In the spirit of the season, we invite you to listen in on our conversation with Cliff Barackman as we let ourselves wonder: is Bigfoot out there?
Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, is the subject of campfire stories and heated conversation as people ponder Bigfoot’s existence. You can go down a YouTube rabbit hole and find convincing evidence on either side of the debate. Cliff Barackman has dedicated much of his life to studying Bigfoot. He owns the North American Bigfoot Center in Boring, Oregon, and he was one of the main experts featured on Animal Planet’s show, Finding Bigfoot. In the spirit of the season, we invite you to listen in on our conversation with Cliff as we let ourselves wonder: is Bigfoot out there?
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Cliff Barackman:
I know Sasquatches are real animals. I've seen them, I've tracked them, I've smelled them. I know they're real, there's no doubt. To me that means their discovery or academic acceptance is inevitable. It will happen. Some hunter will pull a trigger one day and kill one, or maybe a logging truck we'll hit one on the way to work. Something will happen and a corpse will come in and then the mystery will be over.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, raise your hand if you believe in Sasquatch, like who here actually believes in Sasquatch? Oh, my goodness. Both my producer's hands are raised. All right, Chelsea, you're nodding your head over here. What is your experience with Sasquatch?
Chelsea:
So, 16 year old me hopped in a pickup truck with three of my friends and we drove to Eastern Washington on a whim. And so we had no place to stay or anywhere to go. So we just drove up a forest service road and our plan was to sleep in the back of the truck. And we were just hanging out and we started hearing these weird noises that were unlike any noise I've heard. And I've been camping my whole life. I've been outside, I've done backpacking, I've done all of that. It was like a weird kind of like deep huffing noise. It wasn't a bear, that wasn't anything. And so we sent my friend Jake out to go explore with his airsoft rifle, which would do nothing. And he just, about 10 minutes later, he just came screaming back to the car and said he saw a big thing in the distance. And then for the rest of the night, we just kind of hear these deep grumbling noises from in the distance of in the trees.
Shelby Stanger:
Any way to impersonate that grumbly noise?
Chelsea:
Absolutely not. I can't.
Shelby Stanger:
Come on if like if like Sasquatch, you made a noise. Like, [roaring sound].
Chelsea:
No, no, no. It was a lot more subtle. It was like a deep rumbling. It's like more from your throat or like guttural than you would ever hear come from a creature, which is why it was so scary to us because it wasn't like anything we'd ever heard before.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, Sylvia, you believe in Sasquatch for real?
Sylvia:
Oh, well before we interviewed Cliff, I didn't, but now I do.
Shelby Stanger:
What made you change your mind?
Sylvia:
The way that Cliff talks about the footprints and stuff and how it's, couldn't be possible for just to be someone in a suit doing the footprints, given where the ankles and the toes and everything hit. That was really convincing to me as well.
Shelby Stanger:
I thought cliff was incredibly convincing. Do I believe in Sasquatch after listening to him? I believe in the idea of Sasquatch, for sure. I think Sasquatch is a wild idea. Do I think I'll see Sasquatch in my life? I'm not sure, but I sure hope so. I think it'd be fun and good thing is I can run really fast.
Sylvia:
That is a good thing.
Shelby Stanger:
The existence of Sasquatch is the subject of heated debate, spooky campfire stories, and even silly conversations with your coworkers. When I found out we were doing an episode about Sasquatch, I'll be honest, I laughed. But after interviewing Cliff Barackman, I had to rethink my stance. And I was surprised to find out that half of the Wild Ideas production team are believers. Sasquatch, also known as Bigfoot, is a mysterious creature. Imagine a giant hairy animal, kind of like a seven foot tall ape. The sightings are extremely rare, but mostly happen in remote wooded areas. For today's conversation, I'm inviting you to keep an open mind about whether Bigfoot exists or not. You might be surprised what you end up believing. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Shelby Stanger:
There's a lot of folklore about Bigfoot. There's lots of fictional stories and maybe even some factual stories that seem fictional. There are also some stories that seem really freaking believable. You can definitely go down a YouTube rabbit hole and find convincing evidence on either side of the debate. But Cliff Barackman has dedicated much of his life to studying Bigfoot. He's been gathering evidence about Sasquatch since the 1990s, and he's made a name for himself in the Bigfoot field. Cliff works with scientists and historians on his research. He owns the North American Bigfoot Center in Boring, Oregon, and he was one of the main experts featured on Animal Planet's Show, Finding Bigfoot. For Cliff, the evidence is clear. Sasquatch is out there.
Shelby Stanger:
Cliff Barackman welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Cliff Barackman:
Thank you so much for having me on.
