The Uncanny Coffee Hour with Dr Kitsune and Odd Bob
From Yokai and Bigfoot sightings to spirits, other-worldly beings and UFO encounters, we share stories and interviews; exploring evidence, theories, and philosophical implications. Always respectful with a touch of impish irreverence, we gather stories with wit and wisdom encouraging a strong look at Indigenous perspectives.
This project has been brewing in our minds for years and now with the help of our community (including the uncanny world) we are making it a reality.
The Uncanny Coffee Hour with Dr Kitsune and Odd Bob
The Children of the Night: Encounters with Ye'i Tso on Navajo Land
The veil between our world and the unexplained grows thin as Donovan, a Diné (Navajo) man, leads us into the shadowy realm of Ye'i Tso—the Navajo name for Sasquatch. Growing up in Monument Valley where mystery shrouds the landscape day and night, Donovan's childhood was filled with elders' stories told by firelight in his native language, warnings about what lurks beyond the safety of home after dark.
With striking clarity, Donovan recounts his unforgettable encounter at age 18 when what he initially thought was a skinwalker revealed itself as something far more primordial. A towering figure with red hair, dome-shaped head, and amber-reflecting eyes stood before him, unleashing vocalizations that defied human capability. The terror escalated when Donovan's young cousin came running back from around a bend, wide-eyed and panicked, having narrowly escaped what he described as a huge orangutan-like creature attempting to grab him.
What makes this episode truly exceptional is Donovan's cultural insight into the complex relationships between different beings that share the Navajo lands. He explains how skinwalkers actively avoid Sasquatch, how these creatures sometimes helped Navajo people escape from soldiers during times of genocide, and hints at an entire cosmology of interconnected beings from dogmen to entities even more dangerous than Sasquatch itself. Perhaps most chilling is his mention of cave systems containing evidence of victims from throughout history—shoes, clothing, and other remnants of those who ventured too far into the children of the night's domain.
Whether you're a skeptic or believer, Donovan's testimony offers something rarely found in cryptid discussions: an authentic Indigenous perspective that places these encounters within generations of cultural knowledge. This is just part one of an extraordinary conversation that continues next week—listen now and you might think twice about that nighttime hike you've been planning.
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I'm an evil-minded man, we'll keep you evil-minded too. Get evil, cause there's nothing else to do. Come on, Come on, get evil cause there's nothing else to do.
Speaker 1:Coming to you live from the back porch of Odd Bob's Ectoplasmic Estate, east of Springfield. Welcome to the Dr Kitsune Odd Bob Uncanny Coffee Hour.
Speaker 3:Where we're always respectful, with a touch of impish irreverence. We tell stories with wit and wisdom, encouraging a strong look at Indigenous perspectives.
Speaker 4:And, as always, Saoirse here to lend me a bit of magic and intelligence to the conversation. Also, I might be a girl this time, but I wouldn't mind being a horse again and going for a bit of a ride, Pooka style.
Speaker 1:Brought to you this week by Odd Bob's Organic Arugula.
Speaker 4:Unadulterated.
Speaker 1:Have you ever been a little constipated? Have trouble pushing it out. Got a little hair stuck in there.
Speaker 4:Jesus.
Speaker 1:Never worry, try Odd Bob's Organic Irregular. One million and one uses.
Speaker 4:I feel like I had a baby feckin' idiots always respectful with a touch of impish irreverence, you're both away with the fairies so what are you drinking today?
Speaker 3:um, I was drinking an oat milk latte Hipster With Mexican mocha spice.
Speaker 1:Oh, that sounds good.
Speaker 4:No, it doesn't.
Speaker 1:And it's oat milk this time. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh, I just wanted to mix it up, not hemp milk.
Speaker 1:Not today. And what are you drinking, Saoirse?
Speaker 4:I'll be having some Riders, sears, whiskey and coffee. Black.
Speaker 3:Isn't that yours? Wasn't I supposed to give that back to you?
Speaker 1:I am drinking a blackberry sage tea. Ooh, I felt it would be fitting. That sounds delicious. It is actually. It's quite delicious. It's dried blackberries with white sage ground up made into a tea. It's very relaxing.
