Sasquatch in Canada are not just seen in British Columbia as many might think but they are seen all over the second largest country (in land mass) in the world.

W.T. Watson joins us to talk about bigfoot sightings up north!

You can find his recent book on the subject Sasquatch Canada: Beyond British Columbia at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3XcZ9g2

Thanks W.T.

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TRANSCRIPT

[intro music]

This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.

JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the program. So glad to be with you once again, and I especially am happy to be with you when we have a repeat guest who is just fantastic. We’ve spoken to W.T. Watson multiple times on our Plus shows and so forth, and now he’s on the Paranormal Podcast. We’re so glad to have him. We’re going to talk about our friends Up North, and specifically one friend Up North – Sasquatch. He has a recent book out called Sasquatch Canada: Beyond British Columbia.

W.T. Watson is a coffee addict (that makes two of us) and writer of both fiction and non-fiction. He infuses his work with his expertise in cryptozoology, monster lore, magic, Forteana and the paranormal. He brings a unique shamanic and magical perspective to all of his work after over 30 years of exploration in these topics. When he’s not writing or reading about monsters, he can be found outdoors, allowing his dogs to take him for a walk around his neighborhood in Kitchener, Ontario. He lives with his spouse, Stacey, in a townhome that would be jammed with books if it weren’t for e-readers. Thank goodness for e-readers. W.T. Watson, thank you for joining us today.

W.T. WATSON: Thank you so much for having me again, Jim. It’s a pleasure talking with you.

JIM HAROLD: Really good to speak with you today. I really appreciate your time. Now, first of all, I want to get this clear with people because I think people lose sight of it, particularly Americans – which is the plurality of our audience, the majority of our audience. Explain to people, when we’re talking about Canada as a land mass, the geography of it, how massive is it? And how much of it is really inhabited?

W.T. WATSON: This is one of the things that really drove me to write this book. Canada is actually the second largest country in the world. I learned in researching Canadian Monsters & Mysteries, it also has the longest coastline in the world. But the interesting thing about it is that this massive land mass of Canada, the majority of the population live within 150 miles of the American border. So there are vast swaths of Canada that see little to no human interaction or human touch at any given time.

I tell a story in the book about the Lazarus species that comes from Canada. It’s called a wood bison. You’ve got to understand, the wood bison is, by weight, the largest land animal in North America. But that creature was declared extinct at the beginning of the 20^th century and was considered to be extinct for several decades, until an Alberta forestry officer happened to be flying over one of the forests in Canada, looked down, and saw a herd of 200 of these critters. This is the largest land animal in North America. It’s not the tallest – the moose is taller – but it is the largest land animal in North America, and we lost it in Canada for 30 or 50 years. [laughs]

Canada is really a massive, massive country, and it’s for the most part fairly uninhabited by human beings, so there’s lots of space for strange things to develop. As I said, my last book was about some of the other weird things that you see in Canada, but I wanted to focus on Sasquatch in this one.

JIM HAROLD: You use that phrase “Beyond British Columbia,” and I suspect that’s where most people think when they think of Canada, these reports of Sasquatch. I know in the United States, when we think of Bigfoot, a lot of times our minds go to our Pacific Northwest, which is Washington state and so forth, and obviously in close proximity to British Columbia. Is that true? Is there this misnomer that all of the Sasquatch sightings in Canada are in B.C.?

W.T. WATSON: It is true. I joke sometimes that a lot of the American writers who write about Sasquatch or Bigfoot, whatever you want to call them, forget that Canada is not this vast ice sheet above the United States border where there’s just a few people living in igloos with polar bears running around. It’s actually a vast, forested ecosphere with many different ecological regions, many of which are capable of supporting a large animal.

The reason that I focused on “beyond B.C.” is exactly what you were talking about, Jim. In most cases, if the writers about Sasquatch dealt with Canada at all, they simply transferred up from the Pacific Northwest into British Columbia. And don’t get me wrong, there are a huge number of sightings in British Columbia. It is a definite hotspot. Places like Harrison Hot Springs are very, very attuned to the whole Sasquatch lore and mythos and incidents and encounters because it happens a lot around these areas.

