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SPC S2 E30 Richard Freeman - Cryptozoologist, Author, and Zoological Journalist
14 Plays7 days ago
Today I'm more than delighted to have with me Richard Freeman. Richard is from the UK. He's a cryptozoologist and author, a zoological journalist and web TV presenter
We started off with talking about the Sci-fi Show Dr Who, as we are both fans.
We then went on to discuss some of Richards expeditions, from looking for Giant Snakes in Thailand, The Orang Pendek in Indonesia, to looking for the Di-Di in Guyana.
Richard then spoke about the Mongolian Death Worm, and the Dragons of England and Europe
Richard and i finished off with talking about the Yeti, and it being a flesh and blood animal.
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Transcript
Intro
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:12
Lee Hatfield
Hello everybody and welcome to the latest episode of SIPA Paranormal Chronicles. Today I'm more than delighted to have with me Richard Freeman. Richard is from the UK. He's a cryptozoologist and author, a zoological journalist and web TV presenter. Richard, thank you for joining me my friend. How are you doing?
00:00:32
Richard Freeman
Fine, thanks. Thanks for having me.
Weather Patterns and Comparisons
00:00:35
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, so I know we've been just been talking offline, but the UK's been having a little bit of a heatwave, and it's good to see that you're surviving.
00:00:44
Richard Freeman
Yes, we've had three days One after the other, which has broken broken the record, each one breaking the the the record for the hottest day ever recorded in Britain.
00:00:55
Richard Freeman
Last December, I was in northeast India looking for giant crocodiles in the mangrove swamps, and it wasn't as hot as it is in England.
00:01:06
Lee Hatfield
That is absolutely crazy. And you know damn well now that that's it. that that That is your summer done and dusted now. You're going to get unsettled weather between now and the rest of the year. You just know it's going to happen.
00:01:22
Richard Freeman
Well, we don't get snow like we used to. and When I was a kid, we'd have snow drifts like six foot up the front door. And we haven't seen that in years, which I can honestly say I don't miss because I hate snow.
00:01:37
Richard Freeman
But I remember even like 15 years ago, Christmas Day, the roses were blooming in granddad's front garden. And he said, this isn't right.
00:01:51
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, sure. I remember working in London i was as a paramedic. I started in London, then moved to Leicester. And we had one week where there was absolute tons of snow and London absolutely absolutely became gridlocked.
00:02:09
Lee Hatfield
So no matter where we went, if we were finishing the shift, starting the shift, going to get fuel or whatever, everywhere had to be on lights and sirens, otherwise we would not have gone through it. And I had to stay at a friend's house because the snow was that bad. I couldn't even get back to to where i was staying in Hitchin.
00:02:28
Lee Hatfield
which was ridiculous. But, yeah, we get over here all the time, and it's like, it's second nature now. It's like, oh, yeah, it's snowing. Okay, no biggie, and we'll just go carry on our normal day.
00:02:40
Richard Freeman
It swings now from floods, massive floods every year. I remember the first one I saw was the year 2000. I'd just come back from Thailand looking for giant snakes in Thailand.
00:02:55
Richard Freeman
And I was going up to Newcastle to do a talk and it took me as long to get to Newcastle as it did to get to Thailand. And on the way back, it took twice as long because we had to go around Wales because of all of the floods.
00:03:07
Richard Freeman
So it's it's either drought in summer or floods in winter. And it's the two extremes now.
00:03:16
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, that's crazy.
Critique of Modern Doctor Who
00:03:17
Lee Hatfield
But one of the things I'm also excited to talk to you about is you're a little bit of a Doctor Who fan.
00:03:25
Richard Freeman
I am a massive fan of classic Doctor Who.
00:03:29
Richard Freeman
If you ask me what my religion was, it would be classic Doctor Who. only the I like the first five Doctors, up to and including Peter Davison.
00:03:42
Richard Freeman
My favourite is John Pertwee with Tom Baker, a close second. The new stuff, when it came back, a triumph of... style over substance. it had some good actors. I like Peter Capaldi, who reminds me a lot of John Pertwee, but they were just not given the the scripts to work with. When it got it right with with stuff like Blink, it could knock it out of the the stadium, but mostly it was show over substance.
00:04:14
Richard Freeman
Then they cast Jodie Whittaker just to tick woke boxes.
00:04:15
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:04:20
Richard Freeman
and myself and 60% of the viewers turned off. Instead of course correcting, they said, oh, you're all bigots, you're all ists and phobes and netbeards.
00:04:33
Richard Freeman
We're going to show you the first doctor wasn't William Hartnell. It was a little girl. So even more people switched off when they did the Timeless Child rubbish. And then they said, oh, right, right. you You bigots will teach you a lesson. Now the doctor is going to be gay.
00:04:50
Richard Freeman
And The tiny few that were hanging on switched off and now it got canceled. And those are the wages of woke. We've seen it time and time again with, not just with Doctor Who, we've seen it with the Witcher, we've seen it with Star Wars, we've seen it with Star Trek, the new animated Batman series, the Caped Crusader, the gender swap, the Penguin and the Mad Hatter.
00:05:15
Richard Freeman
but Nobody likes it. no This is done. just to satisfy those wokeerati that have crawled into places of power.
00:05:27
Richard Freeman
And they don't give a damn about not making money. They don't give a damn about not pleasing the fans. All they give a damn about is preaching their ridiculous, pathetic message. And I'm a card carrying lefty.
00:05:41
Richard Freeman
But I think wokeness, as what it means today, not it what it meant originally, but what it means today, is a goddamn cancer. And it's like a scatological version of King Midas. Everything it touches turns to shit.
00:05:55
Richard Freeman
But the real Doctor Who, particularly the peak in the 70s with John Pertwee and Tom Baker, that was fantastic.
00:06:02
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:06:02
Richard Freeman
That was inspirational to me because it was more about horror than it was about science fiction. You've got the giant maggots crawling the slag heaps in Wales. You've got the sea devils rising up from the ocean to destroy mankind.
00:06:17
Richard Freeman
you've You've got the autons that can possess anything plastic and turn it into a killer. And then they manifest as the great Lovecraftian tentacle creature. This is it is Lovecraft meets quite a mess. And it was Doctor Who at its finest. And that, along with...
00:06:33
Richard Freeman
David Attenborough, are things like the world of outers and fabulous animals and life on earth. That's what bought got me interested in mysterious creatures. When I left school i was a zookeeper for many years. I worked at Twycross Zoo where they had the the PG Tips chimps. If there are any Brits listening to this they'll remember the PG Chip chimps peggy tips chimps from the adverts. I ran the reptile house there for a number of years then I got involved with an organisation called the Centre for 14 Zoology, the biggest mystery animal investigation group in the world. So I moved down to Devon where they were based. And since then I've been all over the world to every corner of the globe on the track of all kinds of bizarre creatures.
00:07:21
Lee Hatfield
That's pretty cool story. And yeah just for the record, John Pertwee was my first Doctor as well. But I've also been extremely lucky because I'm involved with Comic-Con over here.
