Ray Doherty of Australian Yowie Project alerted me to what must be the most important scientific investigation into Sasquatch / Bigfoot vocalisations by Scott Nelson during his presentation entitled 'Sasquatch Language: Radical Translation of the Barry-Morehead Tapes' which can be watched here:

The photo with this post belongs to Australian Yowie Research and was published in the Gold Coast Bulletin as a publicity release of alleged Yowie vocalisations recorded in the Blue Mountains. I believe that all Yowie and other relict hominid researchers would be well advised to record the vocalisations in this presentation and play it back to resident Yowie / Bigfoot in researcher's study areas and record any vocalisation responses for comparison. Also take the opportunity to collect and save DNA in the soil of footprints for future evaluation.

The secret behind their elusiveness appears to be that Yowies / Bigfoot / Sasquatch have developed essential human observation skills, which is why they are so hard to find, because they are always watching humans and so can remain alert to our presence in their territory and so can remain elusive. Their survival depends upon knowing where the humans are and what they are doing, The Yowie appears to be either the same species as the Sasquatch, though long isolated from them in Australia, or perhaps a closely related species of what is generally referred to as a relict hominid.

For those short of time to listen to the entire Scott Nelson presentation, I have transcribed what Scott has to say in his presentation, so please take the time to at least read the following.

Scott Nelson got into studying Bigfoot language when his son asked him “what does Bigfoot sound like?” Scott looked on the internet for such and found the Bigfoot Field Researches Organisation (BFRO) website and then he listened to a recording that was entitled ‘Samurai Chatter’. Being a Foreign Language and Linguistics expert, he realised that he was listening to a non-human language and that the recording could not be faked because the language was extremely complex. He discovered that in 1978 another linguistics expert, Dr Kerlin, had gone through these tapes and had also reportedly found that the language recorded was not human but every bit as complex as a human language and the sounds were way beyond the ability of humans.

I have written down approximately what Scott Nelson states in his lecture so please read this as an overview of his presentation. Scott Nelson states; “The deer hunters, Barry and Morehead, who made the recordings, had been going up that particular mountain for decades since the 1950s and they had built a cabin that they lived in and they had accidentally habituated the Sasquatch. The hunters could only get to the location using a mule team to travel 10 miles up into the mountains. From the beginning they had been encountering Bigfoot and because they knew that nobody would believe them, that the Bigfoot were up there, in 1972 Barry took up a reel-to-reel tape recorder, to record the sounds that they were hearing.

The Sasquatch knew that the hunters would not leave if they tried to scare them away and the hunters had never taken a shot at the Sasquatch so they had become used to one another. The Sasquatch particularly liked the innards of deer and as the hunters always left the innards behind, that appears to have habituated the Sasquatch. They got used to the hunters and began vocalising at night near the hunter’s cabin and so could be recorded.

Barry and Morehead had recorded 90 minutes of Sasquatch vocalisations. In the recording the Sasquatch are speaking twice as fast as a normal human, though humans can also talk twice as fast when excited. When they are articulating they pronounce their words both while inhaling and exhaling which humans cannot do. First one can hear a juvenile speaking, then a big female and a big male and you can also hear the people speaking and calling out “come down for dinner”.

The hunters had put out a big pot of stew to try to encourage the Sasquatch to come down and so get closer to the microphone that they had hidden nearby so they could record their voices. The hunters did not go back into the cabin as they usually did but stayed outside to record any vocalisations. This seems to have upset the Sasquatch and they began vocalising and communicating with each other. You can hear the big male grumbling and trying to scare the humans back into their cabin with his powerful sounds and the female interjects and sounds like she is saying “stop making all that noise when they are trying to feed us” and then the male settles down. The female seems to say, “me watch food, plan food” meaning “I can see food and there is plenty of food.”

Query, reflection and response can be heard between the male & the female. One of the functions of language is the expression of emotion and at one time the male sounds like he is making fun of the hunters and chuckling to himself. The Sasquatch laments the noise of a jet plane passing overhead. They use terminal expressions, regularly using repeated words as people do, as an example “like” and “you know.” There are words they use such as “breert” which seems to mean “brother”.

There are 40,000 published investigated Sasquatch reports in the USA. Each state has a different name for them, and the history of reports go back 100 years. One of their most important skills that Sasquatch have developed seems to be the observation of human beings, which is why Sasquatch are so hard to find, because they are always watching humans and can remain elusive. If your entire survival depends upon knowing where the humans are and what they are doing, over thousands of years of evolution, would you not be developing that skill of observation and mimicry and learning some of the worlds that humans use?

I (Scott Nelson) have played the recording to many different national and tribal language experts and asked them what they thought of it and they all stated that it was language but not human. However, every expert has heard sounds in the recordings that had meaning for them. Spanish language dominated Western USA five hundred years ago and English has been a dominant language for 400 hundred years and so Sasquatch may know and have incorporated into their language some Spanish and English words.

We have verified that these creatures use language by the human definition of it. The months of hard work that we have put into the study of the Berry/Morehead tapes is finally coming to fruition. The analysis is finished, although I am still working on parts of the final write-up such as frequency count tables, morpheme lists, etc. I believe that the study of these tapes will never (and should never) end. With the recognition and acceptance that these creatures do indeed speak and understand a complex language, a greater effort will be made to collect voice recordings and our analysis of the language will improve. Now that we have a precedent and techniques established for this study, this process will certainly become easier.

In order to begin to understand this language, which is not related to any human language, we have used the work of the first person to bring this concept up, which was Dr Willard Quine who published several books in the 1960s stated ‘’what if human beings were to discover a language that was not related to any human language? If we tried to translate it, we would have to term this as a radical translation”.

Step one would be to find out the words used for “yes” and “no”. We do this by using frequency counts, in English “e” and “ah” are the most common. We have found that the Sasquatch seem to use a word that means “no” more than any other, so think that we may have a start here. The word for “no” is the most frequently used word in every language.

Biography: Scott Nelson retired from the U.S. Navy as a Crypto-Linguist with over 30 years’ experience in Foreign Language and Linguistics, including the collection, transcription, analysis and reporting of voice communications. He is a two-time graduate of the U.S. Navy Cryptologic Voice Transcription School (Russian and Spanish) and has logged thousands of hours of voice transcription in his target languages as well as in Persian. He is currently teaching Russian, Spanish, Persian, Philosophy and Comparative Religions at Wentworth College in Missouri.