But as I started to do the research for this book, I wanted to know if there were a significant number of sightings in the other provinces in Canada. And as it turns out, there really are. I found Sasquatch encounters in every province in Canada except for Nunavut, which is in the far, far north. Part of the reason for that may be simply a lack of cover. Part of it may be that the majority of the people that live in those areas are Indigenous people, and they’re not as forthright with their stories about the Big Man as some people are.

But there are huge numbers of sightings in Canada, besides British Columbia. In my notes – not all of these stories made it into the book, obviously, but in my notes I probably have somewhere between 150 and 200 encounters. So Sasquatch definitely still exists outside of British Columbia.

JIM HAROLD: One I want to get to right away is your very own province. You think of Ontario, you think of Toronto, you think of Ottawa, these big international, important cities, your nation’s capital. And Toronto obviously is really, truly an international city. So Sasquatch even in Ontario?

W.T. WATSON: Oh, absolutely. What most people don’t realize – just to give a United States example, when you say that you live in New York state, most people picture New York City.

JIM HAROLD: Sure, that’s true.

W.T. WATSON: They don’t realize that there are vast swaths of woodlands and the Adirondacks and all this farmland and so forth. I lived in western New York for many years, actually close to a state park, and had all sorts of wildlife encounters and so forth there.

The same thing happens with Ontario. When you say Ontario, a lot of people think of Toronto, and they picture the big cosmopolitan, wonderful city that Toronto is, Toronto and its surrounds. I live in the Kitchener Waterloo area, which is a little ways from Toronto, but it’s still maybe an hour or two from where I live.

What they don’t realize is that if I left my house right now and I drove two hours north, I could be in the wilderness. I mean dense, forested, wooded wilderness. So we do have a significant number of Sasquatch sightings here in the Ontario area, some of which center on a place called Algonquin Provincial Park, which is probably well-known to people who’ve done any camping or backpacking or that kind of thing up here in Ontario. It’s a very popular park. It’s populated by wolves and loons and all that sort of thing. And if the stories are to be believed, it’s populated by Sasquatch as well.

One of the interesting stories that I found – there’s a whole section in the book about roadside encounters because it’s so common to see these creatures alongside of a road. Two truckers driving along Queen Elizabeth Way, which is a major highway that runs through southern Ontario – goes from the Buffalo area into Canada and then across to Toronto and keeps going on. I believe it ends up crossing back over the border into Michigan. But these two truckers are driving along. They’re in St. Catharines, Ontario, which is, again, southern Ontario. It is a town of about 150,000 people, so it’s a good size city, and there are suburbs and so forth in the area, so the population is actually much larger as far as human population.

These two truckers saw what they were certain was a Sasquatch in a creek bed in St. Catharines, Ontario, as they were driving along the Queen Elizabeth Parkway, I believe it’s called. They were talking about tall figure, dark, broad shoulders, the standard conical head, no-neck kind of description that you get so often in Sasquatch reports. But these guys are in a populated area.

I was thinking about that, and part of me kind of wanted to disregard that sighting. But then I got thinking about it. As I said, I live in Kitchener. The Waterloo area is actually larger than St. Catharines. We have creek beds and river beds and all sorts of waterways all throughout this area, and the wildlife use them as highways. If you get down to one of these things, you can see foxes, you can see raccoons, and I’m told – I haven’t actually seen this, but you can see deer down there. And one of the things that seems to be fairly common with Sasquatch is the relationship to the deer and how they may predate those.

So I put the story in the book because it’s always possible one of the big guys followed a deer down one of these waterways and ended up in town. For a creature that’s pretty well-known for its elusiveness, I thought that was – maybe a juvenile or something that doesn’t know any better. I thought it was a fascinating story.

JIM HAROLD: Canadian stories of Sasquatch map to U.S. stories? We’re seeing very common behavior. Are they pretty much very similar physically and all of those things?

W.T. WATSON: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve been asked is if the Canadian Sasquatch is any different than the Sasquatch –

JIM HAROLD: More polite, maybe. [laughs]

W.T. WATSON: Maybe a little more polite, yeah. The one thing that I’ve noted is that the Sasquatch encounters that I researched were pretty similar to the kind of Sasquatch encounters that you might have in the Pacific Northwest. You’re talking about a creature that’s supposed to be somewhere between 8 and 10 feet tall, depending on who you’re talking to. Massive. People often emphasize the shoulders and talk about how it’s built like a linebacker or whatever. Very little in the way of neck. They don’t actually turn their heads, they turn their bodies. The conical head. Most of the encounters that I read seemed to be more of the ape-type creature that people described.

