Cryptid Case Files: The Mountain Gorilla

0:28 Merriamwebster Dictionary Cryptozoology. Noun the study of and search for animals and especially legendary animals such as Sasquatch. Usually in order to evaluate the possibility of their existence. If in a rabbit hole presents the mountain gorilla. Hey welcome back to infinite rabbit hole everybody. I know that you were you were so hoping you're like, man, we finally got rid of Jake.

1:14 He finally quit and he's gone and all we can we we only have to hear Jeremy now. Well guess what. I'm back to ruin your day. Maybe not longterm, maybe longterm, I don't know. But for right now we're starting. I'm starting a new series that I'm calling the Cryptozoology Case Files, and we'll get more into that here in just a second. But today I am joined with my cohost, Jeremy. Jeremy, how are you doing this? Fine day. It's so it's it's fun being on this side. I like, yeah, yes. Well, that's good. That's it. All right, cool. That's pretty much.

1:55 I mean, everything's going good, man. I'm working on a very large presentation. For this, well, pretty pretty BIG4 episodes so far. Going to start episode 150 with a Banger and then break it up in the smaller sections for the next four are three episodes 15151, one 52153. So far all the same subject broken up in the smaller bits. That's that. Each cover a subtopic within that topic, so I'm pretty excited about it. Just an FYI to anybody listening might be infinite rabbit hole lists for a few weeks.

2:36 This this is a pretty big subject and it's been working on it for over a month already and I want to say I'm about halfway done. So I mean, if there's anyone to do that between the two of us, it's definitely you since I barely know how to read. Had to watch an awful lot of videos for this. No, no. I'm just messing okay. So basically, here's the gist, right? I had this thought for a while, even before I I decide to walk away from the show for the second time. Which, don't worry, they'll probably be a third. But I I wanted to do so. We talked about cryptophysiology quite often. You know, whether we're getting into the Loveland Frog Man or Bigfoot or Loch Ness Monster, whatever it is, right?

3:24 But I wanted to discuss a small series, or maybe a large series on what we'll see as episodes continue, but of real cryptozoology discoveries, right, where something either went extinct and was rediscovered, or it was theorized to exist and then actually found by science to exist. And so the first one I want to start with was the mountain gorilla, and we'll get into it a little bit. This might not be a tremendously long episode trying to really just focus on the stories and then discovery and all that stuff of the mountain gorilla and not really get this into like a mountain gorilla documentary type thing because it was certainly going to start going in that direction and I had to cut it off pretty short.

4:13 But yeah, just kind of given people an idea of when we talk about all this cryptozoology type stuff, it's not just legendary monsters we're referring to. Of course, the ones that we focus on are undiscovered monsters, right? Or undiscovered creatures. But the realm of cryptozoology has a lot to it, and we'll see as the episodes progress. You're going to hear of a lot of animals that you know you are pretty familiar with and you're going to be like, well, that was considered a crypted no way, right. And so we're just going to get into that sort of stuff. Man, I dig this. It's like crypted success stories.

4:53 Yeah, pretty much. That's pretty cool, man. I dig this. I dig this. I like this. This is this is important because a lot of people who think of cryptozoology, they actually think of like urban legends. And there's, yes, urban legends, sometimes the monsters. The creatures can be categorized as cryptids as well, but cryptozoology is a technical science. Now, are you going to find it in, you know, college classrooms? No, probably not. There might be here's and there's, but for the majority of it, you're not going to find it. And these here, Jake, I like this. This is cool because we get to spread the success stories of cryptozoology.

5:38 Why does it exist, right. Is it all about going out and finding the Jersey Devil and the Pine Barrens of New Jersey? Yes and no. You know, you do have those people, those thrill seekers who go out and look for these monsters, right? Cryptozoology has this man it. I don't know. It's it's got this flavor to it that everyone just thinks it's got to be something about monsters. Monsters that are there to harm you, that are there to kill you. Dog men, they'll just slit your throat. The reason why? Nobody you know. Can tell you of a a run in with dog bands because nobody has ever survived it.

6:18 You know it's a it's so this is cool this is this is good. We get to see the other side of cryptozoology. The more scientific side the more where when science did take this quite seriously and we got some really cool discoveries out of it. I know. I know of a handful right off the bat but but so yeah cool man. Let's roll. I'm down before I get into it honestly when it comes to I'm going to keep this to you know if the the more the more well known ones. But really when it comes down to it, any place that has ever had local people, native people, tribes, whatever that may look like for that area in that region that had legends and stories associated with certain animals and then later on they were discovered to be true is considered cryptozoology. So really you could get into all right, we have 1500 topics on the docket, you know, and we're going to work our way through them over the next 10 years.

