Regular Episode
#127 – MONSTER TREK: The Obsessive Search for Bigfoot
Gisondi grew up reading the National Enquirer back when it was still more interested in Bigfoot than celebrities, and that childhood curiosity never fully faded. When he went looking for an MFA project that would actually hold his attention, Bigfoot culture was the obvious answer.
🥾 Why the Hunters, Not the Creature
Gisondi’s central argument — one that resonates with the MonsterTalk ethos — is that the most interesting story in Bigfoot-land isn’t whether the animal exists, but why so many thoughtful, intelligent, otherwise ordinary people commit so much of themselves to finding it. He encountered financiers, insurance professionals, scientists, and outdoorsmen on his expeditions, shattering the television-fed stereotype of who a Bigfoot researcher looks like.
He draws a parallel between the intensity of a reported Bigfoot sighting and religious experience: a transformative, nearly impossible-to-replicate moment that leaves the witness simultaneously certain and uncertain, and often obsessed with seeking confirmation for the rest of their life. He’s candid that he wants to believe — and equally candid that he can’t quite get there without better evidence.
🎥 Media Coverage and the X-Files Problem
Blake raises a pattern familiar to MonsterTalk listeners: mainstream news coverage of Bigfoot almost always follows the same formula — a brief “mysterious creature” tease, some spooky music, a shrug, and a cut to commercials. Gisondi, speaking as a working journalist, doesn’t pull punches. He calls it exploitation dressed up as filler, journalism that has its hand over its mouth the whole time. He’s actually researching media coverage of Bigfoot as a separate project, and his preliminary findings track exactly with what Blake describes. The tabloid framing, he argues, disrespects both the subject and the people who take it seriously.
🐍 The Very Real Hazards of Looking for Bigfoot
One of the book’s recurring pleasures is Gisondi’s frank accounting of what actually threatens people out on Bigfoot expeditions — and it isn’t Bigfoot. He walked through Florida’s Green Swamp (an area so forbidding it was reportedly used to discourage German POW escapes during World War II) alongside researchers who treated cottonmouths, coral snakes, feral hogs, and alligators as routine hazards. Invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades get a mention too. He also went out in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming with grizzly bears and mountain lions in the vicinity.
His honest verdict: the scariest thing in the woods is always another human being, which is why he was careful about which expeditions he joined solo versus in groups.
👣 Key Figures in the Bigfoot World
Gisondi gives candid portraits of several prominent names in Bigfoot research:
– Tom Biscardi — charismatic and engaging in person, “P.T. Barnum would be proud,” but also the central figure in the infamous 2008 Georgia Bigfoot carcass hoax, which caused Gisondi to narrowly miss going on a North Carolina expedition with him.
– Matt Moneymaker of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) and Finding Bigfoot fame — candid and pleasant in person, even though Gisondi was briefly blacklisted from BFRO expeditions after declining to sign a nondisclosure agreement (a non-starter for any working journalist). Both Blake and Gisondi agree Moneymaker comes across as a genuine believer.
– Jeff Meldrum, professor of anatomy at Idaho State University and the academic most closely associated with serious Bigfoot track analysis — warmly described as the most scientifically rigorous person in the field, with a figurative “target on his back” from skeptics and credulous believers alike.
– John Mazinski, Gisondi’s “modern MacGyver” — a remarkable outdoorsman and naturalist who shared a striking personal account of a final conversation with the late anthropologist Grover Krantz.
– Cliff Barackman of Finding Bigfoot — former middle-school science teacher, accomplished jazz guitarist, and by Gisondi’s account one of the more thoughtful and approachable people in the Bigfoot world.
🌿 Things That Go Scream in the Night
Gisondi recounts the episode that stuck with him most: a late-night call session in the Green Swamp with the late researcher Carol Ann Solomon, in which something responded to her calls from the tree line — a sound he describes as somewhere between an ape and a barred owl, moving fast through dense vegetation in the dark, before falling suddenly silent. He’s still annoyed he never hit record on his recorder. (Blake notes that the barred owl is also a leading candidate for some Mothman reports from Point Pleasant, West Virginia.)
Other field experiences include rock-throwing incidents in Oklahoma and an unnerving episode in which a normally unflappable female researcher’s heart rate spiked dramatically after a possible encounter — observed by a paramedic in the group.
🛸 Flesh and Blood vs. the Paranormal Fringe
Blake asks how Bigfoot researchers divide on the question of the creature’s nature. Gisondi found that most treat Bigfoot as an undiscovered biological animal — a cryptozoological mystery rather than a supernatural one. But a meaningful minority lean toward wilder theories: alien origin or protection, interdimensional travel, or association with will-o’-the-wisps. He mentions the late Eric Beckjord, a vocal proponent of the UFO-Bigfoot connection, who called Gisondi repeatedly (once interrupting a youth softball practice he was coaching) to register his displeasure. Gisondi remains firmly in the flesh-and-blood camp if Bigfoot exists at all — though he keeps an open mind on the possibility of unusual animal sensory abilities.
📰 Journalism, Facts, and the Bigfoot Classroom
Gisondi brings his fieldwork back into his journalism courses, using the process of researching and writing Monster Trek to illustrate source-building, scene-construction, contextualizing claims, and the ethics of writing about people sympathetically without becoming a mouthpiece for them. He’s direct about the damage done by treating facts as optional — in Bigfoot coverage and in broader public discourse alike — and argues that rigorous process, whether scientific or journalistic, is the only reliable path to anything worth calling truth.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Monster Trek: The Obsessive Search for Bigfoot 💵 by Joe Gisondi
🔗 Related Links
– Bigfoot — Wikipedia overview
– Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO)
– Jeff Meldrum — Idaho State University anatomist and Bigfoot track researcher
– Grover Krantz — anthropologist and early academic advocate for Bigfoot research
– Barred Owl — frequent candidate for misidentification in cryptid encounters
– Green Swamp, Florida
– Wind River Range, Wyoming
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
In this episode of MonsterTalk Blake Smith interviews Joe Gisondi, author of Monster Trek: The Obsessive Search for Bigfoot. A journalism professor takes us on a first-hand tour of Bigfoot Hunter culture.
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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