Monsters in the Mist: Bigfoot, Mothman & America’s Cryptid Lore (Part 1 with Cryptozoologist Dr. Brian Parsons)

What if the monsters we tell stories about… are still out there?

In Part 1 of this special interview, Robert Barber talks with cryptozoologist Dr. Brian D. Parsons about the eastern U.S.'s most persistent legends—Bigfoot, Mothman, the Beast of Bladenboro, and the Loveland Frog.

Explore how folklore, geography, and belief collide in these paranormal stories, and why the forest isn't the only place these creatures live—they haunt memory, maps, and even AI.

🎧 This episode blends true stories, mythology, and the blurred line between hoax and horror.

##Check out Dr. Parson's newest book, Eastern Cryptids, HERE

🎧 Listen now to State of the Unknown—your go-to for haunted history, cryptid lore, and eerie encounters. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and everywhere you listen.

Chapters

• 0:00 Strange Shadows in Eastern Woods
• 3:05 Dr. Parsons' Journey Into Cryptozoology
• 6:30 Evolution from Believer to Balanced Researcher
• 11:32 The Appeal of Cryptid Folklore
• 21:00 Cultural Influences on Eastern Cryptids
• 27:21 Faith, Belief, and the Search for Meaning
• 33:50 Technology vs. Cryptid Evidence
• 40:05 AI and the Future of Cryptid Research

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

In the quiet woods east of the Mississippi, things move just beyond the light Shadows, too large sounds with no source, eyes in the dark that blink and vanish. People have names for them Beast of Bladenboro, mothman, skunk, ape, grassman but for every name there's a dozen others that never made the papers, just warnings passed down, stories traded over firelight. Some say these creatures are myths. Folktales stitched from fear and isolation. Are myths, folktales stitched from fear and isolation. Others say they're real flesh and blood, just clever enough to stay out of reach. So how do we explain the thousands of sightings, the blurry photos, the midnight screams, the missing livestock? If these things walk among us, why haven't we found one? Today we begin a conversation with someone who spent decades chasing that question.

Speaker 1: 1:30

Dr Brian D Parsons has been chasing the unexplained for over 25 years. He's a paranormal investigator, researcher and former host of the Paranormal News Insider, which ran for more than 500 episodes. He's also the author of a handful of nonfiction and fiction books about the paranormal and cryptozoology. His latest work, eastern Cryptids, explores the strange creatures and elusive legends east of the Mississippi River, from the Dover Demon to the Snallygaster. East of the Mississippi River, from the Dover Demon to the Snallygaster. Today this is part one of our conversation where we talk about what drives a search, why these stories persist and whether cryptids are more than just shadows in the woods. This is the story of creatures that won't go away, despite the odds, despite the questions, despite the silence.

Speaker 1: 2:28

I'm your host, robert Barber, and this is State of the Unknown. Dr Parsons, thank you so much for joining me today. It's an honor to have you on the show. For those who don't know, dr Brian D Parsons is a seasoned researcher with over 25 years in the field of the unexplained, and author of the book Eastern Cryptids, which we'll be talking about today. He's also the former host of the long-running Paranormal News Insider. Really excited to have you here.

Speaker 2: 3:02

I appreciate it. I love podcasts. I love being on either side of the mic, either hosting or being a guest, but I really love your content. Every episode is enthralling, so I'm even more excited to be your first guest.

Speaker 1: 3:16

Thank you so much. I really do appreciate that. Dr Parsons, before we get into the book, I'd love to give listeners a sense of who you are. You've been chasing the unknown for more than 25 years. What first drew you to the world of cryptids in the Unexplained? Was there a moment or maybe a story that made you realize this was more than just a passing interest?

Speaker 2: 3:40

So for a lot of people I've met they have these exciting origin stories where they were in the woods and they heard a strange noise and they see a fleeting shadow. Or they're in their house and they see an old woman standing in front of them. I don't have any of that stuff. I just actually was researching local urban legends when I was in college, first went to college and you know the whole legend tripping thing, which I'm sure we've all done. I'm sure even the younger kids are getting involved in that stuff, and I was kind of on the other end of that. I thought that some of these stories were very foolish and kind of full of it too with some of the things. But I was really interested in how people believed those stories so adamantly and if you asked a younger guy or you asked an older person they would tell you the same exact story and I thought that was really interesting.