7:26 So that's true. It it could be like that. But I'm going to stick to the more well known ones. So that way I'm not just repeating over and over again. You know, this week we're talking about squirrels, the next week we're talking about fox squirrels, and the next thing we're talking about Gray squirrels, you know? Well, I I think the I like the mountain gorilla because this is, this is something that was Bigfoot esque. You know, back in the day there was the lowland gorillas, and then the mountain gorillas were the ones that were myth and fable. The and then they were also vicious, which is another symptom of cryptozoology. You know on the mainstream level is that it's it's there to kill you. So you you had some people that were really afraid to go up in the mountains because of these gorillas that were killing people.

8:15 All right, now you shut your face. You're gonna get in the get in the way of all of my research and we're just gonna have a chat conversation. OK, OK, OK. All right, I'm done. I'm muting myself. Go. All right, shut up. Shut up. Now you're here. I can remember times when I was a child and visited the local zoo with my family. Seeing the animals there was so fascinating. The ability to see birds of all shapes and sizes beautifully colored, some from the most remote places in the world. There were lions and tigers and bears. Oh my. But of all the amazing species, my attention was drawn to the monkeys and the apes. As a matter of fact, my favorite animal to this day is the howler monkey, but that's a story for another time.

8:57 It's really not that interesting. I just like the way they sound. My interest in these mammals was how similar they appeared to us. They're human like faces with deep understanding eyes that seem to reflect our own emotions. Incredibly intelligent beings that have been observed creating simple tools to help with foraging food and even can be taught to speak sign language for communication with humans. The other day I saw a short on YouTube where a visitor to a zoo had brought her newborn baby to the gorilla enclosure. On the other side of the glass was a female gorilla staring and wonder at the baby. Then, to the onlooker surprise, the gorilla ran away and collected her own baby. She came back and proudly presented the offspring to the other mother, as if to say, look, I have one too, We're the same.

9:46 I personally don't know how someone could have seen the same video as me and not have been moved with emotion or thrilled with excitement for the mother primate and her newborn. In any case, if you want to know the similarities and the differences between apes and us shameless plug, check out our Aquatic Ape theory done by Jeremy. He actually does a fantastic job of it. But here in the age of the Internet, vast resources of information, National Geographic, etcetera, you'd be hard pressed to find a person, except for remote indigenous tribes who haven't at least seen a picture of one of these incredible creatures. But of course, that wasn't always the case. In fact, would you believe that the gorilla was once an animal of mere myth and legend?

10:31 We'll settle down and I'll tell you a story of how these giant, elusive creatures were discovered, went from the realm of a legend into reality. Get it? Cryptids and whatnot, You get it. The discovery of these massive creatures didn't happen until 1902. Now, the lowland gorillas were already known to exist and had been discovered by accident something like 2500 years ago in circa 740 BC, where Hano, A Carthaginian navigator, discovered the gorilla Greek for Tribe of Hairy Women. He took three females on board his ship which died in the voyage from now Sierra Leone to Rome, but was able to retain their skins.

11:16 Although it is believed that he had actually encountered chimpanzees, not gorillas, because he described their hostility and stone throwing, which is not a behavioral trait for gorillas. But the name stuck. Fast forward a cool 2000 years and you have the account of an English sailor, Andrew Battelle, who, encaptured in the western coast of Africa and 1559 by the Portuguese, claim to have seen giant human like apes. Now there's two species of gorilla, the eastern and western types, with the eastern generally being a bit larger than the western. Under those are 4 subspecies for the western portion is the Cross River and the western Lowland. These gorillas live in the tropical and subtropical regions of Cameroon and Nigeria, and the only real physical difference between them is actually the volume in which they communicate, like legit their loudness of their howls and whatnot.

12:15 The eastern gorilla species has the subspecies of the eastern lowland living in tropical rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the mountain gorilla featured in this episode that resides in the Virunga Mountains at elevations of 8 to 13,000 feet. Yes, I said 13,000 like almost 2 1/2 miles above sea level or almost 4 kilometers for anyone outside the US Kind of makes sense why they were the last to be discovered. What do you think about that, Jeremy? Good breakdown. Yeah, very good breakdown. Thank you. Yeah, I throw humor in it. You did? And I chuckled. Yeah, I saw that.

12:55 Yeah, that's that's why I needed myself. But no, man, good stuff, good, good stuff. I don't know what I can say. I don't wanna, I don't wanna put too much out there. I don't wanna take away from your shine. Well, then it's gonna be a very short episode. All right. Well, I mean, if that's it, we'll just move on. Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. I say what you gotta say. No, no, no, no, no, no. Because I feel like what I'm going to say is coming up next, it's a it's a very good transitional piece. It's cuz you know my flow, you know my description, legends, discovery, the same flow I have for literally everything.

13:40 It's a good flow. Good flow. OK, yeah. All right. Now, just for everyone's sake, I might butcher the names of African places and geographical locations and names and all that stuff because I do not speak any native African languages. So just hang with me, but I'm going to do my best. Yeah, Lauren. Yeah, Lauren, There isn't a plethora of legends and lore that come with the mountain gorillas as a scene with Native American tribes and the animals that surround them. As a matter of fact, I'm just using that as an example because we we see a lot of that in Native American tribes and we also speak about that as well.

