Groucho: 00:22

Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. But there is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe bumming a ride on the omnibus of art. Among the misty corridors of pine, and in those corridors I see figures, strange figures.

AP Strange: 01:05

Welcome back, my friends, to the AP Strange Show. I am your host, AP Strange. This is my show and today's show is brought to you by The Sanderson Cryptid Generator. If you need a cryptid generated for your own use, it can really help boost tourism to your town after a couple generations or perhaps you just wanna have a TV show or some fun stories to tell on YouTube, get the Sanderson Cryptid Generator for all of your cryptozoological monster needs. And tonight on the show, I'm very happy to welcome Sharon A.

AP Strange: 01:41

Hill. She's a self proclaimed strange claims adjuster, somebody I've been reading for quite a while, longer than I thought actually when I was going back and looking at some of her writings. She is the author of The Culture of Amateur Paranormal Investigators and has been published in quite a number of places and somebody I find intriguing for having been published in both The Skeptical Enquirer and 14 times. So we're going to be talking Cryptids tonight and I'm thrilled to get into it. So thank you for joining me, Sharon.

Sharon Hill: 02:16

I'm glad to be here.

AP Strange: 02:17

Yeah. Well, I'm glad to have you here. As I said, I was looking for a piece you had written once about mystery holes. Then you kind of wrote about Mel's hole and I was looking at it, I'm like, twenty twenty. I'm like, wow, I've been reading her for a long time.

Sharon Hill: 02:33

I've had that blog for like twenty years now.

AP Strange: 02:36

Right. Yeah. Hadn't really, you lose track of how long you've been kind of in contact with somebody's writings and then I'm like, well, at least six

Sharon Hill: 02:48

years. Time goes fast.

AP Strange: 02:51

It does. So yeah, it's a thrill to be able to actually sit and talk with you now because like I said, I enjoy your work. And I guess to start off, I was curious, where did it all begin for you? What was the initial impulse to look at anomalies and travel into unknown territory?

Sharon Hill: 03:16

Boy, I can't remember. I mean, I've always enjoyed learning about the natural world. There were things I can remember learning how to read. I learned how to read, I think at like five years old and I was always into nature books and science books. And I love Nancy Drew and Scooby Doo and monsters, ghosts, all paranormal topics, particularly cryptids, haunted houses, things like that.

Sharon Hill: 03:40

And I always knew I wanted to be a scientist. So, I eventually got a bachelor's degree in geosciences and became a geologist. And then like, I still had that interest in anomalies, but you're busy, you know, you're growing up and you're becoming an adult. And then I discovered the skeptical literature and the internet, and that was another big wide open opportunity to see a whole bunch of new information. And I was able to connect to, people involved in these subjects like never before.

Sharon Hill: 04:14

I think the internet is really just underrated as the thing that opened up the door to not only, paranormal interests for people who had interests in these fringe topics, but also for the skeptical community too to talk about them. And so there was a much bigger, audience on all sides. And then later on, I actually got a master's degree in science education and a focus on science in the public. Wanted to do my thesis on something interesting. So I did it on paranormal investigation groups and how they attempt to do science.

Sharon Hill: 04:51

Do they do science? What does it mean when they do science? So that turned into a thesis and then it turned into the book, Scientifical Americans. And then, I also started a blog called Doubtful News. And at that point, the internet was blogs were just great.

Sharon Hill: 05:10

You got thousands of hits a day. You don't get that now, but at the time it was fantastic. And I would do this daily, just collect news stories. And I already knew a lot about them, but that's not what was coming out in the media. Stupid stuff was coming out in the media.

Sharon Hill: 05:27

So I would cover those subjects in a way that I knew something a little bit different or I knew a person involved, or I had a reference that wasn't listed in the media. So that was a lot of fun. Got huge exposure, all sorts of subjects, but I kind of got burned out around 2016 when fake news sites were just flooding the internet. I just couldn't keep up with all the potentially doubtful air quotes here, news. You know, what, what does this mean when somebody says that this is happening to them and this anomaly occurred?

Sharon Hill: 06:01

You can't even follow it after a certain point. I was also heavily involved in the skeptical community. I worked with all three major U. S. Skeptical organizations at the time.

Sharon Hill: 06:15

I eventually exited the skeptical community for several reasons. And then I started a project called Spooky Geology, which very much was my wheelhouse, the intersection between geology, earth sciences, and all the weird paranormal topics and thinking about the earth. And there's just, there were endless topics. I'll never cover everything. There was so much.

Sharon Hill: 06:41

And then I'm just always like looking around for things to do and going by my interest because this is just a hobby. It isn't what I do full time. And then I started a blog called Modern Cryptozoology that was originally a annotated biography of books. Then it turned into like news and commentary. And now it's just kind of my blog about what I see going on in the crypto community.

Sharon Hill: 07:07

And, I still write for my own site, sharonahill.com. I occasionally write for 14 times, like you said, a few journals here and there. Sometimes I collaborate with other people. So I've done a lot of very different things.

AP Strange: 07:24

Yeah. And recently on Substack because that made it easy for your new stuff to pop up for me when I followed you there. And I was like, oh, sweet. All the Sharon Hill.

Sharon Hill: 07:36

Yeah. I don't obviously, I don't do, like, Twitter anymore. And because the platforms are so spread out, it's very difficult to get that kind of following or to talk to the people that you'd like to talk to. So the Fortian community in particular is quite spread out and it's hard to figure out what topic to follow if you're interested in all types of anomalous topics. So it's very hard to find that community.

Sharon Hill: 08:05

So like Yeah. Post in different

AP Strange: 08:08

Yeah. I feel like there was a golden moment where we were all on Twitter. Oh, That was great.

Sharon Hill: 08:14

Yeah, it was great. It really was. It was that you were able to make so many connections, good and bad. I had, you know, fights with certain people, especially cryptid people

AP Strange: 08:26

Right.

Sharon Hill: 08:26

Who didn't like what I was saying, but that was actually, I think, constructive.

AP Strange: 08:31

Yeah. Well, I hope they saw it that way. I I I'm I'm sure some of them didn't. But No. Because I I feel like there was a cryptid equivalent of what I refute what I referred to as as UFO Twitter, you know, a lot of UFO bros on there that

Sharon Hill: 08:51

Yeah.

AP Strange: 08:52

Immediately called you the enemy for not being pro disclosure and pro whatever the propaganda talking point is at the moment. So

Sharon Hill: 09:00

Yeah. I did save some some choice screenshots from the day that I still have from certain people.

AP Strange: 09:09

Okay. Well, yeah, I'm not on Twitter anymore either. No. I can't imagine. I don't know how people still are.

AP Strange: 09:17

Like, I have friends that are, and I just I I don't get it, but Yeah. It seems real toxic over there.

Sharon Hill: 09:23

It does. Yeah.

AP Strange: 09:27

So would it be fair to say that your opinions or approach to some of these subjects has changed over the years and kind of evolved or because it seems like you're almost got like, one foot in the skeptical waters and one foot in more of the 14.

Sharon Hill: 09:40

Absolutely. Yeah. And that I feel like it's been a pendulum for me. Yeah. You know, in your twenties or or before that, you're just like, wow, this is amazing.

Sharon Hill: 09:52

There's aliens, there's Bigfoot, there's ghosts and we could communicate with the dead and all this stuff. You're very open to those types of belief. And then for me, as I learned the scientific method, you know, I'm using our quotes again, because that's not just one method, it's a whole big thing. And, then, you know, finding the skeptical literature and I was open to that and I saw, you know, these questions resonated with me that they were asking. We need to be reasonable about this.