So yeah, very similar. The thing that you see, though, the thing that I pointed out, is the differences in Sasquatch lore seem to happen when you get farther south in the United States, into places like Florida, where you get what seems to be a somewhat smaller, skinnier version of the Sasquatch. That may be a local adaptation to the climate. As you know, we grow things big up here in the Great White North. You’ve got moose and bison and so forth.

One of the things that I did note was there was a series of sightings in the Alberta area around the Bighorn Dam where people claimed that these creatures were upwards of 15 feet tall, and it seemed to be in that one area.

One of the things that irritates me is we have these people who are experts who tell us, “No, that’s not possible. Sasquatch don’t get that big.” I always have to stop and wonder about that. I’m 6’7”. The average male in North America is 5’10”, 5’11”. Does that mean I don’t exist because I don’t fall within the average height parameters? There are differences in the size of human beings; therefore, one would assume that there would be differences in the size of these creatures, depending on how you see them and what you think they are.

That’s one of the things. I hadn’t run across a Sasquatch story with a creature that big in the United States. Maybe the local adaptation – as I said, the farther north you get, the larger things get. You compare our timber wolves to the wolves in the United States and they make them look diminutive. We have the big bears and the moose and so forth. Go ahead.

JIM HAROLD: I was going to ask you this. You were talking about the Sasquatch near the Queen Elizabeth Way. Other than that, how close are we talking that Sasquatch in Canada has been reported near a city? Because you can have areas that are not city-like at all and all of a sudden you’re in a city. So how close to a major city have they been reported?

W.T. WATSON: Again, the typical Sasquatch encounter happens in the wilderness. Your witnesses are going to be outdoors people, hunters, fishermen, people like us, forestry service people. Those kinds of folks are the people that encounter Sasquatches most often. The next most common thing is going to be your roadside sightings, and those, again, tend to happen in more wilderness areas. There’s a terrific one with an EMT who’s coming out of an oilfield in Alberta that saw a Sasquatch along the side of this track that they used for getting out of the oilfield.

As far as cities go, though, what seems to happen – if you’re going to have a Sasquatch encounter somewhere close to a city, you’re not obviously going to have them in the inner city, but typically what will happen is you’ll have something that’s in something of a suburb, and that suburb is going to back onto dense forested area that goes on for some ways away from whatever the housing is.

That St. Catharines sighting is kind of a one-off, but we do have reports of these creatures in truly close proximity to cities, but as I say, it’s usually in the suburban areas that back onto – you’ve got to realize that in Canada particularly – and I saw this in western New York, too – you drive for 10 minutes and all of a sudden you’re in the woods. You’re like, “Okay, how did I get here?” That’s the kind of situation that I’m talking about, where you have a suburban home.

There’s one – I can’t remember what province it was in. Might’ve been Quebec, where the people had a house in a suburban area. The houses weren’t super close together, and their property backed onto a forest that went on for some distance from their home. They had fruit trees on their property, and they were having visitations from something that was taking all the fruit off the trees. Eventually they actually had a visual sighting of the creature, or probably more than one creature, amongst the trees, in the tree line away from the house. The guy’s talking about his sighting and he’s like, “You don’t realize how big these things are until you actually see one, and then your mind freezes.” [laughs] Because you’re looking at something that you just can’t comprehend, because it’s not supposed to exist.

But that’s probably the closest you’re going to get a Sasquatch in proximity to a city, those kind of suburban sightings.

JIM HAROLD: Well, it’s a great conversation we’re having with W.T. Watson. We’re talking all about Sasquatch Canada: Beyond British Columbia, and we’ll be back right after this.

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JIM HAROLD: We’re back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guest is W.T. Watson. We’re talking about his recent book, Sasquatch Canada: Beyond British Columbia. Now, I just read an article where there was a statistician who was talking about Bigfoot sightings, a mathematician. I can’t remember the exact gist, but part of it was these are mistaken black bear sightings. Not that the people are being disingenuous, but they’re seeing black bears or bears of differing types.

