Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town. Wednesday we learned how one man created his own lake monster sham.

Maybe it’s because we’re at a century’s distance with only selective research sources left to go by, but I feel like there’s respectable, genteel nobility behind both the Hodag hoax and the Lake George Monster prank. I say this in light of the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco, which mirrored modern film and record promotion campaigns far more than it did the homegrown ingenuity of yesteryear’s cryptid shenanigans. At the same token, it’s difficult, in the case of the Sasquatch carcass thimblerig, to figure out exactly where the wild dream logic and delightful homespun madness ended and where the frustrating dishonesty and grubby-handed cash pawing began.

It’s easy to point fingers at Carmine Thomas Biscardi, the Las Vegas promoter and notorious Bigfoot hoaxer, who teamed up with the two Georgia pranksters after they had already set their small-scale practical joke in motion… easy because he’s obviously guilty, and by far the least sympathetic party involved. In 2005, Biscardi went on Coast to Coast AM to brag about a live Bigfoot specimen that everybody could watch and enjoy via live webcam feed… for a subscription fee of $14. The surprise here isn’t that there wasn’t actually a captive Sasquatch pacing circles in front of the camera lens, but rather that there was nothing pacing anything anywhere; Biscardi didn’t even try to fake a spectacle. After announcing that there was never a live specimen and claiming that he, too, had been ripped off by the people in possession of the non-existent Bigfoot, Biscardi took the webcam money and ran. (To his dubious credit, he did refund all post-prank-revelation subscription orders.) The refusal to present even the drunkest of vagrants in the nattiest of Gorilla Grodd costumes clearly crosses the line between hoax and scam.

So after Biscardi jumped on the bandwagon-cum-Yeti-hearse of the Georgian sheriff’s deputy and his used car salesman buddy, it was really tempting to cite him as the reason that the hoax felt less like a harmless, misguided jape than a carefully orchestrated deception. After all, Biscardi’s the one who called down the media frenzy, and who organized the ridiculous live press conference, and who, at the outset, before pictures of the so-called corpse were released on the Internet, charged folks $2 a pop for cadaver photos. On the other hand, Biscardi didn’t start the hoax. He didn’t author the boys’ tale of hiking through the woods and finding the 7’ 7” fur-covered body amid a gathering of three similar living creatures. He even joined up after the first YouTube video was filmed. Biscardi is just a savvy, opportunistic mooch, the crooked conductor of a runaway train built by Deputy Matthew Whiton and Rick Dyer.

Get the rest of the story AFTER THE JUMP…

Dyer and Whiton are harder to pin down. It takes very specific sort of f***-all enthusiasm to dash out into the world claiming to have found the bloating corpse of a monster. Still, a century before, Eugene Shepard ran into Rhinelander, Wisconsin with not only the faked corpse of a monster, but also an epic tale detailing how he and a lumberjack posse had killed the beast with dynamite. In both cases a false cadaver was created, and advertised as the genuine artifact. I haven’t found anything to indicate that Shepard charged anyone to take a look-see at the immolated Hodag, but neither is it clear what sort of monetary designs Dyer and Whiton did or didn’t have before Biscardi joined up (though the ease with which the Vegas promoter convinced them that their bizarre animal was, in actuality, a cash cow doesn’t speak well of their intentions). “But,” you point out, “Shepard did charge people a dime to see the supposed live Hodag at the County Fair.” And here, again, we are walking the high wire between hoax and scam.

