Science - If bigfoot is there, it could be a bear.

[Mendel]

To quote somebody or other, "The time to believe something is AFTER the evidence has been presented", and "The plural of 'anecdotes' is not 'evidence'".

Harriet Hall.

 

[Mendel]

He also says that after the big eruption of Mt St Helens, there were very large, hairy, burned corpses that were quietly and secretly removed by the military. Or "them". That might be interesting to follow up by a serious researcher.

Rest assured that whoever follows up on that won't be a serious researcher.

So your explanation for the many hundreds of witnesses is that they are ALL wrong. It naturally follows that the physical elements, not evidence, such as the footprints and recorded sounds all do not exist.

Remember witchcraft? The trials and the hundreds of witnesses?
Did witchcraft exist?

If there's physical evidence you like, start a thread on it. We happily try to debunk stuff like that.

 

[Ann K]

Harriet Hall.

Thanks. I thought it might be Matt Dillahunty, but it's commonly quoted.

 

[Mendel]

Thanks. I thought it might be Matt Dillahunty, but it's commonly quoted.

I assumed you remembered it from my post a week ago, on this thread.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/science-if-bigfoot-is-there-it-could-be-a-bear.13328/post-325757

 

[Ann K]

I assumed you remembered it from my post a week ago, on this thread.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/science-if-bigfoot-is-there-it-could-be-a-bear.13328/post-325757

Nope, I remember it as a thing Dillahunty often says, but did not know who originated it. It's still an apt quote.

 

[JMartJr]

So your explanation for the many hundreds of witnesses is that they are ALL wrong. It naturally follows that the physical elements, not evidence, such as the footprints and recorded sounds all do not exist.

The corollary of that is "Anything that is witnessed by a number of people must be real." Given the number of things people claim to have seen over the centuries, are you sure that's where you want to make a stand?

(See: Spring Heeled Jack, creepy clown hysteria, witches (mentioned above already), werewolves, ghosts*, the Monkey Men of 2001, the great sea serpent, alien abduction cases, Nessie, spiritualists and mediums, rains of frogs and fish, etc.)

-------
*You can tell I've spent the morning setting up Halloween decorations!

 

[John J.]

So your explanation for the many hundreds of witnesses is that they are ALL wrong. It naturally follows that the physical elements, not evidence, such as the footprints and recorded sounds all do not exist.

Lots of witnesses and (very) poor quality evidence does not necessarily mean something exists or happened.

Unless you're the Witchfinder General (Mendel beat me to it on this angle).

Respected astronomers saw, and documented, channels on Mars that some thought were likely to be canals.
Extraordinarily, this was published by the US Aeronautical Chart and Information Center in 1962:

-Definitively shown to be utterly wrong by Mariner 4's flypast in 1965.
(Map from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals).

Astronomers didn't use to take perceptual (or other cognitive) factors into consideration.
-They believed they were documenting exactly what they saw, which in turn indicated exactly what was there.
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity or general competence of the channel discoverers and mappers (notably Schiaparelli, Percival Lowell), or their desire to systematically expand human knowledge of the solar system.
Their descriptions of linear features on Mars were widely accepted (Lowell's belief that they were engineered canals, less so).

Some children have seen Bigfoot, many, many more have seen Father Christmas / Santa Claus for real.
There are posts here describing military pilots making identifications of other aircraft or ground vehicles that are wholly incorrect.

...such as the footprints...

...which no-one has lifted DNA from, ever.

Clinical swabs are widely available and cheap. Processing is more expensive, but should be within the reach of a small group of average people without breaking the piggy-bank.

I doubt that Bigfoot carries bleach/ a strong UV lamp/ gamma emitter to sterilize each and every footprint.

 

[Alytha]

Rest assured that whoever follows up on that won't be a serious researcher.

But "they" are really good at making things disappear, you know? Dead Bigfoot, dead aliens, you name it.

Seriously though, I've only watched a couple of episodes in that series (came to it through Monstertalk, so was expecting something a bit more scientifically objective), but these people appear to be genuinely nice and passionate about what they do. If only they used all that beautiful energy for something more useful than looking for a creature that probably doesn't exist.

In 2014, there was a TV series called 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty, where anthropologist and DNA expert Todd Disotell and his team taught hobby Bigfoot hunters how to correctly take samples and generally behave in a scientific way. And guess what they found this way? Nothing.

And that was 10 years ago. What has happened since then? Nothing as far as I'm aware.
We're still analyzing the Patterson-Gimlin film to death, and that's about it. There was an episode of The Proof Is Out There dedicated to that, where Bigfoot "experts" including Jeff Meldrum went over the restored version of the film and seeing amazing things in a few admittedly still blurry pixels. Now I think The Proof Is Out There is one of the better paranormal shows (they have Mick West on it sometimes to talk sense), but a lot of their experts are still pretty credulous.
I used to have a coworker who walked down the hallway exactly like "Patty", down to the head-turn (excluding the boobs though). I've never had any trouble believing that this is a man in a suit.

Rant over

 

[NorCal Dave]

'And open-ended question like yours work both ways: Why do people report seeing an animal that there is NO physical evidence it ever existed?'

