Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

When most people see Bigfoot he’s generally lumbering across a road, staring from a distance or getting really upset with John Lithgow after finding dozens of animal heads in the Lithgow family coat closet. Also, people often picture the great beast nibbling on a Mars bar.

What’s that you say? That’s not a typical Bigfoot scenario you say? Well, tell that to the guy who caught it on video.

Bigfoot’s an odd legend. A giant hair-covered neanderthal with a monkey’s IQ who doesn’t wrestle professionally? Well that’s just a bit too much. People have caught him on film though – remember the Honey Island Swamp Monster? It was caught on film in the late 70s, allegedly, and it sure looked Bigfoot-ish. That meaning, of course that you never get a clear shot of the thing that’s moving through the woods like 100 yards from the camera.

Today’s topic is similar to that – but with a slight twist. The big beast was filmed with a thermal camera. We’ll let Mike Greene, the man who hit the record button, tell you about it in his own words as found on MyFox8.com:

“”The image is the first comprehensive thermal image of a Sasquatch? even though I admit that it’s blurry,” said Greene. In the video, Greene claims you can see a big creature come out of the woods and grab a candy bar that was set up to attract the Sasquatch. “It can’t be anything else, I mean, it literally can’t be anything else,” said Greene.

“Greene said many people have said the image is just a guy in a fat suit or gorilla suit, but he claims the thermal image proves it’s something different. “The heat signature – which is what you’re looking at?the heat signature would be completely different. It would be splotchy,” said Greene. “You could put a guy in a Bigfoot costume and fool night vision, because that’s just like a video camera. But if you put a thermal image on him, that’s going to look completely different.”"

He’s got a point, right? A guy in a monkey suit would look pretty warm where the body is, but there’s be cooler spots around the edges of the costume where the suit was bigger than the body inside it. The only way we can think of that the monkey outline could be so uniformly colored on the heat scan is if the guy wearing the suit ran himself through a pizza oven. We kind of wish Greene had filmed more of the area to show that there’s no glowing Dominoes logo nestled under a pine tree anywhere.

Yes, yes we’d be far more comfortable had Greene done that. But you know, you should decide for yourself:

Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Honey Island Swamp is a marshy place located somewhere in Louisiana. It would probably look a lot like other swamps around the world – inhabited by alligators, insects and the hideouts of Zartan, the master of disguise GI Joe guy who turned blue in the freezer. One thing that makes the Honey Island Swamp stand out though, is its very own mythical monster.

Honey Island enjoyed a nice normal existence until the seventies when a couple of men spotted a monster living in its swamp. The beast’s physical description appears to be identical to Bigfoot upon first look – but it’s not. The footprints the thing leaves behind vary from its hair covered cousin.

The Honey Island Swamp Monster leaves tracks that have what appears to be four toes, three big ones and one that looks thumb-ish. According to one cryptozoologist the feet that leave those tracks look like they are good for climbing. Bigfoot’s never been described as a climber.

Eye witness descriptions, though, seem to be very sasquatch-esque. It looks like a big furry ape-man covered in heaps and heaps of hair. Here’s the story of man’s first recorded encounter with the swamp beast. It’s off of AmericanMonsters.com:

“The legend of the Honey Island Swamp was first revealed to the world in 1974, when a pair of Air Traffic Controllers, Harlan E. Ford and Ray Mills, shambled out of the deep antediluvian sloughs of Honey Island with an unbelievable story… and something even more incredible. The veteran hunters claimed to have discovered a pair of unusual footprints imbedded in the soft earth next to a wild boar whose throat had been torn open. They saw something else that day. Something that would change their lives forever… they saw a monster.

“They described a vicious looking creature that stood on two legs. A man-like animal that was covered with a coat dingy, gray hair. The men estimated that this beast stood over 7 feet tall and weighed somewhere between 400 and 500 lbs. But what they remembered most were its sickly yellow eyes, set far apart on its skull, and the horrific stench which surrounded this creature… it was the smell of death.”

Since then there have been multiple encounters with the animal. A lot of people report hearing it, a lot report finding its four-digit tracks – and some say they’ve even seen it with their own eyes. On the accompanying video a man says he thought he hit a log with his boat at night time – and then when he shined his light on it he saw it was a partially submerged bipedal creature.

There’s one other thing you should know – footage of the creature allegedly exists. It was recorded by Harlan Ford, one of the first two men to report sighting the monster, but the tape just sat in a box gathering dust until his widow found it in 1980. It’s since been included in a Honey Island Monster documentary made by his grand daughter. The footage is included in this Youtube clip. It starts at 3:24 – don’t get overly excited though. The ape-man is only seen in the distance through some huge trees.

Aside from that, the video – which is a clip from Fox News’ Hannity & Combs – includes a whole bunch of eye witness accounts.

Enjoy them, won’t you?

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Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

People are familiar enough with Bigfoot and the common descriptions given to him – that being visually identical to how Rosie O’Donnell would look if she always walked around naked and backwards with her face on the reverse-side of her skull. What people don’t often know is that the sasquatch is not the only hairy anomaly out there – oh no.

You see, there’s also the much less reported Agogwe – an animal that’s every bit as hairy as sasquatch but a fraction of the size. There have actually been a surprising amount of sightings of this guy – sightings to be detailed on the next page, sucka.