00:07:35
Lee Hatfield
So quite a few of the new ones up to Peter cal Capaldi. I've met them all. And I did actually find out that Karen Gillan, who played Amy Pond, I'm actually related to by marriage.
00:07:49
Richard Freeman
right.
00:07:50
Lee Hatfield
It's like I did admit did my ancestry and I actually asked her at one of the conventions and she went, yeah, that person's my grandfather.
00:07:57
Lee Hatfield
And the grandfather's sister was married to my uncle. So it's a a very small world.
Thailand Expedition for Nagas
00:08:05
Lee Hatfield
But the reason why we are here is due to your cryptozoology antics that you've been up to. You've mentioned it a little bit already and you've mentioned how you got into it starting off at the reptile house at the zoo.
00:08:20
Lee Hatfield
So let's go into some of your expeditions. What was the first one that you actually went out on and went investigated?
00:08:29
Richard Freeman
The first way I did was to Thailand, to the jungles, rivers and caves of Thailand, looking for these giant snakes called Nagas in Thai and Indo-Chinese mythology.
00:08:43
Richard Freeman
Nagas are gigantic snakes with a fin or a crest on the head, much bigger than anything known to science. Despite being thought of as purely legendary, people still report seeing these gigantic snakes. I talked to a the head of the river police on the Mekong River and he said he saw this immense snake. At first he thought it was debris in the water and then he realized it was swinging against the flow of the water and it was gigantic snake 60 feet long and I talked to another old man who had been
00:09:19
Richard Freeman
exploring some caves. He discovered this network of caves in the jungle and he took us to these caves and we were the first Westerners ever to go down them. And he took us down this network of caves and this this old guy, he reminded me a bit of Albert Steptoe.
00:09:33
Richard Freeman
And I thought, we're all going through by candlelight and we were like miles under the ground in these claustrophobic caves. And I thought, God, if this old guy pegs it now, we're never getting out because no one knows we're here and we can't find a way back out. But he had been exploring he came to an underground river and he saw one of these things swimming through the river and he said it was black with a greenish sheen to it and it was like 50-60 feet long as it thick as around as a barrel.
00:10:01
Richard Freeman
But that was the first one I did.
00:10:05
Lee Hatfield
What was your experiences like you knowing that you're looking for this giant snake yeah and also being in Thailand?
00:10:13
Richard Freeman
it was fantastic. It was my first time in Asia. I've visited Asia many times since and i absolutely loved it. Another witness was an abbot of a monastery.
00:10:25
Richard Freeman
There was a ruined temple and they were trying to repair the temple. And they said every time the workmen went down into the cellar, there was this monstrous black snake down there that terrified them. So the monks all prayed and the snakes left.
00:10:44
Lee Hatfield
That's crazy. And it's it's interesting that you that you say about it, that the the monks were doing the praying, because yeah if these things are flesh and blood creatures, they're not going to be of a a spiritual, like, what's the word I'm looking for?
00:11:05
Lee Hatfield
Like, building, if you like.
00:11:07
Richard Freeman
They're not affected by prayer.
00:11:09
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's what that's what I was getting at. I completely lost my words. are Yeah, but so the fact that they prayed and got rid of the snakes. Yeah, you could you could say if you have a rational mind that that was purely coincidental. So what's your thoughts on that?
00:11:25
Richard Freeman
In this case, I think it was purely coincidental. A lot of animals have magical attributes. or fantastical attributes put on them.
00:11:37
Richard Freeman
But the natives in Central Africa used to think that gorillas tore the branches from trees and used them to fight elephants. And they'd carry off native girls and rape them and stuff. They don't do any of these things.
00:11:51
Richard Freeman
It's all nonsense.
00:11:51
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:11:52
Richard Freeman
And there's a snake in the Sudan called a sand boa. It's a small harmless snake. It's a constrictor. It feeds mainly on rodents. It's a couple of feet long.
00:12:04
Richard Freeman
But they call it the apris and they believe it's so venomous that it doesn't even have to bite you. Even if it touches you, you'll die. A bit like the the salamander in medieval Europe.
00:12:17
Richard Freeman
But of course it it doesn't. But sometimes these legendary attributes turned out have a basis in fact. There's a type of huge tree frog called the giant monkey tree frog in South America.
00:12:31
Richard Freeman
And the natives said it had the power to stop hunger and thirst and it made you invisible in the jungle. And when biochemists looked at its secretions, they found that that it negated feelings of hunger hunger and thirst and it masked your scent so effectively making you invisible in the jungle.
00:12:54
Lee Hatfield
Wow. And that's not the one that a some of the tribesmen rub their arrow blades on.
00:13:01
Richard Freeman
No, no, they're the poison dart frogs. that they They're different.
00:13:03
Lee Hatfield
Right.
00:13:04
Richard Freeman
There's another animal called the hero shrew and it comes from the jungles of Central Africa. It's a tiny little shrew.
00:13:13
Richard Freeman
The local people, they're the warriors, put its pelt on their belt because they believe it gives them strength. They say it's so strong it can support the weight of a man on its spine and it can. Nobody knows why because there are other species of shrew in the same area that don't have that power.
00:13:29
Richard Freeman
but it's got like a a network of bony struts that strengthen the spine. And nobody knows why that this one species of shrew has it and others don't.
00:13:42
Lee Hatfield
What? That, you know, because like shrews are kind of like, yeah, not very big at all. So the fact that they can, yeah, and look at the fact that they carry of the weight of a man, that's absolutely bonkers.
00:13:49
Richard Freeman
No, it's like a mouse. Yeah.
00:13:57
Lee Hatfield
That's good. So moving on from Thailand after searching for giant crested snakes, if correct me if I'm wrong, but Indonesia was your next location.
Search for the Orang Pendek in Sumatra
00:14:10
Richard Freeman
Yes, for the Orang Pendek, and this is the creature I've searched for the most. I've been back to the Indonesian island of Sumatra six times now to look for the Orang Pendek.
00:14:22
Richard Freeman
Its name in Malay means the short man, and it is supposed to be a upright walking primate, three to five feet tall. So it's not massive like the Yeti.
00:14:36
Richard Freeman
covered in hair, walking erect like a man with a very human looking face. It lives in the jungles of Sumatra and it's been reported ever since the first Dutch settlers went to the island. and The natives said it's always been in the in the forest. and I went there you know six times and I found its footprints and its hand prints which are different from any he's different from the orangutan.
00:15:04
Richard Freeman
and The footprints are different from any other ape. i've I've seen ape footprints in all kinds of mediums. This is different. It has much broader heel for weight bearing because it it walks erect. on The hand prints are different to an orangutan. They are more like a small gorilla with a much larger thumb. and and It lacks the elongate fingers of of the orangutan.
00:15:27
Richard Freeman
I've heard the creature calling. on numerous occasions. It makes a number of calls, and one of them, bizarrely, it sounds like the laugh of Skeletor. Do you remember a camp and rather preachy cartoon called He-Man and the Masters of the Universe?
