Ep. 173: The Klickitat Ape Cat of the Columbia River Gorge

[00:00:03] And I just turned around and I pulled ass out of there. I was done. I wasn't dealing with that. The hypocrisy of the cult is one of the things that turned me away the quickest. When I turned my headlights on, it turned and looked at us. And one of the things I remember the most were the eyes were glowing red.

[00:00:30] I see an orb of light. It is just circling these steps like it is waiting for me. And he begins to tell them that he saw a UFO. They're basically like, what are you talking about? That's seven foot up on a tree, peeking around it. And that's where I saw the top of the muzzle, nose and the eyes.

[00:00:58] As soon as I made eye contact with this thing, it felt like death. Welcome back to Tinfoil Tales. I'm your host, Brandon Wright. Tonight's episode, we're going to be joined by my guest, James. James is out in Oregon. We got in contact here recently. Talk about some of the weird stuff going on out there and things that he's been researching. Before we bring him on, if you've ever had an experience and you'd like to be on an episode of Tinfoil Tales, there's a couple of things you can do. You can go to tinfoiltales.com and go to the contact section.

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[00:02:25] So if you have any experiences, you can call in live and talk with me. Make sure to follow me around on all of the social medias. We're going to go ahead now and bring James on and dive into the conversation. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. I'd like to take this time to welcome my guest tonight, James. James, thanks for coming on here and talking to me. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Would you like to let the audience know a little bit about yourself? Sure. So my name is James Sheepske.

[00:02:52] And I'm here today because about four years ago, my wife and I inherited some stores in the Columbia River Gorge. And it wasn't long after we picked up this family business, one of them was an outdoor adventure store that people started coming in and telling us all kinds of interesting tales about the things they were encountering in the wild reaches of the Columbia River Gorge area.

[00:03:18] So we were hearing stories about Bigfoot and UFOs and ghosts and a creature we call the click-a-tat ape cat. And so I put up a big sign in the window that said, file paranormal reports here. And we, I gave my employees instructions. I said, we are going to be a safe place for ordinary people to talk about extraordinary experiences.

[00:03:44] And in that time, so now it's, that program's been running for just about three years. And we have had over 375 reports filed at the store. And so it's been just a real joy to be a part of this where, you know, we've got this. Well, just to give you a little bit of context.

[00:04:06] So, uh, before doing this, um, I was a highly decorated infantry soldier, uh, with the U S army. And, uh, a wildland forest firefighter. And then more recently, uh, a search and rescue EMT. And so I've got a lot of experience in wilderness areas and being outside and doing that kind of stuff. And one of our stores, like I said, an outdoor adventure store.

[00:04:33] And so the gorge is if you play video games, it would be the real world's coolest, uh, open world map. So the Columbia river is largest river in North or South America that flows into the Pacific ocean. And, uh, through the gorge, uh, it cuts through the cascade mountains. It's the only sea level passage to those mountains. And you can go from just about sea level at the river to 3000 feet and less than half a mile.

[00:05:01] Now, because of those mountains, the whole west side of the gorge is a Pacific Northwest rainforest. So you imagine soaring pine trees and, uh, waterfalls. In fact, um, the gorge has got the highest concentration of waterfalls anywhere in the United States. There's over 90 named waterfalls out here. And some of them are over 600 feet tall. And so that's that Western side, deep forests, a lot of X-files looking type places.

[00:05:30] And then when you get to the East side, um, the rain shadow forms a high plains desert. And so on that side, it's more like desert mesas and, uh, scab lands and, um, very austere, uh, almost spiritual out that side. And then, uh, so that's East and West, North and South. So to the North, uh, we have two strata volcanoes.

[00:05:54] Uh, we've got Mount St. Helens, which famously erupted in 1980 and Mount Adams, which has been the center of UFO activity since 1947. When people started talking about UFOs for the very first time in America. And then to the South of the Oregon side of the river, uh, we've got a Mount hood, which is a famous Bigfoot area. So it's pretty much, um, you know, there are cliffs and caves and mountains.

[00:06:21] I mean, like every kind of awesome adventure kind of environment you can imagine we have out here. And, uh, so when I got here, like I thought I had landed in heaven, like this is a perfect kind of a place for a guy like me. But as these reports started coming in, the place just got more and more and more interesting. And so that's a little bit of, uh, who I am, how I got here and, uh, the kind of place we're talking about.

[00:06:49] And just to give your listeners a sense, um, Portland, Oregon is probably the closest airport. And that's about a 60 minute drive, uh, to the West from where I'm at right now. I'm in the little town of Binge in Washington. How far are you from, uh, hood river? I'm about, uh, I can see the hood river.

[00:07:12] I mean, yes, I, uh, I've been up there on the Oregon side and we actually, I went into the Columbia river and I went over on the other side of the Washington years ago. So I bet that is definitely, I loved it up there. The air was completely different compared to what, uh, what I think of. So for me, it's like, uh, it just felt crisp. I don't know how else to describe it. Different air.

[00:07:40] It's a very unique, uh, place. Um, and you know, it's been a huge mystery. Like we have been getting all these reports and we'll get into detail, uh, about some of them. And I'm really excited to talk to you about this, uh, relatively new cryptid. I really haven't heard anything quite like it anywhere else. Uh, we call it the click a tet ape cat. So we've had over 130 reports of an enormous black Panther creature.

[00:08:08] And all of these, uh, reports, uh, talk about a creature that looks very much like a very muscular cat. Um, dark fur, which is something that you don't ever see in cougars, which do live around here. Long tail. Um, but half of the reports say the creature is enormous in size. So four to five feet tall at the shoulder. And that's bigger than any living cat, uh, recognized by science on the planet today. And, um, so that's half the reports.

[00:08:37] The other half to say it's a really, really, really big cat. Um, very muscular. And then a handful of reports, and this is the one that, um, is kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. But a handful of reports say that it has a face that looks like a monkey.

[00:08:55] And so, but to be sure it's not all the reports, uh, but they describe, uh, no fur on the face, a sort of a leathery, dark, uh, skin, uh, intelligent, ape-like eyes, shortened snout, sort of primate like features. And again, I don't know if that's a reporting error or if we're dealing with different types of creatures, or if it's some type of shape shifting type of situation. Uh, we don't know, but it's part of the data that's coming in.