Speaker 4:Tasty.
Speaker 1:Tasty on the palate.
Speaker 3:Yeah, panky up Nice and we're back.
Speaker 1:So what are we going to talk about?
Speaker 3:I was just going to ask you that exact question what do you got?
Speaker 1:So, alright, this week I think we're going to Give my buddy, donovan, a call. Oh, and Donovan is a A Diné Navajo man who hey, there's Gracie, gracie agrees, gracie approves. And Donovan is a Diné Navajo man who hey, there's Gracie, gracie agrees, gracie approves. So Donovan is a Diné man who will be sharing some stories about Ye'i Tso, which is what they call Sasquatch, ooh, bigfoot.
Speaker 3:Bigfoot. Yeah, okay, that sounds amazing. Let's do that. I want to acknowledge to everybody that listened to our last episode that we will have a continuation of those ghost stories, and specifically the Yurei.
Speaker 1:Traditional Japanese Yurei stories will also be there.
Speaker 2:And I think that's next episode.
Speaker 1:I actually think what we're going to do with this episode is we'll probably break it into two episodes as well, and we'll have a follow on episode Cool, very cool. He's a talker, then yes, he is. I expect him to tell us stories that will go long beyond our coffee hour, which is 28 minutes.
Speaker 4:Roughly 30, I'd say beyond our coffee hour, which is 28 minutes.
Speaker 1:Roughly 30,. I'd say so, we'll probably have two or three coffee hours about the yeti tso, that's fantastic.
Speaker 4:Fantastic indeed.
Speaker 2:Let's get him on the gab box then. Hello, hello, who's that? Then? My name is Don Vignosi and I'd like to talk about Bigfoot, talk about Sasquatch. Yeah, it's all.
Speaker 2:As a kid I was, I always was like that. You know, I was raised by the older people, you know, with the kerosene lamps and the fireplace giving off light and the old people drinking some strong coffee, speaking only in Navajo, talking about skinwalker stories or ghost stories, haunting stories. You know, bigfoot stories. You know I just had to stay up and listen as long as I could, even though it gave me nightmares, but I had to know what was out there in the darkness. You know, and I come from Monument Valley, utah, arizona, borderline, so just coming from that area, it's always been mysterious. It's always been mysterious in the daytime, night, all the time, and a little bit of a wander around at nighttime is a big no-no. It's always been installed in us, it's been put in us that you don't wander around because you can run into something out there that you wish you had it. You know, and a lot of my growing up into teenage years, I was a rebellious young kid. You know, I was a rebellious guy and I wandered around and you know, going running at night, hiking at night, just because I couldn't sleep and even though, when I'll get to having my first sighting, you know going hiking in outside of El Chido, utah this is on the Navajo Nation by Mexican Hat Utah, the Four Corners area. So I went hiking with my family. You know they came from out of state, they were raised in Nevada, so they would come to the reservations in the summertime only and when they do we would always spotlight and you know, play, hide and go, seek and do all kinds of things. You know, and that's gonna be. That's where I'm gonna lead into a lot of the stories.
Speaker 2:You know that we encounters that we had roaming around at night and you know they they came through and I was like around 18 years old at the time and you know they're like let's go hike right now, let's go. You know I want to go somewhere right now. I was like are you sure you just drove 16 hours to get here? You know it's a long drive, aren't you tired? He's like. He's like he works in the mines, so he's like working nine miles underneath the earth. So yeah, he's a driller. So you know he's like I want to see something, I want to see something scary. I was like you're gonna regret that, but let's go. And then I was like who wants to go? And I had, uh, two aunts and three cousin brothers that were younger than me and one uncle, the one that, the one that's a driller. So all right, let's go then.
Speaker 2:And within the 30 minutes of our hike we went over one, two hills. We probably walked about two miles away from the community. Um, the navajo nation is really, really stretched out. It's a vast land, you know, with sparsely populated, and the terrain is really rugged. You know it's very rugged. And you got mesas, you know that go to 8,000 feet, 9,000 feet. And you have mountains around too. You got trees of all kindsonderosa, cedar, juniper pine and um, you know, you got we're in high desert as well, in slot canyons, you know some fine dirt, cotton, wood trees, creeks, so you know it's it's really really not populated at all.