00:15:44
Lee Hatfield
yeah yeah yeah yeah
00:15:45
Richard Freeman
Do remember Skeletor had this high-pitched laugh, the villain? Well, the the orang pendek makes a noise like skeleton's lap. It's really bizarre.
00:15:56
Richard Freeman
And we brought back hair that was found near one of these footprints, and it was examined by a man called Lars Thomas, who is a Danish biologist, and he's one of the world's leading experts in animal hair. They couldn't get DNA off it. The only DNA they got were of the native guides who picked it up with their hands, unfortunately. wouldn't They should have picked it up with tweezers but they picked up their hands.
00:16:21
Richard Freeman
But the scale arrangement on it and the structure of it was different to any other primate. And he said it's a primate. It's related to the Sumatran orangutan but it's not the Sumatran orangutan.
00:16:37
Richard Freeman
So can only conclude there's a larger known species of primate in Sumatra. Now on Sumatra there's the Sumatran orangutan in the north and then there's the Tapanuli orangutan which lives in central Sumatra that was only identified in 2017
00:16:57
Richard Freeman
And then we've got this, which seems to be a new ground dwelling species of orangutan. That's what i think orangutan is. And I've spoke to so many witnesses.
00:17:08
Richard Freeman
though One of the times I was there, we yeah we got together about two dozen witnesses who'd all either seen the footprints or seen the animal. And they were all describing this same creature.
00:17:21
Richard Freeman
A short barrel chested, long armed ape walking a wreck. not a gibbon.
00:17:27
Richard Freeman
And oh it's amongst most likely all
00:17:35
Richard Freeman
of all the cryptids and I've been close to it twice. I mean, I've heard it calling from yards away. And the last time I was there, I heard one calling from behind a stand of bamboo and a colleague of mine went round to the other side to try and scare it back to me where I was hiding with the camera.
00:17:54
Richard Freeman
And it took off at an angle and just caught a glimpse of something rushing off into the jungle. But we've been coming so close to finding the Arang Pendek.
00:17:59
Lee Hatfield
Wow. Yeah.
00:18:03
Richard Freeman
There's a guy called Adam Thorne, who's an Aussie bloke, a really good researcher. He's just come back from Sumatra and he got on camera track what might be the arm of an orang pendek.
00:18:15
Richard Freeman
And he's waiting for all the eDNA samples that he's having analysed. He's waiting for them to come back. So it's it's very likely that it's a new species of eight.
00:18:28
Lee Hatfield
So why is this one so close to your heart, the fact that you've been back to Sumatra on numerous occasions?
00:18:38
Richard Freeman
because we've come so close to finding it and it's so likely to exist. You wouldn't get me spending reams of money going after the chupacabra because I think it's essentially a media creation. I don't think there's anything to it. It's a media creation and a, yeah you know, like a,
00:18:58
Richard Freeman
you know, urban legend. I don't think there's a real animal at the bottom of it. So you wouldn't get me wasting my money looking for something like the orang pendek. Sorry, sorry.
00:19:09
Richard Freeman
You wouldn't get me wasting my money looking for something like the chupacabra, but I would look for something like the orang pendek because it's very likely to exist. And you've you've got a fighting chance of finding it. I've come close to seeing it twice.
00:19:22
Lee Hatfield
And that is so-called the fact that you might be on the verge of discovering a new species because, yeah.
00:19:31
Richard Freeman
There's a friend called Dave Archer and he came on one of our expeditions and first expedition he ever did, first day in the jungle, he saw the orang pen neck.
00:19:44
Richard Freeman
He said it was squatting in a tree and it had thick, dark fur, a bit like a mountain gorilla. a very human looking face and it realised it had been seen and you could see it looked frightened. Its eyes were darting about and it climbed down out of the tree and walked away on two legs.
00:20:03
Lee Hatfield
Wow. Now, we've been over the border into the US. And when you get asked by the border guards, why you there? And we're going, oh, we're going to investigate this haunted location.
00:20:16
Lee Hatfield
You're going to do what? We're going to investigate this haunted location. And they kind of look at you like you've got two heads. So what kind of response do you get when you turn up at all these locations and go, yeah, I'm here to investigate a giant crested snake or a yeah bipedal ape-type creature that we haven't discovered yet? What what kind of response
Debating the Existence of Cryptids
00:20:40
Lee Hatfield
do you get?
00:20:41
Richard Freeman
Well, most of the people have heard of it and believe it. And some of them have even seen it or know people that have seen it. One of the things we've been looking for recently is the Caspian tiger, which is a subspecies of tiger that was supposed to have been hunted into extinction in the 1960s from Central Asia.
00:21:02
Richard Freeman
And three times we've been to Tajikistan looking for it. And everyone we spoke to had either seen one or knew someone had seen one. And we talked to a park ranger that had seen one just a month before we were there.
00:21:17
Richard Freeman
We talked to hunters, honey farmers, imams, who'd all seen it. And some them had seen them with cubs, biology teacher who'd seen them.
00:21:32
Lee Hatfield
Oh, so yeah, I know that you've been to multiple locations and to talk about a few more in in a minute, but what would happen and let's use the around around pendek as an example.
00:21:49
Lee Hatfield
Currently, because you've yeah not had a clear glimpse of it, you've heard it, you've seen evidence of it, it's still classed as a cryptid, but once it gets discovered and we got the name for it, the orang pendek, surely then it does it's no longer classed in the cryptid category. would that Would that be kind of correct?
00:22:14
Richard Freeman
Yes, yes, it would become accepted by mainstream science. And a lot of mainstream scientists feel that the orang pendek is a real creature. This has happened before with animals that were thought to be completely mythological. The Komodo dragon, the mountain gorilla, the giant squid.
00:22:35
Richard Freeman
Well, in France in the 18th century, there was a biologist who specialised in mollusks and he was called Pierre Denis de Montfort he wrote lots of books on mollusks and he worked with the botanical gardens and the Natural History Museum and he went as far afield as Egypt collecting specimens and he got talking to whalers from Nantucket who had come to Paris to live in Paris and they told him about sucker marks found on sperm whales, huge sucker marks
00:23:08
Richard Freeman
how dying sperm whales it vomit up huge tentacles. He realised that there was a giant squid bigger than anything known to science. and This was probably where the legend of the the Norse legend of the Kraken comes from. so He wrote a book about giant squid and giant octopus.
00:23:25
Richard Freeman
and Then he became a scientific pariah. He lost his job. No one would employ him. He was reduced to selling seashells and he ended up dying of starvation in a Parisian gutter in 1820. In the 1850s he was proved correct when the first giant squid was actually captured.
00:23:45
Richard Freeman
But he's been not only was he ostracised by mainstream science, he's been largely forgotten as well.
00:23:45
Lee Hatfield
Well,
00:23:52
Richard Freeman
I think he needs to be rehabilitated.
00:23:53
Lee Hatfield
and it's.
00:23:55
Richard Freeman
I call him the prophet of the craker.
00:23:57
Lee Hatfield
That's yeah, and that that also kind of brings me to the point that yet when we were kids, It doesn't matter if you saw cryptid, UFO, a ghost or whatever. You was either ridiculed or you were told to sit down, be quiet, shut up kind of thing.