Speaker 2: 4:32

So I kind of got drawn in through the folklore piece and then I'm a master of the rabbit hole, so I get lost all the time and I started looking at one piece which was ghost and how, how this supposed ghost worked and I wanted to figure out if, is that really real? Is that possible? And next thing I know I wake up and I'm running a paranormal a few months later and I didn't have any intention of doing that and that was back in the mid-1990s, so about 1996, I don't remember exact dates. People always ask me. I'm like I don, I didn't know I was going to be doing it. It just kind of happens.

Speaker 2: 5:09

And my goal was to kind of figure out what was going on behind these things and knowing full well that there had been scientists at that point 130 years Now it's been over 140 years back in the age of spiritualism, 1882, with the Society for Psychical Research, that were digging into this stuff. So it wasn't like I was going to figure anything out, I just wanted to know kind of for myself. And I think that's where a lot of people are at. They're looking for their own personal answers and admittedly that's where I was at when I first started trying to sort past these local urban legends.

Speaker 2: 5:45

But now these ghost stories, these ghost events were actually happening to people and that was, you know, again mid-1990s. This was the age of the. The internet was getting big. You know, back then we had we actually had yellow pages for the internet, worldwide web, yellow pages you can get in a bookstore. But then you know, things got big with, got big with ghost hunters and everybody became a ghost hunter. And you know I branched out into cryptozoology and UFOs and I've really fallen more in love with cryptozoology for a list of reasons, but that's kind of how I got my start.

Speaker 1: 6:21

Okay, you're a researcher, a paranormal investigator and a longtime podcast host and broadcaster. How has your approach evolved over the years? Has your mindset shifted? Your skepticism, belief? The way you weigh a good story.

Speaker 2: 6:38

It's funny because I was thinking about this a few weeks ago I was at a UFO convention and somebody kind of asked me the same question and I was like you know, it's funny because I feel like I've come full circle. I'm right back where where I started out, which is weird because I started looking at urban legends and folklore, and that's pretty much what eastern cryptids is it's. It's a book of of legends, of, you know, these urban legends that have become folklore all over the East Coast. But when I got into the ghost field, admittedly, I started to believe and I started to kind of rub off on the people that were around me and people telling me oh, ghosts are real, this is real and this technology is real, and so I started to believe all that. So I kind of I finally came around.

Speaker 2: 7:23

It took me a little little, admittedly a little longer than I wish it would have, until I realized I was kind of falling for all these tricks, subjectivity, um, situations that were going on, and then, uh, you know, I was afraid to kind of part ways with that because it became part of who I was with this paranormal group. I was surrounded by people who believed and I was starting not to believe, and so it was kind of a hard struggle. But then you know, kind of little by little you kind of come out of that and you kind of you try to get people to be more balanced. And it's at that point where I know a lot of other people out there, a lot of other investigators, that turned and you know you could say like a Skywalker turn, going from the light side to the dark side, going from I believe, to I absolutely hate you people for fooling me, and now I'm going to become that skeptic with the dark cloak and take you all down. I didn't do that I could have and I kind of felt like that because I felt betrayed to an extent. But that was my fault, and so I've kind of found my foothold and my foothold is trying as best as I can to be balanced in the middle.

Speaker 2: 8:37

It's so easy to write content or write books or to sit here and tell you that Bigfoot is real and all of these things are real beyond the shadow of a doubt, because I can't and it's easy to do that and I could easily do that to get a lot of fans become famous, get on a TV show, but it's also just as easy to be a skeptic and say this is all not real. There's no bodies, there's no evidence, there's no. None of this stuff is real, it's all just. You know, folklore, it's just part of our culture. But the hardest part to do is to stay evenly keeled on both of those topics and both of those ends and kind of be that speaker in the middle and say here's the story but here's the other side. It's up to you to believe. And that's where I've really tried to be since, really, my first cryptid book, which was back in 2014,. A handbook for the amateur cryptozoologist.

Speaker 1: 9:32

I think you really touched on an important point right there the idea of impartiality and objectivity, and that's definitely something that we try to do here. With State of the Unknown, we lay out the facts, lay out the story as known and let the listener make up their own mind, rather than telling them what is quote-unquote true or not.