The thing to me – you made the point that most of the people that see these are outdoorsmen, outdoorswomen, people who are used to being in the wilderness and probably seeing bears, I’m quite sure, many times. Forestry workers, whatever it might be. So to me, that kind of puts the lie to that whole idea that they’re seeing black bears. Now, occasionally I’m sure that could happen. But I think some of these reports, based on the accounts, people get a good enough look that they could tell if it was a bear based on their knowledge of the wilderness. What are your thoughts on that?

W.T. WATSON: Absolutely. I absolutely have to agree with that. I know that the skeptics would love for all of the Sasquatch sightings to be either hoaxes or hallucinations or somebody misidentified a known animal. And I’m sure that a certain percentage of these encounters are misidentifications. It’s just the way. You get out in the woods, you see something, you get excited – particularly if you’re not super acclimated to the woods, to the wilderness, it’s not something that you spend a lot of time doing.

But what I saw over and over and over again in the research for this book is people who have been in the forest, in the woods, lived in the wild areas of Canada for their entire lives. They know what a bear looks like. And they know when they’ve not seen a bear.

There’s a sighting from the northern Ontario region from a Toronto police officer, who also happened to be a dedicated moose hunter, who saw one of these creatures while he was out hunting. He had ATV’d out to a location he was going to do, and he put out his scent markers and stuff, and he actually saw a moose, and the moose turned and fled, which was something that moose don’t do. Moose are some of the most confident critters on the planet, apparently, because they don’t give way for much of anything. This moose turned around and beat feet out of there.

He was very puzzled by this behavior, so he continued, set up in this location, and eventually heard crashing and crushing in the brush and looked down into the little canyon that he was next to, and there was the Sasquatch making its way along the creek bed there, holding onto trees and stuff to help the footing because it was very uneven in that area.

We’re talking about a guy who is a trained observer, who has every reason not to report this, because if you’ve ever been around law enforcement people, you know how merciless they can be when it comes to teasing their colleagues. Not to mention that back in the time that this happened, he might’ve gotten called up for a psych eval. He’s been a hunter since he was a child, and the man was in his forties or fifties, as I recall, when this happened. All of these things put together make for a fantastic witness. It’s somebody who knows what a bear looks like, has encountered bears in the wild before, and looks at this creature and says, “That’s not a bear.”

It is one of the most common things that people say to Sasquatch witnesses, though. “You just saw a bear.” And they will invariably say, “I know what a bear looks like. That wasn’t a bear. It just was not a bear.”

We have stories from Indigenous people who live throughout the wilder areas of Canada. Sometimes they don’t even know what the creature is called, but they know it’s not a bear. There’s one story – and this witness was a child, but again, they’ve grown up in the wild. They’ve seen bears in the wild. They know what a bear looks like. They didn’t know what this thing was. They were in Strathcona Park in Alberta, I believe. They were there with their family. Family picnic. They were frolicking in the river. It was August, so it was warm enough to be swimming. Somebody suggested they go back to their campsite, have lunch.

This young man decides he’s going to beat everybody there because he wants the first hotdog. He encounters this massive creature that’s squatting next to a berry bush, and he describes the creature as being, squatting, 5 feet high and at least 4 feet wide. It’s very calmly picking berries. He gets back to his campsite and he’s telling everybody what he saw and they’re like, “You saw a bear.” He’s like, “That wasn’t a bear. I know what a bear looks like. That was not a bear, especially not when it stood up. It stood up on its hind legs. It stood up on two feet and walked away from me.” They’re like, “You must’ve seen a Sasquatch, then.” He’s like, “What’s a Sasquatch?” He had no idea what this was. When they told him what a Sasquatch was, “Yeah, that’s what I saw!” He knew what a bear looked like, but again, this was not a bear.

You hear that refrain over and over and over in the witness testimony. People who’ve been outdoorspeople for their entire lives. Somebody says, “You just saw a bear.” It’s like, “I know what a bear looks like. That was not a bear.” So as far as veracity goes, I’m very much of the opinion that most witnesses know what they saw. Particularly the forestry service people, people who work in the woods all the time and encounter all kinds of wildlife – again, encountered one of these creatures, somebody tried to tell them it was a bear and they were like, “No, I’m sorry, that was no bear. I know what a bear looks like.”