[00:09:25] And, uh, the data is interesting. Um, you know, we were talking before the show that when, um, we started getting all these reports, I was really, really curious about that. And so I gave my employees special instructions and I said, we're going to take these people seriously. If someone comes in with a report, um, we're not going to tell them they're crazy. Uh, we're going to ask intelligent follow-up questions. We're going to treat them with respect and we're going to gather the data.

[00:09:55] We're going to see where it leads us. We're not going to impose what we think they saw on their report. We're just going to, uh, take it at face value. And, you know, I'm not a scientist and I'm not trying to be a scientist. I'm more interested in what's going on in this community. And, um, when you look at what's going on with all of the, uh, disclosure from the government and UAPs and the shifting attitudes, what they're finding is when there is a stigma to reporting, phenomena gets underreported.

[00:10:25] And science can't advance if people are afraid to report their experiences. And so we're, um, I'm very proud of that part of the program because, you know, like I said, we've had over 370 people trust us with their stories. Oftentimes me or my employees will be the second person they've ever told in the world. The first person they talked to told them they were crazy. Sometimes it's even a family member or something like that. And they said, I'm not talking about this anymore. It's not worth the trouble.

[00:10:56] But because we built up trust, um, we get to hear a lot of really interesting stories. Um, and I mean, if you think about it just from the fun aspect of it, it's like, um, you know, a couple, three times a week, a new scuba do mystery walks through our door and we get to talk to people and figure out, um, what's going on. Sometimes if it's recent, we'll investigate it.

[00:11:20] Um, but it's been a, just a phenomenally interesting, fun, and, uh, you know, uh, really juicy project to be working on. Now the stories and everything you've been getting told to, like, how did that come about? Like, do you have stuff up for people to come in and tell you about, like for them to write down something or reach out to you or how do you go about getting all that?

[00:11:45] Yeah. So, um, now we've got a whole section of the store, which is the Gorge Paranormal Info Center. And we've got a giant six foot long map, uh, six foot by three foot that I hand illustrated myself. Sort of looks like a Tolkien map, but it's got a lot of the, uh, locations of, uh, where people have had, uh, encounters. And then we've got information about those encounters, sort of with, you know, strings pointing different areas in the map.

[00:12:12] We've got, uh, you know, hair samples that people have brought in of Sasquatch. You know, some of our customers, we've got footprints. Uh, we've got, uh, no, I made an 11 foot tall, uh, Sasquatch replica. It's hairy and a lot of fun for people to come check out. And then, you know, uh, different photographs of some of the phenomenon that, uh, evidence we've received in the store. We have, um, forms that you can fill out in person.

[00:12:38] And then we have an online form at Margie's outdoor store.com. And we try to stick with a phenomenon that's happened here in the gorge. Otherwise it's just, you know, too much out there. And so we really can't get beyond that, but yeah. Um, and then we do work on social media. So a lot of times I'll get an interesting story from somebody in the store or I'll get stopped in the street or at the post office or at a restaurant or something like that. And people will tell me about an encounter they had.

[00:13:08] And so I'll post it on some of the local community boards in the gorge. There's probably, oh, maybe a dozen towns in the gorge. Gorge is about 80 miles long, small towns. Uh, the biggest one I think has got a 1700 people in it. And, um, and then on the message boards, you know, like the Facebook comments and stuff like that will, people will reach out and, uh, add to their story to that. Or they'll, uh, private message me and tell me about an encounter they had.

[00:13:37] Um, so it's kind of comes from a bunch of different places, but the store is sort of the focus for all of it. Right. What kind of led you down this pathway? Like what made you interested in this? Like usually when I've talked to someone that does stuff like this and we talked off air, like I reason I do what I do. There's always something that drives someone into this whole realm of other worldly activity. What happened with you?

[00:14:05] Well, it's a good question. You know, um, when I was 19, I joined the army and I volunteered for a highly experimental unit and had some unusual experiences there. Um, and, uh, that's, that's a whole nother podcast to get into.

[00:14:27] Um, but a long story short was that it made it clear to me that, um, you can't dismiss stories just because they're uncommon. And, um, because there are genuine, you know, pocket cases or, uh, rare events that, uh, do happen to folks.

[00:14:50] And so, um, so I've had some unusual experiences along the way since I've been in the gorge, which is kind of where I like to keep the focus. Um, you know, we started doing these, uh, reports probably a year after we got down here. And by then I had, uh, captured a glowing orb on camera and, uh, we did some pretty significant image analysis of it.

[00:15:17] And it was clear that it's not a lens flare or swamp gas or something like that. Um, and there's other activity in that area. Um, I've also seen some strange creatures, um, swimming in, uh, some of the desert lakes actually around here. And, um, and then I've had some, there's a place called Broke Lake Boroughs. Uh, and it is a huge ancient lava bed. It's about 8,000 years old and, uh, compasses don't work there.

[00:15:46] Cell phones don't work there. Now, um, we'd get a lot of reports out of that area. And, uh, you know, I have been doing land navigation on a professional level since I was 19 years old with the army. And I know what I'm about in the wilderness, never get turned around, never get lost. I've been in, you know, glaciers and deserts and jungles and forests and you name it.

[00:16:09] Uh, I've been in that kind of terrain, but this lava bed, man, it is one of the weirdest places and, and palpably dangerous places I've ever been. So when the lava flows, it's basically like this giant bulldozing of huge jagged rocks. And it just sort of fills this entire mountain valley. And sometimes the lava will cool and lava will run underneath and form what they call a lava tube cave.

[00:16:40] And so it's sort of like the rock insulates the lava inside and all the lava flows out and it just becomes a hollow tube underneath the ground. And then, uh, those tubes will collapse sometimes and they form these micro canyons. Anyway, this place it's filled with, you know, razor sharp rocks and people go missing in there all the time. Local hunters refuse to go in there anymore. Uh, there's dozens of missing persons cases out there.

[00:17:08] Anyway, I was out there flying my drone. Um, and I had a time and space displacement experience where, um, basically I thought I was in one place using all my land navigation experience and knowledge. I traveled what I thought was a considerable distance away and I came to a new spot and, uh, I realized that it was the place where I had started.