Speaker 2: 9:54

Yeah, you can't be judgmental either way, you can't totally agree with somebody. It's like, you know, when the police take a report, you know they're not going to say, oh, absolutely, that guy's a criminal. Or absolutely you have no clue what you saw. People are bad witnesses. You, you, you know, you probably saw a blue jumpsuit. You're saying it's red. You know they're not going to do that, they're not going to take sides Although sometimes they do. But you, you know, as a, as a researcher or as an investigator, you have to take a neutral stance and unfortunately, I've seen it a hundred times where they don't you know, or even you know. Tv shows are a good example where they're people like I spend my whole entire life researching and investigating ghosts. I finally made it on the tv show. I see a ghost and my first reaction is to scream at the top of my lungs dude run.

Speaker 2: 10:42

I just watched that episode the other night I know exactly what you're talking about why in the world would you you wasted your whole entire life to get to that point just to do that for entertainment, um, or you know these, these guys out in the woods looking for bigfoot. You know, finding bigfoot, which is, they're not finding bigfoot. Um, they're looking for stories. They're looking for more additional things, the folklore, but they it's all subjective and it's frustrating because we're not supposed to be putting ourselves in the middle of these things. We're the documentarians. We're supposed to be taking notes and trying to figure these things out, finding evidence, finding information, documenting for the future, not inserting ourselves in there so we could be on TV. So it gets a little frustrating.

Speaker 1: 11:25

I'm sure it does Now, after all that experience, what keeps you coming back? What still pulls you in?

Speaker 2: 11:32

Well, I would say, you know, finding these creatures, but I don't think we're going to find any of these creatures really. But I just I really love the. This is going to sound weird, but I love the folklore. I love the fact that so many people believe these things, even blindly. You know, so many researchers have never seen a Bigfoot, but they still search for Bigfoot, they're still looking and they believe in it and it's just amazing that that kind of mentality continues to bring people back. But I enjoy, you know, I enjoy just sitting back chewing popcorn and watching the whole thing. Really it's entertaining to me.

Speaker 2: 12:10

And the ghost field was frustrating because I'm trying to uncover answers, I'm trying to create new methodologies of investigation, and people just didn't get it. They didn't care, they wanted the easy way out. The science takes work. It's not easy. Nothing is handed to any scientist. You have to work hard for it and they don't care. They just want to be sitting in a circle and have something happen to them and they jump up and down and put it on youtube. That's not me, you know. I want to help, I want to do things, uncover things.

Speaker 2: 12:39

But you know, in cryptozoology there's not really a whole lot you can do. You know we're not. You know you'll look at the definition of cryptozoology right the search for and study of animals whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated. You could tell. I've said that a billion times. We got it memorized so that you know search for hidden or missing animals is misleading.

Speaker 2: 12:59

You know, when this first started out as a, as a kind of an area of I don't know, you can't really call it, it's not science, it's not. You know it's cryptozoology. But it has nothing to do with zoology. It's nothing to do with science, it's just a pursuit.

Speaker 2: 13:15

When, believe it or not, a lot of people say well, bernard Houvelman is the father of cryptozoology. No, ivan T Sanderson was the first one to say it, back in the mid-1940s I think it was 1946 and 47, he wrote a couple of articles about sea monsters and used the term cryptozoology. Then Bernard Hovemans, a few years later, put it in a book and it got a lot of traction. Then it's few and far in between. The whole concept of cryptozoology was you know, it wasn't these fantastic creatures as much as it was sea monsters and potential dinosaurs still being alive. There were people that were going out there and looking for these things, but it was still the collection of folklore and I think now it's become more of the collection of folklore that it is actually getting put in your strap and your boots on and getting out there in the wild and looking. Although some people still do that, it's few and far in between.

Speaker 1: 14:07

Really interesting background information. Now let's talk about Eastern cryptids. This isn't just a list of strange sightings. It feels like the culmination of years of work. How long did it take to compile and research this?

Speaker 2: 14:24

Was it a fresh project or something that grew out of older investigations. So pretty much my most popular book is my 2014 book Handbook for the Amateur Cryptozoologist, with a second edition in 2015,. Because I had Loren Coleman wanted to get involved with that book. He voted it in the top 10 of cryptid books in 2014. So wrote a forward for it. I released a second edition in 2015 and this book is still getting me library presentations across the state of ohio, where I reside, and I kind of felt like I'm missing the mark here.

