The Lake Worth Monster with Lyle Blackburn

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For the guys on this screen, except for you, Matthew, you know, the 90s were like yesterday. The guy that directed the last film was the creator of Earthworm Jim. Dr. Napalm told them that Steven Spielberg had said to him, when you're done with this, I'll take a look at it. It's so hard to explain this and not sound like I'm crazy. I'm impressed Scott found that. Astonishing Legends. We'd like to thank Mint Mobile, Raycon, HIMS, our contributors at patreon.com, and you, our listeners, for making tonight's show possible. In the summer of 1969, John and Linda Riker took an evening trip to Lake Worth, about 25 minutes northwest of Fort Worth, Texas, to relax a bit and see if John could catch some fish. Linda didn't like sitting outside after dark, so she sat in their car reading a book while John fished from shore. After a while, John finally had success reeling in a huge catfish that he'd just placed on a stringer when a blood-curdling scream pierced the night air. He turned to see a huge, strange, bipedal figure on the roof of their car trying to attack Linda. He rushed towards the car as she continued to scream. As he approached, John encountered what he would later describe as a half-man, half-goat creature, covered in white fur, and of all things, shiny scales. Acting instinctively, John confronted the beast, shoving it off balance, causing it to stumble away, but not fall down. For a brief moment, he found himself face-to-face with something inexplicable. The couple quickly got into their vehicle and fled, with the creature reportedly clinging to the back of the car before falling off as they sped away. The Reicherts raced to a nearby cafe and called the police. Officers arrived shortly after and found the couple visibly distressed but unharmed. While initially skeptical, they noted deep scratch marks along the side of their car. This incident marked the beginning of a series of reported sightings of the creature that would become known as the Lake Worth Monster, or Goatman. Throughout the summer of 1969, numerous witnesses claimed to have encountered the beast, describing it as a large, white-furred creature with both human and animal features. Despite searches and investigations, no solid proof of the Lake Worth Monster was ever found. But the legend just wouldn't go away. It became a permanent part of the local lore, sparking debates about its nature and origins that would continue for years. Now, we've covered dozens of cryptid cases over the past 10 years on the show, and this is one of the most bizarre ones we've ever heard of. And to that, there's precious little information on this astonishing legend. In fact, the best source of information out there has been a self-published book by Sally Ann Clark from 1969 that may have had only 1,000 copies printed. That was the only place you could find an account with a level of detail that appeals to us here on the show. Until now. Our returning guest and friend, Lyle Blackburn, who grew up just over 20 miles away from Lake Worth, has just finished a new book, Lake Worth Monster, The True Story of the Greer Island Goatman. And tonight, he joins us to talk about this astonishing cryptid. Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess. The thing appeared to be standing upright on two legs like a person, yet it looked like it could be some kind of animal or beast. It was covered in wild, white hair with what looked like horns or some kind of protrusions on its head. Some parts of it glimmered like scales of a fish. Lyle Blackburn from his book, Lake Worth Monster. Join us tonight for this episode on the Lake Worth Monster with our special returning guest, Lyle Blackburn. And we're back. Well, that we are, folks. Wow, man, we had a fun October from The Entity to some astonishing listener stories to the launch of our new short show, The Dead Letter Office. I mean, we had a blast. Yes, we did. And thank you very, very much to everyone who ordered our special Halloween merch this year. We actually forgot to take it down on our deadline of the 26th, so some of you managed to get a few orders in past the deadline. Well played. Yes, and for those of you who haven't heard it yet, The Dead Letter Office is our new short show with stories from you that you've sent in over the years. It runs weekly in our main feed, so if you're subscribed to Astonishing Legends, you'll get it automatically. Yeah, it's a great show for folks looking for a more concise effort from us. Yeah, we know. You didn't think we could do that. But seriously, it's a lot of fun reading and discussing your story. So if you haven't heard The Dead Letter Office yet, check it out. I love the theme music. It's actually pretty great. Hats off to Alan Caressia for that. Also, folks, the other three Astonishing Legends Network shows are in full swing right now, so find and subscribe to The Midnight Library, Scared All The Time, and Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf, wherever you get your podcasts. Or just visit AstonishingLegendsNetwork.com to access any and all of them. All right, we've got a great show tonight, so let's welcome Lyle Blackburn back to the show. Yeah, Lyle has been on the show a few times in the past. We're glad to have him back. We originally met him through Small Town Monsters, whom he frequently narrates documentaries for. And over time, we've done a lot of hanging out at various monster fests and other events. Yes, we have. You know, Lyle is an author, cryptid hunter, and musician. Oh, and he makes a mean hot sauce. But he's really made a name for himself investigating some of the most fascinating cryptids out there, especially in his homestead of Texas. And I will say his books are so enjoyable to read, not only because it's just detail you don't get anywhere else, and it's the right perfect approach to this. But his writing is just really pleasurable to read. Yeah, the style of his prose is just excellent, on top of everything else. He's written some really acclaimed books, like The Beast of Boggy Creek, Texas Bigfoot, Lizard Man, which we had him on for, too. And now, this new one, Lake Worth Monster, the true story of the Greer Island Goatman. Lyle, welcome back to the show. We don't even know how many times it's been now. I think this is easily the second, but I think it might even be the third. I'm not sure at this point, but we're glad to have you back. Thank you. Yes, I believe it is the third. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. It's funny, because we're closing in on our 300th show. I used to know everything that we had done in the past, and now it's starting. Some things are starting to fly away. Well, kind of like Lyle's so popular since his books have come out that I'm not sure he knows what show he's on. But he's a good friend of ours by now over the years, and always eager to hear about the next new monster that has popped up on his radar. And folks, these books are so readable and enjoyable, and if you love this kind of thing, they're a real delight. Yes, it's great stuff. We're glad to have them back any time. Well, as we get into the story, we told a little bit about it in the cold open, so our listeners will have heard a little bit of an overview of the Reichert story. But we thought that might be a fun place to start, so we're wondering if you could share with the listeners what the Reicherts went through that night at the lake. Right. You know, this is really what just set off that whole case, and that all began on July 10th, 1969, and there was a man and wife who lived in the Fort Worth, Texas area, John Reichert and his wife, Linda. John was a fisherman, and he was working at a service station, and he asked around, where is the good fishing? Several guys said, you should go to Lake Worth, and Lake Worth is north of Fort Worth, basically a reservoir of the Trinity River, so, you know, it's got a lot of wildlife there. There was an area called the Fort Worth Wildlife and Nature Preserve that kind of encompassed this area, and at the time, it was quite wild. A bit of a lover's lane hangout and, you know, roads that back in there to the lake where people kind of hung out, but a lot of people went there for fishing. So, John and his wife drove down there after work, so it was late evening, getting on into dark, and they arrived, went along Shoreline Drive, which kind of dead ends at this area called Greer Island. It's kind of creepy back there, and especially so back in 1969. I mean, this was just way out there, and very thick woods, just a spooky setting. So, John's wife, Linda, just, she did not want to get out of the car. She thought it was too spooky. Even though the lake was very close to where they parked, she decided to stay up in the car. There were a couple of other cars parked out there, presumably with other couples in them, as, you know, Lover's Lane type places are. But John went down, and he proceeded to start fishing there on the edge of the lake, and he could still see the car. He wasn't far from it, just doing his fishing, and all of a sudden, he hears Linda scream. He turns around, and he can see that something or someone had come down on the hood of their car and was going towards the passenger side window. Well, of course, you know, John responded by just throwing his fishing pole and running up there, and he confronted what he described as some sort of a creature covered in white hair. It was able to stand upright. It looked like it had perhaps horns. It was glistening in some way he thought may have been scales, but ultimately, he tussled with this thing for, you know, some period of time before he was able to jump in the car and drive off. This all happened very quickly. They drove out of there, out of the nature preserve area and onto the nearest highway, and the only thing open was this cafe up there. So they stopped in there and went inside to use the phone because they wanted to call the police. I mean, this was something that was so shocking and so scary, and they were both shook up, you know, especially Linda. And they called the police, and the police responded and showed up out there and, you know, obviously asked, what happened? And, you know, you have to explain to the police that you were attacked by a monster. And the police were, of course, dubious when they hear this kind of a story, but they could see, you know, that they were shaken up. Something happened to the Rikerts, and as, I suppose, proof, John showed the police a long 18-inch scratch down the side of their car where this creature had clawed at it when they drove off. And so the police now are looking, okay, well, you know, something happened here. So about that time, the other couples who had been parked down there drove up, and now you had six people telling the police that there was something down there that jumped on their car. The police followed John back down to the Greer Island area where they had been parked. And, of course, by then, you know, there's no sign hiding or hair of this strange creature. Well, the police, like I said, were dubious and thought, well, surely this is some kind of prank. However, they said that for about two months prior to that, they had received other calls, people telling them that there was some kind of unknown thing, a creature or something that people had seen down by this area of the lake. So this was picked up by a journalist named Jim Mars, who actually became a writer and had written several New York Times bestselling books later, another story there. But he was a journalist at the time for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which was the huge newspaper there in Fort Worth. And so by the next edition of the paper, there was a headline on the front page that says, you know, a couple attacked at Lake Worth by a fishy goat man or some strange headline. And that was just something that went viral. And so the article described what happened to the Reicherts and detailed briefly about the creature and what the police had thought about it. And so by the next evening, it was already big news. There was 50, 60 people gathered at Lake Worth ready to hunt this monster. So something was instantly viral back in those days. Just a quick question here. You mentioned Jim Mars. I think he wrote the now famous or infamous book, Alien Agenda. Yes. So he has built up some lore himself about his works and all things paranormal, I believe. So it's kind of a bit of a coincidence, I guess, maybe that he was one of the first to write this story up. Right. It was just, you know, coincidental. And he, you know, he had some connection there with the police department. So he was able to get this information very quickly. And that's how it came out so fast in the paper. But yeah, the Jim Mars thing. And of course, this is a side story, but the supposed alien crash in Aurora, Texas, where the alien was supposedly found and they buried it out there in the late 1800s. That was something that Jim looked into as well. And that's not very far from Lake Worth. So this is like, I mean, super high strangeness in Texas. How far is that from Lake Worth? 