Sharon Hill: 10:24

The evidence should be better for this topic. If you really are interested in a topic, you need to see both sides. You need to address the skeptical questions because, they're a weakness and you need to address that weakness. So I did I swung to the skeptical community for for several years. However, that was actually partially toxic in its own ways.

Sharon Hill: 10:54

They were very dismissive because I was very interested in cryptozoology and and ghosts and stuff. They thought that was ridiculous. And I knew that this was I don't know if they're real. I don't know if it's real, but people have had experiences. And it doesn't matter if you think that they were or were not Ghost Bigfoot, something happened to them and it's important.

Sharon Hill: 11:19

And I felt that being dismissive of their experiences was not good and it wasn't fair. And then at that point, skepticism was also turning very, it was all atheism. And I found that very, that's not what I signed up for. So, I left that and realized that I very was swinging both sides, but now I was in the middle and I was my own voice and I felt comfortable with that. Uncomfortably comfortable or comfortably uncomfortable, however you want to put it, because it's not an easy place to be.

Sharon Hill: 11:58

You have to constantly hear everything from from different sides. So I but that's the way I think it's supposed to happen. It's a true open mind. I'm listening to everybody.

AP Strange: 12:09

Yeah. I think that's great. I mean, one quote that I always have in my head is uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but absolute certainty is an absurd one.

Sharon Hill: 12:20

Right. Yeah, definitely.

AP Strange: 12:25

Think that's great because I mean, do come across as skeptical in some ways, but that always makes me think like, is she still interested? But I always feel like you don't necessarily set out to debunk per se, but you are kind of calling bullshit where you need to.

Sharon Hill: 12:45

Right. And I think that's fair because you can't just go on blindly believing things. It's just not a good way to go through life. But I, and I have a lot of people ask me, why are you in this, you know, Bigfoot forum or or cryptozoology forum or something if you don't believe? Again, people have had experiences.

Sharon Hill: 13:10

It's a part of our culture. It's a very important part of our culture. Right now, I feel that people sometimes move into the paranormal topics or or belief in these types of topics because they're leaving behind orthodox religion, traditional religious structure, but they're still looking for something bigger in the world. What's really out there? You know, what are the bigger questions?

Sharon Hill: 13:37

Why are we here? And could there be more to life than what we see in front of us every day? To me, that's like an evolution of what used to be a religious type question or scenario. People are now being able to pick and choose what they believe off of a shelf and do their own thing. So I do see, some similarities there, but I don't really dig the whole religion thing, but I think it's pretty interesting to see how people are really into some of these paranormal topics and how much meaning it has in their lives.

AP Strange: 14:14

Yeah. And I mean, to try to take meaning away from people just seems to need to be an unnecessarily cruel thing to do. Like, I I I think the kind of skepticism you were talking about is typified by people like Richard Dawkins who, you know, is just condescending. I find him just to be very condescending and wrong half the time. He's like, he's not even right.

Sharon Hill: 14:36

Yeah. I mean, met Dawkins a couple of times. He used to come to the skeptical conferences. And you only see that one side of a person. You don't see that they're actually a nicer person.

Sharon Hill: 14:50

You see James Randy you know, can be very, you know, gruff with some people but he was a really nice guy and you know, things like that. It's different to see that, in different situations. However, a lot of these skeptics did not know a thing about the evidence that we were talking about. They were just, this is ridiculous and it doesn't fit and I'm just gonna dismiss it. And Schirmer was really good at that.

Sharon Hill: 15:19

He just didn't know anything about it and just dismissed things and it was very frustrating to me because a lot of that stuff was wrong. So like you said they really didn't know much about the topics where, I felt like I knew more.

AP Strange: 15:33

Yeah. I I only use Dawkins as an example because I have seen him I haven't seen him speak as much as I read things that he wrote or that he's put out there that just were factually inaccurate to the point that it kind of undercut any argument that he could have that people believe in silly things. Because it's like, you didn't even get your facts straight. Then you're telling us that we have silly beliefs. So that's kind of kind of undercuts your argument there.

Sharon Hill: 16:02

Yeah. You have to watch. I mean, hubris is is a thing as you get older yeah. And You always have to keep learning.

AP Strange: 16:09

Yeah. So, I mean, how how would you define scientifical versus scientific and especially in regards to well, I guess you had it more in regards to paranormal investigation with ghosts, but I I suppose you could apply it to cryptozoology as well.

Sharon Hill: 16:29

Yeah. Yeah. So as part of the investigation that or the research that I did on investigation groups, looked at ghost hunters were huge at the time. This was like 2010 to 2017. Ghost hunters were huge.

Sharon Hill: 16:44

Bigfoot hunters were getting up there. There was quite a few of them mostly. Some of them did all cryptids, but there wasn't really a call for people seeing, you know, shupacabras or something like that. They were seeing Bigfoot. And ufologists, there was also What happened with ufology was many small groups back in the day coalesced into Mufon.

Sharon Hill: 17:08

So looking at a really big organization that had a lot of people, but under one banner, whereas the ghost hunters were a thousand different small organizations and they didn't have any organization above them really. So that was quite different, but all of them had things in common. And what I did was I looked at their websites and how they portrayed themselves to the public. And I looked to see if they said they were doing science or if they were scientific in their methods. And then I looked at what they actually did or how they portrayed themselves by using kind of a chart that I had made up in a way to code what they were doing.

Sharon Hill: 17:55

So scientifical was mostly what they did. So about 50% of them said, we're scientific, we'd have scientific methods. What are those methods? Well, we use jargon and we have blinky gadgets and we are professionals and we act, you know, professional and we name drop and

AP Strange: 18:16

it was just,

Sharon Hill: 18:17

it was performance. It was performing what they think science should look like to themselves and others, you know, who are observing them, their clients, so to speak. They would go into a place and they would act as if they were scientists. They would pretend. It was like LARPing, a scientist.

Sharon Hill: 18:38

They didn't have any scientific training. I asked them. I asked certain ones, what do you mean by your scientific? They would backpedal like crazy. Once somebody actually called them out on it, they had no answer.

Sharon Hill: 18:53

Right. They kind of admitted, well, we're just trying to be scientific. Well, you're faking it. You're being scientific called, but you're not being scientific. That's kind of where I got the name for it.

Sharon Hill: 19:06

And it really happens on TV a lot. What TV programs were doing was something that I called sham inquiry. You're supposed to be watching this TV show where there's investigators doing this inquiry or investigation into a site, but what they're doing, they already know what they want to find or what they want to present to you. So then they work backwards and take things in and they, put them into the slots to make a dramatic story and then editing is done. And, so it was a preexisting framework.

Sharon Hill: 19:40

It wasn't real. It wasn't reality television. So it was deception for people sitting at home. And then what happened was a lot of people sitting at home were like, well, I could do that. And they got up and they did that.

Sharon Hill: 19:53

They became part of their local ghost hunting group or or eventually, like these days, now they're joining their local Bigfoot hunters.

AP Strange: 20:02

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've always found that a little bit funny because I I I I've never actually gone on a ghost hunt. I've experienced weird things in my life and I've always felt like weirdness is gonna find its way to me if it wants to.

AP Strange: 20:20

I don't have to go out looking for it but if I did, I think I would probably rely on like dowsing rods or a pendulum or something. I don't really have any use for like an EMF reader or a, you know

Sharon Hill: 20:33

Yeah. EVPs and stuff. Yeah. I would read these accounts of people getting EVPs and I'm like, that doesn't really happen. And then I would listen to EVPs, I'm like, that isn't what they said.

Sharon Hill: 20:48

That's just somebody like brushing the fabric on their coat or something. It sounds like a noise or a language. It was just really unimpressive. And I did go on a ghost hunt, to a very supposedly haunted place. And of course, I've been to Gettysburg a number of times and there's ghost hunters there almost all the time that you go, you can find people kind of milling around doing those things.