[00:17:35] But, uh, complicated to explain, but the long story short was that, um, it, I found myself completely damn boozled by what had happened to be navigationally. I was not where I should have been. And for a guy like me who does land navigation at the level I do where lives are at stake, especially in search and rescue, um, to be that disoriented was something that I had never experienced before.

[00:18:02] And again, like I can only tell you that that was my experience, but it was clear that I had been a huge portion of my memory is missing from where I thought I was going to where I ended up. And then when I realized where I was, it was sort of like waking up from a dream, very bizarre experience.

[00:18:20] Um, but I think more than anything, you know, after hearing close to 400 reports, um, you, there's a few people who've come in who are clearly, um, have mental health issues. Tiny fraction of the 400, it's less than five. Uh, and then there are a few people who are coming in just to have fun and they'll sign their report, you know, see more butts or something like that.

[00:18:44] But the vast, vast majority, well over, you know, 350 of these reports are people having some kind of genuinely weird experience, something out of the ordinary. And, uh, I grew up, my dad worked for natural history museums. And so, you know, sort of this idea of being a citizen scientist, very interesting to me. And here we are, most mainstream science scientists have abandoned this whole, I guess you could call it paranormal field of study.

[00:19:14] But this is one that, um, leaves a huge, uh, wide open area for citizen scientists to come in and investigate this stuff. We don't have to worry about academic reputations or funding so we can sort of dive in and really get a sense of what's going on. Hmm. Hmm. I've always wanted to, this is me being, I grew up in the, I'm proud of the eighties.

[00:19:42] So the X files was like a huge thing when I was a kid. Yeah. So for me, I, um, this is what I always wanted to do. I wanted to go out there. I wanted to find monsters. I wanted to find the aliens and everything else. And then it didn't ever happen. It's not how it panned out for me, but now I'm doing a podcast talking about this type of stuff. So maybe that's my way of it kind of working out for me. Yeah. But, um, I've always wanted to be able to hear more about stuff.

[00:20:10] And I think that's probably why I subconsciously did a podcast. And for me, it's like, I want to know about these things. And I think that's why I'm doing the endeavor now. I'm trying to actually go out and document stuff and do a little documentary for it. But I don't think we have that many people. Which like what you're having out there, obviously your landmass is a lot bigger than this small area that I'm trying to go into.

[00:20:39] But I've been out there and I've looked at the lands and I've been, I've said it when I went out there like 10 years ago. Like it's definitely Sasquatch territory just because of the, how different it was compared to what I'm from here. We got flatlands and cornfields and out there, I was like, man, there's, there's mountains, there's pine trees, there's forests. There's no people. I was like, it's definitely a, I could see why I feel like the Pacific Northwest is like a hotspot for Sasquatch. Yeah.

[00:21:05] So one of the most interesting stories, like I said, is this creature we call the clicky tad ape cat. And so the first report that I ever got of it, a guy came in the store kind of close to closing time. And what's really neat about this story is as we've investigated it, it turns out that it may be a part of our atomic legacy.

[00:21:28] It may actually have these sightings may have roots within the Manhattan project, which was, you know, that thing that kicked off the whole atomic age. So the guy came in and he explained that he was orienteering near Buck Creek, about three miles west of the store. And he, his compass started acting strange. He looked up and across the river was this enormous black cat creature.

[00:21:54] And, um, so it had, uh, sort of long fur, long tail, and that it was standing five feet tall shoulder. And, um, and so right away, uh, you know, my mind started ticking off like, okay, this is an unusual experience. A couple of big reasons. We have cougar out here, lots of them. Um, but cougar are terrified of humans. They'll abandon a fresh kill just at the sound of human voices.

[00:22:23] And so, uh, this thing stayed and looked at him for five minutes. He says, so it wasn't running away. It was black fur. So it's genetically impossible for cougars to have black fur, the either tawny sort of tannish color. And when they express their melanin, they go to a red color. The only black cats in North America are black jaguars.

[00:22:45] And their range is a thousand miles south of, uh, the Columbia river down like in, uh, southern New Mexico and Arizona and, uh, that area. So it's not afraid of humans. It's got black fur and it stands four to five feet tall to shoulder. Um, so a cougar is maybe 24 inches, uh, big ones, maybe 26, 27 inches tigers, maybe 36 inches. And tigers are the biggest cats on the planet.

[00:23:15] And then, um, this creature is a foot taller than all that at the shoulder. And, uh, and then as he described it, he said, and James, the weirdest thing was that it had a face that looked like a monkey. And that's where I was like, wow, what is going on? Like, this is a remarkable tale. I couldn't make heads or tails of it really.

[00:23:40] Um, and so the next day I came in and was explaining to my employees about this really cool report that we got the night before. And when it's one report, you know, we, it's a data point for us, but we don't put too much stock in it because you sort of need to have, uh, a collection of data points, a cluster before, you know, you start to believe in something. Mm-hmm . And right away, one of my employees, uh, one of my employees, Missy, she started shaking.

[00:24:07] Like she was emotionally, um, moved by the description of the creature. And I said, Missy, what's going on? And she said, my God, James, I've seen that creature myself. I was driving down Clickatad Canyon at dawn. And I saw this enormous cat walking by black fur. Um, she had, she was so stunned by it that she stopped her car and watched it. And she didn't get a look at its face. Um, but it was clearly enormous.

[00:24:36] And she wondered if she should warn the nearby households about this giant predator. Um, she decided not to. And it's a good thing that she did. Because when she told her family that she saw an enormous black cat in Clickatad Canyon, um, they, laughed at her. They dismissed her. They told her that, uh, she said, well, how do you explain such a big size? Is it, oh, you just probably saw a cow.

[00:25:04] So think about like, this is a grown woman. And would you know the difference between a cat and a cow? Like there's some pretty significant differences, especially that tail. Yeah. And, you know, it would be like if in your hometown, you saw a red Lamborghini drive down Main Street. And you told all your friends, hey, hey, hey, I saw a red Lamborghini. And they said, well, Lamborghinis are really rare. You probably just saw a red minivan. Like, it's just preposterous.

