Kayana Szymczak/Getty A person dressed as "bigfoot" makes their way through the strong wind and snow in the Back Bay neighborhood during a blizzard on January 27, 2015 in Boston.
Joe Rogan often talks about the supernatural on his show, whether it’s UFOs and aliens or other mysteries. During a recent conversation with fellow standup comedian Nate Bargatze, Rogan talked about a record that purports to be of bigfoot or giant apes in California that he says is the “weirdest s*** ever.” The recordings are known as the “Samurai Sounds” or “Sierra Sounds.”
The conversation on the March 17, 2021, episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” began with the comedians talking about Les Stroud, the host of the TV show “Survivorman.” Rogan told Bargatze, “I love Les Stroud. Love him. Love ‘Survivorman.’ But that show was so f****** dumb. He had a guy on the show that is known in the bigfoot world as being full of s***. Which is bad. The bigfoot world is pretty openminded.”
Rogan then mentioned the audio recording supposedly taken in the 1970s in northern California, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, “These guys had this spot they would go in the mountains where they would hunt every year. And they built this structure out there and then they brought recording equipment and they claim to have recorded sounds of these animals, these bigfoot. These bigfoot were around them all the time while they were out there. What’s crazy about it is the sounds are so weird. It sounds like someone pretending to be Japanese who doesn’t actually speak Japanese. It’s the weirdest s***.”
Bargatze was on the show with Rogan to promote his new Netflix special, “The Greatest Average American,” which debuted on March 18.
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The Skeptical Rogan Said the Men Recording ‘Sound So Calm … Wouldn’t You Be Freaking the F*** Out?’
Rogan played the audio for Bargatze on the podcast, telling the Nashville-based comedian, “It sounds so strange and so fake. They have these quote-unquote experts that said ‘the human voice is not capable of making sounds remotely similar to this. The range.'” Rogan added, “which doesn’t make sense if you know who Michael Winslow is,” a reference to the “Police Academy” star known for making unusual sounds with his mouth, impersonating “everything.”
Rogan added, “These guys are like in the foreground, who recorded it, they’re trying to communicate with these things. They sound so calm, if there really was giant f***** 8-foot apes out there wandering around, 2-300 yards away from you screaming and whooping and talking, and you’re in the woods, would really be so calm? Wouldn’t you be freaking the f*** out?”
Rogan said Stroud was “balls deep with these guys.” Rogan had Stroud on his podcast in 2015. He later talked about Stroud with survivalist and “Life Below Zero” host Glenn Villenueve in 2019. He told Villenueve, “Now he’s all bigfoot. Les has gone crazy. Villenueve responded, “I just can’t believe people waste their time talking about stuff like that,” telling Rogan that as a survivalist who lives in the woods it’s one of the questions he gets the most.
Rogan said about Stroud, “his show is sad. It makes me sad. Because he was like a really respected guy doing the survival thing, I think it was a really interesting, educational show and it showed people how hard it is. Then he filmed these bigfoot shows. It looks so fake. It’s so dumb it hurts your feelings. ‘What you’re doing this?’ But it’s real popular, that’s the problem. If you have a survivor show you might get X amount of people to watch it. If you have a bigfoot show, you might get double the number.”
Rogan, talking to Bargatze in 2021, said Stroud told him he did have an experience while in Alaska that led to his Sasquatch obsession. “Unfortunately a lot of people lost faith in him because of that,” Rogan said.
Rogan added, “I want it to be real. That’s the thing. If someone had a convincing bigfoot encounter, where they caught it on video where I was like ‘holy s*** what is that?’ Or there was something, but there’s nothing.”
The Recordings Were Made by Al Berry & Ron Moorehead in 1971 Somewhere Between Lake Tahoe & Yosemite National Park
The so-called “Samurai Sounds” played by Rogan on the podcast with Bargatze were recorded in 1971 by journalist Al Berry and his friend, Ron Moorehead, according to the magazine Distinctly Montana. Berry was reporting on the bigfoot phenomnen and was skeptical of it, the magazine said.
According to the magazine article, Moorehead and Berry recorded the sounds while they were setting up camp in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California somewhere between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite National Park. Scott Nelson, a retired Navy cryptologic linguist, is one of the experts Rogan referenced on the podcast who say that the sounds could not be human.
Nelson told the Hastings Tribune in 2019 he hadn’t believed in bigfoot until he heard the recording, “My whole world changed. It took me out of my paradigm that I was so comfortable in for so long.”
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