I know there are probably a certain number of misidentifications, but the other thing is, a lot of times people will say, “You saw a black bear.” If you’ve ever taken a description of a Sasquatch, you know that for one thing, they’re much bigger than a black bear. The other thing is, bears will get up on their hind legs sometimes, but they’re very awkward, and they have their paws out in front of them for balance and they walk along on two feet until they get to wherever it is they’re going, the tree they want to get honey out of or whatever. That’s as far as they’ll go, whereas Sasquatch are described repeatedly as moving with a smoothness that humans would envy, being very, very quick, and not at all like what you would encounter if you were seeing a bear walking on its hind legs.

All of those things combine together to convince me that people are seeing something out there in the woods that’s not a bear.

JIM HAROLD: Well, I definitely believe so. It’s kind of the same argument – I read the argument one time that pilots are the worst witnesses for UFOs, and I’m like, wait a minute. [laughs]

W.T. WATSON: Why would you say that? [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: It’s like, that makes no sense whatsoever. The same case with this. Now, in terms of Sasquatch itself – and it could be these non-B.C. sightings in Canada, it could be B.C. sightings, or it could be sightings in the U.S. or other parts of the world – basically, what I’ve always heard is it’s a genteel creature for the most part. In other words, you probably wouldn’t want to cross it or threaten its young because that’s probably not going to end well for you, but in general, their objective is to survive and take care of themselves and their family groups, and they want to be basically left alone. What did you find – if you had to profile Sasquatch, how would you profile it?

W.T. WATSON: For one thing, I’d profile – there’s a joke, the Bigfoot t-shirts that say “Hide and Seek Champion of the World.” One of the things that I’d say about these creatures right away is that they are elusive. If you see one, you were in the right place at the right time, because they’re very difficult to encounter. There’s some idea that maybe you can habituate them or whatever, but I didn’t see any clear evidence that anybody had really succeeded in doing that.

For the most part, the encounters that I found seem to indicate that these creatures, most of these sightings were at some distance. Not like incredible distances, not 100 meters or whatever. They were in the somewhere between 10 and 40 meter range. And the creatures always seem to be – as soon as they know that they’re being observed, they’ll just disappear. They take advantage of whatever cover they can get and disappear into the woods.

So it’s very much the case, I think, that most of these Sasquatch, most of these creatures have no desire to be in contact with human beings at all. On the other hand, though, they’re curious about people. There’s a story in the book from an RCMP detachment, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, that were getting reports from one of the local Indigenous villages that they had this creature that kept coming into the village and peering in their windows. While the Sasquatch is very elusive and tends not to want any real interaction with people, they’re also curious about people, for whatever reason.

There’s a story in the book about a young man who was studying really hard so he could make good grades because he wanted to apply to the Canadian Armed Services when he got out of high school. It’s much more competitive than it is in the United States. He’d been over at a friend’s house; he’d been studying. He came home late. It was 11:00 or so. He was getting undressed for bed. He’s standing next to his bed and he looks in the mirror on the other side of the room, and he sees this reflection in the mirror. At first he thought it was his reflection, so he does the thing that people do where they wave their hands or whatever, and nothing happens.

So he turns around and he looks out this window, and he’s looking into the face of a Sasquatch looking in the window at him, complete with the red eye shine and the whole thing. Scared the bejeebies out of him. He stumbles off of his bed, falls on the floor, and he’s screaming at the top of his lungs. His parents come running in the room, and of course the Sasquatch has disappeared at that point. They go out, because he’s so adamant that it wasn’t a bear, it wasn’t anything he’d ever seen before, he didn’t know what it was, but there was this giant head with the gorilla-looking face.

His father says, “Okay, okay, we’ll go look.” And sure enough, there were some deep, heavy impressions outside his window. They weren’t like tracks, really, but something had been standing there. I thought that was one of the funnier stories, because it’s like these creatures are interested in us, but only if they think they’re not going to get caught.