15 minutes. Okay. It's close. It's real close. Yeah, it's real close. And before people start putting this together and start asking in their minds, at least, how far away is the legend of the goat man who lives under the bridge? Is that Denton? Right. That's in Denton. That is also very close. Yeah, I was going to say, that's the most immediate connection I made in my mind when I started hearing goats, goat men, water, bridges, all these kind of things that factor in. You have a map drawn in your book that shows all the relative locations that are close by. And I saw Denton popped up in my mind like, hey, that's not too far away. And here we have another goat, well, more legendary perhaps than this case. But we also have descriptions of a goat-like person or being or man or whatever. Right. It is. I mean, you could almost explore this in terms of the location with all the strange things that have happened and sort of some famous cases, which include the Lake Worth monster, obviously. But yeah, it's interesting how all these are just located in a close proximity. A couple of quick questions about the Rikerts. How old were they roughly when this happened? Do you know? She was maybe around 20 and he was late 20s. And the reason I know this and one reason that prompted me to go ahead and write the book at this time was John had passed away some years ago. And, you know, I never I never met him or was able to interview him. All we had was what was in the newspaper. But by fate, I guess, I met his son who lives in in New York now. Oh, wow. Who really had no idea that any of this sort of stuff like we do and how we talk about these cases. You know, I've been on an episode of Monsters and Mysteries in America about the Lake Worth monster. Sure. And his wife was kind of doing some Googling and figured out somehow that people talk about this. Well, he remembers very well this story from his father and his mother and even remembers a drawing that his father did once of the creature. Now, of course, you know, his father just was kind of tired of telling the tale because most people just laughed at him. Yeah. You know, I mean, just your average person is just you try to tell him you saw a goat, man. Of course, you know, it's not like if he was on this show, we would have a lot of interested people. But his son, Eric, was very helpful in sort of piecing together the story of what happened that night. And I also had met a guy years ago by the name of Bill Morris, who actually was sitting in the cafe the night that the Rikerts came in. Now, Bill has since passed away, but he also helped me piece together a lot of stuff that, you know, happened back in 1969. Because obviously, I would have been out there in diapers and a cowboy trying to investigate if it was myself. So I was a little young, but and we were about to walk on the moon. Yeah, that's something Lyle mentioned in his book in that a lot of times we find with these stories, there'll be an impossible fantastical happening. And then it gets kind of buried a little by all the other news stories going on. So we had a moon landing. We've got some political unrest happening. Yeah. There's a lot going on on the news day back then. And you describe it very well in your book, basically, how it made a big splash. And then these things kind of fade away after time. Other stories kind of come up. And that's certainly a big year. The Summer of Love in 1969. After a while, these things kind of fade. But the stories and the sightings did not. Here's another question. With Bill Morris, like how did you meet him and come to find out that he was in the cafe? I presume the cafe, is it Chennault's Cafe? Is that how you pronounce it? No, Chennault, I believe. It's gone now, I would presume? Yeah. It's changed a lot, you know. How did you meet him and come to find out that he was in there that night? And what did he say about that experience of being there when they came in? Some years ago, I was asked to speak at a gathering. It was more like a, I don't know if it's like a book club or people interested in this subject. And they asked me to do a talk. It was either about Boggy Creek or just Bigfoot. And he was one of the guys who was a member of this. And so when I met him, we just became fast friends because he was very interested in all these subjects. And then, of course, the Lake Worth Monster came up and he said, oh, yeah, I mean, I was there and, you know, I'd been in that cafe. And he also was there the next day, which, you know, those were great perspectives because up until that time, basically, mostly what I had was the news articles. And, you know, once I started meeting people and, you know, this is I mean, I'm in the right place. You know, I was born in Fort Worth. I've lived here all my life and now doing, you know, talks that, you know, I've spoke at the Fort Worth Library and, you know, Lake Worth Library and all these libraries around here. So when I every time I do, you get these older people that come in and say, oh, yeah, you know, we used to hunt the monster or with this and that. And you start collecting these sort of reports that, you know, nobody would ever know about if because the newspapers obviously didn't publish much more. You know, once the bigger news, you know, trumped this or whatever. Is there anything in the police reports or any other interesting information about the other two couples? Because, you know, the way that you tell the story in your book, the Reicherts tear out of there. Then later, the other two couples show up. How did they know to come to the cafe? And like, I mean, maybe that's just on everybody's way home. And then the second thing is, did they say anything about what happened after the Reicherts left, like where it went or anything like that? Is there any data on that? Unfortunately not. I could never learn the names of of that couple, those couples. And so I couldn't, you know, even figure out who they were. And I'm not sure what they told the police much of anything, because it seems like Jim would have mentioned that in the article. It was mostly centered around John Reichert. But in police reports like that, when you try to go back and find something that's that old, typically, you know, it's not filed digitally, but typically those things are purged. If there was no actual crime, then it's just excess stuff. And it's not kept in the same archive as if there was a crime and they need to sort of make sure they they keep the evidence. So usually that stuff just goes right out the window. So I would presume that they just went to the cafe, because at the time, when you kind of went out of the Greer Island, you know, Lake Worth area right there and went to Jacksboro Highway. You know, this was kind of in the in the nowhere, you know, at night, you know, the cafe was kind of the only thing, you know, only thing with the light on. And I'm sure I would presume that they probably could see, you know, there's the police. They saw, you know, obviously saw the Reichert's car. So I just assume it was pretty much the only place to go. And Jacksboro Highway. I mean, there's another weirdness that Jacksboro Highway at the time was like gangster land. This was like where all the casinos and all sorts of illegal activity. Oh, really? This was north of Fort Worth. And so if you drive out Jacksboro Highway north and I know a lot about it because my dad used to back in late high school, early college times, he would be out there. My grandfather worked for the railroad and these were rough bars. And Bill Morris told me that he saw somebody dumping a body out there at Lake Worth one time. Oh, really? And that is not surprising because there were literally all kinds of, you know, underworldly stuff going on out there. A whole nother, like, bit of, you know, dark, weird stuff, you know. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners do all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. And that's what makes Aloha stand out. Aloha protein bars nail the delicious and nutritious. They're USDA organic and made with ingredients that actually grow somewhere. It's their whole taste that grows philosophy. 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We know the importance of seeing the person behind the patient. Because we see all of you. Learn more at trinityhealthofne.org slash heart. Let's talk about the next day then. Because this triggered a lot of other folks to go out there and check it out, right? Right. Nothing had been printed in the newspaper until July 10th when the Reicherts story came out. So that came out. And by the next evening, July 11th, there were at least 50 people gathered out there around Greer Island wanting to check this out for themselves because, of course, back then, that was the source of information. Everybody read the paper. You mentioned that it says there's a monster out here at Lake Worth. Well, man, that sounds like good times. So there was a lot of people out there, including allegedly police officers, park rangers. Bill Morris was there and some other guys I've talked to since. But as people were hanging out that night, at some point, everybody saw something run up on this ridge. There's this sort of a grassy field across from that area where Greer Island is. And there's this rocky ridge. And people saw someone or something run up there. And it ran back and forth a bit. And then they said it took a tire, which had the wheel and everything, and allegedly threw this thing 400 feet over the heads of the astonished onlookers. And now, of course, with the bravado of everybody who's going to hunt the monster, now everybody freaked out and just scattered and ran. And, you know, stories of one guy backing his car into a tree, everybody just freaked out. And that resulted in another article the following day, which said 40 people or something saw the monster and it threw a tire. And there's a drawing in the paper of how the tire was thrown, a picture of the tire, all this stuff, which has become sort of legendary, this whole tire throwing thing, association with the monster. But, again, you don't often have that many witnesses who see something. And no matter what it was, there's no dispute that something happened that night that kind of was a follow-up to what had happened to the Rikerts. Yeah. When I read that about the tire, and I saw in your appendices the article that had the picture of the tire and everything. Because it's like when you think, oh, it threw a tire. And it's like, yeah, I can throw a tire. But with a wheel in it, no. I'm not throwing that very far at all. That's a heavy situation there. And I want to talk about this later. But the idea of throwing something in either in self-defense or to create aggression towards people is interesting. And then with all of those witnesses there, that's really something. I do have a question, though. So this is the area in the book you referred to as the pit, right, where they were at the flat part at the bottom. And then that ridge, because I saw that picture, too, in your book, I think, from an article. Or maybe it was a picture that you took. But the ridge, which looks different now. I think you had a picture in there from 2014, maybe, and then a more recent one. And you could see where it would have been up on the ridge. But this, to be clear, this is on the main part. This is not on Greer Island. This is across from Greer Island, right? Right. So when you drive down, enter into that wildlife area, you drive along basically the river. Because this is north of where the lake really opens up. So it's the Trinity River for a while. And then there's just sort of dead ends into this parking area right there at what they called the pit. And then Greer Island was just right across that where the lake is. And Greer Island was something you couldn't drive or walk to it. The only way to get there would have been by swimming or boat. People theorized immediately that that's where the creature lived. You know, because later people reported a few encounters where they saw the creature go into the water or thought it, you know, might have swam. So it was a good theory right there to explain how there could be something out there. But even beyond that, I mean, you could just walk in the woods in any direction away from the pit. And you're just in thick woods. It's a marshy area back there. I mean, this is a, you know, this is a river. And then it opens way up into the lake. So there's a lot of area where something could roam. And certainly back in 1969, it was not as developed, you know. Well, once again, we're back to a creature that has an amphibian component to it, like the lizard man. Well, there's always water around, usually, it seems like. And, of course, you know, that's naturally something that animals, humans, and spirits apparently need or gravitate towards. But here, with the description of this creature as being somewhat shiny like it had fish scales or some part of it did, and there's something about it going in and out of the water and coming out of water or going back into it, it just adds to the creepiness because we can't, it's not something we can access. You can go tromping around in the woods and try and find something, and you can see evidence of it. But the water is a whole other world, so something that makes its habitat there partially, perhaps, or that has that component where it can go into water or survive around it adds that layer of creepiness. It's just a bit more foreign to us. But the throwing is, as Scott brought up, it's very Bigfoot-y behavior. Any of these types of things throw objects, large ones, that some are kind of small. Sometimes a lot of times you'll hear people talking about pebbles being thrown if it's hitting them. Thankfully, nobody seems to be clobbered by any boulders, but it's a display of like, I could do this. I could really hurt you folks if I wanted to. It's like these things know that something large and heavy is an act of, well, showing off. Like, I can throw this big, heavy thing as kind of a warning. So at this point, this creature had been sighted a few times, or there had been reports, at least for, I think, a couple of months before the big incident with the Rikerts. That's why the police weren't surprised. There had been reports of something lurking around those woods. But as far as you know, Lyle, nothing, no kind of report or anything kind of concrete came up before the Rikerts. That's kind of the first time this is starting to make public awareness locally. Right. That was the first time anything had been printed in the newspaper. And it was only till then that the police basically told Jim Mars that, yeah, well, you know, we've gotten some calls for the last several months of people saying they'd seen something strange. But, you know, that that's all there is to it. And there wasn't any description of what people had seen prior to that or anything like that. But just one reason the police, I think, took it a little more serious, you know, because the Rikerts weren't the first ones to say anything. And, of course, when somebody, even if the police think it's a prank or whatever, when somebody seems to be in danger, of course, they need to respond, you know. In the examination of what happened there, we have that thing that we almost never get. And we love, and I'm sure you do, too, as an investigator into this kind of stuff to have, which is contemporaneous research and investigation done by an author named Sally Ann Clark. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about her story and her book? Yeah, Sally Ann Clark really has an amazing story. And I probably wouldn't have been able to write that book if it wasn't for Sally Ann. Essentially, she, like everybody else, read that article on July 10th in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. And she lived in the Fort Worth area and just, I think she had aspirations to be a writer or a journalist or something like that. But this story really clicked with her and she thought, wow, this is, this is crazy. So, literally, by the next day, the day of which the tire-throwing incident would happen, Sally Ann went down there. She took a camera and a cassette tape recorder and then just proceeded over the next several months to interview anybody who said they had seen the creature. And she took a lot of photos of various guys out there and stuff. And somehow, she put this all together, transcribed those interviews and did all this stuff and managed to write and publish a self-published book called The Lake Worth Monster. It was released sometime around late September of 1969. So, I mean, we're talking July to September. She had already done this. And this is, you know, this is old school. This is writing it on a typewriter. Yeah. And transcribing from a tape recorder. And so, she, her book is, it's a little bit of nonfiction meets fiction because at the time, she would document, you know, what people were saying they had seen. But at the same time, she kind of goes off in these fanciful passages about imagining what it would be like if she saw it. I mean, there wasn't a lot of templates for sort of cryptozoological books at the time. She's forging the trail. Blazing a trail. You're blazing the trail. Blazing, blazing a trail. And so, fortunately, but ironically, she did this so fast that some of the most significant incidents would occur after that. And in fact, even more ironically, Sally Ann said that she actually had sightings of the creature sometime after that because she spent a lot of time out there. And so, she claimed to have had these other encounters. So, none of that is in the book. But at least she preserved a lot of the information that was not printed in the newspapers because once those first two articles came out, now it was time. The newspapers went on to talk to all these so-called experts who would try to explain it away. You know, oh, this is this and that. Whereas Sally Ann Clark, I mean, she was down there interviewing the people. And she said, I believe these people. They have seen something. Something's going on here that's worth preserving. So, luckily, I was able to use that as sort of the springboard and collect everything else that's happened and sort of work that into my book. But without hers having captured some of those key elements, that would be – that would have just been lost. I mean, I'm sure you're guessing, but you think maybe she only published maybe 1,000 copies of this book. Right. That's my estimation. Now, I'm friends with a guy named Bobby Brooks who drew the cover art on the illustration and who was literally there in her house when she was transcribing these interviews. Sally Ann gave Bobby the very first copy when they came in. Now, Bobby says he believes she printed 500, but the reason I think it's higher is because I never met Sally Ann, unfortunately, but I did meet some of her family members and her late husband, and I've been to her house. And there was a few leftover boxes that had 88 copies each in them. And just in judging from that, I think there was probably more like 1,000. Maybe she made another print of 500 at another time. But I don't think there's any more than 1,000, and that's reflected – this book has become a sought-out collector's item. I've seen it go for like $200 or whatever on eBay, you know. I think a lot of these legends really benefit, of course, from somebody who takes notes at the time that gets bit by the bug, you could say. Same thing with the lizard man and Sheriff Liston Truesdale. You get a repository of reporting at the time, and you ever tried to write a book, Lyle, that didn't have some major single source that was, as Scott says, contemporaneous with the accounts? It would be much harder. I mean, because most of these, in order to make a complete book, there's got to be some substance, not just – people say, well, why don't you write about this case? Well, I'm like, well, there's three sightings, and that's it. Yeah. Unless you can tap into somebody – and, of course, you know, some of mine are older cases like this, but I consider them classic cases that, you know, when the library is asking me to speak about it and I'm on TV, yet there's no book. I'm thinking, okay, this is something that needs that Blackburn approach where I just take it all and put it all together, and this is the story. But, yeah, without Sheriff Truesdale and the Lizard Man case or Sally Ann Clark, it would be pretty thin and hard to fill a book because a lot of it would have just been lost. I found a copy on eBay. It was $90, but I couldn't find it at the usual rare book places that I go to the websites. None of them had it. None of them had it. It just happened to be one on eBay at the time. So I'm supposed to get it. I think I'm supposed to get it today. So I'm looking forward to looking at it myself. So speaking of which, you mentioned one thing that I thought was really interesting and jumped out at me. It's on page 26 of your book, which I think came from a testimony that she got about the Bramlett family talking about coming across some sheep whose necks and heads have been crushed. It just seemed like they had been killed by something super powerful. I thought that was really interesting because, you know, obviously there's no eyewitnesses to that. That doesn't necessarily mean nobody saw that thing doing it. But, like, it jumped out enough for that family to say, you know, this seems like a large predator that maybe has a different method to dispatch prey than your standard. Like, what would be the largest predator in the area? Black bear, I imagine? There could have been some black bear. More rare. I mean, probably cougars. Yeah. You know, back in those days, I mean, a lot, you know, the inhabitants as far as wildlife has, you know, been eradicated or run out over the years. But I would say there could have been a cougar and possibly a black bear. But in general, yeah, I mean, if you find something that, you know, the bones were crushed. Yeah. That's quite unusual. You know, it wasn't killed in the usual manner that you would expect common wildlife. So, you know, as people like the Bramlets and all these people were just became obsessed with going out there and looking for this so-called monster, that they were finding all kinds of weird stuff. And then that just sort of got added to the, you know, to the case file. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about some of the eyewitnesses that you mentioned in the book. One of the really compelling accounts was Jim Stevens, who you said was from Blue Mound. And so, yeah, that report by Jim Stevens, and this would have been one that, you know, would have totally been lost because this wasn't printed in the newspaper. But he claimed that one night he and some guys were driving around near the lake when the thing just jumped on the hood of his car. And they had been out there fishing, so very much like the Rikerts. And, you know, of course, by then the news of the creature was all out there, so everybody knew about it. But he said when he got on the hood, it held on and he had to swerve and eventually ran into a tree. And at that point, then the thing, you know, ran off into the woods. He described it as being really big, human-like, and said it had burnt scars, quote, burnt scars all over its face, arms, and chest. And he said it was tall, probably seven feet tall, maybe even taller. You know, it was obviously, this is a very monstrous description. And the detail about the scars is something that really only he reported. I would suppose he was close enough. I mean, they're looking at it through the windshield. They got a better look, or at least a longer look than maybe even John Rikert when, you know, John was fighting with it. And that was an interesting detail, you know, about that. Yeah, what do you think, like, burnt scars? I wonder what that means, or, like, what might have produced that in this, you know, if you believe any of this at all with this thing being real, but, like, what in its day-to-day life would have done that to it, I wonder. Right. I mean, it's kind of bizarre. And, you know, of course, he didn't say, or at least Sally Ann didn't say whether he said it had horns. He also didn't say what color the hair was. I mean, most people reported it as being white. And something I've kind of learned about a little bit later, I was aware of this just sort of a little bit when I was writing the book, but there was some old tale about some gorilla that was down on Casino Beach, is what they called it, at Lake Worth, that was supposedly in a fire when the building burned and may have run off into the woods. But, I mean, that was an actual gorilla, and it was not white and not like what people describe, but the whole part about the building was on fire and something was interesting and kind of plays into what Stephen said he saw. But, unfortunately, you know, if I could get those tapes, you know, that Sally Ann Clark had, you know, we could go back and listen and see if there's more details that perhaps she didn't mention. Like, you know, of course, I would ask the guy what color was the hair and did you see it as having horns? And maybe she did ask that, but unfortunately, that's all we have as far as... Does the family have the tapes if you asked them about that or... You know, I never asked them at the time, and I've since kind of lost touch with them, but I don't know. I mean, I would presume they would have been at the house, but once her husband passed away, you know, I really don't know what happened to all of the possessions and some of that stuff, including this big seven-foot drawing that Bobby Brooks had done of the creature that was still at the house, which, you know, would be a nice, really nice thing for you even to put in a museum. But I'm not sure what happened to all that stuff. You know, anybody that's been through settlement of estates or something like that after your parents or older folks in your family have died, it's, you know, it's a lot and it's overwhelming and it's a hard time for the family. So it's horrible to think of that, you know, just like, oh, what's this old box of tapes? Oh, no, just put it out with the yard sale or, you know, or the auction people are like, well, no one's going to pay for that. And it just goes in the trash. It's like, which makes my stomach turn sometimes when I think about losing things that way, you know, but. Right. And I've tried to, you know, even in the Lizardman case, I don't know what happened to Truesdale's stuff. It's just sort of once, unless somebody's interested in that, it just becomes old clutter. And, you know, oh, there's, you know, my dad or whatever, he didn't have any children. So that was a problem there. But, you know, it just depends on what value you put on that. And the family may not have the time or the wherewithal or the emotion to deal with that like we would, you know, or something. So another story I wanted to talk about was the story of Charles Buchanan that took place literally 55 years ago today, as we're recording this, November 7th, 1969. He had gone to sleep in the back of his pickup truck in a sleeping bag. Something came, picked him up, dropped him back down and was, I guess, attacking him. And he gave it some barbecued chicken. And I guess it took off and he said it swam away toward Greer Island and it went away that way. It reminded me of the Albert Ostman story, which we covered a long time ago. And for listeners who haven't heard that, look up Ostman and Astonishing Legends, O-S-T-M-A-N. I'm sure Lyle's heard that story. He's a trapper who was carried off in his sleeping bag as a gift for his Bigfoot children. But that was just so similar, just like this idea of this. And the other thing that I thought was interesting that you said Buchanan described was that it had long arms, which, of course, we're expecting, but short, stubby, deformed fingers, which primates compared to humans have longer hands and longer fingers. So it made me wonder a little bit more about, like, what exactly we're seeing. But that's one of those cases, too, like Forrest mentioned earlier, where it's definitely got some kind of amphibian quality. It's got no problem swimming over to Greer Island. But you made the point where it's like, well, people want to think it's on Greer Island because it would have a moat around it for all intents and purposes. But there's plenty of dark woods for it to hang out in right there off the island as well, right? Right. You know, Buchanan's statement is one reason that, you know, we know that people were theorizing that it lived on the island, you know, and says it got into the water. Which his description with a stubby fingers, you know, just adds another weird characteristic or trait to the descriptions. And just even the whole concept of anything, if we presume it's ape-like, for it to get in the water, swim, a lot of just things that are hard to piece together. But, yeah, that similarity, I mean, he was down there also down there for fishing and, you know, just people slept out there and he's sleeping in the back of the truck and gets awakened by something shaking. And then this thing just reaching over and grabbing at his sleeping bag. So, I mean, obviously the moral of the story, if you're going to sleep in a sleeping bag outside, always have some barbecue chicken because... Or an egg salad sandwich, you know. Yeah. If Albert Ostman had had barbecue chicken, see, he wouldn't have been dragged three miles. That's right. That's right. And his defense was snuff. At the end, it was snuff. I believe he offered snuff. Yeah. And it made the creature sneeze and do a backflip and he was able to escape. But, you know, these things are often looking for food or like any animal. You can kind of distract it maybe with some food, but, you know, and it sounds silly, but there's kind of a human slash animalistic aspect to these creatures as well. That they're not all animal, they're not all human, and they have characteristics of both. You know, and there's often a comical, as terrifying as these things are, there's often a comical aspect to some of these sightings. Right. I mean, just