The Cryptid Factor - 1: #001 The Very First Issue

Episode Date: October 11, 2008

('Radio station days' archive) We are taking you back to where it all began, the very first Episode of Season one of the Cryptid Factor - well, at least the only 15 minutes of it that remain...

It's time for the vaults. I love I love the live sting. It's genius. This is the part of the show where we dive into the vaults. We open the vaults and we talk to a Wellington stuntman and just a cryptozoological expert, Peter Hassel. Peter Hassel, how are you? Yep, good. Look, mate, I appreciate having you on the show. You had something to say about those people that aren't into cryptozoology. Yeah, well, I've got a baseball bat, so I'm a bit like that character in Glorious Bastards. Oh, wow. Who basically kills people with a bat. Yeah, just collect their names and addresses.

Any nice names. Don't know if we're going for a contest. Oh, good. Don't know, I appreciate. Look, we're diving into the vault this week. What have you got for us, Peter? I'll open the cabinets. Oh, cheers, mate. Wow. How many cabinets have you got there? 12 filing cabinet drawers. Wow. It's a lot of drawers. It's a lot of content. Yeah. People said this show, it can't last. It's not enough cryptozoological content forever. I say the buddy is. Well, I'm not going back too far, but 1994 could be far enough for some of your younger listeners. There was a lion in Tower in Wellington. A lion. Explain the lion, the lion of Tower. The lion of Tower, not the lion of Tower. Easy to get confused. Can we just,

you know, are you sure it's the lion of Tower? We're not bringing her back. Well, in early December, I was driving back from Wellington City to my boat in Upper Hutt and just called the end of the radio news program, which said, you know, something about a lion and Tower. I tend to my soon to be wife and said, you know, did I hallucinate that? Yeah, a lion. Yeah. They say a lion and Tower. And she said, no, no, no. And the next day in my paper, the local evening post at that time, they had the police helicopter and everything up looking for it. Right. So it's been taken very seriously, this lion that was roaming about in Tower. Yep. They had a police helicopter. The caption of the photo, a helicopter with sharp shooter

sweeps over Tower during the search for a lion like cat seen in the area. And obviously, a man of your kind of nature couldn't resist that kind of a story, I imagine. Obviously. So I put the baseball bat in the car. I did. Yep. No, that's fair enough. And I went up to interview the witness, not with a baseball bat. The vision of you killing a lion with a baseball bat is amazing. Wow. Did you find did you find this witness? Did you speak to them? What happened there? Yeah, I did. I'm sure it won't hurt to give us full name now. I mean, it was an address if you cook. They were fine. Full name, including the middle name, please. I'll just give us first name. Yeah, nervous. Now you're thinking about it. No, what did this guy say? His name was Ross. Now,

it sounds crazy, you know, some of the wellings in the line ramming around, but that's what I thought initially. But when I went to his place, it was in a cul-de-sac. I'm not going to name the cul-de-sac. It's also known as a no exit street, folks. You've got stalk attendancy, haven't you? Anyway, round the back of his house, it just sort of backs on to Bosch, basically, and then fields and everything for many, many kilometers. So it's sort of like, I don't know, some place, you know, 20 or 30 k's or something. There could be a line there. It seemed like it. There could be a line in the bush. Yeah, well, the thing at the time, I'd say he just got up on a Saturday morning, made himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen, looked out the window, and sort of a great big line.

Was here a local guy, just quickly? Yeah, well, funny enough, he was a businessman and everything, very respectable in the community, and he was also a member of the Lions Club. There we go, mate. There we go. So he assured me it was not a publicity stunt, and of course, he had got a lot of stick from other millions of them. Lion tamers. In the next meeting, you know. Look, I think this story just proves, Peter, that cryptozoology, weird animals in weird places, entirely new animals, or just a lion and a tower, you know, it's not limited to Bigfoot

and the Loch Ness Monster. Here in New Zealand, we have heaps of examples of odd cryptozoological creatures knocking about. Because it's not just the search for hidden creatures, it's creatures that turn up in places they shouldn't, which is also in the study of cryptozoology. So a lion shouldn't be really going down. What is a lion doing at someone's back lawn? Well, he was worried that, you know, someone had, you know, wanted to escape from the circus or something, travelling around, and then there was nothing like that. It was about