14:26 As a matter of fact, the bulk of the myths come from explorers that cross paths with them and the western world post discovery. Various legends of giant hairy man eating brutes that are more likely to rip you limb from limb comes from outside locations they populate. However, there are some legends and it's tied to an almost occult like worship of the gorilla. In my research I stumbled upon a peer reviewed paper titled Who Knows what about Gorillas? Indigenous Knowledge, Global Justice, and Human Guerrilla Relations by Adam Amir, PhD, Communications Coordinator, Totland Central Government.

15:11 A lot of my presentation came from this paper and it's refreshing since most of the Guerrilla Fact websites seem to not be able to agree on really anything. Within this paper is section 2.2 Indigenous African Ways of Knowing Gorillas and within he writes about the belief systems from all over Africa regarding gorillas, such as quote. If a pregnant woman sees a gorilla, she will give birth to a baby gorilla and if a gorilla is killed, a man connected to it via totem will die. In Nigeria, hunters tell of a variation. If a woman eats gorilla meat, she will give birth to a strong baby.

15:51 Some Fang groups refer to the spirit of the gorilla as Esengui or Father Gorilla. They believe gorilla spirits to be so potent upon encounter that a pregnant woman would give birth to a gorilla. The Fang groups in northern Gabon and southern Cameroon call gorillas indie to refer to a positive force, and the evil force is actually represented by chimpanzees, which actually, if you kind of look at their behaviors, gorillas seem to be more elusive and docile and really just don't want to be around anybody. They're vegetarians. Chimpanzees will roam in packs, attack gangs of other chimpanzees, and rip apart and eat monkeys, so I can see what that would come into play.

16:38 However, in Virunga the gorilla is seen as a as a negative and saying its name, and Gagi brings about bad luck. The Quaale people of central Cameroon believe that gorillas are reincarnated people, and as a matter of fact, there are a lot of shared belief systems surrounding gorillas and reincarnation. And not to go further and just quote the entire section, you know, we'll move on. But please check out the link in the description. The information is actually pretty fascinating. Isn't it cool the the comparisons, the parallels that you see from mountain gorillas to Bigfoot. Look, look, I'm going to need you to calm down.

17:21 See, See. I can't. Speak kind of stuff, no, I know. But yeah, it's it's very similar. So in relation to the bit that I said about Native Americans, so it's because we cover that a lot. Obviously we're in North America. We speak about the local legends and lore and stuff quite often, but in those sorts of cultures we you'd see they just didn't have just, you know, explanations and stories regarding, you know, Sasquatch, which they most certainly have a lot of. But they also covered really any animal that they had contact with on a regular basis. And these various legendary stories or mythological type stories.

18:10 When it came to African culture, their belief systems surrounding the gorilla was actually pretty interesting because some of these belief systems came from areas where gorillas are never known to have existed. And it's possible that they, the people that even to this day who believe them, have never actually seen a gorilla before in real life. And when these belief systems were coming together, they had never had contact with them, but perhaps they had heard from different tribes about these giant apes or whatever it was, and they have a shared belief system. So it's literally all over the African continent the the things I talked about where a pregnant woman sees a gorilla, she becomes pregnant with a gorilla, or they eat gorilla meat, they have a strong child or whatever it is.

18:58 Or this idea that warriors are reincarnated into gorillas or just people are reincarnated into gorillas. All sorts of stuff. If if you're burying a person and a gorilla shows up, that's the spirit of the individual. Those sorts of beliefs are shared throughout the African continent. It's actually pretty interesting. Whereas guerrillas themselves are only in a few select locations within Africa. And Africa's absolutely gigantic, right. So it's it's actually really interesting and the article that went through and of course it'll be in the description, but they go through a lot of that. And I didn't want to just, you know, one thing after another quoted, but kind of give everybody a general idea of these are some of the, you know, religious type beliefs surrounding these beings and that isn't exclusive to mountain gorillas or lowland gorillas or you know, whatever Cross River gorillas.

19:58 This is just in general as far as what I found. Specific mountain, Gorilla legends really. Well, I'm not going to say they didn't exist, but I truly couldn't find any. But the stories remained. And after, you know, I, I don't know how to describe it, but I guess maybe scientists at the time or you know, field researchers weren't expecting another type subspecies of gorilla to exist. So that's why it kind of went into the realm of mythology. And then of course I had mentioned that it wasn't till actually they were discovered in 1902 that all those really crazy, you know, monstrous cannibal type legends start actually springing up.