Sharon Hill: 21:13

And I went to a couple conferences and and and, you know, I I listened to what they had to say and I was just completely unimpressed. So and now I am really done with ghost hunters. I just don't have any interest in ghosts whatsoever. Same with UFOs. I just had absolutely no no interest in UFOs.

Sharon Hill: 21:33

If it's Earth lights, that's my thing. I love that idea that something is happening in the Earth that is producing some sort of unknown electrical phenomenon. That's really cool. That falls into the whole spooky geology thing. But UFOs is craft, ETH, don't like, and then ghost hunters, I'm done.

AP Strange: 21:54

But Yeah. It seems like you do have a soft spot for cryptozoology because you

Sharon Hill: 21:58

I do.

AP Strange: 21:59

That's another whole section of your writings. And I I I had the idea to invite you on because around Christmas time, you did, like, the twelve days of Cryptids instead of twelve days of Christmas. And I was eating that up. So I went back and read it all again this weekend to prepare for the show. But I thought it was pretty great.

AP Strange: 22:21

How so how would you define cryptid or cryptozoology? Because it seemed like in the course of these writings, you're talking about how this terminology has really changed over the years. Right. And how you can't really stop language from evolving, but how would you define it now where we are?

Sharon Hill: 22:42

Yeah. This is contentious and it's constantly And, when I go on places like Reddit or something like that into those conversations, single day you can see somebody arguing, that's not encrypted. It shouldn't be in this group. You know, we need to, can't talk about that. But what's happening is it's, it's very interesting what has happened with cryptozoology.

Sharon Hill: 23:07

You know, back in the day when it started in the fifties, Bernard Hovamans and Ivan Sanderson, started this and the intent was for it to be a scientific field. This was the end of the colonialist era, you know, empires no more, no more British empire. The world was becoming more known. And then we had this surge of like men's adventure tales, you know, or white men still wanted to quest to dangerous places and and conquest, but that era was kind of over. There there still was, like, a certain aspect of of racism present, like, that these guys would go into these these unknown areas of The Congo or, you know, Cameroon or places like that and say, oh, you natives, you know, what animals have you seen?

Sharon Hill: 23:59

Because we wanna come in and we wanna take them and name them and give it give them our own description. And all your magical myths, that's not real. These are probably zoological animals, and we wanna take them back and do science. And it was it was I don't know if it was nice idea. It was it was a pie in the sky idea that there were still these types of very large animals that had not been discovered.

Sharon Hill: 24:22

Obviously there's plenty of new species all the time, but these were definitely, animals that had a cultural story to them. So cryptozoology was traditionally considered the study of sightings and accounts of, quote, hidden animals. So they had stories to them, but they never were found, described, you know, classified, I never understood the word hidden. Who's hiding them? Are they hiding from us?

Sharon Hill: 24:54

What what does that even mean? Right. And then, like, at what point is something encrypted? Because dragons had stories about people seeing them. People say they see dragons today.

Sharon Hill: 25:08

Are dragons cryptid? Cryptids, if you go on Reddit, no, absolutely. Dragons are encrypted. They're they're fantastical animals. Well, why?

Sharon Hill: 25:15

We don't know what they are. We don't know what people saw. How can you say what it is that they saw? It's encrypted because it's not scientifically recognized, but somebody had a story about it. There was a couple things that I brought up again and again.

Sharon Hill: 25:29

There was there's a big big argument about Mothman. Is Mothman a cryptid? No, because it's not a zoological, potentially zoological animal. It's a, it's some sort of paranormal. So you, you get that argument about what's paranormal, what's fantastical, what's potentially zoological, you have this really large spectrum of cryptids.

Sharon Hill: 25:52

And if you think about it going from the left to the right, on the far left are animals that people say, oh yeah, I saw this interesting monkey. You know, the natives in in an area will say that, oh, yeah, there's this interesting monkey. Or or there's a rat or a new squirrel or something like that. And I don't think that Bigfoot hunters are actually very interested in that. I think, you know, in there are definitely new species that that are found, oh, well, that's super interesting.

Sharon Hill: 26:23

They're they're rather mundane. You get to, like, the traditional cryptid ideas, the Bigfoot, Nessie, Champ, you know, McKellie, Mbembe, you know, prehistoric survivors, all those kinds of Now you're straddling some potential weirdness there. But then you go all the way to the right and you're dealing with, you know, really bizarre things that can't exist like Dogmen and Mothman itself. You know, there isn't a real man moth or bird man or whatever it was. It was originally described as Birdman.

Sharon Hill: 27:01

And then, people will argue with me about, no, cryptids are absolutely, you know, these hidden animals that are scientifically unrecognized. Well, how do you know that until you find them? Because let's take the Loch Ness monster, for example, there isn't just one cause for people saying they see a Loch Ness monster. We know that they see logs, waves, other animals. We know that.

Sharon Hill: 27:31

At what point can we say that that's an animal that we describe as a plesiosaur like thing that's potentially existing there? We don't know that. That's a construction. So we end up with cryptozoology and cryptids being just pretty much a mess. It was never a good construction to begin with, even though Hoovelmans would argue that he had a whole layout of what he wanted it to be.

Sharon Hill: 27:57

The word cryptid didn't come up until 1983, but it didn't catch on for much longer. And it was meant to replace monster. They were using, Oh, monsters. And, Oh, that's not a great word. And it wasn't.

Sharon Hill: 28:13

But they never really operationally defined what a cryptid was. And I don't think the methodology for cryptozoology is there. And I think that the people who are pushing that it should be it should go back to being a scientific subject, you know, get rid of all this paranormal stuff, get rid of all these fantastical, fearsome creatures that are being described as cryptids. You can't, you cannot put the horse back in the barn. It's out.

Sharon Hill: 28:42

Right. Cryptid is a popular term. You can't, like I said, like you mentioned, I said, you can't change a lot. You can't police the language. It changes all the time.

Sharon Hill: 28:54

And when I say that people get really angry, because they kind of want it to be their thing.

AP Strange: 29:02

Yeah. Well, I mean, because as you say, there's no real goal or definition or methodology with cryptozoology. So it is by definition a pseudoscience. It If you can even call it that.

Sharon Hill: 29:17

If you can call it that, yeah.

AP Strange: 29:18

If people want it to be more respectable, they like to point to the coelacanth or say, oh, you know, the mountain gorilla in Africa was once considered a mythical animal. And then we discovered they exist, you know? And because they they wanted to be about discovery and actual science.

Sharon Hill: 29:36

Right.

AP Strange: 29:37

But when it's a new tree frog that had previously gone undescribed, you don't see a lot of dues about it. I think that's cool. I wanna know about all the new frogs, but

Sharon Hill: 29:47

There there there are there are great blogs that just tell you every day new species that have been published, and there's a lot of frogs. A lot

AP Strange: 29:57

of frogs,

Sharon Hill: 29:58

a lot of lizards, a lot of insects. Yeah. A lot of plants. It's great. There's new species being found every day.

Sharon Hill: 30:03

They're not cryptids. And I do get into the who's to say, because there is no, there's no society anymore. There's no professionalism to that field. Failed. It failed in like the late nineties.

Sharon Hill: 30:21

It just kind of collapsed and they didn't have success in finding sexy cryptids, you know, the things that would would get big attention. They they went looking. They went looking for the yeti first. They went looking for Bigfoot. They went looking for Nessie.