00:24:17
Lee Hatfield
Whereas nowadays, there's more of it in the mainstream. People are seeing more evidence. ye They're hearing more things. They're seeing yeah UFOs or they're seeing spirits or whatever. And it's kind of becoming...
00:24:34
Lee Hatfield
normal conversation for people to talk about on a regular basis.
00:24:39
Richard Freeman
Yes, yes, yes it is. Well, you did get things that were reported. Do you remember Nationwide?
00:24:45
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:24:46
Richard Freeman
Nationwide. It's time to go Nationwide. They covered the Hex and Werewolf scare. Do you remember that?
00:24:58
Lee Hatfield
I do actually. Yeah, yeah, that's that's a blast from the past year.
00:25:01
Richard Freeman
They've just found the footage again. the footage again for it that they they had lost. and This is a supposedly a yeah a couple of stone heads dug up in a garden in Hexham that brought with them not only a poltergeist outbreak, but this sort of phantom wolfman that was seen by the family, the neighbours, and then Dr. Anne Ross, who's an expert in Celtic Britain, who thought these heads were made by the ancient Celt, she took them to her house. And then she saw the thing and so did her daughter.
00:25:35
Richard Freeman
But they've been lost now.
00:25:36
Lee Hatfield
Wow.
00:25:36
Richard Freeman
Nobody knows where the Hexham heads are. But I remember being five years old and watching that on Nationwide and thinking it was fantastic that a news programme was covering werewolves. Now, a mate of mine who's who's older than me, he was 10 at the time, and it scared him so much. He lives down near London, on the outskirts of London.
00:25:58
Richard Freeman
He thought that the werewolf was coming all the way from Hexham specifically to kill him. So eight he reasoned that the way to escape it was put all his teddies and cuddly toys around him at night.
00:26:14
Richard Freeman
When the werewolf burst into his room, while it was tearing them to shreds, he'd escape while it was ripping the teddies apart. And he used to cuddle this big teddy that was as big as him at night, frightened of this werewolf, and ended up losing his virginity to this teddy.
00:26:35
Lee Hatfield
OK, then.
00:26:38
Lee Hatfield
I don't what to say to that.
00:26:38
Richard Freeman
So my friend lost his affinity to a giant teddy bear thanks to the Hexham werewolf and Nationwide.
00:26:47
Lee Hatfield
Well, that's that's a definite claim to fame that I don't think anybody would be proud of, really.
00:26:54
Lee Hatfield
So moving on, yeah this side of the pond, we have the Sasquatch, we have the Yeti, but you went to Guyana to look for the dye dye.
00:27:07
Richard Freeman
Yes, well we were mainly looking for the giant anaconda. But we also heard stories about the Didai, which is a sort of hairy wild man from the mountains.
00:27:20
Richard Freeman
And we didn't find anybody that seen it directly. We just heard second hand stories about it. And there was one story we stopped in a year a native village.
00:27:32
Richard Freeman
And they said that a few years ago, the next village along, which was about 15 miles away. A boy and a girl were walking home from school when one of these things stepped out of a stand of trees, grabbed the girl, pulled her into the trees she was never seen again.
00:27:50
Richard Freeman
And there was never an official investigation because the native people in Guyana are very much third class citizens in their own country. country
00:28:01
Lee Hatfield
So yeah technically, it could have been yeah a homeless person, for example. Yeah.
00:28:07
Richard Freeman
But they said it was a huge ape-like creature covered in hair.
00:28:08
Lee Hatfield
but
00:28:11
Lee Hatfield
yeah
00:28:12
Richard Freeman
But we heard, unfortunately we when when we went, there was a drought and it was the worst drought that anyone could remember. Even the native people said that we'd never known it.
00:28:24
Richard Freeman
Like i see it was hotter than it has been here. It's the hottest I've ever been anywhere. And we were collapsing with you know fatigue from the heat It was unbelievable because we were in the jungle. We were on the grasslands, the savannah, and we saw the tracks of anaconda and we heard accounts of massive anacondas, but we didn't see any.
00:28:46
Richard Freeman
But everywhere we went, people were saying they'd seen these red faced pygmies. Our guide had seen one, Damon Corrie, who's a chief of the Eagle Clan, Arawak people.
00:29:03
Richard Freeman
And we met so many people that say that there's a race of little hairy pygmies about three feet tall and they paint their faces red and everyone's seen them and reported them.
00:29:14
Lee Hatfield
Wow. And it's yeah it's great to hear these stories because yeah in the modern world, we kind of yeah you can go into the woods, you can hear noises that you know are not animals.
00:29:28
Lee Hatfield
You can look into the sky. You can see yeah light anomalies that may or may not be a UFO. But then you go to some of these countries that are not as modernised, shall we say, and you get all these stories that yeah of pygmies and of yeti-like hominids and that kind of thing.
00:29:51
Lee Hatfield
And it's it's absolutely fascinating that you can pull these stories from countries yeah and bring them into the modern world so people learn about them.
00:30:04
Richard Freeman
yeah yeah I'd like to go back to Guyana to look for the giant anaconda but I wouldn't go at the height of the the dry season a again it's blisteringly hot.
00:30:15
Richard Freeman
Certainly not on the savannah, maybe in the jungle where there's shade. Giant snakes are one of these things that been reported from a number of places. I mean, all over South America, tropical South America, there have consistent reports of giant anacondas for the past 200 years, more than that. And in Africa too.
00:30:36
Richard Freeman
And one of the best photographs of a cryptid was taken in 1959 by a charter pilot called Remy van Laide. And he was a...
00:30:49
Richard Freeman
fighter pilot in World War II and he had been captured by the Nazis and put in a concentration camp in Spain. He escaped and got to Britain on foot, joined the i the r RAF and went straight back into war again.
00:31:03
Richard Freeman
After the war he was a charter pilot in what was then the Belgian Congo and he was flying over an area of the Congo near Katanga.
00:31:15
Richard Freeman
and he came across a clearing and as they passed the clearing he saw a massive snake come out of a hole in the ground and he said it was green with a pale underbelly and he said it was about 50 feet long and as they went over it reared up and his head was about two feet wide and three feet long and it reared up ten feet on They made three passes so that one of the other guys could photograph it.
00:31:47
Richard Freeman
There was a photograph of this immense snake on the ground. He reckoned they were about 40 meters up and this snake was about 15 meters long. fifty feet but recently Using Google Earth, they this clearing and it's got the same rock formations.
00:32:09
Richard Freeman
And they've worked out that if Van Lide was correct, saying they're about 40 meters up, and this snake would have been as big as he said it was, about 50 foot.
00:32:20
Richard Freeman
So that's quite big enough to constrict a horse or a cow as well as it holds.
00:32:27
Lee Hatfield
So what, okay, yeah, we know that there's big boa constrictors and there's other big snakes that are yeah that we have been identified. So what point would you start using the term giant compared to normal sizes of some of the big snakes that we have?
