out there because we haven’t found them yet, because literally what we’ve been able to look at and certainly visit in terms of outer space is so infinitesimally small compared to what is actually out there in our universe.

0:12:37
BR: Literally.

0:12:38
CW: Yeah.

0:12:39
BR: Literally, not just figuratively, literally.

CW: Exactly, yeah, possibly even that’s an understatement. And they’re right when it comes to the vastness of outer space. But coming back into actually imaginably sized spaces like an Iraq weapons depot or Lake Okanagan or the Pacific Northwest, you know, wooded areas, earthly habitats like that are definitely measurable. They are searchable.

0:13:08
BR: And especially lakes. That’s the other thing to keep in mind. It’s one thing to talk about a migratory group of Bigfoot, of, well, there’d have to be thousands of them for breeding population, but it’s one thing to say that they’re all constantly moving, that everywhere you’re looking, they just happen to make sure that they’re not there. When you’re talking about lake monsters such as champ or Memphrey and Lake Memphromagog or Ogopogo or Loch Ness, of course, that these are landlocked lakes. There are some passages out, for example, to the St. Lawrence Seaway with Lake Champlain, but they’re not areas that are navigable by a large unknown creature. Of course, people say, well, in Loch Ness, there’s these underground passages that connect with the North Atlantic. And the question is, oh, that’s interesting. Where are they? Well, they’re hypothetical. Well, no, they’re not. They’re not there. They haven’t found them yet.

0:14:05
CW: Yeah. And, and, and, and sure, if you look back in time, big, huge swaths of land that are impossibly enormous and have not been explored, we had a lot of places like that. But now in the modern world, the human population has ballooned and we have people living just about everywhere. You’d be very hard-pressed to find a piece of land that has not been claimed, owned, managed by some organization. In other words, you can’t just put a flag someplace and claim it. Even Antarctica is pretty much spoken for. It’s mapped out and parceled nowadays. I was recalling a talk by Daniel Loxton, one of the authors of Abominable Science, which delves into famous cryptids.

0:14:45
BR: A fine book by Daniel and Dan Loxton and Don Prothero.

CW: Yes, yes, and he mentioned that the Pacific Northwest, the reputed haunt of Bigfoot or Sasquatch, is not this vast uncharted wilderness that people, mainly squatchers, tend to think it is. And if I’m not mistaken, Loxton himself comes from a family that has done some business in the logging industry.

BR: He was a shepherd actually.

CW: Oh, okay. Well, he’s Canadian. They’re all into logging or shepherding or something, right?

BR: And hockey, yes.

CW: And hockey, yes. So anyway, he said that the Northwest is in actuality a carefully measured, parceled out, managed commodity that people keep track of. I mean, loggers are going to use the areas they can, shepherds and cattlemen are going to use the areas that they can, and park rangers guard and manage the other bits of it. And that really stuck with me, thinking of the giant swaths of wooded land as a commodity was sort of like an aha moment. Of course if there’s money to be made, people have gone there already and exploited what they can. It’s kind of what people do.

0:15:53
BR: Yeah, you’re exactly right. In fact, that brings up another quick one from the BFRO, the Bigfoot Field Research Organization, field research organization that we mentioned a couple episodes back, on their website, which I don’t recommend you going to unless you really want a good laugh, there’s a series of arguments and one of them is saying, well, why is it that bodies of Bigfoot haven’t been found? And their rebuttal is that no one has systematically looked for Bigfoot remains.

CW: What?

0:16:21
BR: No, I’m serious. This is what it says. Their argument is, well, no one’s looked for them. To which my response is, first of all, what? Second of all, go look for it. If you’re really trying to tell me that the reason that people haven’t found Bigfoot is because they haven’t looked for them, it’s just absurd. That’s not how that works.

0:16:43
CW: Well, there’s an offshoot to this argument that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence in what you’re saying now, which is kind of math-based. Are you familiar with Zeno’s paradox?

0:16:54
BR: I am.

0:16:55
CW: Yeah, it reminded me of kind of a great little real-life version of Zeno’s paradox, which is, for listeners, it is Zeno was this ancient Greek mathematician that imagined you could like shoot an arrow and if you were to cut that distance that the arrow had traveled in half, you’d have half the distance. And then if you cut it in half again, you have a quarter distance and a quarter. And you keep bisecting it. You could do that infinitely, which means that any distance becomes an infinite distance, which is a paradox. And it reminded me of, well, we haven’t systematically looked for Bigfoot remains. Well, they’re just saying that you haven’t looked in all the places that you haven’t looked yet. So you can cut the wilderness into a bunch of hectares and look everywhere and put outposts every two acres but well you’re missing the Bigfoot that are like in the middle of where you’ve put your outposts.

0:17:52
BR: The Bigfoot are getting smaller and smaller.

CW: Okay, well you double your outposts and you double your coverage with humans and oh well no the Bigfoot are just in that space that’s between those you know you keep bisecting the amount of square footage and the Bigfoot are hiding in these smaller and smaller recesses. And it’s almost like the anti-evolutionist people who are saying, well, you know, okay, there’s no missing links and you find a missing link. Oh, well, there’s now there’s two gaps and you need another missing link in between that gap and that gap.

0:18:21
BR: Right, right. I don’t like, I don’t like the missing link you found. I want one named Fred.

0:18:27
CW: Yeah, well every missing link that’s found creates two more gaps. And so anyway, the misapplication of what could be a mathematical or symbolic logic statement just disinterested me. It started going down a rabbit hole on there, probably went down too far, but I’m taking you with me, listeners.

0:18:47
BR: Well that’s cool. Why don’t we mix things up and hear from an old friend of the show, Sharon Hill.

0:18:52
CW: Yes, we have guests.

(MUSIC)

0:19:10
BR: So let’s bring on an old friend of mine, Sharon Hill. I’ve known Sharon for many years. We actually, I think we first met each other over discussions about cryptozoology. And she’s one of a handful of really good cryptozoological skeptical friends. Sharon, are you there?

0:19:27
SH:Yes, I’m here. Hi, how are you guys?

CW: Hey, Sharon. Welcome. Sharon’s also a wonderful guest to have on because she has recently published a book called Scientifical Americans.

0:19:37
BR: A fine book indeed.

0:19:40
CW: It discusses this very thing, doesn’t it?

SH: It does. Well, it talks about amateur researchers, mostly in America. That’s basically the scope of what I could study. And mostly I looked at what they were producing on the web and in books and in the media. And the categories would be ghost hunters, ufologists, but also cryptozoologists which form a ever-growing community of amateur Sort of citizen scientists. They sometimes like to call themselves and looking at these Claims that people are making they see weird animals around their their neighborhoods and communities and out in the woods I was it with an emphasis on the amateur part Yes, because there’s a significant difference between what amateurs how they approach this issue and how a scientist would approach this issue and I uncovered some kind of interesting nuances in that how cryptozoologists in particular but also the other fields that I mentioned have this love-hate relationship with science and they want to have their field be legitimized by scientists and yet they don’t really know how to do science. So they kind of fake it. And you see this as an example on the TV shows that they’re trying to do sciencey things, but there’s core things that are missing from it that make it pseudoscience. And they don’t like to hear me say it’s pseudoscience, but it really does match the description pretty well.

0:21:07
CW: Well, they don’t realize that it’s pseudoscience because you need to have a scientific background to understand what pseudoscience is.

SH: Pretty much. I mean, science is hard. That’s why everybody doesn’t do it. It’s difficult. And you can ask pretty much any scientist who is out there looking for, you know, cataloging biological specimens, that it’s a very difficult thing to do. It’s just not running out into the woods on the weekend with gadgets and things.

CW: Well, in your research for the book, what are some core misconceptions that pseudoscientists looking for cryptozoological creatures tend to throw up over and over again?

0:22:06
SH: Well, I think you guys are going to cover most of them in this episode, but the one that I really focused on in the book was that scientists don’t look at the evidence. We’re doing this amazing work. We have all this great evidence and scientists won’t look at it. And I start each chapter on the different categories with a history of what has been done previously, mostly by scientists. So in all those three categories, but let’s focus on cryptozoology. From the beginning of science professionalization, back in the time of Richard Owen and Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley and Charles Lyell, you know, the father of geology, they were looking at these examples of, cryptozoology wasn’t a term at that time, but weird animals that people were reporting and they didn’t know if they were real or not. So they considered the evidence of sea captains who would come in and say that they’ve seen sea serpents or people who claim to go to other faraway lands and see strange-looking man-like creatures or other animals that they didn’t have catalogued yet. I don’t think that people really realize that Richard Owen and his class of professional scientists at the time were arguing over whether sea serpents were real. And Owen said, well, we don’t have a body. And he recognized the problem with eyewitness testimony way back then, even from sea captains who knew their stuff. But he looked for that extra evidence, and he was not convinced that sea serpents were actually a thing, but they discussed it quite heavily.