Sharon Hill: 30:38

They scanned the entire lock. You know, now we're into DNA sampling. They still haven't found anything. I think this is kind of a time of reckoning and we could get into why because there's been a couple of things that have popped up in the recent year or two that I think really, changes the scene for cryptozoology. But for me, what I started to see was a differentiation of there's zoo cryptids, you know, maybe a real animal is behind them, maybe not.

Sharon Hill: 31:11

I don't know. Then there's these paracryptids that have very strong paranormal characteristics to them. And then there is the pop cryptid, which is what I came up with this model of pop goes to the cryptid, because all of a sudden around 2014, the word cryptid overtook the word cryptozoology on Google. And cryptozoology trended downward and cryptids shot up like a rocket. Why?

Sharon Hill: 31:45

Because it was a word that caught on in pop culture at that time. And now you see it everywhere. You see people, young people using that word, meaning something, they use it in all sorts of different ways. It's very interesting. My cat is the because he rarely comes out and he may not even exist.

Sharon Hill: 32:06

My boyfriend is encrypted because he likes to hide out. He is not very social. I'm encrypted because I like to hang out in the woods and not be seen. Very different social connotations. People use it as a sense of in a sense of an identity, the otherness, you know, there's gay cryptids.

Sharon Hill: 32:31

It's just it's very socially interesting. And Mhmm. Like I said, when I bring this stuff up in the community, they're like, no. No. No.

Sharon Hill: 32:37

No. No. No. That's not what it is. Let's go back twenty years.

Sharon Hill: 32:41

You can't. We can't put that back in the bag.

AP Strange: 32:44

Well, it became an industry, really. Mhmm. I mean, especially with all the TV shows shows and like finding Bigfoot and you've written about all of these TV shows as well.

Sharon Hill: 32:56

Yeah. I mean, think about like in it was 2012 when that mermaids documentary came out. Oh, Fake fakeumentary. Right?

AP Strange: 33:05

Yep.

Sharon Hill: 33:05

And then the year later, it was Megalodon. And then there was, like, an explosion of these shows that you couldn't really tell what was fake and what was fiction or what was truth. It was very weird. But I think that that had a lot to do with the direction that that we turned in and here we are.

AP Strange: 33:25

Yeah. I mean, I think it was a confluence of things. Like, I never really thought I'd see Mothman have such a heyday. Like, once upon a time, that was a really niche like subject.

Sharon Hill: 33:38

The movie did it. It really did.

AP Strange: 33:40

Mhmm. Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 33:41

The the movie injected new characteristics, new lore that didn't that wasn't there before.

AP Strange: 33:49

Mhmm.

Sharon Hill: 33:50

And it it caught on with some people who just really thought that was cool. And it's it's it's got got to be one of the most popular cryptids right now.

AP Strange: 34:02

Right. Yeah. I mean, I know Yeah. Five I mean, Bigfoot's huge too. Mean, I I feel like you see Bigfoot everywhere now.

AP Strange: 34:10

And I can't tell you. I'm in I'm in Massachusetts, and there's so many people that have like a wood cut out of of Bigfoot in their yard or like a chainsaw carving in a tree that looks like Bigfoot.

Sharon Hill: 34:24

Absolutely. I see that too.

AP Strange: 34:26

Right. And I'm like, it's Massachusetts though. We don't have like a, you know, I'm around the Pacific Northwest, I would expect it there, you know, but, Bigfoot has had a moment that has just kept going for for quite a while.

Sharon Hill: 34:41

And And I'm not yeah. I'm not so sure that people people are having fun with it. They definitely are. I'm not really sure that the belief percentage when they do polls never gets higher than like 20% of the polls that people say they believe in Bigfoot. It's usually less.

Sharon Hill: 35:01

It goes from like 10 to 20% at any poll. Are people saying they believe because it's fun? If you question people, do you really think that there is a eight foot tall, new ape like animal out there? They would probably bet against it, but, it's fun to believe and it's fun to pretend and to buy into it and to use it to represent yourself as somebody who likes this kind of stuff and, you know, likes to go out in the woods and

AP Strange: 35:38

Yeah. Yeah. I'm just thinking about how, like, Bigfoot's like a spokesperson for jerky now. And I mean, it is fun. It's like, I've always been the kind of person that when I was a kid, I loved getting the weekly world news seeing what Bigfoot was up to.

AP Strange: 36:02

And now I feel like that's that's kind of that's reverberated out to the point where that's more mainstream now.

Sharon Hill: 36:08

It That used to

AP Strange: 36:09

be kind of a weird people would look at you funny if you're talking about Bigfoot.

Sharon Hill: 36:16

And and the same with Mothman. I was in my local garden center last year just checking out, and the lady behind the counter was talking to the other lady about going to the Mothman Festival. That's crazy. I never would have heard that five, ten years ago. Just wasn't known, but now it's a thing.

AP Strange: 36:37

Yeah. And there's so many festivals and this is something you write about frequently too. In fact, I heard recently this year they did an anniversary festival for the Kentucky beach shower. I don't know if you've heard about this.

Sharon Hill: 36:52

I think I did. Yeah, I'm not surprised. That's a great story.

AP Strange: 36:58

Speaking of jerky, I think they had a plane go overhead and drop like little jerkies on people.

Sharon Hill: 37:03

Yeah, that'd be great.

AP Strange: 37:04

Yeah, they did. That's what happened.

Sharon Hill: 37:07

Wow. Fantastic. The I I found the town festival phenomenon just fascinating, and it it really was the Mothman festival that that kicked that off. Although the the Willow Creek Festival for Bigfoot is bigger, longer. That was there before.

Sharon Hill: 37:24

But of course there was also the Chorubusko Festival celebrating a giant turtle. And so there were others that came before, but now you see smaller communities looking for their, token cryptid, their monstrous patron, right, of their town, to be the center of a festival, family friendly, something that brings people into the town, spends money. I've been to several of them, works pretty well. It's not that hard to do. And sometimes it catches on and now it's just, it's everywhere.

Sharon Hill: 38:05

So I kind of keep track of the festivals as best I can. Sometimes they come and go, you know, they don't have them every year or they move locations or there's a dispute or like there's two Loveland Frogman festivals in Ohio right now. Yeah. It's not a very big deal, but there's two of them. And there's a ton of Bigfoot festivals, and it's just funny to see towns adopting their their local creature.

Sharon Hill: 38:30

No matter how ridiculous it is, they still love it.

AP Strange: 38:36

Well, I'm guessing Alba Twitch must be relatively close to you. The Alba Twitch Festival.

Sharon Hill: 38:41

Right? Yeah. I've been I've been there a couple times as well. I spoke there the first the first one I spoke at. That one is interesting.

Sharon Hill: 38:50

It started to get really big and it was great. And then I went last year and it was kind of a mess. Don't know what happened. If the weather is bad, that kind of ruins things. If they lose their spot and they have to move to another location, parking is always an issue.

Sharon Hill: 39:06

Places like that for a small town, getting in vendors. So it can be a little bit of a hassle, but it's interesting to to go there and see what is being, sold, like, in the in the stands, what the vendors are pushing, what the motifs are. Is it scary Bigfoot? Is it cute Bigfoot? You know, cute Cryptids is a thing, family friendly stuff too, or is it horror based?

Sharon Hill: 39:35

There's every year it's a little different, the themes. So I I find that interesting as well. You know, the art themes and and and and the cosplay sometimes people are coming in costume, which is Yeah. That's fun.

AP Strange: 39:50

Yeah. I feel like I've seen a lot of pictures like that from the Mothman one.

Sharon Hill: 39:54

Mhmm.

AP Strange: 39:55

A lot of people show up in costume for that. Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 39:57

Yeah. That's definitely a thing.