Speaker 2:And well, we got two miles away and, um, we heard a yelling, uh, coming from the hill, like a strange yell. You know like what? All, the, all the locals here, they, they always think that, uh, there's drunk people, drunk people having a party on the hills, yelling around. You know, that's what everyone always would say. But this yell was not human, you know, it was uh, it was uh disturbing.
Speaker 2:You know, at first for me I thought it was a call for distress and we and we only had one flashlight. My uncle had a really bright flashlight and he shined his light over on the hill and we only had one flashlight. My uncle had a really bright flashlight and he shined his light over on the hill and we seen eyes reflecting. You know, looked like it was on top of a mesa further back, going back and forth, and I was like it's probably just a cuckoo or a bobcat. Let me go check it out, you know. And we were just watching it and then it stopped and it started screaming, you know, and I was like like what in the world? What is this? You know, like what kind of scream is that? I never, ever, heard anything like that. You know, we're all of us. You know, all seven of us were just standing there together with our flashlight on there and we were quiet. I don't know how long we were staying there. This thing was, if you ever heard, the Sierra sounds, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what I was hearing All the vocal pitch ranges, the sound, the vibration and how long it's carrying on like longer than 20 seconds, so the long capacity is just amazing. It didn't get quieter, it got louder and it was oh man, it sounded like a lady as well, like a lady crying, mixed in with it yeah and it sounded feminine to me and everyone.
Speaker 2:We were just looking at each other like what the heck is that, you know? And I was like all right, let me go check it out. It's probably a skinwalker, you know. I thought it was a shapeshifter.
Speaker 1:Because you just go check out skinwalkers. That's crazy man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I can share some stories. When I first seen one with my eye, I was 13 years old, but I was 18 this time. I was like I'll be back. It's probably a skinwalker, it's probably an old man, or most likely it's an old lady in some kind of skin. Let me go check it out, I'll be back, guys. No one didn't follow me, so I was walking this whole time.
Speaker 2:This thing was walking back and forth on the hill and his eyes were reflecting amber and I got within 100 yards, 100 yards away from my family, going down a hill, going towards up a little hill, and I got within 60 yards. This thing was loud, really loud, and you know, the light was still on it and the whole time in my head I was like this is a human, this is a person that knows black magic, this is a witch. This is not a monster. Monsters aren't real. Humans are the monsters. We're the monsters. I'll say that to myself. And I seen this thing stopped pacing back and forth and I realized that it had red hair because the heel that it was on, or it was standing, actually wasn't on the heel, it was standing behind the heel. So this thing was tall and it had red hair and I had no neck and I had a dome head and his eyes was? It stopped pacing. It faced me and his eyes was facing towards us because it tells me it's a predator and its eyes is reflecting amber. So, you know, I can tell between livestock and, um, domesticated and wild. You know the animals, the eyes. Sometimes you can tell the reflection, sure, and yeahicated it in wild. You know the animals, the eyes. Sometimes you can tell the reflection, or sure, and yeah. So everything was telling me it's a predator. And it started swaying back and forth and I'm going to try it. Yeah, I'm not going to try it. I'm not going to try it. I'm not going to try it. I was going to to try it. I'm not going to try it.
Speaker 2:I was going to try to mimic what it was doing and it was screaming and it was swaying back and forth really fast and you know it looked like a plywood, you know huge, and his eyes was probably as big as my fist when I closed them. You know, like a big softball, and his eyes was probably as big as my fist when I closed them. You know, like a big softball, and his eyes was wide apart from each other. You know, like how us humans, our eyes and our nose, you know, are proportioned to our face, and this thing was very proportionate to its size. You know it fit its size, proportionate to the size. You know it fit its size. And you know the screen that was given off, you know it was yelling and it was making different vocals and you know I just made my hair stand up now staring at it.