0:23:33
CW: Do you think this was part of the natural into actual science?

SH: Sure, and it happened pretty quickly. The amateurs were shut out very quickly as certain people rose to prominence in organizations that were set up and institutions that were set up like museums and the like, and they were given these titles and the knowledge progressed very, very quickly when it came to cataloging species and having access to that body of information. And amateurs still did it. Paleontology is a good example where the amateurs were still out there picking up fossils and things like that. But there always was this community aspect of this discussion about what was in nature. And that’s kind of missing in today’s cryptozoology field. They don’t communicate very well, they don’t publish, they don’t share their data except in a public forum, and it’s just not good quality data. And I think that’s one of the things that leads to the fact that what they give us is not very scientifically valuable. So, you know, why do scientists not take this data seriously? Well, it’s kind of poor, it’s not well organized, and the few scientists that do take a look at it, they recognize that. They recognize the evidence is not that good. I think that there are a few examples of scientists who say, look, if you give me this, I will take a serious look at it and I will give you the results fairly unbiased. DNA is an example. You give me a DNA sample, I will run the test, I will tell you exactly what’s in it.

0:25:27
CW: I can’t even count on both my hands and my feet the number of times I’ve read about suspected Bigfoot poop or carcass or hair or fingernails or some kind of Bigfoot physical evidence is supposedly found and the first thing they do is take it to a lab. In the lab you have scientists and they’re looking at it by definition. And it sounds like the scientists, the capital S scientists, the ivory tower scientists that the Squatchers might call them, it sounds like they’re not saying we refuse to look at it. They’re saying give us something to look at.

SH: Right. And scientists can see the problems with the data, the evidence that presented that non-scientists or these active proponents of a cryptid, they can’t see that or they don’t think that that’s important. The way that it’s collected, the potential for contamination, the margins of error that could occur. They fail to see how science works. And you can’t blame them. They’re not scientists. You don’t learn this stuff in school. So they really don’t understand the high standards that need to be in place before we could, as a society, what we know and adopt some revolutionary idea such as Bigfoot or a lake monster.

BR: I think that’s one of the things that I really remember coming through when I was researching the Chupacabra. You know in the case of Chupacabra is initially we just had sightings but no bodies and then right around 2000 we suddenly had bodies. First in Nicaragua and elsewhere and of course once you have bodies then you have DNA and this and that. And so you have people like Todd Disatel, who did DNA research on the bodies. I mean, you know, every time someone says, well, scientists won’t look at it. Like, here’s a list. There you go.

0:27:02
SH: Exactly.

0:27:03
BR: And there’s others as well. And it’s like, the problem isn’t the refusing to look at it. The problem is that your evidence is piss poor. And actually, let’s talk. We don’t get too off track, but let’s talk for a second about Melba Ketchum. Sharon, why don’t you, for listeners, can you give us a little thumbnail of Melba Ketchum and her foray into pseudoscience?

0:27:25
SH: Well, several years ago, she decided, I don’t know how this was cooked up, that she was going to conduct this project, and she got some private funding to collect samples of what people were saying were Bigfoot evidence. So things like hair, poop, toenails, blood samples, whatever. And she was going to run the genetic tests on them, and she pretty much had it in her mind that something weird was going to come out of it. The samples were not well collected. They were contaminated, I’m sure, and they all came with an interesting story. There was questionable authenticity of the samples and whether they were handled correctly. The bottom line was she wasn’t a geneticist and she tried to interpret the results and she really botched it up. Not only were the samples bad, but the results were terrible and her interpretation of the results were terrible. So you ended up with the fiasco and even the most ardent Bigfooters didn’t buy into her very inflated claims of scientific importance.

0:28:29
BR: In fact, at one point, she, in fact, we should do a whole show on this because it’s just this fascinating fiasco of failure. But yeah, so she tried to get her results, and I use the words very loosely, published and she wouldn’t do it. So she she created her own journal because that’s what you do. If no one else will publish your stuff, then you self-publish. And I was asked to look at it, and Sharon was as well and others, and we’re looking at it and I’m just like, what is this? I don’t recognize, just the provenance wasn’t there. This was gathered by people just sort of, oh, you know, it just had no semblance of science to it. And yet it was just being treated with a straight face. And it was, anyway, it was just, it was just remarkable.

0:29:14
SH: As a corollary to that, she had some backing from a few Russian scientists. Burtsev was one. And the Russians in particular, as well as the Chinese scientists, they have in the past taken hairy hominid ideas very seriously. They’ve developed institutes. I don’t know how serious those institutes were, but they actually had teams of credentialed scientists out there looking for evidence of these man-eat creatures. So it’s not just in the USA. I mean, there are other places too where scientists have taken a serious look at this. I mean, you have to remember that even Roger Patterson took the Bigfoot film to the Smithsonian and showed it to scientists there. And he thought he was going to blow them away. And they just, I think, sat there in silence. You could read Brian Riegel’s book, Searching for Sasquatch, but they looked at it. Of course, a video, a film, is just not… It’s interesting. It could guide you to where to look, but it isn’t the evidence you need to declare the animal as real. Brian Sykes, we’ll talk about him for a minute. He was a legitimate geneticist that came after Ketchum. It was going on pretty much at the same time. There was some overlap. But Sykes did have credentials to collect these samples. He actually forged a good relationship with several of these amateur Bigfoot researchers and went out with them and took their samples and talked to them about what they’d seen. He was really impressed with their sincerity and their passion. But ultimately, the genetics, nothing fell out of that other than some interesting bear genetics because of it. We’ve really looked. You have to also consider, say, Loch Ness. How many expeditions and projects have gone on at Loch Ness that took a serious look for some anomalous creature in there? So many decently funded efforts found nothing. So…

0:31:17
BR: Yeah, the BBC did a huge investigation.

0:31:20
SH: Yeah, deep scan, looked at the whole thing.

0:31:23
BR: Yeah, I mean, it’s not for lack of evidence. And that’s one thing I really appreciate about your approach, Sharon, is you bringing a historical perspective to it. You find this with Bigfooters and also ghost hunters. They think that this was invented last year. I saw this on TV, finding Bigfoot and you know, and they don’t have a clue that there’s actually a robust history dating back decades and in some cases well over 100 years of people who are actually looking for these things and they’re just completely unaware of what has come before and they’re cog in it.

0:31:59
CW: If I can throw out another shout out, I know we’ve shouted out a number of times through the Wikipedia project, but I think one of the efforts that they’re doing, the guerrilla skeptics are doing is they are going back and going through all the various issues of Skeptical Inquirer and they’re helping to bring that robust history of skeptical inquiry and scientific looks into matters like this to Wikipedia so that literally the first source that people go to these days will actually have some of that history incorporated into it.

0:32:46
SH: And there have been several legitimate anthropologists too that spent their career on this and I’m not sure that the recent Bigfooters understand what they looked at as well. It wasn’t just Krantz and Meldrum. I mean, it was at the time that the Patterson film was out, it was anthropologists and zoologists at the time looking at this too. So there is such a long history of legitimate scientists who have gone out on a limb. It’s not the most popular subject to tackle in an academic situation, but their understanding is that if it’s real, it’s interesting and it’s important. So they did give it their try, and then they saw there really wasn’t anything to pursue.

0:33:12
BR: And you saw the same thing if you look at the search for the Yeti with Tom Slick, right? You had a millionaire who, I mean, this was a well-funded expedition and not much came of it, but you can’t say that people aren’t looking for these things. I just, I hear this all the time. Well, you know, they’re not really looking hard. Well, then do it! It just doesn’t make sense. I mean, on one hand, oh, well, you know, they’re out there, but they’re elusive. And I remember someone talking to me about, well, I was asking a Bigfooter, why is it that the Bigfoot don’t seem to get, why don’t they get hit when we find any carcasses, you know, being hit on freeways and roads? And he said, oh, well, because, you know, they’re, they’re elusive and they’re not seen around, you know, highways and roads. I said, well, actually, they are specifically seen around highways and roads. So they can’t walk ways.