20:46 And that came from the Western world. And you can see that in relation to like King Kong, which I believe is from the 20s or 30s, where there's this vicious, monstrous thing and everything and and that's lies or or falsehoods or or stories perpetuated by the Western world's ignorance of what these animals actually were. And so that was actually pretty interesting to see. Do you talk about the water babajon at all Now Go for it. Oh, really? Yeah. It's actually a South African Bigfoot. So yes, the Guerrilla lore goes throughout the.

21:27 Entire continent of Africa, but there are smaller sections of what they what they describe as upright walking gorillas, something that we would describe here in the United States as Bigfoot. The water Babajon is I think it has a different name. I think it's like Fudu or FUBU. Something along those lines. There's there's some debate. On whether or not it's more gorilla like or more baboon like, but the the skeletal structures there it's a it's an upright walking primate and it man, I don't want to butcher this because I don't have the research right in front of me.

22:13 But I want to say that when the natives of Africa talk about whether or not they're talking about gorillas by their numerous different names, the same thing where these Bigfoot type creatures. Is basically whether or not they're hunched over and walking on their knuckles or if they're standing up straight. And there's a lot of lot of people that actually believe that they're interchangeable, that, you know, just like us here in the United States, we there has been plenty of sightings of Bigfoot. When they're running full speed, they're down on all fours and they're running like you know what we would typically view as gorilla run. But when they're walking or just casually moving about? They're up on 2 feet, and that's something that we could be seeing here in Africa as well.

23:00 And you could be getting interchangeable interchangeable names, interchangeable reports or legends or mythologies about gorillas or vice versa. No, I agree. And the reasoning for me not getting into any of the other crypted tie ins is because them and themselves can be their own, their own episodes, but also, I believe, their own entities entirely. So I mean we have what the yaoi, the Erin, the Sasquatch, skunk, ape, Yeti, you know, all these various things. But when you come into the realm of, you know, these are mythologies about gorillas.

23:50 And you know, considering that this belief system has been around for quite some time in Africa, it it's more likely that anybody from outside of that continent would have made-up their own, you know, stories or whatever. Or, you know, having not ever seen a gorilla would have been fantastically pulled in by these stories. But what the Africans were actually referring to is a real animal that we have today or a real discovered animal rather, you know, something that's been proven versus pulling in a bunch of other cryptids or, you know, Sasquatch type cryptids and pulling them into this episode and saying like, oh, could be this, it could be that. Well, no, because once, you know, it was verified by someone else, they were like, Oh yeah, that's exactly what we're talking about.

24:45 They just just no one outside the continent knew, right. Yeah, yeah. I have enough really to add. Again, I'm walking on glass here, except for I can probably add some names like the Ma Punguari, the Amus, and then the smaller Orang Pandek. Of course, there's 10s of hundreds of different names for. Befa like creatures around the world. Just wanted to throw those ones out there 10s of hundreds, some would say 10s. Of hundreds, 10s. Of hundreds. Yeah. Took the long route. Yeah, hundreds. Hundreds of ones. We're the world's most okayest podcast, so in the world.

25:28 Yeah, that's right. Alrighty. So what about these mountain gorillas, the indigenous people that resided alongside the mountain gorilla before the time of discovery, where the Echuya Batwa in Uganda and the Tois in Rwanda? I put time of discovery in quotes, obviously because they already knew about the gorillas. But as history has shown, no one really seems to care about what the locals know until some random foreigner shows up and discovers something you know, also in quotes. And then somehow, it's valid anyway. These tribes, also known as Pygmies, which is probably a more familiar word to people, existed alongside the mountain gorillas high up in the forest and cared for the animals in the landscape with their hunter gatherer lifestyles.

26:21 And there they resided for thousands of years, considering they are known to be one of the oldest people groups in existence. Until one day, you guessed it, A foreign German explorer, Captain Robert Vaughn Bering shows up. On August 19th, 1902, Captain Behring Physician Dr. Anglin, 20 or so men and porters visited Rwanda's Sultan Messinga. They left there to travel to a row of volcanoes to visit the German outpost located in the mountains. Fun fact, Rwanda was claimed by Germany as a territory during the 1884 Berlin Conference until the control ended in 1962.

27:03 To quote Bearings report of the expedition, quote from October 16th to 18th, Senior Physician Dr. Anglin and I, together with only a few Ascari's and the absoluteness necessary baggage, attempted to climb the so far unknown Kurunga ya Sabinio, which according to my estimateation must have been a height of 3300 meters. At the end of the first day we camped on a plateau at the height of 2500 meters. The natives climbed up to our campsite to generously supply us with food. We left our camp on October 17th, taking with us a tent, 8 loads of water, 5 ascari's and porters as necessary. After 4 1/2 hours of tracking we reached a height of 3100 meters and tracked through the bamboo forest. Although using elephant trails for most of the way, we encountered much undergrowth which was to be cut down before we could pass.