00:32:49
Richard Freeman
anything over 30 feet.
00:32:53
Richard Freeman
Yeah,
00:32:55
Lee Hatfield
Okay. So yeah, so like the fact that he said it was 50, that was, yeah, that it was have aver as like a light snap for breakfast and then move on to somewhat bigger.
00:33:05
Richard Freeman
yeah there's another there's a guy, an Italian guy, Gatti, whose name was I think his name was something like
00:33:06
Lee Hatfield
Wow.
00:33:13
Richard Freeman
a tilo gatte but He was an an Italian explorer who took about 8 expeditions into Africa. He was the first person to capture a carpets for zoos.
00:33:24
Richard Freeman
He claims to have shot a python that attacked him in a cave in Africa. He measured it at 37 feet. So that's another monster snake.
00:33:35
Lee Hatfield
And the thing is, though, this yeah people say that, yeah, we're going to go to Mars and it's yeah it's a place that people have never been to and it's going to be investigated.
00:33:47
Lee Hatfield
But there's so many different places on Earth that no one's ever investigated. So how do we know what kind of creatures are living there? And it's the same with the seas.
00:34:00
Lee Hatfield
yeah We've only investigated like 30%.
00:34:03
Richard Freeman
We have a false notion that the world has all been mapped and explored. And it hasn't even in the age of satellite photography because you can't see through jungle canopies and you can't see to the bottom of the ocean.
00:34:17
Richard Freeman
And there's large swathes of Africa, so Central Africa, tropical Asia, South America that have not been fully mapped.
00:34:28
Richard Freeman
Even Tasmania. I've been to Tasmania three times looking for the Tasmanian wolf, the dog-like, flesh-eating marsupial. And even parts of that haven't been properly mapped.
00:34:39
Richard Freeman
And that's about the size of Ireland.
Evidence of the Tasmanian Wolf
00:34:41
Richard Freeman
But less than less than half a million people live there. and they're mainly in Hobart and Launceston.
00:34:54
Richard Freeman
Their towns are like villages and their villages are like hamlets. then when you get to the west of the island, there's just massive of wilderness. i've I've been there three times. I've spoken to so many people that have seen the Tasmanian Wharf. I spoke to an old guy who passed away now, but in the 70s he used to work for a hydroelectric scheme and he was driving to work with five other people.
00:35:17
Richard Freeman
And you they said they saw one in the middle of the road and they stopped and looked at it. And there was no ambiguity about what it was. They all had it in view, plain view, very closely.
00:35:28
Richard Freeman
I talked to another man who is employed by the government to shoot feral cats because okay domestic cats are a bloody menace when they get anywhere they get out and breed and they kill all the birds and small mammals and he goes out shooting them and he goes right into the wilderness he'd seen the Tasmanian wolf twice another guy we spoke to ran an arboretum where they keep trees and and he said he'd seen one with his wife and it was running along the side of the road trying to get under a
00:36:03
Richard Freeman
He said there was a car full of people behind it that had seen it as well. They've got a very distinctive smell and a very distinctive bark.
00:36:15
Richard Freeman
They've got a high pitched spasmodic yap yap yap yap. I talked to a park ranger and he said yeah I've heard that. i've heard that not seen it but I've heard that yeah many times. and One time i was in a remote place in the outback in the in the forest and I got this distinctive smell very similar to a hyena. All the old bushman who were there in the days when we know it was about they said it smelled like a hyena because most of them had been in Africa.
00:36:51
Richard Freeman
in the Boer War and they knew what hyenas smelled like. And they said that the Tasmanian wolves smelled like hyena. and One of the other names for it was the hyena. there's a place called Hyena Hill that's named after them. They're not related at all to hyenas or to wolves or to tigers. They're related to the Tasmanian devil and other flesh eating marsupials.
00:37:12
Richard Freeman
But I got this very distinct hyena like smell as if this thing had just crossed the path about five minutes before.
00:37:21
Richard Freeman
I'm pretty sure it's still out there and I want to go back and deep into the Frank and Gordon wilderness to look for it. And I think it's probably still around in New Guinea as well because we have the fossils from New Guinea and New Guinea is one of the most explored places in the world.
00:37:22
Lee Hatfield
it's
00:37:39
Richard Freeman
And the hill tribes in New Guinea talk about this animal that they call the dobsonga, which they say looks like a dog. It has stripes down its back.
00:37:51
Richard Freeman
and a stiff tail like a kangaroo, and its jaws open very wide, and it comes down to kill livestock. And they say, you'll only find it when there's plenty of prey species around. If there's not many prey species, it won't be there.
00:38:04
Richard Freeman
But it goes wherever the prey is, and it will kill livestock. And they don't hunt it because it's taboo. And that's a perfect description of the Tasmanian wolf.
00:38:13
Lee Hatfield
Wow. And i yeah you've been to so many fascinating places that yeah half the people can't even imagine to go in a lifetime. So out of all the places that you've been to, and yet we've we've touched on a fair few, we've not touched on all of them.
00:38:34
Lee Hatfield
And you can't have Sumatra because you've been there six times already, but Is there one kind of place where you where you could go, okay, I've decided to leave England. I want to go somewhere where I can investigate a particular creature for the rest of my life.
00:38:52
Lee Hatfield
Where would you go to?
00:38:53
Richard Freeman
Well, my favourite place I've been to, I think, is Mongolia. Because it's, I mean, i wouldn't want to live there, but it's it's so remote and so alien. It's like stepping out onto another world.
00:39:07
Richard Freeman
The landscape is so bizarre and so different. Parts of it are sort red and rocky, like the surface of Mars. Other places have chips of mica that make it look like.
00:39:19
Richard Freeman
a mirror. Other places, tiny little bits of gravel look like cat litter stretching off into infinity. and You'll see mirages made by heat haze that look like minarets or lakes. or stuff and and We had our camp completely destroyed by a a tornado, what rather a whirlwind in in the desert that started out as a little dust devil and got bigger and bigger and closer and closer. and then It was on the camp and it wrecked our camp and I was clinging to the side of the van like Dorothy in The Wizard of ourse looking up into the eye of the storm and seeing one of our drivers being whipped round and round and round 15 feet in the air holding the shredded remains of one of our tents.
Hunt for the Mongolian Death Worm
00:40:04
Richard Freeman
But we were looking for something called the Mongolian death worm. And this is, the locals call it Alroi Hoi Hoi, which means the intestine worm. And it's supposed to be sausage
00:40:18
Richard Freeman
or draft excluders shaped creature that comes up after rainfall in the remote goby. And Roy Chapman Andrews, the paleontologist first heard about it in the 1920s. And there've been a number of expeditions for looking for it.
00:40:33
Richard Freeman
But we went across a thousand miles of the Gobi Desert and we talked to about two dozen witnesses who were all describing the same creature.
00:40:43
Richard Freeman
And there was one old man that seen it when he was a boy in the 30s when he was out tending his family's camels and goats. And he went back and told his mum and dad and they rarried up the animals, packed up their gyr, which is the circular animal hide tents they use and they moved out the area they were so scared. A death worm sighting can throw a whole community into a panic.