Shelby Stanger:
You've obviously seen Bigfoot?
Cliff Barackman:
I've seen one.
Shelby Stanger:
Tell me about when you first saw one and then what kind of evidence does one need to be like a Bigfoot sleuth?
Cliff Barackman:
Well, my sighting wasn't the best sighting. It's kind of mediocre at best. I saw it through a thermal imager. A thermal imager is an optics tool that sees heat in the environment. So it's kind of like night vision, but a little different. And Sasquatches being mammals like deer and humans and everything else, we radiate heat. So out in the woods, something radiating heat would be much warmer than the surrounding areas. I saw this thing through a thermal imager for five or eight seconds. Not very long. It was walking from left to right along a hillside, about 70 yards from me at about two in the morning, I was about two miles off trail at the time. And this thing was just navigating the hillside without a light, just kind of cruising through the brush. And one of our guys tried to get close to it, it quickly outpaced us. And about 30, 40 minutes later, we got a big vocalization off the hillside. It walked very unusually, very peculiar gait. And it was also one color from head to toe because remember, I'm seeing the same through my thermal imager. And it was February in the mountains of North Carolina. And so if you were wearing clothing, your clothing or your puffy jackets or whatever, it would be keeping your heat in, there would be differentiation in the heat pattern. But this thing was basically one color from head to toe. So I guess it could have been a naked human out in the woods, walking around spying on us. That's a possibility, but I'm inclined to think that it was likely a Sasquatch.
Shelby Stanger:
What year was this?
Cliff Barackman:
2011.
Shelby Stanger:
So 2011, February, you saw your first one?
Cliff Barackman:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
But you'd been obsessed with it for years.
Cliff Barackman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, well, I'm not one of these people who need to see something to believe it. For example, I've never seen an atom and I'm pretty confident they're real based on the evidence. Never seen a black hole, but sure enough, the model seems to be that black holes are real. The evidence can tell you if something is real or not. You don't have to actually see something.
Shelby Stanger:
So tell me more about the evidence. What kind of evidence is out there with Bigfoot and what tools, I mean, you just mentioned the thermal heat. They use that to look for people who get lost in the woods all the time. So what sort of evidence is out there for Bigfoot?
Cliff Barackman:
Well, there's actually a tremendous amount of evidence. Most people are unfamiliar with it, which is interesting because I find that the more diehard the skeptic is usually, the less acquainted with the evidence they are. But isn't that the truth of everything, right? I'll just approach this chronologically. Literally, every native indigenous tribe in North America that lives in suitable habitat has stories of these things. They have words for these things and tales about them in the oral tradition. That just doesn't make sense to me, at least, that the people in British Columbia are describing the same sort of creatures as the native people in Georgia. They have the same descriptions of these animals and oftentimes showing the same behaviors that weren't discovered for centuries after these stories were told. There's actually-
Shelby Stanger:
But we have lots of stories about Santa Claus and not lots of evidence.
Cliff Barackman:
Well, yeah, yeah. But a little bit different here. This is only the tip of the iceberg, you see.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay.
Cliff Barackman:
If we move beyond the indigenous people, we can go to the early settlers. And as I mentioned, as they started moving inwards towards the central part of the United States, they started running across these animals as well. And a lot of these stories ended up in the newspapers at the time about seven foot tall gorilla like things. And it is so interesting too because the lowland gorilla was only discovered in something like 1851 or two or something like that. And before 1850, I'll just say, these things were described as wild man and all this other stuff. But after 1850 people started saying a wild gorilla had been seen in the woods of California or they started using the new terms because gorillas were suddenly a real thing.
Cliff Barackman:
Then of course, the largest primate on the planet that's currently accepted is the mountain gorilla. And it was only discovered in 1902, I believe. So even gorillas were elusive beyond reality, if you want to say that, until very recently, pretty much. And of course, these sightings still go on. There are about three or 400 footprint casts that have been obtained over the years. You see a lot of people look at a Sasquatch footprint and say, "Oh, that's just a big old human footprint. They probably just took a human thing and blew it up to that size." And actually it's not.
Cliff Barackman:
When you look at the markers in the foot and the way it bends, you can actually kind of infer where the bones are in the foot. And it turns out that the differences that you see are the necessary redesigns of the foot biomechanically to carry a mass of their size. And then one of those structural differences is their shortening of the metatarsal. The metatarsal are the bones right behind your toe bones. And then they end right below your ankle. And so if you shorten the metatarsal, what happens is that the ankle bone moves forward on the foot, which functionally elongates the heel bone. By elongating the heel, and so the calf muscles can pull up on it, you're actually making it so the calf muscles do less work.
