New Zealand Resident Shares Bigfoot Forest Encounter and Photograph

So, there's this absolutely fascinating interview that dropped recently over on the Cryptid Women's Society channel, hosted by Lisa on her Shadow Talk series, and honestly, it stopped me in my tracks. The guest is a Kiwi guy named Richard who has spent years exploring Sasquatch hotspots across North America, but the encounter that really got under his skin happened right in his own backyard in New Zealand. And here's where things get really interesting. New Zealand has no indigenous land mammals. Before humans arrived, it was just birds and reptiles. So the idea of a large, hairy hominid wandering around the bush there completely flips the script on conventional science. Lisa brings this up early in the conversation, and Richard's response is one of those moments that makes you lean in closer. He floats the idea that if these beings are interdimensional, as many researchers are starting to consider, they wouldn't necessarily need a traditional food source. They could, theoretically, pop in and out wherever they please. Canada one minute, New Zealand the next. The interdimensional hypothesis has been gaining serious traction in the research community lately, and it's worth exploring if you're not already familiar with the theory. Richard grew up in Canada until he was 12, so he was surrounded by Sasquatch culture from a young age. He remembers those classic roadside warning signs with life-size Bigfoot silhouettes telling drivers to beware. His dad dismissed it as myth, but the seed was planted. The Patterson-Gimlin film from the early '70s also stuck with him over the years. When he eventually moved to New Zealand, he found himself drawn back to the mystery, especially after stumbling onto Bigfoot content on YouTube. The encounter itself happened in a pine forest in Auckland, somewhere he prefers to keep vague out of respect for whatever might be living there. He first visited the area with his wife and noticed tree knocks, those distinctive rhythmic taps that researchers have documented in Sasquatch hotspots all over the world. His wife didn't catch the sound, but his senses were clearly tuned to it. This was about three or four years ago, somewhere around the COVID era, though the timeline is a bit fuzzy for him. Here's where the story takes a wild turn. Richard became friends with a guy named Alan through the comments section of the How to Hunt YouTube channel. Alan lived down in Rotorua, which is Lisa's hometown and an absolutely loaded area for folklore and paranormal activity. Rotorua sits on a volcanic plateau with hot springs, sulfur vents, and a deep history of Maori legends including the Patupaiarehe, those mysterious fairylike beings described as having blue faces and red hair who live in the mist. The region is also home to stories of giants and other unexplained entities wandering the mountain ranges around Mount Moehau, the Coromandel, and the Waitomo areas. If you're unfamiliar with Maori cryptozoology, the Patupaiarehe are often considered one of the closest cultural parallels to Bigfoot-type beings in the Pacific. Alan used to walk the Redwood forest near Rotorua for hours every day with his big dog, and he had this recurring experience where he felt something was leaving feathers for him on the trail. Skeptics would say feathers are everywhere, but Alan was convinced something was following him or trying to make contact. When Alan drove up to Auckland to stay with Richard for a few days, they headed into that pine forest together, and that's when things escalated. Richard captured a photograph during that outing that shows what appears to be a large figure standing over a fallen log. Combined with everything else they experienced that day, it became one of the most compelling Bigfoot-style encounters reported in New Zealand in years. Lisa was so gripped by the story when she first saw it on another channel that she reached out to Richard directly to share it with her audience. The full interview covers the photograph itself, the investigation that followed, and Richard's thoughts on what might be living in the wildest corners of Aotearoa. It's a longer conversation, but honestly worth every minute if you're into international Sasquatch research or the interdimensional theory. Lisa and Richard have great chemistry, and she does a solid job pressing on the scientific implications of a mammalian hominid existing in a country with zero indigenous mammal history. Definitely worth checking out the full episode over on the Cryptid Women's Society channel. The New Zealand angle alone makes it stand out from the usual North American content, and Richard's perspective as someone who's actually walked the famous Sasquatch territories in both the US and Canada adds real credibility to his observations back home.