00:41:07
Richard Freeman
They say it's supposed to spit a corrosive yellow saliva that acts like acid. And some people say that it I think it can generate electricity like an electric eon and kill animals as large as camels with a blast of this electricity. But all the people I spoke to said that the electricity, they call it throwing lightning, they say that that is a fallacy it doesn't do that. It's just a piece of folklore. But they did believe it was venomous and good spit and they were terrified of it.
00:41:40
Richard Freeman
We talked to one retired army colonel in an army base near the borders of China and he said he'd been out
00:41:48
Richard Freeman
patrolling in the early 70s and he saw what he thought was a section of tyre in the desert and he got closer and he realised it was the death worm and that sort brick red salami shaped scaly thing lying in the sun and he said it had dew on its back and the rising sun was sparkling on the dew and said that's where I think the electricity comes from the idea that it's got this electrical power that everyone's terrified of them, absolutely petrified of them.
00:42:19
Richard Freeman
One person, they saw one come out of a hole in the desert and grab a mouse and eat a mouse.
00:42:19
Lee Hatfield
That's
00:42:24
Richard Freeman
I think it's some sort of reptile. There are a group of burrowing reptiles called worm lizards. and They're not snakes and they're not lizards, they're in a little group of their own. The worm lizards are Amphysbane. I think it's a very large worm lizard that's undiscovered by science.
00:42:42
Richard Freeman
Or very large sand boa that's undiscovered by science. But whatever it is, it's completely unknown to science. But in the same area, we had contemporary reports of dragons.
00:42:55
Richard Freeman
there's There's a story about that associated with water and rainfall. They thought they they come down in clouds in the mountains and they make the rainfall and they can live in wells as well. And we heard of one story and several different people told this story.
00:43:12
Richard Freeman
They said there was supposed to be this dragon in a well. And an old man saw it rising up into the sky out of this well. And because this was in the communist period,
00:43:24
Richard Freeman
Local government officials took that as a religious story because they closed down all the temples as well. They cracked down on religion. So they poured oil down the well and locked the well to teach the people a lesson.
00:43:37
Richard Freeman
And so the story goes within two weeks, two of these men were dead and the other one was struck impotent and could never have children. And we heard now that sounds, you know could be a modern day piece of folklore, but I heard a story about a doctor that saw one of these things. Now the equivalent of a county in Mongolia is called a Sum. because Mongolia is so massive it's the size of Western Europe. The Sum can be the size of a small country and there are traveling doctors that go to the Sum centers which are the capital of each Sum, the largest conurbation within each Sum.
00:44:13
Richard Freeman
and
00:44:15
Richard Freeman
We were told by the mayor of one of these sun centres that a couple of years ago, doctor had been in this area and he'd gone to raise water out of a well and he said he saw something coiled up in the well that had a head like a horse or a camel with horns and a great long serpentine green body.
00:44:39
Lee Hatfield
Wow, that's crazy. and i always on.
00:44:43
Richard Freeman
What
00:44:45
Richard Freeman
Modern day sightings of dragons are much more common than you'd think. Not just in Asia. You get them from all over Asia, but you get them all over the world. Last year, I investigated a case from Waverley Abbey in Surrey, of all places, of a group of 10 people that gone out ghost hunting one night.
00:44:45
Lee Hatfield
Sorry.
00:45:09
Richard Freeman
And I've interviewed five of this 10 and they're all sane. And not one of them tried to exaggerate. What happened was there was a Polish lady there called Dora.
00:45:22
Richard Freeman
And she was looking out over these woods that are about a quarter of a mile, maybe if that from. ruins of Waverley Abbey and she said she saw an immense animal with bat-like wings 10 meters across flying above this wood and she would she judged the wingspan against the tree and said it was about 10 meters and it's it it circled above the the woods and then banked down into the woods.
00:45:52
Richard Freeman
And then immediately after that, she was the only one of the 10 that saw that, maybe after that, two smaller creatures came flying out of the woods on the other side of the of the ruins of Waverley Abbey. And these were smaller. They had wingspans of about 10 foot.
00:46:09
Richard Freeman
But all 10 people saw these. One of them flew and landed on the abbey itself and folded up its wings and they said it had a long tail at the back with an arrowhead on it a long neck and an elongate head and another one flew into a yew tree and one of the other women in there a woman called Julia said she was terrified she had a feeling that this thing could just swoop down out of the tree and rip her to pieces if it wanted to and i mean At first I thought what they've seen is something like a heron flying around at night and they've not recognised you don't expect herons to be flying around at night.
00:46:48
Richard Freeman
But they said no, it didn't have feathers. The wings were like a bat. I mean this one guy called Luke said the wings were like a fruit bat, it's only much, much bigger.
00:46:59
Richard Freeman
They appeared to be black but if you got them in torchlight they were silver, the scales were silver. And then these things flew out on again towards where the bigger one had been seen.
00:47:10
Richard Freeman
I've interviewed these people about three times and none of them try and exaggerate. a There was no gnashing of teeth or spitting fire or anything like that. They just told you what they saw and they produced sketches as well.
00:47:23
Richard Freeman
And it wasn't any kind of bird. It wasn't a swan, a goose, a heron, an
00:47:27
Lee Hatfield
Wow. And it's, it's interesting that sorry, carry on.
00:47:29
Richard Freeman
There's a case from... Another case was from Iceland. The guy I mentioned earlier, Lars Thomas, who does our hair analysis for us, he was contacted in 2010 when the volcano went off in Iceland.
00:47:46
Richard Freeman
you know're gonna add
00:47:46
Lee Hatfield
Oh, yeah.
00:47:47
Richard Freeman
No one could fly across Europe for a week or so. The volcano was spitting out ash. I'm not even going try and pronounce the name of the volcano.
00:47:58
Richard Freeman
you know a brilliant
00:48:01
Lee Hatfield
Wow.
00:48:01
Richard Freeman
A guy contacted and said, I was looking. through binoculars at the column of ash coming out of the volcano. And I saw what I thought was a plane in the ash. And I thought a plane has flown into that column of ash it's going to crash.
00:48:18
Richard Freeman
And then he said, and then the plane started to beat its wings. And realized what I was looking at was a dragon that come up out of the volcano. And said, either I've gone mad or I've seen a dragon. 2007, Oconto Falls, Wisconsin, USA.
00:48:36
Richard Freeman
Group of teenagers had been to a concert and they were at a car park after the concert. And they saw a ball of orange and blue fire shoot across the sky.
00:48:49
Richard Freeman
They thought it was a meteor or something. but it's quite low down. And then another one came and they were wondering what the hell this was. And they all saw what they described as a white dragon. They said it had four legs, which it held up against its body, a long tail with an arrowhead at the end, these bat-like wings, a long neck and a wedge-shaped head, it flew twice across this car park.
Modern Dragon Sightings
00:49:12
Richard Freeman
And one of these youths went home and told his family, who didn't believe him, But later that night the thing turned up again and it flew over their house and the mother and sister saw it.