Cliff Barackman:
Yeah, they have to travel further. The work is conserved, but it actually takes less energy to pull that foot up and propel it forward. And also in that Sasquatch footprint, we have something called longitudinal arch, which is the arch in our foot, essentially. Sasquatch is, it is now known do not have an arch. They have flexibility in the midtarsal joint right underneath the ankle. And so do every other species of ape and most human ancestors. So the congruence of the evidence is spectacular to me. And I could go through, yeah, the native people knew about them. There's a historical reports people still see them, but when you take a 30,000 foot view on everything and start saying, all these footprints show the same features that we didn't even know about until Dr. Jeff Meldrum, who's a Professor of Anatomy and a specialist in primate feet started publishing papers in about year 2000 on this stuff.
Cliff Barackman:
But yet we can go back to 1958 and those early photographs and see evidence of this same thing. And the Patterson-Gimlin film, for example, the real famous footage of the female Sasquatch walking across the sandbar from left to right. You can see her foot bend in that same place. And you can also see how her heel looks longer than it should. It's a fascinating perspective, how all of this evidence fits together like a puzzle piece.
Shelby Stanger:
How do we know it's not just a giant gorilla or something else that already exists in nature is not its own thing, or it's a person dressed up in a costume?
Cliff Barackman:
Well, you see, from some perspectives and in a very simplistic view, it is kind of a giant gorilla, essentially at the end of the day, but walks bipedally But it's not a gorilla because it's a different species. What we have here with Sasquatch is a relict hominoid. That's a fancy way of saying stuff. Let me break that down. Relict is a biological term that means still existing in small numbers, even though they were probably more widespread. A good example of that would be any of the ape species. They're very isolated. They have isolated habitat. They're not found widespread. There are probably a lot more of them, or better yet the coelacanth fish, that fish that was thought to be extinct for 25 million years until some fishermen off of Madagascar, there was selling one in a fish market and an archeologist walks by and goes "I know what that is. Wait a minute." And suddenly, they're real. They were always real. All local people in Madagascar were eating them. So they knew about these things, but the science rediscovered them, basically.
Cliff Barackman:
Those are examples of relict populations. Hominoid of course, means human-shaped thing. So all the apes and humans are obviously hominoids. So this is a relict hominoid. This is what we're dealing with here. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, more fossils were uncovered. And the dating of those fossils clearly showed us without a doubt, that many species of hominims, human ancestors and our relatives existed on the planet at the same time. So it's not a tree, it's not a linear sort of thing. It's this big bushy situation, where these branches go out in all directions. And some of those branches die off. Some of them keep on going, and a lot of different species existed at the same time and same place, that off the top of my head, that's 10 species of our relatives alive on the planet in the last 100,000 years, which is the blink of an eye geologically speaking.
Cliff Barackman:
Who's to say that's all of them? Who's to say that there aren't other smaller populations of these hominins are relatives like Sasquatches or Yetis or Omestes or Yeren or Yowie living elsewhere on the planet? Still undiscovered in these far-flung corners of the globe. So we're dealing with a relict hominoid here. The second half of that question is how do we know it's not a dude in a suit? There are certainly guys in suits being filmed and put on YouTube and all this. There's a lot of hoaxing, which really muddies the water in my opinion. And that's part of the reason that the subject isn't taken seriously by scientists.
Shelby Stanger:
Hearing about all that evidence is quite convincing. One of the most famous documented encounters was captured in the Patterson-Gimlin film that Cliff mentioned. It's a short film that was shot in the 1960s, and it claimed to catch a Sasquatch on camera. There are plenty of skeptics who say the film is fake, but for many, it seems pretty believable. So you mentioned this Patterson-Gimlin film. Can you tell me about that? It seems like a pretty big deal.
Cliff Barackman:
The Patterson-Gimlin film was filmed in October 1967. Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin were on an expedition. Bob Gimlin didn't even really believe in Bigfoot necessarily. Bob is still alive, Patterson passed away in the early 70s. Two Cowboys from Yakima, Washington. And Roger was just on fire about Bigfoot. He got the bug bad. I mean, he published a book on the subject. He was interviewing witnesses left and right. He was trying to cast as many prints as possible. So they went down to Northern California because some footprints were found in August of 1967. And as soon as they can get down the road October. So they went down there in hopes of filming some footprints on the ground. So they brought the camera along, Roger was trying to put together a documentary at the time. And towards the end of their two week trip, they came pretty close to a Sasquatch.