0:34:01
SH: Yeah, lots of cryptids really don’t act or behave like biological entities at all. And that’s a problem. One of the main things I see in cryptozoology is it’s not just zoological issues. It incorporates a number of different components to it, like the folklore and psychological aspects and sociological aspects as well. And of course, our historians are very important in making sense of these claims. So another one of the myths that I’d like to bring up, that I hear quite often, is that the locals or the natives know the animals. They know it from the folklore, they know it because they’re familiar with the land and everything that’s on it. And this as busted because we have so many examples of local people just completely misidentifying normal animals, not only legendary animals, but also in modern times. And the two things that I see, the two threads in this is, for example, the Bigfooters who say that Native American myths support some sort of hairy ape man in their history. This also comes up, a really good example is Lake Monster Traditions, the book by Merget. I know Ben, you’re familiar with that, which discusses how lake and sea monster depictions are shown, given in folklore and mythology, cannot be safely translated into modern zoological concepts. They served a different purpose, yet we see cryptozoologists doing this. Well, the natives always said that there was a monster in the lake or there was a monster in the woods. And we can’t do that. It’s very dangerous to do that. They’re cherry-picking the native legends and using that as a zoological basis when there’s really no justification for doing that. I mean, then we might as well talk about spirit animals and fairies, witches, or supernatural creatures like vampires or angels and demons, it’s the same concept. They used them in a different way. We can’t really translate that. I think Merget calls it wonder literature, which signifies it’s not factual. It’s not meant to be used as a textbook.

0:36:21
BR: Yeah, I think it talks about the scientification of folklore and the notion that it’s almost sort of a form of the noble savage idea. Us modern Westerners, we were blinded by our preconceptions, but those First Nations people, they knew exactly what they were seeing and they accurately described it. And it’s just, I mean, that was one of the aspects of Ogopogo. But it’s understandable from their point of view, because, you know, of course, the people that believe in these things, they got nothing else. I mean, they’re it’s not as if they have hard evidence elsewhere to point to. I mean, they’re they’re scrounging around for anything that they can co-opt into evidence.

0:37:01
CW: Yeah, that goes right back to just trying to inflate the numbers of sightings as as much as people can. And that means bringing in long dead ancestral people who were inhabiting the land 500 years ago. But it’s almost this part of othering that you see going on in both directions. People can’t conceive that ancient civilizations in Egypt could have possibly had the engineering know-how to build the pyramids, so therefore aliens. Oh, well, there’s no way that the, as you put it, Ben, the noble savages of, you know, Lake Okanagan could have been mistakenly looking at logs, even though modern day Americans sometimes are mistakenly looking at logs. Well, they’re not the same people. We are the same people. All the human beings are the same to some degree.

SH: It translates even to today, where you hear cryptozoologists claim that a policeman was the witness or the hunter was a witness and they know what they saw. They’re trained observers.

0:38:03
CW: Oh, yeah.

0:38:04
SH: And that completely ignores the fact that it doesn’t matter who you are. And I’m sure you’ll talk about this, the whole eyewitness testimony problem is we all make mistakes in eyewitness testimony and observation. And some of the examples are just flat out unbelievable, especially in terms of alien big cats. When people say that they’ve seen a black panther or a mountain lion or something, or even a lion. I mean, not too long ago, the Essex lion was what they call a moggy, a house cat. And people mistook the scale and they imagine it’s much bigger. And we do this with so many animals. Dogs, large dogs are often mistaken for cats, large cats. I mean, if you have a big Labrador running around and in the dark, and you have this idea in your head that you might be encountering something weird, then that’s what your brain comes up with. That’s what the story is.

CW:And what animals are we more familiar with than dogs and cats? Exactly. To be the most familiar animal we come into contact with as a typical suburban American.

0:39:24
BR: Yeah, that that’s exactly. Yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, that’s, you know, if us modern day folk, you live again in Pittsburgh, in Las Vegas, elsewhere, can mistake a chonky neighborhood cat for a panther, well then why is anybody expecting that Native Americans 150 years ago did any different?

0:39:43
SH: Yeah, how about the raccoon in New York City that was reported as a tiger? I mean, come on.

0:39:49
BR: That’s right. I forgot about that. Well, no, and part of it is, you know, going back to the psychology of perception, is that one of the consistent things that researchers have found is that when we’re startled or surprised we tend to exaggerate the size of things. And we saw this, for example, with the Mansi photo of Champ. Mansi described how big it was, saying it was six feet out of the water. Well, in fact, it was almost certainly about half that size or less. And just over and over and over again, we see these cases where you see something and you’re shocked. What is that? You’re surprised. And all of a sudden, it’s sort of magnified in your head. And of course, if you’re telling your story to somebody, God forbid somebody from the BFRO, you’re not going to say, well, it seems large but of course, I know from psychology because I read Schoenhild’s book, they’re going to say, oh my God, it’s 500 feet large.

0:40:40
SH: A couple more examples just to add to this are not too long ago, there was a Martin which a martin, which is like a weasel-like animal that’s very common in Russia. They found the desiccated body of the thing and they called it a dinosaur. It made the news as a dinosaur found a dinosaur skeleton. It was clearly a mammal. This is just shocking that it makes the news that it’s just a desiccated or decaying carcass. But we just don’t, we’re not familiar with these processes anymore. I give the noble savages some credit there. They probably saw a lot more dead animals than we did. Yeah, but we are so bad at jumping to these awful conclusions.

0:41:23
CW: Well, and the and you know, one thing that ancient cultures did not have going for them is is the content hungry news editor who’s dying to make a story out of any little desiccated carcass that they come upon. So you might have a little bit of a motivated falsifying when it comes to spreading a story around, but you still have modern-day people that are surprised or misled all the time by what should be a common animal to them.

0:42:00
SH: Yeah, I really wish cryptozoologists would learn this lesson.

CW: Well, if anybody wants to amuse themselves one afternoon, go on a little internet search for mysterious big cats spotted in people’s backyards and you’ll see all these great photographs of clearly house cats that are like kind of halfway hidden by like an overgrown backyard and because of the clipping of the photograph, it looks like it might kind of be something but you zoom in or you zoom out you see the rest of the photograph it’s like no that’s a giant orange cat not a cougar yeah and you see that you see it all the time so it’s not just that eyewitnesses tend to exaggerate the size of things.

BR: It’s also that you have people on social media either because they’re stupid or they’re looking for clickbait or you know cryptomundo or you know bfro needs needs some clicks. I used to routinely check on Doubtful News and inevitably, I’d say once or twice a month, there would be a photo of something that was clearly forced perspective, right? It’d be like, oh, look at this giant nurse shark that’s eating these, you know, these…

SH: Snakes. Snakes were big, yeah.

0:43:06
BR: Snakes, exactly. Insects and like, just, I mean, come on, guys.

0:43:12
CW: I love the forced perspective photos. I want to see a headline someday. Man discovered to have penis the size of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

0:43:20
BR: I have nothing to add to that.

(MUSIC)

0:43:24
Cw: Okay, that was cool hearing from Sharon. I’m glad she took some time to chat with us. Now, Ben, give us another one of your favorite bad arguments from cryptid enthusiasts.

BR: This is sort of a double one. This is a complex one. So, bear with me here. One of the explanations for cryptozoological mysteries is that some of them may be escaped animals from zoos, for example. Now, keep in mind that even though cryptozoology is usually thought of as sort of the marquee monsters, right? Bigfoot, chupacabra, Nessie, things like that, that in fact, cryptozoology also refers to animals that are known, but are what are called out of place. So for example, if you find an Amazon River dolphin in the Yangtze River, by many standards, that’s a cryptological mystery. Not because no one’s ever heard of, you know, pink river dolphins in the Amazon, but because how in the world could it have gotten to the Yangtze?

0:44:36
CW: Basically, a cryptid is anything that makes a modern-day biologist look stupid.

0:44:41
BR: That’s, there’s one take on it.

CW: Okay.

BR: So, from a skeptical point of view, when someone comes up to us and says, okay, well, what is the answer for Bigfoot? Or what are people seeing when they see, you know, a champ or something? It’s a non sequitur. There isn’t one single answer. It depends on the sighting, it depends on the person, it depends on the circumstance, depends on the photo or the video, whatever it is. And so there is not one blanket explanation for what, for, you know, for all Bigfoot sightings or all ghost sightings or whatever else. And so it’s a mistake to sort of treat it that way. And so what skeptics such as myself have said are that in some cases it’s likely that some of these mysterious sightings are or may be escaped animals, that is ones that wouldn’t normally be there. And a lot of the Bigfoot people like to ridicule this, they say, oh well, so the skeptics are saying that, you know, every time there’s a Bigfoot sighting in Pennsylvania, well I guess there was some zoo that had an escaped monkey that no one knew about, right? Well, in fact, it’s not quite as outlandish as it sounds. There are many cases in which there are animals that are, again, known animals that just happen to be out of place. And so, for example, I used to live in Buffalo. If, for example, someone reported seeing a lion lurking in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York, many people will probably say, well, that’s ridiculous. There are no lions in Buffalo. Buffalo is near the Canadian border. Lions are from Africa. Duh.