00:49:26
Richard Freeman
And they say it had two smaller ones with it, like the thing at Waverley Abbey. And they said it was the size of a plane. And this was investigated by Linda Godfrey.
00:49:37
Richard Freeman
You may have heard of Linda Godfrey. She's most famous for investigating the Beast of Bray Road. She wrote a number of books on modern day werewolf sightings. And she wrote this book about other monsters as well, called American Monsters. And she interviewed them.
00:49:51
Richard Freeman
Another case from South Africa in the 70s is actually from Namibia, where there's a tradition of something called the Flying Snake of Namibia. A French farmer rings up the police and tells them he'd heard one of his cows screaming, went to investigate and he said it was being bitten by this what looked like a huge yellow serpent with horns and wings and smoke coming out of its nostrils.
00:50:14
Lee Hatfield
Wow.
00:50:18
Richard Freeman
And he said, the only thing I could think to compare it with is a dragon. And he said it had a sm...
00:50:24
Lee Hatfield
wow
00:50:25
Richard Freeman
like burning tar. Years before, just after World War II, the son of a white farmer in Namibia said he was attacked by one of these things that flew down off a ridge and flew over his head and he passed out.
00:50:44
Richard Freeman
But he said it had a smell like burnt tar. And these are just a few.
00:50:48
Lee Hatfield
Wow.
00:50:48
Richard Freeman
This the tip of the iceberg. People are report seeing dragons or dragon-like creatures all over the world. And obviously these are not flesh and blood animals.
00:50:57
Lee Hatfield
Now, yeah.
00:50:58
Richard Freeman
They're something paranormal. But the dragon is found in every culture on earth.
00:51:01
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:51:03
Richard Freeman
Every single culture on earth. And the earliest representation of a dragon is from South Africa. These rock carvings from 75,000 years ago.
00:51:13
Richard Freeman
And it shows the bushman performing some sort of ritual or some sort what looks like a ritual or worship. And this great serpentine animal with its breath becoming water and rain.
00:51:28
Lee Hatfield
So let's let's put our logical heads on just for a second. And let's believe the fact that dragons don't exist just for a second.
00:51:41
Lee Hatfield
If that is the case, what do you think these people saw? Do you think it's like aquit yeah an animal that hasn't been confirmed yet? yeah Or is it something of a paranormal nature?
00:51:58
Lee Hatfield
Unknown cryptid what?
00:51:58
Richard Freeman
if these things were were real animals If these things were real animals, we'd have known about it by now. They'd have been killing people, turning up on radar, attacking planes.
00:52:12
Richard Freeman
But I think they're paranormal in nature and they're either interdimensional, which many other strange creatures might be, or they are some form of tulpa or thought form, a thought form created by the fossil memories in the collective subconscious of mankind that can take on tangible form for a time.
00:52:44
Richard Freeman
But whatever they are, they're paranormal. Well, if you talk about monsters, and paint with very broad strokes, they fall into two categories. They're the real cryptids, the flesh and blood animals, which may be unknown to science or clusters extinct, but they're still around, or ordinary animals that have grown to giant sizes, giant crocodiles, giant pythons, things like that.
00:53:08
Richard Freeman
And then you've got the weirder ones, like modern day sightings of dragons, modern day sightings of k trolls, modern day sightings of werewolves and fairies and things like that. And they, and the owl man, the Cornish owl man, and the moth man, and things like that, they are paranormal.
00:53:25
Richard Freeman
Those are not flesh and blood animals.
00:53:28
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, because when you talk to people, even about the likes of the Sasquatch and the Bigfoot, they do a lot of people do say this is an interdimensional creature.
00:53:40
Lee Hatfield
and And that kind of thought and idea is becoming more upfront that that's what it is rather than flesh and blood.
00:53:52
Richard Freeman
There's about 100 legends of dragons in the UK alone. And in some these legends, the thing just turns up, terrorises an area, eats people and livestock and then vanishes again as mysteriously as it came. And there's no hero that goes forth to battle it, no damsel in distress, no hoard of treasure. It just appears.
00:54:16
Richard Freeman
Terrorises an area and vanishes and it's written about in local records and things which sounds like something some of the mystery animals we see today which just appear and disappear.
00:54:27
Richard Freeman
Now with the Yeti, I think that's it's a flesh and blood animal.
00:54:28
Lee Hatfield
Yeah.
00:54:31
Richard Freeman
I've hunted the Yeti in Northern India. in the Garo Hills and they are seen in Meghalaya in India and up through Assam right the way to Bhutan in the Himalayas and throughout the Himalayas and Tibet. and The people I spoke to were mainly from the hill tribes in the Garo Hills and they described the Yeti as looking very like a gorilla with long black hair. The Yeti isn't white, it's black, brown or reddish, never white.
00:55:01
Richard Freeman
That's a total fallacy. Very like a giant upright gorilla, about three metres, ten feet tall. And I talked to one guy who said he saw one making a nest, similar to the way the gorillas make nests. And he watched it over three days make this nest.
00:55:18
Richard Freeman
And then later he went down to the nest and he found the remains of food in the nest where the thing had been eating another one had heard these stories and not believed it until he saw a female in a stand of bamboo and she was eating the bamboo and she was sitting down and even sitting down she was five feet tall and it was suckling a baby he only saw it from behind but he saw the baby suckling at her breast and but the mother was eating eating the bambbo and rich not eating the bamboo another guy
00:55:50
Richard Freeman
said he saw one and it made a kind of a a threat display. Similar to what gorillas do. shaking vegetation and roaring and he ran away.
00:56:02
Richard Freeman
And we found tracks, massive human-like tracks going along a jungle stream and they were stopping at boulders and these boulders had been tipped over and no human being have done that. would take 10 Jeff Capes to move it.
00:56:17
Richard Freeman
And it was to get at get it Freshwater crabs. They were eating these freshwater crabs. Another guy said that he had a family family of them, a male, a female and a youngster come onto the his plantation. He had what was it pineapples and they were ripping up the pineapples and eating them.
00:56:37
Lee Hatfield
That's crazy. So Richard, we are coming to the end, unfortunately, but some of these stories, i could listen to you all day because i some of them are absolutely fantastic. So do you have a another trip in mind?
Future Explorations and Publications
00:56:53
Lee Hatfield
And if so, what are you going to investigate and where you going?
00:56:57
Richard Freeman
We're going to Sweden in September to like Storjan to look for the Storjan monster, which may be a titanic eel or sturgeon.
00:57:10
Richard Freeman
We were going to go out to Flores to look for Homo floresiensis, which may still be living in the west of the, sorry, the east of the island, but all the trouble for the Middle East, thanks to Benjamin Netanyahu and his genocidal maniacs, they've sort of put me the kibosh on that for a bit.
00:57:34
Richard Freeman
So we're we're doing Sweden. Yeah.
00:57:37
Lee Hatfield
a little bit closer to home. So my friend, where if people want to read more about some of your expeditions and yeah stories, where can they find you?
