The voice of bigfoot? East Central Ohio Chatter

Staying with yesterday’s theme of potential bigfoot vocalizations, as it happens it was only this year that I recorded something pretty dang peculiar myself. I was on a “mini-expedition” with a number of other bigfoot researchers in East Central Ohio this past April. That’s where I recorded this file:

East Central Ohio Chatter (Thanks go to Stancourtney.com for hosting the file.)

Let me describe the circumstances surrounding the capture of that soundfile. Separate groups of researchers were going to be coming down along a creek valley toward the location that I and my associates had chosen to set up. The thinking was, maybe the other researchers would disturb some animals and drive them toward us, and then maybe when they saw us sitting there they’d make some kind of noise. It was as good a plan as any, but as things almost always turn out in “‘squatchin’”, it wasn’t going to go exactly as planned. Five of us arrived at the location a little after sundown. There was still some twilight available as we drove in, but it was diminishing rapidly. I remember as I hustled to put up my recording equipment, it got too dark to see well in the woods so I had to use my headlamp to get my gear all arranged. I carried my Marantz PMD 671 about 50 yards or so into the woods -- far enough in there that I couldn’t see it from the area we were going to use as a base camp. I didn’t run a line to the recorder so I wasn’t going to be able to hear what was being recorded at the time. One of my associates used a Bionic Ear set up and ran a line from that to his chair, so he was able to hear what he was recording. As is my usual practice, I also wore a mini mp3 recorder (an iRiver T10) around my neck to pick up any noises we made at the base camp. (This proved to be very useful, because the file from the mp3 recorder can be compared to the file from the PMD 671 to rule out whether a sound captured on that file was made by us at the base camp or not.)

I finished getting my gear into place, which involved carrying a tub containing the PMD 671 to the chosen location, attaching a microphone to a standard microphone stand, and then running the cable from the stand into the tub. I secured the tub lid with a bungee cord just in case some animal came upon it and wanted to know (or gnaw on) what was inside. I was using an Audio Technica 3032 microphone, which is an inexpensive mic that has a very good response for field work. And then I made a colossal blunder. Because I expected any sounds we were interested in to come from down the creek bed, I chose a very large tree to put the microphone stand behind, to reject the noise that might leak in from the side away from the creek. Bad move on my part. But with that done, I retreated back to our base camp, which was a nice spot along the wide creek where we had a campfire going. I had no sooner arranged my camp-chair for the long night’s vigil then the sounds you hear on the file above broke out.

I have to say my immediate impressions were confused. The sounds were very loud, and were definitely coming to us from less than 100 yards away, moving away from us as they continued. They sounded clear and exactly what you’d expect to hear from a real animal, yet they sounded to me as if they were a replay of something from the Sierra Sounds CD. They sounded so much like what I had heard before on that CD that I turned to the researchers near me and said, “Do you hear that? Sounds like someone’s blasting Sierra Sounds at us!” Of course they heard it, but they did not agree with me that it was Sierra Sounds, because the sound source was moving up the ridge on our right and away from us.

And naturally this movement took the sound maker directly behind that huge tree I was talking about.

Whatever was making the sounds continued to squawk, yelp, bark, growl, even make wordlike sounds -- really, it was amazing the number of different noises it could make. It kept up its chatter on and off for a good while, during which time we tracked it with a small hand-held amplified microphone, with which we could also hear it’s movement in the brush. A couple of the guys had night vision equipment, and there was some mention of seeing movement up on the ridge through the trees, but I don’t think anyone was satisfied that they could identify what it was visually. It’s movements were slow and heavy -- certainly not the movements of a small woodland creature.

All the while this was going on, my associate, who had not gotten his recorder running in time to catch the initial outburst while the creature was closest, was now monitoring his recorder and he thought he could hear something in the woods still near his microphone. In fact, he thought it might be actually handling his microphone, even hitting it. My own recording from that night bears much of that out -- there are noises of steps in the leaves, branch snaps, and handling noises of my microphone and the crate that held the recorder, but no slap or hitting sounds.

And here’s where things get messy, as it seems things always do in bigfoot research. It turns out the fellow running the other recorder was an unreliable witness. He was later discovered to be involved in a hoax, and had even attempted to create a new soundfile by blasting and recording a set of other soundfiles from a distance. Some time in the future I’ll detail exactly how I know this. Though at the time of that recording we had little reason to be suspicious, we have to recognize today that the simplest explanation for these very strange sounds will always be that the other guy hoaxed them. I do not think that’s what happened, because I can’t understand how he could have gotten someone else there to blast the Sierra Sounds at us with something loud enough and mobile enough, and, crucially, with such high fidelity, that it could replicate what we heard and recorded.