Even disregarding the fact that’s Shepard’s Hodag wasn’t presented in a cultural vacuum – patrons were almost certainly familiar with sideshows and similar humbugs that offered creative, entertaining, but generally obvious, deceptions for a minimal fee – the lurching automaton voiced by Shepard’s son and accompanied by Shepard’s own manic, silver-tongued narration provided enough of a spectacle to justify the minimal price of admission. And it’s hard to tell whether or not Dyer and Whiton possess whatever unnamable compulsion drives people to rig up robot monsters or add a set of blue ears to a painted, pulley-rigged stick. They certainly aren’t like Biscardi, who uses big talk and empty promises to pocket fat stacks of money for nothing. At the same time, they seemed to lack the joyfulness and enthusiasm that both Shepard and Watrous felt for their respective creations. Despite their commitment to creating an ad hoc monster body, they seemed more obsessed with the publicity and cultural caché than with the actual source of attention – Bigfoot remains. Seriously low rent Bigfoot remains.
And for me, that was what ultimately made the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco seem so disingenuous. Initially, the whole business had me really excited – not because I believed the body was real, but because I wanted to see how far they would take it. How much effort they would put into the spectacle. Whether or not, like Shepard and Watrous, they would show us something that, while false according to its supposed identity, was real in its creativity and craftsmanship. I was hoping for a fully autopsy-ready body, with layers of correctly placed viscera, a stomach rife with clues pointing to the identity of its last meal, and maybe even a couple ridiculous, but no less entertaining, physiological revelations (Bigfoot has two hearts! Bigfoot has an artificial hip, indicating that Sasquatches have surprisingly advanced medical capabilities!) So when word came out that it was just an ape suit stuffed with hotdog ingredients, I was more than a little chagrined.

I don’t know where this leaves us. It’s seems reductive to blame Dyer and Whiton’s misguided bottom-shelf prankery on new media and a reality show culture that promise fame to the commoner and increasingly value the frenzied swapping of digital information over a tangible engagement with a physical product, though I’m sure once Biscardi was involved he convinced the boys that, these days, a ridiculously low investment often yields high temporary returns. After all, the hoax was never meant to go undetected forever… just long enough for the three yeti coroners to fill their coffers through the exploitation of Bigfoot enthusiasts and cryptid research groups. Then again, in this day and age, even a well-intentioned prankster with boundless integrity would be remiss to entirely forego a Web presence in favor of some falsely idealized “old fashioned” route.

No, I think the problem with all of this – the thing that made Dyer and Whiton’s Bigfoot prank feel dire and witless – was the pranksters seeming lack of fun. Imagine a grinning Eugene Shepard storming out of the woods with his carbonized Hodag, or a giggling Harry Watrous hiding in some shrubs, waiting to loose his hippogriff upon a hapless boater. These locally performed stunts were just that – performed, with the jerry-rigged monsters taking center stage as their creators MC’d or crouched behind an azalea bush. A snarling Hodag. A blue-eared hippogriff. A hypothetical surgically enhanced dual-hearted Bigfoot. These pranks are attractive because they seek to knit our dreams and nightmares from the mundane yarn of the everyday – to bring us as close as we’ll ever come to actual monsters. What the Dyer and Whiton did was mug for the camera, all the while taunting us with a shi**y cat’s cradle strung between 10 middle fingers.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast. Wednesday, we investigated claims that it is the missing link.

Fear Liath and Science.

After writing that tantalizing gem of a teaser for today’s column, I looked at it for a moment and considered whether I should maybe put some qualifying quotation marks around the word science. And I decided not to. The concepts to be discussed herein are definitive scientific realities… it just happens that we’re going to talk about them as they relate to a 7-foot-tall man-ape descended from the wood spirits of ancient Europe.

Plenty of yella-bellied hikers and goose-pimpled mountaineers have attributed Mount Ben Macdui’s pervasive atmosphere of dread to the mystical aura of the mysterious Greyman; lots of Cryptozoologists blame Fear Liath, too. But not because it has magical fright-throwing abilities. It turns out that, apparently, all Sasquatches, from Bigfoot to Wampas, use powerful pheromones to elude capture by preemptively instilling panic in their would-be pursuers. That’s right. Fear Liath squats down and blows out a mess of chemical fear that drifts through the mist and infects human trespassers.
I can follow this line of thought. Sure, it’s scribbled and erratic and leads off the paper and onto the nice tablecloth, but I can follow it. A threatened aphid, for instance, will blast out a haze of alarm pheromones, thereby, warning any nearby companions to flee the scene. Frightened termites and bees can also pinch off a cloud of fear, though, in their case, it usually psyches up the chest-bumping former half of the fight-or-flight instinct. Likewise, dogs, bears, et al, have all been shown to deploy and perceive an intraspecies “scent of fear” – “intra” being the key prefix here. Based on all existing scientific evidence, the pheromones of any given species are detectable only to members of that species, meaning that even if all the mist clinging to Ben Macdui were one massive pheromone cloud squirted out by cowardly Fear Liath, it wouldn’t elicit even the slightest of pant pees in area humans. Furthermore, considering the termites and bees, if humans were affected, it’s just as likely that they’d pick up a giant rock and charge hulk style toward the jelly-spined source of the panic fog. (Although, if the pheromone did work correctly, Scarecrow would be poaching the hell out of these things.)