AP Strange: 40:00

Up here, all I get is the the Exeter UFO Festival, which is fun in its own way for the the incident at at Exeter. And that's kind of the same thing. People dress in costumes. There's inflatable aliens on every street corner. The local bookseller that has used books, he must stock up his UFO books over the course of the year so that he can display them all in the front.

Sharon Hill: 40:26

Hey, why not? People are interested in it. It's it's a way for them to make money. That that that's great. I I think it's really fun.

Sharon Hill: 40:33

I I I wouldn't fault it, but it it I don't really know that, like, the people who show up at those events, they're there to have fun. I don't know if they really believe the stuff or they're just there just to to have fun. Whatever. It's it's all fine. I I you know, enjoy your local Cryptid.

Sharon Hill: 40:52

What's what's wrong with that?

AP Strange: 40:54

Well, right. I mean, and there's an entertainment aspect to it and just kind of a storytelling. That's really what it is, a storytelling. Human beings have always loved a good story. I mean, long as we've had language, from what I can tell, we've always been telling stories.

AP Strange: 41:08

Right?

Sharon Hill: 41:08

So Yeah. And we used to have like block parties and things like that. We don't have that anymore, usually in neighborhoods. So this is a way for a community to come together around a symbol that they're all proud of. That's that's pretty cool.

Sharon Hill: 41:24

And and and on the same line, kind of like a tangent, is sports teams will adopt the local cryptid as their mascot, and that's catching on. There's lots of sports teams that have cryptid mascots.

AP Strange: 41:38

Yeah. Before we before we were recording, you were talking about the, is it a baseball team that has Lake Champlain

Sharon Hill: 41:45

Yeah. Champ. Yeah. There's the Lake Monsters up there in Vermont, in Burlington, Vermont. I do have a post on Cryptid Team Mascots.

Sharon Hill: 41:55

They make great logos

AP Strange: 41:58

Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 41:58

For your your team. Just they're copyright free. You could make really cool things. Like I'm disappointed. I'm a hockey fan and the one NHL team, the Utah expansion team wanted to pick up as the Yeti, the Utah Yeti.

Sharon Hill: 42:16

The cooler company filed an infringement on them and says they couldn't do that.

AP Strange: 42:24

So

Sharon Hill: 42:24

we didn't get the Utah Yeti, we got the Utah Mammoth. But now we have the Seattle Kraken and they could do a lot more with their logo. Let me just say, they can have a really good look. And they have not capitalized because I'd be the first one out there buying those those Kraken logo logo, merch.

AP Strange: 42:43

Right. You gotta be careful.

Sharon Hill: 42:45

Jersey, definitely. Yeah. Love that too.

AP Strange: 42:47

Yeah. I think I have like one of the lake monsters, like baseball caps somewhere around here in my collection. Found it at a thrift store. It's good stuff. But I mean, as far as storytelling goes, I mean, a lot of this has overlap and this is something that I always love looking at with fiction because you see a lot of these Cryptids pop up like in movies or movies will influence what it is that people report seeing.

AP Strange: 43:17

So that I mean that's a whole other layer to it that goes into it, right?

Sharon Hill: 43:22

Yeah, I was really thinking about this the other day because I thought maybe this would be a good article about the movie characters, the movie depictions of cryptids. How much does that bleed into what people report? We know that happened with the Mothman because they started to say things about the Mothman that never actually happened, were just in the movie. Things like he appeared in Chernobyl you know, he appeared on the bridge and things that didn't really happen in history. So there have been several cases of things that, Blake Smith, my friend Blake Smith calls scripteds, where, they were, depicted in media, movies or something.

Sharon Hill: 44:13

And then people ended up reporting them in real life.

AP Strange: 44:16

Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 44:16

Where they were heavily influenced by what was in that media first, and then reported in real life. You know, that people saw the creature of the Black Lagoon and then reported a Gillman and stuff like that. So, there had been cases of that. And I kind of wondered how many things I could possibly pick up, how much of, people saying, oh, this cryptid is cool. I see this in media, in art, or and this is happening with things like Wendigo and and and Dog Man and things like that.

Sharon Hill: 44:49

People are making artistic depictions of these creatures and then people are seeing them in real life. I mean, I think, you know, Slender Man is a good example of that and there's there's other creatures that that are also that kind of a a phenomenon.

AP Strange: 45:07

Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty wild to think of. And I mean, well, one example that comes to mind that that, you wrote about was the chupacabra as closely tied to the movie species.

Sharon Hill: 45:18

Yeah. People don't love that idea, but I think it's it's pretty solid. Know, chupacabra changed. There's version one and version two. You know, version one was a spiky alien type thing that fit with the species depiction

AP Strange: 45:33

That's of the my chupacabra.

Sharon Hill: 45:35

Great. It's much more fun, yeah, than a mangy canid. And it is interesting if you actually look back that you can see the key parts of the mangy dog idea that was there in the beginning. You know, the livestock was being attacked. Well, it was probably being attacked by dogs.

Sharon Hill: 45:56

Maybe the dogs didn't look so great or weren't very healthy. But that was an easy thing to to import into The US Mainland, and then it came into to Texas, and then it morphed into blue dogs and and other things. There's actually I mean, there's some interesting things behind that too anyway, because why are the dogs suffering mange and some of them look kind of different than we would expect. And it is kind of interesting. So there's definitely some curious things that can be discovered if you're studying cryptids.

Sharon Hill: 46:28

But you could see these things evolve they're and part of our culture evolves. And we pick things out of different places and they get added to the story. It's not a closed system. It's an open system. There's things going back and forth.

Sharon Hill: 46:43

They're going to change until we find one. Right?

AP Strange: 46:47

Yeah. I mean, and type one chupacabra, I feel like had had other layers to it where there was like a conspiracy theory layer, where there was this idea that it escaped from a lab or like a UFO layer where people thought it might have been an alien or something.

Sharon Hill: 47:01

Yeah. The people in Puerto Rico didn't really trust the American government. They thought they were doing experiments.

AP Strange: 47:09

Mean, that's fair.

Sharon Hill: 47:14

Not that far fetched.

AP Strange: 47:17

But, yeah, I mean, you get the fictional stuff, I mean, Dog Man always bugged me because I'm like, it's just a werewolf. Just say werewolf, you know? Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 47:25

Yeah. But they tried to scientize that too. You know, the late Linda Godfrey, I remember she would try to say that, oh, maybe it's a type of dog that learned how to walk on its hind legs. No, no, didn't. It ended up having quite a bit of Christian theology in its background, way people described it as a demon or being at graveyards and saying certain biblical references and things like that.

Sharon Hill: 47:56

So it's a pretty deep, complicated creature. Right. Nobody really writes I'm still waiting for a good Mothman biography. Nobody has written cause it's so complex. It's got so many layers.

Sharon Hill: 48:13

And you could say the same with with the evolution of lots of cryptids. They they just get quite complicated. They're not zoology, they're sociology.

AP Strange: 48:24

Yeah. They're yeah. I I think that with any of this and any of these anomalous subjects, it it takes a multidisciplinary approach to really appreciate it. So I don't think you can come at it from any one particular angle, but if you had to pick one, I would say sociology or cultural anthropology is probably the best because what it means to people is, as you said earlier, kind of needs to be considered apart from the literal materialistic reality of it. Right?

Sharon Hill: 48:56

Right. Because because that you know exists. Know it exists in the culture, and it's definitely important because people are talking about it.

AP Strange: 49:05

Right. And people having meaning or sense of identity is like I said before, it's it it just feels cruel to to dismiss that and take it away from people. Right. I feel like a lot of skeptics can just be downright mean about it and condescending.

Sharon Hill: 49:23

Yeah. It it it does take away a bit of the wonder of the world. And I and I think that's why people love it. It's it's a lot of fun. It's it's interesting to think that there's something cool out there.