I do have some experience with trying to broadcast some of the calls you can get off Sierra Sounds. We tried this in Pennsylvania in 2006, and the problem we ran into was that in order to get the volume we needed to broadcast the calls, we had to turn the volume way up, and doing that also increased the noise level. In our first trial we realized it wasn’t going to be practical to run it off the CD itself. I happen to have some good noise reduction software, but even with a very liberal application of that, I could not get a file that was usable. If you blasted with it, it was like blasting white noise with something like a call embedded in it. The noise was just too loud, even after it was reduced through the software. The fellow in question did not have the software I had and had always relied on me to clean his files for him. And as I said, even when I tried I couldn’t get it clean enough. So I don’t think he could have taken the files and cleaned them well enough to make the sounds we recorded that day. And then there’s the problem of where he was going to get an accomplice from -- we were all pretty far from home, and everyone was accounted for.

So, while skeptics will take the admission above as enough evidence for them to conclude it was all a very, very naughty hoax, I don’t think that theory is satisfactory. [UPDATE 4/18/09: the more I think about this, the more I feel it might have been a hoax, even with all the difficulties I describe. That doesn't mean it is a hoax, just that I'm less confident that it's not. It might be, for instance, a recording of a gorilla mixed with whistling. I have looked around for a gorilla recording that would match and haven't found one, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a gorilla recording that someone had on a CD that isn't available on the net.]

The other major theory I’ve heard is that what we recorded was one of those large feral hogs that roam in the wilderness of our great land. I think the sounds do have something of a hog-like quality some of the time, but not all of the time. For instance, there are very clearly whistles involved in the chatter. Hogs don’t whistle, and neither did any of us. If it had been one of us, it would have been revealed on my iRiver T10, and it wasn’t. So our noisemaker (actually, I think the whistles come from more than one source, so we could say noisemakers) wasn’t a hog, whatever it was. By the time it got up the ridge, it had made so many non-hoglike sounds that we never seriously considered that explanation there onsite. What we did say though was that the sounds reminded us of gorillas. There was that “chestiness” to it live, which does not come through so well on my feeble, tree deflected recording.

Anyway, after I got the recording home, I looked at it in my favorite software for looking at audio -- Raven, made by Cornell labs. Let me digress a minute -- what is Raven? Well, their website says, “Raven has been developed primarily as an interactive sound analysis tool for researchers in the field of animal bioacoustics.” And it does a wonderful job of turning mere sounds into pictures with information that help one try to understand what the sounds are really doing. I love it. The pictures from the previous post were rendered in Raven. Unfortunately, the version of Raven I want to use is not free, but I have been able to use the beta version for free with a ten minute time limit. That means, whatever analysis I do has to come in ten minute lumps. That’s a bit of a nuisance, but when you are a destitute bigfoot researcher, what are you gonna do?

Here’s a picture of the file:



Anyway, using Raven I discovered that the file I had recorded had some interesting properties. I got these values from the loudest "bark" from the file, rounded to the nearest 5:

340Hz, 685Hz, 1125Hz, 1470Hz, 1810Hz, 2350Hz, then a plateau at 2590-2670Hz.

This is kind of a strange bunch of values. It looks as if the fundamental is 340Hz, and the next value at 685Hz is close enough to support that idea, but we're missing a value at about 1020Hz, though we've got one at 1125Hz. That’s strange, although I’ll remind you that we just looked at a file with an oddity like that in the previous post.

If the value at 340Hz were the fundamental, here's what the call ought to look like:

340Hz 680Hz 1020Hz 1360Hz 1700Hz 2040Hz 2380Hz 2720Hz

If I were an expert in animal bioacoustics, perhaps I’d know that this wasn’t really all that strange. One day maybe such an expert will have a chat with me about these things.. Anyway, it looks strange to me when I compare it to other files from known animals.

One thing I consider as I think about what made this file is that there are bigfoot reports from the area where it was obtained, both recent accounts and going back years. I can’t tell you that the sounds you can hear in this file, nor the Illinois Howl we looked at yesterday, are certainly from bigfoot. Since we didn’t see what made the sounds, it could be from anything. But the characteristics of the calls, when you look at them with an “interactive sound analysis tool,” are very interesting to me. I’d like someone to give me a really good explanation for them. As I said above, there may well be an explanation known to science already, but I don’t know it yet. I’d be just as happy to learn that these files come from a known animal as to learn that they actually are the voice of bigfoot. It’s the truth I’m after.

It would have been awesome to have recorded all of the sounds we heard that night with great clarity, but my choice of location for the microphone made that impossible. I do have them on the iRiver T10, but they are indistinct and you have to fight through our whispered conversations to hear them. It’s a truly unsatisfying experience, to say the least. What I did record, after the soundmaker went up the ridge, was that something continued to move near my microphone. A few times it bumped the mic stand or jostled the tub. It sounds as if it might have touched the windscreen on the mic, also. When the first crew of researchers reached our position, from across the creek, something interesting is recorded. The guys across the creek were jovial fellows, and when we asked them how they planned to get over to our side of the creek, they pretended that they were prepared to wade across. Their movement toward the creek made something near my microphone take off running audibly. I found that interesting, but of course without knowing what was there making the noises, you can’t really say that it was a bigfoot that got alarmed that the goofy-looking humans were about to cross the creek. But that theory fits the sounds you hear when you match the PMD 671 with the iRiver T10.

Just a heads-up -- I’m thinking tomorrow I’ll look into the similarities and differences between this file and the Sierra Sounds.