Much more scientific justification for the Fear Liath AFTER THE JUMP…Somewhere, a cryptozoologist just threw up his hands in frustration and said, “Duh! He’s the missing link… his pheromones have some shared human biological stuff. Idiot.” – a rejoinder that, I admit, would present the most sensible zany retort if studies hadn’t already demonstrated that the human ability to perceive or otherwise act on another human’s wafting panic stink is nil. If people can’t sense pure human fear, it’s ridiculous to think that they might respond to some horrific, ape-tainted knockoff.
Another theory? Infrasound.

Infrasound refers to any sound below 20 Hz, which, in terms of the low-end of the auditory spectrum, is considered the cutoff for normal human hearing. The reason excited cryptozoologists have pointed to this particular phenomenon as a possible candidate for Sasquatch’s scare-sharing mechanism is that various experiments have shown that almost a quarter of all human beings, when exposed to infrasound or near-infrasonic frequencies (17 Hz was the frequency used by a 700-subject UK study), have displayed peculiar physical reactions, such as feelings of fear, anxiety and revulsion. Additionally, Vic Tandy, a researcher at Coventry University, has suggested that sounds at around 19 Hz may be responsible for a butt load of ghost sightings. Morrow made this discovery while working in a supposedly haunted lab, where he and other researchers experienced strange sensations of dread, and where Morrow himself witnessed a gray blob drifting through his periphery. Turns out, an extraction fan vibrating at 18.98 Hz was not only inspiring his feelings of anxiety, but also generating an optical hallucination by vibrating his eyes (the natural resonant frequency of the human eye is about 18 Hz).

So far, it’s a pretty thin case: Travelers of regions known to be inhabited by sasquatches are often plagued by strange, unaccountable feelings of dread. Infrasound has been known to cause such feelings. Sasquatches, therefore, must be terrifying people away by generating some sort of infrasound.

Still, writers on Bigfoot-manic message boards and crypto-crazed blogs love to point out that African elephants have been proven to communicate using nasally generated infrasound vocalizations, a zoological revelation that wasn’t even theorized until 1984. The low frequency calls, which are probably used to, among other things, deliver herd movement updates and initiate mating rituals, range between 15 and 35 Hz – well within the limits that can, in some instances, cause less than pleasant sensations within the human body. Some suggest that sasquatches, like elephants, have the capacity to generate these types of ether-rattling ululations. (To be fair, one of the message boarders did pragmatically point out that, “Even if sasquatches use infrasound, we need a video of the species making these sounds as solid evidence.”) Elephants are big animals. It’s not difficult to look at an elephant’s head and understand how a sound beyond the realm of human perception could bellow out of it. Now, I’m not a scientist or anything, but wouldn’t Bigfoot essentially need nasal cavities with the anomalous spatial properties of the Tardis in order to raise such a (inaudible) ruckus?

Look, I know that this isn’t a debunking site, where stories are hunted and vivisected for inaccuracies. I’m way more interested in chasing down the legends, tagging their ears and sending them back to frolic through the collective imagination. If folks want to say that Fear Liath, beautifully monstrous fiction that it is, can, from a distance, raise hackles and roil up visceral fear, I’m totally on board. But pheromones? Infrasound? Maybe Bigfoot, contemporary American icon that he is, might need to resort to the modern narrative contrivance of overwrought, unnecessary, straw-grasping explanation (why bigfoot needs any sort of emotion-finagling superpower is beyond me), in the same way that every modern Hollywood villain gets a tired tragic past to justify his ultimate treachery and every good-hearted hero gets a backlog of clichéd vestigial guilt to explain his eventual honor, but Fear Liath comes readymade with a back story of primitive thaumaturgy and ancient races. Of Wodewoses and of Pagan nightmares. Of the high shrieks, the bite marks on flesh, the cold water shaken from course fur, the electric smell of blood on the wind and all the other things that would one day clatter together into a human being. Save your science for the urban legends and the contemporary myths. The “are they really extinct?” case studies and desperate EVP analyses.