kind of picture that in your mind. But, you know, I'm sure for Mr. Buchanan, in those moments, you know, that would have been rather horrifying. No matter what was reaching over in the middle of the night in these dark woods. And let me tell you, it was, you know, it's still spooky if you drive down there to this day. And if something was reaching over there, grabbing at you, it would have been pretty scary. So grabbing some food and shoving it towards an animal seems like a good thing to do. And I think anybody probably done that, even though it sounds funny. But yeah, so his description, and especially because he presumably saw it up close, that just adds to that kind of strange, very monstrous persona of this thing. Another one of the witness accounts in your book that jumped out at me was Mike Kenson. And I actually want to read this little excerpt from that that you have in your book. In July of 1969, Kenson said that he and others had encountered what looked like ghosts on Greer Island long before the current monster sightings. Kenson said the ghostly apparitions appeared as, quote, a great mist in the shape of men, end quote. They were translucent, yet the features of the men were still discernible. Well, it's hard to explain, and I know it sounds crazy, Kenson admitted. We thought it was some kind of trick at first. Kenson said they observed the ghostly creatures on several occasions for at least a year and a half, but said they were difficult to see. He explained that if there were too many people wandering around in the park, they would not appear. The reporter asked Kenson what the ghosts do after they are sighted. The monster seeker simply responded, no one has stayed around long enough to find out. So I love that you included this in the book, Lyle, because there's, of course, that thing, and we probably have talked about it with you in person before and otherwise, about this whole idea that there's a paranormal component to cryptids. And there specifically sometimes is a paranormal component to the idea of Sasquatch and Bigfoot. But in this case, the idea of this mist also reminded us of, you know, we had Linda Godfrey on our show a while back for her book, Monsters Among Us, before she passed. And she talked about, in that book, these various cases. And that was more, that was the dogman and werewolves and that sort of thing. But there was these mists, and I also can point to Point Pleasant, where these mists have been seen associated with the Mothman, these kind of fogs, and also Skinwalker Ranch. It's just like, that's a thing that comes up a lot. Now, of course, the other thing that comes up a lot in the natural world is fog. Fog exists. So it's like, that doesn't, I'm not saying it just because there's fog, you know, it's a ghost. But what do you think about that, like, and what Kenson said, and how that might relate to the bigger picture of the story? Well, I would say, you know, we do have fog here, but in that area, it wouldn't be very common. Okay. You know, it's just not something you're going to see much. You know, it's not like the moors or anything where it's common to see fog. So anything that looked foggy would certainly stand out. And it is one of those where almost always when I'm looking at one of these cryptid cases where there was a lot of news coverage and a lot of input from various people, you always have those sort of ones that are really strange. Like this one where he says, well, you know, we also saw like ghostly figures. And even, I think I mentioned some in the Lizardman book, you always find those very interesting. And they certainly do kind of seem to support that this is not just some isolated paranormal thing. It's not just the creature perhaps, but there's other anomalous phenomenon occurring. And, you know, it's hard and no way to say if they're related or not, but certainly interesting that, you know, somebody would bring that up. And the guy seems, you know, I didn't interview him, but he seems like he says, I know it sounds crazy. So he knows that this seems odd, but he still says that's what we saw. So, yeah, it just furthers that, you know, speculation that this isn't as simply as just one thing occurring and one simple monster. It could be a combination of phenomenon that we don't understand. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of. Or artificial sweeteners do all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. 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And the pictures that came back, you could see the roadkill, a white mist would show up in one of the frames, and then both it and the roadkill were gone in the next few frames that showed up. Or something had triggered the camera as this thing was leaving, and then you saw nothing. And our idea of possibly kicking it around was, what if this mist was some kind of, that's its stock form. Or it's like the clay that this image is made out of, in a way, in that if you were to see it raw, unfiltered, not through human eyes and perception, and us making images with our brain, that if you capture it with a camera, what you're going to see is a mist. If you're looking at it with human eyes and our brain and eye processing, you're going to see some kind of creature. Like, this is the raw form of it, in a way. And that's what looking at that Polaroid initially kind of reminded me. Now, there is some shape and definition to it, but at first glance, it looked kind of misty to me. And that's the first thing that popped into my mind. And I texted Scott about it. It's like, God, it's a little like that weird, perhaps kind of mist that shows up in some of these cameras. It's all very curious. But Scott, you were going to talk about Jeff Ridley. Oh, yeah. I just was curious about him and his story when he reached out to you, Lyle. What did you think of Jeff Ridley's story? Because it seemed like he seemed pretty compelling. Jeff was, you know, a very just level-headed kind of guy. I'm from Texas, and I've met a lot of guys who are hunters and fishermen, you know. And, I mean, I spent a lot of time with my dad hunting. So, this is what I would consider one of those just hunting and fishing enthusiasts. And so, I can identify with these guys pretty well. And, usually, they're pretty, you know, robust guys. They're not – they're used to going out in the woods. You know, my dad, he never used a compass or anything. I mean, he just walked off in the woods and would go fishing. And so, I thought Jeff was kind of the same kind of guy. You know, this guy wouldn't exaggerate or make something out of something if it wasn't significant. And, of course, the reason I included it was just to sort of stress that there are other weird things up and down what would be the Trinity River Corridor. Because Lake Worth is the northern part of the river, which was damned up to make the reservoir. But all along the Trinity River, if you were to start looking, you would find other very strange, incredible sightings of Bigfoot-like creatures. So, to kind of give it that perspective of, you know, this isn't just, again, one isolated thing. I mean, there's something to that and perhaps something that corresponds to that waterway. So, Jeff's sighting, it was a good one and it's a spooky one. And it was something that I felt like really affected the guy. Again, I mean, I'm familiar with these kind of tough dudes, you know, just the sound of his voice and the motions when he's telling me these stories. Those are the kind of witnesses I say, okay, this person saw something, something happened, something very unusual. And it's just one that sticks with you. So, it worked well for the book. And I didn't have it at the time when I did my Texas Bigfoot book. But, of course, there's so many great sightings in Texas, you couldn't even include them all anyway. But that's how it works with these. And they sort of flow together as well as some other reports that I had gotten over the years that sort of supported that whole notion that there's white Bigfoots. Because what Jeff saw was more of a typical, it wasn't white like the Lake Worth monster. But there are other ones, and you sort of build that case to where you say, all of these people can't be making this up. Right. And something that reminded me, and you could fill us in on this, when we had you on to talk about the Momo monster, I believe there were sightings around the same time of different colorings as well there. And then people started to wonder, is this the same thing? Are there different types? Is this a small clan or group where there's different colorings of this similar type of creature? Or is it a different creature altogether that we're seeing? Because there were also reports of something with light-colored fur or almost white. And Momo eating an egg salad sandwich. That was also one of his predilections there. But in that case, though, with Momo, were there reports of different colored type beasts? With Momo is generally described as being dark in color and kind of range from brown to black. I don't recall off the top of my head if someone said there was a white one. I just remember something about, yeah, the local radio station manager or the marketing manager there who also went out looking for this beast had a slightly different description of a sighting when he went out. And it was a few days or sometime after the initial reports came out. But I just remembered that there were other, sometimes with these cases, that people will see something. It's like, yeah, it was similar, but it was a different color. There's a lot of variation in the descriptions, which Scott and I always go back to. It depends on who's looking aspect of this. It varies depending on the person, the time of day, of course, all these environmental factors, but also the perception of the person looking. So, yeah, I may be mistaken on that of just different colors. But I have certainly heard of different colored beasts that are more bipedal, humanoid, Bigfoot, more ape-like creatures. One that comes to mind is Chestnut Ridge. I think those are reports of white-furred creatures, glowing green eyes. And in this case, though, yeah, we got different materials, scales, horns. In this report, though, were there any descriptions of the eyes? Usually there's a description of the eyes being different or strange. Right. No, there's not really. Typically, yeah, you always get the, we saw glowing red eyes in the woods. Yeah. Or sometimes yellowish eyes. In this case, it was, I felt that most were just of the body, few like the scars, maybe on the face, but it was almost always just this big, white, ape-like creature. And that's how most people described it. I mean, John Reichert described it as a goat man, but actually all the other witnesses, for the most part, said it looked ape-like, more Bigfoot-like. And, yeah, I mean, there's reports of all manner of hair color across this scope of Bigfoot reports. And, of course, I throw in in my book, you know, that it may sound weird that there's a white creature, you know, that makes it sound okay, you know. But, you know, I could find just numbers of examples of people seeing other white-haired creatures, not only in just like that general area, but, you know, there's a spot in Oklahoma. There's, you know, so again, not, it doesn't set off alarm bells when somebody says, oh, it was a white Bigfoot or anything like that. It's like, hey, there's plenty of reports and I've gotten plenty of firsthand reports. And one that I thought was really significant, the one that sort of relates most to Lake Worth was when I did a talk out at a festival there at the Fort Worth Nature Center about 10 years ago. A woman came up and said, my father was a hunter and we lived in this area called Decatur, which is, it's not very far from Lake Worth. And she said, back in the 1950s, he came home from hunting one evening and said he was all shaken up and he had seen what he described as a white ape in the woods and it scared him. I mean, it was just very odd. And she said, you know, we didn't know what to think of that, you know, when he told us that, but she said, my father doesn't make stuff up and he's not a jokester. And it wasn't until 1969 that the reports on the Lake Worth monster came out that they sort of said, wait, you know, that might have been what we saw. So I thought that was cool. And of course, it's a secondhand report, but I met the woman in person and she's like, hey, my man said this. There you go. So, and those are interesting ones that you begin again, just kind of corroborate and to say that it wasn't just the day it came out in the newspapers, all of a sudden people started seeing white Bigfoots. No, no, there was other things, examples you can find before and after. I'm glad you brought that up again. It's something you said a few minutes ago, too, about talking to people that are telling the truth. And that's something that I think for us is one of the hardest things to convey to our listeners is when you interview an eyewitness and you can just tell that this person, maybe they aren't sure what they saw, but they believe that they saw something unusual. And, you know, whether or not a hoax was played on them or not, this person believes that they're not part of it. They're telling you a story, like you said, about the hand gestures and the intonation and you learn to recognize when somebody is being flowery. That's the way we felt when we had the good fortune to talk to Bob Gimlin in person about what he saw. Just when you get done talking to him, you're like, no, that's what he is telling you his truth. And this is real. And it's one of those things where you can write about it, we can talk about it and all that, but it's hard to convey to another person how sincere one of those interviews feels. You know, you must have had so many of them by now. Yeah, I mean, you get a gut feeling on, you know, the ones that you feel are the most credible. You know, I don't claim to have any training in police interrogation or any of that, but, you know, once you're immersed in this subject and you interview enough people, you begin to be able to just say, yeah, that is a person that saw something, you know, unexplainable. And, you know, if I get other ones that I don't feel are the most credible or suspect, well, I just don't include them because I got plenty of good ones, you know, so I don't have to include everything. I try to include the ones that I feel like are the most credible that come from people that are discerning enough to be able to say that this wasn't something else. What then sets off your alarm bells or red flags when somebody gives you an anecdote or a testimony of something they saw that you're like, I don't know about that, or maybe part of it is true, but what gets your suspicions raised? Well, one of them would be that they're too nonchalant about something that would be just almost earth shattering or traumatizing or just like, just, you know, especially if it's multiple encounters or habituations. And I know that would just get normal day to day, I realize, but a certain amount of just like, it's mind blowing, you know, the ramifications of if we prove this or if it does exist or just if it's one sighting and you saw this seven foot tall, hairy, scary looking thing. I mean, if you just look at a gorilla in the zoo and think if this glass wasn't here, I would not like to be standing 20 feet from this thing, because if it had the wherewithal, it would just rip me to pieces. And so that's kind of the thing. If there's just sort of, well, you know, saw this. Yeah, it was cool. You know, I don't know about that. I didn't see a normal reaction. Not that it couldn't be, you know, that kind of thing. And if there's, well, I saw this, and then I saw this, and then I saw this other thing, and I've seen 50 other things, and I've had 200 sightings, I start to think, well, either this is the most gifted paranormal person on the planet or the luckiest person on the planet. How many times could you possibly be in a position to be in the right place at the right time? Stuff like that. Yeah. Okay. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the Allen Plaster Polaroid, the most famous one? If you look up Polaroid and Lake Worth Monster, this one comes up. What do you think that picture shows, and can you tell our listeners a little bit about what it looks like? So on November 19th, 1969, Allen Plaster, who was a Fort Worth resident, was driving late at night along with two other passengers, friends of his. And they were driving down Shoreline Road, and all of a sudden, something stood up to one side of the car in the trees. And his passenger pointed at it and said, what is that? And they could see this white, hairy-looking thing. And Allen, he was considered himself a Lake Worth monster hunter. I mean, this guy was looking for it. Got a photo in the book. He's carrying like a .45. I mean, this is serious Texas monster. He also had the wherewithal to be carrying a Polaroid instant camera, one of those ones where it shoots out the film. And in those moments when this thing stood up, he grabbed that camera and took a shot and managed to get a photo of something he saw. It looks kind of, you know, like Forrest was saying earlier, it's a little bit misty-looking. It's kind of blurry-looking. It's something white. And you can see the trees, and you can see the figure in front of the trees. You know, I hate to say it's a blob-squatch, but it's one of those where, you know, it's not going to prove anything. But I can tell you that in subsequent interviews, I never interviewed Plaster. He passed away, but he had been interviewed by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram a number of times. And he said, look, I just saw what I saw, and I took a picture. And he kind of just dismissed it as he thought perhaps somebody was trying to get his attention. It was a prank or whatever. But there's no doubt that something there stood up, and they took a picture of it. That photo has kind of helped the Lakeworth monster story, along with Sally Ann's book, to keep it alive. Because, you know, think about this. This is 1969. There was very few Bigfoot-related kind of cryptid photos from that early. Yeah. You know, I mean, this is only a few years after the Patterson-Gimlin film. You know, this is Texas. And a lot of times that gets overlooked, that this is a really old cryptid photo of something that was standing there. Alan took the Polaroid and showed it to Sally Ann Clark, and she went down there, and they looked at the area where the thing was standing, and there was kind of a ditch there off the side of the road and the trees. And they estimated that it stood almost seven feet tall, based on, you know, the landmarks there. And, of course, Sally Ann Clark believed in what Alan Plaster said. She interviewed him as well and, you know, was convinced that it wasn't a hoax. So it's not out of the realm of possibility that he was hoaxed. But there is no question in my mind that he did not perpetrate a hoax. That's a real picture of something that stood up. And he said the reason it's kind of fuzzy is that it just took off running. So once it stood up, you know, he's got one shot. And I think it was actually starting. You can see it. It looks like its shoulder is turning, and it looks like it's moving. And that's why it's a little blurry in his defense. But, hey, it's amazing that he even got that shot, you know? I'm looking at it right now as we're talking. And, you know, like I'd encourage our listeners to go look for it. But, I mean, it looks pretty clearly like fur. And it looks also like an upright bipedal being. I mean, but you can't really – the neck and head is some of the harder part to see. But it does look like it has a neck and head and huge arms. It looks gigantic. It, you know, and again, going back to the whole idea of a costume or something like that, it looks pretty sophisticated for even for that and hard to imagine how you would make it. And then on the other hand, going back to what you said, I mean, of course, you don't know who's going to come along. But it's the same thing I thought with Bob Gimlin. He was a crack shot with his rifle. You do not want to be tricking this guy in a costume because it's only going to take him a second to take you out. And it's probably the same thing with plaster. Yeah, we're talking about Texas and Texas justice in an instant here. Talk around FAFO. This is not the thing to be doing, you know, running around where people already think there's a monster and risk getting shot to death. Like, who would be stupid enough to do that? But it's a pretty compelling picture, though. I think even as it being a little bit blurry, it's got more definition than one would think, you know, for a Polaroid from 1969. There's various versions on the web. If you seek out the most clearest one and you can find it, it definitely is better. Because if you just look at the copies of copies and low-res versions, it loses detail. But if you can find that the more clear one, you can definitely see it looks like hair. Yeah. Upon initially looking at it, like as I described earlier, just at a glance, it did look a little misty to me. And then when you blow it up, you can see more definition. You can kind of see a long arm. And we're looking at the left side profile of this beast. Yeah, it's back as to us. Yeah, you can see a little bit of a jawline. The scalp area looks a little darker. Maybe that's the horns part coming out. But it's very barrel-chested. It's very thick around the top part of the torso. And also very thick around the waistline. But it's just a little bit of definition. And the rest of it is just kind of misty to me. And so your friend, Craig Woolheater, who does the introduction in the book, had a post from November 19, 2023 on Facebook, where I'll just read this quickly. He just said, a photo taken 54 years ago today. So we're coming up again on the 55th anniversary of this. He goes on to say, the only record we have is a blurry November 19, 1969 Polaroid of a giant white furball described by one online critic as, quote, some sort of monstrous Bichon freeze. End quote. Which I thought was hilarious. And it was Alan Plaster, the owner of House of Alan Women's Wear Shop, where he was, again, driving along Shoreline Drive, 1.35 a.m. And then he also goes on to say in his post, in a 2006 interview, he now considers the sighting a prank, quote, unquote, adding, whatever it was, it wanted to be seen. So, again, maybe it's a costume, but it's just a very strange costume to make, I guess, and, again, a very risky thing to do to be popping up with people who at least have a camera at the ready and a .45, and you come charging after somebody, you're likely to get shot or ventilated. So, but it's just a very strange, again, it's not like a picture of a regular costume or somebody in an ape suit that they just colored white, which is a strange choice as well. Well, again, if it's dark, easier to be seen. It's just a very strange and nebulous kind of figure there. You know, what do you think about that photo, Lyle? I mean, you say it's definitely something there. It's not hoaxed, but what strikes your gut about this photo, just in impressions? Well, I agree. I think somebody would have to be really crazy to be standing up in front of cars in a costume at that time, because you can see the guns on some of these guys that Sally Ann Clark had taken some photos, and there was other photos from the Stark Telegram. You know, there's one in my book. You can see it, that sidearm on Alan Plaster. People would have been aware, the guns. I mean, and it was in Texas back then. I mean, I remember when I was young, we had shotguns in the truck in the back just on any day driving around. You know, I mean, it was the Wild West. And I can't imagine somebody being down there where they had seen people with guns and just being willing to stand up. Also, if you made a costume back then, if you sort of bought any off-the-shelf gorilla costume, they're not going to come in white. Right. Yeah. You had to custom make that out of, I guess, a white fur coat or something. I mean, you'd have to have a skin of a goat. I don't know. But this wouldn't have been something you could have easily done and then do it well enough to, you know, once the witnesses saw it for a second to go, oh, look, I see blue jeans or whatever. I mean. Right, right. And I know Alan Plaster said later that he thought it was a prank. But, I mean, he's been dwelling, thinking about that, you know, for 40 some odd years or however was long that, well, you know, in retrospect. But, you know, at the time, you got to go by what he thought immediately and all that. He went and showed the picture to Sally and Clark and Sally and he went down there and he wasn't saying, well, it was just somebody, let's don't bother. I mean, they were convinced at the time, maybe in retrospect, now he's thought about it or he doesn't want to answer questions anymore. Mainly, these people are tired of answering to it. And maybe he just goes, look, I think it was a prank. Let's just leave it at that. You know, there's arguments for and against it. Like, well, if you're going to make a costume, it's easier to make one that's not form fitting. So this thing doesn't have a in-shape humanoid hominin type figure to it or waistline. It's very tent-like. It looks like it's got kind of a rough or some disturbance of the fur around the shoulder line. It's just a very strange looking thing. But I would expect nothing less of some kind of creature like that. As Scott and I always say, it's that ironic meter back and forth. If it's too clear, not believable. Too blurry, not believable. It's got to be somewhere in the middle. It can't be one or the other because then you're stretching people's belief. And this one, you know, who's to say? Other than that, I do believe that there's something there, but just a very odd looking thing, very odd shape. Looks like it has a brow ridge or it's just, you know, with not a lot of definition. It's really hard to make out the bone structure or anything else or really even that left arm. But you do see it is kind of round. It is 3D. It's misty, but there's shape to it. And it's just a very odd shape for somebody to be out there goofing around in some kind of costume. I wonder what the evolutionary reason would be if it was just, you know, a primate or some wild animal that we have not seen or categorized yet for white fur. Because like, to your point, it's going to stand out at night. It's not going to be great at hiding if it's not paranormal in some way. It would be an anomaly like albinism. Oh, right. Yeah. Right. I know. Now, you know, in trying to compare that to something zoological, there's one case of a gorilla having white fur, an albino gorilla. So, it's not something that can't happen. And of course, if we, you know, are to speculate that these creatures are anything related to us or hominids or primates, then it could happen. You know, there's other animals certainly that are white. And I don't know, maybe it's just an anomaly. And that's why it's like the poor thing is being seen everywhere. Right. It can't. It's like, this had to happen to me. That's interesting. And it's funny you should say that because I'm even just thinking about it. Very close to where I live, there are two white deer that were born last year, presumably. And I'm presuming they're still there. I don't know because I could only see them in the fall when the leaves are off the trees. I know roughly where they hang out. And so, I saw them two or three times and I have photos of them. But they're clearly an anomalous pair of siblings, I guess, that both were born with white coats. And I don't know if they've survived to this year, but the leaves are starting to go. And I'm really excited to look for them again. But I'm not in that rural of an area. There's like, where I saw them is near a golf course. So, it's undeveloped, but there's woods all around it. And that's where they were hanging out. That albino ape was named Snowflake, I believe. Oh, it wasn't Snowflake. Okay. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Great name. Yeah. So, I guess in talking about if this is a real creature, where is it sheltering? Where are its remains? If it's not with us anymore, how does it reproduce? Does it have offspring? Where are all those things? Which are always the questions people ask about Bigfoot. It's like, all right, where's the scat? Where are the bones? Was it living on Greer Island? We don't know. That's just speculation because one person saw it swimming towards Greer Island. It could be anywhere. But with all the research that you've done, and specifically into Sasquatch and Bigfoots, where is it thought that they might live if that's what this thing is? Yeah. I think people mention caves. Are there caves in that area? No. They mention nests on the ground. Right. They mention tree nests. Supposedly build these structures, but nobody ever sees one sleeping under it. Right. So, I think you just have to think of them just like anything else. I mean, you can walk through the woods. I mean, sometimes I've come up on hogs, but there's hundreds of hogs in any given woods, and I don't just walk up on sleeping hogs. They're burrowed down in areas. They have a nest under places where you're not going to walk. It's too thick. Yeah. That sort of thing. And there's plenty of places out there. And, you know, Texas has a lot of woods in the Piney Woods in the East Texas. I mean, there's a lot of undergrowth in places where you could bed down at night. So, I would presume that they don't have, you know, a permanent place. They just do as, you know, a deer or something and just sort of bed down near some logs and stuff. And the way the fur, unless you're the Lake Worth monster, you know, typically you're going to blend in with the environment and that'll do you good for the night. Right. So, I would just presume that the, you know, people say it was on Greer Island and certainly could have stayed there. But I don't think it was something, it wasn't building structures or doing anything to where people would later discover. It's just, it just has to lay down where it can, I guess. I guess it's like you always wonder, it's like, well, if this one's here, where were its parents? Where did it come from? How did it initially get here? And did it ever find a mate? And did it have kids? And like, have there been any sightings lately? No, unfortunately not. I mean, people ask that. And it's definitely, it is one of those where it kind of is a capsule in time. Now, incidents happened thereafter into the 70s and well in its 70s, some weird stuff and other things that I include in the book. But as far as the sighting, it's kind of a couple of years and then it just sort of died off. And, you know, that could be attributed to any number of things. I mean, this is essentially a riverway. I mean, it's a waterway. It can move on down. There were sightings in other places further south on the Trinity River, things like that. You know, it could be that, you know, it died at anything, really. So the fact that there aren't sightings doesn't mean that that didn't take place. But the other thing about it is over the years, that area has grown up quite a bit. It's not like it was back then. You know, you're not going to. There is still what's called the Fort Worth Nature Center. And that still encompasses that area of Greer Island. And it's got a big chunk of land. I mean, there's wild buffaloes back there, all kinds of stuff. So it is still a wooded place, but essentially it's now surrounded by stone's throw of home depots and restaurants and all kinds of stuff that just wasn't there. A lot more human presence. And, you know, the nature reserve, you know, people go out there and hike and there's a lot more people that traverse and move around out there. So I think something would probably seek a little more remote area if it if it wanted to stay hidden. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. If it tastes good, you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of or artificial sweeteners are doing all the heavy lifting. It's basically dessert in disguise. You shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious. And that's what makes Aloha stand out. Aloha protein bars nail the delicious and nutritious. 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But the gist of it, it was he was at another island, Goat Island, which is same lake, a little bit further away. And he had the whole story of being out with friends, and they had made camp on Goat Island. Something was being hurled at them regularly. Can you just do a brief overview of what happened to him, why he had sent this story into you? Yeah, Gary's story is really weird. And it happened on into the 70s. And he said, you know, my podcast had an episode about the Lake Worth monster, and it was on YouTube. And he actually made a comment and left that. And that's how I contacted him. And he had this wild story. He said they were out there on the lake, and they were going to camp on this little Goat Island, which is not really very far from Greer Island. And someone or something was hurling huge boulders down into the water, and it really scared them. And they never could see what it was. And this isn't something he's like, you know, this was at night. It was a number of them, and they looked all around the shores. They saw no tents. There was no boats. There was no nothing. And he said these were big rocks. This wasn't something you can just casually pick up and throw. He said it just freaked them out. And eventually, they just took off. But he didn't claim it had anything to do with the creature. But it's, again, you know, we've got tire throwing. And now we've got rock throwing, this whole thing about throwing stuff. Very much Bigfoot activity. And I did eventually meet Gary in person, which was really cool. And I loved his story. And I'm like, yeah, I really think that adds to the book. Because it's, again, I just love to tie in all those loose ends of this just weirdness going on in one specific area to really round out, like, hey, there is just strange things going on in Lake Worth and not even just right there in 1969. Well, we found a paper that I wanted to share some excerpts from about throwing specifically, which I thought was pretty interesting. This is called The Neural and Cognitive Correlates of Aimed Throwing in Chimpanzees. And so specifically, I was looking for stuff related to primates. A Magnetic Resonance Image and Behavioral Study on a Unique Form of Social Tool Use. This was written by William D. Hopkins, Jamie L. Russell, and Jennifer Schaefer. And there's two segments here I wanted to read, which I think is interesting for people that might be considering whether or not, if this is a Bigfoot or related to Sasquatch, that there's some kind of primate behavior going on with that kind of thing. And I've always been fascinated by this, too, because there are so many stories of people having stuff thrown at them. Here's the first one. Visitors to the zoo are sometimes treated to the sight of chimpanzees throwing objects, often feces or wet chow, at each other or at them. What most zoo visitors do not appreciate is the rarity with which throwing occurs in non-human animals. Save for a few unsystematic and anecdotal reports of throwing in monkeys and great apes, there is little evidence that throwing occurs in other animals. Thus, throwing appears to have come under positive selection pressure in hominins. From an evolutionary standpoint, some have suggested that throwing may have offered many advantages to early hominins, such as the ability to kill larger prey without putting oneself at a risk of being wounded or killed. The ability to kill large game for the purposes of nutrition while simultaneously minimizing one's personal risk of injury or death would have been selectively advantageous. Among non-human primates, throwing has most frequently been observed in wild and captive chimpanzees, though there are reports in other great ape species and, to a lesser extent, in monkeys. Throwing has been described as a form of tool use in chimpanzees at a number of long-term field sites in Africa, including Gombe, Mahale, Bosu, and the Thai Forest. In the wild and in captivity, throwing has mostly been recorded in the context of both inter- and intraspecies agonistic encounters, although some have described it as a means of initiating play or communication. Well, I thought that was super interesting because if you look at whatever this thing is, and if it has any primate tendencies, you start to think about the reasons that it's, you know, is it a warning? Is it trying to hurt you? Is it just trying to scare you off? Or is it saying, or is it a form of hello? You know, what's happening here, right? The other thing that I read was that aside from some monkeys, almost no primates are good at it. They're not good at targeting, apparently, and they're saying that that's a uniquely human talent when it comes to throwing things, which again, if we were talking about a primate with some human characteristics, it might be better at targeting than, say, a primate in these conditions. So I'm going to read this one last part, and I'll be done here. From a psychological and neurological standpoint, aimed throwing is very interesting for several reasons. First, it has been hypothesized that some instances of aimed throwing by chimpanzees reflect foresight or future planning on the part of the apes, an ability often described as uniquely human. For instance, Osvath eloquently describes a zoo-living male chimpanzee named Santino that hides rocks out of sight of the care staff, waiting to reveal and throw them at approaching visitors at the most opportune time. Evidence of planning comes from the observation that Santino searches for the rocks from a moat inside the enclosure prior to the arrival of the care staff and visitors and caches the rocks out of sight, only to pull them out when the visitors arrive. We have made similar observations of this type of the so-called planning behavior in the chimpanzees housed at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Some of the chimpanzees will pile feces or wet chow in their cage and wait for visitors to pass by before throwing this at them. We would further argue that aimed throwing in the chimpanzees, though often agonistic in function and consequence, is not part of the ape's display behavior. Indeed, most instances of aimed throwing that we have observed occur without any accompanying display behaviors, such as piloerection, hooting, or charging, further suggesting an element of planning on the part of the individual ape. So, sorry, those were two big excerpts, but I thought this was super fascinating because when you think about all the cases, which you know way more, you're a professional Sasquatch Bigfoot researcher among all these other cryptids, you're constantly hearing about these. You hear about the throwing and the tree knocking the most, but then also the hooting. Do you have, in the past, when you look at the broader picture of possible Sasquatch or Bigfoot interactions that involve throwing, going against this, have you, is there always a connection to the hooting and the vocalizations that you hear? Or do you find those to be isolated incidents? It's either throwing or howling. It's one or the other, or do they occur? Can you think of cases where they have occurred hand in hand? Typically, it's just the throwing. Rock started hurling. I interviewed a couple of fishermen lately that said, we're fishing and rock started landing in the water. Not followed by, you know, a hoot or a howl or anything. It's usually just the rock throwing, or if you're in the woods, a rock hurled by out of the trees. Now, sometimes, like in the case of that one fisherman, he said that he got up and went up thinking it was some people, went up in the trees, and all of a sudden, a Bigfoot stepped out 10 feet from him. And then it ran off and he heard hooting or howling or something. Okay. So, later. But yeah, you know, I've never really thought about that. But no, it's not usually like there's grunts and hoots and here's a rock. It just seems like a rocks. A guy, I was at the Texas Bigfoot Conference a few weeks ago, and a guy, this is the first time I've ever seen this. He had a video that showed a rock flying by. Oh, wow. No. They're talking to the guy in person. And he said that, you know, rocks were flying and he turned the video on and he's like looking around all like, what's going on? And you see a rock fly by. Now, typically, you just get the report, the story. Right. Right. But the most fascinating thing about this and listening to that paper is that it says they're not accurate, you know, and then we presume that accuracy comes with being more human-like. Exactly. But I've never had anybody say that they were hit by the rocks. Rocks are always close. Right. You know, and they're strategically thrown, but nobody's ever hit by the rock. You know, nobody comes up with this, you know, their skull crack from some huge rock, which is interesting. It must suggest that they are accurate. Right. In terms of throwing feces too, it makes me wonder about Alan's Polaroid. You know, why was it squatting down? It might've been like, can I just have a minute trying to go to the bathroom when the car came by? But does a beast go in the woods? But here's the other part of the rules aspect of it is that if it did throw feces and it stuck on you, well, then that could be analyzed and then you would have some answers. And so that can't happen. We can't have anything that concrete to analyze with DNA, but it does show some measure of control because here's the thing. We've often thrown stuff, aim for stuff in a waste paper basket. You often miss or you, or you hit it. And then sometimes you accidentally throw something or toss something and you hit something that you didn't mean to, or land somewhere you didn't mean to. And here it just seems like eventually somebody would be hit. Now I've heard stories of people being hit by small pebbles or the side of their tent and nothing crashing through or no serious damage being done, but then sometimes larger stones that crush tent poles I've heard being thrown. So here though, yeah, I think with what we're talking about is something that has a measure of control. It's a message. Basically all of the messages are go away, leave me alone. Or as a method of communication, perhaps like, like the wood knocking and the hooting and the howling. So yeah, we're trying to put behavior aspects on something that is less concrete, even than a Bigfoot. I would say like, this is something just the way that people describe it is that this is maybe something different or a mutation of something else out there, or just from another dimension that we have no idea what type of creatures come from this portal. But if it's going to be a prank, going to be very cleverly done. So I give a hats off to whoever is doing this, but Scott, you were going to talk about some confessors. Well, yeah, I was just wondering, like, you know, because you mentioned towards the end of the book, the kids that came forward and, oh, it's wearing