ACI London 2016

​Sasquatch Syndicate Launches April 20, 2016: A Lifetime in Media Meets a Lifetime in the Woods

The Sasquatch Syndicate project begins.   Host Chuck Geveshausen brings three decades of marketing, broadcast, and documentary instincts — sharpened from Omaha to Hollywood to the ICA in London — to a new Washington State nonprofit dedicated to telling the Sasquatch story the way it deserves to be told.

There are launches, and there are launches that feel like the right thing happening at the right time. April 20, 2016 was the second kind.

That was the day Sasquatch Syndicate officially went live — a Washington State nonprofit, a Seattle-based broadcast podcast, a documentary framework, and the formal beginning of a decade-long project our host Chuck Geveshausen had been quietly preparing his whole life for. By a coincidence none of us could have engineered if we tried, April 20, 2016 was also the opening day of Frames of Representation, the ICA's inaugural documentary film festival in London — the same room, the same week, where Chuck spent two days pitching producers, directors, and documentary storytellers on what was about to become Sasquatch Syndicate. Same day. Same idea. Different sides of the world.

You could call it luck. We prefer to call it timing.

The Long Road From Omaha
To understand why Sasquatch Syndicate exists, you have to understand who Chuck Geveshausen is. And to understand that, you have to start in Omaha, Nebraska.

Chuck came up through one of the great American direct-marketing houses — WATS Marketing of America. WATS, based in Omaha through the 1980s, was one of the largest and most influential telemarketing and direct-response companies in the country in its era, the kind of shop where a young marketing publicist learned how to sell something that didn't fit on a store shelf — a subscription, an idea, a feeling, a mystery. For Chuck, that meant working on campaigns that would shape an entire generation's relationship with the unexplained.

The biggest of those campaigns was Time Life Books: Mysteries of the Unknown. If you owned a television set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you saw those commercials. They ran on TNN, Nick at Nite, MTV, VH-1, TNT, and any cable channel that took ad dollars in the late-night and overnight blocks. Skeptics and believers, Aleister Crowley and the Nazca Lines, the catchphrase "Read the book." The campaign ran from roughly 1987 through 1991, became one of the most decorated direct-response advertising efforts of its decade, and turned Mysteries of the Unknown into Time-Life's biggest-selling book series ever — 33 volumes covering UFOs, hauntings, mysterious creatures, ancient wisdom, and the entire weird and wonderful periphery of human experience.

Chuck wasn't just adjacent to that work. He was inside it — promoting books and shows on the paranormal, learning how to make late-night television move product, and absorbing, almost by osmosis, the lesson that people are absolutely starving for stories about the unexplained when those stories are told well.

He also worked on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom — yes, that Wild Kingdom, the iconic wildlife documentary television show co-hosted by Marlin Perkins and the late, great Jim Fowler. Chuck did film and audio production work on the property, and for a young marketing professional with a head full of his father's deep-woods stories and a memory full of In Search Of… reruns narrated by Leonard Nimoy, getting to work alongside Jim Fowler was the dream. Jim was the real deal. He had four Emmys, decades on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and a love of wildlife that was utterly contagious. Working in his orbit, Chuck learned something he would carry forever — that the camera, the microphone, and the patient field researcher are the most powerful trio in storytelling.

The Pacific Northwest Calls
In 1992, Chuck moved to the Pacific Northwest. There are people who move to Washington for the coffee, the music, the scenery, or the tech. Chuck moved here and discovered something else — that he had moved into the epicenter of one of the great unanswered questions in North American natural history.

He was already primed for it. As a kid he had watched In Search Of… and listened, wide-eyed, to his father's stories from years spent in deep woods — the kinds of stories every serious outdoorsman eventually has if they're honest about what they've heard out there. The Pacific Northwest didn't introduce Chuck to Sasquatch. It introduced Chuck to the woods that Sasquatch lives in.

And then the woods spoke for themselves.

Chuck and longtime friend and eventual Sasquatch Syndicate co-host Paul Bruton are fishing partners — the kind of fishing partners who go where the cell signal doesn't, who set up before sunrise, and who know what the forest is supposed to sound like when it's behaving normally. On more than one trip, in more than one part of this state, things did not behave normally. Sounds that don't have an obvious source. Movement at the edge of the treeline. The unmistakable feeling — and any honest outdoorsman will tell you this feeling is real — of being watched by something that does not want to be seen.