For the most part, almost all of the stories that I saw were basically like any other kind of wildlife encounter, where you get the person who’s hiking through the woods or doing whatever, they see a Sasquatch, and then the Sasquatch goes about its business and they go about their business. Sometimes these encounters are pretty terrifying just because of the proximity of the creature and just how big they are. I mean, you can imagine if you swapped out a Kodiak bear for a Sasquatch, you can imagine how you would feel if you turned around and 10 feet away from you, there was this giant bear standing there, right? Now take that and multiply it by the idea that the creature that you’re looking at is unknown, it’s something you can’t identify, and the encounter becomes even more frightening.

And then a lot of people seem to have a sort of unreasoning fear of the creature once they spot it. There have been some people that theorize about infrasound and those sorts of things being responsible for that. I think basically Sasquatch are pretty well-equipped to get people to leave them alone.

There are some stories where the creatures seem to be territorial, but I think you’re probably right; there are a lot of researchers that believe that if you see one Sasquatch, there’s probably more in the area. So I imagine – it’s my theory that if you encounter one that’s really aggressive, for whatever reason, with the roaring and the charging and the kinds of things that you see in some of the scary Sasquatch stories – I imagine there’s a reason why they’re doing that. These creatures seem to have a personality. It may just be that you ran into a grumpy Sasquatch. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Having a bad day.

W.T. WATSON: Yeah. You’ve got to assume that a creature with this level of intelligence also has some kind of personality, and some of them are probably more well-inclined toward people than others. So there’s the possibility that you may run into the kind that are not so well-inclined toward people, who just want you the heck out of their area. The other thing is something you mentioned earlier. There’s the possibility that they could have young in the area, and they want you out of the area and away from their young ones.

Either way, I don’t think these critters are natural hostile, but I certainly, if I were to encounter one in the wild, would give them plenty of space. This is a very, very creature. It’s very powerful. There’s any number of testimony of them actually ripping trees out by the roots. They’re extremely powerful, and you just don’t want to mess with one. It’s not going to be a winning proposition for you. But I don’t think for the most part they tend to be real aggressive unless they have a reason to be.

JIM HAROLD: I think we’ve talked about this before, but I’m going to throw this out there because this is a true feeling that I have, and I might as well be honest. One day I’m like, yep, those foresters and all these people of goodwill and knowledge, they see these creatures, they say they’ve seen them. Then you’ve got the Patterson–Gimlin film when it’s run through stabilization, very compelling and looks like muscle tone. Does not look like a costume.

But then I think, okay, we haven’t found a body. We haven’t found DNA, at least mainstream science hasn’t. Some people claim that they’ve found things and they’ve been suppressed or whatever, but aside from that it’s not been found. And I know the excuses – nature takes care of its own and you don’t regularly run across a deer or a bear carcass and all of that. I know those arguments. But why haven’t we found some physical proof that everybody can agree on if this creature actually exists?

W.T. WATSON: That’s where you get into the more “woo” side of Sasquatchery, I think. Now, there have been people who theorize – I think of Thom Powell and the book The Locals that raises this idea – people theorize that Sasquatch actually bury their dead, which would certainly make it hard to find a dead one. We’ve seen any number of reports – and there’s nothing like this in the Sasquatch Canada book; I’m extrapolating to other sources. But we’re seeing reports of people who claim to have shot one of these.

Actually, there is a story like that. The young man who shot this creature was out moose hunting, and he went to verify that the creature was actually dead and then fled because he was hunting illegally and didn’t want to get into trouble. But there have also been other claims of having shot one of these creatures, and invariably, when somebody goes back to the body, it’s gone, if they can find the area they were in.

It makes you wonder. As I said, if you see one Sasquatch, chances are – the prevailing theory is that there’s probably more than one around somewhere, that they tend to operate in small groups. Maybe family groups or maybe just a group of Sasquatch got together to forage. So it may be that if one of them dies, they do something with the body, they have a place to put the body or they actually bury it. You’re talking about a big, powerful creature. It wouldn’t be that hard for them to bury something. I don’t know – obviously, nobody knows, really – why that is.

The other thing that occurs when we talk about this is there is the native side to this, the Indigenous people, many of whom – and I talk about this, there’s a whole chapter about this in the book – many of the people that are native to these lands view the Sasquatch as sort of a hybrid creature. My book opens with a quote from a Lakota elder, Pete Catches. It’s from the book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matthiessen. He says, “There is your Big Man standing there, ever waiting, ever present, like the coming of a new day. He is both spirit and real being, but he can also glide the forest like a moose with big antlers, as though the trees aren’t there. I know him as my brother. I want him to touch me, just a touch, a blessing, something I could bring home to my sons and grandchildren, that I was there, that I approached him and he touched me.”