a goat skin. And I put this thing on my head or, or the, the guy who said that they, they rolled the tire down the hill and it only went airborne because it hit a, you know, a natural ramp of some kind. One of the things that we've found over the years in all these shows that, that we've covered that have similar origins and the, and the folklore connections, which we'll talk about here in a second. But even prior to getting into the folklore and how stories get told among people and relayed over time to different generations and that sort of thing, there also always seems to be people who are ready to confess to whatever was seen. When you look into it, it feels like they're confessing to things. There's no relationship between what would actually happened or, or a very thin relationship between what actually happened and what they're saying they did. Much like a false confession as it relates to true crime. What do you think about that? Like, what do you think about these folks that said they threw the tire, they threw the wheel? It was a kid in wearing a, a goat pelt jumping on the hood of the car. What do you think about that aspect of this story? Yeah. I noticed that as well. You, you have these various stories about how, you know, it was me and my cousin and we did it all. Here's how we did it. Or usually it's like they try to explain one incident, but you're like, but there was a whole lot for a number of years. Would, were you down there all of that time? Right. Uh, how do you explain that? And some of them are pretty funny in the Lake Worth case. The one woman said, Oh, that was my brother's. They went down there and dressed up in mascara and underwear or something. They had bungee cords between the trees and they're swinging around. And these, these are like 10, 11 year old, 14 year old boys. I'm like, okay, I don't think that's going to fool anybody into thinking that was a huge seven foot tall, ape-like creature. And also what were 14 and 11 year old boys doing down there at midnight? Right. In a lover's lane way out there in the middle of nowhere. I mean, come on. Yeah. And yet some other just cursory claims, you know, a guy said he threw the tire. It took a lucky hop. I actually got up there on that ridge some years ago when, when they would let you go up there, took a tire with the wheel and attempted to throw it, attempted to give it a crazy hop off the, it wouldn't go like not even 30 feet from, if that, from the edge of the cliff. They did not sail across there. So if these guys did it, it was an amazing one of a time feet. Yeah. But I also was contacted by another guy who said, I was on the ridge that night and I saw this big, tall, hairy thing run off right after the tire was thrown. He said, I didn't see the tire thrown. Right. But he said, I saw whatever it was run into the brush. So ultimately you have conflicting claims about what was going on that often sound more ridiculous than just to say, Hey, there was a monster. Yeah. Yeah. That's so true. That's so true. And then it gets really outrageous. I think that also the need for cognitive closure and people's need to, they don't like to have something out there that they can't wrap their heads around. So they perpetrate some hoax to say, see, Oh, it could have been a hoax or whatever. It's for their own personal compulsion to be like, I can't have this out there. So I'm going to, I'm going to create a hoax just to show that it was a hoax. So it was somebody else's hoax, but this proves that it was a hoax, you know? So, cause it's almost like this need to be like part of it in a rational way and to convince everyone that there can't be something unknown. There is some psychology, I think to that. Cause I used to have a guy who on social media, which just would hound me about how this was just a hoax. And I mean, just seemed hell bent on the whole thing. Like he had some skin in the game. I'm like, I never claimed it was anything. I'm just telling the story. I'm putting it all out there. You decide. But I found it odd, the conviction of, you know, he wasn't disrespectful or anything, but it was just, yeah, he was on an agenda to, to just disprove the whole thing. And he didn't have all the information that I have and certainly never interviewed Eric Reichman about his father or any of that stuff. It's like, dude, there's a lot more to this than just whether the tire was thrown. And even if we throw out the tire throwing, how do you explain all the rest of it? Yeah. We can't say that it's every single instance they actually saw something unexplained fine enough, but just because one thing was misinterpreted doesn't mean that you have to throw out the whole case. That's a very common human behavior characteristic we find with trying to maybe debunk a lot of the paranormal stories people hear is that you find one thing that maybe has a logical explanation to it or can be applied to it. And then you use that to plaster over everything else. You know what I'm saying? Like, there you go. Or this one person turned out to be a liar or they were arrested for something else. And it's like, so the whole thing can't be trusted. Because again, I think it's an easier thing to do than to consider that this kind of strangeness is out there. This kind of terror is out in the, uh, out in the wilds than to say, okay, now we can put this to rest. This one person was untruthful or they did, they were caught lying about something else. So we can throw out the whole story because all we have is the personality really of the people involved. You know, we've seen him with everything and Roger Patterson, like, okay, he was a huckster and a showman, but then we don't have to believe the rest of it. But what did Bob Gimlin see? Who doesn't have that label applied to him? What about all the other cases? Well, you can throw that out or people will say like, well, there you go because Roger Patterson was kind of a showman carnival type. We can ignore the rest of the Bigfoot stories as well. And so again, I just see that as people trying to comfort themselves in some way. I mean, I get you're trying to get to the truth of this, but when you're really, like you say, you have a real agenda to take that one square peg and pat it into the round hole to get this thing to go away. It seems like something more than just say, well, you know, we found some stuff and, you know, it can be dismissed or put aside because it's kind of questionable. We don't have enough evidence, but to really have that kind of, I guess, enthusiasm to want to make this thing go away is, yeah, it's flopping back to the other side of the argument. Rather than also somebody trying to convince other people so much that it's true that maybe they start making up stuff. One other thing is we had, you know, we had, I know, you know, Micah, we had Micah Hanks on back in July of 2021. He was on an episode called Search for Men Like Monsters in History, I think was the name of it, where he basically went through the history of humanity and looked at all of these different kinds of stories and said, what if these are all just Bigfoot? What if all, and they just, they're not being described the same way because they're being described from different periods of time by different cultures who have different words for things and how they're perceiving it, what they're using to characterize the thing that they don't understand is different. But if you look at all of it, maybe it all comes together in a very particular way. And that's the thing I wonder about here too, because you get these stories too, a lot of times with this first incident, especially the first one that makes the paper or makes the news or whatever. And then it's characterized as a goat man because the Rikers thought they saw horns. And so then you've got now the word goat is connected to it. And so what happens is all the folks who become intrigued by it and want to go out there and see it, before they see anything, they're already like, where's the goat man? Where, you know, it's going to look like a goat. And so they start framing it a certain way rather than coming into it with no preconception about what they might encounter. And as a result, you get all of the sightings are tainted in a certain way by the expectations rather than giving us a very like, what did you see exactly? You know? And like with regard to the horns, the first thing I thought of was the Shope papillomavirus, which is what gives the rabbits the horns that led to, in theory, the jackalope or the idea of the jackalope, because they get that virus and these crazy things come out usually of their head or their jaws or whatever. And they're like, poof, now you have a jackalope. So we have this thing that might've been a primate or a Sasquatch or a Bigfoot, if you believe in that, that lives outside in a muddy river area. There are all kinds of things could have, in its fur, could have looked like horns. Do you think sometimes that the popular culture description of the, whatever the being might be, might get in the way of the accuracy of future sightings? What you think you're going to see can influence what you describe. Even just on top of that, just your cultural references, your general life experiences, all of this plays in. It's not as simple as, you know, studying this thing in a very neutral way. It's like you see it quickly and everything you, your brain has, you know, been taught and what you believe and what you think you're going to see can play in. It could taint them. It doesn't mean that you're making it up. It's just that, was it a goat man or was it a Bigfoot or was it a dog man, you know? And I think, yeah, if the paper said it was a scaly goat man, it becomes a goat man, even though really all the sightings after that, no one said it had horns. But when you go, when they have an event every year called, not every year, every five years called the Lake Worth Monster Bash, that it celebrates the goat man. And there's a guy in a goat man costume and there's tire throwing contests and a lot of fun stuff, but it's the goat man. Right. Goat man is more unique. It stands out, you know, not just another ubiquitous Sasquatch. There's tons of those. We got the coat man. But that's from the first sighting. It's like, really, more people described it as an ape-like creature in the footprints were described as being human-like, 18 inches long. It's a Bigfoot track, you know? Yeah. There's a picture in my book of Sally Ann Clark holding one of the castings. That is a straight up Bigfoot, not a hoof, not a cloven hoof, not a goat man. But yeah, just whatever it is described by the paper or whatever, even the nomenclature monster, like the Falk monster that people talk about in Boggy Creek, people, first question is usually, do you think this is a Bigfoot? I'm like, well, look at the descriptions. It's absolutely described as a Bigfoot, but the paper calls it a monster. And therefore people think, well, is it something different? In your book, it's a great drawing by Jonathan Dodd. He was guided by John Reichert's son, Eric. And, you know, that was based off his memory of seeing this picture a lot, I imagine. But in the photo, he does have more goat-like legs and hooves rather than feet. And you see long kind of fingers with claws or long fingernails. This thing, whatever it has, is able to scratch the car. That was seen by the law enforcement. I think there's at least four squad cars that went down to investigate and checked out the car. And they are more ram-like horns coming out of his head. So it's very detailed. And I give this a little more credence because John Reichert actually tackled this thing. He bum-rushed this thing because it was threatening his wife. And basically he had a very good look at this thing right up close in that moment. That thing's burned into your memory. Whatever you could see of it is probably going to make a huge impression for the rest of your life. And it seemed to be that way. He gave a description of it. But it's very detailed, but it is a little different than, it's not Bigfoot-like. This is more Minotaur or Chimera-like. But you're saying this thing generally from when you call all the descriptions together, it is more Bigfoot-like. It's more ape-like overall. That's true. That's what most people described him. But of course, that's pretty compelling because Eric remembered a drawing his dad had made. Unfortunately, as these things go, the drawing has been lost in the course of Eric's life. And he had the drawing, but unfortunately it was lost. But he's like, I can remember the drawing. So I got with my good buddy, Jonathan Dodd, who is an amazing artist. And I said, you talk directly with Eric and see if you can recreate this drawing. And that was what they came up with. And I was really surprised to see that it had ram horns because I kept thinking little horns sticking straight up. Right, right. Exactly. That's a formidable looking creature. And it does the hooves and everything else. But that's what his dad described. And that's what he perceived it. Now, maybe the other people didn't see the horns or maybe there were, maybe, who knows? But again, the people were just describing as best they could what they saw. And what do you make of the different aspects of it? Again, this kind of caught our attention because of the, just the strangeness of the descriptions by people who saw it up real close, inches away. And the idea of the fish scales, because again, with Lizard Man, there was something shiny about that. There were other descriptions that something was glimmering. Do you think it was more just misidentification of that? Okay. It probably wasn't a type of fish scale or a plate. It was probably something more like matted fur or skin that was glistening. Yeah. That whole thing about the scales is the hardest thing to recognize. I don't know. I mean, you know, you try to put this into a box that we can comprehend. I think it's a good, as good a point as any to say, this is a watery area, moonlight glistening over off wet fur look like scales or something. Yeah. So now we have this vision of what that is, but that may not be exactly what Mr. Reichert saw. Nobody had any kind of smell descriptions? Yeah. I don't recall any of that. And yeah, usually you do get that. Yeah. Not exclusive to skunk ape. People will say, oh, there's a foul odor. Right. If you were to get close to one of these feral hogs, they stink and they're not covered