Those experiences hit Chuck the way they have hit so many other Pacific Northwest residents. They didn't make him a fanatic. They made him curious — professionally, methodically, journalistically curious. Curious in the same way the Time-Life campaign had taught him to be: take the subject seriously, take the audience seriously, and tell the story the way it deserves to be told.

The Derek Randles Influence
Chuck found a kindred experience — and a major influence — in the encounter Derek Randles described from the Olympic National Park in 1985. Derek, co-founder of the Olympic Project, was on a backpacking trip with friends, headed to a backcountry meadow some thirteen or fourteen miles from the trailhead. They made camp halfway in. A loud crash in the distance. Then rocks, softball-sized, hurled toward them through the trees. And finally, on the ridge they'd just come down, an eight-foot figure that, in Derek's own words, looked like a giant ape-man.

The detail that stuck with Chuck — and this is the detail every researcher in this field eventually fixates on — is that something with an opposable thumb was throwing those rocks. Not an animal pawing at the underbrush. Something that threw. Derek's account, calm and credible and never once turned into a sales pitch, has shaped the modern Pacific Northwest research community as much as any single witness story since Patterson and Gimlin.

Chuck heard echoes of it in his own woods. He started to wonder what it would look like to bring real broadcast and documentary tools — the WATS Marketing instincts, the Wild Kingdom discipline, the Mysteries of the Unknown late-night reach — to the Sasquatch question. Not to sensationalize it. To do the opposite. To finally give the subject the production value, the research framework, and the respect for witnesses that it has been waiting on for sixty years.

Swap Talk on 1340 KTOX — The Phone Lines Light Up
The catalyst for what would become Sasquatch Syndicate happened, fittingly, on live radio.

Chuck and Paul appeared on a late-night talk show called Swap Talk on 1340 KTOX out of Needles, CA. Three hours of overnight radio is a long time. One night, the conversation ran dry around the back end of the show, and they turned to producer Mark Fargo with a simple question — what else can we talk about?

Somebody, almost casually, threw out Bigfoot.  The phone lines lit up like a Christmas tree.

Anyone who has worked late-night talk radio will tell you what that means. It means the audience has been waiting — not just to hear the topic discussed, but to call in and tell their own story. Witnesses. Hunters. Fishermen. Hikers. Truckers driving the Olympic Loop at three in the morning. The stories came in faster than they could field them. Three hours wasn't enough. Six hours wouldn't have been enough.

Chuck and Paul walked out of the studio that night with two clear realizations. First, the audience for serious Sasquatch broadcast was massive and underserved. Second, between the two of them — Chuck the marketing publicist and Paul the broadcast partner — they actually had the toolkit to do something about it.

That night, in essence, was the seed. Sasquatch Syndicate, the broadcast, the documentary framework, the Washington State nonprofit, the Seattle-based show — all of it grew from those Swap Talk phone lines.

March 2016 — The Nonprofit, By Design
In March 2016, Sasquatch Syndicate was formally incorporated as a Washington State nonprofit. The choice was deliberate, and it was Chuck's call.

The Sasquatch field has a money problem. Not a lack-of-money problem — an influence-of-money problem. Too many shows, too many "researchers," and too many for-profit operations have shaped their conclusions around what sells. Chuck did not want Sasquatch Syndicate to be that. By organizing as a nonprofit from day one, the Syndicate took the financial angle off the table. The mission could lead. Witnesses could trust the broadcast. Researchers could collaborate without wondering who was getting paid for what. And the work — the immersion in the community, the documentation of encounters, the patient assembly of a long-form documentary framework — could be the point, instead of the byproduct.

The first podcast episode dropped in early April 2016, before Chuck got on a plane to London. The Syndicate was already live and broadcasting when he walked into the ICA.

ICA London — Frames of Representation, Two Days That Mattered
The ICA — the Institute of Contemporary Arts — sits on The Mall in London, a few hundred feet from Buckingham Palace, in a building that has been a home for radical art, cinema, and ideas since 1947. On April 20, 2016, the ICA launched the inaugural edition of Frames of Representation, an eight-day festival curated by Nico Marzano and Luke W. Moody and built around the theme of "New Periphery" — cinema, and especially documentary cinema, as a tool for bringing marginalized stories, communities, and ideas to the center of the conversation.

