(Interview) D. B. Donlon's Interview with Henry Franzoni 3-17-2009

Franzoni

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

In the Spirit of Seatco: Interview with Henry Franzoni

As I mentioned last week, I spoke with Henry Franzoni on a multitude of issues relating to Bigfoot, or as he calls them, Seatco. Henry has a lot of very interesting things to say and we covered a lot of ground. In a lot of cases I'd probably pare back the interview to hit the highlights, but really, it's mostly highlights. So I'm inclined to run the whole thing. But it'll take a long time to get it all up. For one thing, I'm not finished transcribing it!

But be forewarned -- Henry's views of the bigfoot phenomenon are not your garden variety views. He has a very idiosyncratic viewpoint built up over years of personal experience, and also though interacting with various PNW Indian tribes. I know that some of what Henry says and thinks will be very hard for most bigfoot enthusiasts to swallow. But I hope you'll read through it all and get a feel for where he's coming from. And even though we spoke at length, we still didn't have time to uncover all of Henry's thoughts. But, if you want to know more, you are in luck, because Henry does have a book wherein he lays his theories plain: In the Spirit of Seatco. I've just finished reading the book and I found it very interesting indeed. A lot of it, I have to admit, went over my head. I'm not an electrical engineer, nor anything close, so there were some gaps in my knowledge that prevented me from getting a firm grip on all of it, but what I did understand seemed to come together into a world view that would, if Henry is correct, not only allow for bigfoot to have "Puzzling Powers," as he calls them (following Rupert Sheldrake), but would even explain how they have these abilities.

I'm pleased that Henry has decided to come forth with his ideas at this time. The recent death of Erick Beckjord left the paranormal position without a clear champion. In Henry Franzoni, whether he wants the mantle or not, they have got not only a champion, but a clear thinking, science-minded advocate who actually bothers to try to make sense.

I know that will throw some people, because they already know about the invisible bigfoot and the starter motor. But just wait until you see what a starter motor has to do with Nikolas Tesla and his alternate theory of electricity.. and how that would relate to bigfoot and their puzzling powers. If you were writing a mystery, you couldn't put it together better.

But that's to get ahead of the game. First and foremost, as you will see here, Henry will talk about his research connecting sighting reports and geography.

So let's get to it.

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Henry: Hello, this is Henry

DB: Well hello Henry, this is DB!

Henry: Greetings!

DB: Yes, good to talk to you.

Henry: Likewise. What would you like to talk about? Bigfoot? I mean, I want you to know that I would be happy to talk about any Bigfoot related topic whatsoever.

DB: Well, my discussions are often wide ranging, so we might get around to any and all! (laughs) But I wanted to start with some things that I read in your book. Now I'm only about 50 pages in so far..

Henry: Okay, that's alright. Thank you! I'm glad you read 50 pages! I hope you liked it.

DB: I did and I'm gonna read the whole thing, so don't worry about that. And it's fascinating because the way that you were.. now I'm not very scientifically minded at all. I come from a Liberal Arts background. I was an English major. So I know a little bit about science, but just by reading it in the popular books and magazines. So I don't come to it from the side of applied science. So, you know what I mean? I read..

Henry: I do. Later in life I got hijacked into science. It was post college. I was always interested in it somewhat, but I was actually a history major in college.

DB: Huh!

Henry: American history.

DB: Very interesting.

Henry: I styled myself as an historian. But I've always had abilities in science. And later in life, after Bigfoot, I became a professional scientist, and ran large wildlife monitoring systems for the federal government.

DB: Right, I remember hearing you talk about that on one of the talk shows you were on.

Henry: Yeah, basically I was.. and believe it or not, today, ‘cause I'm unemployed right now, I just got an interview with the State of Oregon to basically run a tagging program on the coast.

DB: Uh huh!

Henry: So I have an interview for another wildlife position, which, well.. let's just say that if I wind up in a wildlife position for the government again -- and I'm getting an interview, and I'm applying for them!

DB: (laughs)

Henry: ..I may have to keep very discrete about Bigfoot.

DB: Right, yeah. Well I certainly understand that.

Henry: Down the road. I may have to.. we'll have to see. It just goes with the territory. It's part of why I.. there are many reasons why I left for ten years, but that was one of them.

DB: Well, let me ask you.. this makes me think of a question that we often ask people who are in government. Do you ever get any overt pressure not to talk about Bigfoot from somebody?

Henry: No. No one takes it seriously. It's a laugh.

DB: Right.

Henry: All my scientific colleagues laugh. My role was as the computer guy. ‘Cause what's happened in biology, in a nutshell, is that they have so much data now. I mean they have clouds and clouds of data. So that doing biology involves, especially quantitative biology, the reduction and analysis of an unbelievable amount of data.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: For example, the study I was part of tagged three million fish with transponder tags and then followed them for their entire lifetime through a network of antennas that were placed at every mainstem dam in the Columbia river, and it's tributaries, and a fishing trawler towing an antenna array out in the mouth of the river. And the amount of data that came from this giant network of antennas and three million fish over ten years -- you can imagine how big these databases were.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: And so the government got the idea that what they needed.. they had always tried to train a biologist to handle these massive data problems. And finally they said, you know, why don't we just get a hard-core computer guy, and we'll train him in biology? And I just happened to stumble along at that moment as a hard-core computer guy. I had developed software and hardware and things for twenty years. And I wanted to change my career. And they said, well, you're just what we need! And it actually worked out. They taught me biology from nothing. I was not a biologist. I brought to the table a whole bunch of advanced data analysis skills.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: And design skills for building huge regional networks and things. And so it all worked out really well for everybody. That's how I kind of, backwards, fell into science. And so eventually I wound up getting more and more involved in fish and wildlife monitoring, doing a lot of stuff for US Fish and Wildlife, and the tribes. A lot of tribes. And so.. I don't know how we got totally into that, but oddly enough, it was bigfoot that led me into that.

DB: Well that is interesting. But of course you were helping out with Peter Byrne and Glickman.. there was science involved in that, or at least that's the way it's presented..

Henry: Yeah, we -- you know, the true story has probably never been told..

DB: Well let's tell it!

Henry: (laughs) of what happened with the Bigfoot Research Project.

DB: Yeah!

Henry: We got funding. Peter Byrne is a master of Bigfoot funding. Whatever you think of him, whether you.. you know, some people disparage him. I have always been fond of the old man myself.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: He got paid more to look for Bigfoot than anybody ever. I still think he holds the funding record! (Laughing)

DB: Right!

Henry: He has.. through the Academy of Applied Science in Boston, which is actually the outfit that funds Robert Rines. We got five million dollars to look for Bigfoot in 1993 -- Peter Byrne did. I met him then, got hired to -- well not hired. There was a paid staff, there was a project, and I was put on the board of advisors.

DB: Ok.

Henry: Which was a board of esteemed old men! (laughing)

DB: Uh huh. (laughs)

Henry: Mostly! Anyhow, one thing that we did was a Patterson film analysis. We voted and hired Jeff Glickman and his company, Photek, to do it. And we paid Patty Patterson $20,000 to take her copy of the Patterson film from the safety deposit box that she has it in and digitize it. And at that time, in 1993, we digitized it in New Jersey at a place that restored old films.

DB: Right.

Henry: Each 16mm frame of the 953 frames of the Patterson film we digitized to 2480 pixels by 1800, such that each image was 35Mb. We stored it in the RAW data format with no compression whatsoever, and put it on CDs eventually.

DB: Wow.

Henry: Anyhow, Glickman did this really incredible analysis that has passed from history without much notice. In my opinion it's one of the most scholarly things that's ever been done in Bigfoot research. We really endeavored to do straight science. We tried Glickman, we tried to pay scientists to come. Glickman at the beginning was a complete skeptic. And our whole premise was, “Prove that this is a guy in a gorilla suit. Find the zipper. Find something that proves it's a hoax.”

DB: Right.

Henry: So we approached it from the negative, and he was unable to do that. Which, as bigfooters, we have to say, hey, that's a positive!

DB: Yeah!

Henry: We spent $500,000 of other people's money paying Glickman and Photek to do this. Even back then Glickman made a motion-stabilized version of the Patterson film.

DB: Oh yeah?

Henry: It was shown at the 1998 University of British Columbia Sasquatch Symposium. And that seems to have vanished from memory also. He actually took all the jiggles out of the Patterson film way back then.

DB: Huh. That has been forgotten, because everybody credits MK Davis with doing that. And there's even been a more recent one that I just saw that, I think, the Discovery channel did. So they've all forgotten about the one that you guys did back in 1998. Which was probably higher quality because of the way you used up all that memory digitizing it.

Henry: Right. And we paid, like I said.. we also got one of the first copies of the Patterson film as our source by giving Patty Patterson $20,000.

DB: Right.

Henry: We paid René Dahinden $10,000 for the rights to use thirty stills from the Patterson film in a paper. But Dahinden was really anti-scientist. I mean he had a long hard road in life with scientists so he really despised them.

DB: Yeah, that's the reputation he's got.

Henry: So he specified.. his contract for that ten grand specified, although we could publish a science paper, and distribute up to.. 300 copies was, I think, at that time the limit. We could not publish it in a peer reviewed journal. It was forbidden to actually publish it in any scientific journal in the contract with Dahinden. He wouldn't sign it otherwise.

DB: Wow.

Henry: So that's something that I think MK Davis didn't have to deal with. I hope!

DB: Yeah.

Henry: That's the thing -- one learns this about the world of bigfoot. The wheel gets reinvented over and over because the ones that come before are forgotten very quickly. A new generation comes and there's, you know, for whatever reason, or no reason.. it's like pop music or something. Once you're off the stage, that's it!

DB: I'll tell you what I think the reason is, and this is actually one of the purposes that I set up my blog, and that is that there is no community of.. You know how scientists, they not only have to publish, but they have to talk about what other people did before they came along. You can't just publish your stuff, you also have to make reference to everything that came before. That has never happened in bigfoot research. And I've been trying to get people interested in looking back and remembering what has come before, and trying to make it more of a scientific discipline, even though I know that it's not, and it's not going to be any time soon. We could at least start to build in some of the structures that scientific disciplines have. And if we did that, one of the things we'd get out of it is we'd stop forgetting what other people already did. We'd know it.

Henry: Very interesting. Because there were others before me too, you know, I was a part of Peter Byrne's third project. In 1993. There was a flurry of activity in the early 70s in Oregon.

DB: Yeah, he wrote about that one in his book, so we have some of that history.

Henry: Right. So, yeah, there are some long histories that are interesting. And of course there was ‘58-9, '67 Bluff Creek, you know, there's been different periods where there's a flurry of activity.

DB: Right.

Henry: There are people, a lot of times, like me -- one of my rules back in the day was, that you could accomplish anything you want so long as everyone else takes the credit.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: That's how I operated. And so I really saw my role back in the ‘90s as empowering people. Because we had the money! And really my job on the board was to vote on who got the money.

DB: Right.

Henry: That was really my job. And I was only paid occasionally an honorarium. But they helped me out. For example, they bought me the Geographical Names Information System on CD back then in 1993.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: Or maybe it was like '96 when they bought it for me. So they helped my research. But that was what we were doing, helping people's research.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: We weren't doing the research as much as funding it. No, I take that back, we were doing it. We had a 1-800 bigfoot number. We had a team. We investigated 438 sighting reports in Oregon and Washington. We assembled a database. We had a very early GPS, accurate to within 300'. So we went and marked all of the points with GPS, all the sighting reports. And we interviewed all of the people. And we had a lot of gear.

DB: Right.

Henry: Like modern guys. In many ways, it seemed to be a dream that I inspired others to live, in part. You know, the thing that I did then, where I had a website and I was appearing in movies as a narrative character -- I made six.

DB: Yeah?

Henry: We had a snowmobile, and a helicopter with a FLIR on call..

DB: Really?

Henry: Yeah, we had all kinds of gear. Hey, we had money! (Laughs)

DB: (Laughing) That makes me want to ask, did you ever catch anything on a FLIR?

Henry: Nope. Never.

DB: See that's still happening now. You would think that would be one of the most useful devices, and we rarely get anything solid or credible from a FLIR..

Henry: Isn't it interesting that it's so hard to get a picture of these guys?

DB: Well, it's very interesting, and eventually we will get into some of that..

Henry: Yeah, it's so hard to get a picture. Um hmm!

DB: Absolutely!

Henry: We did a whole science thing, and.. there was really a lot of political stuff going on at the time in bigfoot research, like today.. But, really, I was on a different tangent than everybody else. Because I kind of came to bigfoot because I was trying to find out about Indian things. And I went down the direction, even then, of chasing after.. Like what my book is about..

DB: Right.

Henry: Some people, like Dr. Robert Pyle. saw -- I gave him my notes early on and he appreciated my contribution to Where Bigfoot Walks.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: And you'll see that I have.. I was always a peripheral character, like he mentions me in his book, Glickman mentions me in his paper. Glickman also uses my Indian place names stuff in his paper a little bit because he saw a lot of it back then too.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: However, I didn't share it publicly very much back then. In fact I got to the point where I said, “Nah, I'm not going to share this.” And I see in the intervening decade, no one else really went in that direction, so.. anyway, it looks like it's new today!

DB: Yeah. Well, you know, I did hear the, “Look in the Skookum places.” I heard that from.. it was either Matt Moneymaker or someone else. I'm not sure who said it. But it was a very offhand and informal thing when they said it. Some people remembered it. They weren't publishing it, but they remembered what you had said.

Henry: Matt Moneymaker is someone that I think I.. Well actually Matt may tell you himself that he looked at me and the mistakes I made, and then he invented the BFRO as an improvement.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: Learning from the mistakes I made.

DB: Right.

Henry: That's what he says! (Laughing) I think that's his opinion. Or perhaps that could be corroborated one day by him, if he cared! But the truth is that I too learned from my mistakes. But my solution was a different one than his!

DB: Yeah.

Henry: And I really never had the same dream as Mr. Moneymaker. I'm really happy for him that he was inspired to pursue his dream and has made considerable headway. But I never shared that with him. I really was much more interested.. call it selfish -- all I really wanted to do was understand for myself the weird experiences I was having with bigfoot.

DB: Right.

Henry: That's really what it has all been about for me. I didn't want to.. even though I had created at that time an organization and a website and a bigfoot discussion group and all those things, I wasn't really interested in that at all. I wasn't interested in persuading the masses, or persuading institutional science to take it seriously anymore. I gave it a real good try for five years with the Bigfoot Research Project. Our goal was to persuade policy makers and scientists to take it seriously and to, in fact, provide funding for scientists to pursue inquiry and experimental stuff.

DB: Well let me ask you -- when the five years were up, did you have enough evidence that you thought that they should have been persuaded?

Henry: You know, that's an interesting question. No! I would say no. What I had after five years was a really solid understanding that experience never rises to the level of scientific proof.

DB: Right.

Henry: And what you basically have with the bigfoot phenomenon is a whole lot of experiences. You had a whole lot of sighting reports, and you had a whole lot of footprint finds and casts..

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: A couple of hair samples, which still appear to be inconclusive, even though they're getting closer to getting.. maybe one day they are going to get a DNA thing, you know, hey.. However, really, scientists say that anecdotal evidence is not evidence at all. It's no evidence. And so, since you just have all these witnesses, you really don't have.. and this is an interesting thing -- you really don't have a science problem is what I say.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: What I came to at the end of five years was, I said, well, these experiences will never rise to the level of scientific proof. It's just too easy to say that the witness is mistaken, or he was drunk, you know, all the standard things -- it was really a bear that was misidentified, or a moose, whatever. The thing is you wind up in a place where you realize it's a dead end to pursue certain things, because you say, if they're a dumb animal, then of course we can do this science. If it's an ape, then we can do this science, and we're just studying an ape and we're, like, trying to get close to the apes.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: But if it's an intelligent person-like being. A creature that's like a person. Then we're not engaged in science, we're engaged in an intelligence operation. We're gathering intelligence about a phenomenon that is under intelligent control.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: So to presume that they are intelligent, like you and me, then you have to presume that you really can't do science on them because.. you can't get them into a lab, first of all. You can't prove they exist, second of all. Can't get a photo! That's hard. And they are apparently intelligent enough to evade pursuit for at least fifty years.

DB: That's right.

Henry: Year after year, they continuously evade us. (laughing) So it looks like an intelligent, person-like being rather than an ape, to me.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: So I got to the point where I said, no, the sighting reports were “intelligence” on a phenomenon that is under intelligent control. It's not an animal intelligence, I thought, after seeing what I had seen and chasing after this thing so obsessively for five years. I said, hmm, seems like they're people, not apes. Seems like, sure, scientific principles can apply, and using science, when you can, can apply and help, but really you're not going to be able to bring this into a laboratory and do an experiment.

DB: Right.

Henry: And the one thing that you can measure of the phenomenon is the footprints. And there are scientist, such as Dr. Meldrum, who are all over that. And Dr. Krantz. Because that's the one thing that you can measure about the phenomenon, that you can actually do some science on. There it is, an artifact in your hand.

DB: Right.

Henry: Other than that, there's not a whole lot of science you can do with the sighting reports. Although, when you look at them as “intelligence” you realize.. and that's what everybody does anyhow. They get a picture of what bigfoot is by reading all the sighting reports, and seeing all the different things that happen, the things that people would go through in their experiences.

DB: Well you have been able to do a little bit of science with the reports and the geographical data, in that, when you normalized it for populations.. and this, you know, since this is applied science, I get lost at right about this point, but you do something with the numbers, and that tells you where they are most likely seen, or most often seen. And that was a pretty interesting thing that you did. The fact that you did it with two different sets of data and got the same answer, and then you did it with the geographical names and got the same answer.. I thought that was pretty powerfully presented.

Henry: That was a.. I took a really good stab at trying to do science with sighting reports! (laughing) We also did that in 1998. Originally Glickman.. that was Glickman's idea, originally. But he never had the data that was available after his time. Because he left the bigfoot world and went on to other things quickly.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: He did it for a rough approximation of America, I could do it for all of North America. He had, I don't know how many sighting reports. Not that many. I, of course, Benefitting from today and the internet, have at least four thousand. You know, John Green, and the BFRO summaries.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: The idea is really simple. It's from population modeling. Glickman presented it more thoroughly, because there's more than just these two probabilities, really, but.. There's the probability of an observer being in the area -- that's us, people.

DB: Right.

Henry: And the probability of an animal being in the area. There's two probabilities, so you divide the probability an animal is there by the probability that a person is there, and you get an approximation of the animal population.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: Because what you're trying to do is take the human observers out of the equation. You want to say, gee, if I have a lot of sighting reports where there are a lot of humans, I'm going to reduce that and say, gee, the chance of a sighting report is really high. Because there are a lot of humans there. So I'm going to normalize it and lower that. And in a place where there are hardly any humans, like in the Northwest Territories, and you have a sighting report, then, well I'll normalize that too and take into account that there is only one human observer per five hundred square miles. It's a simple idea. And when you look at it that way, and you look at these monstrous continental wide databases that way, you see that it looks like the population of bigfoot is mostly in the north, and the more north you go, the more there are. If you take the population of humans out of the equation, that's what it looks like. Roughly. ?And I'm only doing a model that's province by province and state by state, so it's really crude.

DB: Okay.

Henry: And yet John Green's, and the BFRO's data both show that. They show that it's far more likely to run into a bigfoot above the 45th parallel than below.

DB: Yeah?

Henry: There's more of them there. There's more humans below the 45th parallel, but there's more bigfoot above the 45th parallel. The second thing I see in the data when you look at it that way is that the continental divides actually appear to be.. let's say, when you rank all the provinces and states, and you look at the top ten provinces and states, the continental divide goes through eight of them.

DB: Yes.

Henry: And that's for both sets of data, so what I say from that is, well, it looks like more bigfoot are in fact around the continental divide. There are not that many people there. It's very high mountains, and the Rocky mountains and everything. But there seem to be a lot of bigfoot there. This is just looking at all the bigfoot reports from the thirty thousand foot view.

DB: Right.

Henry: But that also.. see, once again, we put that whole idea forward in 1996. We presented it in 1998, and no one pursued that line of inquiry since.

DB: Yeah, that's really surprising, because reading your book is the first I've heard of all of this..

Henry: We're there again. There you go!

DB: ..all of the normalization of the population, and that there's probably more of them north of the 45th parallel -- yeah that's surprising to me.

Henry: Yeah, Glickman didn't take it to that conclusion. He didn't come to the conclusion that north of the 45th parallel, or the continental divide like I did. But then he didn't have hardly any data to use. I had the data.

DB: Ok.

Henry: He used the back of John Green's book, The Apes Among Us, for his data source. Because it had a picture of his state by state and province by province sighting total. And I think John Green only had about two thousand reports at that time. 1980. Because he used the 1980 edition.

DB: Wow.

Henry: He really didn't have what we have today. So, yeah. I know that no one ever took it all the way to the continental divide and the northward skew of it. I guess privately I had done that back then. By 1998 I had played with enough data to say, hmm, the continental divide.

DB: Right.

Henry: And then every continent appears to be the same. You have the yeti found in Nepal, in the Himalayas, which is a continental divide. And the yeren and the tien-shan are found in the tien-shan mountains, which is the continental divide just north of that. And just north of that is the pamir and the hindu Kush, and that's the continental divide there were the mande barung are found. And keep going north to the Ural mountains, still the continental divide, and the almas and almasty are found there. And in Australia, the Blue mountains are where most of the yowie sightings are, and that's the continental divide of Australia. And then in South America.. I can never remember.. I just have a mental block about remembering..

DB: (laughing) And I can't help you so we're just going to be stuck on that one!

Henry: The southernmost point of South America was named bigfoot. That's how it translates. The state that's at the tip of South America actually translates as bigfoot. That's where Magellan, when he went by in 1565 or whenever that was, said he saw giants on the beach.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: Yes. I just have a mental block about the name of that. But anyhow, my point is, it really looks like the continental divide in every continent is a favored locale for the hairy giants.

DB: Right.

Henry: Yeah, at least to me. When you look at the data. So I'm glad I came back to bring this up again, ten years later!

DB: Well now maybe people will catch on to it and listen and keep a hold of it this time.

Henry: But your project is such a wonderful idea, because we have to have some idea of what people have done, because there were some great pioneers before my time. People like Lee Trippett, who in the sixties were doing some really interesting stuff.

DB: You know, I would say that's a name that I'm not even familiar with. So I'm going to write it down!

Henry: Yeah, well he's one of those -- he's a generation before me. In Oregon. He lived in Oregon, so maybe that's why I know about him, ‘cause he's an Oregon guy. But anyway, I find that the sighting reports are really useful for at least that overall thing where you can say, hey.. you know what this means to the bigfooter is, the place you're most likely to see a bigfoot, you the individual observer, is probably in the continental divide in Alaska.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: (Laughing) I mean if you wanted to go where the most of them were, that would probably be the place.

DB: Well that's interesting.

Henry: Yeah, you know.. and I wonder if the South Pole.. I've always wondered if it's the same when you go south?

DB: That is an interesting question. I wonder if there are enough sighting reports from South America to help us out on that?

Henry: You know, I wonder. Maybe one day. Or Indonesia, or Australia. Or New Zealand! New Zealand, I guess, is really South.

DB: I know a guy from New Zealand, and he declares that there are no credible sightings from New Zealand, so (laughing) we may have to take them off our list! But Australia certainly has plenty of them.

Henry: Yeah. The yowie sounds like our guy for sure.

DB: You know, I read the book The Yowie by Tony Healy and Paul Cropper. And when I was reading their description of the yowie, and the experiences that people have with the yowie, you know you could take that description and put it in North America with no problem at all. And that includes the weird stuff that happens to us, you know, where people feel like someone's staring at them, or they get a feeling like, “I'm not welcome here, I gotta get the hell out of here.” They're having those same things happen in Australia. And as far as I know, it wasn't until, you know, the internet age, that people from Australia could have heard some of these things from people in North America. So the fact that they have these stories going back decades suggests to me that not only is the yowie and the bigfoot really there, but they must be related. They are not unrelated animals.

Henry: Yeah, I would hypothesize they are the same species.

DB: Right.

Henry: It might be like humans, like the difference between an asian and an anglo.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: It might only be that much of a difference. So it's not a species difference, just different traits within a species. And, you know, we have no data! That's the whole thing, we have no.. I'd be interested about the aborigines, if they too had yowie stories. I imagine they would.

DB: Yeah..

Henry: The reason I bring that up is because the Indians here in the North West, many tribes, have a lot of really kooky stories about psychic powers and these guys. And a lot of those stories are really pretty old. They were written down in the twenties and thirties. Of course, they are from oral traditions so they are older than that.

DB: Right.

Henry: And so I wonder if the aborigines.. I bet you they do, but I've never seen anything. I've never seen any collection of aborigine yowie stories.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: I'd love to see those, Maybe Paul Cropper..

DB: Yeah, there are some, at least a few aborigine stories in The Yowie. It's a great book to read because it's so well written, and so well organized, and they obviously researched it very well.

Henry: Now I knew Paul Cropper back in the day. Many years ago we used to correspond.

DB: Oh, did you?

Henry: But I haven't corresponded with him in a decade. As I recall, he was a fine fellow. He was a life-timer!

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: Yeah, he was fascinated by this for a long time. But the Indian stories here fall along the lines of, they have tremendous hypnotic powers, and they can kill game with their hypnotic power. They can knock you unconscious with their hypnotic power.

DB: Right,

Henry: They can even take control of your body. Many Indians here tell stories about how they are basically possessed -- these guys take control of their bodies and make them walk near cliffs and things like that. There's Indians that say that. Indians have been seized control of and just marched right off a cliff and killed.

DB: Would you like to hear something very interesting? You may have already read about this because it just recently hit the news. I think it's the military that is experimenting with this. There is a way of using ultrasound. Now this is not infrasound, which bigfoot people have been talking about for years, but ultrasound. If used at the proper frequency, will actually get through your skull and it affects your brain. And they are looking into ways of making people do things with ultrasound. Just with a sound! And ultrasound is so focusable, it's so easy to focus ultrasound, that you can make a device that would control just one person. So you aren't broadcasting to everyone and they all have to do something, you could just be focused on the one guy there. And that's with just a sound.

Henry: Wow, I haven't heard of that. That's interesting.

DB: Yeah, it kind of blew me away too. And they also have shown that exposure to ultrasound can cause some of the same things that people report when they have a bigfoot experience. Such as thinking somebody is staring at you.. And they've certainly used ultrasound to take sound and beam it to one person so no one else can hear it, but that one person hears it and can't really tell where it's coming from. So a lot of that stuff that they were talking about, we're getting close to being able to accomplish. Now we can already do the beaming of the sound to a person thing, some of the other things, like controlling someone just via sound are on the drawing board. Now people have hypothesized that bigfoot, because they are so large, might be using infrasound. But I think this ultrasound thing is even more interesting, because we've always had the problem with the self-luminating eyes. Which I don't know how it sounds to you, but to me, doesn't that just sound like it's got to be a paranormal creature of the night? (laughs) I mean, nothing else has self-luminating eyes. But I went looking for explanations for that and I found out there's a certain kind of shrimp that can make light in salt water through the use of ultrasound. So what you need is ultrasound and a solution of salt water, and then you can make light. And that might explain self-luminating eyes.

Henry: Interesting theory!

DB: Yeah, it's just a theory, but.. (laughing)

Henry: I have my own theories about those things, but that are a little different, but.. You know it could be ultrasound. I think that the bigfoot can focus energy with their minds. And I think that applies to sound energy also.

DB: Well that might be what we mean, but we didn't even know before we understood about..

Henry: See, that's the thing.. let me tell you -- I'll give you a personal experience..

Henry: This is the kind of experience that I had, which led me down the road I went, because I knew that whatever was going on was pretty hard to understand.

DB: Ok.

Henry: I was driving with my wife, in a van, and we were way high in the Cascade mountains at night, about midnight, when suddenly the, you know, classic bigfoot smell overpowered us.

DB: Hmm!

Henry: Like a wet dog, but like a skunk, really sweet and pungent, I mean just this incredible smell in the air.

DB: Right.

Henry: We stopped, and I didn’t see anything. There was nothing in front of us. It was pitch black. My wife looked at me and said, “Geez, you know, I’m tired. I’m just going to take a nap.” And she just laid down and fell asleep instantly.

DB: Uh huh!

Henry: I.. the hair on my body.. you talk about the feeling of being looked at. Well, this was like that feeling on steroids. Because what happened to me was that all of my hair, and I had hair that was about 4” at the time, stood up all over like you rubbed balloons over my head and held them over my head. My hair stood straight out 4” in all directions, like Einstein’s hairdoo.

DB: (laughing)

Henry: This huge afro pointing in all directions. A huge static charge was.. I could feel my skin tingling while this static charge overwhelmed me. And this static charge was more than just electrical.

DB: Right.

Henry: I mean, certainly it felt like static electricity, my hair was standing up. It felt like it was aware, and I could feel, like, a mind probing me.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: And it was way, way, way more than the feeling of being looked at, it was the feeling of being scrutinized under an electron microscope.

DB: Hmm!

Henry: And the electrical field was so strong that it blew the starter motor of my van.

DB: Wow.

Henry: So, this lasted for five minutes, and the whole thing went away. The electrical field went away, and the smell went away. I still never saw anything. And yet I couldn’t start my van because the starter motor had been fried by the electrical field.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: Now, that’s not ultrasound! (laughing)

DB: No..

Henry: That’s electricity of some kind.

DB: Yeah, it has to be.

Henry: That’s some kind of electrostatic field that really seemed to emanate from this bigfoot that I never saw. I mean the only hint that I had that it was a bigfoot was the smell, and the location where I was.

DB: Right.

Henry: ‘Cause where I was, was a place where the Indians said they lived. And that’s kind of why I was going there. And I said, wow, maybe that was a bigfoot, but I didn’t see anything. However, whatever it was fried my starter motor. And we had to hike out thirty five miles the next day.

DB: Wow.

Henry: Spend the night and hike out. So. That made a real strong impression on me, right away. I said, geez.. I really didn’t care what everyone else said, I said -- even though I didn’t see one, I smelled it, and I said, dang, these guys can, like, emit some kind of force field out of their minds that makes your hair stand up, it can knock your wife unconscious in a split second, and it can blow your starter motor. And I say that’s one of the capabilities at least some of them have. And so that’s why I would beg to differ about the ultrasound theory. I would say, we need a theory that involves electricity and magnetism a bit more!

DB: Yeah. Well, it could have both. It could be that the way that they.. you know how people have said, “It talked inside my mind.” Well now we know that you can use ultrasound to make that appear to happen.

Henry: The commonality would be that, whether it’s sound energy or electrical energy, the bigfoot is able to focus it with its mind, is able to control it with its mind somehow. So yes, we could have both. They are both kinds of energy, and it seems that they can focus them with their minds, manipulate them, and do something with them. So, hey, maybe we stumbled onto a new theory here! (Laughing)

DB: Yeah. There’s definitely something weird about bigfoot. I mean I’ve recently spoken on the blog about the strange experience that I had, which is that one ran along in the woods behind me -- it was evading a dog, and I don’t think it had seen me and my companion. And it came out, or almost came out into the clearing where we were and then slowed up real fast and turned to run right into the briers. And yet when we went to the briers where it had apparently run, there was no evidence that anything had gone in there. I didn’t see it, I had my head turned the wrong way, and it was gone before I turned around. But my companion did, and right where he said it went -- you know, he saw it go there -- there’s no evidence that anything had ever gone in there.

Henry: That’s another one of their puzzling powers!

DB: That’s right! There’s something weird about them. And I like to speculate about how they might do that..

Henry: You know I think you bring up a very interesting point, which is one of my constant themes in life, and that is, when you get close enough to one of these guys.. I mean, basically, when you’ve never had any experiences with them and you’ve never really been up close to them, you can think about them as just, they’re stupid old gorillas of some kind, or mystery apes that you are chasing around. But I think it’s always a matter of time, that when you get close enough to them, that if you’re one of those people that gets out there and encounters them or actually has an experience with them, weird stuff happens. I just think it’s a matter of time before the weird stuff happen to everybody.

DB: Right.

Henry: In the beginning, no one thinks they could possibly be weird because, you know, it’s just an animal, like every other animal. And then as time goes on, and as you actually encounter them, and get close, I think it’s inevitable. You know, I think that this is the path that every bigfooter that ever lived is on, unfortunately. They’re all going to have to confront the weird, because it gets weird!

DB: Yeah.

Henry: And it’s not easy, you know, it’s not like chasing a beaver.. (laughing) It turns out that it’s not. And so, yeah, I think that when they focus energy with their minds sometimes that they actually produce light from their eyes.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: One of the things that I’ve seen with my own eyes is light come from the eyes of one of these guys. I was in an extremely dark place in the woods, with no light, and green light came out of the eyes. (laughing) At least that’s what it looked like to me!

DB: Right.

Henry: And that’s where my logical brain said, “Hmm, there has to be a logical explanation for this.”

DB: Yeah.

Henry: I don’t care that if I ever mention it to anyone, they say, “Oh, God, you’ve got to be wrong. It’s the tapetum lucidum of course. Like every other animal that has a reflective eye.”

DB: Yes, people do like to say that!

Henry: Everyone explains it away as that, and I’m like, no, there was no light, and the light actually came out of the eye! (laughing)

DB: Right.

Henry: So, there you have it. Those experiences happen to you eventually, I think, if you’re fortunate enough, and persistent enough to actually get close enough. There’s no way you can avoid the weirdness.

DB: Yeah. I believe that’s true. I do believe there are a lot of researchers who haven’t experienced anything weird, and especially if they are not the kind who will actually go out in active search of the creature, they might be able to continue to say, no, there’s nothing strange about them. But if you get out there a lot, I think you’re right, your chances of experiencing that weirdness go up. It’s reminded me -- you know we’re talking about a couple of the weird things they do. Here’s something a police chief from South Dakota, I think, reported. He and several of his deputies responded to a call that someone saw a bigfoot. And they pursued it. They were riding along on a road, but there’s this big drainage ditch on the side, and he’s got this on his thermal camera. So here’s a guy who has seen one on his thermal camera. He sees it going down into the drainage ditch. So now they know they’ve got it in this drainage ditch. His deputies are coming the other direction, and he gets them to come out and shine their big flashlights down into the ditch. But when they do, they can’t find anything. So he’s seen it go down in there with his thermal camera, but when they bring their heavy lights to this area, there’s nothing there. They can’t find anything.

Henry: Well that makes sense to me. There’s a hundred-year argument in Indian country, it’s been going on at least a hundred years, as to whether or not they can turn invisible.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: And, you know, I could go find five Indians that say, yes, they can turn invisible, and I could find five Indians that say, no way! But, once again, my personal experience has shown me that they can turn invisible. I’m convinced that there’s a logical explanation for it. In fact, I’m convinced that there’s a scientific explanation for it. But that makes me a little weird, because.. see, it’s easy, I think, to go fully paranormal. You know, you have these weird experiences and you go, oh my God, they turn invisible! Their eyes light up, oh my God, what am I dealing with here?

DB: Yeah.

Henry: For me, I just think there’s got to be a logical explanation. What it has led me to do is revise science. And that’s of course where I get on really thin ice, and I go way, way out in the weeds. And that’s what the large part of the last half of my book is about. Where I try to say, see, part of the problem with understanding bigfoot is that science itself is inadequate.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: Now, I know that very few people are going to come with me when I go on this journey to try to invent a new science, in a bigfoot book yet! Yeah, of course, right?

DB: Right.

Henry: However, really I wrote this book for the people who have had some strange experiences and are looking for a logical explanation. Because if this has happened to you, if there’s been an invisible bigfoot that’s telepathically communicated with you, or if you’ve seen the lights come out of the eyes, or any number of things, my book may be useful to you, because I try to fashion a logical explanation for it. I try to say.. one of the problems is we live in an era of reductionist and mechanist science.

DB: Right.

Henry: Where mechanist science is the dominant paradigm right now.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: And what that means is that, way back in the 17th century, René DesCartes, the famous philosopher, postulated that that the universe was a great machine, and that nothing actually had a soul except the mind of man. The mind of man was separate, but everything else was a machine. And you could understand the universe in terms of chemistry and physics, and that’s all you needed. You could understand life in terms of chemistry and physics. And we treat today, microbiology, and the study of DNA -- and the study of DNA is certainly the hot scientific field of the moment.. and there’s a faith. An article of faith -- it’s almost a religion -- among institutional biologists, that any day now they’re going to be able to understand life just using chemistry and just using physics. And that’s all they need to do it. And they believe they’ll be able to understand awareness, self consciousness, and living beings, and the energy that animates life itself, strictly by looking at things like the Krebs citric acid cycle, etcetera, etcetera.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: I point out that back in the 1920s there was another branch of science that said that living things actually have a life force. Like Star Wars. There was a branch of science that said, “There is a force, Obi Wan!” (laughs)

DB: (laughs) Right!

Henry: There is a force behind everything. And these guys got discredited, heavily, by the mechanism school. Really by the 1930s they were pretty much done for and the mechanist modern philosophy came to dominate institutional science and institutional biology in particular. Now, why am I going through this long winded thing? Basically to explain that, see, I don’t think you can understand bigfoot without understanding “The Force”!

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: And kids understand this. Adults have a tough time. When you say to a kid, look, the force is real, and bigfoot is a wookie, basically every kid in the world goes, hey, okay, I get it. You know, and what you’re saying is bigfoot is person like, and there’s things about life that you’re not going to understand with DNA. You may understand a lot about this creature when you get your hands on its DNA, but you’re not going to understand about its awareness, and you’re not going to understand about its self-consciousness, or its intelligence, or its behavior. You’re not going to be able to predict its behavior if its a thinking creature like you and me. I mean, there’s a lot you’re not going to know from getting a DNA sample. A DNA sample may prove to some people that there’s something out there. I postulate that they’re still not going to get their hands on one... but anyhow, it’s through this vitalist kind of view that I start talking about life energy, this energy that cannot be measured using chemistry and physics. Bigfoot is a master of that energy, the energy of awareness itself.

DB: Right.

Henry: And this is part of how they a lot of the stuff that they do. They can control your awareness. They can probably hide right in front of you and you can’t see them.

[Note: At this point I wish I had remembered a case I know about that really fits in with what Henry is saying here. There was a picture that came out of Oregon that was taken under really very strange circumstances. The witness who took the picture heard some things, and her dogs were acting like there was something nearby that they did not like, but she couldn’t see anything no matter how hard she looked. She had a camera with her and she took pictures as she spun around 360 degrees. On one of the pictures you can see what looks like, for all the world, a family of gorillas or something like that. They are all reclining, so you don’t see any legs, but you see at least three of them, alert, and looking toward the camera. They look pretty clear in the picture, on a hill, though at some distance away. Yet she had not seen them as she was taking the pictures. She returned a day or so later and took a picture of the same area, and you can’t see anything in that spot that would account for the “family group” that had been there before. Too bad I didn’t mention this during the interview, but I am inserting it here for your consideration, dear reader. Henry continues..]

Henry: So they have some really interesting tricks up their sleeves. Some puzzling powers.

DB: Well that reminds me of.. did you ever read the book, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Henry: I did, once, yes indeed!

DB: Do you remember the “Somebody Else’s Problem” field, or the SEP field, where if you turned on an SEP field and you were inside it, no one would ever see you because their brain would register you as “somebody else’s problem”! (laughing) So they wouldn’t even look at you! And I have wondered if that could be the case when bigfoot appears to disappear.

Henry: You know, I wonder about that too, that’s an interesting concept! (laughing) I’ve never applied that concept. I think that might work here!

DB: You know, something like that could be activated via ultrasound. If they can actually do what science is beginning and thinks they are going to be able to do, remotely control a human being using ultrasound, of course they could get you to not notice them. They could be standing there and you wouldn’t notice them if they were able to do that. Or by using some other energy, as long as they can get ahold of your brain and tell your brain what to do, they can disappear without physically disappearing.

Henry: Yeah.

DB: That doesn’t explain them disappearing off of a camera, or a thermal camera..

Henry: Well, that’s another, you know.. I think they are.. my theory is their mastery of being able to focus energy with their minds, actually lends itself to form a field that reflects no EM (electro magnetic) energy whatsoever, nor does it absorb any EM energy. In other words, it’s like a complete stealth-field. I think they have stealth-technology in their DNA! And they can form a stealth field around themselves that emits no heat, that emits no.. nothing.

DB: Now if they have that -- that’s the kind of thing that would make me start thinking that maybe they aren’t a natural life form, but they would be an engineered life form.

Henry: See I think they are a natural life form just like we are. I think we co-evolved with us, and we, early on, focused on becoming man the tool-maker. And they early oh as a species focused on developing their psychic powers, and found that that replaced the need for tools.

DB: Yeah they wouldn’t need any tools. Even if they didn’t have the psychic powers, they wouldn’t need any tools. They’re so fast, so strong..

Henry: They have better hearing, better vision, they’re stronger, they’re faster, they’re bigger.. all of those things would give them a competitive advantage in a lot of ways, however, they’re non-confrontational. We as a species are very confrontational. And as a species, obviously, they’re not confrontational. We don’t even know if they really exist! So that’s an emotional difference.

DB: Right.

Henry: Seems to me that it would be an emotional difference. They have no real.. other than those events you describe, where someone gets a psychic message to get out of here, or go away, you don’t belong here. That is about as confrontational as they get. Of course they do that bluff charge thing. They may be, on occasion.. I don’t want to say that they are not confrontational ever. (laughs) I think there are times when they might seek to run us off.

DB: Yeah, they take care not to put themselves in any physical risk.

Henry: They do.

DB: To me it looks like -- somebody explained this somewhere.. if you are a large creature, and you don’t have many offspring, it is in your interest to protect your physical body at all costs. I don’t mean the individual’s interest, but the interest of the species. So you might expect them to be cautious like that, being very large and that, at their size, they probably don’t have offspring as often as some of us smaller things do.

Henry: That’s interesting. I’ve never heard that. That is interesting. Hmm.. Another biological law is the more north you go, the larger your body is. So polar bears and brown bears are bigger than black bears, etcetera, etcetera.

DB: Right. That has to do with the efficiency of maintaining your core body temperature. The larger you are, the easier it is to maintain your body temperature, from what I recall.

Henry: Well that is interesting, the.. I don’t find any modern sighting reports that say they can control your body. But I do find a lot of Indian reports that say they can control your body.

DB: Well, there could be one reason for that that I can think of. And we can use René Dahinden as the example. If he thought that there was.. actually, you knew him later in life and this might have changed, but early on, if there was a whiff of paranormalism or UFO connection in a report, he would just drop it. He wouldn’t even take the report.

Henry: Yeah, he was always like that. He.. the thing about René and I was, we were friends. One of the things I did was put $10,000 in his pocket! (laughs)

DB: (laughs) He liked you a bit after that!

Henry: He knew I wasn’t a typical paranormal guy. And the other thing is I was part of a hard-core science project, and I kept all my paranormal stuff in the background back in those days. Really, I laid low. I did not advertise the weird stuff for the first, I don’t know.. a long time. And, René, like everybody else, really liked my Indian place name research and all of the history that I found, where I found all the place names where these guys were supposed to live. And then I would dig into the stories for specific places, and I would say, look, this place, that place is where the Indians would say that they lived. And René.. everybody liked that. René liked that. René respected that research. He thought whenever I was going off on my crazy explanations that I was just out of my frikkin’ mind! But he tolerated me because I made solid scientific contributions despite the fact that I was completely crazy. (laughs)

DB: Right.

Henry: So we were friends, but he was still not tolerant of that stuff.

DB: Even at the end of his life he wasn’t tolerant of it. So that kind of thing explains..

Henry: Well, I have to give him this: he knew there was something psychic going on. He knew they had some kind of psychic power. He did know that at the end of his life. I think it was just like, you know, the hint of it. There was a hint that there was something about that at the end of his journey.

DB: Right. And other researchers wouldn’t even go that far. And I think that what they would do is collect the facts and details that they were interested in, and the other things they would leave aside. And I’ve actually seen this. I was in the BFRO briefly, for about a year. And I did all the reports for Virginia and I looked at all the previous reports from Virginia, even the ones that they’d rejected -- because they keep them, even the ones that they’ve rejected. And I found one where a lady had a pretty solid sounding report, and the investigator who wrote the report about it even said that she seemed credible. But she also said that, on a later date, she saw a UFO and she wondered if they could be related. And because she had made that connection, the investigator would take it no further.

Henry: That is the bias that has been in place since the beginning. I mean, there’re many many people.. see, this is the mistake that is always made with, quote unquote, “anecdotal evidence.” That you apply some kind of subjective criteria to it. You decide subjectively what’s credible and what’s not. There’s really no other way, because you don’t know, you weren’t there, you’re not the one who saw the UFO, the lady is. You just say, oh well, that’s not credible. So these weird reports have always been filtered. And this has always been one of my big differences.. I have to say that Matt Moneymaker did do a smart thing in the sense that he kept those reports in a garbage file. I commend him for that. I have always said from the beginning that one should take all the reports. Because they’re all anecdotal and any time you apply any subjective criteria to it, you’ve violated the premise of science. Right there!

DB: Yes.

Henry: You’ve screwed with the data. You’ve cherry picked. You’ve found what agreed with your point of view and just stuck with that evidence, and discarded anything that disagreed with your point of view. And that’s not scientific. But yet, there’s practical reasons for doing that, in the sense of the BFRO, because you’ve got most people who are not wanting to be part of something that’s kooky like that. And so, if you present a picture that doesn’t have any kookiness in it, it lends itself a lot more to.. presenting a public image that’s fundable, let’s say. I know what I’m talking about! (laughing) I did it before he did.

DB: Right. Well I do think that, probably, most of what we have when we’re looking at our anecdotal evidence.. you know, at least when we’re looking at the vast body of it, most of it has gone through filters. I don’t think that we’ve actually had the discipline to just write down what the people say and leave it that way. I could be wrong, because that’s..

Henry: I think you’re right. I think.. well, oddly enough, Raw Crowe did just write down what the people said. “Make sure you have your skepticals on,” was Ray’s line all the time. But in the The Track Record, the newsletter of the Western Bigfoot Society, Ray 
Crowe didn’t apply any filter, he was really straight about that. And I commend him because he was the one guy who said, I don’t care what you say. However, even given that, one time something really weird happened to me, and I told Ray Crowe, and he looked in my face and said, “You’re a liar!” (laughs)

DB: Yeah?

Henry: So, even Ray, Mr. Objective..

DB: Do you care to share with us what that weird thing was that Ray couldn’t accept?

Henry: Yeah. I will. And most people won’t be able to accept this, but this is the sort of experience that I’m talking about that leads down the primrose path..

DB: Yeah.

Henry: My wife and I were in the coast range, where I live now. And we were on the Hallem River, which is in fact a place that many old stories of the wild man take place. This is a long time, legendary area for hundreds of years with the Indians. So I was, oddly enough, going on about the first three minutes of the universe. Because modern physics had made some recent discoveries. This was actually in the spring of 1994. So there was some really neat theoretical physics stuff that they were finding out with the telescopes and the atom smashers, the cyclotrons.. My wife was actually like, “Hey, tell me about that.” So I was giving her the theory of the Big Bang. And I’m not a physicist or anything, but I was just giving her my layman’s “bozo” theory of the Big Bang and the first three minutes of the universe, and what happened. And I had just started doing this, when suddenly.. there was a bush about 30’ away from us, about 10’ high, 10’ around. And this deep laughter came out of the bush, really laughing really hard. And it seemed to be like a Hollywood gorilla laughter. It was a real deep chest, and a really strong laughter. And this laughter occurred.. it started the microsecond I stopped talking. And I looked at my wife and I said, “Wow, who’s that laughing at me from that bush?” And as I said that phrase, the laughter stopped on a dime as I began to actually say that, and at the end of that phrase, the laughter started again. So, I said, “Is that bigfoot laughing at me?” Because, believe it or not, it was surreal, like a cartoon. It seemed like Hollywood gorilla laughter. This deep chest laughter. And as I said the “i” of “is,” the laughter stopped. And as I said the “e” of “me,” the laughter started again. And it was happening back and forth like this for about five minutes. And I would say, “I think that is! I think he’s laughing at me!” And the laughter would start and stop. And I said, “I wonder if he’s laughing at my physics?” And each time I would say something like this, the laughter would laugh harder.

DB: Uh huh!

Henry: And so, I’m like, “I think he is laughing at me and my physics!” And it was laughing hysterically! And so, suddenly it stopped. It stopped, and dead silence. I was just stunned. My wife and I didn’t move for ten minutes. I mean we just stood there, and then we said, hey, let’s go see what’s in that bush. We were kind of a little freaked out still, but we hadn’t heard anything or, we had never seen a branch move or anything in the bush. We walked over to the bush and there was nothing there. And there was no trace of anything either. Not any disturbed soil or footprints or branches broken, nothing at all. And so I was just, you know, flabbergasted. Now that’s the story that I told Ray Crowe, and he said “You’re a liar!” And I said, well I can understand how anyone telling this story would encounter some resistance from any rational person!

DB: Right! That is a strange one. And I especially like how it is like, you know, like when you talk into a phone, the phone will mute when you stop talking so that the people listening to you won’t have to listen to a bunch of static.. it’s like a.. what do you call that? It’s like a little trigger. Every time you would stop talking, the trigger would come on and it would laugh -- that seems super human.

Henry: Yeah, I don’t know what that’s called. You know, as a drummer we call that call and response. Being the person going through the experience, I have to say that it was happening at the speed of thought. This laughter knew when I would speak and when I would not speak. It knew the micro-second when I would start and stop.. It was really.. Oh, I think it’s a gate. I think you’re talking about a gate.

DB: Yeah, a gate.

Henry: You’re talking about gating in recording. And, the thing is, ironically -- and this is part of the reason even in 1994 that I went down the path that I did. Ray Crowe called me a liar, however, I had Indian friends who said to me, “Yeah, you know, something like that happened to me!” And I said, “Really..?” (laughs)

DB: Huh.

Henry: And they were of the opinion that bigfoot was a tribe of Indians with psychic powers that could turn invisible. But, well, that’s really at odds with what white man is thinking over here. And they were like, well, white man has never believed us. (laughing) White man doesn’t believe you when you tell him these stories. And I said, ‘That’s right. You are absolutely right about that.” And once it happens to you -- and it happened to my wife as well. Which, I always say, I was very fortunate because my wife understood me and.. my wife of all people had no trouble believing me. Everyone else might not have, but my wife saw it with her own eyes too. So I was very lucky. I always say, this quest for bigfoot can lead to a lot of relationship stress if only one person is a bigfoot obsessed freak.

DB: Yeah, but if you’ve both seen it, then you’ve got something to talk about!

Henry: Yeah, and she was -- mark my words, let me defend her because I have impugned her. She was never the obsessed maniac I was. She was always a lot more detached and interested in other things. But she did understand why I was so fascinated! (laughs) She did know that. She’s a cat judge and she’s very interested in cats. But she did understand my obsession. And that I really really really wanted to learn more. I backed off of that in time. Part of what happened to me was, once I sort of got a workable theory that helped give me a logical explanation, that was good for me. Because that was my goal. Unlike others, I just wanted to understand. How could they do that?

DB: Right.

Henry: How could the invisible bigfoot laugh at me from the bush with telepathic power? And why did he laugh at me because of my lame physics about the Big Bang? That’s the question I had. (laughs) Other people have questions like, “Are they real or not!” (laughs)

DB: Yeah.

Henry: I was way past the, “Are they real?” point! I was on the, are they really laughing at me because my physics was lame?

DB: Well did you ever have an experience where you felt like you were having a conversation with them?

Henry: Oh, yes. Later. You know, my.. I have felt their presence many times. Well, many isn’t the right word. A number of times in the last fifteen years. And I’ve had some really strange conversations with them. Believe it or not, my wife is better able to communicate with them than I am. But she’s an animal communicator in the first place. She talks to cats. She’s like a cat whisperer.

DB: Oh really?

Henry: It seems that her cat whispering ability helps her in communicating with bigfoot! (laughs)

DB: I see!

Henry: Yeah. I admire my wife’s ability to do that, but yeah. Certainly I’ve had conversations with them. And they are very strange!

DB: Do they tell you anything that would be useful?

Henry: No, they are very strange things. One time one said, “Find the gold.” And I said, “Find the gold? You mean like go out and go looking for gold in the woods?” (laughing) I don’t get it, I’m not sure! Did he mean, literally turn into a miner and go out prospecting? What did he mean? I don’t know. Another time one said, “Eyes in the wood.” Not, “Eyes in the woods,” but “Eyes in the wood.” And I said to myself, well, that’s interesting. That could be useful. Because an Indian had said to me once, when I was.. I bugged a lot of Indians, because I’m part Indian, and I was working for the tribes, so I would just annoy them. (laughs)

DB: Yeah?

Henry: And this one guy said, “Count the trees.” He said when you are looking for these guys, count the trees when you go down the trail, and then count the trees when you come back up the trail. And I thought, oh, that’s an interesting tip. And I thought about that one telepathic phrase I got, “Eyes in the wood,” and I thought, hey, maybe that’s a reference to them looking like trees sometimes, you know? I mean I kind of think they might have been hinting at that. So that was something that was semi-useful when I added it up with what this Indian said. I wonder if they can do that? I suspect they can, make us think they are a tree.

DB: You know, you might have just solved a mystery for me.. I recorded something very strange in Ohio. People have listened to it and it has similarities to some of the sounds on the Sierra Sounds CDs. So maybe it was bigfoot that I recorded. But something happened that night that later on I wasn’t able to square up. I took my microphone and I put it behind this really large tree. I mean the tree was huge, or at least that’s the way it looked to me that night. I remember saying that I’d always be able to find that tree because it was so much bigger than all the others. As it happened, putting it behind that tree turned out not to be the best thing because it rejected some of the sound as the creature I recorded walked around to an area behind the tree. But when I went back later in the daytime, I could find the tree, but it was only half the size that it had seemed that night.

Henry: (pause) ..that’s strange!

DB: Yeah! And, you know, when they started doing their squawking, it was right after I walked out of the woods to go sit down. So perhaps I had walked right up next to one and it was doing this “eyes in the wood” thing. Maybe it just looks so much like a tree if it doesn’t move that I didn’t notice it, but you’d think I would have smelled something, because I was right next to the tree. It has always puzzled me. Why did that tree look twice it’s actual size in the dark? You know, I did have a headlamp on so I had light to see with. But when I went back in the full light of day, the tree is half the size I thought it was. I mean in girth. It was as tall as it should have been, but it was only half as wide in girth as I thought that night. Now that could be a perceptual thing, but it has always struck me as odd. Maybe another one of these odd things that happen when you are dealing with bigfoot!

Henry: Well when you get close is when.. you know, when you get all those reports, “I saw bigfoot cross the road,” they are not really close, but when you’re close like that, what you’re talking about, yeah, that’s when some strange things happen. I advise people to really pay attention. Just like you did. Because when you really pay attention, there are anomalies that are interesting! (laughs) But I really do think that anomalies really do contain the seed of true understanding. See, I don’t think.. I’m a lone eagle, and I basically think that we’re dealing with a flesh and blood creature that has puzzling powers, but that these powers can be understood with vitalism and other.. let’s say other forms of discarded science from the 19th century.

DB: Right.

Henry: Yeah, that’s my basic thing. But I think that, like, their ability to.. I think they do have the ability to either make us think we’re seeing a tree, or either merge with the tree in some way.. somehow they are able to do that, and I think that’s really interesting. Maybe when he hugs the tree close, he looks just like a tree. There’s a lot of ways to explain it away, but I think they’ve got some puzzling powers of camouflage. I’m not a pure paranormal guy by any means. Because I think we will, as humans, will be able to understand how he did that one day.

DB: Well you and I are about the same there. The only place where we might diverge is that I don’t know much about the discarded science that you are talking about, and I think that quantum mechanics and the way that science is beginning to see that puzzling things emerge from the way the universe just seems to work. And I think that maybe our answer will come from that, but that may be the same thing more or less.

Henry: It’s very similar. What the physicists are finding now -- non-locality, they are finding that sub-atomic particles are connected in some way that we can’t understand yet despite the fact that they are heading away from each other at the speed of light, and the fact that they are far apart. Some how, atoms on the moon are still connected with atoms here on earth if they once came from earth, they are still somehow connected. Non-locality has been proven by physics, and we really haven’t figured out how that works.

DB: Right.

Henry: And I think that the exploration of the quantum flux, as they call it, the idea that there’s a cloud of virtual particles behind this real world that we see and perceive is really similar to where I come from with my crazy vitalism. I kind of think that cloud of virtual particles is the same thing as the life force, more or less. Let’s say they’re analogous. I mean the quantum model is cool, but.. I diverge at Maxwell. I think everything beyond Maxwell, other than Tesla and a couple of others is erroneous. I think that the problem with quantum mechanics, as a layman, you know, I’m just a schmoe.. the problem is that they’ve missed things about the structure of electric and magnetic fields. And they actually missed things about electricity and magnetism, and that’s why they can’t understand gravity, because they’ve missed some fundamental stuff about electricity and magnetism. I find that I’m a lone eagle saying that! All of the real scientists out there, unlike Mr. Layman Bigfoot Chaser, me, out here throwing rocks at the window from across the street.. they are leaning towards quantum mechanics as the, you know, they call it the standard model. It is the dominant paradigm of physics today.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: So I know I’m not going to win a lot.. but what I find is that when people start to have strange experiences that go beyond what quantum mechanics can offer as an explanation, that’s when they might be open to a little more of the weird stuff that I propose.

DB: Right. Well it’s definitely the case that the we don’t understand the universe very well yet. I mean people have this idea that scientists know everything. But if you actually delve into it, you find out that they know very little. And they are always finding out that they were wrong about what they thought they knew!

Henry: There are holes in their models, yes. For one thing, they don’t understand life, actually, yet.

Henry: Like I said, they believe that one day they are going to understand self consciousness and awareness by studying DNA and smaller and smaller processes and chemical and physical properties of these processes. I think they’re.. I hate to say they are religious zealots. That’s too strong a term. They have an ideological faith that any day now they are going to understand life. But they don’t understand it yet. The don’t understand what animates living organisms yet. And what makes self conscious creatures self conscious, aware creatures. They have a million theories, like, gee, if we make a neural net complicated enough, will that make it self aware? That’s one of the holes in modern science.

DB: Yeah. I kind of feel like maybe we’ve come about as far as the mechanistic reductionism is going to take us, and there’s going to have to be a.. one of those paradigm shifts here pretty soon.

Henry: I think that biology will have that, I think that’s coming for institutional biology. And I really think that when it comes to bigfoot, boy, its time should come sooner, because I think that.. I don’t know, I don’t think that I’m going to create a paradigm shift. I think I’ll just be a lone eagle out there, saying from my little soap box on the corner, “I don’t think you guys are gonna really get it!” (laughs) “You gotta sort of shift your thinking there a little bit.”

DB: (laughing) Yeah. Well explaining bigfoot is probably beyond our powers at the moment, although there are definitely avenues that you can follow that lead toward explanations. Finding it is possibly within our powers..

Henry: I’m hoping we can get a handle on it. Because all I ever wanted and I still want is just to understand my own experiences. I want to know if he was laughing at me because of my lame physics. Actually, as time has passed, I’m almost certain he was.

DB: Well, if you’re right that we took the wrong turn in the ‘20s when we went into quantum mechanics and all that, then he would have had reason to laugh about that. But if he’s laughing specifically about the first three minutes after the Big Bang..

Henry: Yeah, it was the whole Big Bang thing that really set him off, see.

DB: Right, he couldn’t stomach that! (laughing) Well, you have to wonder, what is bigfoot physics like? Maybe there’s something that they can tell us?

Henry: This is my lifetime pursuit! (laughing)

DB: Understanding bigfoot physics!

Henry: Since 1994 that’s been a question in my mind, well, what are their physics? They apparently.. if they are people they probably have science, so what’s their science? So that’s the line of inquiry I’ve been on, away from everybody because, you know, mainstream bigfoot research does not move in that direction. The BFRO and others.. like I said, I commend Moneymaker for creating his dream. I’m surprised because so many people have had really profound experiences who have gone along on his expeditions. More than I would have expected. I think it’s a good thing that he is actually enabling people to encounter the unknown, up close and personal. I think that’s good. That’s really the thing that leads further down the path. Until you start having your own experiences, there’s no way for you to know. I say all the time, no one ever believes you when you tell them. They find out for themselves.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: And ten years ago when I left the building, that was something I probably said a hundred times. You’ve just got to find out for yourself. I had got to that point a long time ago where I really didn’t expect to persuade anybody, ever again, of the reality of bigfoot or anything. I just said, geez, you’ve just got to go find out for yourself.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: And the BFRO.. I’m glad they enabled that somewhat. That’s a good thing, and all the other guys looking. Which used to be me, because.. you know once I was the only bigfoot moderator on the only bigfoot discussion group. (laughs)

DB: Right.

Henry: And to see today, with ten thousand groups and all, it’s just amazing. Who knew? I had no idea this would become so popular.

DB: Yeah, nobody could have foreseen it back then. Well you might have been able to foresee it, because bigfoot has always been..

Henry: You know I had 400 on my list at the most? The biggest my list ever got was 400, maybe? Yeah, I didn’t know that there would be a bigfoot club in every state. At least one. And that specialization would come, just like in every field.

DB: It definitely has exploded since the BFRO launched their website, and especially since they started doing those expeditions. But you know what I’m reminded of? You were telling a story about a time when you and Peter Byrne and the rest of the Bigfoot Research Project got a report from some people in a valley, and you were only a few hours behind it. And there were three separate groups of people involved in the report, and something odd came out of it. I wonder if you could talk about that?

Henry: Sure. It’s like your experience where your companion saw this bigfoot run in the bushes and you found no trace of it. It’s basically that sort of experience. Early on, we dreamed.. we had this 1-800 number and we dreamed of getting what we called the 24 hour report. We would collect these reports, and just like the BFRO today, they’d be from five years ago. Ten years ago, you know? “Oh, back in 1978 I saw a bigfoot!”

DB: Right.

Henry: We dreamed, and one day, we were in Hood River, Oregon, and one day we get a report from The Dalles, Oregon. From two hours before. And we race over there. We had three employees, and I was just hanging around the office bugging everybody that day. Raced over there. These three groups you mentioned.. there was a valley just outside of The Dalles, and there was a group of hunters, a group of sledders, and a group of skiers, I think it was, and they were in three different places in the valley. Far apart from each other. They didn’t know each other. There were twenty people in total. And one by one we interviewed these groups. Each one of them said they saw seven bigfoot walk over the hill down at the end of the valley. And they all described the same thing, they came from the left, the went over the hill right about the center and they went out of sight. Boy, were we hot to go. So we had Peter Byrne, Todd Deary. We crawled all over that hill. It was two feet of snow, with a bit of ice on the top, about a quarter inch. We actually found mouse tracks, we found rabbit tracks, we found deer tracks. We ourselves made tracks. Tons of tracks. We destroyed the hill looking for tracks. But there was not a single bigfoot track. Not a hint. And Peter Byrne, being a sober, rational human being, said, “They must have been mistaken.” And so we marked it down as a mistake. And that was that. It didn’t make it into the database as a sighting report, because obviously these people were mistaken. There was no trace of any bigfoot having ever walked up this two-foot deep snow covered hill.

DB: Well there’s that data suppression thing going on again!

Henry: Yeah, because, see, my experience that day was a little different, because.. one of the things I learned, one of my rules of thumb.. you know everybody develops their own antenna for identifying hoaxes. So when I would interview these people we chased around Oregon and Washington, when they were really really shook up, that was one of my indications that, yeah, they probably really had a sighting.

DB: Yeah, it has an emotional impact on them that is very hard to fake.

Henry: There is a noticeable emotional impact, where it freaked them out and they were still pretty freaked out about it. So that was one of the ways that I would read to see if it was a hoax or not. And almost all of these twenty people were really shook up. And I said, well, you know, that’s the mark of credibility in my own private way of telling credibility. So I stored that away, and I know that Peter and Todd and the scientists say they were mistaken, that was that. But I didn’t think so, didn’t add up for me..

DB: Yeah, you knew that they saw something.

Henry: I said maybe there’s some way they could actually walk through the snow and not leave a trace. It just seemed like.. I couldn’t imagine what the logical explanation was for it, but I said, maybe that could happen. Now, once again, later, and I even bring it up in my book, I had an Indian friend who described that happening to him. He was sitting at a campfire in the middle of the winter in the middle of the woods, and bigfoot came up and shared his campfire with him. And as he walked up he left no tracks in the snow.

DB: Uh huh!

Henry: And then I said, ah, okay! And this was an Indian witness that I really trusted, who had 100% credibility with me. And I said, well, okay, they really can do that. I actually bring that story into my book.

DB: Cool.

Henry: That was one of those first hand times, early on -- that happened in 1994, and that was one of those times where I said, wow, this bigfoot thing is way weirder than all of these people want to portray it.

DB: Well speaking of that Indian friend of yours, was he able to confirm that the bigfoot had corporeal, physical presence there? I mean, could he touch it, or..?

Henry: He.. yeah, well he could smell it, he said. And having smelled it myself, this is one of those things -- it smelled like an animal. You can’t imagine that it’s not an animal because it stinks like an animal.

DB: Yeah, I’ve smelled it too -- it’s very very physically there when you are smelling it.

Henry: You’re like, man, that smells like a wet dog! But it’s not a wet dog, it’s much stronger and more pungent. So you’re like, oh, man, what is that? You know what he actually confirmed for me was.. it did seem to be a physical creature to him. It sat down at his fire with him. It sat there for a long time, and then the bigfoot raised its arms over its head and disappeared. So he was the one who confirmed for me that, yes, they can turn invisible.

DB: Or they can blip out of our material universe or whatever..

Henry: However that works, somehow they can blip out or something, but they can raise their hands over their head and be gone. Whatever it is. And leave no tracks in the snow. So he was the one sighting report that confirmed those two things for me. It made me know, yes, there’s another who has experienced what I’ve experienced, up close and personal. Over time I’ve found others like that. I mean there’s a lot of.. I’ve talked to a lot of Indians now. And now of course I know that one can not generalize about what Indians think, because they are all individuals. Some will tell you, yes I’ve seen them turn invisible, and they are mutli-dimensional, and I’ve seen them step into this doorway right here. And others that will tell you, those guys are crazy! (laughs)

DB: Right! Don’t listen to them, they don’t know what they are talking about!

Henry: They are out of their minds! There is no such thing as bigfoot, and I’ve spent my life in the mountains and I’ve never seen them.

DB: It’s depending on their experience. If they haven’t ever had the experience, it’s a lot easier to say it didn’t happen to the other guy.

Henry: Yeah, exactly. And you find that dichotomy everywhere. Once I went, a long time ago, to the Estacada Ranger Station. Early on I was all idealistic and I went, oh, ranger, ranger, did you ever see bigfoot? And there was a young ranger there and there was an old ranger there who was obviously the boss. And the old ranger just gave me the standard line, and said, it’s crap, I’ve spent my whole life, my whole career here at Estacada and I’ve never seen anything, no trace, it’s just baloney, it’s garbage. And the other ranger, the younger one, said, “No, they’re real. I’ve seen one.” (laughs) So, really, you can find that problem in a small office.

DB: Yeah!

Henry: Yeah, but you’re right, it’s all experience. I wish others had weird experiences like me, because then I wouldn’t be such a lone eagle.

DB: I think that other people have had those experiences, it’s just that it has been a hostile place to try to air them in the bigfoot community.

Henry: It’s very difficult to..Yeah, like on the forums, if you try to bring any of that up, you pretty much get slammed down pretty hard.

DB: And then banned!

Henry: Yeah, it violates what people think is possible. They’re afraid, I think, a lot of times, that science will unravel if there’s anything weird going on. (laughs)

DB: Yeah, like the world won’t be the same anymore..

Henry: But really, science will adapt, don’t worry!

DB: Right, we’re just saying reality plus this, not that reality is replaced by this. This is something that has been going on the whole time. It’s not just starting now..

Henry: As a student of the phenomenon.. one of the things I do in my book is I go through a lot of weird stories from the Indians from the 1920s and 30s. So this is nothing new. And even back then, the same exact themes are present. The people telling those stories say, “No one ever believes you if you tell them this: they turn invisible. Ah, god, I don’t even want to tell you!” It’s the same.. of course, it’s the resistance of the rational and logical people! (laughs) But when it comes to this guy, this particular species, these guys came to be unique like we’re unique. You know, we humans are unique compared to all the other animals. We do things that are quite different from the other animals. I think bigfoot is another species like us. They are unique, and they do things differently than all the other animals. So I think they are an exception, like we are. You can’t successfully lump them in with all the primates and gorillas. You have to look at the hominid line.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: And that’s another thing. One of the things we found when we looked at the Patterson film.. I don’t know if MK Davis also found this in modern times.. was that the Patterson creature, Patty, had a big butt and she had an occipital protuberance on the back of her head. And when you have a gluteus maximus, a big butt, and an occipital protuberance, the point on the back of the skull -- that’s really the adaptation of the hominid line. That’s not a primate, that’s a hominid.

DB: Uh huh!

Henry: That’s the adaptation for upright posture in the hominid branch. So just by looking at the occipital protuberance and the gluteus maximus in the Patterson film, we pretty much said, boy that really suggests that bigfoot is a hominid, on our branch. Now, I don’t know, that was never accepted by the dominant bigfooters, or perhaps Grover Krantz brought his gigantopithecus skull forward again and did another three television appearances of the same interview where he showed the skull. Whatever happened, it’s like people never noticed that particular fact that can be derived from the Patterson film. And I think it’s one of the most convincing things about the Patterson film -- hey, it’s a hominid! (laughs) Didn’t you guys realize that? So I know that there’s a lot of.. there’s nothing definite, and people are still wondering if the Patterson film is real or not. I was convinced when I paid a group of scientists $500,000 to find a zipper, and they couldn’t prove it was a hoax.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: That pretty much cemented it for me, personally. I said, you know, that looks like it’s not a hoax. Can’t prove it.

DB: It does look really convincing in the stabilized versions anyway, where you can see the muscles shaking and the hair looks like natural hair. In the suits that people use, the hair looks pretty ridiculous when you put it on film.

Henry: Back then in 1993-98, we were looking at that, and we saw all those muscles moving underneath the hair, and we actually could see grains of sand stuck to the footpads underneath.. we could see the bottoms of the feet in some frames. And, yeah, it looked real. All those details were spot on. And so I always said, wow, how can people overlook that? That the drunken rodeo cowboy.. no, he was actually a drunken rodeo clown. Roger Patterson’s chief form of employment was rodeo clown. And he was a drunk.

DB: And he came up with the film.

Henry: Well, you know, the.. many have said, well maybe some sophisticated guy hoaxed the film and just fooled Roger as well, and I’m like, no, that’d be a really sophisticated guy who understood physiology really well! (laughs) I’m glad that people see that now with the stabilized things that.. you know part of the thing that happened with the Bigfoot Research Project is that it all ended in tears.

DB: Yeah?

Henry: With tremendous acrimony. Peter was fired and then Jeff Glickman was put in charge. And then Jeff Glickman was fired, and then another one took over. Then all of the data wound up with me. I was given all the data that had been collected. And the Patterson film digitizing, and all the stabilized stuff and everything like that disappeared off with Glickman and everybody, and the power behind the throne who had funded it all, who had remained anonymous, this industrialist fellow was behind it all actually. So all that stuff never really made it, you know, the stabilized footage, and the 70 CDs with the Patterson film -- that disappeared forever. So a lot of our achievements disappeared. I was the only one who would still talk to the bigfoot research community at all. Everyone else.. well Peter, maybe. I don’t know what Peter is up to, maybe he still visits and says hello to the bigfoot community. But everyone else hated all bigfoot researchers with such passion. Just despised them, and just hated it. Wanted never to talk to anyone again, and they never have. And I was the only one who, well I think Glickman also was sort of like, “Eh, well, it went down the drain.” But I’m the only one from the project who has ever come forward, ever, and said what happened.

DB: Let me ask you, is Glickman still around?

Henry: He’s around. He has nothing to do with bigfoot research. He was a real scientist. He was actually a member of the.. he was a forensic scientist. And he had a lot of work in his area of expertise, and did a lot of stuff. This was just another contract for him, and he did that contract. He did some bigfoot work, and he did excellent work. Then he moved on back to real contracting that paid real money in other areas. When bigfoot was paying money, Glickman was there. He was a serious individual, a serious scientist that actually had nothing to do with bigfoot. So he was only around as long as we paid him! (laughs)

DB: You haven’t had any conversations with him since then?

Henry: I’ve remained friends with him, actually, ever since. I was like Ringo in the Beatles. I was never paid by the project, I was just on the..

DB: Everybody still likes Henry! (laughs)

Henry: Yeah, exactly. I was on the board of advisors and I was still everybody’s friend. Everybody still likes Henry from the project, but a lot of them don’t like each other. Glickman.. a lot of the others were really mad at him. It just was a sad disaster, actually, in terms of the net result. Glickman, we published his paper. We could not put it in a peer reviewed journal, which was his hope. Because he is a serious scientist and the whole thrust of what he was trying to do was get something reviewed. Dahinden refused. Everybody just said to hell with it. The funding went away. Everyone left and got real jobs. And I wound up with the data it in my closet, for a decade. I mean I just took it and put it away. Because for a long time I said, God, I want nothing to do with these guys either. I want to go do some real biology. (laughs)

DB: You know there’s an interesting parallel with what happened with your project, and the original Tom Slick project..

Henry: Peter Byrne was part of that project too.

DB: Yeah. Well that one ended up with everyone hating each other..

Henry: Yeah, it did.

DB: And there’s no data left over from that one either, because when Slick died, everything went to his heirs, and they didn’t release it.

Henry: Well, in this case what happened was the 438 sighting reports went to me. That was the only thing I was interested in. And Patterson film.. yeah, the digitized Patterson film, that just basically went to the heirs of the guy who funded it and went (whistles), so that’s gone. And then Glickman went on to other work. And today, if someone bugs Glickman about bigfoot, he refers them to me! (laughs)

DB: You talk to Henry!

Henry: ‘Cause I’m the only sucker that still talks about it with people. So that’s the funny thing, is that he, yeah, he doesn’t pass that many to me. Because they have to pass the Glickman filter. He doesn’t waste my time. I think he did a lot of really great -- I think he advanced the field back then, and due to history just kind of going away, a lot of is was just done again, and some of it not so well. The 2nd or 3rd iteration of the Patterson film analysis were not as good as the one we did. It’s amazing to me, but that’s what happens. Now I feel, now that I’m older and more experienced, that the idea of convincing institutional biology to take it seriously is like 50 years premature.

DB: Right.

Henry: Just like mechanism, a lot of what keeps bigfooters going, is that they have a religious faith that any day now a body is going to show up. They think it’s just a matter of time, it’s just around the corner, any day now, someone is going to find a body. Maybe it’s going to be Tom Biscardi! (laughs)

DB: Yeah. Doesn’t he find a body about every two years?

Henry: Yeah, I mean, to an old dog like me it’s like, my God, haven’t you guys been through this three or four times already? However, he does, he’s been finding bodies for a long time. Oddly enough, they look like the MInnesota Iceman. Hmm. Very peculiar!

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: I think the bigfoot community is vulnerable to Tom Biscardi because they do believe that a body is going to show up. I assume a whole different framework. I think they are people, I think they are intelligent, and that they bury their own dead. It’s that simple.

DB: And there wouldn’t be that many of them, either. That was something that I meant to ask you from before. When you ran that population analysis, what were the kind of numbers that you were coming up with for how many of them there would be, say, in North America?

Henry: Here’s the weird thing. The only hard number that we came up with was an upper limit. Their population could be no larger than 20% of the human population.

DB: Okay.

Henry: That was one of the only facts we could derive statistically. And that’s not very much, you know what I’m saying? (laughs)

DB: Well I wouldn’t be able to tell you what that number turns into because, along with being scientifically illiterate, I’m also mathematically illiterate! [Note: I think I misunderstood Henry’s point here -- it seems to me now that he meant that getting that one fact out of the statistics is not much.]

Henry: It’s 20% of the human population, so 20% of 6 billion. That’s 120 million? My number brain may not be working too well either! But it’s a lot. However, that’s just the upper limit that we came to. It would certainly be smaller than that.

DB: Okay.

Henry: Now another interesting thing. Totally different topic. But it’s related to getting up close. One of the things that has always bothered me about footprints is, I think there is a weight problem. I think if you’re actually one of the people who actually finds footprints, there’s a weight problem. The prints are always too deep or too shallow for the surrounding material. It almost always gets explained away. Everybody that finds a footprint, they jump up and down right there and go, well, the footprint was pushed two inches in, and my foot only could go down a quarter inch, and I weigh 250 pounds.. and so based on this ad hoc analysis, they say something like, ah, it must’ve weighed five or six hundred pounds. The deep footprints are always explained away as soil compression. But what I would say is, if you ever run the numbers on it, and you look at the surface area, and you calculate the amount of force needed to push that surface area two inches deep into the soil, like what happened with Glickman, is he estimated the weight at 1800 pounds! That really upset everybody, because, they were like, well, no way! Nothing can be that heavy. Can’t be 1800 pounds. However, what I would say is that there is also the opposite. There are many times when you will find one or two footprints and you won’t find any more. Or they’ll be very shallow, in a place where you can leave a deep footprint, and yet the footprint you find is not as deep as yours. And these are the kind of things that I say, if you have a first hand experience and you’re actually there investigating the footprints and casting them, and really paying attention to what you’re doing and what you’re casting, you too may say that there’s a weight problem here. They are too heavy or too light. Or there’s not the right number. There are too few. Even when one really studies the footprints closely, and one does not cling to the idea that the footprints have to be just like a 500 pound animal, because that’s what Grover Krantz said, one starts to notice that..

DB: There’s another anomaly there.

Henry: The footprints themselves are weird. They are not altogether just totally simple, they are weird. There’s weird parts to them. They are too deep or too shallow. I find that most people have never found footprints so they don’t know that. They just have that second hand experience.

DB: Yeah, you read about somebody else finding the footprints.

Henry: You read about all those footprints and you know you see people that have collected casts, like Dr. Meldrum. A large part of his cast collection he bought from Paul Freeman.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: Paul Freeman was thought to be a hoaxer by most people. Dahinden in particular was convinced Freeman was a hoaxer. And so was Peter Byrne. And yet Dr. Meldrum looked at the casts and said, no, they’re real. And he bought the collection for $2,000. And one of the other things about Freeman was that he had about fifteen hair samples, and he gave them to Dr. Fahrenbach, and Dr. Fahrenbach found that two of them were legit. Two of them fit his morphological bigfoot hair idea that he found. So Paul Freeman was not a hoaxer 100% of the time, that is for certain. He actually had real hair samples, and Meldrum actually bought his cast collection. So it’s really hard.. once again, it’s that filtering thing you’re talking about. During his lifetime, or most of his life, Freeman was thought of as a clown by quote unquote, “serious” bigfoot researchers. And yet now that he’s gone, and there’s just these artifacts he’s left, one realizes that he was on the level, at least part of the time.

DB: Right.

Henry: It’s an interesting thing, we’ll see what history brings us all.

DB: Yes. That problem with hoaxing is a serious one because it throws such a monkey wrench into our ability to really know what evidence we actually have found.

Henry: This was my original argument with Matt Moneymaker, actually. Why he did the BFRO and I did not. Because at the time, Glickman and I had discussed it, and we said, if we make an internet database for sighting reports, we are going to enable hoaxers to bombard us. And we had just run this 1-800 bigfoot number for like three years, and, boy, I can’t tell you.. we got five calls a day from, “Hey, bigfoot slept with my mom!” We got five a day of crazy bigfoot calls. And so we were fed up with the hoax thing. So we said, “Do not!” We even suggested to Moneymaker, don’t do this, don’t make an internet sighting report database, because you’re just going to help all the hoaxers hoax. And Moneymaker said, no, I’m going to do it, and he went and did it, and then once it started to take off, Glickman and I said, “Ok, the BFRO is the official sighting report database!” (laughs)

DB: You know the thought I had about that is, yes you will get hoaxes, but if you are using that database as a researcher looking for an area to research, the hoaxes don’t really harm you. Because you choose to research in the areas of multiple reports. If someone throws a hoax in with five good reports, it didn’t hurt you.

Henry: Yep. And you know, that’s one of the great uses of it, that you can find hotspots. And actually Dahinden used to say that. He used to say something that was relevant: “Everybody knows where the hotspots are.” Once you become a pretty good bigfoot enthusiast, and you can peruse the BFRO database, you get a sense of where the hotspots are, because you’ll see five or six reports coming out of a locality over a period of time, and you’ll say, well, that’s interesting. It can really help you home in on areas, that’s for sure. I, of course, think that it’s better to look at Indian place names than the sighting reports when one is looking for areas, because I feel that the Indian intelligence gatherers were far more astute than the modern guys, most of the time. It’s not always the case. But that’s part of what I also go on and on about in my book. Indian place names, where the Indians said they lived, that’s always been where I went. That’s been my secret. That’s how I look for bigfoot. I pretty much disregarded modern reports and said, I’m going with where the Indians said they lived a hundred years ago. And I’ve always gone that way. And, you know, others may disagree with my methods, but those are my methods and I’ve had tremendous success for myself. I must say, I’ve had seven or eight encounters pursuing my alternative view. Now the thing is that, over time, I certainly did the thing where I take Green’s sighting data, the BFRO sighting data, and my Indian place name data, and I show how they actually correlate with each other 62% of the time, or there’s 62% correlation. Meaning that they are all kind of the same. And I show how Indian place names are pretty much in the same places as the sighting reports are, and suggest the same places. There’s a little difference. Whereas sighting reports might be 20 miles over here and the Indian place name is 20 miles over there, that’s where I might go over to that other place, and avoid the modern guys who are all wandering 20 miles away. And so there’s a lot of times where I’m 20 miles off from where the modern guys are looking. (laughs)

DB: You know, I do have something interesting to relate about that. Now this area that I’m going to talk about doesn’t have an Indian place name anymore, but it is remembered as an area that was sacred to Indians. Of course, that gets rendered as “Indian graveyard.” And it’s very near Richmond Virginia. Richmond is a pretty good sized city. This place is across the river from Richmond, so it’s actually in an area which used to be farmland, but which is now mostly overgrown with just a few houses here and there. There was bigfoot sighting that had, I think, at least five witnesses, on two separate occasions. I was able to interview three of them, and they had that emotional reaction thing, especially two of them, who were kids. And it had happened in an area that had an Indian association. They called it an Indian graveyard. But I doubt that’s what it was. It was probably an area of spiritual significance to Native Americans.

Henry: That’s very interesting, what you’ve touched upon..

DB: I think the name is lost, but it still has that association. I believe it has some of those mounds that Native Americans would sometimes make.

Henry: One of the little studies I’ve done for myself, is I’ve mapped all the Skookum places in North America -- Skookum being the name for, you know..

DB: Yeah.

Henry: And then I’ve mapped all the places named Mamaloos. Now, Mamaloos is the Chinook jargon.. here in Oregon, I deal a lot with Chinook Indians that once lived here because they named a lot of places. One finds, when one looks at all the Mamaloos places and the Skookum places, that they occur in pairs a lot. That the places that are associated with death, the Indian burial grounds, and the aforementioned homes of the supposed bigfoot are really close to each other. I found that association between death and bigfoot by studying the Chinook names here in the Northwest.

DB: Huh!

Henry: I just thought I’d mention that because it’s kind of a real clear association. At least, to me! (laughs) But I’ve spent a lot of time mapping where all the Mamaloos places are and where all the Skookum places are, and then I noticed that, God, they are a lot of times real close to each other. I can’t explain why that is.. I have my theories, but bigfoot and death seem to be associated with each other.

DB: Interesting!

Henry: In fact, I think I saw a sighting report come by in my RSS feed last week that was on Mamaloos road. It always seems to strike me like that. It’s very interesting. A lot of times here, the word spirit is also a synonym for bigfoot. Spirit Lake on Mount St. Helens being the most famous. That’s where Fred Beck was for the 1924 I Fought the Ape Men of Mt. St. Helens incident. And Spirit Mountain in the coast range, and there’s actually a number of spirit peaks out west that were associated with skookums. It was called Spirit Peak because Skookums lived there, or it was called Spirit Lake because there were Skookums nearby. One finds that those sacred places like that, where it’s, “Oh, it’s a spiritual Indian place,” are.. one can, sometimes.. at least here in the Northwest, I’ve been able to find the stories connected to those places.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: It’s probably the same thing in your part of the country, if one goes to the library and stats digging around.

DB: Yeah. I guess we’d have to look farther back, though, because the Indians got displaced pretty early.

Henry: Yeah, that’s right, you’d have to go further back. Here, the treaty of 1855.. white man colonized here last. Really you have Indians here until 1867, and then we have a trail of tears where the lower Columbia River Indians were force marched to the Grand Run Reservation in 1867. It didn’t really get a lot of attention in the history books because we signed treaties with the Indians rather than fight wars. Yeah, down there they got displaced, what, in the 1600s?

DB: Yeah, 16-1700s they were getting kicked out.

Henry: So you’d have to dig a lot further back. It is much different. There’s a lot more trace of Indians out here. There are a lot of large reservations, still, in Oregon and Washington. From the treaty of 1855. There are places here where Indians have always lived, where white man never conquered it.

DB: There are a couple of reservations here in Virginia and I’ve always wondered whether anybody has tried to talk to them about bigfoot, and what reaction they would get.

Henry: Yeah, I wonder about those East coast Indians, because, here.. the Indians basically don’t talk to outsiders, much. It took a long time before I had any Indian friends would talk about the Stick Indians, as they would call them. I had to earn their trust. And most Indians have lived a life where, even today in 2009, they are just constantly getting screwed by the US Government one way or another still. So they are not very willing to talk about bigfoot. But, sure enough, when you really penetrate the veil, a lot of times you find out that they have lots of stories about them. It all comes down to who you are as a person. If you actually become friends with somebody who’s an Indian, it can lead to you actually hearing some stories. Or you can be a completely annoying person like I’ve been!

DB: (laughing) So they finally go, “Allright! I’ll tell you, get off my back!”

Henry: Yeah! One person I knew was in the Kwakiutl tribe on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The Kwakiutl tribe has a secret wildman society called the Hamatsa. And this society is a secret society within the tribe. It’s hereditary. You are the chief of the Hamatsa if you are descended from the chief of the Hamatsa. And you are a clan member if you are descended from a clan member -- that’s pretty much it. You have to be in these families to be in the secret society. If you are in the Hamatsa, then you can put the Dzunukwa on the bottom of your totem pole -- because you read totem poles upside down. The most significant creature is the one on the bottom, not on the top. And only clan members of the Hamatsa can put the Dzunukwa on the bottom of their totem poles and house poles. Now, the current chief of the Hamatsa is a fellow named Tom Sewid. And this poor guy.. boy did I want to talk to this guy! And I chased around and chased around, and actually Dr. Bindernagel knew him and brokered a meeting, where we had breakfast one morning. And of course I was just, Mr. Questions. “Where do they live!” (laughing) And he said, “My grandmother taught me that they live in an invisible house high in the mountains.” And I said, “Ah, that’s very interesting.”

DB: Uh huh!

Henry: It turned out that they have a ritual. When it’s time to join the Hamatsa secret society, you must go live in the woods for four months with the Dzunukwa, the wild woman and the wild man. This turns you into a cannibal. You eat human flesh. So at the end of the four months you are a cannibal, and to come back into the tribe you have to go through a three day cleansing ritual, where you eat a human being. You and all the Hamatsa members gather together and in ritual form you have a cannibal meal where you actually eat a human. Now the Kwakiutl are a hierarchical culture, meaning that they have free people and slaves, and you eat a slave. And they still have slaves today.

DB: I didn’t know that..

Henry: They are like India, where you have a caste system. And so, one of the questions I asked Tom Sewid was, “Hey, do you really eat a person? I mean, are you guys for real, you actually eat a person?” Because what the anthropologists who had studied the Kwakiutl had always said was, no, they don’t eat a person, they cook a bear so that it looks like a person, so they actually eat a bear. And I said, come on, I want to know. And of course he said to me, “Oh no, we eat a person.” (laughing) So I said, does the government know that? “Oh no, the government doesn’t know that, no.” Well, that’s interesting! The thing is that, they don’t think.. their whole thing is that once you eat this meal, you are cured of your cannibalistic tendencies and you’re a human being again, and you can return to the tribe, and live normally with the tribe from then on, however now you’re a full fledged member of the Hamatsa secret society.

DB: I see..

Henry: So I had to verify all these details. And it turns out that the view of the Kwakiutl is that the Dzunukwa is merely the messenger for the really heavy duty god named Bakbakwaliwiksawae. This is the invisible god that has a thousand eyes and a thousand mouths, who lives on the bottom of the ocean, and bigfoot is only a door man for Bakbakwaliwiksawae’s palace that’s on the bottom of the ocean. So they have a whole other level beyond bigfoot, where bigfoot is just the doorman of the really heavy duty god. These local tribes up here have some pretty evolved ideas about bigfoot! (laughs)

DB: Well, I’d say! And once we’ve gotten into the area where we’re saying, okay, we’re going to take this stuff seriously, and then you hear a story like that.. now what are you going to do?

Henry: Yeah, that’s the thing is, it’s.. I’ve always just wondered about them and for me.. yeah, what are you going to do? One thing I took from the Kwakiutl is that they live underground and they live underwater. And over time, I’ve decided the Kwakiutl are right about that. Now the rest of it I’m not so sure. Because, once again, we’re dealing with really a whole different civilization. These guys.. up here in the Northwest there are still a lot of Indian cultures that are still intact, and they are quite different from modern consumer mall culture. (laughs)

DB: Right.

Henry: Now another thing I’ll mention is, for example, a lot of tribes have bigfoot as part of their creation myths. The Nez Perce for example, a bigfoot was.. their culture hero conquered bigfoot and tore his body up, and the Sioux were formed from the arm, the Shoshone were formed from the leg, and the Nez Perce were formed from the heart, which is an interesting myth when you think about DNA and genetics and evolution.

DB: Right.

Henry: That’s a very interesting creation myth. It starts with bigfoot’s body being torn up and all the different tribes being made from it. When you encounter something like that, you go, hey, bigfoot is not a recent phenomenon! (laughs)

DB: Yeah.

Henry: Bigfoot is really interwoven with all of the different cultures. One of the interesting things is that the Nez Perce, apparently, and I can understand this, really don’t like talking about it. They don’t like mentioning bigfoot’s name in their native language. It’s taboo to actually say the name that they have for him. So it’s not done. They have a monument on Rt. 12 called “Heart of the Monster.” It’s a big rock. And it’s the center of the Nez Perce civilization. The bigfoot heart was torn out and it got turned into this rock. The Nez Perce culture developed from that point and from that place geographically. When you go to Heart of the Monster, the monument, today, there is not a word mentioned about bigfoot. Not a single word. It’s just “the monster” and his heart is there. And they never actually use the Nez Perce term for the monster. So I, of course, went to the monument and then I went to my Nez Perce friends and said, how come you never say his name? I just went to the monument and they explained the legend and here’s the heart, and here’s where the Nez Perce came from, and yet it never actually mentioned his name. And they said, “Well.. taboo.” (laughs) “We don’t like to say his name out loud.” And I said, oh, I can respect that. So that’s another cultural thing with Indians, a lot of times it’s taboo to talk about them. It’s just not done.

DB: Uh huh.

Henry: And yet there is a culture that actually has it in it’s foundation myth. Same with the Athabascans, who live on the Copper River in Alaska. The very first story in their entire collection of stories, their creation story, involves arriving at the place they live and fighting a huge battle with bigfoot who disappear into caves and don’t bother them again. And one finds that.. to tie it into the thing that we were talking about in the very beginning. One of the things I started to look for is I said.. this is kind of Henry Franzoni’s Mutant Law of Indian Lore -- the closer you get to the continental divide, the more you are going to find Indian stories about bigfoot. And I have found that to be true in my last fifteen years of digging around. When I get close to the continental divide and I study the tribes that are there, be they in New Mexico or Alaska, I find that they seem have more stories about the hairy giants than the other tribes. It’s sort of a pattern that I expected to find, so maybe it’s not really there but because I expected it, I found it. But I think that the data supports that. I started to focus on those tribes, and when I find a tribe that lives on the continental divide, for instance the Flathead Indians of Montana, I’ll really dig into finding every single story of theirs that I can possibly find, looking for hairy giant stories. I’ve found that it’s sort of a shortcut for finding tribes that have a lot of bigfoot stories.

DB: Yeah. They would have been near the continental divide.

Henry: Near or on top of. In the case of the Flatheads and the Nez Perce, they straddle the continental divide. Of course, in Virginia, I think you’re just going to be talking about your summit peaks and ridges of whatever mountains you have around. Because that’s another pattern that I’ve found, that besides the continental divide, the Indian place names are located in mountains everywhere. Wherever you’ve got summit peaks and ridges of whatever mountains you are in, that’s kind of, locally, the most likely place to look. My interpretation of the data leads me that way. Your mileage may vary!

DB: It’s something for the interested readers to take away from this, that the continental divide should be a place of interest, wherever you are..

Henry: And the coast. In my book I take 4000 Indian place names and I map all of them, and I show that pretty much all of them are in the continental divide or on the coast. That’s the pattern I find.

DB: Which is fascinating..

Henry: Yeah, well, you know sometimes you can’t see this stuff unless you look at the big picture. If you look at all the sighting reports of South Carolina, it’s not clear that there’s any pattern at all. The only pattern you can usually ever find is, oh, this is a hot spot over here, that’s a hot spot over there. That’s it!

DB: Yeah. And I guess they can occasionally come around someplace that wouldn’t be all that close.. I mean I don’t think Richmond is close to any continental divide. There aren’t a lot of sightings in Richmond, either..

Henry: You’re not far from the coast.

DB: No, that’s true, and you’re on a river that leads you to the coast.

Henry: Yeah, you’re near water. And see this is one of the things, water.. many people have noticed an association between water and bigfoot.

DB: Yeah, I think we’ve definitely seen that in our little regional bigfoot database. When you have a sighting, you have a good sized body of water nearby.

Henry: Yes. I think there’s a logical explanation for that, but it’s the same around here too. There’s a famous bigfoot researcher named Tom from Alberta.. Can’t remember Tom’s last name. He wrote a couple of books..

DB: Thomas Steenberg?

Henry: Yes, Steenberg. He has enunciated the relationship between bigfoot and water, in doing a fair amount of studies with his data. I think that they live underground or underwater, and that sometimes the doorway to get underground is in bodies of water. Because that would be real good camouflage to have a body of water on top of the door to your cave.

DB: Right.

Henry: So that’s basically where I think that, yes, water is also needed. I have many Indian friends that will say that they are often found in the water. They are in the water a lot. My friends have encountered them in the lakes and rivers. So there’s definitely an association. And one ties it into the summit peaks and ridges -- one looks at headwaters. And one can look at the watershed divides between headwaters as a really interesting thing to look, because above the headwaters, right at the hydrological divide between different basins is where the summit peaks and ridges are, and that’s where they are, at least in my model. I think that’s where they are hanging around, a lot. Maybe just to avoid us, because..

DB: Because we’re not there very often!

Henry: Right, we’re not there! It’s high up, and you know, hard to get to. So, I don’t know, we’ve talked for a while, shall we..

DB: Yes, you are so much fun to talk to that I just realized a few minutes ago that, dang, this has been going on for two and a half hours! Which probably means you’re tired.

Henry: Yes, I’m sorry, I hope I haven’t talked your ear off.

DB: No, it has been extremely interesting.

Henry: One of the good things about me is that I haven’t talked about bigfoot for ten years, so I’ve saved up a lot to talk about.

DB: Well it has been extremely interesting, and I know the people who read this blog will be -- they won’t think that any of it was boring. They’ll think all of it was interesting, so don’t worry about that.

Henry: Wow. Well I’m really pleased to see some open-mindedness today to some of the weird stuff. I mean, not that there’s much. I see that there’s still some organizations that are hell-bent to keep their eyes shut! (laughs)

DB: Yeah, I think that they’ve loosened up in the last couple of years. Because when I first started this, and I’m a recent enthusiast as far as active research. I only started actively researching in 2004, and then researchers were absolutely, completely against the paranormal. It was all flesh and blood only, don’t even talk about anything else. And there would only be whispered conversations, sometimes, when people met together. “Well, you know it could be that they’re..” blah blah blah. It had to be secret, though. It would not be something that anybody would publicly state. Now it has loosened up.

Henry: That’s what it was like back in 1998 also. It was like, boy, don’t say anything weird. Do not say it if it’s weird. So I’m glad that it has loosened up a little. Like I said, I think it’s inevitable that it loosens up because it’s inevitable that people are going to get close and it’s going to be weirder than they expected. Paul Freeman used to say, and I love this line, “If you ever encounter one, you are in for a shock.”

DB: Yeah?

Henry: Yeah. I used to like that. (laughing)

DB: Yeah, that’s a good one.

DB: (Returning to the theme of paranormalism in bigfoot research) Well let me tell you what I think is the proximal cause for why it has loosened up in the last couple of years. And maybe you wouldn’t even call it couple of years. It was the illness and death of Erik Beckjord. Because while he was alive, if you took an interest in paranormal bigfootery, he would actively pursue you.

Henry: That’s true.

DB: He was annoying..

Henry: He hounded me, he attacked me. If I ever said anything publicly, he hounded and attacked me. He wrote letters to everybody I worked with that was a scientist that said I had committed a federal crime.

DB: Yeah, he was a weird one..

Henry: And since I was working for the federal government and had been accused of a federal crime, they had to investigate it. Beckjord actually forced a federal investigation upon me, where the FBI investigated me to see if I had committed a federal crime.

DB: Oh good lord..

Henry: The whole time I was saying, you know guys, this guy Beckjord is completely out of his freakin’ mind!

DB: Well as long as he was out there he -- and he was himself a complete paranormalist, which is the ironic thing..

Henry: He was. And you’re right. I would never have come out with my book with Beckjord alive. I would never be talking to you today like this with Beckjord alive, because he would seize upon it and.. he thought it was his mission to “out” me. I’ve sent the book I wrote to my colleagues, so I really can’t be outed anymore, I think what I think. But I would never come out publicly when Beckjord was alive. He was a big problem for me too. Oddly enough, he thought that I had all kinds of secrets and that I wouldn’t spill the beans, and he thought it was his mission to get me to spill the beans. If I’d go to a bigfoot conference, Beckjord would show up and he’d follow me around and he’d say, “Spill the beans! Spill the beans!” (laughs) Which also served to just keep me quiet, by the way.

DB: Yeah! I think he did that to a lot of people.

Henry: I hate to say this but Beckjord kind of worshipped me, oddly enough, in a sick kind of way. Even though he would attack me whenever i said anything, he was convinced that I could help him. (laughing)

DB: Yeah, you had the secret knowledge that he wanted so badly.

Henry: The secret knowledge that would help Erik Beckjord. But I still say he was completely out of his mind.

DB: Right.

Henry: But you’re right. You are absolutely right. Beckjord dying had a lot to do with me coming forward. It did have something to do with it, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t do it with him alive..

DB: You would have had to put up with a lot of crap.

Henry: Yeah. I’m enough of a freak magnet anyhow, and when superfreaks like Beckjord actually start interfering with your livelihood, which is what Beckjord did, he had no sense of his boundaries whatsoever, he just thought, oh, I’ll just cost Henry his job and that’ll be fine. No problem! You know, I hate Henry so I’ll get his employer to turn on him. It didn’t work, and I was exonerated, but it was a pain in the ass to have Beckjord out there trying to sabotage your income.

DB: And it was a great irony, because Beckjord thought he was the champion of the paranormal cause, but as long as he was alive and active, he kept a lot of people from saying what they might have thought because they didn’t want to have to put up with his crap.

Henry: Absolutely he did. In my case, he really did. But boy, I think you’re right. I think your thesis is right. He was one of the greatest inhibitors of anybody saying anything paranormal.

DB: Yeah, and that’s why a lot of those websites don’t want you saying anything paranormal because they don’t want Beckjord coming around. Of course, he’s dead now, but the policy persists. They’ve just gotten used to it.

Henry: Yeah, even I had to, in the very first bigfoot group.. on the very first bigfoot discussion group and website, I had to ban Beckjord from it. (laughing)

DB: (laughing) I’m not surprised!

Henry: Yeah he was disruptive and crazy from the beginning. And the reality is, I was far more.. my explanations and theories about things was far different from his. One could say, maybe a lot more out there than his too. But that’s very interesting. You’re right, I would never.. and my wife would never have let me be involved with the bigfooters as long as Beckjord was alive either.

DB: Well I certainly kept a lot of the paranormal stuff out of my blog as long as he was around, because the very little I ever had to do with him was very unpleasant, so I didn’t want any repeats!

Henry: Yeah, I can understand that. Well, you know, we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but that’s one person that I’m really glad is gone!

DB: Yeah a lot of people have said the same. It seems to me like he needed help that he never got. That his life must have been miserable, so in that sense I’m sorry for him..

Henry: Well I’ve studied that life of his, you know, know thy enemy. Beckjord went to the Air Force academy, where he got thrown out after two years.

DB: Really.

Henry: Yes. Beckjord was ex-military, or he was frustrated military really. I’d say a large part of his identity was formed in that experience.

DB: Huh.

Henry: But he was the classic definition of a sociopath, or even a psychopath. He had no sense of boundaries about where his personality ended and yours started. And he as a person had decided that he would step on anybody and do anything and hurt anyone in order to gain glorious expansion for himself.

DB: Right.

Henry: That’s pathological, that’s sociopathic, that’s psychopathic. “I don’t give a living shit about anybody at all except me, and how you are useful to me for me to improve myself, and I don’t give a thought about anything else.” That’s clinical psychopathic. And that was part of his problem. He was really very intelligent, but he had no compassion for anyone at all, as long as they could be used to further his bigfoot glory. And we all knew that, and we thought, man, what an ass! He did need help, I’m convinced you are right about that. That he didn’t get.

DB: Yeah, well I guess it’s kind of hard to help people who have that particular problem. I think I’ve recently read that there’s no cure for psychopathy..

Henry: Yeah, well, what I’m saying in one way is that he was a complete asshole! (laughs)

DB: Yeah, right. This field has attracted more than a few people who fit that same description. They’re kind of psychopathic, and you’d call them a complete asshole when you have your dealings with them. So it may be it attracts that kind of person. Because they want to glorify themselves.. it’s like big fish, little pond. They look for the little pond where can get the glory..

Henry: Yeah, maybe bigfoot attracts these guys. I like to say that it’s one of the places where an amateur can still make a difference. Not everybody is Jeff Meldrum. Most of us are not Jeff Meldrum! (laughs)

DB: Right, our qualifications are few and varied!

Henry: That’s right. But this is a field where an amateur can make a difference. It’s like astronomy. I’ve always said that about bigfoot. We amateurs are not shut out. Big science hasn’t moved in with the big funding and the big studies yet. And I don’t think they are coming any time soon.

DB: No, I agree with you there. Having had the very few experiences that I’ve had, but knowing how strange they were, I’m convinced that there’s something weird about bigfoot, and it’s going to be a while before science is able to step in and have anything to say about it.

Henry: I think so too. That was the lesson of the Bigfoot Research Project. Here I did a credible research thing with Glickman, I helped him do it, and it just was like, I did nothing at all! (laughs) And that was one of those defining moments where I said, boy, you know, science is just not interested in this.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: Not yet, at least.

DB: Right, but for all we know, they might turn over a discovery in the next few years where they go, oh, wait a minute! Then an animal that you can’t really find, or you know, a kind of human being that we don’t really know yet and can’t find, makes sense suddenly. And then they’ll turn around and start looking at it. You know, those kind of discoveries come out of left field, you don’t know when they are coming.

Henry: One can hope. Right, one can.. well one wonders, I mean it could be in the cards. I think it’s in the cards that some day we’ll know about them. I think it’s going to be on their terms, as much as on our terms. It may be a thing where, when they are ready to let us know about them, they’ll let us know. It actually might be under their control more than it’s under our control. We’ll have to see.. who knows? But I suspect that when that day comes, it’s going to be with their consent. Because we don’t seem to be able to get anywhere without their consent.

DB: Yeah. Did you find, at those times when you were communicating with them, did you get a sense that they were in control of it the entire time? It wasn’t that you went to the right place, but they came to you?

Henry: Absolutely. My personal experiences support what I was just telling you, yes. You know I.. as a creature walking around on this earth, I felt so outclassed by this creature that was standing next to me. I could tell one of us was smarter than the other, and it wasn’t me! (laughs)

DB: Oh, really? That’s really interesting..

Henry: Really, yeah! So that’s part of where I’m coming from when I say, yeah, I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere without their consent. Accidents happen. Right? I mean, accidents do happen, so maybe somebody winds up with a body one day. Who knows? I don’t think that’s very likely. When I have been in their presence, I have felt that they are very much in control of the situation, and they found me more than I found them. In fact, they laughed at me for looking for them on more than one occasion. And I realized that I wasn’t really going to get anywhere myself without their consent. So that’s a personal discovery.

DB: Did you ever get a sense of why they were letting you interact with them at all?

Henry: No. I’ve been baffled by why some people.. One of the things that really baffles me about this whole bigfoot thing, is why I meet some people that interact with these guys in different ways, and I’m not the only one that’s had conversations with them, that I’ve met. But it doesn’t happen to everyone. I mean some people, the only interaction they have is they knock on a tree with a stick, and something knocks back at them with a stick from across the valley. That’s never happened to me. And I go, well, maybe I should go knock on a tree or something, I don’t know. But that never happened to me. From my view, I see them joking around with people, so if people like to do that, they go, hey, ok, let’s do that. If people want to touch us and know we’re real, we’ll let them know we are around?

DB: Right.

Henry: What always baffles me is why it’s an individual thing? Why did I have the weird experience with the invisible bigfoot laughing at me from behind the bush when I’m trying to explain the Big Bang? And why didn’t that happen to Matt Moneymaker. It should have happened to Matt Moneymaker, that’d fix his wagon! (laughs)

DB: (laughing)

Henry: But it didn’t happen to Matt Moneymaker, it happened to me. Now one could say, oh boy, you’re just trying to sell your book, but hey, I didn’t say anything for fifteen years! So it’s not like I’ve been eager to come out and say this crazy stuff. But I don’t understand why.. and I’ve certainly met dozens and dozens of people who have had weird telepathic experiences with these guys, and I’ve always looked for patterns. Why them? Why that person over there, why that plumber, why that Indian, why that hunter? Sometimes you think about non-violence and everything, and yet I’ve met one person who only runs into bigfoot when he has his rifle with him. So that throws a monkey wrench into the theory that they don’t like guns! (laughs)

DB: Right.

Henry: And there’s certainly a range of different experiences that people have. We’re all getting different pieces of the puzzle. I always think of the three blind men and the elephant..

DB: Right, exactly.

Henry: Grabbing the tail, and the trunk, and the foot, and all thinking it’s something different. I think that’s what we’re seeing with bigfoot all the time. There’s a hundred people that say, “I saw bigfoot cross the road.” And then there’s three people who say, “I saw bigfoot, and then I saw a UFO!” (laughs)

DB: There’s even the one or two people who say I saw bigfoot in a UFO.

Henry: Right! I’m not one of those. I’ve never seen bigfoot in a UFO. But, I ran into a bigfoot once in the mountains, in the Cascades, and I went back a month later, and a UFO came out of the ground and took off.

DB: Really?

Henry: It would be the same area. The same basic square mile.

DB: How close were you to the UFO and how good a view did you have of it?

Henry: Oh, it was really a staggering view. I was really close. The thing is that I was, maybe, an eighth of a mile, and I was on a valley wall, and the UFO came out of the ground in the valley below me. And it came up above the trees, and it hovered above the trees.. and I’d say an eighth of a mile, which is, what? 600 feet or so? And it was really.. it looked like a sideways ice cream cone.

DB: Huh!

Henry: It didn’t look like a UFO that I had ever seen in a book or anything. It had a glowing amber half-ball at one end, like at the ice cream end of the cone, and it went down to a point, and it was a silver point. And it wasn’t flying like a rocket, it was flying sideways. So it was actually hovering sideways above the ground. And it slowly turned.. like a video game, just the yaw and pitch, and stayed at one altitude above the trees, and just rotated in a plane about 90 degrees. And then the orange ball got really bright and it just squirted way up into the sky, and just disappeared. Silently. It never made any noise. We saw it go all the way up into the sky. Like I saw it basically go out of the atmosphere or whatever.

DB: Wow..

Henry: Yeah, I mean it was really a.. it was a.. (laughs) My wife was with me. The thing about it is that for a couple years before that, my wife and I had occasionally seen a streaking light in the sky, and I’d say (playfully), “Look, a UFO!” And she’d go, “Oh, that could be a plane, that’s not very UFO-y..” So when we saw this one, I said, “Well is that UFO-y enough for you?” (laughs) It was a machine that we could see, a craft with an unknown propulsion system. And I came to the conclusion, after the shock, that either that was one of ours, and there’s a closed book of science that the military has..

DB: And we don’t know anything about it!

Henry: Right, we don’t know anything about it. Or aliens are already here on earth. Or both! So when I saw that happen that day, I thought, well one of these things is true. I went from never believing in UFOs to, wow, they’re real.

DB: You know, it occurs to me that there could be one other explanation. And that is, if.. going back to bigfoot, you did see bigfoot in that area. If they are able to manipulate our minds, it’s possible they can make you think you saw a UFO..

Henry: Right..

DB: For purposes of.. who ever could figure that one out, why they’d want you to see a UFO. But that is a possibility

Henry: You’re absolutely right. I didn’t think of that, but it’s absolutely correct. Because, just because I have eyes, I believe I can see. But that doesn’t mean I’m seeing what’s actually there.

DB: I guess nobody got a picture of it?

Henry: No, we were.. I was looking for bigfoot at the time. That’s why I was there in the middle of the night on the valley wall. But I didn’t have a camera. It was so unexpected, the whole thing..

DB: Yeah..

Henry: Even when that happened to me, I said, gee, could UFOs have anything to do with bigfoot, because it was in the same area?

DB: Yeah, it certainly doesn’t prove any connection.

Henry: No, and wondered in the back of my mind, but that too is one of those things that if I ever mentioned it to a bigfoot researcher, that was the same thing as saying “Erik Beckjord is my god!” or something.

DB: (laughs)

Henry: (lauging) I just really offended them! So I learned to not tell the UFO story. I learned not to go public with that because that just offended everybody. And yet, that’s what I wanted to understand. I wanted to understand my experiences. I really didn’t care a whole lot about everybody else’s experiences as much as my own.. I just said, “Well, you may not have seen a UFO, but I did!” (laughs)

DB: Yeah.

Henry: And so, how does that work? What’s underground anyhow?

DB: Yeah, my next question is, did you go to the place where you saw it come out, and if you did, was there a place where it could have come out, or did it somehow come through the ground without leaving any evidence that it had?

Henry: Oh.. it’s weirder than that!

DB: Yeah?

Henry: Yeah. This is the unfortunate trifecta. I call it my 1993 trifecta. My wife and I.. this happened about 3:00 in the morning. So we took a short nap, and then we went to where it came out of the ground. Because we had seen the exact spot it came out of the ground. We had a real good view of it. We had to drive down logging roads that went down around the valley, because there were no straight road that went there, and there was some pretty severe terrain. So we drove up to the spot. And as we drove up to the spot, who would be between us and the spot it came up out of the ground but two men in black.

DB: Seriously?

Henry: Seriously. For real. I mean, I know.. this is why I say it’s the crazy trifecta. In the same month in 1993 I ran into bigfoot, a UFO and the MIBs..

DB: (laughing) Did you get to talk to them, or..?

Henry: In the same place! Yeah, the thing is that as I came up to this place where the thing came out of the ground, and I could see no evidence of there being a hole or anything, it just looked like a solid.. just a clearing in the woods, like a clear cut. And the MIBs are standing on the edge of it, and they came towards me and, here’s where we get totally out there.. I got the telepathic message from the MIBs that, “You don’t belong here.” That was the message I got from them.

DB: Did anyone have something that they pointed at you when you got that message? (Note: Here I was thinking of the ultrasound device the military has been developing for sending discrete messages like this.)

Henry: Nobody pointed anything, they were still probably 20’ away, but they were walking towards me, and I was looking at these two guys, and there was a woman in red. It was just like some of these experiences that you read about. I read about them later. After running into the MIBs, I learned about them on the internet! (laughing) I was like, no, the men in black aren’t real too, are they? But there was a woman in red, who had blonde hair, bright red dress, and white skin, and she was wearing sun glasses. They were all wearing the same sun glasses. They really had the same sort of oriental look, sort of asian look, really thin, same hair, shiny black shoes in the middle of the Cascade mountains. You know it was really strange. And they had what looked to be like a Ford Explorer, or a Ford Expedition, like a big, green, dark green government looking thing. And we had come down the logging road and had not seen any trace of anyone beating us to this place at six in the morning down the logging road. It was like they had appeared in front of us. And, I just looked at my wife when I got the message from them that we didn’t belong here and I said, “Shit, the men in black, let’s get the hell out of here!” (laughs)

DB: (laughing) And you can’t be blamed for that!

Henry: (laughing) No! I just hit reverse and just whipped out of there on that gravel road as fast as we could. It wasn’t like they really threatened me or anything. I did get this message I didn’t belong there, and I respected it. (laughing) Partially because they had communicated it telepathically!

DB: Yeah.

Henry: (laughing) I said, you know, “I’m outta here!”

DB: I can’t imagine anybody having that bunch of stuff happening, and not being completely freaked out about it. I mean you would have to be crazy not to be freaked out about what you just described.

Henry: Yes. That happened in August and September of 1993, and honestly, my world.. everything I knew was wrong. And my world and all the things I cherished were severely thrashed and turned upside down. For years. I mean, literally, you know, it took me five years to get over that, at least. You know, “Wow, you mean bigfoot, UFOs and the MIBs are all real?” Because, honestly, I didn’t care at all about them before August of 1993. And I didn’t think any of it was real. I didn’t think UFOs were real, I didn’t think bigfoot, and.. nothing. And I had these three things at once, and.. at the time, when I would mention it -- for example, I went to my father. I said, hey dad, bigfoot and UFOs, MIBs, and he didn’t take me seriously, he said, “Hey, have you ever seen the X-Files?” (laughs)

DB: Yeah, exactly.

Henry: (still laughing) So I was like, “Yeah, yeah, I know, sorry Dad, I was hoping maybe you would believe me!” But he didn’t at all. So I was getting no traction at all. No one believed me. And yet my wife and I, like I said, we were off in our own little corner, saying, “Yeah, that was -- what’s going on?” (laughing) So, you know, UFO, bigfoot, what’s going on out there? So that became our study area, right? Needless to say. You know that being like one of my main study areas ever since. And of course, over the years, I’ve learned that, yeah, people have been having bigfoot sightings there forever. It’s just one of the hotspots one finds on the map. Sometimes I think those hotspots are.. I wonder what’s going on? But yes, I’m glad today that I can tell this story to you and you don’t just react hostilely and banish me from ever talking to you again.

DB: Yeah, well I’ll tell you why I don’t. My cousin, when I was very young, told a story of her entire family watching a UFO come down in their field behind their house. And they watched it for five or ten minutes until somebody finally said, “Holy crap, that’s a UFO, we need to get a picture of that!” So one of them went inside to get a camera, and that’s when it took off. Now, you know, my cousin didn’t have any more strange stories to relate. That was the only one, and I believed her. So I always thought there must be something to UFOs because my cousin and her whole family saw one. But if people don’t have that experience..

Henry: That’s interesting. See, for me, there was no one like that, and then one day I saw a UFO, and I was like, wow, there’s no mistaking. That wasn’t swamp gas, that wasn’t Venus. That was a machine. It had an orange ball that was like the motor! (laughs)

DB: Yeah, and the one that you’re describing, you can understand sort of conceptually how that works. Because it sort of makes sense, but it’s not the usual UFO shape or behavior.

Henry: Like the power thing was at one end, and it moved like a space ship, you know.

DB: Yeah, and it’s not like you had a delusion that fits with the same delusion everybody else is having. That’s a unique shape.

Henry: It wasn’t a saucer, it was like an ice cream cone, and it wasn’t like any UFO report I’ve ever read or heard of. It was a funny looking thing, and I was like, you know, that’s a weird looking thing! A sideways ice cream cone with an orange ball that glows bright when it’s about to squirt off. The orange ball gets really bright. Yeah, that’s the thing, it didn’t fit the.. I don’t think it was a mass hallucination in my case. Whenever I did talk to rational, scientific people, they’d kind of go through the same story, which is they’d say, “Uh, well, you know, you must have been mistaken, it must have been a helicopter. It was wishful thinking, that’s what it was, you wanted to see aliens. You dream of aliens and you wanted to see them so you manufactured that. Unwittingly, you fabricated that with your mind.” One explanation after another. And I sat there, and at the end I said, “No, I just saw a space ship come out of the ground is what it was.” (laughs)

DB: (laughing) Yeah, and then there were two men in black and a woman in red and everything!

Henry: I knew not to go there!

DB: I think what that really is, is the fear level of the person you’re talking to. They cannot accept that reality, and they didn’t see it themselves, so you’ve got to forgive them for that..

Henry: You’ve got to forgive them, yeah, because until that happened to me, I gave no credence to that stuff. So, yeah, you’re right, you’ve got to forgive them.

DB: They can’t accept it. It’s the fear level. I can remember when I was a little kid I read a book, that you can still get now, it’s Bigfoot by Slate and Berry. There’s a story in it, I think it’s got a name, it’s the Uniontown case where a bigfoot is seen and it’s near a UFO, and one of the guys experiencing this goes through some kind of animal possession type thing. And when I read that, I was thirteen years old, and I couldn’t take it. I had to actually physically rip that book apart, throw it into the trash, and never think about it again! Because I couldn’t handle all these things coming together into one paranormal story. It was my fear that caused me to reject it.

Henry: Wow.

DB: Now since then, I’ve actually seen that the two investigators continue to tell that story. There are a series of YouTube clips you can watch of them retelling the story. And they are very credible when they tell it. The story hangs together. People experienced things there, including one of the local law enforcement officers. So I had rejected the story, but the story still looks legit here thirty years later.

Henry: It’s a strangely persistent story.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: Yeah, you know, amongst my friends, and I had friends in 1993.. and actually, in 1993 I told the story about the invisible bigfoot that fried my starter motor, the one I told you earlier. And I’m a musician, so at the time, in a local rock magazine called Paperback Jukebox, I actually told that entire story just like that, because the rockers didn’t care that it was crazy, they were like, “Hey, rock on dude!” (laughs) They were not bigfooters. And if you looked at that, verbatim, you’d see that I have told the exact same story for fifteen years on those few occasions that I told it, it’s still the same. And, honestly, it’s doing more harm to me to tell that story than good! (laughs)

DB: Yeah, and, you know, people are having experiences. Now I’m not going to say that I know what’s behind all the experiences that we’ve had, because I’ve had some strange ones too. But we’re having these experiences, and I think that not talking about them ensures that we will never solve the mystery.

Henry: I don’t say I know either, but yeah, I agree.

DB: So you’ve got to talk about it.

Henry: You gotta. Because there’s something there. Whether or not it’s just that your mind can be manipulated or fooled or it’s imperfect or not, I think there’s something valuable to learn in the weirdness. In learning about why the weirdness happens.

DB: Exactly. That would be the nugget that I hope people take away when they read all of this. Even if they can’t accept it, if it’s just too weird for them to accept, I hope they understand that people have these experiences. Whatever it is behind them, they’ve actually had them. We’re not makin’ this stuff up!

Henry: Yeah, there’s people that.. yeah, I had a bunch of weird ones and really what I found was that when I told my weird experiences to Indians they were really pretty accepting of it, and they would tell me a bunch of weird ones. That’s probably why I just talk to Indians about bigfoot most of the last ten years. And I didn’t talk to the Western scientific civilization, because I can talk to my Indian friends and there’s no problem. But, you know, I forgive people for not regarding that stuff as credible. And as you say, people do have these experiences. They do. I’m convinced that as they get closer, if they get out there, they are going to have weird experiences because it just goes with the territory. What is at the end of the road is not what you expect with bigfoot.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: Whatever it is. Yeah, I don’t say that I understand all of what’s behind it. But it’s not like a regular animal, it’s not like a bear or anything.

DB: It’s a lot weirder than we might have thought when we first started.

Henry: It certainly is weirder that I thought! (laughs) I’m in a much weirder place than I was fifteen years ago.

DB: Yeah. Well, you know, this has been probably the most fascinating interview that I’ve ever even heard of. So I’m very grateful to you. And I feel like we still haven’t said everything we could say, so one day we should probably do this again!

Henry: Oh, I’d love to. Like I said, I’ve not talked about bigfoot with anybody that wasn’t an Indian for like ten years. I’m just happy.. it was really enjoyable for me too, I’d love to do it again.

DB: Well it’s going to take me a long time to type this up, and you’re going to come on to the radio show that Billy Willard and I do. So I feel like I don’t want to scoop that, so I’ll probably hold it off until sometime after that happens, and that’s in the middle of the month. So I’ll probably run it as a series of posts sometime after that happens.

Henry: Yeah, I wouldn’t want to.. well we’ll probably talk about some of the stuff that we covered today with you and Billy Willard because, boy, we covered a lot of stuff!

DB: Yeah! I think the callers will be most interested in what you know about where to find them. But they might want to get into some of the weird stuff too.

Henry: Yeah, and I did not run out of things.. I have not exhausted my supply of things to talk about either, so.. we can focus on that sort of thing, and there’s a lot of details that we can talk about.

DB: And after that happens, and if you still think you’ve got more to talk about, then let’s get together again and do another one. Because I think people are going to love this interview that we’ve just done. Because you’ve done so much.. first of all, you’ve experienced so much, and then you’ve thought about it so much. It’s obvious to me, reading as much of your book as I have, and then talking to you, that you’re not some whacko. You have a scientifically organized mind. And you’ve had these experiences and tried to make sense of them, and I think that is something people are hungry for.

Henry: Boy, well, let’s see! (laughs)

DB: I could be wrong.. let’s put that on the table, I could be wrong about that!

Henry: They’ve never really been too thirsty to listen to what I have to say!

DB: Well I think that they probably didn’t hear you. They stopped at the, “What, you say a bigfoot burned out your starter motor? Ok, that’s enough for me.”

Henry: Waitaminute! The bigfoot talked to you telepathically, what?

DB: They don’t want to hear anymore after they’ve heard that! But if you get into it where it’s obvious that you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these things..

Henry: I have. I am a true bigfoot enthusiast, like you and many others. You know, I’ve sat here in front of my computer screen and pondered for ages. Like, wow, what is going on? (laughing) But I had an opportunity early on by running into Peter Byrne and Glickman and getting a lot of money to spend that not everybody gets to do. Not everyone gets to spend 500 grand analyzing the Patterson film. Where you go, “Ok, that’s very interesting. That sure looks real!” (laughs)

DB: Yeah, and that’s sort of something that we’ve all.. and when I say all, I mean the bigfoot research community. There might be some few who still doubt, but most of us are like, that’s the real deal. We’ve seen enough, once we saw the stabilized version and you can see the muscles shaking..

Henry: Yeah, it’s pretty convincing I would say. Yeah, ok, it’s anecdotal evidence and you can raise the skeptical flag and say, “I’m not convinced!” (laughs) But really, there’s no apparent hoax in it at all. I can say, you can’t prove its a hoax. I would say that I was unable to prove it’s a hoax. There may be stuff going on with it that I don’t know about. I mean maybe there was gunplay and they suppressed things. Maybe Dahinden and Patterson suppressed things. I don’t know. There’s always that possibility. But given my experiences later in life, I’m certain the Patterson film was the real deal.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: I can’t prove that scientifically, but I can tell you.. it looks like what I saw.

DB: Yeah.

Henry: So, I’m one of the old guys.. there are those of us who have many years of experience chasing.. The guy I mentioned, Lee Trippett, or another one, a friend of Dahinden’s is a guy named Warren Thompson. I bet you’ve never heard that name.

DB: It doesn’t ring a bell, so I probably haven’t!

Henry: He.. boy, you talked about Ann Slate and Al Berry and their book. Warren, a lot of that came out of Warren Thompson’s collection. He was one of the guys who was always behind the scenes but he was also one of the guys I looked up to because he had this massive sighting report collection.

DB: Really?

Henry: And I was like, wow! And I don’t know if he’s still alive because he was an old man when I was still young.

DB: So we wouldn’t know what happened to his sighting report collection?

Henry: No, we don’t. So let us continue this at another time.

DB: Yes, indeed. Your mouth must be about as dry as it can be now because you’ve been talking three and a half hours straight now!

Henry: Boy, that’s enough! (laughs)