Sharon Hill: 49:35

Monsters in the woods. Yeah.

AP Strange: 49:37

Right. And I mean, also they they they become symbols for, as you know, at various points, how we how we come to terms with tragedy. Like that how you wrote about this because that's a really tricky subject. When people talk about Mothman, you have a lot of people that don't wanna talk about the Silver Bridge, and then you have a lot of others that like to sensationalize that as being, like, the end of the story or being directly related to Mothman. So I feel like there's various camps on that, but it it was a horrible tragedy.

AP Strange: 50:12

And as you know, it gets a lot less attention than the few sightings of Mothman.

Sharon Hill: 50:17

And that's controversial because when you're talking about, town festivals, this is this is kind of what brought it to my mind. I started looking at this list of town festivals and I was struck by how some of them were connected to death and destruction and tragedy. And then I started counting them. And, another colleague of mine, Jeb Card, we started talking about why this was. And the only person who'd actually done any work on this was Joe Lacock, a religious studies scholar who did look at the Mothman.

Sharon Hill: 50:57

So I started asking around as best I could and asked people, if you go back during the time of the Mothman flap, before Keehl got there, to Point Pleasant, what did people think about the Mothman sightings? Were they scared of it? Were they scared to go out of their house? Because like we think about it now, people were terrified to see the Mothman. They were running into him everywhere and they knew something bad was gonna happen.

Sharon Hill: 51:26

No, that's hindsight. What was really going on? People didn't really notice it. They didn't Right. Really connect it to and when the bridge did collapse, they did not connect it to the moth pan.

AP Strange: 51:38

Right. They had Exactly. Better information

Sharon Hill: 51:41

They they they were like, something bad happened. They did not connect it to people seeing a weird creature flying over them. So it was just in later work, particularly Kiel, who made those connections. And now we think of it as, well, yeah, that's how it is. Another interesting example was the public monster, the goat man, which I feel is really controversial because that is an active issue of people still trying to, know, live out that legend.

Sharon Hill: 52:20

They're doing legend tripping. They're going to that bridge and they're trying to see the goat man. And it's not a real thing, but people are really dying. And then they have a festival to celebrate the goat man. Right.

Sharon Hill: 52:33

And it is very controversial for the families that lost, their loved ones on that bridge. And I I don't feel good about it. But I've I've I've seen arguments both ways. Sometimes people will say it's the way that the community deals with this tragedy or this danger in their community is to personify it into this creature. I guess I can understand that too, but it's quite complicated and I'm not really sure what to think about it.

Sharon Hill: 53:08

And there are other examples about connecting cryptids to tragedies, the whole Missing four eleven thing with David Polides. Again, he's not come right out and say, Oh, it's Bigfoot. Some people will come out and say that Bigfoot took her. There's there's a series on Netflix right now, a short series. I started watching that and it's it ends up not really being about Bigfoot.

AP Strange: 53:34

Right.

Sharon Hill: 53:34

But it

AP Strange: 53:35

I had that one spoiled for me already, but I know I'm like, it sounds interesting.

Sharon Hill: 53:39

Yeah. It's it's it's okay. And and there was, in the past, good series about Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest that ended up being about pot farmers. Yeah. Was also Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 53:53

Very

AP Strange: 53:54

Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 53:56

And then you had things like, the the the guy who bombed Nashville, Tennessee being a a follower of, you know, believing that there were reptilians or lizard people out there. So these things kinda get woven into the stories where cryptids feel like they personify some larger belief in in culture. So I think that's kind of interesting. I think more work needs to be done on that.

AP Strange: 54:24

Yeah. And one of the ones you mentioned, I remember was only like a year or two ago where people were lost in a park somewhere, I think, because they were looking for Bigfoot. But then you noted that there wasn't clear that that's what they were doing. Like, they might have had a passing interest in Bigfoot, but the news, right, really took that in with it to the point where people were making fun of them and conflating it with conspiracy theory beliefs and stuff like that.

Sharon Hill: 54:49

Yeah. Could you imagine you you leave your house as a joke? Hey. I'm going out for a walk, going out for a hike, gonna look for Bigfoot. And then something happens to you.

Sharon Hill: 54:57

They got lost. They they perished from exposure.

AP Strange: 55:01

Right.

Sharon Hill: 55:02

And not thinking about it, that's what the family says, and that gets out into the public. It's just this is terrible.

AP Strange: 55:09

Because it's perfect clickbait. People will click on that. Yeah. Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 55:13

You you do see that a lot in in in the media. I I have seen a couple times where they've they've mentioned oh I this person thought that this person they killed was a demon or yeah. It's it it's unsavory. It's it's upsetting.

AP Strange: 55:30

Well, it's it's pretty ghoulish to do that for the for the clicks but Yeah. Yeah. But I I mean with all of that it occurred to me that something I've noted before. I'm certainly not the first one but the term monster almost is more appropriate because it's derived from the term the I think the Latin monstrum Mhmm. Which had had associations with omens importance and stuff like that.

AP Strange: 55:58

So monsters are supposed to be ominous or or harbingers of something that's coming.

Sharon Hill: 56:06

Right. Right.

AP Strange: 56:06

You know? I almost feel like monsters are more appropriate word. Indeed.

Sharon Hill: 56:12

I mean, it's just the way humans operate. We tend to personify those tragedies. Yeah.

AP Strange: 56:21

Yeah. Yeah. And we do in language still. I mean, I guess some of the phrases are outdated, but we talk about, like, the green dragon of envy or something like that. You know?

Sharon Hill: 56:31

Yeah. I didn't think of that one. That's a good one.

AP Strange: 56:38

Well, I think that's I I think it's really good to point all that out, and I I thank you for doing so. Because the other thing you do well is you kind of call people out for borrowing stuff from indigenous legends or traditions, cultural traditions that become divorced from from their original oral tradition of storytelling and turned into creepypasta basically online.

Sharon Hill: 57:06

Yeah. I'm not the one to say what's cultural appropriation or not, but it just seems to feel like certain stories get ripped from another culture and made into a commodified, thing on your podcast or your YouTube channel or whatever you have. And you have these people that aren't in that culture saying what that culture is saying about that creature. And to me, the Bigfoot of native American lore just doesn't sound like the Bigfoot that people are seeing in their back yard. Does not seem to the same thing.

AP Strange: 57:48

Not to mention there's dozens and dozens of tribal, things that people equate with Bigfoot and those are all separate things that are very

Sharon Hill: 57:57

different from each other. Yeah. And I really feel like, a cryptozoology researcher trying to get some validity is going to reach back into the past and cherry pick things that look like they could bolster that claim to make it out to be a long tradition. Yeah. And I think that that is fraught with errors.

AP Strange: 58:23

Yeah. I don't know if that counts as a scientifical, but it's certainly a faulty thinking.

Sharon Hill: 58:30

Yeah. The Wendigo thing is a long running thing that's extremely disturbing, how that's been commodified into culture. And it seems really, really wrong.

AP Strange: 58:44

Yeah, I agree.

Sharon Hill: 58:45

Compared to the true stories.

AP Strange: 58:47

I mean, if it's got antlers, that's

Sharon Hill: 58:49

Yeah, not exactly.

AP Strange: 58:53

Somebody came up with a design they thought was cool. I mean, it probably was originally like a like a creepy pasta thing. Like one of those they used to have those contests. That's where Slenderman came from was

Sharon Hill: 59:06

Right.

AP Strange: 59:06

Kind of an online contest for who could come up with the best creepy image, you know?

Sharon Hill: 59:10

Yeah and it's hard to trace like where where would that original image came from? Somebody added a a creepy deer band and you know, and and and ended up being equated with the Wendigo legend. So, yeah.