Cliff Barackman:
They came around this big root wad and there she was, she was like standing there in the river, squatting down and doing something rather. Roger's horse panicked, kind of reared up, threw Roger off the horse. And then Roger got control of his horse, got his camera out of the bag. It was a Kodak K100. And by then the Sasquatch kind of like looked him over a bit, stood there for a moment and started walking away. And so when the film begins, Roger is actually running after the Sasquatch. It was about a 100 feet away at that point. And then at some point he kind of falls to his knees and starts filming this thing. And then that's when the closest and best frames of the film. And she walks from left to right. At one point, she turns and looks over towards the camera.
Cliff Barackman:
She wasn't looking at the camera. It turns out she was looking at Bob Gimlin who rode his horse across the river at that point to kind of back Roger up with his gun. And then Roger basically filmed this thing. And it was about a one minute piece of footage and people say it's blurry. It's not blurry, actually. It says 16 millimeter, super chrome film, and has also set on infinite focus. So everything in there is as focused as it can be. It's just it happens at 60 millimeters of course, is the size of the frame. And the largest of the creature ever is in any frame is one millimeter tall. So it's remarkably clear, actually. It's clear enough. You can see individual fingers moving on the creature.
Cliff Barackman:
But the details in the film are not able to be reproduced by someone in a suit. You can see muscles bulging when the weight of the animal is put on her legs. You can actually see, as she's swinging her arms and walking away from the camera, you can see evidence of the shoulder blades moving underneath the skin. The creature isn't really big. She's only between six, six and a half feet tall, which actually puts it in human range. Maybe it is a person in a suit. But the problem with that, even at six foot or six and a half feet taller, her shoulders are 31 or 32 inches wide. That's extraordinarily wide. And her arms are longer than any other person on the planet, because there's something called an intermemberal index. Basically, the ratio of your arm length to your leg length.
Cliff Barackman:
In humans, it's about 0.75 or something like that. So our arms are 75% the length of our legs on average. Then the other great apes, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas it's over one, so 1.08, 1.1, something like that because their arms are longer than their legs. That Sasquatch in the Patterson-Gimlin film, depending on the frame you use to measure is somewhere between 0.8 and 0.9. So her arms are actually longer in proportion to their legs than anyone on the planet. Now, let's go back for a minute. If that's a dude in a suit or a really robust female in a suit, the height isn't unreachable, but the shoulder width is, and of course they said, "Well, you can just put extensions or pads on there." Not really, because you'd have to have arms longer than anyone on the planet because you see her fingers moving. Individual fingers are moving in the film.
Cliff Barackman:
And people say, "Oh, just put extensions on the end of the arms." No, none of that doesn't work either because her elbows are appropriately distanced and they move to. So there are so many things about this film, and I can go back to the footprints again. You can actually see her foot flexing at one point. You can see the elongation of the heel, you can see her calf muscles bulging. You can see her thigh muscles bulge when they put weight on it. Dr. Jeff Meldrum from Idaho State University, who is a professional anatomist. He shows that film to his anatomy class and says, "Identify every muscle group moving." And they do. The film is remarkable.
Shelby Stanger:
But from a paleontology perspective, if Bigfoot exists, how come no one has ever discovered Bigfoot bones? Where do Bigfoots go to die?
Cliff Barackman:
I get asked all the time, that if Sasquatches our real, where are the bones? And my reply to that question is if bears are real, where are their bones? The thing is, we have bear bones from bears that have been shot or bears in zoos and all that sort of stuff. We don't really have bear bones from naturally dead bears. You see that there's basically two kinds of animals out there. There's predators and prey. The prey species like deer and rabbits and stuff, they don't get to choose where they die. But the apex predators, the ones that are at the top of the food chain, like bears and mountain lions and Sasquatches, presumably, they actually get to choose where they die. Just like us when we're sick, we kind of squirrel ourselves away in safe areas and put ourselves to bed. They probably do the same thing.
Cliff Barackman:
So they probably find really, really thick brush and lay down and try to get better. And one day they don't, they die. Now, within a few hours to a few days of their death, scavengers would move in and start eating away at the flesh and dispersing the body parts, making the whatever bones might be leftover really, really hard to identify. Other animals move in and start eating away at the bones, and even the hair. Moths eat the hair. And the bones are eaten by the most plentiful animal in North America, by biomass, which is the deer mouse, as do wood rats and porcupines and coyotes, and even deer and elk. That's where they get the calcium for their antlers.
Cliff Barackman:
So basically, all the body parts of any animal, whether it's a Sasquatch or a bear or a human or whatever, out in the woods will be quickly recycled, but also consider how rare the species is. People who are far more knowledgeable than I am about ecology estimate that there's probably 100 bear for every one Sasquatch, and that's obviously a very rough number. We have no idea, but I think it's a pretty safe bet. So even in my state of Oregon, where there's 30 to 35,000 black bears, that means there's maybe 300, 350 Bigfoot. That's really not very many.