in fish scales. They just stink because they live in the woods. But yeah, you just didn't get that, which is kind of odd. Well, I suppose people could point that to the hoax theories like, well, if you're going to dress up in a suit, you're not going to cover yourself with stink, you know, or some kind of predator urine or pheromone that you're going to find at a outdoor shop. Well, there you go. That's why it didn't, you know, nobody reported a stink because it's a guy in a suit and he's not going to want to stink himself up for this. But, but I would, I would, I would be, I would be dedicated. How far is it from the shore? I know there's a bridge now, there's a pedestrian bridge now, but back then, how far of a swim would it be from the shore to Greer Island? It's about a hundred yards. I think something like that. Yeah. About football field. And deep enough that you couldn't, you couldn't wade or walk across in the water. No, it's, it's deep enough there. Well, one thing I always enjoy about Lyle's writing in his books is that he also covers mythology of these types of things going way back to antiquity, ancient times, ancient Greek and Roman times. And even further than that, what people in antiquity have described and seen, or at least that's part of their mythology and it's part of their belief system at the time. Because I think a line can be drawn from them. And we always think like, oh, those silly people from the ancient Greek times, they didn't know what they were talking about. And they got such great stories, but that's all they are. And then I see this. And like I said, if you believe the people and you hear these eyewitness accounts, okay, is that a minotaur? Is that a chimera? And so one thing I wanted to describe is like that goat man, that sounds ridiculous. Like nothing has a goat head on it. Like how can that be just even as a hybrid or some kind of genetic mutation? Well, you know, according to Greek mythology there, the chimera, C-H-I-M-E-R-A was described as some kind of beast with a lion's body with a goat's head protruding from its back. And then it has a tail that's like a snake's head. Some descriptions have it with dragon's wings. Again, another thing we've often seen winged creatures, Mothman comes to mind. And in antiquity there, also something that breathed fire. So now we have a dragon hybrid kind of thing, but then you just wonder about the goat's head coming out of its back. And of course it's got a lion's head as well. So, and then you look at the minotaur from ancient Greek myth, sometimes called Asturion, with the head and tail of a bull, but the body of a man. Or as Ovid describes in the Roman poet, part man and part bull. He's a beast that must be defeated. But then, you know, man, if you watch any of these other shows, ancient aliens, it leads back to the discussion of like, well, were these creatures real then? And were they some kind of genetic experiment by some extent force? It's described in the Old Testament as the Nephilim or the Nephilim of the offspring of angels, gods, supernatural beings, and humans, and breeding this class of very destructive giants and other strange creatures that terrorized people. And do those still exist today? Are they just coming through another portal? Is what the ancient peoples, our ancient human ancestors saw just these types of same things, but they wound up in their myths and mythology? And is that what they're describing? But these things did exist in some form. So what's your idea though, about the mythology and how that all ties in with things like the Seder and other mythological creatures? You know, this book gave me a good excuse to delve into the Goatman legends because it's something I haven't been able to do in the course of some of the other books. But the fact that even if one witness describes it as a Goatman, you know, you're like, okay, how does that compare to other cases where people report Goatman? And of course, you know, you have the most famous, perhaps the Maryland Goatman, you have the Popelik Monster of Kentucky, and these all have similar descriptions which are, you know, a head of a goat with a body of a man and the legs of a goat, something, you know, a mishmash of that. And, you know, of course, all that is not something new at all. That's something we have, you know, a creature like the Seder. We think of the god Pan, you know, playing the Goatman-looking thing, playing a flute. You know, these themes have been there. And of course, they bring into question, like you said, are these things that people have been seeing all along? And they're described in that moment of culture as, oh, it's a, is it a beast in the woods? Is it a god, creature of folklore? It just depends on that moment in time as to how people describe it. But, you know, you can look backward and find descriptions of similar creatures as far back as you want to go to suggest that perhaps they've always been here. So, you know, I, in the book, you know, I took a moment to just sort of talk about a bit of the, you know, the correlation between the Maryland Goatman case, which also has descriptions of it being just a, more of a Bigfoot-like creature. Yeah. And it's sort of evolved into this Goatman, and then suddenly it's carrying an axe. And, and even legends of Goatman, how they often correspond with bridges. Yeah. Yeah. Or train trestles, like in the Popelic Monster of Kentucky, that's associated with not only a bridge, but a train trestle. Yeah. And the Maryland Goatman's associated with a bridge. And also we have a legend, the old Alton Goatman legend, which is not far from where Lake Worth was, that has this more paranormal Goatman entity. But what I found, and one thing that's unique in Lake Worth is all the others tend to have some crazy origin stories, like it was a science experiment gone wrong. The circus train crash. The circus train crashed in the Kentucky woods. Or, you know, the old Alton Goatman, a man who was called the Goatman was hung from the bridge, and now his spirit is a Goatman, it's returned. But the Lake Worth Monster, however, it's just simply, people started seeing something strange. There's no crazy, mad science origin or nothing. It's just monster in the woods that occurred. So that's what I found in comparing. But certainly these ancient creatures, the similarities to minotaurs and other wild things that we think are very mythological. Hey, John Reichert literally ran into what ancient people would think is a mythological creature or even a god. I mean, but we call it a cryptid now, you know. Well, Lyle, we want to thank you for your time. You know, the folklore aspect of this, I see the folklore and the story itself almost like a classic painting. It's like the folklore is a frame on the painting. The painting and the frame, they're two different things. They're both beautiful and compelling in their own ways. And they're connected forever, but at the same time, there is a border between them. And they both can stand on their own. But to me, they're both part of the story. And you can identify differences between the painting and the frame, because the frame is accenting the painting, but the painting in itself is also real. I think that, again, to Forrest's point on what he said about your writing at the top of the show, the great thing about all of your books is that you look at all of the angles, you look at everything, you look at the origins, you look at the other stories, and you put in the most compelling stuff, and you dig up things that other people haven't found. Again, thank you for your time. Thank you for joining us today. Folks, if you haven't heard Monstro Bizarro, it's a great podcast by Lyle. Look for that. And then if you want to know more about this and read a really great book about it, find The Lake Worth Monster, The True Story of the Greer Island Goatman by Lyle Blackburn, which, of course, we're going to have links to in our show notes. Is Amazon the best place to get that? Or is there anywhere else that people should be getting it from? Your website, maybe? Well, it's all good either way, but you can get autographed copies if you visit LyleBlackburn.com. So there is that option if you so prefer. After all this, and everybody's stance has evolved, the more research you do, and you've certainly done a lot of it, what is your overall stance on Bigfoot and other cryptids being paranormal versus supernatural, like an actual living thing? Or do you think that, where do you come down on it being something that exists outside of our reality? You're always gathering data and refining what you think this is. It's not something that you get a hard, in-stone view of right when you start. So I always say that I like the romantic thought of there is this undiscovered ape in the woods and it's attainable and I could get a picture. I could have something like that and you're Indiana Jones and you're going to discover this or whatever. But you realize that there is something that's a little bit beyond our ability to capture or prove. And so all theories are great to me. I mean, that's how you get things accomplished in life. You speculate and you try to sort out what is the best. So it is possible that there is some aspect to these that is what we might consider paranormal. You know, I'm not convinced, I'm not convinced they're coming here from outer space or I'm not sure about the portal possibilities. But again, I'm just, I'm just one guy who people say, I mean, you're an expert or whatever. The newspaper will call you that. But I'm just a guy who does a lot of research and love these topics and love the possibility that any of this even remotely exists. And so I'm open-minded as to what it is. And the more I keep going down this path and the more experiences I have, and the more people I interview, the more I refine that into a solid theory of what it could possibly be. That's going to wrap up episode 296 of Astonishing Legends. A very special thanks to our friend Lyle Blackburn for joining us tonight. Look for new episodes of The Dead Letter Office weekly on Tuesdays, and we'll be back the week after next with a new show. Find and subscribe to the other shows from the Astonishing Legends Network, The Midnight Library, Scared All the Time, and Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf. We have links to all of them in our show notes. Our show is edited by Sarah Voorhees-Wendell at VW Sound and co-produced by Tess Feifel, who is also head of research and the social media manager. Our technical producer is Ed Vakola, or as we call him, The Mechanic. Special thanks to our announcer, John Bolin. Hi, I'm Luke Schoaf. Hi, I'm Luke Carruthers, and I give permission to Astonishing Legends. I'm Billy, and I give permission to Astonishing Legends. I understand this is with no implied promise of present or future compensation. Hey, this is Luke. My name is... Hi. 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At IBM Research, what we always do is answer what is the future of computing, whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together. It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future. Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff? Yes. Building actual physical machines. Yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? Yeah. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum? By 2029, we'll build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit ibm.com slash quantum. 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Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed's sponsored jobs. On eBay, every find has a story. Like if you're looking for a vintage band tee. Not just a tee. The band tee. From the last show your favorite band ever played. You wore it everywhere. Then, your BFF started glaring it. Which was cute, until they unfriended you and took it with them. Which was not so cute. Anyway, now you're on eBay. And there it is. Same tee from the same tour. Still living in your memory, rent-free, forever. See? The things you love have a way of finding their way back to you. But eBay isn't just for getting whatever your ex-BFF stole back. It's also for that rare championship foul ball you caught, then heroically gave to the kid next to you. And where else are you going to find your first car? The one you wish you never sold, but now, you finally get the chance to take back home. For good this time. Shop eBay for millions of finds. Each with a story. eBay. Things people love. You are more than just a heart patient. At Trinity Health of New England, we get to know you, which can help us diagnose a problem and start treatment faster. Our cardiovascular team offers the latest imaging and device technology, testing, and surgical procedures you'd expect from a national health system, with the personal touch you want from local experts. We know the importance of seeing the person behind the patient, because we see all of you. Learn more at trinityhealthofne.org slash heart. You are more than just a heart patient. At Trinity Health of New England, we get to know you, which can help us diagnose a problem and start treatment faster. Our cardiovascular team offers the latest imaging and device technology, testing, and surgical procedures you'd expect from a national health system, with the personal touch you want from local experts. We know the importance of seeing the person behind the patient, because we see all of you. Learn more at trinityhealthofne.org slash heart. Central Connecticut State University. Master your future. Enroll in graduate studies at Central. Voted Best Graduate Schools by U.S. News and World Report. Apply today. Visit ccsu.edu slash apply. Hi, this is Danielle Robay, the host of Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, a podcast by Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts. I'm partnering with Simple Mills, and I've just found my new go-to reading snack, Simple Mills Almond Flour Crackers. Think of this as a quick book style review, because these crackers deserve it. The premise? A snack that feels light, not heavy. Made with almond flour, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds. Nutrient-dense ingredients your body can use, not empty carbs. And the taste? Crunchy classic flavors that leave you feeling energized. For a good plot twist, try Pop'Em's. Cheesy, airy, poppable crackers packed with veggies. Final verdict? These are a shelf staple. Find Simple Mills at your grocery store.