UPPER TIERS: BIGFOOT AND ALIENS... THEY WANT TO BELIEVE

Morning, Patrons. It’s Saturday! Hurrah. This week has been a slog. Had a load of work stuff to get out of the way – so we can film next week – but getting through it all with a cold was a right grind. It’s not even that bad a cold, just bad enough to make me want to switch off my brain, and it’s still lingering. Sanja seems to have it worse than me though. She tested for you-know-what, but it seems to be merely a stinker.

Anyway… that’s enough health-whingeing. 

More pieces are falling into place for the UFO vid. I don’t know why this one has basically turned into a proper documentary. However, as it might be our final video until Christmas (we’ll still do some Patreon exclusives of course) – because you’ll have Digi Level 2 instead to keep you going - we want to press pause on a high.

I say it every time, but THIS is the most ambitious video we’ve done. I mean, it has as many moving pieces as any of the big Kickstarted projects we’ve put together (and yes: more characters, including a couple of new ones…). 

The picture above is from The Great British UFO Learning Centre – which has something like 25,000 documents, videos and audio recordings from eyewitnesses. It’s run by a former CID officer, who has agreed to show us around and speak to us for the video.

Hilariously, meeting up with him has become all very cloak-and-dagger. At this point I don’t know if he’s going to put a bag over our heads and bundle us into the back of a van, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Years ago, when I was writing my monster hunting book – if you don’t know, I turned down an offer from a publisher to write the kids' show Dani’s House instead – I spent a month emailing back and forth with Bigfoot Hunters in Georgia. The paranoia was off the charts, and even if I never made it out there, I was going to publish the entire email exchange as one of the chapters.

Clearly they’d been stitched up by journalists before, and were wary of being ridiculed. It’s fascinating to me, because you’d think that if these guys were just fantasists – while getting that wounded by reporting their experiences – they’d just walk away and shut up about it.

The reason they were so cautious is that guys I'd been speaking with had been involved in a high-profile news story - apparently the 7th most searched-for on Google in 2008 - in which they revealed to the world's press that they'd acquired the frozen corpse of a Bigfoot. They put out a press release inviting the world's press to their unveiling. Apparently they had paid $50,000 for the corpse from a hunter - who had taken it home, put it in his freezer and frozen it solid in a block of ice by filling the freezer with water.

"I'll tell you this, what I seen, what I touched, what I felt, what I prodded, was not a mask that was sewn on a bear hide," Tom Biscardi, the Bigfoot hunter who I'd been speaking with, told reporters. "And what I smelled also."

However, when they thawed out the body... they discovered it was indeed a gorilla costume - that had been stuffed with offal.

It shows you that the belief in the unexplained is very real, even if you question whether the truth is or isn’t out there. These guys were SO desperate to believe that they paid a large amount of money for the "body" and made their announcement before doing their due diligence in establishing what it was.

Prior to the hoax being exposed, one of the other Bigfoot guys - a serving police officer - was quoted as saying: "Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words."

He was later fired for his part in perpetrating the hoax.

When I interviewed "alien abductee" Russ Kellett, that was what I found most bewildering; whether he was a fantasist/liar, whether he'd truly had some sort of experience that he'd interpreted as an alien encounter, or whether he'd gone so deep into the fantasy that he had convinced himself it was real.

https://youtu.be/NRq_CJJr1yE?si=RZhiMNxIv4-RZQlk

Indeed… I don’t know if any of you are aware, but there was a second bi-partisan Congressional hearing into UFOs/UAP this week. I watched the whole thing. Very little in terms of concrete evidence, but a lot of anecdotal stuff about aliens and reverse engineering of technology.

But the main thrust of the hearing was a move to protect whistleblowers from ridicule and public shaming. That’s fascinating to me because, again, it shows that people – the witnesses were a mix of ex military personnel and scientists - are willing to risk their reputations to talk about these things. The psychology of that fascinates me, and as much as anything else it's why I love covering these topics.