Top: The famous frame of the Patterson film. Middle: An official sketch from the BFRO of what Bigfoot's face looks like. Bottom: a fur trapper from the movie "Jeremiah Johnson."

It turns out there’s an organization out there that hunts Bigfoot, the mythical ape-man that roams North America.  But that’s not the weird part — what is strange is that groups of people pay $300 to $500 each to go on Bigfoot hunting tours.

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization runs four-day expeditions to locate and observe Bigfoot, or perhaps multiple… bigfeet?  What makes this interesting is that, even though these expeditions seem to always end with no sightings, people still pony up hundreds of dollars to go on them.  What they usually find are holes in the ground the tour leader often claims is a footprint, and, of course, big piles of poop they claim was left by Bigfoot.

That’s right, no sightings of Bigfoot, so people are basically paying hundreds of dollars to collect Bigpoop.

According to the BFRO, it is undisputed that for over 400 years people have sighted tall, furry man-like creatures in the woods of North America.  This is very shocking considering the woods of North America have been the stomping grounds for hunters and trappers for hundreds of years.  And what do they tend to wear?  Well, animal furs, basically.  And big animal-fur boots, which make their feet seem bigger.

If you do happen to spot Bigfoot, however, do be sure to fill out this contact report form at the BFRO.

Someone driving the civilian version of this thing is clearly compensating for something.

One of our readers sent us an email noting that there is another vehicle named “marauder” in the world of badass vehicles.

The Paramount Marauder is a mine-protected military vehicle similar to the HMMWV “Humvee.” Where the Humvee is built in the US, the Marauder is built in South Africa, and used mostly in third-world nations like Azerbaijan and South Africa.  It’s a pretty tough truck, but doesn’t really compare to our USVS Marauder.

Our Marauders were custom-built by Mack Trucks many years before the Paramount one of the same name.  Although the design for both of our Marauders is still classified, it’s safe to say that the sensors built into ours blow away this third-world knockoff.  Ours are significantly bigger, and can actually off-road better!  We also carry more fuel and get much better gas mileage, just like the highway monsters Mack makes every day.  And we created ours first, so they should change their name to something else — like the Pansy Marauder, or the Wanna-Be Marauder.

There’s now a civilian version of the Marauder, which isn’t much different from the military version.  As much as I’m keeping my Marauders, it probably would be a lot of fun to drive one of these things.

Even when a government oversight committee is trying to help you, it still feels like someone's counting your beans.

I’m not quite sure what Government Computer News is all about, but apparently they review government agencies to keep us all honest.

We got an anonymous tip that we’d been reviewed by this company back in October of 2010.  We haven’t heard anything else about it, so we’re guessing we passed with flying colors.  After all, we work really hard to be the best at what we do, and we can only hope that those who take a fine-toothed comb to our work will see it the same way.

This is what a soccer field looks like all over the world. Billions of kids play soccer on fields like this every day, but apparently that's not good enough for America's captured terrorists.

In December of 2003, President Bush signed a law that trained pilots and other flight officers on how to properly carry guns on planes.  This program, called the Federal Flight Deck Officer program, is run through the Federal Air Marshal Service – the same guys that are tasked with protecting us when we fly.  Since then, estimates suggest that there are somewhere around 12,000 trained and armed federal flight deck officers.

The current White House administration wants to significantly cut the program.  They want to drop the budget from this program from $25 million to $12 million, which breaks down to about $1000 per trained, armed flight deck officer.

Now, before you think that’s a lot of money to keep you and your family safe while flying the terrorist skies, take into consideration that the same White House administration just built a brand new, $774,000 soccer field for the prisoners down at Guantanamo Bay.  Mind you, this soccer field will only be used by about 120 prisoners, which means that the field cost about $6450 per terrorist Pele.

The White House approves spending $6450 per terrorist to let them play soccer, but feels that paying anything more than $1000 per pilot to keep your family safe is too much.

Does anybody else have a problem with this?

Even Lobot from The Empire Strikes Back knew to wear hearing protection when handling firearms... well, blasters.

When you go to the shooting range, you wear glasses to protect your eyes, and hearing protection to protect your ears.  This is because guns blast all kinds of things out into the air and potentially your eyes, and they’re so loud they can cause damage to your hearing.

So what happens when a cop on the street has to fire his gun?  Why, he risks damage to his vision and his hearing, that’s what.  I SAID HE RISKS DAMAGE TO HIS… yeah, you get the joke.