Shelby Stanger:
When we come back, Cliff talks about a Sasquatch encounter he had in April of this year and what his life is like as a Bigfooter.
Shelby Stanger:
If we've totally convinced you that Bigfoot exists, and you're feeling a little nervous about your next wilderness adventure, don't worry. We'll let you in on one little tidbit that might make you feel better.
Cliff Barackman:
There are a few stories of Sasquatches either attacking or in one case that I know of killing somebody. That one case of them killing somebody, that story was told by Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1893 book, The Wilderness Hunter. It was called the Bauman Incident in the Salmon River watershed, kind of on the border of Montana, Idaho. This guy named Bauman, went in there with his buddies and they were trapping. And they found these footprints that they thought were big grizzly bears or something. But then they noticed, well, this bear is walking on two legs and it could it be a really big person, but there are too big to be a person, had to be a bear, but there are no claws.
Shelby Stanger:
Once Bauman and his buddy saw these footprints in their camp, they got spooked and decided to pack up and head home. Bauman left the camp to grab one of their traps. And when he returned, he found his friend dead on the ground. The body was still warm with four awful fang marks across his neck. And Bauman saw those same big foot prints surrounding his dead friend. So I guess it could have either been a Sasquatch or maybe a vampire with extremely large feet. As the owner of the North American Bigfoot Center, Cliff has heard hundreds of stories about Bigfoot encounters. Some people are pretty shaken up when they see a Sasquatch, but their testimony often aligns with the evidence.
Cliff Barackman:
One of the most amazing stories I've heard at least recently came from April 14th, 2021. A gentlemen that came in the shop and shared this story with us, outside of Stevenson, Washington, which is on the Columbia River. It's about an hour or so east of Portland, Oregon on the Columbia River, but on the Washington side. This gentleman gets off work quite late, like after midnight. And he generally brings his coworker home and then drives himself home. So he's driving his friend home, drops him off, and then he's driving himself to his house. And there's this one corner over on the edge of town, I guess, that there's a vacant house. So a lot of deer have taken to bedding down on the lawn. And he drives by this house every night and he takes pictures of the deer. He actually showed me photographs of deer that he had taken prior to this event.
Cliff Barackman:
But he always goes slowly around that corner because he knows that there's a deer in the area. So this particular night, between 12:30 and one in the morning, he's taken this corner. And then something runs in front of his car quite quickly. He thought it was a person in a ghillie suit or somebody in ragged clothing at first. And of course, he swerves to the left and stops. And right in front of his car in the ditch in front of him is a stump. And one side of his head is going, "There's a stump." And the other side of his brain is going, "You drive this every single night. There's no stump there." And that his brain that are used back and forth for a few moments, but then the stump stands up. The stump stands up and turns around and it's like this eight foot tall, it's a Sasquatch, and it's totally lit up by the wonky headlight. It's right there. It's literally 12 feet from where he's sitting in his vehicle, right in front.
Cliff Barackman:
The Sasquatch kind of bends over slightly and then opens its arms, it goes [roar], just yells, like shakes him to his core. This vocalization is loud and close. And this guy's mind is blown, blown. Imagine what would be going through your brain if you're confronted with this reality that you never really entertained before. That Sasquatch does something very peculiar. It raises his left arm perpendicular to this body. It doesn't point to anything, just raises his left arm and he's going like, what in the world... The left arm was it basically went across the entire hood of a car. That's how long this arm was. And he took that as like get out of here. So he did, he got out of there. He drove home.
Cliff Barackman:
And his brother who works at the same place, came home about 20 minutes later and found him like white knuckle in the steering wheel in the car. Then his brother goes, "What's going on?" And he tells him, "Let's go back." And he goes, "No way, I'm not going back there." But his brother does. And looks around, he doesn't see anything, drives back to this gentlemen. And says, "I didn't see anything, but sure smells over there." And describes the smell and this guy says, "Oh, yeah, that's what I smelled too."
Cliff Barackman:
I eventually heard that story directly from the witness. And here at the North American Bigfoot Center, we have a really nice Bigfoot statue in our exhibit hall. It's very realistic. And whenever I have someone like this guy, who's seen a Sasquatch, very close. I invite him in the back and say, "Hey, here's our statue. Tell me what's different? Tell me what's the same?" So I did that with this guy, his name's Jeremy. So I come back with Jeremy and go, "Hey, check this out." And I'm pointing at the statute saying, "Hey, tell me what's different?" And I look back at him. The dude is crying. The dude is tearing up. He's covered with goosebumps. And there are tears on his cheeks.