AP Strange: 59:23

Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of images and all those stuff, I mean, like this stuff, I I don't think there is there is a way nowadays. And this has been true for some time, but especially now that we could ever have video or photographic evidence that's worth anything at all in regards to Cryptids as proof, you know, I don't think it proves anything now. Right?

Sharon Hill: 59:51

No. I mean, it's been a while since we've been able to do Photoshop and things like that and manipulation. So it's been a while since I would ever think that any video or photo evidence was any good.

AP Strange: 01:00:06

Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 01:00:07

And now with AI, it's impossible. Just In fact, you're safe to dismiss any audio or visual or photo evidence, audio, I'm sorry, video or photographic evidence just out of hand because unless you have corroborating evidence for it that appeared or other witnesses or you were witnessing or you have a, you know, something that supports the claim of what you have on this digital digital piece of footage, it's worthless.

AP Strange: 01:00:47

Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 01:00:47

Just You just can't do anything with it.

AP Strange: 01:00:49

Right. People send me stuff all the time. They're like Mhmm. What do think of this? Or, oh, check this out.

AP Strange: 01:00:53

And they go, well, really I have no way to tell you if that's real or not, but I'm gonna lean toward just not because it's just too easy to fake stuff.

Sharon Hill: 01:01:02

Right, right. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:01:04

You're gonna have to do better. I'm gonna need context at the very least. Like I have to know who took it and what their story is. You know, it's just but and I mean, I'm fine with a hoax. I actually think hoaxes are very amusing a lot of the time.

AP Strange: 01:01:20

But but AI just seems like the most low effort You know? It's just there's not even an art to it. You know?

Sharon Hill: 01:01:27

But people love to just put it out there. And there was always this, excuse. Why would somebody hoax this thing? Why would they go through people have hoaxed for a lot less, and some people are just jokers, and that's what they do. And they wanna get a rise out of people.

Sharon Hill: 01:01:46

And I think that we're just deluged with jokers on the internet sending stuff to paranormal podcasters and YouTubers and bloggers and saying, this is an account I had. And watching it go up on on their media and doing this. Think I think we're being flooded by it. It's still getting clicks, though. I mean, people are still reading this stuff, and some people are believing it.

AP Strange: 01:02:15

Mhmm. Yeah. So as long as as long as people keep clicking, I mean, it'll keep coming, I think, you know. Yeah. So I guess this is kind of like a turning point as as you mentioned earlier for for Cryptozoology.

AP Strange: 01:02:28

We're kind of do you think it's the end of an era or do you think it's going to evolve into something else or do you think we're going to start to see a decline in interest?

Sharon Hill: 01:02:39

I'm very bad at predicting these things.

AP Strange: 01:02:42

I'm putting you in an awkward

Sharon Hill: 01:02:43

position

AP Strange: 01:02:44

of

Sharon Hill: 01:02:44

writing, Well, like say it like 2017, when I was finishing up my book, it's like, Oh, ufology is dead. How wrong I was. Ghosts kind of declined. I mean, they hit a peak and they kind of declined. Ghost center is not as popular anymore.

Sharon Hill: 01:03:03

We saw the end of like finding Bigfoot. It ran very long time, nine seasons or something like that, that never found Bigfoot. And then the shows that kind of came after weren't as influential. And now, you know, there's a couple things that have happened, particularly in Bigfootery, but also in cryptozoology in general. And like you said, the AI thing is is really bad because people can't can't really take seriously any video or photographic evidence anymore.

Sharon Hill: 01:03:38

So that's not it's kinda out of the out of the the picture now. But, I recently wrote a post because I started thinking about this. Can can, the Bigfoot community recover from the Patterson Gimlin film reveal that's just out this past month. Can they recover from Jeff Meldrum's death? Will somebody be able to step in as the scientific face of Sasquatch research?

Sharon Hill: 01:04:11

Can they come back from, the fact that, there's no evidence any better for sixty years and and some that that key piece of evidence that Cornerstone, like it or not, was the PG film. And now that that seems to be about to fall for good. Yeah. So I I don't I think it's inevitable that it changes. I don't know what that's gonna look like.

Sharon Hill: 01:04:40

To me, I think it's going the pop cryptid route where cryptids are just as popular as ever, but it's not about finding them. It's about just having fun and and and, you know, the explosion of of media and and art and and consumerism.

AP Strange: 01:04:55

Yeah. Well, maybe the real Bigfoot was the friends we made along the way.

Sharon Hill: 01:05:00

That's right.

AP Strange: 01:05:05

I have to say it has been kind of amusing to watch all the Bigfoot people talk about the Patterson Gimlin film nonstop lately because I have noticed a good amount of them that have come out and they're like, I always knew it was fake and

Sharon Hill: 01:05:19

you're just Oh, really?

AP Strange: 01:05:20

Did you? Did you really? Because I'm pretty sure you weren't saying that before.

Sharon Hill: 01:05:27

It is, it is really a strange, example of cognitive dissonance too.

AP Strange: 01:05:33

Yeah. It's a lot of people that like to want to be right all the time, you know?

Sharon Hill: 01:05:38

Right. I haven't I haven't seen the people who said I haven't seen too many people that have said, I knew it all along, except for the skeptic people that I'm already, you know, friends with. I have seen a lot of people just lose their heads about it. They are twisting themselves in knots. I cannot believe the mental acrobatics they're doing to maintain this belief.

Sharon Hill: 01:06:08

And I have seen in the past, you know, people who, science has failed to discover Bigfoot. So they, in order to sustain that belief, they turn to more paranormal ideas about Bigfoot.

AP Strange: 01:06:23

It's an

Sharon Hill: 01:06:24

ultra terrestrial, interdimensional, you know, something like that. In order to maintain that belief, they have to resort to more extreme assumptions.

AP Strange: 01:06:34

Right.

Sharon Hill: 01:06:34

I see what these so called scientific Bigfooters who will believe anybody off the street who said, I had a Bigfoot encounter. Just without question, they'll believe them. Oh, this is a credible witness, blah, blah, blah, blah. And take their information and put a dot on the map and record it in the database and all that. And now you give them actual evidence that's supported and then they reject it out of hand.

Sharon Hill: 01:07:02

They're just so adamant about not allowing this to be deconstructed. So if anybody doesn't know, this is about the Capturing Bigfoot documentary that premiered at the Sundance, Film Festival and is not out in public distribution yet. So not that many people have seen it, but the people who have seen it has said this is a slam dunk. This really closes the case on showing that the Patterson Gimlin film was was a hoax by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin. So it it just clashes with a lot of their belief and their ideas about Bigfoot.

Sharon Hill: 01:07:44

And it doesn't mean that everything collapses, but I feel like, it is creating a lot of doubt in in the community for people who are critical thinkers. And for those on the outside who now say, Oh, for sure, now we know this is a hoax. Let me not bother with Bigfoot at all. So we may see a decline in people now going out into the woods, paying to go out into the Bigfoot camping adventure or whatever. So I don't see people loving Bigfoot any less.

Sharon Hill: 01:08:22

They love the idea of it, but I don't think they're gonna see it as a real creature as they did before.

AP Strange: 01:08:29

Yeah. Yeah. That seems reasonable. I mean, for my part, I I I am interested in seeing the film but it's like, I don't feel like I can have an opinion until I do, right? Right.

AP Strange: 01:08:42

It's just I haven't really said much about it publicly. I haven't posted about it too much because I don't know. I'm talking about what people tell me is in the film. So. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:08:54

I mean, apparently, you had mentioned Doctor Doctor Meldrim and from what I understand, he's in the film and he he takes back anything he said in favor of the PG film being accurate. But again, this is all I'm I'm just hearing from people that allegedly saw the film.