Speaker 2: 14:58

If I'm still getting stuff about cryptozoology and I'm still talking about cryptozoology, I need to write about cryptozoology. Granted, uh, after 2017, I wrote a book, a handbook, for the amateur ufo investigator. I focused back on writing fiction and I really wanted to get fiction out. My first two first two novels came out last year, which is crazy that actually it took me eight years to write one and took me one year to write the second, and they both got published within the same calendar year, which is mind-boggling. But after that I decided I really need to finally write something and this is going to sound crazy, but I actually wrote this book in about seven months, which sounds bad because people are like oh, you just rushed this together.

Speaker 2: 15:48

But, like you said, I've been researching cryptids since about 2006-ish. I did my first presentation in 2009,. But I was researching cryptids long before that and compiling all this data. And compiling all this data, I did a podcast 534 episodes with Paranormal News, which the first part was always cryptozoology. So I had over 1,300 pages of notes that I had to fall back on, including links and stories that have happened since 2008. And links from doing research for library presentations. So I already had done a lot of legwork, but my goal with this book was to strip away almost all of that and just focus on what really happens.

Speaker 2: 16:33

If I could go back in time and really document these stories, whether they happened in 1773 or 1925 or 1965 or 2008 or whatever how can I approach that in a way, that's, I can carefully research these stories in a way that I'm not being fooled by the media who, you know, early newspapers, even newspapers into the 1990s would fabricate things or embellish things to sell newspapers, to sell stories or to get other you know larger newspapers to, to get that story syndicated. So they could, they could get credit. So, yeah, and how do you disseminate that? And then, of course, people make horrible witnesses. People like to embellish things, they like to get attention. So how do you see through those?

Speaker 2: 17:27

But it wasn't my job to say whether these are real or not. It was trying to find the best, clearest picture of what really took place and put that in the book, and I went one by one, I didn't jump around. I started at the beginning of this book and I researched each individual thing until I was done. So I had literally 30 tabs of edge open, 30 tabs of Chrome open, with newspaper clippings and all these links, and following the again the rabbit hole down, well, here's this. Where did this person get this information? Oh, here and here. Well, let me go to those resources. Where did those people get their information? And so on and so forth.

Speaker 2: 18:10

Just traveling through time to get all that information, which you would think it would take a lot of time. And on top of that, though, I was working a seasonal job, so I ended up taking about three months off. So this was for three and a half months. This was my full time job, so I was working a lot of hours on this book, and it's also a great thing because knowing I had a date to go back to work in the spring I had a drop dead date that I had to really get this book done and it really made it exciting to to kind of relearn all these things. And I think that was part of it too was since I wrote handbook for the amateur cryptozoologists and I'm doing all these library presentations.

Speaker 2: 18:51

I'm I'll tell us about the Loveland frog. Okay, loveland frog, is this, this and this? And I tell the same story. But sometimes I kind of forget things or maybe I put the wrong thing in there and so I've had a few people say well, that's not what happened and this happened. I'm like you know what, you're right, and I'm kind of forgetting because I'm just rehashing the same thing.

Speaker 2: 19:12

So I kind of went back to the drawing board and re-researched all these things from scratch and again very carefully researched and amazingly, when you do this, sometimes you find mistakes. So I found a lot of mistakes that people had written in books and once you you could find the original book, because all the books after it have that mistake in it. So people are copying and pasting instead of really doing that research. And I found a lot of that, which is kind of scary because some of these are really big researchers, big writers out there. So that's the kind of stuff that I dug up and my goal for each one was to learn something that I'd never known or uncover something that was not included in any other major resource or any book that I'd read, to kind of do something new and different. You know, being in Ohio, I could have easily written just an Ohio book, which has been done about a dozen times, and that's only a few small things. So you've got to do a lot of research for each one.

Speaker 2: 20:11

But then do I do a whole United States one which you know. Dozens of cryptids which I think I had over hundred and over a hundred. That I started with, but I think I think there's only like 70 titles or 70 titles, but I put a few at the end which didn't get included, but I kind of summarized so it was well over a hundred. Um, that would have probably doubled that if I would have done the whole united states. So you know it would have been a blurb or a page. I wanted to do more than that. So that's why I chose eastern cryptids, east of the Mississippi, which amazingly, 26 states exist east of the Mississippi, so it's more than half of the country You're counting right now. I can tell.