28:04 After two hours we reached a Stony area with vegetation consisting mainly of BlackBerry and blueberry bushes. Step by step we noticed the vegetation becoming poorer and poorer, the ascent becoming steeper and steeper and the climb becoming more difficult. For the last 1 1/4 hours we climbed only over rock. After covering the ground with Moss we collected. We erected our tent on a Ridge at a height of 3100 meters. The Ridge was extremely narrow so that the pegs of the tent could be secured. In the abyss, the ascaris and the porters found shelter in a rock in rock caverns which provided protection against the biting cold wind. From our campsite we were able to watch a herd of big black monkeys which tried to climb the Crest of a volcano. We succeeded in killing two of these animals and with a rumbling noise they tumbled into a ravine which had its opening in a N northeasterly direction.

29:02 After five hours of strenuous, strenuous work, we succeeded in retrieving one of these animals using a rope. It was a big human like male monkey of 1 1/2 meters in height and weighing more than £200. Its chest had no hair and his hands and feet were of enormous size. Unfortunately, I was unable to determine its type. Because of its size, it could not very well have been a chimpanzee or a gorilla, and in any case, the presence of gorillas had not been established in the area around the lakes. End Quote A sample was collected of two gorillas that had been killed and were sent to a museum in Berlin, and it was determined that Bearing had discovered a new species and guessed what? Yep, they were named after him.

29:47 The gorilla Baranga Baranga, isn't it? Isn't it stupid? That a foreigner has to come in and verify the legends of the locals in order for it to be accepted by science. Yeah, I was actually going to go on a pretty substantial rant during this. I got kind of irritated because that seems to be, I mean, that's just commonplace, you know? And yeah, it's basically like the locals have their stories or their sightings or, you know, it's like the white moose and the Amazon. There's pictures, black and white pictures, but pictures nonetheless in the Amazon rainforest of white moose.

30:33 Now whether they are albino moose or whatever that other one is, where instead of red eyes, they have blue eyes and they are white. But no one actually holds any credit to them. And that's why they sent Expedition to the Amazon to discover these white moose. Because who cares what the locals say or what they see all the time? We have to discover it, and then somehow it becomes valid. And then the guy who discovers the thing then gets his name associated with it, which is stupid. It is. It's like, how about the tribe that live next to them and say, hey, we interact with these things all the time, you know? Name them after the tribe at least. Yeah, right. At least give them some damn credit. No, I 100% agree.

31:14 It's funny if I'm not, if I'm not wrong, earlier this little paragraph that you have here, you were talking about them climbing the mountain and that some of the locals just climbed up at night and gave them some food. It was like like nothing. But these guys, this great adventure about it just shows you like, yeah, we you know, we'll. Explorers keep theirselves on such a high pedestal and that they have to go out and play these verifiers of things. But yet, this grand adventure that they're going on to, you know, 1300 feet before they get to their first break is done in like an hour or two by the locals. Yeah, right.

31:56 Here you go. Knock it out. There's all the stuff you left at the bottom. Yeah, for real, it's. Kind of stupid, but no. That's pretty cool, man. That's all stuff. Like, I've never really had a chance to dive into the history of the gorilla and how it was found. That's freaking cool, man. I dig it. Yeah, well, unfortunately we're gonna get into the result of that finding, which isn't so great, but but it's it's very, it's very classic. And generally what happens when a new animal is discovered, you know it.

32:38 Which is interesting, too, because the mountain gorilla doesn't really look anything different than the rest of the gorillas. Like, it's not like, I don't know, like Darwin's finches where it has the same species of Finch, but this one has a pointed beak and this one has a curved beak. You know those sorts of things from isolation, adaptation and you know, microevolution. But really there is no difference. The subspecies are split because of the location that they live in. And that location could end up going into, like I had mentioned, the western ones or the eastern ones, whichever it was.

33:19 But the the volume of their communication, well, depending on like what they're communicating through, whether it's trees or a plane landscape, you know, it makes sense. But yeah, it's like, I don't know what the immediate fascination would have been for these things. Yeah, the finches, the beaks actually were representation of what their preferred food source was. So if you had finches that preferred like a nectar, right, they would have longer beaks that could go into the bulb of the flower if you had the ones that were used as like, you know, kind of like a woodpecker sort of thing where they would chisel at pieces of bark. You would have something shorter and fatter. That way it could hit a little bit harder and be more successful or wouldn't snap off like the longer beaks would. The hooked ones were the ones that would like seeds and whatnot.

34:13 No, they would spear worms and stuff. Yeah, there you go. But yeah, the finches, That's a pretty cool story. But yeah, absolutely, man. Yeah, it's kind of silly. So what happened next? Well, in classic fashion, European zoos offered big bucks to anyone who could capture this new subspecies of great ape. The adults were way too difficult to capture, so they resorted to stealing babies. Also, they are poached to Dang near extinction for their fur and meat by the year 1978. There around 400 left in existence. In the 1980s. The population remains stable and grew slightly due to the glamour wearing down.