0:46:13
CW: Or Detroit.

BR: Or Detroit.

0:46:15
CW: Yeah.

0:46:16
BR: Right, right. However, if you happen to know that there is a business called African Lion Safari that’s just across the Canadian border, it’s over in Southern Ontario that has over a thousand animals in its park. Then you’re like, well, you know what? Yes, it’s true that lions are not native to western New York. Good job, guys. That does not mean that lions do not exist there and that they may not in fact have gotten out. And you also see this, for example, in international airports, particularly in Florida. Have you heard about this?

0:46:46
CW: Why is it always Florida? Nothing surprises me about Florida anymore.

0:46:51
BR: Because Florida man smuggles an alligator in his crotch.

0:46:54
CW: In his pants, always in the pants. Yep, yep, yep.

0:46:57
BR: Because that’s what they do. No, but here’s the thing, guys, is that oftentimes, and this is a known fact, you can look this up, oftentimes in the environment surrounding international airports, particularly in Florida, they have exotic animals that were smuggled into the country but escaped or were released, maybe, for example, by sympathetic airport workers. This is a known thing. I mean, there have been exotic animals that are not native to Florida that have been found in the areas. And so, in fact, there was one in your neighborhood. You know the case I’m talking about?

0:47:28
CW: I could give you dozens. I live in Las Vegas. Do you know how many entertainers? It doesn’t have to be a zoo. It can be an entertainer that just… I used to live nearby where Siegfried and Roy had their giant palatial estate with lions that you could hear roaring nightly and there were always stories, oh the lion got out or something. I don’t know if it actually happened like on the property but you’ve seen the hangover with Mike Tyson and his tiger getting away, right?

BR: That was a good documentary. I didn’t expect it to be that good. I was skeptical of the based on true story tagline but sure enough I think they hewed pretty closely to the facts on that one.

0:48:04
CW: What was the one you were thinking of in Vegas? I’m curious.

0:48:07
BR: In July 2012, a chimpanzee named CJ, 180 pounds, was rampaging through a Las Vegas neighborhood.

0:48:15
CW: I vaguely remember. That was just a privately owned…

0:48:18
BR: And it wasn’t the first time! This happened twice! This happened… It was a 13-year-old chimpanzee that was kept in a backyard enclosure, legally apparently, because it’s Vegas.

0:48:29
CW: Yes, like a private owner had this chimpanzee.

0:48:32
BR: That’s right, that’s right. And it was a 13-year-old named CJ, somehow got out. Whatever happened, it is entirely true and documented. A nearly 200-pound chimpanzee was running around a Las Vegas neighborhood in July 2012.

0:48:47
CW: Yeah, well, we’re laughing about it, but those chimpanzees can be freaking vicious animals and there’s been instances of people getting their faces ripped off.

0:48:56
BR: Yeah, not messing around here. I’ll give you another couple quick examples. In 2010, two camels and a tiger were found, let me see if you can guess, where do you suppose two camels and a tiger were found in the woods?

0:49:11
CW: I’m thinking they were found on an improv stage, because that really sounds like the setup to a joke.

0:49:17
BR: And then the rabbi says, so this was in Canada. They were being moved to a private zoo outside of Toronto, and the escape from the truck carrying them was stolen by thieves in Quebec. So, Quebecois thieves causing trouble, letting camels and tigers out in Canada.

0:49:38
CW: Oh my!

0:49:39
BR: Here’s one of my favorites. So in Oklahoma, not Florida, I know this is going to shock you, in Oklahoma, a couple was driving home in 2009 from church on US 81 about an hour north of Oklahoma City and they swerved to avoid an 8 foot tall, 4,000 pound what?

0:50:01
CW: I want to make a yo mama joke really bad.

BR: An elephant!

0:50:04
CW: An elephant in Oklahoma!

BR: An elephant on the freeway! It had escaped the day before from the circus at the Garfield County Fairgrounds and amazingly nobody could find it.

CW: They’re always the last place you look.

0:50:21
BR: They are, they are. And then there was one other case in October 2011, it’s kind of a sad case, an Ohio man released his private menagerie of exotic animals into the wild before killing himself. You may remember the story.

CW: Oh, geez.

BR: And so for a while in Ohio, there were nearly 60 animals, including wolves, grizzly bears, lions, Bengal tigers, leopards, and monkeys scattered in the woods outside of Columbus.

0:50:47
CW: Boy, that was a fun day to work for animal control.

0:50:50
BR: So, look, I’m not saying that this happens all the time. I’m not saying that any time someone puts forth the argument that, well, it’s clutered, clutered is an escaped animal, it’s always the explanation. But again, if you actually look at the history of these things, weird or out of place animals happen much more often than you would expect. And keep in mind that all it takes to create a cryptozoological mystery or sighting is just something weird I can’t identify. If you live in an area then you probably have some idea of what the local fauna are.

0:51:25
CW: You’re making me remember all the instances of on Facebook where it pops up train wreck or a tractor-trailer wrecks on the highway and 4,000 chickens are released or 200 pigs roaming the interstate and they’re trying to round them up. That’s livestock animals, but exotic animals are moved around all the time too.

0:51:48
BR: They are, and keep in mind that in some of these cases the animals were recovered within hours. So it’s not like they were around for years. In other cases, they spent days or even weeks roaming rural areas.

0:52:00
CW: Oh man.

0:52:01
BR: And it’s likely that they were spotted at some point. These animals, they don’t explain every mysterious animal sighting, but they don’t have to. All it takes are a few unknown reports to generate the belief that something weird is out there and suddenly you’ve got a monster sighting.

0:52:15
CW: Yeah, yeah.

0:52:16
BR: So moving on from escaped Bengal tigers and bears and elephants on Oklahoma freeways, what’s on your list, Celestia?

0:52:27
CW: Well, the next one I came up with was the argument, again, it’s sort of a, it’s a bad argument from math, namely, quote, there are so many reports, just look at the numbers, surely they can’t all be hoaxes or mistakes. And my TL:DR rebuttal to that is, yes, yes, they can.

0:52:48
BR: In fact, yes, in yes.

0:52:51
CW: But to look at it a little more closely, which is what we do here, when you’re citing a huge number of something, in this case, eyewitness accounts or reports and say, well, they can’t all be wrong, that’s a form of cherry picking. Similar to the way that snake oil cures are hawked by pointing to the rare cases of people who have survived a bout of cancer or some disease because of some miracle cure. This presents a one-sided argument because just like on those ads for ginger mixed with baking soda mixed with lemons or whatever will cure a cancer tumor, you’re hearing from the one person it worked for and you’re not hearing from…

0:53:35
BR: And how did that even work? They left out the camel semen.

0:53:36
CW: Yeah, exactly.

BR: That’s not going to work. Come on.

0:53:42
CW: Yeah, you’re not hearing from the people who may have taken this ineffective medication and did not survive. As they say, the dead don’t provide anecdotal evidence. So, taking that idea and turning it to the cryptid argument, you don’t hear from people who went into the woods and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. If you look at the vast number of people that are in the Pacific Northwest or go fishing out on a lake that’s reported to have a monster in it, you have a tremendous number of people who don’t see anything out of the ordinary. But these people don’t make the news. You only hear the guy who’s been drinking a six pack who saw something. He makes the news. All the other people who just saw normal flora and fauna that belong there, they don’t make the news. As Daniel Loxton says in Abominable Science on page 23, quote, as more and more people have been looking for these creatures in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, the snows of the Himalayas, the jungles of the Congo, and the waters of Loch Ness, the evidence for the existence of Bigfoot, Yeti, Mokele, Mbembe, and Nessie has diminished, not increased. And the emphasis there on diminished is his. So yeah, this points to the fact that we’ve got cell phone cameras everywhere, satellite imagery, and one could now add drones to the mix. They’re almost everywhere. So it really makes the absence of solid imagery and evidence stand out, hearkening back to the absence of evidence argument that we talked about earlier.

0:55:15
BR: Well, it reminds me of the argument about the sort of file drawer effect. And that is sort of, as you mentioned, you know, noticing the hits and forgetting the misses. And that effect, of course, also happens in published research. Experiments that show that something is effective, for example, a drug or procedure, are more likely to get published and noticed than ones that show that it didn’t happen.

0:55:40
CW: And yeah, you see this happening in encrypted research and reports. And it’s just, again, a parallel. It makes me go down that rabbit hole and say, look at this relates to this and it’s just like what this happened.