[00:25:32] Um, that, uh, people. And I guess it's, it kind of makes sense. People want to normalize stories. Like the world is difficult enough. You don't need giant black cats running around. And so the instinct for all of us is to jump to, uh, trying to make it something mundane, something we already understand. And what we always try to do at Margie's Outdoor Store, when we get these reports is let the information just sit. We don't try to fill in the blank with something we know.

[00:26:02] And I think, um, this happens to a lot of people. Like a lot of people have extraordinary experiences and then they talk themselves out of it. They say, oh, well, it was just this. It was just that. It really wasn't anything that special. And, um, and so this is one of those cases where I feel like, wow, here, like one right after the other, um, two reports from people that to me were credible. Um, the first guy had a relationship with my mother-in-law Margie. And so, uh, before she passed away.

[00:26:32] And so he was kind of like a friend of the family. And then Missy was an employee that I've known for years. And they're both telling similar stories. So I have an advertising budget. We, uh, started putting up radio ads. Has anyone else seen this creature? We put up, uh, signs of the trail heads and people started coming forward. And remarkably we had, uh, at least two senior law enforcement officials have told me that they've seen it.

[00:26:59] Um, and we've had dozens and dozens of reports. A lot of them are pretty boring. Uh, some people, you know, I was driving my ATV and a giant black cat jumped across the trail and scared the crap out of me. And I never saw it again. So it's because they're not some kind of, uh, expanded tail, uh, that brings some credibility to it. And, um, we've had now the earliest report is 1968. We've had reports of it with cubs and kittens.

[00:27:28] So it seems to be a reproducing population, whatever it is out there. Um, and, uh, like I said, dozens of reports, both in the Oregon side of the river and on, uh, the Washington side. And so, um, fascinating stuff, right? So I started doing some research. Uh, first of all, there's no cat alive that's that size, but there is one in the fossil record. During the ice age, there was a creature. It was a North American lion called the Panthera atrox.

[00:27:58] This is a creature that is well known to science. Over 80 skeletons of the Panthera atrox were found in the La Brea tar pits down in LA. And so they understand this creature really well. And it stood four to five feet tall at the shoulder and weighed between 900 and 1300 pounds. It lived all over North America 10,000 years ago. It was believed to have gone extinct around, uh, the younger driest timeframe. And, um, and so, and it lived alongside human beings.

[00:28:27] Uh, I have a replica skull of this thing and compared to a jaguar or a cougar skull, it is orders of magnitude bigger. And so we do know that it is genetically possible for a cat of this size to live in recent history. Um, but where the hell did it come from and what's it doing in Clickatad County? So dug a little deeper and trying to figure out, you know, maybe it's some kind of exotic pets that have escaped.

[00:28:57] Um, difficult to research that, but also difficult to think that you'd have a reproducing population. Right. And then I came across an article, uh, that really kind of freaked me out. So, um, back during world war two, everyone is aware of the Manhattan project where Oppenheimer was down in Los Alamos and his team of physicists designed the world's first atomic weapons.

[00:29:23] Um, but another part of the, uh, Manhattan project was in Washington state at a place called Hanford. Now, uh, they needed a place where they could build the world's first industrial scale nuclear reactor and to create the plutonium fuel for the nuclear weapons, the atomic weapons that Oppenheimer was working on.

[00:29:46] And so they basically evicted everyone off of a 600 square mile area along the Columbia river. Um, and whether you were native American and it was your traditional hunting ground for more than 10,000 years, you got kicked off. If you were a pioneer homesteader family, you got kicked off. This is back in 1944, 1943 timeframe.

[00:30:10] And, um, they needed this area of land in Western wall or in Eastern Washington, because the Columbia river was going to provide cooling for the reactors. And also there's a big hydroelectric dam that was going to provide the power. And it was remote enough that it would be very hard to detect and you couldn't get, you know, enemy bombers. It's well over a hundred miles away from the coast. So like, it was the perfect location for it. And, uh, they closed it down in the 1980s at the end of the cold war.

[00:30:40] Um, and now it is North America's biggest super fun cleanup site. Like there is not only nuclear waste out there, but there's all kinds of chemical strippers that they used and all kinds of weird stuff. It's big, like just the worst kind of, um, industrial atomic waste you can imagine is out there.

[00:30:58] And I read an article that they had found buried in the desert, uh, railroad box car filled with the half burned carcasses of radioactive animals. And I was like, what the hell is that about? Well, it turns out that they had an animal testing program at Hanford. In fact, they had an animal testing program from the very beginning.

[00:31:24] So during the 1920s and 1930s, um, the Nazis and the Russians are interested in creating super soldiers and super animals. The Russians were famously trying to create human chimpanzee hybrids, human Zs to create super soldiers. And there was, um, Ilian Ivanov, I believe his name was, was inseminating, uh, female chimpanzees with human male sperm.

[00:31:53] And then he was attempting to inseminate human females with male chimpanzee sperm. So crazy stuff going on there. The Nazis of course are doing all kinds of weird animal experiments. They are trying to do, um, telepathy testing with dogs. They actually, you know, the German shepherd, they had, uh, deployed over 200,000 German shepherds to fight alongside, uh, German soldiers during the war. And so the allies were aware of this.

[00:32:21] They were also aware that radiation could induce mutations. Uh, but back in the 1940s, no one really knew exactly what that meant or what it looked like. And so from day one at the Hanford site, they had an animal testing program and it was run by a professor from the university of Washington in Seattle area. His name was Dr. Lauren Donaldson. And his only academic achievement before getting this posting was that he had actually created a super animal. It's called the Donaldson super trout.

[00:32:50] And it is a fish that is still alive today, but he created a fish through retro breeding and nutrition and all these other programs that is eight times larger and stronger than a normal fish. It reaches sexual maturity in half the time. It could swim in saltwater and freshwater and it's super survivable. And so he's the guy that they put in charge of this animal testing program. Well, you know, uh, other weird things start happening at Hanford.

[00:33:16] So they, um, the reactor spins up, I think in September of 1944. And then in January of 1945, um, F6F Hellcat Navy fighter planes get scrambled from the Pasco air base down there, uh, to try to intercept this giant low wing object over the reactor.