Cliff Barackman:
And there's like another half dozen customers in the back room. This guy is six foot four, a former security guard. He's tough. And his tears are welling up in his eyes, looking at Murphy saying, "Yeah, that's pretty much it. He was terrified. We made arrangements to go out to the location the next day. And out there we did an onsite interview. We made a video for our museum members about it. And I found a footprint at the scene. I found a footprint that again, is morphologically the same as the other Sasquatch prints on record.
Shelby Stanger:
What is this smell? Can you describe it?
Cliff Barackman:
Oh, well, yeah. I've smelled them three times. Twice it was exactly the same, even though the smells were hundreds of miles apart. And the other time was in, both of those were in California. One of the Sierras, one in Northern California. In Tennessee, I smelled one. It kind of smelled like a wet skunk, but both times in California and Northern California in the Siskiyou wilderness area, and then the Sierras and Stanislaus National Forest, it kind of smelled like dog crap parmesan.
Shelby Stanger:
Dog poop mixed with cheese?
Cliff Barackman:
Yeah, something like that. Then one of those cases I was out and we had Sasquatch activity the night before, sounds and screams and stuff like that, very close to camp. And then two weeks later I was following up on this multiple witness siting by Marines up in Stanislaus National Forest. And they said that it walked through this area and walked in between these trees. And when I got to the area in between the trees, the tree smelled like that. So those are the three times that I've smelled them, but really only 10 or 15% of sighting reports have a smell associated with them.
Shelby Stanger:
Why is like the Pacific Northwest such a hotbed for Bigfoot?
Cliff Barackman:
There's a couple of reasons. Number one, there is a lot of habitat. All animals need food, water, and cover. And there happens to be a tremendous amount of that in the Pacific Northwest. Of course, that doesn't mean that's the only place Sasquatches are around. You can find them in most states, at least historically, Delaware doesn't have anything recent, but that you can go back to the historical records and find evidence of them. But wherever there's food, water, and cover. And if other animals like bears and mountain lions live in the area, Sasquatches are probably around too. Maybe not a lot of them, maybe just occasionally, but they're around. And also the Pacific Northwest, everybody thinks that that's the home of Bigfoot, et cetera. And that's largely because the early researchers, they all lived here and wrote about it.
Shelby Stanger:
What do you think Sasquatches do? Or what do they want with humans? Or do they not want with humans? Like they don't want to hurt us. Do they make babies? Where are they into?
Cliff Barackman:
They're just animals. I mean, they're animals, they're smart animals, but so are we, we're smart animals to. And they're kind of doing similar things as say bears or mountain lions. I think a lot of their time is spent just eating, foraging essentially because they have a large body. We don't know anything about their metabolisms, of course, and from what I understand, ape metabolisms are pretty slow, but they probably spent a lot of times looking for food, but they're also real smart. So I suspect that when they have a good a nice honey hole where there's a lot of food, they hang out there. And then that gives them a little bit of leisure time. And if they have free time, they'll check out what's going on in the environment.
Cliff Barackman:
I would even venture to say they probably have some sort of sense of humor because a lot of researchers when they're out there, when they see the Sasquatch, or if they see a Sasquatch, a lot of times it's watching them, it's actually watching them. So isn't that interesting that, I suspect that Sasquatches probably know a lot more about us than we know about them.
Shelby Stanger:
There are not a lot of people who are as in the Bigfoot as Cliff, his livelihood revolves around this creature. He spends his days educating tourists at the Bigfoot Center, visiting locations of Sasquatch sightings and recording his Bigfoot podcasts. And in his spare time, he goes out Bigfooting. This is basically going out into the woods and trying to attract a Sasquatch.
Cliff Barackman:
There are several ways that I go Bigfooting, and it depends how many people are out with me. I very often go alone because I like being in the woods alone at night. There's something peaceful out there. And when I'm alone, I know I'm deer-sized. I also know that there's a whole lot of mountain lions where I go. So I'm not going to tempt a mountain lion into eating me. So when I go alone, I tend to stay pretty close to camp. I may or may not have a fire. And I bring my guitar and I fiddle and I play and this singing or whatever. I do whatever I do because I'm trying to bring them to me. The forest is too large. They can see in the dark, I can't, they know their way around. I try to bring them to me like, "I'm here, I'm doing something unusual. I'm doing something you've probably never seen. Come check me out." Maybe I can get them to make a noise on accident. Maybe I can detect them. Maybe I can see them on the thermal imager. I've heard them lots of times, only seen one, so. That's my version of going Bigfooting alone.