34:58 So you want to hear something messed up? In 1991, the government of Uganda forced the Pygmies to leave their homes in the mountains so that they could make the area an impenetrable National Forest for guerrilla conservation. So the tribes uprooted everything and were forced to join modern life. They are now considered one of the poorest groups of people on Earth. I don't like this, considering they lived alongside the mountain gorillas for so long without any problems. I mean, they didn't even hunt the gorillas and they called them Sacamunto, which means just like me. And that's how they regarded them so. This happens with the Native Americans too. I get it right.

35:39 The one thing that we can say about the Africans is that they're incredible lengths they've gone through for conservation for the elephant, for the, you know, rhinos, for the gorillas. It's just top notch. Like, not only is it, you know, they keep them in these massive parks or massive nature, nature preserves or whatever, but also, I mean, there's incredible penalties for poaching, right? Like they're, they don't mess around. It's not like, oh, you're going to lose your hunting license. Like, you know, it's it's pretty rough. Like people get killed for getting caught poaching in these areas, for trying to attack the rhinos or the gorillas or whatever. And I understand that.

36:24 I understand from a conservation perspective the need to protect these animals, especially so they don't get just wiped off the face of the Earth. But to move a population that for the last, well, I don't know, 4005 thousand years has lived alongside these, these creatures in complete balance with them. They don't hunt them. They don't have any problems with each other. Yes, the Pygmies are hunter gatherers or we're hunter gatherers, but they ate like forest antelope and collected, you know, medicines from the trees and the plants and they, you know, ate the plant life and all that sort of stuff.

37:08 But to like kick them out of their homes, I don't know. I think there should have been some kind of a agreement or compromise done there. I don't disagree, but I'll tell you what, I'm very curious about Bigfoot. You told me to shut up, so I wanna know about it. I wanna know your connection here. All right, so getting into, getting into the end then. Sorry, I I just. I have more to talk about there. Well, yeah, I mean, once, once we're done with this, I'm actually surprised we're going this long. But once we're done with this, we can chat about it all you want. It's no big deal.

37:49 I don't really have any giant tieins, but I'll just kind of do my my final rant. Yeah, this story for me rings the Bigfoot bell in my brain. No, I'm not saying that gorillas in Sasquatch are the same, but a missing portion of the Greater 8 family. Yeah, maybe. Here in this episode we discussed the local legends and belief systems surrounding the African tribes who had contact and runins with the mountain gorillas. You heard about the knowledge of other types of gorillas that we were already known to exist, but it wasn't until some guy with the various degree of authority shows up and says, hey, these things are here that the discovery is made.

38:31 All I'm saying is that if we had less people out there in the woods trying to attract the Sasquatch with their yelling and screaming, we might actually get something discovered. And with all the reports of hair samples being collected coming back inconclusive for DNA, but that's where it stops. I mean, what's up with that? What is the level of authority needed to discover something? Maybe we need to get some random foreign guy to come take a look around. I don't know. But at the same time, and I really don't want to see it discovered and then hunted to extinction or forced into cages to be jeered at in the same fashion as the gorillas when they were discovered.

39:12 I'll tell you what, if in a rabbit hole will go find them, but don't expect us to recover a body because that's messed up and we won't tell anybody about it either. But we'll know. We'll report on it right here. You see a rabbit hole? We'll tell you that we didn't see it. That's right. But we did. And you'll know. You know what that means if you listen. Hey man, maybe we do maybe we just need a foreigner to come over here and confirm that Bigfoot are are real simple as that. Any foreign people over there that want to come over to America and verify this? It can't be from from England or anywhere in the UK, That's too easy. Must be from some place like I don't Germany or something and. Let's let's do the exchange from Africa. Yeah, I was going to say that.

39:59 Yeah, exactly. Exactly perfect. Perfect. Yep, I agree. Talk about Bigfoot, man. What'd you have in your mind? I just didn't want you to jump and start talking about the apes and whatnot of the gorillas. Well, I don't want to. I don't want to turn this into a Bigfoot episode. I want to try to keep this gorillas, but I don't have too much to say on gorillas, you know, it's just it's the comparison between gorillas and Bigfoot, right? It's because they're greater apes. Yeah. Well that not, not just that but you had, you had the myth, the lore, the the stories of apes and you know, the the mountains and the lowlands in in Africa.

40:42 And you have the same thing here you you have all kinds of stories of upright humans or humanoids or or what do they call them, wild men. It was a, it was a very popular word that was translated into many different languages that the native spoke. There's a lot of parallels, you know, especially when you come to the natives, like the tribes in Africa or the tribes here in in America who had these discussions and and conversations, these stories about these, these hairy apes, whether or not be a gorilla or Bigfoot. And the difference is, is so far, the African gorillas were confirmed to be real here, right? Where, like you said, there's there's plenty of evidence, there's evidence up the ass.