Speaker 1: 20:51

Eastern North America has always had a distinct kind of mythology Dense woods, forgotten roads and towns where stories linger longer than names. Why do you think this region in particular is such fertile ground for cryptid legends?

Speaker 2: 21:07

Well, it's the oldest part of our country for us, you know, for the Europeans that stormed the shores, you know, found shelter here. We've been bringing so many cultures here, plus the native american cultures have been rubbing off on us as well, so there's so much that's mixed into this. You go to europe, you know, you go to england and the united kingdom and they have their backstory. It's pretty much somewhat, for the most part, unchanged. It's just goes back, you know, hundreds, hundreds of thousands of years, because it's the same cultures. Granted, they've been stormed by different countries and things. But here in the united states it's, it's a. It's kind of a flash in the pan compared to the rest of the world with our history. But we've had people pour in from all over the world and there's so many different things that have have occurred here, um, with with history and clear-cutting the forests and hunting all these creatures to the furthest corners, killing off the mountain lions, the wolves and, you know, fearing everything. But you know, people still wonder what's in the woods and you have so many, again, so many cultures that have settled here, that have brought their traditions and brought their own folklore, and it's kind of rubbed off on this country. But then again you have all these strange corners of the east, especially the Appalachian Mountain region where tons of these stories occur. Um, then you have, you know, river basins and all along the east coast, you know, with the fishing industries and seeing all these lake and sea monsters, and it's just, it's just really fertile ground, and you look at so many people that live on the east coast that a lot of these stories have taken place in the shadow of even new york. A big red eye, a giant Bigfoot creature, less than 50 miles away from New York City, a mountain lion struck in the Wilbercross Parkway in 2008,. Thought to be an eastern cougar, ended up being a dispatched male mountain lion that traveled 1,500 miles from South Dakota, struck and killed again on the Wilbercross Parkway in Connecticut, 60 miles from New York City.

Speaker 2: 23:23

A large population of people live so close to all these legends and all this. These are amazing. It's hard to not see that. We all have that in our backyards. Every state has their top five cryptids and you know, we think of, you know, we think of Sasquatch or Bigfoot. We think of, you know, california, which sure, washington, california lead the list, but Ohio is in the top five. Florida is pretty big with Bigfoot sightings, so you know we have our own out here on the East Coast. So you know we have our own out here on the East Coast seeing a menagerie of mysterious beasts that fly through the skies and roam through our forests and swim through the waters as well.

Speaker 1: 24:05

Absolutely. In Eastern cryptids, many of the creatures you cover have roots that go deep, some stretching back before colonial times.

Speaker 2: 24:21

How did Native American oral history shape or echo the sightings that we hear about today? Well, there's a lot of that that rubs off, of course. You know people jump to Sasquatch, which is on the West Coast. We wouldn't talk about that guy but you still have. It's amazing, like you don't realize how much Native American history rubs off on anything. American history rubs off on anything here in ohio ohio itself is a native american term lake erie, um cuyahoga county.

Speaker 2: 24:45

So many different words come from from that. But also their traditions, their oral traditions, kind of cross over with ours as well and you can look at, even like the loveland frog. The loveland frog is actually they had a similar creature that they believed in, had a similar creature that was a large shunahook, which is a river demon that looked like a giant frog. That was their creature. At how many frog or lizard type creatures, whether reptile or lizard, which are different things but people just describe them differently all occur along through the Ohio River Basin and even through on the eastern coast as well, through like Chesapeake Bay, and all through that area, these similar creatures which are based on. You know, native Americans had their own beliefs in those things, which is kind of interesting. But of course you know native americans had their own beliefs in those things, which is kind of it's kind of interesting. But of course you know we have all kinds of other. You know you have the pennsylvania dutch that brought over, you know tommy knockers and you have all these other strange creatures that that are born from folklore, from from other countries, and all throughout, especially in the south, I mean, you have.

Speaker 2: 25:59

I mean I always talk about the gulagichi from, uh, africa basically, where you get your carolina blue. People paint their doors and shutters blue because of toward off evil spirits and people do that now just because, well, it's carolina blue. That's what we do, but it's it's because of that culture and it's spread and people some people don't even know where it comes from. They just do it because they know they're supposed to. But different cultures have really embedded themselves in this country and that's kind of what makes it more interesting to me than looking at the Loch Ness Monster. Scottish history is Scottish history. It's the Scottish. They believed every body of water, even a puddle, had a monster in it. That's boring. It's the Scottish. They believed every body of water, even a puddle, had a monster in it. That's boring. It's exciting but boring. But here we're influenced by so many cultures at any point in time and it just overlaps with our beliefs as Americans, or whatever you want to call us, because we're a melting pot.