[00:33:38] Now at the time, the pilots didn't know what the Hanford site was, but they are sent in the country's most advanced fighter planes to intercept these things and they can't intercept them. Uh, and then in July, again, 12 of these F6F Hellcats get deployed. Uh, this is the same month that the Trinity test happens and they get deployed, uh, to chase down more glowing objects over the Hanford nuclear reactors. When they get there, they say that this thing is as big as three aircraft carriers combined.

[00:34:08] They're told to chase it, uh, and to max out their engines. The thing gets above their operating limit. And they've said, even if you blow your engines, just glide home, catch this thing at any cost. And they couldn't catch it. So a lot of weird stuff is going on at Hanford. Well, we win the war and, um, Hanford becomes a public knowledge. They announce it. And then, you know, the cold war begins because the Soviets start scooping up Nazi scientists. So we start scooping up Nazi scientists through operation paperclip.

[00:34:37] Some of those people actually wound up working at Hanford, those Nazi scientists. And, uh, so Donaldson winds up going to the South Pacific. He's part of like the Bikini Atoll tests and the Castle Bravo tests and all that kind of stuff. And a new guy named Bill Bear, uh, gets put in charge of the life sciences program at Hanford. And so Bill died in 2014, but when Hanford closed down, the national parks took it over and they did this oral history program.

[00:35:06] And so they interviewed Bill and there are three interviews of Bill online. And he talks about how they were, uh, doing all these different experiments on animals to try to determine, you know, like important national security stuff. Like if a cow eats grass that's been, has followed in it, is their milk safe to drink? You know, like those kinds of questions. But then he gets to his point in the interview, all three of them.

[00:35:29] And he says that they were doing radiation experiments on apex predators and those apex predators escaped and they couldn't recapture them. And, um, and so this is a part of the historic record. There's no question about it. It's not, you know, science fiction. It's what really happened. And, uh, apparently they had, um, the reports vary, but at least 30 alligators and they were irradiating these alligators.

[00:35:58] And in one of the interviews, he holds up a picture of the device that they used to irradiate these creatures. And, uh, there's actually an alligator in the device at the time the picture was taken. And so they were doing these bizarre radiation experiments on these alligators. Um, and then one night the alligators, these experimental creatures outsmarted the scientists and escaped into the Columbia river. And so there are six of these irradiated gators swimming around in the Columbia now.

[00:36:27] And for a number of reasons, they decided to put out a press release in case a civilian ran into them. And, um, so it is a well-documented historical fact. There's no question about it. Irradiated alligators escaped from the Hanford animal testing lab. Well, they, this happened like in the summer. And so for months and months and months, they had this special covert team that would go out and hunt for these gators. They only caught four of them. And so two of them were still large.

[00:36:55] It got to be January and they decided that the creatures wouldn't ever survive the winter. And so they called off the hunt. And in these interviews, Bill Bear says, even into the eighties, he was getting calls from fish and wildlife guys on the river. You know, state workers saying, do you know anything about alligators in the Columbia? And he would just say no and hang up on them. And he laughs about it in the interview. Okay. So what does all that have to do with giant cats running around Clickatack County? Well, before I can get there, I have to explain a little bit about dolphins.

[00:37:24] So since 1958, the U S government has used dolphins to guard some of our most sensitive nuclear sites. And the reason why is one of the biggest threats is if you have a nuclear site on a waterway, like a Trident submarine base.

[00:37:42] If you have a Soviet scuba diver coming up, especially at night, it is really difficult for sonar, especially 1950s and 1960s sonar to tell the difference between a Soviet diver and a sea lion or tuna fish or some kind of marine marine life. Mm hmm. But you can train a dolphin to tell the difference. Right.

[00:38:03] And so what they did was they trained dolphins to identify divers and they attached a special apparatus to the nose of the dolphins that had like this sort of clamping claw on it. And they trained that diver or that dolphin to ram into the suspected diver. It would clamp down onto the diver, a balloon would inflate and then bring that diver to the surface. And the atomic security forces would come and collect them up because a dead diver at the bottom of the ocean doesn't tell you anything. You want that the information about them.

[00:38:31] And so this was an extremely successful program. And I think right now, a quarter of the U.S. nuclear stockpile is guarded by dolphins. And Hanford was by far, no question about it, our number one most important strategic nuclear site, because by the middle of the Cold War, there were nine nuclear reactors running at Hanford. And they created enough plutonium to build 60,000 nuclear weapons.

[00:38:58] And so they had all kinds of security measures in place there. They had four Nike missile launch sites where most sites around the country had one. But the problem is there's 45 miles of the Columbia River that flows right through the middle of Hanford. And that's 90 miles of river coastline that you need to guard. Now, at the time, they were well aware of the success of the dolphin program. And they would have loved to bring dolphins to guard the Columbia River.

[00:39:28] But the Columbia River is freshwater. Dolphins operate in saltwater. So what do you do? Right. It's a gigantic security problem. So if you're a zealous cold warrior, you're going to ask yourself a really simple question. What are the world's most effective riverine hunters? Is there a creature outside of a dolphin that we can breed, train, manipulate in order to be a sentinel creature for our most important nuclear site?

[00:39:57] And so you might obviously try alligators. It's a pretty reasonable, you know, aquatic guardian animal. Or you might try jaguars. So jaguars, including black jaguars, are amongst the world's most effective riverine hunters. These creatures can hold their breath for 15 minutes. They can swim a kilometer in the open ocean. They can eat underwater. They have night vision that's six times better than a human being.

[00:40:26] And as a bonus, they always instinctively drag their prey to shore. So what we believe happened was that there was a jaguar breeding slash training program to create sentinel creatures to guard the Hanford nuclear site. Just like the alligators, those creatures outsmarted the scientists and escaped into the wild.

[00:40:49] And if you look at a map where Hanford is, if you go north, east or south of Hanford, you just go deeper into like this desolate sagebrush wasteland desert. If you head west into Cliquitat County, you find, you know, incredible, beautiful habitat, lots of food sources, all the things that a big cat would need to survive. You know, and these creatures can travel 25 miles a day.

[00:41:16] And so we have had reports of them all up and down the entire gorge. And like I said, the sightings are so common. In fact, we've even seen some distant video footage of it. And so next spring, we're going to get a little more serious and put up a reward for anyone who can give us good evidence that we can go and investigate. See if we can find the Cliquitat Ape Cat. Hmm.

[00:41:44] The description of it having like the ape face though sounds... I don't... Unless they were trying to do some sort of weird gene splicing back then, which I don't know how that's possible, but... Yeah, you know, that's a head scratcher, you know? And it may be that we're dealing with two different kinds of phenomenon. When I studied Native American legends related to this, I found that there was a Native American connection.

[00:42:14] There is a race of what they call underwater panther protectors. These are these spirit beings, I guess you'd call them. And they're called the Mishepeshu. And the way that they're described is they look like a black panther with the face of a man.

[00:42:33] And when Native Americans talk about things coming from the underwater realm or the sky realm or the earth realm, they're talking about something that has one foot in the physical reality and one foot in the spirit world. Whatever that means. And so we do have stories like that about these creatures that look like black panthers with the face of a man. In the eastern part of the gorge, we have a lot of petroglyphs.

[00:43:03] So this is rock art. And there are some very strange cat-like looking petroglyphs at an area called Horse Thief Butte and Horse Thief Lake. And what's interesting, so Horse Thief Butte is like a desert mesa. And it looks like it's got these monolithic flat walls and a flat top, so steep cliffs flat top.

[00:43:27] But when you get close to it, it's actually riddled with a labyrinth of hidden passageways and natural amphitheaters and ways to, you know, crawl around inside. And Native Americans would go on vision quests to find their spirit animal in this exact spot. Lewis and Clark even stopped there. And I was up in those, the Horse Thief Butte area. And so there's the butte and then there's a flat plain, probably 300 yards.

[00:43:56] And then it drops into a cliff and then there's Horse Thief Lake. And I was looking down into Horse Thief Lake. It was June around getting close to dusk. And I saw a large creature swimming in the lake. It had dark fur and there were waterfowl on the lake. So I could kind of get a sense of how big it was. And it was definitely larger than a man, but smaller than a car. I didn't have binoculars with me, so I couldn't get any, you know, better resolution than that.

[00:44:26] And I watched this creature for about 20 minutes and it was sort of swimming in circles patrolling the center of the lake. It would submerge for up to three, four, five minutes at a time and then come back up. And I could not figure out what in the hell I was looking at. Now this was before we had started the paranormal reporting program and I'd heard anything about cats or anything. And, you know, there's a couple of creatures that live out here that are natural that might fit the size. You've got elk.

[00:44:56] They're big enough, you know, bigger than a man, smaller than a car. But their fur isn't quite that dark. And they're definitely point to point swimmers and they definitely don't submerge. We also have a lot of black bear. And in some of the more remote areas, there's a few grizzly bear. But again, you know, these are not creatures that are going to be paddling around in the middle of the lake and not creatures that are going to be submerging for any length of time. So I just chalked that one up to, I don't know what the hell I saw, but pretty weird.

[00:45:25] And what's really strange is that if you drew a direct line from where I was sitting to the creature in the lake, to the petroglyphs on the far side of the lake, that is exactly where one of these cat-like creatures are depicted in the petroglyphs. So there is this sort of Native American possibility that also comes into play. And again, we may be dealing with two different phenomenon. Or it may be that, you know, this ape-like face thing is a reporting anomaly.

[00:45:54] I go back and forth between thinking that, and then someone really credible will come in. I had a woman who was a fire crew chief, you know, wild then forest fire fighting, fighting fires between Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens. And she said that her whole team saw the creature with the ape-like face on the first night of a three-day deployment. And they wondered what in the hell they were going to do if it showed up in their camp. Unfortunately, it never did.

[00:46:21] But so there are, for me, a handful of witnesses, credible witnesses reporting this ape-like face. But it clearly is not all of the sightings. Most of the sightings say that, you know, it's just a big cat. They don't have anything to say about a weird-looking face. I was just kind of thinking, like, maybe there's two different...

[00:46:48] It's weird to think there'd be two different, similar-looking animals. But... Yeah, you know, what strikes me as kind of strange about all of it is that the whole idea of the Meshepeshu is that it's a protector creature. And whatever they were doing with these... If they were doing anything with cats at Hanford, which I can't confirm, that was also designed to be a protector creature. There is one more possibility.

[00:47:16] So out here, we have a lot of UFO sightings. Tons of them around Mount Adams, in fact. And there's a guy named James Gilliland. He runs a place called E-SETI Ranch, his own property. E-SETI stands for Enlightened Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence. And for decades, James has been inviting people up to his property to watch UFOs fly around Mount Adams. And people come from all over the world. Many come as skeptics and leave believers.

[00:47:44] And they have, you know, video on their website, E-SETI.org, you know, that shows some of the stuff. I know a lot of people who've been out there who've seen it themselves. And so they claim to be in contact with a number of races of extraterrestrial intelligences. And one of them, they claim to be a feline-human hybrid. And so again, this is what they report.

[00:48:14] And the difference here is that these are creatures that have the body of a human but the face of a cat. So, like I said, there's no shortage of strangeness out here in the gorge where I don't have any kind of real answer. And that's why we hope to get some better answers by doing some real investigation next spring. You mentioned off-air that you could talk about all sorts of things like UFOs and portals and stuff like that from the area, too.

[00:48:43] So I definitely want to hear more about that. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Just on November 6th, we had a really interesting sighting. A woman sent me three pictures of a bright, almost rectangular-shaped object in the sky above Mosher. So this was, she was in the Oregon side of the river. And the pictures were really clear. We did some image analysis on them. They're clearly not any kind of aircraft.

[00:49:10] What's interesting is that her and her nine-year-old son observed it, the phenomenon, for up to five minutes. And it never moved. And then she was driving in her car watching it, and it didn't move, stayed stationary in the sky. And then it just winked out of existence. And as, so we took in the report. Eventually, we went out and interviewed her and went to the sites where she had had her sightings.

[00:49:38] And we were talking to some other folks, and we have reports of the same phenomenon on the same day from the other side of the river. So from the Washington side of the river, people driving on roads going in the opposite direction also saw the phenomenon. It was matched her photographs, right? And they saw it three hours before she saw it in the same location.

[00:50:03] So we have two different witnessing parties, multiple people in each witnessing party, both observing the same phenomenon in the sky at the same, you know, triangulated location above Mosher, Oregon. And it means that there was a stationary something going on for at least three to four hours in that area in the skies there. No. No.

[00:50:33] What exactly it is, we are starting to lean towards the idea that it may have been a portal, not a craft. And because it, we do have pictures of like UFOs that look like the classic tic-tac shapes that you see on the Navy gun cams and stuff like that. And this thing was, looks different than that. And it also looks different than the glowing orbs that many people have taken pictures of and submitted, um, and have had many outwitness accounts of.

[00:51:01] So that's one that we're still investigating, trying to figure out what's going on with that. But we do have other reports of portals. Um, there is reportedly a portal on Mount Adams and, um, that's, there's a number of stories related to that. Some people claim that there's a physical hangar door, uh, that opens and closes.

[00:51:21] Others say that, um, that there is a dimensional gate and that the UFOs are guarding that gate and that gate leads to a higher vibratory realm or something like that. Now we have had numerous, numerous, numerous reports of the UFOs around Mount Adams being pursued by what appear to be aircraft in the U.S. military's inventory.

[00:51:50] Like a black cop, helicopters, C-130 aircraft, um, and other, um, mostly helicopters, um, that pursue these, these craft around Mount Adams and try to get to them. Uh, on the ground, we have reports of soldiers stopping people from entering, which should be public lands and telling them they can't go any further.

[00:52:14] Uh, either soldiers or paramilitary types, you know, brandishing firearms and wearing tactical gear. We even had one story of a woman who was horseback riding and she saw something glowing in a canyon. You know, she could tell that something was in the canyon glowing. She was approached by two men with rifles who said they were from the power company and that she couldn't go any further because there was some kind of dangerous event going on down there.

[00:52:42] So again, like these are all stories and you know, there are people, uh, giving their account and there's no way, you know, I can't verify. Can't verify. Right. Uh, that's kind of why we really want to get into the investigations next spring. We're going to be filming those and, you know, make available for people to watch. But, um, yeah, it's been a really fascinating, uh, set of circumstances.

[00:53:09] I will tell you though, the most interesting story that I heard about a portal. This would happen, uh, near Goldendale, which is the West edge of the gorge, sort of, um, on the Washington side. And a gentleman was driving through the desert. He saw what he thought was some kind of Indian casino signage, you know, bright lights and glowing and stuff like that.

[00:53:31] But when he got up to it, he realized that it was a portal that had opened up, um, and he could see into some type of other realm. Um, like the, the landscape he could see through it was different than the landscape surrounding it. And then he said a black metallic cube, like structure came out of that portal and then flew down the gorge.

[00:53:58] Um, and again, he said that he had taken a picture of it. I haven't seen that picture, but, uh, he also told me that I was the second person that he had ever told about that. And so, um, you know, we, we are always, um, we have a scientific mind about it and we want to be open. We don't want to discard any information. Uh, when you think about science, it's usually the last to know because you have to have people with field reports.

[00:54:26] And a lot of them before an investigation is warranted or an investigation, you could even get a photo to do. Um, but we certainly try to not dismiss data if it doesn't fit our worldview and try to make sense of it and gather other data points around it. Yeah. When it comes to portals and everything else, it's really, uh, I don't know how to take it.

[00:54:50] Cause I don't know, like part of me wants to believe it, but the other part of me kind of be like, well, where's this portal going to? Like what's coming through the portal? Where's it? What's on the other side of the portal? Like I've heard so many stories about portals here in the last couple of years. It's like almost become a trendy thing. But for me, it's like people are seeing something, but I don't know. Yeah. I can assign the word portal to it, but if unless you've walked through it, there's no way for you to know what you're talking about.

[00:55:19] You know, what's interesting about the gorge is that it is geologically unique. Um, so when you look at government issued maps of the gorge, there are bright pink letters on them that warn you that your magnetic compass readings will be off in this area. And that's because the gorge has got this incredibly unique electromagnetic environment. It's a long geologic story, but basically a giant fissure opened in the earth at the Washington, Idaho border about 17 million years ago.

[00:55:48] And huge lava flows erupted out of this thin soupy lava that ran down the ancient Columbia River Valley, 300 miles all the way to the Pacific coast. And over time, there was over 300 eruptive events. Some of them were separated by thousands of years. It built up a layer cake of rock. They're all this basalt rock now that has formed columnar basalt. So think of like the giant's causeway in England. It's that sort of hexagonal type stuff.

[00:56:16] But it's layered on top of each other here in the gorge. And each one has a different magnetic signature because as it cooled its magnetic material oriented towards the earth's north pole. And then a thousand, 10,000 years later, when the next flow came, the earth's north pole had wandered. And so now the new layer has got a different magnetic signature. Then all that got buckled by the Cascade Mountains rising up. And so all of those layers got folded and bent and twisted and are under immense tectonic pressures right now.

[00:56:45] And then 10,000 years ago, we had this giant biblical flood that literally was the biggest flood ever recorded by mankind. Graham Hancock talks about it. Randall Carlson talks about it. And it washed across eastern Washington. And then it got constrained as it ran down the gorge. And where my story is, the waters were over 800 feet deep, moving at 60 to 70 miles an hour, carrying boulders and icebergs and trees and anything alive.

[00:57:12] And it scoured all of those layers of rock barren. And so now it's just like a live wire out there. Excuse me. And then we've got 14 hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River system that produce 48% of all the hydropower in the States. And so this place has got all of this really strange electromagnetic activity going on here.

[00:57:34] And what makes that interesting is that back in the 80s and 90s, there was a guy, Dr. Michael Persinger, up at the Laurentide University in Ontario, who was studying what happens when you manipulate magnetic fields around a human brain. His work is well documented, well understood. And he created this basically as a motorcycle helmet with solenoids on it.

[00:57:58] And it became very popular because he was able to consistently produce paranormal like experiences in people. And so they would put on the helmet and they would have a sensed presence, like they would sense something else was there. He could do things like turn fear on and off like a switch. And we had reports like that here in the gorge. And so what he showed clearly was that magnetic fields subtly manipulated around a human brain can induce paranormal like perceptions.

[00:58:28] And it turns out what they're doing is they're impacting these structures called magnetosomes in the human brain. Magnetosome is like a sheath like structure that sits along a brain cell and it has magnetite crystals in it. Our brains have, this is scientifically known, over a billion magnetite crystals, particularly in the hippocampus and temporal looms. And so these crystals are stacked up in these sheaths that are alongside the brain cells.

[00:58:56] And when they encounter magnetic fields, they torque and they exert an influence on the brain cells. And they're clear now that this is how those migratory animals that migrate over thousands of miles are able to have no direction they're going. They're basically using a magnetosense. And so all that is to say that the gorge is this unique electromagnetic environment.

[00:59:20] There is a physical mechanism through these magnetosomes and magnetite crystals in our brains that can induce paranormal like perceptions. And what we think is happening out here in the gorge, and maybe even in places like where you are, is that there are magnetic fields that are influencing people's perceptions.

[00:59:44] And an important question from that becomes, okay, so are these like personalized hallucinations? Well, because we have hair samples and footprints and photographs and multiple witnesses of events, we don't think they're localized hallucinations. What we think is happening is that we humans have a very narrow perceptive range. Like we can't see infrared light, our dogs can hear sounds we can't hear, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[01:00:14] And so we're tuned to a particular bandwidth of phenomenon that we can easily and habitually perceive. Think about it like a radio station. If every time you got into your car, the radio was set to the country music station. And then so you just assume that reality included country music. And then your electromagnetic tuner got adjusted slightly. And suddenly, instead of country music, you're hearing rock and roll or classical music or something else.

[01:00:44] Those signals were always present in the environment. It's just that you weren't tuned to pick them up. And so what may be happening out here in the gorge is that people's electromagnetic tuners in our brains through these magnetite crystals and magnetosomes are getting adjusted in ways that they don't fully understand. And then we're tuning into parts of reality that we normally don't perceive.

[01:01:12] And so when you talk about a portal, it may just be a passageway or a change in your brain state where you can perceive things in this other bandwidth that we normally don't perceive. Like a different frequency wave. Exactly. Exactly. It's all around us, but we can't see it because we're not in tune with it. So once you tune into it, you're able to see it.

[01:01:35] And I've always kind of leaned that way here lately that maybe a lot of the things that people are seeing, I don't like throwing out the whole interdimensional thing, but it's kind of like they're on a different frequency pattern. They're always around us. We just can't see it. Like full spectrum cameras could see things that are around here that we can't see with our naked eye. Maybe these things are always around here. They're just not on the same frequency as we are. Yeah. And you could call it another dimension. I mean, in some ways, maybe, maybe not.

[01:02:03] But if it's a frequency pattern that you can't perceive until something changes, then it's effectively the same as a portal. I mean, think about like a video game. I don't know if you've played like Red Dead Redemption or anything like that. Right, yeah. So imagine that game's on a CD disc, right? And so all of the experiences, all the people, all locations are encoded on that disc.

[01:02:28] And you could take that disc, you could grind it up a million different ways, and you would never find Arthur Morgan or the town of Valentine or any of the things, no matter how finely you sifted the bits and pieces of that CD-ROM. But if you have the correct, so basically all that's on that CD is information, right?

[01:02:48] And if you have the correct translation device, you know, your PS4 or whatever it is, PS5, then you can perceive that entire world and all of its richness. And other people can perceive the same things that you perceive as like a shared reality. But it's only when you've got the right tuning equipment that you can experience that reality.

[01:03:12] So this notion that there may be a spirit world like the Native Americans talk about the underwater realm and this, you know, the sky realm and the earth realm. What they may be talking about is information that's encoded in a way that we normally don't perceive. And then something happens to us, our tuner gets adjusted and we're able to perceive it and decode that information and have a lived experience there that is consistent and persistent and can be shared with others.

[01:03:42] You know, if you think about reality, not being dependent necessarily on physical stuff, but rather the organization and translation of information, then a lot more things become possible. Mm-hmm. No, I get that. It's kind of... The way you explain it actually makes better sense than the way I explained it, so... But no. Is there anything else you would like to discuss before we wrap this up? We've been going on for about an hour. Oh, well, there's so much going on out here.

[01:04:12] All I can say is we'd love to have people come out and visit. I can promise you, even if you don't see a Sasquatch or a giant black cat, or even one cat with an ape face, or a ghost or a UFO out here, you're definitely going to have a magical experience in the Gorge. Like, it is a place unlike any other. You've been here. You kind of got a sense of what I'm talking about. It just feels different out here. It does.

[01:04:34] It may have something to do with that electromagnetism or something else, but since I've been down here, it's been just... Every day has been amazing. And the reason why I go on these podcasts is because I want to share this with other people. Like, it's such an amazing and unique place. And weird stuff happens here all the time. And so, yeah.

[01:05:03] Come check it out if you can, I guess is what I'd say. Where can anyone find information about it? Well, best place to start is margiesoutdoorstore.com. We've got a paranormal section on our website. And then if you hook into our social feeds, which are Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as we get these investigations running, we're really looking forward to it.

[01:05:27] The team we've assembled consists of a soldier, a psychic, a preacher, and a cowboy. And we're going to be offering a financial reward for good evidence that we can investigate. And next year, starting in May, we're going to start putting that stuff out on the YouTubes. Awesome. I'll make sure to put that in there for anyone listening. Awesome. Well, James, it's been a pleasure. Yep. The pleasure has been all mine. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah. Thank you.

[01:05:56] We're going to wrap this one up though. So thanks for listening. And thanks for James being on here tonight, but we'll check you on the next one. And that's the show, everyone. I really hope you guys enjoyed the conversations. If you would like to be a guest on 10 Foil Tells, remember to send an email to 10foiltellspodcast at gmail.com or go to the contact section of 10foiltells.com. To get your message to me, we'll get something scheduled for a future episode.

[01:06:24] And just remember the truth lies in the stories we share, the connections we make. Stay curious, stay open-minded. Thank you all for joining us on this journey. And until next time, keep questioning, keep seeking, and keep exploring the unknown. Good night, everyone. 10 Foil Tells in the headphones. Yeah, it's time to rock. Got a story about a cryptic creature. Let's take a walk. Dogmen. They're out there in the top. The truth is out there like an idiot.

[01:06:52] The writing's got the whole world shook. Conspiracies unfold like a story in a book. We're controlled. The truth is out there like an idiot. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.