Cliff Barackman:
If I go with other people though, then we've changed strategies. Basically, we would probably take night walks, walk a mile down the path without a light. And then you come back and you listen along the way. And maybe you make a call to imitate their vocalizations, to see if they're going to call back. And that's kind of like casting the line out into the water and reeling back. These sounds that we make, they're kind of like chumming. I love fishing. This is one of these outdoor activities I really love to do. And so the fishing analogy metaphor works really well with Bigfooting as well. You're basically chumming the water making noises, trying to attract the Sasquatches to you or the fish to the boat and casting by doing these night walks to see perhaps maybe you can get one close enough to film.
Shelby Stanger:
What kind of gear do you like to take with you when you're Bigfooting?
Cliff Barackman:
The most important piece of gear actually is a notebook. So you can take notes on the things that you see, the things that you don't see. If you do find any evidence, you can write all the details down. But beyond that, the easiest way to gather Sasquatch evidence of any sort that is empirical, like you can share with people as sound evidence, these knocks or these calls that they do. So like $100 give or take sound recorder. You showed me, you have a Zoom H6 I believe? I have the same units. It's fantastic for the field. It is absolutely fantastic for the field. Something like that would be wonderful. Your unit records all night, which is really nice because you never know when they're going to call.
Cliff Barackman:
You can try to elicit calls, but they don't always cooperate. They might call it random at 3:30 in the morning when you're sleeping. So that'd be another great piece of equipment to bring out. Cameras are essential because if you find the footprint or if you find hair samples, if you find anything, you want to document the circumstances as best you can. Your phone is wonderful because there's video as well in case you see one. And there's also all sorts of fancy night equipment like night vision optics and thermal imagers and stuff like that too. But really, the most essential stuff has probably a camera and a notebook.
Shelby Stanger:
What about like snacks to share with it?
Cliff Barackman:
There's been some properties that have come to our attention that Sasquatches frequent sometimes, maybe not every day or anything, but a couple of times a year they might cruise by. And from people who have lived amongst them, so to speak, they say meats and sweets go real big with that. They like the meats and the sweets. And of course, they might be feeding raccoons and bears a whole lot too. But every once in a while, you never know, because some peculiar things have come out from that. For example, in the Sierra Nevada mountains they put a bunch of apples up in between some branches in a tree. And when they came back to it, all the apples were gone, but one and that one apple had been moved for three or four feet higher in the tree. It was like, "Well, is that a raccoon? I don't know. It wasn't a Bigfoot? I don't know that either." But it's enticing and it's intriguing and it deserves a closer look and maybe repeatability because that's what science is about. Can you repeat the results?
Shelby Stanger:
What makes Bigfoot so alluring? I mean, because people are obsessed with Bigfoot, who are obsessed with them. You got into it.
Cliff Barackman:
Yeah, that's a really good question. I'm not sure what the answer is. And there's probably as many answers as there are people. But I think if I had to take five or ten steps back and look at society as a whole, I think that there's something enticing about seeing an animal that is so similar to us in so many ways. And they look similar to us. They walk similar to, but I think that our fascination with Sasquatches is somewhere in that line, kind of seeing ourselves in the other species that are not us. It might even represent something that we've lost because we've certainly domesticated ourselves. And in our "civilized society", although I might argue it's not as civilized as we think. They can get along without clothing and politics and taxes and jobs and live a thriving life. I don't know. I don't know. That might be something for philosophers once they're proven to be real animals.
Shelby Stanger:
So you've taken your curiosity for Bigfoot Sasquatch and you've turned this into a TV show with Animal Planet on Discovery Channel. You have a podcast that's crushing it. And you have this museum in Boring, Oregon, which I imagine is not so boring because there's this cool museum there. How did you do it? Has it been organic, has it been trial and error? Have you just continued to follow your passion? Do you block out the naysayers? This is a really wild idea, whether I believe in Bigfoot or not, I think it's great that you've followed your passion and made it a career.
Cliff Barackman:
Well, I appreciate the kind words and really it's more of an educational pursuit than anything. It's kind of like a Joseph Campbell ideas, like follow your bliss. If you follow your bliss, it's like surfing really. You look at the opportunity, you make the most of what the universe presents to you at the time. And you make a couple turns when you have too and see where you end up. A lot of it is luck. A lot of it is I love the natural sciences. I'm just enthralled by all of it. And I want to participate in it and I would like to think that perhaps my participation has proven on some level, at least for some people to be worthy of paying attention to. I try to do the best work I can, doing what I love. And I've kind of got really, really lucky along the way, essentially.