Speaker 1: 26:53

That's a fantastic point, and you're right, that's what makes our country so interesting. Now you write something in your book that really stuck with me and I'm going to quote it here. While it is difficult to ignore the sheer number of eyewitness accounts, we must also recognize that there has never been one caught or definitively proven to exist. Now that contradiction, that tension, is at the heart of cryptozoology. Why do you think so many people continue to report sightings despite the lack of physical evidence?

Speaker 2: 27:28

So I mean, it's folklore, it's what we believe, it's kind of embedded in us. You know, it's this belief in these creatures that defy, sometimes defy physics or defy the laws of nature. I mean not all of them in cryptozoology, so not all. Cryptozoology is all these fantastic creatures like Mothman and Sheep, goatman and Jersey Devil and all those things. Some of them were once living creatures like Thunderbirds or you know Pteranodons, which people? I don't buy into that whole thing, but anyway, you know. Then you have the Eastern Cougar, you have the Ivory-billed woodpecker, stuff like that. That's real, that has existed.

Speaker 2: 28:07

The problem is, when you get into creatures like Bigfoot, even Mothman. So Mothman and Jersey Devil and some of those other creatures are the one-offs, the ones that I call the one-offs. They defy physics, they defy laws of nature. There's really no way that those things could exist in in their form, because we would have had. We have to start somewhere. You know the let alone, you know finding a holotype, you know the original creature, but there's nothing to go on. At least bigfoot, you can kind of sort of say well, you know, it could be this, it could be that, even though most of these things are completely wrong, like gigantopithecus, I don't know where, why they started that one. That doesn't even make any sense. Science says that it walked on all fours, not on, it wasn't bipedal and it didn't even live in didn't even live in the americas or what would become the Americas. But it's difficult when you're trying to take folklore, which is basically word of mouth. You're taking these legends People saw this or they saw that and you're trying to make science out of it. You're trying to find evidence to support a statement. It's not always that easy, especially when you have nothing to go on. So we're talking about Bigfoot. You can find all the prints you want, you can find hair, you can find whatever, but until you find a body or bones, none of that really matters because you have nothing to go on. You have no original thing to say. Well, this is where we started, this is what we have. Does this match? Does this evolve? From that?

Speaker 2: 29:40

Again, we go back to the definition, the search for and study of animals whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated. Sounds cute, um, it sounds like we're all putting on our little boonie hats and going out with our machetes and looking for all this stuff and the, the woods of the carolinas and the you know appalachian trail or whatever, wherever we're looking. But it's really, when people talk about the search for hidden or missing animals, I don't think it's really, unfortunately, the physical search anymore. I think it's more the documentation of these legends, of the total folklore which is actually.

Speaker 2: 30:15

There's a term for that, called ethno-knowledge. Ethno-knowledge is the kind of the summary of all that we know about cryptids and it's a shared belief system. People believe these things exist Even though science says quite the contrary. The Mothman was a sandhill crane, the UFO sightings with the Mothman were weather balloons that schools were putting out at the time, the exact time that everything was seen. All these things can be explained away by science, but people don't want to listen, they don't want to hear that. They're just like, oh yeah, swamp gas, right, it's going to explain everything. They ignore all that because it messes with their beliefs. It messes with that folklore.

Speaker 2: 30:52

That's what makes the ethno-analysis that people believe all these things. It exists in a bubble outside of, dare I say, at the rational world, and that to me is fascinating, that there's this firm belief, and and you know, I don't want to, I don't want to get anybody angry or mad or anything but to me. It's very similar to people that are really deeply religious, that believe you know all, you know creation and and and god and all these other supernatural things but then they say, well, bigfoot can't be real. Wait, bigfoot can't be real. But you got a guy out there with a stick parting the seas like hold on a second. What is more fantastic here? So it's.