When it comes to the Agogwe, there are three basic sightings that seem to get reported the most. Let’s get them out of the way right off the bat. Here is what Captain William Hitchens claims to have seen in 1900, in his own words:

“Some years ago I was sent on an official lion-hunt in [east Africa] and, while waiting in a forest glade for a man-eater, I saw two small, brown, furry creatures come from dense forest on one side of the glade and disappear into the thickets on the other. They were like little men, about 4 feet high, walking upright, but clad in russet hair. The native hunter with me gazed in mingled fear and amazement. They were, he said, agogwe, the little furry men whom one does not see once in a lifetime.”

Hitchens didn’t tell his story publicly until 1937. He was, of course, met with ridicule at which point Cuthbert Burgoyne defended him in a magazine with his own Agogwe sighting a year later. Here are his own words:

“As we watched [Africa's east coast from a Japanese cargo ship] two little brown men walked together out of the bush and down amongst the baboons. They were certainly not any known monkey and yet they must have been akin or they would have disturbed the baboons. They were too far away to be seen in great detail, but these small human-like animals were probably between four and five feet tall, quite upright and graceful in figure. At the time I was thrilled as they were quite evidently no beast of which I had heard or read. Later a friend and big game hunter told me he was in the Portuguese East Africa with his wife and three hunters, and saw a mother, father and child, apparently of the same species, walk across the further side of the bush clearing. The natives loudly forbade him to shoot.” Without the quote, an account of Mr. Burgoyne’s making such a report is given in.”

And finally, here is the third frequently given account, as found on Wikipedia:

“Charles Cordier, a professional animal collector who worked for zoos and museums, followed the tracks of the [Agogwe] in Zaire in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Once, said Cordier, [an Agogwe] had become entangled in one of his bird snares. “It fell on its face,” said Cordier, “turned over, sat up, took the noose off its feet, and walked away before the nearby African could do anything”

Well that’s pretty interesting, and if that last account is true it shows quite a bit of intelligence clicking and ticking deep in the skull of that little furry animal. You should know that the Agogwe seems to go by different names depending on where its living. Other names it goes by include the Kakundakari, the Kilomba, the Sehite, the Agogure and Orang Pendek.

We said there were three primary stories available for the curious to read, but that’s only for those specifically researching the Agogwe. If you check under the other names, like the Orang Pendek, for instance, there’s more to find. For example, here’s a sighting from a Dutch colonist. We found it, too, on Wikipedia:

“I saw that he had short hair, cut short, I thought; and I suddenly realized that his neck was oddly leathery and extremely filthy. “That chap’s got a very dirty and wrinkled neck!” I said to myself. His body was as large as a medium-sized native’s and he had thick square shoulders, not sloping at all… he seemed to be quite as tall as I. Then I saw that it was not a man. It was not an orang-utan. I had seen one of these large apes a short time before. It was more like a monstrously large siamang, but a siamang has long hair, and there was no doubt that it had short hair.”

And there you have it. Hairy creatures of various sizes are found absolutely all over the world – and sightings of them are taken seriously enough for National Geographic to be in the middle of a very real effort to catch the Orang Pendek on film.

Good luck to them, that’s what we say. Good luck to them.

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Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Dear everybody,

Well, they found Bigfoot’s body, and it’s currently being kept in a freezer. The long question of whether the thing exists or not is finally answered.

Or so say the two guys with the freezer.

Evidence of Bigfoot has long been floating about – the problem is it’s always weak evidence. Last time we told you the proof was in the form of foot steps heard deep in the woods with an electronic ear, and how no creature known to man has ever snapped twigs quite in that pattern while walking.

A few years ago we told you about the kid who video taped a sasquatch, but then couldn’t remember quite where the encounter happened, and was in a big hurry to talk dollar signs. Also, there’s the child molestor, who himself was once molested – by a Bigfoot.

This time around it’s two guys (Rick Dyer & Matthew Whitton) in the woods. They run some sort of Bigfoot hunting business, and on a fairly recent expedition stumbled upon a pretty intact hair-covered carcass. Reportedly, they dragged it out of there while other sasquatch watched from the side lines. They made it all the way to a plugged-in gigantic freezer, and are currently keeping the beast quite preserved.

They were going to present incredibly solid evidence that the monster exists last Friday at a press conference – but they didn’t.  Here’s the New York Times’ take on things:

“One photograph provided to the news media showed what resembled a gorilla — or maybe an old sheepskin rug — lying twisted in a freezer, with a dollop of intestines protruding from its belly. “There’s a lot of comment being made that it looks fake, or it looks like a suit,” Mr. Dyer said. “But these people wasn’t there when I was sweating, pulling this thing through the woods.”

But that was written before the big news conference. More recently we have something from the Sydney Morning Herald:

“They didn’t produce a Bigfoot corpse; that is in a hidden location, they said, after being moved from a freezer that broke down a couple of times. They will not say exactly where they found the creature and claim they saw a band of other Bigfoots watching them. Neither will they allow anyone other than their own hand-picked scientists to examine the body of the dead animal.

“We’re now the best Bigfoot hunters in the world,” said Matthew Whitton, 31. Whitton and his hiking partner, Rick Dyer, 28, wore the hats to prove it, advertising their website. Mr Whitton is a police officer who is on disability leave; Mr Dyer is a car salesman and tow-truck operator.”

It’s not looking good at this point. But then it doesn’t have to. You know their website is currently being ransacked by a curious public – bringing in loads of advertising money. Their tour business might even be picking up – $150 for an overnight hike and as many Costco-brand granola bars as you can eat.

We don’t actually know their price chart or services rendered.

What we think is this – there are two many sasquatch encounters reported each year for it to be nothing – but this ain’t it.

It could, however, explain where Harriette Winslow from Family Matters has been lately. Seriously – what happened to her?