0:55:50
BR: Right. Look at it this way. I mean, there’s been, well, many, many, I can think of about a half dozen because I’ve written about them, cases of where there were fatal hunter errors. I wrote about this in the appendix, I think, to my Lake Monster book with Joe Nickell, where there was a guy, I’m forgetting the details, I think it was a guy named Dennis Plucknett, and he killed his own son. He and his son were out hunting, and he saw what he thought was a boar. It turned out to be his son’s head, and he blew his son’s skull open. It was a case of where, well, first of all, keep in mind that when the Bigfoot believers talk about all the experts and how police officers are trained to know things, so are hunters. So in this case, and there are many like it, the father mistook his son for, I think it was a toboggan cap, for a boar. We talk some about eyewitness testimony and things like that, but there’s a couple of key aspects I want to focus in on. One is that like allegedly police officers and these other trained witnesses who would never mistake anything, hunters are trained to notice things. They seek out, they’re looking for specific animals. If they’re wrong, the consequences can be literally deadly.

0:57:06
CW: Well, and like with police officers, how many times have we read about a police officer mistaking a cell phone for a gun?

0:57:14
BR: Yeah, yeah. And the and the whole the whole question of expected detention. But keep in mind that the cases we hear about are the the dramatic ones, the fatal ones, right, where somebody mistook something for another person and shot and killed them.

CW: Oh, yeah.

BR: We don’t hear about all the times when somebody saw something mysterious or strange in the distance and didn’t verify what it was because it wasn’t a person that didn’t get shot or killed. So we we only hear about the cases in which the victim and or target, if you will, was identified. We don’t think we don’t we don’t hear about the huge number of cases potentially that were the entity or the person, the animal was was was misidentified. It was it wasn’t a Bigfoot. It was a tree. We don’t hear about those.

0:58:03
CW: Yeah, it does not make the media sources. If he had missed and not hit his son, which would have been far less tragic, it wouldn’t have made the news. He wouldn’t have gone around saying, oh, for a second I thought my son was a boar and, you know, let’s get this in the news.

BR: Exactly.

CW: No, it just would have been crisis averted. Yeah, it’s just, as you said, it’s relatable to the file drawer effect, what gets publicized. And speaking of publicizing things, a lot of the cryptids, a lot of the cryptid researchers will try to draw attention to the fact that, oh look, we had similar, we had a similar creature in Native mythology or in legends of ancient peoples of this area or sometimes all over the world, like, oh, we’ve got, there’s tales of a wild man in all sorts of different cultures have tales of a wild man. And it’s almost like they’re sweeping ancient civilizations into their cherry-picked bushel to inflate the number of reports. And therefore, in their mind, that means that’s evidence. In their mind, it’s evidence. As Sharon touched on this a little bit when we talked to her. And in actuality, the presence of these monsters or monsters like them in ancient folklore and other cultures, or even just the wide array of sightings that we have among Americans isn’t necessarily proof that the thing exists, but rather it can speak to the fact that this particular creature is a trope, a common psychological boogeyman that we all sort of have jostling around in the recesses of our brains. The wild man definitely is, the kraken-like monsters from the deep, these concepts pop up in Shakespeare and in ancient mythology, in the Odyssey, in Gilgamesh, you know, almost as sure as you find the concepts of true love or a tragic hero because it rings with us. So it stands to reason that human beings frame their experiences around such tropes. And you can think about this like, if you’re telling a story that you heard about and it involves some kind of hero, you automatically frame the narrative. You punch up the heroic bits, just as if you spot something you can barely see in the woods and you’re telling that story later around the campfire, you might punch up the details that are similar to a Bigfoot or a Wildman or a Sasquatch or a Yeti or a Lake Monster or a Chupacabra, wherever you happen to be. So everybody does this. It’s part of our psychology. And so, yeah, we do have a bunch of reports because people have similar psychological makeups and we have throughout the history of humankind.

1:00:31
BR: Exactly. Going back to what you said a while ago. I think one of the fun little differences between a skeptical approach to cryptozoology and a sort of more believer approach is the argument that sort of where there’s smoke, there’s fire. So, for example, you know, Bigfoot believers will admit, because they have to, they will admit to you that yes, not every Bigfoot sighting is really a Bigfoot. That is self-evident, that’s been demonstrably proven. So yes, it’s true that there are hoaxers, yes it’s true there are misunderstandings or else, but, but they claim, loudly and repeatedly, there must be something in there. maybe 70%, maybe 80%, maybe 95, maybe 99% of what’s out there are misidentifications, hoaxes, misunderstandings, what have you. But!…

CW: Yes, if you have a large number of something, at least some of it must be correct.

1:01:29
BR: Right.

1:01:29
CW: Yeah.

1:01:29
BR: And again, it’s sort of a where there’s smoke, there’s fire argument. And sort of basically there’s too many sightings that can’t all be fully explained. Again, you touched on this earlier, but I think it’s important to realize that that’s, as you mentioned, that’s not really a good argument because there are enough sources of error, bad data, flawed assumptions, hoaxes, and implications, bad memory, all those sorts of things that there doesn’t have to be, and it’s not likely to be, a real creature hiding among all the all the misunderstandings. Is it possible? Sure. You know, it’s possible that Bigfoot exists. I have never said otherwise.

1:02:09
CW: Well, it’s possible there’s a kangaroo in the backseat of my SUV. It’s a big SUV.

1:02:14
BR: Well, that’s true. Keep in mind. But so that that’s not the question. The question isn’t, is it possible? The question is, is it probable? What does the evidence show? There’s there’s a sort of a hidden assumption in that argument that I hear all the time from the Bigfoot believers particularly. There’s this hidden assumption that the unsolved claims or sightings or the ones that can’t be explained, the 5% or 1% or whatever else, are substantially different than the solved ones. That is, there’s a hidden assumption that, well, okay, that 1% or that 5% whatever it is, that’s categorically different than the other, you know, 95, 98% because that is somehow inherently unsolvable. Of course it’s categorically different because it can be thrown in the face of skeptics and waved around as, aha, find an answer for this one. There’s not enough data, well, therefore it’s on my side. So, I mean, basically their argument is that the remaining mystery sightings have been so thoroughly and completely investigated, there’s no possibility of a normal explanation. Keep in mind that history is full of cases that were said to be the gold standard. This is proof of evidence. This is this Bigfoot sighting. This is this footage from Todd Stanning, this is the video, or else, that turn out to be hoaxes or turn out to be misunderstandings. It’s simply not true that the unsolved cases are different than the solved cases. An analogy would be to say, well, X number of homicides are unsolved, so therefore, it’s mysterious, right? We can look at police numbers and let’s say in a given city, 13% of homicides are unsolved. What does that mean? Does that mean that there is no explanation? Does that mean that a fairy or a dragon or-

1:04:12
CW: I was thinking Bigfoot killed them, right?

1:04:14
BR: Bigfoot killed them, I mean-

1:04:15
CW: Yeah.

1:04:16
BR: No, what that means is that for whatever reason, lack of evidence, lack of eyewitnesses, coverups, any number of reasons that the investigators or detectives don’t have enough information to conclusively point to the killer. It doesn’t mean that those unsolved homicides are inherently mysterious or paranormal or unexplainable. It just means that in these cases, we didn’t have enough information. There weren’t enough eye witnesses. The body had been, you know, left out to the elements for 10 years, whatever it is. So there’s nothing inherently different about the unsolved cases compared to the solved cases.

1:04:57
CW: Agreed.

(MUSIC)

1:05:16
CW: Alright, and so we actually have another special guest joining us, Ben.

BR: Another special guest?

CW: I know, it doesn’t get more special than this episode. We’ve got two wonderful people who are very much into cryptids and the culture of cryptozoology and…

BR: Our cryptozoological cup runneth over.

1:05:38
CW: Yes, and Erik Kristopher Myers has joined us.

1:05:41
BR: Hi Eric. Thanks for coming on. We want to talk monsters and that’s one of the many interests that you and I share in common. So give us a take on some of the cryptozoological myths and stories and basically BS claims that are made that are some of your favorites.

1:05:57
CW: Give us some bad, bad arguments.

EM: That’s a really, really long list. It’s a question of where to start. But one of my favorites, and it’s one that I’m constantly having to argue with people about because you know, when you get on the internet, that’s what you do you argue with people.

BR: Oh, yeah, that’s what it’s for.

EM: There is this perception among cryptozoologists and cryptozoology advocates that there is such a thing as the inerrancy of eyewitness testimony. Basically, if a person claims to have seen something, for a skeptic or anyone to question what they saw and whether it could have been something else, is to, and I’ve run up against this a lot, that you are essentially saying that they are stupid because they were not able to recognize natural phenomenon or whatever it was for what it really was, or that you’re calling them a liar. And the common counter argument to this is, well, eyewitnesses are constantly brought in to sway a verdict in a court of law. That is so much of what will decide a case. And that eyewitnesses need to be taken literally at their word. And we all know that whether it’s lake monsters or big hairy monsters or whatever they are, so much of the groundwork of the sort of cultural belief system surrounding these cryptids is eyewitness testimony.