Speaker 2: 31:30

It's weird how people pick and choose what they want to believe and how they believe it. But so that's why I don't have any problem with people having these beliefs or or feeling that way, because it's it's folklore, it's culture, it's the same. I don't attack people for their religion, their beliefs. My god's better than your god. That's just how. That's how the world is. There's there's not one god. There's there's at least 150 of them for all these different religions. Well, how could there be so many different ones? Because it's culture, it's what they believe, it's it's what they were brought up on. And the same with cryptozoology and these cryptids. It's a lot of these people. They believe in it because that's what they were brought up on.

Speaker 1: 32:05

It's part of their culture it's really interesting that you brought up religion, because, as you were speaking, one thing that I was thinking was belief sounds an awful lot like faith correct.

Speaker 2: 32:16

And yeah, and I think a lot of people latch on to these cryptids, because the same for me, when, when I was searching for answers, when I got into the ghost field, it's a search for spirituality, it's a search for oneself, one, one's place, one's belonging, um, we know a higher thought, a higher thinking, what's, what else is out there? And it's it's weird. When you get a new person in the group, you'd interview them and they would say, yeah, I had an experience when I was a kid I'm just trying to figure it out and I don't know. Already, in the back of my mind, as soon as this kid gets something, he's gone. As soon as he sees something, he'll light a click on and he'll leave the group, which is okay, okay and sure enough.

Speaker 2: 32:55

That's what happens, because they find their answer. They find that personal thing that they were looking for and that's it. They move on to their next hobby and sometimes I think that's what people are looking for. They're looking for that spiritual answer, you know. And bigfoot, you know, you got a lot of people that believe in the spirit of the wolf, you know, but then you have the spirit of bigfoot. It's the same, it's just a different creature.

Speaker 1: 33:17

Absolutely. It's 2025. We live in a world blanketed in cameras, security footage, trail cams, drones Everyone walks around with a high resolution video camera right in their pocket. So why, after all this time, is every cryptid video still shaky blurry?

Speaker 2: 33:39

or inconclusive? Well, the first thought. I've been asked that question quite a few times. But the first thing I always laugh because I think of how many times I've been out hiking. We're just walking and my phone's in my pocket and I go to reach in my pocket to take a picture of this rabbit or snake or whatever's at my feet and by the time I get my phone out, get my camera on and go to take a picture, it's gone. And that happens quite a bit and I challenge anybody.

Speaker 2: 34:04

I mean a deer, okay, deer. They stand there and stare at you and kind of move their head around, especially here on the East Coast, because they don't have any predators except for cars and people, but most animals. You're not going to be able to get a picture that fast unless you're on your phone and the people that are on their phone really aren't paying attention anyway. They're on TikTok and they've got their face planted in their phone anyway. But as far as most technology your ring cameras or your stuff that's around your house it's not really pointed out toward anywhere, it's pointed at your property. So those really aren't going to pick up anything. It's amazing how they do pick up police ch, police chases and people that are, you know, just trying to escape on in cars, and those things end up in court all the time with uh car, uh, police pursuits and things like that, but they're not going to pick up animals. Uh, drones, like drones are, are good, but you you can only use them in certain circumstances for short periods of time.

Speaker 2: 35:05

We've seen some drone video through the years that were, uh, hoax. We had the one where bigfoot was seen I forget where it was a utah I think and there's just flying over this field and you see this bigfoot running and that came out and everyone's like, oh, we finally got proof. And like that's got to be a hoax. And sure enough it was. A was a hoax. The guy laughed about it. Everybody looked foolish. It was reporting, saying it was real.

Speaker 2: 35:28

But yeah, just because we have technology, cameras, doesn't mean that we're going to pick up more of these creatures. Folklore it's just stories. So some people may be having these things happen to them, but a lot of the times they just want to be part of the story as well. So it's maybe there's not as much flesh and blood as you think that's out there. And of course you know you could argue too that if you have an intelligent creature and they hear a little buzzing in the sky, they're sure going to be kind of cautious about putting sticking their head out to get viewed on a on a camera.

Speaker 2: 36:07

But you know we've cameras, aren't you know new of matt, moneymaker of the bfro, as he's been using infrared cameras and emf detectors and all kinds of stuff out in the field trying to find bigfoot for 40 some odd years with no luck. But yeah, we have more cameras now than ever trail cameras used all over the world for studying animals in the wild. They've captured some amazing creatures, such as albino mountain lions, which has never been seen in nature. We've seen black panthers captured well north of where there's usually thought to have been, but even then we got to get out there and we got to use more than technology to capture these things.