Speaker 2:You know, and you know, all these memories came through from the back of my back of my mind. You know, like this is the monster that we've been fighting with since probably the beginning of mankind. You know this. All these memories, everything, the ancient fears, just look, boom. This is why they say you're not supposed to go out at night because you're gonna, you're gonna run into the children of the night. You know they're the children of the night, we're the children of the day. You know, every all the elders always told me that. You know, know, I was never sure who they were talking about. I thought they were talking about witchcraft people. You know, skinwalkers that run around at night and do things at night. That's who I thought they were talking about, but I had no idea they were talking about all these cryptids that I was yet to run into.
Speaker 2:You know, and you know, this life is really mysterious and there's a lot of questions that you know that I want answered. And you know, why is there a goat man Running around? Why is there a scimitar Running around? You know, why is there a gargoyle flying around? Why is there a pterodactyl roaming around? Why is there you gargoyle flying around? Why is there a pterodactyl roaming around? Why is there UFOs coming around? Why did I see a UFO abduct two people over two trailers within seconds, with my wife Seeing all these giant cubes in the sky, light up the sky? A lot of these times I was never alone. I ran over a saber-toothed tiger. You know, it was a giant cat, you know, and I wasn't alone and I started investigating that myself and I had. I came across two families that seen the same thing that described the same being that I seen, and they said that it lives around that area. So you know, I have yet to get my cameras. You know, some time to go and see if I can catch this on camera.
Speaker 3:That's my drive do you think there's more than one, or do you think it was just the one that was there? I have no idea when you heard the sounds like the Sierra sounds. It was just like the one One.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, we're going back to Sasquatch.
Speaker 2:Yeah sorry yeah it was just one, sorry, yeah. Yeah, it was just one for sure, but I wouldn't doubt it, there's another one around, because all our attention was on that one and there was a creek behind us, there was a cliff behind us, so one might have been down there, you know. And after that, you know, it walked backwards behind the hill and the light, you know it, stopped where I can only see its eyes, and it was staring, you know, staring at me, and it disappeared. And then, you know, I turned around and I walked. I was getting closer to my family, I was walking towards the light, I was looking on the ground. As I was approaching them, I was trying to figure out what I'm going to say. What am I going to tell them? What am I saying? You know, this is my backyard. I'm not afraid of anything here. You know, I run at midnight. I'm not afraid of anything here. I run at midnight. There's no moon, no stars. I know these dirt roads by heart. It's how well I know my terrain.
Speaker 2:And I got back to my family, they were looking at me with huge eyes and I told them it's just a bobcat, let's keep going, it's all good, let's keep going, because we were trying to make it to the San Juan River and you know the whole time we got into the creeks, into the wash, where it turned into a labyrinth, a maze. The whole time I let my family get ahead of me and you know I let them get 100 yards ahead while standing there in the wash, you know, seeing if this thing is going to come, you know, stalk us like a predator, because I know it was stalking us the entire time, because rocks were sliding off the hills on our left and our right and then you know, the whole time a lot of things were going through my mind and my family. You know, I don't think they had a clue and like an hour passed and you know we got back to the main dirt road again where we decided not to get to San Juan. You know, we got back to the main dirt road again. We decided not to get to San Juan River because we got spooked out.
Speaker 2:And we're making our way back to the community and the youngest member of the group that we had he was 13 years old, and not only he was the youngest, he was skinny, he was slender, he was small and he was a little bit of a naughty guy. So he, he got ahead of us. This is around three in the morning now, so he got ahead of us around the bend. You know, I seen him. He got 70, probably 60 yards ahead of me. He, he turned the corner. I looked down to look at my footing, I looked back up and he is, like you know, like 20 yards, 15 yards away from me. You know, just like you know quick, and his eyes was really wide open, really huge. You know, like he was about to pop out of his socket, and his mouth, his jaw, everything was wide, open, open, and he wasn't running like a sprinter, he was running with his uh, arms swinging around. I don't know if you ever seen woody on toy story run yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's how he was, you know, that's how he looked. He was running and his legs, you know, was dangling everywhere he was, was running for something in his life and he tackled me. He tackled me and I was like what's up, what's up, what did you see? What did you see? Tell me, what did you see? You know he was yelling, you know he was screaming. He was, you know, panicking. I told him relax. I told him relax. What did you see? Tell me, I need to know what did you see. Tell me, what did you see? He told me it was a Yan'atloshi.
