#1927 - Forrest Galante

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Still alive, you are still alive. This is a truthful title to this book.

Forrest Galante (0:17)

That's true, it's ridiculous, but it's true, and it's catchy, that's the whole point.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

Dude, I watched your show the other day, the television show, what is the television show?

Forrest Galante (0:25)

Mysterious Creatures.

Joe Rogan (0:27)

Yes, you were looking for some wolf thing.

Forrest Galante (0:30)

The red wolf.

Joe Rogan (0:31)

Yeah, but they didn't think it was a red wolf. They thought it was some mystical beast.

Forrest Galante (0:35)

An Ozark howler.

Joe Rogan (0:36)

Oh my goodness. I mean, wolves do howl.

Forrest Galante (0:40)

Yeah, no, that was an interesting story. If you look at the timeline from when this cryptid, this howler popped up, it's right when the red wolf was starting to plummet in its numbers, and as soon as wolves plummet, they call to each other, right? They howl.

Joe Rogan (0:55)

Oh, that makes sense.

Forrest Galante (0:56)

So it's like, oh, we're hearing this thing and the spooky thing that we've seen running around the woods, and it's like, well, yeah, it's wolves trying to find each other, and it happened to also overlap with when moonshining was like a big deal. So they perpetuated the rumor of the howler to keep people out of the woods.

So it like checked all these boxes to like make up this animal.

Joe Rogan (1:15)

Is there any cryptid that you find compelling?

Forrest Galante (1:19)

Just the, I think we talked about it before, the megatherium, the giant ground sloth in Peru.

Joe Rogan (1:24)

Yeah.

Forrest Galante (1:25)

That's the only one. I mean, depends what you define as cryptid, right? Like I'm not a Bigfoot guy or Loch Ness monster, but thylacine could be considered a cryptid, right?

Joe Rogan (1:34)

Yeah, because it was alive. We do have video footage of it and there's been a bunch of sightings.

Forrest Galante (1:38)

Yes, but now you have all these Bigfoot-esque people, right, all these sort of tin foil hat guys who are like, it's here, I've seen it or whatever.

And so it's like started to fade into this cryptid realm. And I still think that in Papua New Guinea, there could be an extant population.

Joe Rogan (1:54)

Why in Papua New Guinea?

Forrest Galante (1:56)

So they used to range, we got right into this, this is great, by the way.

So they used to range from PNG from New Guinea all the way down to Tasmania. And then as people came over, they brought dingoes with them, right? And this was like 4,000 years ago. And then the dingoes out competed the thylacine in mainland Australia and in theory in Papua New Guinea, but dingoes were never introduced into Tasmania, which is why thylacine occurred for so much longer in Tasmania. However, why in Papua New Guinea is because it's such a dramatic habitat. There's so many like valleys and canyons and things that dingoes just probably couldn't traverse.

That would mean that there's isolated, unexplored areas that the thylacine, because it had evolved there, could still be thriving without the competition.

Joe Rogan (2:41)

And for people who don't know what a thylacine is, it's a Tasmanian tiger.

Forrest Galante (2:45)

Yeah, it's a marsupial, wolf, crazy jaw, stripes.

Joe Rogan (2:49)

Crazy jaw, really wild looking.

Forrest Galante (2:51)

180 degrees.

Joe Rogan (2:53)

Yeah, cool looking animal.

Forrest Galante (2:55)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (2:55)

Look at that thing.

Forrest Galante (2:56)

So when you talk about cryptids and blah blah blah, I still think that these animals could be out there.

Joe Rogan (3:01)

Didn't you go looking for one at one point in time?

Forrest Galante (3:04)

Twice. Twice.

Joe Rogan (3:05)

And did you have any sightings, or at least amongst the people that you were around, or any credible reports?

Forrest Galante (3:12)

No. Well, reports, yes. I mean, there's a guy named Nick Mooney, who is like an incredible, that's Benjamin, the last living thylacine in the zoo in Hobart, Tasmania.

A guy named Nick Mooney, who's like a state biologist, like world, like renowned naturalist and biologist, who has no reason to make this up or anything. And he swears that he saw one in Tasmania about 25 years ago. And he's like, I, you know, he's like, I know every animal in Tasmania. I am a biologist. I work with Fish and Game or Fish, whatever their equivalent is. He's like, I, why would I make this up? He's like, I didn't even tell anybody for a year or two because I like didn't want to be called a kook.