I think that we have to consider that, at least in some – I’m a both/and thinker, so I’m entirely okay with the idea that there is a relict hominid or bipedal ape that hasn’t been discovered yet that’s existing in some of the wild areas of North America. Who am I to say? It’s entirely possible. I also think, though, that when native people tell us that a creature that they acknowledge the existence of is something other than a normal animal, we might want to pay attention to that, too. Their theory is very clearly that the Sasquatch exists in a spiritual world and that it can walk from that world into our world and take on physical substance.

Again, a lot of flesh and blood researchers will rail at that kind of idea, but we have this subset of reports – and I talk about this a little bit at the end of the book, and I’m going to talk about it more extensively in my next book – we have reports from people who’ve actually seen these creatures vanish. And I’m not talking about hiding in the woods or any of that kind of thing.

JIM HAROLD: Dematerialize.

W.T. WATSON: Yeah. There’s actually a report from the Yukon – a gentleman was driving along somewhere near Yellowknife, if I remember correctly. I love place names in my adopted country. [laughs] Yellowknife is wonderful. There’s a place called Medicine Hat in Alberta. There’s a bunch of other really interesting names. But anyway, he’s driving along a road. He sees a Sasquatch. It’s walking along the break that’s cut for utility lines. And as he watches this creature, he watches it, it’s solid, it’s solid, it’s solid – suddenly it starts to become transparent, and within a few more steps it disappears completely. That’s not something a natural animal can do.

I told you the story of the young man who encountered the Sasquatch next to the berry bush. Interesting side note to that story is that as he’s looking at this creature, he’s thinking to himself, “What am I looking at?”, and he hears clearly in his mind a voice that tells him, “You don’t see me. I’m not here.” Again, not something that a bear or a wolf or whatever is going to do for you.

There’s several high strangeness stories that I put toward the end of the book that make you wonder if a certain percentage of these sightings – not all of them; some of them may actually be that relict hominid or bipedal ape, Gigantopithecus or whatever. A certain percentage of these stories, though, seem to have a spiritual component to them, which may explain too why it’s so hard to find a body, because they just disappear.

Either way, I’m happy with either theory. Either they bury their dead or they actually are capable of vanishing into another world. It’s hard because nobody really knows – you can’t prove that Sasquatch exists. The best that we’ve been able to do is maybe get some DNA that’s been identified as unidentifiable. Unless we have a body and have DNA samples that we can compare to other DNA samples, we’re not going to be able to prove to the scientists that this creature exists out there.

But the anecdotal evidence is so massive at this point that if you took it into a court of law, you could prove that Sasquatch existed just by the testimony of all of these people. But what Sasquatch is? We have no clue.

JIM HAROLD: That’s true. It’s true, but it is fascinating to talk about it, and this recent book, if you’re interested in Sasquatch and Bigfoot, seems like a natural thing to pick up. Sasquatch Canada: Beyond British Columbia, and W.T. Watson is the author. Thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find this book and all your other books?

W.T. WATSON: All of my books are available on Amazon, both as Kindle eBooks and you can order the paperback as well. I will mention that they’re all available on Kindle Unlimited if you happen to subscribe to that service. That’s where you can find the books. And this one has been doing quite well, from what I can tell. It’s still early days, but people are really, really fascinated by this subject. This book is – like I said, a lot of the researchers of Sasquatch are Americans and they tend to focus on American stories. There are a few stories from Canada that make it into those books. But this is a set of encounters that some people probably haven’t even heard of, so I encourage people to take a look. There’s lots of stuff going on in Canada.

JIM HAROLD: Very good. W.T. Watson, thank you for joining us today on the Paranormal Podcast.

W.T. WATSON: Thank you so much for having me, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: That was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed speaking with W.T. and talking about Sasquatch Canada. Fascinating stuff.

If you like what we do, please make sure that you tell a friend today. Text them a link to this episode, people who are interested in cryptids and things of the like. And we thank you so much for being a part of the Paranormal Podcast. We will talk to you next time, and stay spooky. Bye-bye.

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