41:34 Let's just be honest about it. Oh, yeah, there is. But we just haven't had the right person see it and that's where the that's the differences. We need the right person. And you know, so I guess, I guess the real confirmation right was the body, right? They brought the body back. Actually, not even. They didn't even bring the body. They brought a patch of skin from one of their hands. They shot two of them, held them and just cut off like a little piece of skin from the back of their hands and sent it to this museum in Berlin. So I guess they had a sample, but that'll do it.

42:15 That'll do. It for the rest of them to rot it. Like what? What's wrong with you people? Well, look at those people. You know, this is, this is what we got to do. We got to go in the woods, find a Bigfoot, shoot its hand off, cauterize it because we're not Dicks. And then we'll take the the hand and we'll present it to science and be like, listen, this was found in Wisconsin. Tell me that this is not real. I don't know. I think they'd be better off just finding out where they live and then searching that area for their burial spot. I think that would be less messed up, doing grave digging versus maiming something. That's how they did it in the old days. In Africa, they.

42:56 I know it won't work and why would it work? Now, no, it is, it is crazy. I mean, those stories of the inconclusive DNA for the hair samples where they can say that it's some kind of primate type thing, right? Because it doesn't have the same hair structure as a wolf or a bear, whatever it is, you know, a canine or, you know, a pig or anything like that. But then that's literally where it stops. It'll come back inconclusive. And then? You know, and then the the provider of it either never gets the sample back or when they do there is zero help that they get from the actual scientific community to do anything into well, let's find out what this is then. You know, I don't know why they spend this enormous amount of time looking for, you know, another type of itty bitty tiny frog when there is a possibility we have another type of great ape living in our own backyard.

43:56 Could you imagine that? Could you imagine, I mean, you know, to each its own right, different flavors or different folks. But to me the upright walking Sasquatch in the woods of North America is incredibly exciting. Incredibly exciting. Like this would be one of the biggest discoveries in the history of man be one of I mean, I I'm not gonna I'm not gonna give it the crown and say like this is the biggest one but this is this would be pretty Dang big. Next to Dragons for Jeff, Am I right, Jeff? Old Jeffrey, old Jeffrey.

44:44 This was cool, man. You like it? I did. I did like this and like, I'm I'm curious. I'm curious because this was an easy one to have a conversation about, right? Bigfoots, big Feets or Bigfoots? I was gonna say that's probably probably the more correct way to to say it. Big futches. It's such an easy comparison. It's very, very easy, but I'm sure you're gonna get into later on down the series like the cola camp and and and the such, and I'm curious where you're gonna go with that, That's. It's a tough one, man. Thylacene's a good one.

45:28 The platypus that was encrypted, you know, various things like that. I mean, yeah, I mean it's it's it's something that I wanted to do for a while and it was just so that we can. Get the listeners to kind of understand our point of view, that our interest in this isn't from merely the perspective of people that want the mythology or the legends to become real, but that this has happened before. There's evidence behind this that this pseudoscience of cryptozoology, or, you know, science of cryptozoology, has been it has worked out.

46:10 Before and maybe it wasn't considered at that time to be cryptozoology, but with the definition of cryptozoology and what its purpose is, I mean that's what it is, right? So we'll get into more of these topics and and they'll be relatively short. You know what, We'll do our conversation piece right here and then you know if you, if you bounce over to the new. Channel. It'll be the documentary type style and it probably only be 20 minutes long, 25 minutes long. But it's not to turn this into a documentary about gorillas. It's to just talk about this thing, a couple legends around it who discovered it when it became known to the rest of the world that this is an animal that exists. And it's no longer just stuck in that realm of the local people around it are saying, hey, there's this, you know, duck billed, egg laying venomous.

47:05 Mammal. Yeah, that's hotter. You know that, you know, that's living in the waters. And then it's actually discovered by science and it's like, okay. Now the rest of the world knows a platypus actually exists. But yeah, just just like that. And probably just a refreshing note of instead of us saying, Oh yeah, this could exist or this, I believe that this could be a real thing or whatever. It's like, Nope, these are real things that exist. This is a crypto. This is a crypted right? Right, yeah. Couple things to add. 1 you had made the the the point about DNA missing and everything for the for the Bigfoot, for anybody that wants to look into it. Eventually we'll cover it here on the infinite rabbit hole. But Melba Ketchum did a something called the the genome project, which is what she was trying to do, was to map the genome of the of the Bigfoot and prove it by DNA that this thing does exist.

48:02 Very interesting. I know Melba Ketchum is a very she's hitting her miss in the community. Of course, if you're in the Bigfoot community, right. If you're in the cryptic community and you're one of these these researchers and I'm doing this with air quotes, right. Because you know everyone is a researcher. I'm not a researcher. I can tell you every now I read books. I research. I research the Internet. Yeah, that's that's about it. We're not, we're not field agents. I can guarantee that. I mean, eventually, one day, right? One day, maybe we don't. We'll get out there. I would love to do it, but I'm not claiming that whatsoever. But the people who do go out there and do this, you know, because there's such a rat race about who can get there first.