Sometimes it’s better if a villain is just bad. Sometimes it’s better if a hero is just good. And sometimes it’s better if a sasquatch is just magic.

We have more footage of what can only be described as a tense stand off between one mountain man and a predatory Sasquatch. We talked about Tim Peeler in the most recent WeirdThingsTV but another local news station covered the battle and even advanced the story, revealing the technology Peeler plans on using to snap a picture of the beast.

Come back to WeirdThings for continued coverage of Tar Heel Bigfoot Watch…

Beautiful hair…

[CNN]

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast.

Wudewas. Wodwos. Wodewoses. Woodwoses. Variants of the word are as numerous as the trees in the forests inhabited by the feral possessors of these ancient names. The wild men. The tidiest accounts of Scotland’s Fear Liath would have you believe that the giant grey creature’s closest relative is Bigfoot – that noble missing link who hides deep within America’s dwindling native woods, and in whom hides lost vestiges of man… scattered dust from genetic corners that were sanded down into curves during the civilizing renovation of the primal human spirit, the process itself an exciting necessity of the social evolution that created both the modern world and the most basic, aching nostalgia found therein. This nostalgia takes the form of a chromosomal muscle memory, a scuffed shoebox, brimming with relics, tucked beneath the bed of the collective id.

It’s more than just the bare carnal reasoning of the reptilian brain – the eat, kill or screw impulse that any cynical 16-year-old can tell you is as alive today in the forests of laminate boardroom furnishings as it was millennia ago amid the dark tangles of forgotten jungles. No. This is about an understanding of place, an unselfconscious symbiosis between man and topography, man and biology. The unvoiceable knowledge that, if dropped in the woods – any woods – one could navigate the soil, elude danger, secure shelter, procure food and still find time to gaze up in wonderment at the twinkling panorama of space.

It’s also probably an illusion. After all, humans still have these senses and abilities. Modern man has just repurposed them for urban environs, so that if dropped in a city – any city – one could navigate pavement, listen for sirens, and recognize chain hotel logos and the trademark color schemes of a half-dozen burger chains.

Get the rest of the story… AFTER THE JUMP

Put simply, missing links represent, among other things, a false notion that it was only post fire and after the wheel that man’s trip from ape to commuter lapsed into a bumbling process of trial and error. That people were born with knowledge to efficiently take down an elk, to strip the meat off its bones and, when preparing the side dish, to use non-poisonous mushrooms. It’s this misplaced (a less generous person might say, “B.S.”) sentimentality that makes a brief glimpse of Bigfoot so magical; it’s as if we’ve been afforded a peek at an organized era before flatware and firearms came along and mucked everything up. It’s why a fog-shrouded encounter with the Fear Liath is so terrifying (besides, of course, the monster’s mystical fear conjuring ability) – we are on his turf now, and he is living a life we abandoned. A life that, try is we might, by camping, hiking, etc., we can never fully reclaim – a sad fact that finds us physically and mentally vulnerable to that bygone lifestyle’s dangers and obstacles, among them the hulking Greyman.

Wodewoses – mythic wild men of ancient Europe – represented something similar to the modern Bigfoot. They possessed the same sort of preternatural, pre-civilized bond with nature (some of them could even see years into the future, evincing a sense that, in giving up its primal beginnings, mankind likewise sacrificed some broad and mysterious link to the larger universe), and represented a similar understanding of man’s anti-domestic roots… but they also had a bit more personality. Whereas Sasquatch represents an iconic image of a missing link as recalibrated by modern science to include overwhelmingly ape-like features, Wodewoses had human physiques (swathed though they were in a carpet of fur) and demonstrably human faces. Most of them measured in well below the slam dunk-ready height of most modern man-apes. Many boasted leonine hair and wild beards. Some were part goat. Some, part elf. Some descended from elementals or dark spirits. Others carried clubs. Some even had hairless, feminine chins and tig ol’ bitties.
Essentially, Wodewoses hopelessly blurred the lines between fairy tale creatures, missing links and hirsute madmen. The parenthetically aforementioned prophetic wild men, for example, were generally portrayed as contemporary humans driven mad by ancient and powerful forces. Even outside the bounds of the mythic and supernatural, rumors of feral tribes prowling the landscapes of unexplored continents ran rampant. Early Christians believed that Wodewoses had supernatural powers of seduction, and feared their ability to coerce virtuous women into debased and vile sex acts (which at the time, probably constituted, like, gentle reverse cowgirl). The church no doubt viewed the mischievous perverts, drunk as they were on animal lusts and the howling winds that stir the leaves, as horny, impish mascots of Paganism.