Shelby Stanger:
But because you do something pretty eccentric, you must get people who aren't always super positive about your work or like doubted or whatever. I'm just curious, what you do to block them out and lean into the people who are just excited about your work instead?
Cliff Barackman:
Well, I certainly target my work to the people who are kind of following me along and appreciate and encourage me. But I have a lot of followers on all my social media stuff and being on TV, looking for something that a lot of most people don't even think is real, kind of puts a target on you, especially when you take it seriously because our show we always told the truth about Bigfoot stuff. We may not have had to take a helicopter to get somewhere that's the TV story part, but when it came to Bigfoot, we never lied, ever. And that's something to be proud of. But that certainly puts a target on you. And honestly, I'm a quiet, introverted homebody at heart. I like camping alone or just with my wife, for example, or my dog or something. I like being alone. I love my alone time, quiet time. And I still don't understand people very well, because there's a lot of people in the world that I don't particularly agree with. There is a surprising amount of antagonism towards what I do. But then again, I'm also a sensitive guy and that one or two negative comments on Facebook it's probably going to hurt my feelings. And I'll carry that a lot longer than the 20 or 30 people that say, "This is amazing, Cliff, thank you."
Shelby Stanger:
I guess with something like Bigfoot, they're always going to be haters, but you've definitely made me believe a little. I'm going to the Sierras in a couple of weeks to Mammoth. What clues can I look for? Or what can I do to see if I can attract a Sasquatch?
Cliff Barackman:
If you're going up into the Mammoth area and hiking up into the hills, look for the big herds of deer. If you find a lot of deer sign around or if you're hearing coyotes at night and that sort of thing, one of the easiest ways to Bigfoot essentially is at night, say it's midnight or something like that, step away from the fire and go 50, 100 yards away from the fire. Let things cool down for a few moments, maybe five minutes, then hit a tree with a stick, go like a nice big pop noise, because Sasquatches, we call it tree knocking. Although to be fair, we don't exactly know how they're making the noise. I have two reports, two eye witness reports of Sasquatches hitting a tree with a stick, but I have three reports of them clapping, which is a known ape behavior.
Cliff Barackman:
Gorillas, it turns out they clap to signal each other when people come and leave their area and it's a communication technique for gorillas. And I suspect Sasquatches are largely clapping. They might be hitting stuff on the trees. It might even be making it like or something in their mouth. I don't know, but they do these things. We call them tree knocks. And sometimes if you do one, one might answer and of course people say, "Well, how do you know it's not this or that or whatever?" Well, because sometimes they actually mimic the patterns you're doing, which is astonishing when you're out there and you go [clap clap] and then you get pop, pop back in the next time you go one and then there's one coming back and the next time pop, pop, and you get pop, pop, pop, pop.
Cliff Barackman:
That's astonishing because if you're going backpacking, you kind of know if there's anybody else in the neighborhood. You would have seen them. You would have heard them. You would have seen their fire. Oftentimes, when you're out in the woods, you can be fairly certain that there's no one around at least within a half mile or a mile. And when that kind of stuff happens at one or two in the morning, it's really mind blowing.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm definitely going to try clapping in the woods on my next hike or maybe I won't. I'm not sure that I actually want to encounter a Sasquatch. And on the other hand, I'm still not totally convinced that Bigfoot exists. What do you all think? Let us know in a review or by commenting on this episode on the REI website. And if you want to hear more about Sasquatch, you can listen to REI's other podcasts called Camp Monsters. They've produced several episodes about Sasquatch. The Dark Divide Sasquatch episode features Harvest Moon, a Quinault native elder. She retells the traditional Quinault tale about this mysterious creature. You can find the link in our show notes.
Shelby Stanger:
Cliff Barackman, thank you so much for coming on the show and opening up my curiosity about Bigfoot. I loved learning about Sasquatch and hearing your passion about this wild idea. If you want to learn more about Cliff, you can tune into his podcast called Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. You can also watch his TV show, Finding Bigfoot on most streaming platforms. If you're near Boring, Oregon, you can go visit cliff at the North American Bigfoot Center. And of course, you can connect with him online. His Twitter handle is @CliffBarackman and on Instagram he's also at cliff.barackman. That's C-L-I-F-F.B-A-R-A-C-K-M-A-N.
Shelby Stanger:
[Roar] Bigfoot. [Roar] What kind of sounds do you think Bigfoot would make? [Grunting] Or maybe they would sound like a Howler monkey like [monkey sounds]. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, written and edited by the talented Annie Fassler and Sylvia Thomas and produced by our amazing Chelsea Davis. Our executive producers are these really cool guys, Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we appreciate when you follow this show, when you rate it, and when you review it, wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.