48:49 Melba Ketchum did put it in a ton of hard work, right? But 90% of the Bigfoot community will will call bullshit on it. And it's strictly just because she went at it very scientifically, very scientifically. And to her, she believes that she has proof right? One the the the scientific community, the mainstream scientific community, they're not going to give it the time of day and neither are the people you know in cryptozoology because well, if she proved it, that means I'm not going to prove it, you know, and and such a stupid thing, it really is.

49:31 And then the other thing I wanted to point out was that I completely fucking forgot that we now have a second show. So if you're listening, if you're listening still here at the end of this episode, probably should have said this at the beginning. We'll we'll get better at this with time. But we started a new show, a new podcast and it's a companion show to the Infinite Rabbit Hole. So while I was kind of doing things for my or, I was kind of doing this for The Infinite Rabbit Hole by myself, I was doing these documentary series, which is just me with a whole bunch of fancy music behind me and and cool drawn out theatrics, but, you know, not visual. Audio theatrics.

50:19 Yeah, audio theatrics. And some people reached out and they were like, man, I really liked us. And some people reached out and it's like, you know, it's cool, but everyone's doing this. That's not the infinite rapper. I was like, yeah, you're right, it's not. And I I put a lot of time and effort into my research. And I mean, it's it's an obsession to me with this stuff. And I want to be able to put out some stuff that isn't necessarily looked at as a comedy show because believe it or not, Spotify, Spotify says for comedy, That's cool, That's cool. I'm, I'm down with that, right?

50:59 But I also want to be known That, or I also want it to be known that I can be serious too and I can put out some really good quality stuff. So every episode do you see here on The Infinite Rabbit Hole where we do one of these old school documentary style episodes where we chat about things in between just information vomit? Well, if you want an episode that is nothing but information vomit, head on over to the Docks by Infinite Rabbit Hole. Now we don't have a lot up there. There is. By the time this comes out, we'll be a few episodes in. If you like the the new documentary style episodes where it's just somebody reading off the information for you, you don't have time for an hour's worth of bullshit and you don't want to hear us sit there and talk about things. Or Bigfoot.

51:50 You want to just be strictly about the gorilla, right? And I'm over to Docs by Infinite Rabbit Hole. It's a brand new podcast there, Will, There will, I'm going to say this now and I'll keep putting this out. There will be exclusive episodes on Docs by Infinite Rabbit Hole. And basically how this is going to work is we're taking away the stresses of doing the Infinite Rabbit Hole. Like today, Shake and I were just like, yeah, we're both good, let's do it right. That wasn't necessarily the case before. Now it is, hey, if you're not available, then I'm just going to go ahead and read it as a documentary and we'll slap it up on Docs by Infinite Rabbit Hole.

52:35 And there just won't be an episode on Infinite Rabbit Hole this week. As simple as that for the weeks that we can get together and and do this right, because let's be honest, we have lives and there's other things that are more important than a podcast, well then we'll sit down, we'll we'll bullshit about it. We'll talk about it. Still going to do the author interviews here. We're still going to talk to researchers and and have guests and everything here on the Infinite Rabbit hole. But if you want something that's a little bit more refined, something that's a little bit more professional, little bit, you know, more strictly informational driven and not necessarily opinion driven as we do here when we're chatting about things, head on over to Docs by Infinite Rabbit Hole.

53:19 That's for you. That's for you. Yeah, that's it. That's it. So that's it. The first episode of The Cryptic Case Files. I left a ton out so it didn't turn into a gorilla documentary as I always already said. But if you liked this episode, please consider giving us a 5 star review. I have plenty of these on my list, but if you'd like me to add another, hit us up on our Infinite Rabbit Hole Facebook group. Thank you for listening, traveler, And we'll see you next time in the next fork of the Infinite Rabbit Hole. Bye, bye everybody. I would like to thank you once again for tuning into the Infinite Rabbit Hole podcast.

54:01 Please make sure to give us a follow and one of those beautiful five star ratings on your podcast player of choice. If you would like to join the conversation and stay up to date on all things infinite rabbit hole, head on over to Facebook and search for the Infinite Rabbit Hole Facebook group. You all know it's us when you see the logo. If you would like to help contribute to the cause, there are a few ways to do so. First, head on over to anchor dot FM forward slash infinite Rabbit hole and click on the subscribe button where for $5 a month you'll get access to all the old episodes that will never see the free spotlight ever again. It's horrible stuff, but if you're into that kind of thing and go check that.

54:44 Second, head on over to infiniterabbithole.com and click on the IRH Merch Shop tab and grab yourself a sweet Tshirt sticker or whatever else you see that you wouldn't mind owning. Until next time travelers, I'm Jeremy and I'll see you. But the next fork in the path of the infinite rabbit hole?

55:29 Reality for everyone else.