1:07:24
CW: Yeah, and that’s a great example of how it crosses over into other walks of life. The eyewitnesses are not some solid gold You know scripturally perfect source of information.

EM: No, absolutely, and I mean if we want to you know take this out to the next logical step I mean you could make the argument that is not the entire basis of all of our religious beliefs That’s all based on eyewitness testimony. The Bible is eyewitness testimony and stories That’s exactly what it is. And again, it’s considered inerrant the interesting thing is that when we really start breaking down what memories are and how they are clearly influenced by a Person’s bias by a person’s psychological makeup by their belief systems in general. Whether it was a stressful situation Whether they were upset by it or elated by it. There’s so many factors that color a person’s memory, and it’s a very dangerous thing to just take a person at their word when we’re dealing with extreme examples of reporting, in this case, monsters.

CW: Yeah, and you’re just talking right there, all the things you listed, that’s just applying to how the memory is formed when you first make the memory. Then you’re talking about the ways that memories shift like sands in a windy desert when you are recalling it 15 times and telling the story over and over again, or have somebody else asking you leading questions that might make you remember some details a little differently than other details. Any listeners who are curious about memory research, I highly recommend the work of Elizabeth Loftus.

1:09:13
BR: Yeah, she’s really the best out there. I mean, there are many others as well, but she has been just instrumental in many skeptical issues, particularly over the past few decades, everything from recovered memory, for example, with satanic ritual abuse, things like that. And she’s actually gotten quite a bit of flack from some in the recovered memory field who believe that her work, which is well regarded among academics and scholars, that means that these people are lying. It’s not that simple. That’s one thing that people should really remember is when a claim is made and the response is why would someone lie about that, you’re already making the assumption that either they’re lying or they’re telling the truth. And there are many, many other alternatives. They could be mistaken. They could be misremembering. They could be all sorts of things. So whenever you hear someone say, why would they lie about that, keep in mind that they’re not necessarily lying about that.

1:10:21
CW: Yeah, and the memory issue is just tied so much to the eyewitness issue because you have to be able to remember what you see in order to report what you see. But Erik, you are a professional in the visual and illusion creating field. So you probably have some good insights into how people can be mistaken when they are witnessing something.

1:10:43
EM: Well, the best example I can give is the time that I went to Loch Ness and I was there in a cottage on the shores of the lake and I went over as a skeptic, someone who had read all of the literature since I was a young boy. I very much believed in Nessie. Then I saw all the evidence begin to cumble.  It is an environment without going too deep into it that is prone to all sorts of natural aberrations and optical illusions on the water. So it’s a place that generates all sorts of phenomena that can be mistaken as being something else.

CW: Now, why is that? Why is Loch Ness, as you said, it’s a little bit more illusion prone than other lakes for some reason? Is it the hills or the atmosphere, the fog? What makes you say that?

1:11:34
EM: It’s all of those things. It’s also the fact that Loch Ness is not a traditional landlocked body of water. It’s essentially a trench that was carved out by glaciers. And so as a result, the walls are sort of a V-shape going straight down and there are very few beaches. The water stays at 42 degrees all year round, it doesn’t freeze, there are different temperatures on the upper layers than on the lower layers. This causes all sorts of heat distortion and mirages. It’s a wind tunnel due to the way that the hills are on either side, all sorts of weird funky stuff happens there. And…

CW: That’s fascinating. You know, being in the desert here where the temperatures get up to like 118 sometimes. I’m very familiar with the heat distortion over like Asphalt or dirt, but I didn’t realize you get that effect with lakes too sometimes, huh?

1:12:36
EM: Absolutely and add to that the fact that the weather changes every five minutes and you can be standing at one point looking over the Water and to your left. There’s a thunderstorm in front of you. There’s a bright clear sky and to the right it’s snowing. I mean, it’s a weird place and the weather changes constantly and that has effects on the water. The water has all sorts of underwater storms that are propelling things up to the surface. You do have a lot of debris that’s floating in the water and the water incidentally is the color of tea due to the peat that washes down the hills into the water to stain the water this dark color. It’s a very ominous and moody and atmospheric place. It’s even got its own castle. It’s such a romantic place that it’s easy to believe in monsters.

1:13:21
CW: Okay, I officially want to visit now. I’m putting that on my list.

1:13:24
BR: It is cool. I loved Inverness when I was there. I mean, it’s this quaint, it’s just a really cool little small town and they all speak with this weird Scottish accent. You should definitely check it out.

1:13:37
EM: It’s fantastic. And again, I went there as a skeptic, and I knew without listing all of the various things that happened there on the water, I knew what many of the reported sightings, figure quotes, really are. Convergence of wave patterns and all the things that look like monsters. And I’m sitting there every day, looking out the window or sitting on my porch, drinking tea and seeing passing surface vessels and the way that the wakes will converge after a while when the boat is out of sight. And when they do, it creates, you know, this multi-hump sort of thing in the water. And I’m laughing to myself and being like, ha ha, you know, I see what you’re doing here, Lake. I see why people are thinking that these are sea serpents or whatever they are. So one afternoon, I was coming back from a drive. I took a drive around the entire loch. Took me the whole day and when I got back, I had been shooting with my camcorder all day, getting all sorts of scenic touristy stuff. And I put my camera inside, the battery was just about dead, and I went back outside with a drink to watch the sun beginning to dip down over the hills. And all of a sudden, I saw coming from the direction of the castle, moving, I guess that would be eastward toward Inverness, I saw this large hump that was plowing through the water. It looked like the back of a whale. And suddenly, all of my skepticism vanished in an instant. This thing, you know, and I’d been watching surface vessels, so I felt, you know, that I could make a fair and accurate estimation of size on the water, which again, you know, that’s another trick is the fact that there’s no scale over a body of water that is between a mile and a mile and a half wide. But I felt that I could make a fairly accurate estimation and it was probably close to maybe 10 feet long and maybe five or six feet out of the water. And it was undulating and as it did, it was throwing up spray as it’s plowing through the water toward me.

BR: Wow.

EM: I could not believe what I was seeing. I ran inside to get my camera. Again, my camera is now, is almost out of juice. I’m desperately trying to plug it in and realizing I’m in the UK, so I need one of those adapters that can go.

1:15:54
CW: Oh!

1:15:55
EM: So I’m running around the cottage and I finally find it, but the entire time I’m also looking out the window and charting where it’s going. And by the time I get the adapter in the wall, by the time I get the plug plugged in, by the time the camera finally comes back to life, I look out the window again, and all of a sudden there is not one hump. There are dozens of them. And I suddenly realize there is a storm coming from the southwest and it is moving up the lock toward Inverness and that was the first outlier. That was a wave that was being pushed forward rolling over itself.

BR: Wow.

EM: A huge wave and now the entire water is turning into that.

CW: And it was just water formations.

EM: It was water formations and I sat there and laughed and laughed and laughed and said, Loch Ness, you got me, you got me. I saw the Loch Ness monster. And it’s a series of magic tricks. But that brings up a really important fact, which is expectant attention. If a person sees something strange on a random body of water, they’re gonna go, oh, I wonder what that is. You go to Loch Ness and you’re, you are seeing the Loch Ness monster. Anything weird is the Loch Ness monster. You are psychologically programmed for that.

1:17:23
BR: And not just psychologically programmed for that, but also there’s a file drawer effect in which, you know, people will report cases that they find mysterious for whatever reason, but they’re the sort of, sort of sighting and report that you just had is not going to be considered when people are looking at the body of evidence for lake monster sightings.

1:17:45
CW: You didn’t call the news and immediately get interviewed about how you saw what you thought was a monster but turned out to be waves.

1:17:52
EM: Correct. And, you know, there is the possibility, the very strong possibility, that if I were not a, you know, armchair student of the Loch Ness Monster that I could have honestly believed that I saw a living animal and that the way formations began to change immediately following that. But that could have gone down as a sighting. And the fact of the matter is that it makes total sense at a place like Loch Ness because it has a lake monster tradition. And one of my favorite examples of the fallibility of eyewitness testimony is a little discussed photograph that appeared in August of 2016. It was taken by a photographer, a tourist by the name of Jolene Lin, and I would say that anybody that’s not familiar with this that’s listening right now, please go on Google right now, Jolene Lin, L-I-N. She took this photo of the Loch Ness Monster, her eyewitness testimony, what she’s quoted as saying, is that she saw a quote, thin snake-like head emerging from the waters and moving a little before submerging back into the waters again after a few seconds. Now, Loch Ness Monster advocates or Lake Monster advocates would immediately say that’s another head and neck sighting. That is a classical Nessie sighting. It is the head and neck of a long-necked animal, very much like a plesiosaur. What’s very, very interesting and what I feel is incredibly important is the accompanying photograph. The photo that we see is clearly a boat, possibly a boat with a sail. It is a rectangular object with a sort of square base to it. There is nothing snake-like about this at all. The photographer saw something on the body of water and she immediately, her brain went to the Loch Ness monster and she saw something that in no way corroborates or is corroborated by the photograph that she took. You take that photo away and you just take her verbal testimony and you have a classic Nessie sighting. You take the photo and suddenly we have to start wondering about other eyewitness reports.