Meanwhile, French monarch King Charles VI saw the Wodewoses as a limitless source of amusement. During a 1393 masquerade ball held in the honor of the Queen Mother, Chuck and five of his courtiers donned hemp wild man costumes, chained themselves together and trudged out into the ballroom, where the amusement quickly assumed a very real limit – embers from a torch ignited the flammable costumes, resulting in the horrible, fiery deaths of at least three of the King’s companions.

In Germany, club wielding wild men, buxom wild women and even whole wild clans were fixtures of family seals and coats of arms, offering the suggestion that each family’s roots were both deep-set and brawny. This usage highlights the sense of primitive strength and wild power evoked by Wodewoses. In short, even before humans had any coherent sense of the mechanisms of evolution, there existed inside people an understanding that man had fought his way out of the wooded darkness and into the light of civilization, but that that emergence was bittersweet, held as it was in the receding presence of things left behind.

Misleading notions that earlier times were simpler, truer, better, etc. are attractive shadows under which to toil through this modern life. Our ancestors dreamt up the wild men to keep an imagined ideal alive, even if it sometimes led to irrational fear or catching on fire. Sure, modern science has re-shaped the wild men – grown them and aped out their faces and robbed them of supernatural powers – but the ideal remains. We retain that strange nostalgia.

Ancient Scotland was host to an uncountable number of feral elves, dark spirits, vengeful ghosts and hirsute wild men. There’s no doubt that today’s simian Fear Liath is a direct descendent of the Wodewoses of yesteryear. The proof is in the supernatural power that the creature displays – its ability to covertly project feelings of panic and fear into the hearts of hikers and mountaineers.

Crypytozoologists, however, have a different theory about this “magic” power.

Friday: Fear Liath and Science

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. Come back Monday and Wednesday for the rest of the story.

Leave it to Scotland’s Fear Liath to meet any (or all!) of your horrifying cryptozoological encounter needs. A sudden sense of creeping psychic dread followed by inexplicable panic and unprovoked activation of your fight-or-flight response? Leave it to the Liath! A more traditional, rampage-style assault, up to and including wild pursuit of a moving car? He’s on it! Or maybe a subtler, mysterious encounter – a huge, lumbering figure glanced through the fog… a giant footprint in the mud… a stolen picanic basket? Greyman’s got it!

“What is the Fear Liath?” you ask.

Some folks refer to it as Scotland’s Bigfoot, and in some ways that’s accurate. Hiker’s who have seen the Fear Liath (also known as “The Greyman”) have described it as a burly giant with a strikingly inhuman face and a head-to-toe coating of thick, ash-colored fur. What makes the Fear Liath a taxonomical oddity, however, is the effect it’s said to have over people in its vicinity. Supposedly, travelers of the Cairngorm Mountains, and especially visitors to Ben Macdui, the range’s highest peak and suspected site of the Greyman’s lair, have experienced bizarre sensations of terror that come out of nowhere and, often, send the suddenly stricken mountaineers screaming into the mist.
John Norman Collie, an experienced British mountaineer famous for performing pioneering climbing feats in the Himalayas and the Canadian Rockies, authored the most famous account of this strange phenomenon.

In 1895, while hiking near Ben Macdui’s peak, Collie sensed that he was not alone. After listening for several moments, he discerned a distinct and frightening crunching sound trailing him up the mountain: “For every few steps I took I heard a crunch, and then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own.” Collie desperately struggled to identify his stalker through the thick curtains of mist that shrouded the rock formations, but perceived nothing but drifting fog and the slow, crunching persistence of the phantom interloper’s progress. Eventually, consumed by fear, Collie took off running, scrambling up and around an estimated five miles of boulders and out-cropping rocks.

Other hikers and adventurers have descended Ben Macdui with similarly eerie tales. Some report finding giant footprints stamped into the mountainside. Many claim to have seen a giant grey figure, plowing through the fog or, sometimes, looming behind them as their strange sense of terror reached a crescendo. In the ‘90s, one guy even called out Fear Liath for chasing his car through a nearby forest.