Speaker 2:In Navajo that means skinwalker, and I was like, okay, tell me, what did it look like? I need to know, you need to tell me what did it look like. And he said that when he got around the corner, he said he seen what looked like to be a huge orangutan running towards him on all four. He said that it reached out. His hands were so huge and it was reaching out to grab him and he turned around. He looked it back towards us and after that I took him off me and I started running down that road where he came from, and I had a cousin that was a year younger than me, join me. We were both running down that road. We hit the corner, we're running and we ran to a wall of stink. You know, the smell made us stop in our track.
Speaker 2:Try being around these two after taco and margarita night and I was gagging trying to catch fresh air, but the smell was so overwhelming and this heel to our left goes up at an impossible angle where a human cannot go up. You know, even if we try to go up on all fours, we're going to slide down because the hill is full of fine red pebbles where it's very slippery, and not only the red pebbles, there's those flat rock, the red flat rock, the sandstone, that's what it is. So it's really impossible for us to go up. But this thing was already at the top and the pebbles and rocks were coming down from this hill. This hill was probably about, let's see, 100 feet, 100 feet in height. It was a steep hill. It looked like a giant pyramid, but it's not, it's just a hill.
Speaker 2:So this thing already ran up the hill and disappeared on the other side and, yeah, we went home and we never, ever spoke of it again until he passed away last year, and you know everyone was there from that night and I told him hey, you know I wanted to talk with him. You know I didn't get the chance to ask him again. But do you guys remember that night? You know they're like yeah, and I was like just think, guys, that was a Sasquatch we ran into. I finally figured it out and, you know, my whole family's jaw dropped and they're staring at each other and they didn't want to say anything. They didn't say anything, you know.
Speaker 1:So you know, it's just do you think the Yan Ogloshi, do you think they have any connection with the Sasquatch?
Speaker 2:they avoid them. They avoid them so much that they have their own caves. So there's separate caves where Sasquatch takes, he occupies a cave, or a cave that leads to a entrance to the hollow earth, where the other cryptids take as well and where the where we also took refuge from, um, the flood, from destruction of the last world. We took refuge in there and we live amongst them for a time and and we we left when the water receded and when we came out of them, tunnels, um, we couldn't speak with the animals, no more, the animals couldn't speak with this last world. They used to. So the skinwalkers, the, when they're out doing their own thing, they go around these things because if they run into them, these Sasquatches will kick their behind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there is stories of that that I've actually heard. They avoid them. They're the bigger things out there and Sasquatch is not the only big thing out there. There's a bigger being out there than Sasquatch and there's a more eviler being than Sasquatch that also takes those caves and lives those caves and occupies those caves.
Speaker 2:So we leave those caves alone, because if you go down there, no one's going to ever see you again. And if you do go down there and you happen to be in there when none of them go down there, no one's going to ever see you again. And if you do go down there and you happen to, you know, be in there when none of them are in there, you're going to see remains, you're going to see shoes, you're going to see clothes, you're going to see toys, you're going to see women and children's clothing from all different periods of times down there, and even weapons and shoe piles different shoes, shoes, different moccasins. You know, like a lot of the some of the witnesses I came across on navajo land while investigating. They said that sasquatch has a strange obsession with shoes as well. You know it's like okay, that's kind of weird.
Speaker 2:He can't find any that fit I don't know right, he's a or he's a feet guy maybe he's a defeat.
Speaker 1:Maybe we should start a only fans for feet or something you know, he likes little feet, you know so awesome go ahead. Some some of the stories up here that I've heard other native people talk about. You know some of them. I hear them talk about sasquatch as a monster. Some I hear them talk about sasquatch as a medicine person or someone that helps. Have you ever heard stories like that before?
Speaker 2:oh yeah both. It's hard to put your thumb on this guy, because he's really unpredictable.
Speaker 3:It's like humans, right yeah, malevolent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good and bad and ugly, maybe different tribes.