1:20:05
CW: Yeah, I had Googled that earlier, Erik, on your advice. And the only way that that is a photograph of a snake-like plesiosaur Loch Ness monster is if Nessie was wearing a top hat and had submerged to the point where only the top hat was showing.

BR: You can’t prove it. You can’t prove it didn’t happen.

CW: Right before the shutter went off.

1:20:25
EM: Well, it’s our job as skeptics to prove that the Loch Ness Monster does not wear a top hat.

1:20:31
CW: Yes, there might be a monocle on there too. We could have a whole, have a whole playset going on here.

1:20:34
EM: Another example that I very much hold near and dear to my heart is the Ken Chaplin video of Ogopogo. This has been immortalized on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries from, I believe it was the spring of 1990. I remember recording it when it first aired. And what this video is supposedly showing us is a 15 foot long snake-like creature that is undulating through the water and during the climax of its appearance, raises its tail and slaps the water before submerging. Now, Chaplin visited a location that was sort of a log jam on the lake where his father Clem had claimed to see a monster previously. And Ken, who incidentally, coincidentally or not, was a used car salesman, goes to this location with a video camera. And he has the incredible fortune of seeing the Ogopogo and shooting it on video and just happens to see it again something like two days later and takes yet another video of this 15-foot animal undulating through the water.

CW: Now you described this area of the lake as a log jam area just to be clear you don’t mean that metaphorically you mean this is an actual log jam area.

EM: A literal log jam area. And so we have to raise the question, what animal that inhabits a lake near a series of logs also happens to raise its tail and slap the water on occasion?

CW: Huh.

BR: Hold on.

EM: Think very hard here.

CW: Platypuses.

EM: We all know that a platypus doesn’t exist. Come on.

1:22:31
CW: Peacocks. Ardvarks?

1:22:34
BR: Elephant?

1:22:35
EM: You’re both wrong.

1:22:36
BR: Thylacine.

1:22:37
EM: No. The answer is an Ogopogo. And Ken Chaplin, he held this video footage, you know, very close to him and was going out and trying to auction it off to the highest bidder.

1:22:54
BR: Because that’s what you do with scientific evidence.

1:22:57
EM: Exactly. He was trying to make a fortune off of it and ended up having to sell it for much less than he’d originally predicted.

1:23:03
CW: You mean he could not find a Canadian willing to buy footage of a beaver slapping his tail on the water?

1:23:10
EM: Hey, why did you say beaver? It was clearly Ogopogo.

1:23:13
CW: Oh, that’s right.

1:23:13
BR: Beaver Ogopogo. Well, maybe it’s some sort of French Canadian term.

1:23:17
EM: It’s possible. But I will say that when the animal raises its tail and its head at the same time, it does look more the length of a beaver than a 15-foot-long serpent, unless it’s like drooping its belly under the water and it’s this incredible horseshoe shape that we’re not seeing in profile. But no, this is another case where you look at this footage and you go, hey, that’s a beaver or clearly a small animal. And what anyone is possibly trying to interpret as being the lengthy tail trailing behind, it’s the wake of an animal swimming through the water. But Chaplin, whether he honestly 100% believed that this was genuine or he was just trying to use his used car salesman acumen to Raise a buck he you know, he was out there and he was talking about this green Sea-serpent in a fresh body body of water that did not match what he filmed.

CW: Well props for effort there.

1:24:20
EM: Absolutely

1:24:22
BR: So speaking of evidence offered for sale, that’s one of the common refrains that skeptical researchers refuse to look at the evidence. Eric, do you remember the Bigfoot butt print?

EM: Yes, absolutely. How could I forget?

BR: Yes, the Skookum cast. I want to do a show on that at some point. Actually, I was thinking of having Matt come back on, Matt Crowley, who we last had on for the condom snorting challenge for those who are keeping track. Anyway, that’s actually where I first met him, was at a Bigfoot conference in Idaho. And that was actually the first time I actually got a chance to see the Skookum cast. And I won’t go into the details, but basically it was said to be the best evidence to date other than arguably the 67 Patterson-Gillen film. And it was in the custody of the BFRO, the Bigfoot Field Research Organization. And I contacted the head of it, Matt Moneymaker. And I said, hey, I’m I hear I heard about your evidence. You’re you’re you’re sending out press releases and think about how great it is. Can I see it? He’s like, no. I was like, but I’m interested and I’m qualified and I’m one of the main Bigfoot skeptics. And I would think that you would like me to see it. And he’s like, no, I think you have an agenda to debunk the cast.

1:25:41
CW: Well, did you look him straight in the eye and say, no, I like Bigfoot butts and I cannot lie.

1:25:46
BR: I did not. I should. I should have. And he said, well, no, I won’t show it to you. But if you’re interested, you can pay $35 for a documentary on DVD available through White Wolf Entertainment. And there you can see our Bigfoot evidence.

CW: Oh, nice.

1:26:05
EM: I hope you said yes.

1:26:06
BR: I told him to f*** off is what I did, but actually, because it was at the conference in Idaho, I actually finally had a first-hand chance to examine it, and I was somewhat less than impressed, but again, I’ll say that for another episode. Okay, looking forward to it. So another common claim and alleged knock against skeptics and skeptical researchers of cryptozoology is that us skeptics don’t do field research. You just sit around in your ivory towers and sniffly dismiss all those hardworking bigfooters out there drinking six-packs and running around.

1:26:40
CW: Where are these ivory towers? I don’t know anybody who can afford to live in one.

EM: I do.

BR: We’ve all heard this over and over again and one of the first times when it was really blatant was on Crypto Mundo, the website, and I had posted a couple observations on Bigfoot and I was criticized by a member and I’ll read what he says. Mr. Radford, with all due respect, I don’t see you getting out in the field and searching for Bigfoot. You and your fellow skeptics like to sit back on your laurels and make proclamations that Bigfoot doesn’t exist without going out and taking the time to do field research yourself. Until you and your fellow skeptics actually go out into the field and do research into whether or not there is a Bigfoot, do not come here or anywhere else with your nebulous, arrogant statements proclaiming your ignorance.

1:27:38
EM: Nice.

1:27:39
BR: I know, right? Well written.

1:27:41
CW: Wow. Of all the people to accuse of not doing field work, and anybody who’s been listening to Squaring the Strange and heard about your various travels and the adventures of a Duende kidnapped boy becoming a guide, and the Chupacabra voyages, and everything else.

1:28:02
BR: Well, I mean, really, dude, I mean, you know, first, just I mean, this should be self-evident, but it may not be. So number one, I’ve never, ever said that Bigfoot does not exist because I don’t know. That’s not a scientific proposition. I can say that from my research and the work I’ve done, it probably doesn’t exist, but I’ve never, ever said that it can’t exist. Second of all, in terms of, again, you just picked the wrong guy to accuse of nebulous, arrogant statements proclaiming your ignorance. I’ve done extensive field research. I’ve gone personally looking for cryptozoological mysteries in Canada, Jamaica, Argentina, Costa Rica, Honduras, Tanzania, Kenya, Morocco, Scotland, Peru. I mean, just, I mean, come on.

1:28:50
CW: You probably have 10 diseases mankind has never even heard of, Ben, with all your extensive travels into the jungle.

1:28:56
BR: You know what? It’s a risk I’m willing to take. So, so I just, again, I, it’s a bogus argument on several levels. One of them, of course, is that number one, you know, the whole thing, skeptics don’t do field research is simply not true. Some of them do, but not everybody can do that. I mean, I get that. Not every Bigfoot skeptic has spent years in the woods. And the reason for that is number one, they don’t need to. Second of all, the bigger issue is that it’s failed. It hasn’t worked. You can point to like, well, you know, I spent, I’ve spent every summer for the past 18 years in the Pacific Northwest looking for Bigfoot. How’s that going? How many have you found? Oh, okay. Okay. So, but you think that it’s my job as a skeptic to spend every summer for the next, you know 20 years to outdo you by two years so that I can also find nothing.

1:29:46
CW: Misery loves company.