0.6 metres tall, bigger than the neighbour's Labrador dog, which is actually away that weekend. Oh, that's convenient too, and that's brilliant. And, you know, just like a mountain lion or a puma, tan-colored. And the curious thing was, he was only about 20 metres away from him, sat there, on a great big sort of tree branch that's quite horizontal, which when it jumped off that the branch sprung back up, the weight was off it. And I did find some claw marks and things on the branch in question. Also, there was a woman, he told me up on the main road,

I'm not going to give you her address. No, no, it's alright, fair enough. I went round to see her because she had found great big paw prints in her garden, which has about a 2.5 metre high wall around it, which is too high for dogs. Well, look, this is proof for me. Look, we're running out of time here, Peter. Yep. But look, thanks for the first case from the vault. We're going to have more vault items with you every week, just proving what a weird, strange place New Zealand is. Thank you, Peter, in the vaults.

Now, we've got a comment here heard about the Death Raptor. Rumour has it's a human-like figure, Covenant feathers with huge wings ahead of an owl. Wow. It swoops down and takes children. Thanks. Thanks. Clarifying. That's that. I mean, there are so many creatures out there and I know a lot of you listeners here have got some either eye witness accounts or some sketches or some information on the

various thousands of different sort of weird things that have been seen. And please get to us. We've got a Facebook group, haven't we, David? Yeah, if you search for the Cryptid Factor, you can join up, post your artwork, post your stories, the Cryptid Factor group. Join that up. What's that Gmail as well? And we've got the Cryptid Factor at gmail.com. You can email us there, the Cryptid Factor at gmail.com. Also, we've got a Twitter. We're all over the web. Twitter.com slash Cryptid Factor. So follow us there and you'll get our weird updates.

There's another bit of feedback here. You guys need to give up the acid. Oh, that's a bit rude. I'm out of money. I've only just started. Look, we're out at 8 a.m. We're not doing acid at 8 a.m. That'll come later in the day. I thought Bigfoot was a band or a DJ. All right. That's a good one there. And that was the feedback section. Positive feedback. What about my wife? Didn't she have something to say? Oh yeah, your wife said you guys are like bizarre religious leaders trying to win people over to cryptozoology whilst dangling the beer carrot. Redemption will come through beer

and belief in cryptozoology. Thanks for not playing any doof doof music. No worries. Love it. Thanks, Reese's wife. Appreciate it. And we've actually had some feedback from the States as well. We've made someone's Friday lunchtime in America unbelievably enjoyable. Special shout out to the Americans. Shout out to Lysa. Lysa. Lysa. Thank you. Witness accounts. Thank you. So this eye witness account, I've just discovered it now and it links to the vault story we had today where Peter talked about a lion being found in someone's backyard in Tawa.

So I'm taking this one from the latest 40 in Times magazine. If you haven't read this magazine, it's literally the Bible for cryptozoologists and 40 in's alike. And you can get it at any brilliant news agents. I say brilliant because in this country, at least you have to go somewhere special to buy it because it's an import. It costs about 30 bucks. Yeah, well this one here was $18.50. A bargain. Good for us from magazine. It was well worth it. Here's the story.

A chap called Mark with a C, so M-A-R-C. And he was, now I'm going to mention a couple of names here of where he was. And if you can recognize some of these names, I think it's probably in Wales. It's either Wales or Scotland, so forgive me. I mean, I've lived over that side of the world for quite a long time, but I still can't get to grips with either pronouncing or even identifying where these places are. But he likes to go through walks, go through walks. No, just walk through the Cairngorms, okay, the Cairngorms.

And he's encountered a lot of wildlife in these mountains, including golden eagles. But what he saw on the 19th of August 2004 stunned even him. Okay, so here we go. I was walking in the area between the end of the Lurik Guru and the beginning of Glen Tilt. The terrain there is an ongoing series of drumlands. Now that's in brackets, that's Little Hills, okay, drumlands. So you've learnt something today. A little fact then.

And it's quite easy to hide even several metres away, he mentions here. Now on this occasion, I had been walking for about four days, and it was... Now let's just stop there. Now he's been walking for four days. Through the long grass. Man, that's a long walk. But I will just... That's what happens in these reports.

That's what you do over there. And it was a glorious, clear, summer, sunny day. I had a feeling I was being watched and looked around expecting to see a reindeer. Now why... Okay, let's just stop there again. Why would you expect to suddenly see a reindeer if you're being watched? Was it Christmas? I don't know, was it?