00:57:48
Richard Freeman
Well, the Centre for 14 Zoology can be found at www.cfz.org.uk. I've written a number of books, including Adventures in Cryptozoology and In Search of Living Monsters.
00:58:06
Richard Freeman
But if you type type my name into Google, if you type my name into Amazon or Google, ebay you'll You'll see my books. I've written a number of books on my various expeditions. I didn't even know get a chance to tell you about the Russian Almasty, which I may have got very close to seeing.
00:58:28
Richard Freeman
The Russians took it so seriously in the time of the Soviet Union. They had the snowman commission to look for their wild man. on the the head of the Darwin Museum, Peter Smolin was one of the people in this commission, Marie-Jean Kaufman, who was a famous mountaineer and explorer, and Boris Proshnyev, who's a famous scientist. They all took it very, very seriously.
00:58:53
Richard Freeman
And spoke to lots of people in Russia, ordinary people have seen these things.
00:59:00
Richard Freeman
They'd come into farms and killed guard dogs with clubs and stole cheese. They'd hurled rocks at people. One guy had one in his garden and he left out bread for it and came and took the bread. And people couldn't understand why scientists from Britain had come all this way to some for something that they just accept. They think that that the Elmasti, the Russian wild man, is no more fantastical than a bear or a wolf.
00:59:27
Richard Freeman
And there was time we were we were staking out an old abandoned farmhouse. And we put bait out and camera traps. And these things, the people we spoke to, when they make a vocalisation, it's like the twittering of a bird.
00:59:42
Richard Freeman
And at about 10 o'clock at night, when it was dark, we heard a twittering and noise like a bird, when all the birds should have been asleep. And the camera traps went off. And we thought, God, is this the Elmas thing?
00:59:56
Richard Freeman
we were waiting till... about two o'clock in the morning at this old abandoned farmhouse. And we went inside to warm ourselves around a stove. And the door was slightly ajar. And this door was about seven foot tall, this door.
01:00:12
Richard Freeman
And there was moonlight starlight coming in. And from outside, there comes this deep guttural vocalization. Then something walks along the veranda outside, passes the door where we were.
01:00:25
Richard Freeman
Whatever it was was on two legs because it blocks out the starlight and the moonlight to a height of seven foot plus. and I said to my colleague Adam Davis, it's out there, it's on the veranda. We grab our cameras and wash out, but whatever it was, it disappeared into the night.
01:00:41
Richard Freeman
When we took looked at the camera traps in the morning, all we got was vegetation moving about. But some of the people that we were with, there was a Ukrainian biologist and Ukrainian archaeologist. This is before Putin's evil madness had kicked off.
01:01:01
Richard Freeman
And both of them had seen it. Both of them had seen this creature. date The archaeologist, Anatoli, had seen it around the very...
01:01:11
Richard Freeman
abandoned farmhouse we'd been staking out. Grey hair, seven feet tall, walking like a man. And the other guy, that the biologist, Gregory, a had been asleep in a barn. He'd staked out a barn where this thing was supposed to come in every night and entertain itself, playing with it.
01:01:30
Richard Freeman
the mane of an old mare that was tethered up in there and the farmer had told him about it It was a different farm, not the same one. And he said he'd put some food and drink and stuff out for and he'd waited for he fell asleep and he woke up and the food had all gone.
01:01:43
Richard Freeman
And he saw this creature in the moonlight and it come through window and it was there next to the mare and it was like smacking its lips and making this twittering noise and playing with the mane of the mare, plaiting it and it had long grey hair He didn't see the face, and he only saw it from the back. and he said he thought it was a young one.
01:02:03
Richard Freeman
It was about as big as a man, but very much more muscular. And then suddenly it leapt up into the rafters and went through the window. was no glass in the window, it was one shutters. and vanish But he was like 10 foot away from it, hiding under this massive hay when he saw it.
01:02:22
Richard Freeman
So may I may have come within 12 feet of seeing one of these things when it walked along the veranda in that
01:02:23
Lee Hatfield
is
01:02:29
Richard Freeman
old abandoned house. But I'll never know.
01:02:31
Lee Hatfield
That is crazy. And like yeah some of these stories, it's like, yeah, if only, if only.
01:02:40
Richard Freeman
Well, the only thing is we've got to keep at it.
01:02:40
Lee Hatfield
My friend, go on, carry on.
01:02:43
Richard Freeman
We've got a keep we've got to keep cracking it.
01:02:44
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, I agree.
01:02:46
Richard Freeman
And when they first went off to try and film the snow leopard in the Himalayas in the early 70s, the BBC and a scientist called George Shallow were there looking for it. And it took them six or seven years to film the snow leopard in the wild.
01:03:01
Richard Freeman
That's an animal we know existed and they even had them in captivity at the time, but they'd never filmed one in the wild. So if you think about something like a Yeti, which may be a relative of one of the ancestors of a highly intelligent primate, a tool user, it will hurl rocks to kill yak and eat them.
01:03:19
Lee Hatfield
Yeah. Yeah.
01:03:21
Richard Freeman
will use clothess
01:03:22
Lee Hatfield
We've got. Yeah, we've got a.
01:03:23
Richard Freeman
So it's intelligent. You don't want to be found.
01:03:25
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, we.
01:03:27
Richard Freeman
So how difficult will you find yeti?
01:03:31
Lee Hatfield
Yeah, we've got a a Bigfoot investigator in the US and he posted something a couple of days ago that this giraffe escaped from a zoo.
01:03:44
Lee Hatfield
and they'd got infrared, they'd got helicopters and all this kind of stuff. And it took them two weeks to find this giraffe yeah out in the open.
01:03:53
Richard Freeman
Yeah.
01:03:55
Lee Hatfield
So he says, yeah, we're looking for Bigfoot. We're looking for Sasquatch and the like. So if we can't find a brightly colored giraffe out in the open,
01:04:06
Lee Hatfield
for two weeks, what chances have we got of finding a Sasquatch or a Bigfoot or Mossman or whatever?
01:04:15
Lee Hatfield
But I say, Richard, for now, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, my friend. I've i've learned so much today. Definitely going to have to have you back to go into more depth about Dragons because I think that will be a fun conversation as well.
01:04:26
Richard Freeman
Yeah.
01:04:28
Lee Hatfield
But for now, my friend, thank you for your time. It's almost time to see if England can get through into the World Cup. So we'll let you go. And I look forward to speaking to you again.
01:04:41
Richard Freeman
Okay, well, on hopefully young i'm trying to get a series off the the ground where I go through Africa, Asia and New Guinea and Australia looking for giant crocodiles. So fingers crossed that this gets off the ground. I've already done a recce for it and filmed monster crocodile in India.
01:04:58
Richard Freeman
So hopefully it'll get people interested.
01:05:01
Lee Hatfield
Hopefully, my friend. Okay. For now, you take care. Have a great rest of the evening.
01:05:05
Richard Freeman
Cheers, mate. And you.
01:05:06
Lee Hatfield
Try and stay cool.
01:05:07
Richard Freeman
luck.
01:05:08
Lee Hatfield
Thanks, sir. Take care.