Wild Thing · Foxtopus Ink

In Memory of Peter Byrne—S1 Bonus Interview

March 15, 2024·25 min·1 clip

Peter Byrne secretly cut a finger from an alleged Yeti hand in a Nepalese temple, replaced it with a human finger, and had Jimmy Stewart smuggle it out of Nepal hidden in Gloria Stewart's lingerie case.

Peter Byrne enters as a survivor. The host places him with the old Bigfoot pioneers, alongside John Green, Rene DeHinden, and Grover, but the interview quickly gets wider than Sasquatch. Byrne was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1925. His Bigfoot career began in 1960, when he was 35, and by this conversation he was 93. He looks the part almost too well: khaki safari clothes, an Indiana Jones style hat, and a green vintage camper van. Then the story backs up. Byrne remembers running advertisements in Outdoor Life and Field and Stream, trying to build a safari business through letters and cables. One contact changed the course of it. Joe Broecher, a Los Angeles safari agent, sent him clients for 20 years after liking what Byrne offered. The hunting details stay blunt. Clients came for tiger, leopard, buffalo, bison, wild boar, crocodile, five kinds of deer, fishing, and bird shooting. Two animals were off limits. Byrne says elephants were protected across Asia and tied to Ganesh, while rhinos were kept for royal family hunting. He set his own tiger limit too. No outside rule stopped a client from taking more, but Byrne says he held it to one. From there, the host turns toward the Yeti. Byrne traces that pull back to bedtime stories from his father, then to treks with Sherpas in the lower Himalaya and Sikkim. The interview feels less like a case for a creature than a record of a life that kept brushing up against strange stories, remote places, and unfinished business. The oddest piece is a finger. Years later, a BBC reporter said it had been found in a drawer in a small lab at the Royal College of Surgeons. Byrne went to identify it. DNA testing gave the whole thing a dry, almost funny ending: after all those years, his DNA was on the finger.

As heard by us

A long life, a stranger-than-fiction trail, and another pass at Sasquatch.

Peter Byrne's life makes the Bigfoot story feel like one branch of a much larger expedition. Dublin childhood, African safari work, Yeti treks, and a late-life search for Sasquatch all sit in the same frame, and the episode gives him enough room to sound like an old field hand…

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Why you'd press play

Follow one of Bigfoot's last old guards through Yeti hunts and safari years.

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