I know when I'm being watched, I expect a reindeer. Never happens. Okay. What did he see? What was there? Well, and to my surprise, there was a large tan cat about 25 metres away. It was walking along parallel with my direction and matching my speed. At first, I thought I was seeing things and remembered reading about Native Americans

meeting their spirit animals. But it looked exactly like a puma. Any puma I've ever saw on television or in pictures. Tan and colour with a tail about one metre in length, I guess. Round and strong-looking with a curl at the end. It looked strong. Classic tail there. Classic, strong-looking tail with a curl in the end.

It was about 90 centimetres tall and two metres long, including its tail. This continued for a number of miles. He was just walking along and it just was, you know, sort of parallel to him for a number of miles. Each of us curious about each other. So how he knew that that cat was curious about him. I don't know, but, you know, you get these feelings, don't you? I think, and I had a feeling of mutual casual observation happening here. I felt no sense of threat.

Sometimes it would walk behind a knoll, another word there for you, a small hill, I think, and be out of sight for a few seconds before reappearing. After about an hour, it changed direction slightly away from parallel and the periods of time out of sight grew until I could no longer see it. It sounds like a beautiful sort of spiritual kind of moment he had with it there. Mutual understanding, mutual admiration. If I could just finish, David. In a strange way, I felt almost a little honoured that it gave me so much of its day.

It remains a highlight experience for me and that's from Mark in the UK there and that's from the latest 14 times. So there we go, so that's a big cat he's seen, but it was a spiritual experience and this is something we'll learn over the few weeks that what these experiences are that people are witnessing strange and bizarre animals, where do they suddenly come from and look at talking about interdimensional proof that they're from another sphere, which is something and I believe in that they can just reappear and then disappear and that looks like one of those occasions here for me.

So that's this week's... Eyewitness! Look, it's time, we're rounding up the show and we have our DVD or book review section. This week we've got a DVD and a condo 3 offspring. What did you think, Rhys? Oh my God, unbelievably bad. It wasn't a good, I mean crypto movies can be awesome or incredibly bad. This was about a giant, it's a third in the Anaconda series.

I love the first one and even the second one I went with because I love a good boat trip through the river. The CG snake in Anaconda 3 look like something out of the early 90s I'd say? Yeah. Upside to the movie, had David Hasselhoff. Now we've got a couple of clips from the movie together. There's a bit of dialogue from the hoff, then we have a bit of explanation of the snake and then we've got some screaming and I think this sums up the movie. Do you want to roll that down there?

Okay. Come on guys, took five shots to bring them down. We'll give you 20. That's market rate. Look guys, I don't care what kinky plants you're into, but these are five pound Java rhino horns. So I suggest you go to an ATM teller, one that just spends some respect. Good line man.

These creatures are one of a kind. Growing to become 60 feet long. 60 foot snakes. I've got one of those. Dreamer. Please! They are fast and very strong. If you've never dealt with anything quite like this, I urge you to use extreme caution.

I'm burning! And that there in 30 seconds is what takes about an hour 20 to unfold in the actual movie. What I liked about the movie is the acting was so bad, it was a real joy to see them curled off individually. There were some good deaths, there were a couple of good deaths and when they left you were like great, this movie is getting closer to the end. Genius. Look, that's our show for the week.

Reese, what are we on Facebook and Twitter? Yes, we're on all those features and we're even on the Amiga 500. So we're on everything. We're on the FX82 calculator, you've got one of those. If you're on the Twitter, if you haven't been on the Twitter, twitter.com forward slash cryptid factor, search for the cryptid factor on Facebook and you'll get our little group. Join up.

Tell us what you think. This has been our first show. It's been a learning experience. Neither of us have done much radio before. I mean, I've done loads of it, obviously, interviews, but this time I'm on the other side of the desk. This is the other way around. Yeah, this side of the desk is a bit different.

It is a bit weird, but no, it's been fun. And next week we've got some sort of official stings. We're not going to be doing the wise things from next week. We've actually got some pre-recorded ones. We're going to bring them in next week. We left them at home accidentally. Sorry. Thanks for listening and we can't wait to see you again next week

and thanks for all the positive feedback. Rock on. Look for those creatures and we'll catch you same time next week. Bye.