That’s why we use suppressors, and partly why we use frangible rounds.  A suppressor is basically a “silencer” for submachine guns, like our hoses.  We need to hear the bad guys crawling around, which means we can’t wear those big, 1970′s like headset earmuffs.  Our helmets do have hearing protection built in, and we also have electronic amplifiers that increase the sound levels.  The thing is, we don’t want our guns making all the noise and masking the sounds of the bad guys, so we try to quiet our guns.

Likewise, we don’t want bullets and junk coming back at us.  When a bullet hits a rock, it may ricochet, or even break apart causing multiple fragments to come back at us.  By using frangible rounds, or bullets that turn basically to dust upon impact, there’s nothing significant coming back at us.  That means our eyes and asses are safe.

Mr. FPSRussia put together a cool video here that shows you how a silencer/suppressor can diminish the noise a weapon makes.  In the same video, he also shows how the frangible rounds we use add to shooter safety while still delivering maximum damage to our targets.

Apparently this issue is very important to someone with Photoshop.

We’ve taken some flak from readers who have finished my book, “Vikings, Vampires, and Mailmen,” and have noted that the metal thing filled with bullets you load into a gun isn’t called a clip, it’s called a magazine.  Well, they’re right.  That isn’t lost upon us.

The thing is, we call our magazines “clips” for the same reason US Marines call their parade grounds a “deck,” or how sailors tell you to “batten down the hatches” when they mean to use bungee cords, not battens, to secure hatches and loose items.  The term “clip” we use comes from World War II, specifically the M-1 Garand rifle.  It was the standard-issue rifle for US soldiers.

You see, a single-shot rifle has a barrel, and behind it is a chamber where you load one bullet, and then fire.  In multi-shot guns, you generally have a magazine that stores the bullets and loads them one at a time into the chamber.  Some weapons have removable magazines, and some don’t.  When you have a removable magazine, like with modern pistols, the spring that pushes the bullets up is in the magazine, and you put the whole thing — bullets, spring, containment device and all — into the handle of the pistol, and everything works.

With the M-1 Garand, the magazine was built into the rifle.  You took a pack of bullets, held in a cheap metal clip, and pushed them into the magazine.  When the bullets were done firing, the clip was ejected, but the magazine was still inside the rifle.  Basically, a clip just holds the bullets together, but the magazine does all the work.

Many of the guys who helped build the USVS that you know and love today were WWII vets.  They beat the Nazis and they beat the bugs, and damned if I’m going to say that the words they used to do so were wrong.

Today, my team still says “clip,” but we mean “magazine.”  We also ask for more “film,” when we mean flash cards for our digital cameras.  Just throwing it out there in case you didn’t understand that sometimes old habits are hard to break.

This is the Kensington Runestone. Judge for yourself.

In 1898, a farmer by the name of Olof Ohman claimed he dug up a 200-pound rock while plowing new woods near his farm.  His son noticed that the big rock had carvings on it, so they flipped it over and tried to read it.  This happened in Kensington, Minnesota.  Initially, Olaf and his son, Edward, thought the stone was carved by native Americans.  They thought it was possibly an “Indian Almanac.”

The runes were Viking runes.

From that moment until now, people continue to debate whether the stone is real.  As they’ve debated this, more runes have been discovered along the northeastern United States, like in Maine and Rhode Island.  And experts finally realized that an old tower in Newport, RI wasn’t actually a mill, but a Viking tower that during the winter solstice, points to Kensington.  For a quick and easy lesson on all this, go watch the History Channel documentary, “Holy Grail in America.”

We also found some Viking runes down in Alabama, which of course you can read up on in my first book, “Vikings, Vampires, and Mailmen.”

The point of this post is that the Vikings made it to Minnesota, and they found something out there that was very important to them.  So important, in fact, that they built a rather impressive tool to lure the vampires away from it.  That’s what makes the Kensington find so important: were vampires a huge problem for them in the New World?  And if not, what was so important about the Kensington location that they worked hard to keep vampires away from it?

This is the factory-made Mac-10. Ours look a lot different.

You know how in the movie Roadhouse people repeatedly say to Dalton, “I thought you’d be taller?”  Well perhaps the most frequent comment we get from older military guys has to do with our hoses, or our Mac-10 “hose” submachineguns.  Anybody with experience firing and maintaining a Mac-10 says something like, “Your guns must jam a lot.”