EM: Is it the obligation of the skeptic to do the field research? I mean, it’s it’s great if you can and I absolutely believe that If you are passionate about a subject it is your responsibility to study up on both sides. I think that if you believe in Bigfoot, you should be reading the negative arguments as well. If you are a skeptic, you should be reading all of the pro writings and looking at all of the evidence that way so that you understand both sides and you can make an informed decision. However, is it the job of the skeptic to go out and to attempt to actively disprove a claim?

1:30:26
BR: I would say no. I mean, you know, we go back to the burden of proof. I’m not claiming Bigfoot doesn’t exist. As I said, I’ve never claimed that. So even if I were to try and prove that, that would be a fool’s errand, because I could go everywhere in the world and show there’s no Bigfoot in every square acre. And then, well, it’s in a cave or it’s in space. So no, it’s not my obligation whatsoever. You bring up a good point, is keep in mind who has the burden of proof. And so, if the Bigfoot believers truly believe that despite the decades of failure in going out and looking for hard evidence of Bigfoot, if they truly think that this next summer we’re going to do another expedition with the BFRO and we’re actually going to find something, go for it. Knock yourself out. No one’s stopping you.

1:31:13
CW: Yeah, this ties back to our discussion earlier about skeptics won’t look at the evidence, supposedly. And this raises the bar of what true believers are expecting of skeptics even further, where they don’t just want skeptics to look at the evidence, they want skeptics to go out and find the evidence themselves. That’s not my job.

1:31:37
BR: No, absolutely. And in some cases, as an investigator, in some cases, I do take on the burden of proof. And I try to be aware of that. For example, there’s many examples. One I’m thinking of is the psychic and the serial killer case with Nancy Weber, where I had that debate with Alex Soteric, as I forget what his name is, with the Skeptico podcast. You know, he claimed that he had the best evidence for psychic detectives and I asked him what he had and he showed me a half-hour TV show And that was his evidence and I I could and should have just walked away and said you haven’t proven your evidence You’ve given me nothing But in that case I decided to take the burden of of doing his work for him and proving his case. And so in that case, I did.

1:32:26
CW: Yeah, well, I guess I guess there’s a lot of people who just expect that a half an hour TV show ought to just answer all questions and act as proof, because that’s what that’s what the Skullcumcast guy wanted you to do.

BR: There you go.

CW: Here’s this DVD you could buy for thirty five dollars and it ought to convince you. Well, speaking of DVDs and recording devices, Erik, you have you have some words for us about those type of things, right?

1:32:50
EM: Specifically, the whole burden of proof issue, and it’s what I call and what others call the cell phone problem. This is an argument that has been raging over the past couple of years over the fact that once upon a time, there were few people who happened to have a camera or knew how to operate camera and had the good fortune to encounter a Bigfoot, an Ogopogo, or whatever that might be. Now, today, in 2019, almost everybody carries a high-definition camera and recording device in their pocket, depending on what numbers you look up on the internet. You know, the projected number of users this year is going to be between 2.5 and 3 billion. So we all have high definition cameras in our pockets at all times and there are all sorts of crazy things that people film every day. Why do we not have more and more compelling footage of lake monsters, of Bigfoot, of UFOs, of ghosts? Why is there seemingly more ambiguous photographs that are being taken rather than the sort of dramatic, a monster is walking, you know, across the frame or, you know, there’s a head and neck shot of the Loch Ness Monster. We’re seeing less of that sort of evidence. The sort of shots that we’re getting now are far less distinct. That’s another issue that at this point, eyewitness testimony should not be enough. If everybody has a cell phone camera and someone says, well, I saw X, Y, or Z, it’s very difficult to take that person at their word when they could have easily pulled out their phone. And even more so when the evidence that is presented, if a person does pull out their phone, is a still shot. It takes half a second to switch over to video mode. And we all know that he still shot can make an ambiguous object look far more convincing than video footage can. So the argument is with cell phones now being at everybody’s fingertips, why are we getting less content? And the cryptozoology people are coming back and they are coming up with some of the more interesting counter arguments that I’ve heard and they basically come down to, well, DSLRs are better than cell phones. And how many photos are you expecting there to be? And unless the video recording device is mounted on a tripod, video mode is not a viable alternative. So basically they’re non-answers.

1:35:34
CW: It sounds like special pleading. I should mention again, I brought this up at the beginning of the episode when I cheerleaded about why we should be taking Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster researchers seriously when we talk about how to dispel their arguments because they’re bad arguments. And the new book out by the Skeptics Guide to the Universe Guys actually mentions Bigfoot and Bigfoot researchers in their section on special pleading. And this fits right in that category. Believers will find a way to add reasons to things. Oh well, they can’t be captured on cell phone footage because, well, they’re psychic and they know when people are coming.

BR: Or they go into different dimensions.

CW: Yeah, or the the signal from the Wi-Fi thing bothers them. It sets off their natural tingly sense and they get away from it naturally. So you can only really view them when all of your devices are off. You know, there’s all these reasons that just bubble up. And you’re absolutely right, Erik. Everybody out there has got a brilliant piece of technology that can take amazing photos and videos and do recordings.  And you can recharge them using devices that will gather electricity from a flowing stream or the sun or any way you want to in the wilderness now. You could literally live out there for a year and just charge your cell phone using any one of these amazing things that we have now. I’m just the future astounds me every day.

EM: Well, first of all the counter arguments you guys just came up with are ten times better than a non response like well a Cellphone can’t really, you know show an animal at a range of half a mile a DSLR is the only way to accurately do that I mean, that’s a non-answer. That’s not a counter argument and it blows my mind. But it’s just so crazy that, you know, I’m sitting on my sofa and my son takes his first step, which I did not see coming, had no idea whatsoever this was going to happen, but I see it beginning to happen. I grab my phone, switch on the video mode and there I’ve got it. I recorded it. I documented it. People are able to do that with all sorts of things every day.

BR: Let me give you an example. At this very moment, as I’m speaking, I’m looking at a crystal-clear, well-done, non-faked photograph of a weasel riding the back of a woodpecker It was taken on on March March 2nd 2015. It’s a real photograph. You can find this by a man named Martin LeMay and It is a I’m looking right at it. It’s it’s it is a it is an amazing thing I’ve never seen it before I wouldn’t have assumed if you had bet me Hey, do do do wheels ride woodpeckers make you know? No, I don’t think they do and I’ll put a hundred bucks on it, but I can see it right here. And so Well, however, it happened and this has been verified. This isn’t this is no hoax So you there are bizarre unusual incredibly rare things that happen all around us that have in fact been documented And so I can look at a weasel riding a woodpecker, but I can’t look at a good photo of a Bigfoot?

CW: I’m looking at that now. That’s got to be a baby weasel. That’s so tiny. That’s crazy. And there’s one here that somebody’s photoshopped a shirtless Vladimir Putin riding the same woodpecker.

BR: I’m skeptical of that one. I want to be crystal clear. I’m skeptical of that one. The weasel, not so much.

CW: Yeah, this is my new favorite photograph. Thank you, Ben.

BR: You’re welcome.

CW: Okay, well, Erik, that’s some really good information you brought to us and again it’s been wonderful having another opinion to talk about why the most popular arguments that cryptozoologists put forth don’t actually hold water.

EM: It’s been fun as always.

1:39:26
CW: Okay.

BR: It’s been great chatting with you. I wish we had more time. We will do it again soon.

1:39:31
EM: Excellent.

(MUSIC)

1:39:32
BR: Well, thanks for joining us for this fantastic fun episode. We hope you all enjoyed it. So Celestia, what do we have coming up next time?

1:39:50
CW: Well, we’re going to be looking at sketchy psychological tests throughout the ages. Not so much psychology tests that have been proven wrong because there’s a lot of those, there’s a ton of those. We picked our three favorites and we’re going to be talking about the rise, the popularization and the fall of some pretty entrenched psychological tests that you probably, you know, that that a lot of you might actually still think hold water.

1:40:31
BR: I can’t wait. I as an undergrad in taking psychology courses, I remember reading about some studies. I’m like, really? This this sounds kind of sketchy to me, but I, I, I didn’t always challenge the teacher. So I’ll be looking forward to talk about.

All right. Well, talk to you then. We would like to thank our sponsor-level patrons Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange.

1:41:05
Every bit helps us keep the lights on here in strange studios and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re looking to provide moral support, head on over to iTunes and give us a five-star review. Every positive review helps us move up the podcast charts. Thanks again, strangers.

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Squaring the Strange is a production of Two Heads Studio, LLC. Copyright 2018. Theme music by Shriekback. Additional music by Memory, Keytard and Feathered, and Pasquale Romero. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, Robert Sundin, and of course our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Head Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Head Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo