Cliff Barackman
Appearances
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Yeah, this afternoon, actually, I spoke. There was a Mountain Hood Sasquatch Festival. All of you guys were there. That's cool. I'm actually a regular speaker at quite a few festivals around the country. In two weeks, I have to go to Colorado. I'm in Ohio after that. I'm kind of a busy guy. What was your topic at this conference?
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Today I talked about the efforts that we've been putting in at the North American Bigfoot Center out in Boring because it's a museum, so there's a forward-facing educational component. But there's a lot of things we do behind the scenes.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
We do our own field research, and we're also trying to find and curate historical collections from researchers who die and pass on before those research collections end up in the trash can.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
how did you get into the bigfoot world were you a kid that was into this or was it later in life oh yeah i've always been weird right um and essentially and i've had eccentric interests all of my life but um when i was going to school i actually have a degree in jazz guitar of all things right so you never know where life is going to take you but the music department was on one side of campus and i was way in the other and i had a few hour break between classes so i would go in the library
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
and picked books off the shelves in subjects that I was interested in, science stuff, you know, because I'm a science nerd. And one day I was in the anthropology section, and I found a couple books that were compilations of scholarly articles written by anthropologists on Sasquatches.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
A lot of this stuff was like cultural anthropology, how the indigenous people of North America, whether they're from Florida or British Columbia, were all describing the same things, the same shapes, the same behaviors. Many of these behaviors were ape behaviors. that weren't even recognized until the 1960s when Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey did their pioneering work.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
And then, of course, the physical anthropologists were weighing in about how the Sasquatch footprints, even though they kind of look human-like in some ways, are actually very, very different. The leverage ratios in the feet are way different than in humans. The metatarsals have been shortened, the heels are longer, and that's all about the biomechanics of the foot.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
And the more I read about the actual evidence that has been gathered and analyzed by scientists. I said, holy crap, they're not only eccentric and weird and cool and funny, they might be real. And that was back in 1994, and I started doing serious, what I thought was serious, Bigfoot research at the time, and I've been just drowning in the subject ever since.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Yeah, yeah. This is a handprint cast in the Blue Mountains outside of Walla Walla, Washington in 1986. This is from a large male, and we believe it's a male because in Sasquatches, like all primates, there's a sexual dimorphism, which means that the boys and girls are different sizes and shapes. In primates, the boys are bigger than girls.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
And the footprints associated with this particular hand cast were 17 inches long. And when you graph all of the footprint lengths, it turns out there's clusters at a 16, 17-inch range and about a 13, 14-inch range, which strongly suggests, in my opinion, sexual dimorphism. So this is probably a big male's handprint. And of course, it's moved around a little bit. The butt of the palm is down here.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
You can see the fingers are a little crooked because the shape of the impression isn't really the shape of the hand. it's the shape of the damage done to the ground by the hand. Or if we're talking about footprints, it'd be the same thing. So there's slippage and sliding and that sort of thing.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
There's a lot of similarities between these and human hands, but there's also a lot of staggering differences. For example, the thumb is at a different place on the palm. It's actually a little bit lower. If you notice that the fingers look short and kind of squat,
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
It's because the webbing in between their phalanges, their finger bones, actually goes up higher and gives the impression of them having shorter fingers, when in all likelihood the phalanges are probably more or less proportionally similar to ours. But the differences in their hand indicate that they don't have what's called a precision grip, like we have, like we can pick up BBs from the table.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
They have a power grip designed for entirely different things, like ripping apart logs, ripping deer legs off, ripping apart animals, and that sort of stuff. And that's what they do with them. They've been seen doing those sort of things.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Yeah, in order for a species to be academically accepted, we have to have what's called a holotype, which is basically a dead one or a piece of the body in some sort of way. And so far, no one has successfully, very few people have tried, I'm not a hunter myself, but to kill and bring in a Sasquatch. There's a lot of problems with that.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Number one, and hunters are not the gun-toting hillbillies shooting up the countryside that media oftentimes portrays them as. The number one rule of hunting, and I'm sure a lot of you are hunters as well, is that you never, ever, ever pull the trigger on something unless you know exactly what it is that you're shooting at, right?
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
And unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on what side you're on, Sasquatches look just like people in monkey suits, right? And most Sasquatch sightings are about two to three seconds long. And is that enough time for you or any hunters out there in the audience thinking, okay, I'm going to pull a trigger and prove a species is real, or am I going to shoot a guy in a suit?
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Because it's a gray area whether or not it's legal to shoot a Sasquatch, but it is absolutely illegal to shoot a jackass in a monkey suit.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
I don't always agree with that law, but it's on the books.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
It's a species of animal. They're breeding. They're breeding. Oh, absolutely, yeah. There are many, many sightings of juvenile Sasquatches. In fact, over here I have a track cast of a juvenile. There are females. The very famous Patterson-Gimlin film subject walking across the sandbar, for example, she has breasts, so she's clearly a female.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Yeah, this is a species of unknown primate in some sort of way. So that's what we're looking at here.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
very common motif if you look back in the 1800s at the newspaper reports as the European population is pushing inwards towards the center of the continent.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Because Sasquatches being perfectly normal animals, you can find oral traditions in native cultures about them, of course, but you can also find historical newspaper articles that describe these animals to a T of what people continue to see on a regular basis here in North America now.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Oh, there's been a lot of moments. I've been doing this for a long, long time, and people ask me that. I would say it has to be, well, I met my wife while I was looking for Sasquatches, and she's by far the most exciting thing in my life. Amazing. Yeah, amazing, right? I met my wife while I was working on the Animal Planet TV show. She wandered out into a field? No, no, she was a bird.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Oh, no, I wish. They're looking.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
No, but she was a production assistant on the TV show, of course. Found my dog. But as far as interactions with the animals, I've been screamed at from very, very close range by unseen entities in the woods. I've seen a Sasquatch. I observed one for about six or eight seconds through a thermal imager in North Carolina. Rewind. What the fuck was that like? That would be amazing. It was crazy.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
It was crazy. You dropped that so casually. You've seen one wandering around. I may have seen two, actually. I saw another upright dark figure walking through a clear cut in Texas one time. Yeah. So, yeah.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
But oddly enough, the exciting... You know, when you see a Sasquatch, especially for someone like myself who is actually trying to see a Sasquatch, when I actually do see one, I'm thinking, what am I actually looking at? What... Am I fooling myself? That's the question in my mind all the time. Am I fooling myself? Because I'm very skeptical. In fact, I have a reputation in the Bigfoot community.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
I'm no fun because I don't believe what most people tell me. I really question other people's observation skills and their communication skills. And I do that to myself as well. Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing? And I didn't even enjoy the moment where I actually observed one through the thermal imager for six or eight seconds because I was saying... What is that? Is that a person?
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
It sure doesn't walk like one. What in the world? But it was a thermal imager sighting, of course, which sees heat. And it was in February in the Uari National Forest in the mountains. And I was observing a human-like figure walking at about 70 yards away that was one color pretty much from head to toe.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Now, the color is important because if it was wearing clothing in February, like you would in the mountains, you would think you would see some sort of differentiation in the color because the color indicates how much heat is coming out of it. But the fact that it was more or less one color head to toe indicates it wasn't wearing clothing.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
And this was like two in the morning in the mountains in February, and it was navigating a wooded hillside without a light, and I watched this thing go into the woods, and I'm thinking, what the hell is that? What is that? What is that? And then by then it was gone, and I realized, I just spent my whole sighting wondering what it was, and I think I do know now. Yeah.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Did you sort of chase? Oh, yeah, I went after it. I went after it. Ran, yeah. No, I went around, actually, because it went over a ledge like that. So I came around the corner trying to head it off at the pass. My colleague went up after it with a thermal imager and a night vision, and he never saw it again. I never saw it again.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
And then we kind of regrouped, and about 45 minutes later, we got a... Fuck that hillside. Really? Yeah. Yeah, vocalizations are fairly common. I've heard Sasquatch vocalizations from very close range. They are very, very loud, rather intimidating animals. One more time. Holy shit. Okay, just this butt print. We nicknamed the animal Bigfoot because the first thing we had was a footprint cast.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Can you imagine if that was the first thing that we got from the animal, what it would be called? Yes, uh... So can you explain where this is from exactly? Yeah, yeah, that is another cast from the Blue Mountains, a place called Dry Creek. And yeah, Bigfoot got back, in case you're wondering here. I like Bigfoot and I cannot lie. But this is a very, very interesting cast.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
There is a lot of... Don't do that again. There's a lot of anatomy in here. Yeah, sure, it's a butt and it's an ass. That's hilarious, right? But there's actually a lot of anatomy here that's very intriguing. You probably can't see from in the back, but there's actually hair striations in this cast.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
And the hair striations go towards the butt crack, just like the hair on your ass does if you are a hirsute in that region. You can see the tailbone. You can actually make out the sphincter. And in case you're wondering, there's some really strong indication that this was, in fact, a female. Wow.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
And you know, it's an interesting looking cast, of course, because, you know, maybe I'm a butt man or something. I don't know. But when you look at a bodybuilder's asses, as I'm sure we all do, when you look at a bodybuilder's ass, what you notice is that the butt cheeks, you know, the butt is a muscle. It's very, very strong and pronounced.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
And basically, the better in shape your ass is, the more pronounced your natal cleft, your butt crack is. You know, if you have a squishy butt like many of us do, the butt cheeks push together and it doesn't really open up like that, so to speak. But Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, his butt crack would be quite wide open just like that. So it's very, very anatomically correct.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Well, you know, we all have our types.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Oh, absolutely. A lot of weirdos and freaks. There's a decent dash of mental illness put in there as well. But there's also a lot of serious people. Like, I obviously have a pretty good sense of humor. I'm a serious person. I'm rather eccentric. You know, you can kind of tell. But we had Dr. Jeff Meldrum, a professor of anatomy and physiology, speaking at the same conference.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
And he is completely convinced Sasquatches are real. His specialization is the primate foot, so he's uniquely qualified to examine the evidence. And there's other people who, there's a strong paranormal bent in the Bigfoot world today, which I'm a little disappointed in.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Sasquatches, and I've been doing this for a long time, I've never once seen, heard, or observed anything in the woods that would lead me to believe that Sasquatches are anything but a perfectly normal animal of some sort.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
But there's a lot of people who think that they're UFO riding, shape-shifting, interdimensional whatevers, and I say, okay, well, I guess, but if they're doing that, like if they're riding on UFOs or whatever, why are they eating roadkill? Can they just go to the holodeck and order a steak sandwich or something? I don't get it, man.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Well, you know, you got to remember, I live in that kind of world. You know, to me, it's weird when people don't think Sasquatches are real. And in my life. Yeah, right. Yeah. So I live in a very odd place, you know, and I live out in the woods and I surround myself with this. I own the North American Bigfoot Center. So that's my work.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
I'm out in the woods between one to three days a week doing my best to gather more evidence. I speak at these conferences. I am literally drowning in the subject. So I try not to pay too much attention to the outside world because it kind of stresses me out.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
I live in a great world, I really do.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Not the anal glands. See, Sasquatches, being perfectly normal animals, have been around pretty much forever. And the word Sasquatch was coined in the 1920s. The word Bigfoot was coined in 1958. But they're around, right? So the local people who lived in the area who saw these things had other words to describe them. And one of the terms is skunk ape. They use that down in Florida, right?
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
And it turns out only maybe 10% to 15% of sighting reports have a smell associated with it. this stuff. It's very, very rare. But in the Trinity Alps, I smelled one in the Sierras immediately after a sighting. And then I also smelled one a day after a woman saw one on her property in Kentucky. All three times, it smelled exactly the same to me. It was very, very jarring.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
I think if I were to encapsulate that odor with words, the best description would be dog shit Parmesan. Parmesan.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Well, I do. I've encountered them actually several times. I've put my eyes on one, one or maybe two times. I'm not sure what that second one was.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
I really do think that, and I think we're getting closer all the time. Just recently, the last year and a half, two years, North Carolina State University is now undertaking a study. It's a university-sponsored study, the first and only of its kind. Now, they got it past the guards, so to speak. They're like, we're going to study Bigfoot. No, they didn't quite do that.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
But the guy who's putting the study together, this guy named Darby Orcutt, his job description at the university is interdisciplinary project coordinator. He basically gets these people to talk to these people, and the two departments had never really speak back and forth.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
But he got it past the guards, so to speak, by describing the project like, we are giving grad students and postdoc students opportunities to examine real unknown samples from North America. using whatever techniques, genetic, whatever techniques they want to identify the species. And they're undertaking this large study.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
The North American Bigfoot Center, we're working with them closely on some interesting projects. They're soliciting hair and possible blood samples and flesh samples. They are doing their best at this moment to push this study ahead.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
And if they start getting genetic hits on this, that's going to raise a tremendous amount of effort all throughout North America, through all the institutions involved. So I really am very optimistic about this unique and fantastic study. The literal first study sponsored by academics of any sort on that level.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
So I have great optimism, essentially, because technology is catching up to the Sasquatch. Let's hope that Donald Trump doesn't hear about that.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Well, I'm not sure mean or not mean is the way to couch it, really. But now, they are wild animals. They are scary animals, I'll tell you that. They're very human-like, which makes them even more horrifying. They're everything about, everything monstrous that we've been trained to fear, you know? So I would say that they are... He's a child, Cliff. Eight years old.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
If he has nightmares, then I'm not sleeping. Well, yeah, they're potentially dangerous, but let me say it like this. If they were out to get us, there would be very few of us left. They're clearly not out to get us.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
They're cute and cuddly. They're okay. They're okay.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Okay, ecologists, and I don't fancy to be that. Again, I have a degree in jazz guitar. I'm just an earnest nerd, you know. But ecologists who take the Sasquatch subject seriously, they're obviously very rare, but they estimate there's probably at least 100 black bear for every one Sasquatch. And I like that number because it's easy math, frankly.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Dr. Jeff Meldrum from Idaho State University estimates maybe 150, 200 black bear for one, but I like 101. Now, right now, at this very moment in Oregon, there's about 30,000 to 35,000 black bear, right? And we have the third highest number of forested acres of all 50 states. You know, Alaska is number one. Oddly enough, Georgia is number two. And then Oregon is number three.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
So we have a lot of habitat for them. So maybe 300, 350 Bigfoots, maybe. It seems that's a pretty reasonable number. It sounds like a lot, but it's not.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
It seems like a lot, but think about this. Think about you're an Oregon native. Count how many black bear you've seen in your entire life. How many black bear have you seen? None.
Flightless Bird
Live in Portland: Bigfoot, Beavers, and the Oregon Trail
Yeah, actually, it was in Washington, but unfortunately, the weather got them. They went Bigfooting up in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, and I think it was in January, and the weather got them. Weather and your own mistakes are by far the most dangerous thing in the woods, and they came to that, unfortunately. Yeah.