Speaker 2:They are a different tribe, that's for sure. They were created along with us at the same time by the creator. Our Navajo culture story has that creation story. We're all created together. This whole universe was sent into existence by the creator himself. And you know, over time, sasquatches just started eating us. You know, there's, there's more than one sasquatch, there's different sasquatches. They all look different but they're all the same. They're cousins. They're all the tribe, the children of the night. They're all the tribe, the children of the night.
Speaker 2:There's the dogman. It's probably his cousin, you know, yeah, yeah, the mandrill, because if you look at the ape, you know the mandrill is not a baboon. You know he has the ear, no longer snout. So that's what some of the witnesses, you know, that I've interviewed here on Navajo Nation, they that you know they had the ear in a snout. You know, didn't? It didn't look like a skinwalker, because the skinwalker can make himself look into werewolf, a nine-foot-tall werewolf with the medicine bag in a Navajo kilt and some symbols painted on his body and he speaks Navajo. That's that, the witch, you know? Yeah, not Loshi. So there are two different things. One's a human, the other is not a human, the other is something more than a human beyond the human.
Speaker 2:So, like the stories of him doing good for us is like when the genocide happened here, all our neighbor tribes here, the Paiutes, the Hopis, the Pueblos, the Utes, everyone betrayed us. You know, we had the Mexicans come in, we had the Mormon militia and our own people turned on us too. So we had to resort to our witchcraft, and that's where I, you know, know part of my family descends from that line the band that was never captured. We played hide and go seek from um bears ears utah all the way down to the grand canyon. You know we used black magic um at night to attack.
Speaker 2:So we had a mental and physical uh warfare with the calvary. So a lot of times they ran out of the canyons hightailing it. We fought guerrilla warfare every inch and we never signed no treaty. Good, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, yeah. That's why we say we're second place in hiding ghostly championship. That's why we say we're second place in the hide-and-go-seek championship. While the enemy tribes and the cavalry were surrounding us, a lot of times Sasquatch would be coming in to save the day.
Speaker 4:He'd be going around that camp screaming bloody murder all night, scaring the soldiers and the enemy warriors while we made our escape into the night. Do we have to hang up? I wanted to hear the story about the skinwalkers on the cliffs.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a cliffhanger.
Speaker 4:It certainly is.
Speaker 3:Sweet, suffering saints. Less blathering, more banter, if you please. It makes me wonder, like you know, I mean if you have, you know, sometimes people can come together if there's an enemy that's greater than both of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, like if UFOs attack tomorrow, like the whole world might put aside our problems and come together to fight them.
Speaker 1:Except for those white nationalists.
Speaker 3:Except those guys, they're just Nazis, yeah, yeah. Yeah, fork, nazis yeah.
Speaker 1:Crazy.
Speaker 3:That's her way of saying it Fork Nazis. Jesus Christ, get some. Get a candle in here, or something that was you. That was you. That was not me, that was the dog.
Speaker 4:Or isn't that a scent to wake the dead or the aftermath of a drunken fairy feast Blurred.
Speaker 1:Join us next week with More uncanny stories. And the Ye'i Tso and the cliff.
Speaker 3:More to come. Ah, Grandpa Spuds, thanks for sticking with us. Yeah, Sersho, can you take us out with Grandpa Spuds please? I love Grandpa Spuds.
Speaker 4:Just what I always aspired to be a creaky collection of bones and wrinkles. The very picture of enchantment I am.
Speaker 5:Thanks for listening. Join us next time for more Uncanny Chats and coffee and tea. You can find out more about us read show notes and get your Uncanny merch at wwwuncannycoffeepodcastcom.
Speaker 1:Until next time, remember never whistle at night take seriously all signs of cardiac arrest and, above all else, remember we are not all monsters. Dr Kitsune and Odd Bob's Uncanny Coffee Hour is produced by Mitch Kiyotakitsune and Odd Bob's Uncanny Coffee Hour is produced by Mitch Kiyotakitsune and Bob Mason and copyright protected under all laws, foreign, domestic and supernatural by the Unseelie Court. I'm getting a little bit.
Speaker 3:Gracie, you are a stanky dog. Thank you, Gracie.