From a logical standpoint, it’s fairly easy to explain away all the varied symptoms of a standard Fear Liath encounter. For example, scientists have suggested an easy explanation for the towering silhouette sighted skulking up the mountain – the same blankets of fog that make the mountain look like the set of gothic melodrama on closing night, when all the leftover dry ice gets poured into the bucket, create perfect conditions for the Broken Spectre effect; angled sunlight casts a trail-weary hiker’s shadow onto a nearby fog bank and ACH! Giant grey figure. That combined with the standard cast of cryptid rationalization factors – the natural anxiety provoked by lonely, fog-draped surroundings; exhaustion; cultural memory of the entire gamut of cryptid encounters as dutifully recounted in books, by television and on this website, etc. – make the Greyman shrug-offable as any other hirsute missing link.

From a folkloric standpoint though, there’s a lot more here than just a tam-topped, haggis-devouring Sasquatch. There’s a reason that the Fear Liath seems to share traits of both classically simple ape-men (like Yetis and Skunk Apes) and creepy, sense-meddling phantasms (like maybe a magic ghost or something). It turns out that “Scotland’s Bigfoot” has a history that pre-dates all Bigfoots, dating back to a time when men were men, and furry ape-men were, like, feral elf spirit monster things.

Wednesday: Fear Liath, Wudewas and other words guaranteed to be useless in Scrabble

It seemed like the perfect way spend a summer day in Silverton, Colorado.

For a mere $250 registration fee, Silverton-businessman Rick Lewis offered 400 people the chance to win a cool million bucks if they could only get one snapshot of Bigfoot. For your money, you also get to stay at the beautiful Kendall Mountain Resort for the weekend.

The website even boasts sponsorship from companies like Nikon and Kodak as well as government agencies including the U.S. Department of the Interior and Fish & Wildlife Service.

It was also fake.

Silverton town administrator Jason Wells says the Kendall Mountain Resort, which is owned by the town, has never been scheduled to host the $1,000,000 Hunt For Bigfoot. Wells says the resort is booked with a different event that weekend.

“I just want to make sure that we’re not somehow tied into this whole affair,” Wells said. “I don’t want a bunch of people showing up here who have paid $250 for there to be a lack of an event that’s got the town’s name in any way attached to it.”

Wells says Silverton is known for colorful characters, but he said this “dubious” hunt was “bizarre even for here.”

After being confronted by town officials over the false booking claim, Lewis says he was moving the contest to a town in Northern California but refused to say where, according to Wells.

The site is still up for now although registration is closed.

[Cryptomundo]

Cryptomundo is rightly ticked off by the name dropping of Sasquatch on the new “Adventure’s of Bobby Bigfoot” website designed to teach kids about sustainability and green living. See, we leave a carbon footprint, Bigfoot has a big footprint, so you shouldn’t be a Bigfoot when it comes to carbon emissions. Blah, blah, blah.

But Sasquatch isn’t some tip-toeing green poster boy. Hell no! He’s mean mother loving devotee to the Earth.

When will Earth Day organizers look to the family bands of Sasquatch out there trying to survive in the environment for the logical icon? Actually, damn, Sasquatch are protectors of the environment, aren’t they?

The Earth needs warriors, as well as educators, but certainly not neurotic kids!!

It is time for the Sasquatch to be promoted as the ultimate Earth Day symbol.

There is a cause we can get behind!

[Cryptomundo]

[Adventures of Bobby Bigfoot]

Bob Saget is shooting a new show for A&E entitled Strange Days where he hunts down the strangest elements of our society, including Bigfoot, which was the episode he was shooting last week.

“Bob Saget’s Strange Days” delves into weird, wild stuff: biker gangs, partying Amish teenagers, mail-order brides, a survivalist cult — and, of course, Bigfoot.

So out Saget came to the North Olympic Peninsula to peek at the West End woods and interview John Bindernagel, author of two books about the hairy creature supposedly living in the deep forest.

And since Saget wanted a nice spot to meet Bindernagel — who came down from Courtenay, British Columbia — he and his entourage found the George Washington Inn, a replica of the first U.S. president’s estate in Mount Vernon, Va.

[Peninsula Daily News]