Speaker 1: 36:50

It's really interesting that you bring up the idea about the deer, and when I think about it, it makes perfect sense. Even I, at different times, trying to pull out my phone and take a picture of a rabbit or some other animal or something, and as soon as you pull it out, they're gone. So that makes complete sense, thank you. Now, to make it even more complicated, we now live in an age of artificial intelligence, deep fakes, video manipulation, ai-generated creatures none of it's science fiction anymore. Has that made it harder to take new evidence seriously? Or even harder to take new evidence seriously, or even harder to trust what we're seeing with our own two eyes?

Speaker 2: 37:30

Well, 100%. I mean I come from the mid-1990s when I was first starting out in the ghost field. Everything that we used was analog. I had a shoebox recorder, a tape cassette recorder, a microcassette recorder, 35 millimeter camera, so you'd have like 24 to 32 frames. And you, you know the trick was when you took it to the photo lab you would, when you go to pick it up, you choose what you wanted to take to pay for it. The false positives are the ones that were dark. Oh, you're like, ah, I don't like that one, so I don't, I'm not going to pay for it.

Speaker 2: 38:06

We even then had a lot of things you could manipulate with film. You could take the negatives and do things to them to make new prints that had different things on them. I mean, heck, you can go back to the early or the late 19th century, the 1800s, with that famous picture of Mary Todd Lincoln with Abraham Lincoln's ghost over her shoulder Spirit photography. You know, manipulation has been going on for hundreds of years. It's not new. The digital era brought all sorts of issues, all sorts of problems with digital manipulation and of course we adjusted. We learned how to fight that with viewing the exif information. You know the metadata within every image. You know, if you're going to show me a picture, I need to see that that metadata to verify what was changed or what wasn't changed.

Speaker 2: 38:57

People got fooled all the time. Look up the ufos over jerusalem. That was a huge thing where multiple angles were manipulated at the same exact time Really fooled a lot of people. But now we're in this AI age and it's tough. It's hard and we're actually now at the point where AI isn't exactly new anymore. Early AI you get a picture and you look at if it was a Bigfootfoot. It had six fingers and seven toes or stuff like that. It was pretty obvious. Well, now all that's pretty much fixed. It's really difficult. There's only certain things you can find now, like, um, when you have people, that is one of the easiest. There's a couple easy things to see.

Speaker 2: 39:41

When you're looking at a video like there's all these things on tiktok, people don't realize it's all AI. These videos started with a news reporter lady and there's a whole bunch of different videos of that. Of course, the Bigfoot ones I love. There's very little that we can really connect with now. There's no XF information, there's no metadata. Now because you type it in, you get the product, there it is. There's no metadata now, because you type it in, you get the product. There it is, there's your video. There's no stream of information in there anymore at least that I know of so it's a lot more difficult.

Speaker 2: 40:15

But on the same token, I think this is the first time that this stuff has come out and been more of negative than a positive. For us, digital was great because, my gosh, it's tired of spending all that money on on film and and money on prints and development, having to wait like a couple of days, like, my goodness, can you imagine now waiting to get you take all these cool pictures but you can't see them for a couple of days? People lose their minds nowadays. That's just how it was back in the good old black, when everything was black and white.

Speaker 2: 40:45

It's just a matter of time until we're able to kind of like feed these into a program and get you know yes, this is definitively ai and here's why. Uh, you know, so we can kind of exploit this technology against itself. I mean, it's, it's gonna happen. I think if we're patient and we continue to utilize this technology for the good that it has, maybe we can focus on. Let's get out there in the woods and look for this stuff again. Let's go back to the way it used to be. Let's take these documents of these people that were seeing these things and interview them. Stop worrying about trying to prove it to the world and let's just solve it one case at a time.

Speaker 1: 41:27

That's the first half of our journey with Dr Brian D Parsons, researcher, author and chronicler of the Strange. If you're intrigued by the creatures we haven't caught and the stories that won't die, stay tuned. Part two drops next week where we dive into Bigfoot belief and the future of cryptid research. Follow State of the Unknown wherever you listen, leave a rating, share the show and help us keep the folklore alive. I'm Robert Barber. Until next time, keep your eyes open, because some things refuse to stay hidden.