Sharon Hill: 01:09:12

Sexual. Yeah. Not too sure about that one. I would be interested in seeing his actual reaction. Unfortunately, he's not here to speak about it Right.

Sharon Hill: 01:09:22

You know, after the fact, which is sad. What I found interesting is it's definitely fair to say, let's withhold judgment until we see the film. However, you have a lot of people coming out and saying, no, it's a hoax of a hoax, or, you know, it's AI and all this stuff. That's absurd because if that was true, we would have seen a cease and desist. Would have seen, you know, other people coming out and saying, this is fake.

Sharon Hill: 01:09:54

This is not true. There are people saying it's AI. Well, it's not, it's not. Right. Nobody would go out that far on a limb with, the Patersons who are litigious, you know, They've had a copyright on this thing.

Sharon Hill: 01:10:09

They're not going to let it go unless it's time to let it go. And I think it is time to let it go, and they knew that. So, I, yeah, I'm pretty much convinced it's the end. And I'm, if that's the case, which I'm, you know, I'm pretty sure that's the case, I'm very happy about that because it removes that ambiguity. And now we could say, that said, there's still a bunch of people who are like, no, that's not.

AP Strange: 01:10:41

Right. It's

Sharon Hill: 01:10:42

not. I'm gonna twist myself in knots and and say that that's not true. So very interesting.

AP Strange: 01:10:49

Yeah. It's it's interesting times. Strange times. Yeah. Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 01:10:57

But

AP Strange: 01:10:59

but, yeah, this is this is all been great. This is a blast to discuss Cryptids with you, and and I'm glad we finally got the opportunity to talk after having read your work for so long. It's it's been a real pleasure. So

Sharon Hill: 01:11:15

Yeah. I I I love to talk. It's my favorite subject. Sometimes in in the past, I've gone on, you know, paranormal podcasts, and it ends up curving back to UFOs. And I'm like, please don't go back to UFOs.

AP Strange: 01:11:29

Don't wanna talk about that a lot.

Sharon Hill: 01:11:31

Yeah. That's fine. That's fine. But I have been I have been cornered by by some people who are just, well, let's talk about UFOs. Please, let's not talk about UFOs.

Sharon Hill: 01:11:42

Let's talk about earth lights or, you know, something more interesting that may have a I love natural anomalous phenomenon. So if if it you know, there's strange rains or weird sounds or, cryptids even fall into that, you know, strange animals, that's that's my jam. Those are the things I I really like.

AP Strange: 01:12:04

Well, for Strange Sounds, you wrote about one that's kinda near me, the Mudus noises and Connecticut. Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 01:12:11

That I got so lucky with that one. I didn't hear the Mudus noises, but I did have enough background in earthquakes to understand what was going on there. And I was able to, meet up with a folklorist who knew a lot about it and took me on a tour of the park and showed me all the interesting places. We went into the cave and did all the things, and it was so illuminating to see what was going on. And I loved that town.

Sharon Hill: 01:12:42

I I went back there again, took my husband there because I had such a good time. I just loved the feeling of the town and it was just beautiful and enjoyed a lot.

AP Strange: 01:12:51

Connecticut's got a lot of really cool places in it. There's a lot of strange little corners in Connecticut.

Sharon Hill: 01:12:59

Yeah, we went to the Devil's Hop Yard and we hiked that. Oh, yeah, so much fun.

AP Strange: 01:13:06

Yeah, yeah, that's great. Okay. Well, what do you have on the plate for the future? What are you considering writing about next? Because it seems that you're writing all the time.

Sharon Hill: 01:13:19

Yeah. I have a piece on Pop Cryptids that's coming out in a book that I, not my book, but a collaboration. So that article is coming out in a book form. That probably will be a few more months before it actually gets published. I just heard from the editor who said that he's got the final proof, so it's it's in place.

Sharon Hill: 01:13:43

So I I really want to get that out for people to read because I feel that that's an interesting take that nobody's really talking about. Pop cryptids is Yeah. Cryptids are just everywhere now. It there it's common vernacular to use the word like never before. So that's I think that's super interesting.

AP Strange: 01:14:04

Right.

Sharon Hill: 01:14:04

What else? I I I do have some ideas. Like, I I would like to collaborate on an article about what is cryptozoology, what are cryptids, what what problems are we having with that definition. I did talk to somebody about collaborating on that. I would like to get more articles out into journals because, blogs aren't getting the attention that they used to.

Sharon Hill: 01:14:33

I'm gonna do YouTube very much. I just have a couple things out there. It's not my thing. And I think that's kind of ephemeral. I think that the putting things into legitimate, resource resources that people can have is is the way to go and and to to get them out to the public that they could access them too.

Sharon Hill: 01:14:52

So it's not behind a paywall or something.

AP Strange: 01:14:55

Right.

Sharon Hill: 01:14:55

It is is important.

AP Strange: 01:14:57

Yeah.

Sharon Hill: 01:14:58

Absolutely. Review. Yeah. That that's the kind of stuff I think is lacking in cryptozoology. Not that many people are actually writing scholarly academic things about it, and I would like to be a part of that.

Sharon Hill: 01:15:12

I would like to do that. So that's a lot of work. Yeah. It's a lot of work to do that. It's easy sometimes to just pop out a blog.

Sharon Hill: 01:15:21

Sometimes it takes me a week or so to come up with a blog because I don't want to I don't want to put out mistakes. I don't want to put out stuff that's not referenced or sourced. So it takes a long time. Some of these YouTube videos, you can tell they're not really well sourced or they're full of mistakes and stuff like that. But those are the things that get attention, unfortunately.

AP Strange: 01:15:48

Yeah. It's true. And, you know, I've I I I feel like I have to say this anytime I'm talking about my podcast out in the real world with people. If they ask me about it and I'm like, yeah, you know, there's things I probably could do to really make my podcast a lot more popular but they're not things I'm willing to do.

Sharon Hill: 01:16:09

Right, yeah.

AP Strange: 01:16:11

I don't wanna do any like thirty second real videos with me where it's me wide eyed for the free frame.

Sharon Hill: 01:16:22

Oh, I know exactly what you mean.

AP Strange: 01:16:24

I don't wanna do that. So the people that will, you know, the people that will benefit hopefully will find it, you know. Yeah. Just kind of my philosophy with it. Where can people where can people follow you to to keep up with it?

AP Strange: 01:16:38

We mentioned your sub stack and

Sharon Hill: 01:16:41

Yeah. So what I I I use the sub stack to sort of reference the other places. Sometimes I do just stuff on the sub stack. That's a little unique. But mostly sharonahill.com.

Sharon Hill: 01:16:53

There was another person named Sharon Hill, so I got the Sharon A Hill, to differentiate. That's been my blog for twenty years that I've been some of the stuff I took down because it's outdated, but, it's got a whole pile of different stuff on there. It's got spooky geology. You could just click on that if you're interested in spooky geology topics, and it's got pop ghosts to cryptids if you're just interested in that part. Different categories, lots of different categories, anomalies and Freudian stuff.

Sharon Hill: 01:17:27

I occasionally still write for Freudian times, here and there when the mood strikes me. And then I do modern crypto zoology blog, if that's all you're interested in, the crypto zoology stuff, on WordPress. And well, that's about it.

AP Strange: 01:17:48

Yeah. That's enough. Well, there's plenty there to keep people busy. Twenty years worth of blog posts. Go check it out people.

AP Strange: 01:17:57

Thanks again for coming on Sharon. This has really been a blast.

Sharon Hill: 01:18:03

My pleasure. Thanks so much.