Well yes, factory-standard Mac-10′s do like to jam a lot.  In fact, when our team was first offered a modified Mac-10 as our primary weapon, there was much laughing involved.  A jammed gun means we get eaten by the bad guys.  We laughed quite a bit at this poor sales rep who brought this new invention based on an outdated gun with a bad reputation.

Then one of our guys test fired it, and everyone shut up.

You see, our Mac-10′s aren’t factory-standard.  They may resemble the stamped metal Mac-10′s from over forty years ago, but each one is modern and hand-built.  The insides have completely different guts, and employ such crazy things as glass and ceramics.  You’d think glass and ceramic materials would be too fragile for such a weapon, but these technologies can easily handle the workload.  In fact, not only do our guns rarely jam, the cyclic rates are increased over the factory models.

Check out this dated video to see the factory model Mac-10 (and Mac-11).  Now imagine ours having over three times as many bullets, a forward firing handle (so you can fire it with your front or back hand), and a suppressor that makes the thing awfully quiet.

For a better idea of how many rounds these hoses throw downrange, check out this video from the madman Dmitri over at FPSRussia — he’s firing two Mac-10′s at the same time.

We darnk a LOT of beer at Stonehenge.

The crew and I stumbled home to our hotel in Salisbury tonight after having a great time at a place called the Haunch of Venison.  That’s right – the polite English way of saying a deer’s butt.

The place is hundreds of years old.  We had our good friend Father Padraig from the Knock Shrine flown in to join us.  He knew quite a bit about the history of Salisbury, and shared some rumors about the pub as well.  Supposedly, centuries ago the pub was used as a brothel, and a tunnel was dug between it and St. Thomas a Becket church so that the priests could visit privately.  We ate quite well and drank a lot of beer and spirits in a place they call the Horse Box, which is a smaller bar in the building.  It’s got a pewter bar top!  Rumor is that Ike and some of his WW2 masterminds used to meet there.

If you’re ever in Salisbury, you’ve got to check this place out!  And if you don’t know much about Salisbury, you should check out the book Sarum, by Edward Rutherfurd.  It’s a brilliant read, and even I read the whole thing while on duty here at Stonehenge this last week or so.

Which brings me to why I was there — the team and I just finished a job at Stonehenge.  You know, that big circle of rocks north of Salisbury in the UK?  We were called out there because some archaeologists have some new ideas about this oval-shaped area they call a Cursus just north of the Stonehenge monuments, and we were brought in to provide undead protection.  That’s right – undead protection.  We were hired to be like rent-a-cops or movie shoot medics in case the Indiana Jones-type gravediggers discovered something that wasn’t done moving after years of being dead.  This isn’t the first time we’ve worked Stonehenge.  In fact, in the last couple of years we’ve pulled similar duty on other digs.  Just scroll through this blog and you’ll see at least one.  The thing about this one that was silly is that although Stonehenge is believed to be a burial site for perhaps thousands of people, they were all supposedly cremated first.  Which means that even if they were vampires when they were finally taken out, the cremation process would have finished the job.

I pointed this out when we were called the last time, but no, the Federal Powers That Be required us to go for diplomatic reasons.  It makes it look like the US is playing nice with the UK.  Because you know how our two countries have had trouble getting along since the War of 1812.

Just thought you’d all like to know how your tax dollars are being spent.  Oh, and if you’re ever in Salisbury, make sure you visit the Haunch of Venison — it rocks.

The King of Pop was probably undead long before Edward Cullen even hung around vampires.

In the Twilight series, the main character, Edward Cullen, hides his immortality by pretending to be a high school student in Washington state.  He was born in 1901, which makes him 104  years old by the time the first book was published in 2005.

That’s right — a man, after 104 years of life, decides he should stay in high school.  I’d blast my brains out before I had to go back to high school.  Eddie Cullen is a millionaire, or at least should be a millionaire given that time is in his favor.  He could easily claim he’s the grandson of the owner of a big company and work in the mail room.  He could pretend to be a spoiled trust fund baby.  He has many options, yet he chooses to surround himself with underage children.

He’s a pedophile.

Care to argue it?  He falls in love with Bella, who is a teenager, and he’s almost 90 years older than her.  Technically it’s probably not illegal in Washington state.  According to Washington State law, Cullen probably didn’t break any laws.  But if he had sex with her in Arizona, where Bella had just moved from, at exactly the same time he was banging her in Washington, then yes, he’d be in jail.

Best case scenario, Cullen is a creep.  Anything less than that, he’d be doing time at Big Joe Arpaio’s tent city jail.