Hi, Wild Things. Last week I learned the sad news that Jeff Meldrum had passed away after a battle with brain cancer.

I interviewed him multiple times for the first season of Wild Thing, and he was incredibly generous with his time and extremely patient in answering my questions about Bigfoot.

In memory of him, I've excerpted a section from one of our interviews at a 2017

conference held in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Patterson Gimblin film. It was such a noisy

venue that we had to conduct the interview in the parking lot of the hotel, sitting in my rental car,

in the rain. Not exactly studio conditions, so forgive the audio imperfections. I started by asking

him how he'd gotten interested in Bigfoot. Well, let's see. I mean, it's always where to start.

My first exposure to Bigfoot was when I was about 11 years old in Spokane, Washington. And at that time, Roger was coming through Spokane,

showing his produced documentary that showcased that 60 seconds of film. The Roger he mentioned

is, of course, Roger Patterson. So that was my first exposure to it. I had interests that

waxed and waned through the years as I was growing up exposure to it. I had interests that Waxton Wayne through the years, as you know, as I was growing up.

And it certainly, whether overtly or subliminally had an influence, I think, too, on, or at least stealed some of the youthful interests I had in various topics of relating to anthropology.

And I ended up in a field of anthropology that was

very apropos to considering some of the most prolific evidence, the footprint evidence.

And so here I was a budding anthropologist with interest in the evolution of human bipedalism and this sort of

latent interest in the possibility of relic hominoids in North America.

And I'm confronted with this set of this extraordinary, quite honestly extraordinary set of tracks

in southeastern Washington.

And that really set the hook.

I mean,

it was this long line of extremely fresh and extremely clear footprints that conveyed,

especially to me,

...