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!

Some quick links -- Henry's website.
And also a direct link to Henry's book.

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 Rhines. 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..

Continue to part 2 of my interview with Henry Franzoni

7 comments:

Squatcher said...

This could be a groundbreaking interview! Thank's DB!

Great theory about the illuminating eyes. I've always been searching for a plausible explanation for them. Seems like ultrasound can explain all of the weird stuff!

Looking forward to part 2...

Anonymous said...

As always, great stuff. Looking forward to the rest of the interview.

Anonymous said...

Nice interview. I really liked the show last night too.

After the show I went looking for bf related place names in Virginia and found several named devil, including Devil's Backbone in Highland County, which I would like to explore sometime.

Also there are places on the internet where you can upload an audio file and get it transcribed for fairly cheaply.

Bruce Duensing said...

One word. Fascinating...In a meat and potatoes version of food for thought...a rare commodity. My thanks to you for posting this.

Regan Lee said...

Fantastic interview! Thanks for bringing this to everyone. I agree with Squatcher "ground breaking."

speaking of Lee Trippit, I just received a notice from him about his new book he co-wrote with Ida M. Kannenberg; I downloaded it or you can buy it hard copy. I haven't read it yet... it's titled "My Brother Is A Hairy Man" -- Ida I believe lives in Oregon, the Corvallis area (I think) Lee is in the Eugene area...

borky said...

I've always considered it one of the great paradoxes of 'left field' research that the Science 'Police' feel perfectly free to blithely disregard a whole category of evidence - anecdotal data - which, in a court of law would be considered valid enough to warrant sentencing a man to death based on it.

Especially when, in the final analysis, scientific research papers, for all their jargon, are ultimately anecdotes: "We did this...we titrated that...we observed this, we observed that, we observed the other...blah, blah, blah..."

Anonymous said...

DB like the ultrasound and salt water analogy ala the light-making shrimp example. I know what I saw in my sighting and I know it is challenging to describe the psychophysics of my true experience of the white light cones emanating from luminating green eyes. Ultrasound could explain some of my sensations that occur in my research area when these things are nearby. Thanks for the blogging with Henry. He is fascinating. Great blog. Biped.