The 2016 program was a heavyweight lineup of new documentary visions: Pietro Marcello's Lost and Beautiful, Zhao Liang's Behemoth, Betzabé García's Kings of Nowhere, Roberto Minervini's The Other Side as opening night film, six UK premieres, a master class in editing from Oscar-winning editor Walter Murch, and panel after panel of conversation about what documentary cinema is allowed to be.

Chuck spent two days in that building.

He pitched. He listened. He pitched some more. He sat through panels with international documentary directors. He took meetings with producers and storytellers from outside the American Bigfoot bubble — people who had never spent a minute thinking about Sasquatch and had every reason to ask hard questions about why it deserved a serious documentary framework.

He came home with answers.

The Frames of Representation framework — documentary cinema as a vehicle for the periphery, for the under-told, for the dismissed — turned out to be exactly the right intellectual scaffolding for what Sasquatch Syndicate was trying to do. The Sasquatch story is the periphery story. It's the witnesses who have been laughed at. The researchers who have been written off. The communities — Indigenous, rural, Pacific Northwest — that have lived with this knowledge for centuries while the mainstream looked away. Walter Murch's editing master class. The discussions of fiction-versus-nonfiction borders. The international filmmakers operating outside the studio system. All of it pointed in the same direction.

Chuck flew home from London with a ten-year project clarified in his head.
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"ICA was the testing ground," Chuck has said about that week. "Two days in London with people who make their living telling difficult stories — and they didn't laugh at this one. They asked good questions. They pushed back. They sharpened the pitch. By the time I left The Mall, I knew what the next decade looked like."

Straight From London to Bigfoot University
Chuck didn't catch his breath. He didn't even fully unpack.

The weekend after Frames of Representation wrapped, the Sasquatch Syndicate team was on the ground at Bigfoot University at the Baymont Inn & Suites in Bremerton, hosted by Dr. Matthew Johnson and Team Squatchin' USA. Dr. J — a clinical psychologist who came to Sasquatch from the paranormal end of the conversation, and whose Oregon Caves encounter is one of the most discussed firsthand accounts in the modern field — became Sasquatch Syndicate's first featured guest.

That sequencing was deliberate. Chuck went straight from a London documentary festival arguing for the legitimacy of peripheral cinema to a Bremerton conference platforming a researcher many in the mainstream Bigfoot community had argued about for years. The point was the point. Sasquatch Syndicate was going to be the broadcast that takes the whole field seriously — flesh-and-blood researchers, paranormal-leaning researchers, witnesses, scientists, skeptics, all of it — and lets the audience make up its own mind.

Bob Gimlin was at Bremerton that weekend. So was Thom Powell. So was Barb Shupe. So was Thom Cantrall. And so was the Pacific Northwest research community, in force, ready to hear what Sasquatch Syndicate was going to be.

Why This Matters — And Why We're Saying Thank You to the ICA
Sasquatch Syndicate launched on April 20, 2016 because the time was right and because Chuck Geveshausen had spent thirty years getting ready for it. WATS Marketing in Omaha taught him how to reach an audience. Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown taught him that the audience for the unexplained is enormous and patient and loyal. Wild Kingdom and Jim Fowler taught him how to honor a subject. The Pacific Northwest taught him that the subject is real, or at least that the witnesses are. Swap Talk on 1340 KTOX and producer Mark Fargo taught him that the moment you give people permission to talk about Sasquatch on the air, the lines never stop ringing. Derek Randles taught him what credibility looks like. Paul Bruton taught him what a good co-host and a good fishing partner look like. And the ICA in London, on the very day Sasquatch Syndicate was born, taught him that documentary cinema has room for stories like this one — that the periphery is the point, not the problem.

Sasquatch Syndicate is a Washington State nonprofit, broadcasting out of Seattle, hosted by Chuck Geveshausen, co-hosted by Paul Bruton, dedicated to a ten-year project of media production, documentary work, and community-driven research into the legend, the witnesses, and the woods.

We thank the ICA for the invitation, the conversations, and the motivation to take this to the next level over the next decade. We thank Frames of Representation for proving, in the same week we launched, that documentary cinema is hungry for exactly this kind of story. We thank Dr. Matthew Johnson and Team Squatchin' USA for being the first stop on the road. We thank Derek Randles and the Olympic Project for setting the standard. We thank Paul Bruton for staying in the boat. We thank the Swap Talk audience for lighting up the phone lines.

And most of all, we thank the witnesses — the men and women who have seen something in the woods of this state and trusted us enough to say so on the record.

The next decade starts now.

BELIEVE

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer, Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.