So your explanation for the many hundreds of witnesses is that they are ALL wrong. It naturally follows that the physical elements, not evidence, such as the footprints and recorded sounds all do not exist.

Then I prefer to agree with Jane Goodall who, like a true scientist, does not rule out its existence.

I'll reply to this below, but first please learn to use the tools of the forum. When you want to quote someone, you have 2 options.

1: You can hit the "reply" button at the bottom of the post as I did for this post:

Now what you said in your post is at the beginning of my post. Everyone knows what I'm talking about, and I've alerted you that I am replying to your post.

2: If it's a lengthy post and you only want to reply or quote parts of it, you can highlight a section, and you will usually get a "quote/reply" option like this:

Again, this will result in the quote appearing at the top of your post, so everyone knows what you're replying to and alerts the quoted member that they have been replied to. You can also use this technique with lengthy posts, by replying to different subjects in turn.

In addition, if you're having trouble replying, you can "summon" the person you are trying to address by using the @alien tool. This alerts the member that they were mentioned. I find a lot of this difficult on a phone at my age, but usually if a member alerts folks that they're on a phone and have some problems, people will be ok with that. Any questions on using the forum, feel free to PM me.

As for your comment (once again using the reply tool):

So your explanation for the many hundreds of witnesses is that they are ALL wrong.

Maybe. More accurately I don't take an accumulation of unsubstantiated anecdotes as primary evidence. They may indicate something worth looking into, but again, the sum is not greater than the parts. A lot of bad anecdotes don't add up to good evidence.

Are all the anecdotes bad? I don't know. What I do know is that often when dealing with things like UFOs, alien, ghosts and Cryptids like Bigfoot, there is a tendency to simply pile on with evermore anecdotes. Once again arguing that the sum is greater than the parts, and rarely if at all, is any corroborating evidence ever offered for these anecdotes.

We have to decide how many individual anecdotes, or parts, to look at and evaluate to see how many aren't very good for any number of reasons. For example, in post #115 from which you tried to quote me, I used your suggestion of witnesses seeing "faces" to search the NAWAC's database. Of 316 entries I got 2 hits and randomly picked the second one to read through.

As I noted in that thread, the account given was a recollection by an adult of something that happened in Texas during his youth 10-20 years in the past. Part of his description sounded like typical bear behavior, while other parts described an animal that is bio-mechanically and evolutionarily impossible. Even IF there really is a bipedal hominid roaming around Texas, it can NOT simultaneously run/sprint as a quadruped and a biped. Once an ape starts down the road to being bipedal, it gives up being an effective quadruped.

Aside from the memories of the witness, there were no other witnesses and no physical evidence of any kind. The witness says he didn't say anything about the event when it happened and only spoke of it much later in life. Also, according to the witness, there was some sort of family history of telling these stories.

This is NOT a good anecdote. It's a memory of something in the past, that may have been confabulated with family stories and its latter retellings that describes a physically impossible animal.

That leave 315 anecdotes in the NAWAC's database. Do we want to go through every one of them to see if one is good? Maybe randomly sample some here and there to see what we get? And even if we find a "good" anecdote, we still have NO physical evidence at all for a 7-9' tall bipedal hominid roaming most of North America. None.

This also assumes all anecdotes are in fact good faith reports. We know the Bigfoot world is full of hoaxes and frauds and likely some well-meaning but ultimately misleading reports. Just plain misunderstandings of what someone thought they saw, along with the known problems with human memory also make up some of these anecdotes.

It naturally follows that the physical elements, not evidence, such as the footprints and recorded sounds all do not exist.

I'm sure many of these things physically "exist", we've all seen the footprint casts. It's also common knowledge that they are easy to fake, and many people have confessed to faking them. Some are cast of something, that some people interpret as a Bigfoot track, but could be all sorts of stuff.

There are audio recordings of various things. Has anyone EVER shown a Bigfoot making whatever is on these recordings? Not that I'm aware of. So, how does one know they are in fact from a Bigfoot? They don't, they just assume.

 

[Scaramanga]

I don't wish to elevate the "sightings" of these imaginary things, and don't think pedantry needs to be elevated either.

That they are imaginary is one hypothesis, and probably the most likely explanation. But...I reject the whole idea of dismissing anything by being dogmatic about language used. That just seems to me to be trying to restrict to some sort of 'Newspeak' and comes across as dogmatic rather than enquiring in nature.

I mean, as an example, we all know that 'UFO' means entirely different things to different people. Some see headlines such as ' Pentagon Confirm There Are UFOs' as literally meaning aliens confirmed. Sensible people grasp that it simply means they have 'un-identifieds'...which is not surprising or world shaking at all. And we generally know from the context which meaning we are seeing.

Thus there is no need to put 'alleged' in front of 'UFO', or to demand people can't use 'sightings' with Bigfoot'. Allowing people to describe their experiences in their own way and language is precisely the thing that allows us to see the context of the words and what sort of person we are dealing with.

 

[Scaramanga]

There are audio recordings of various things. Has anyone EVER shown a Bigfoot making whatever is on these recordings? Not that I'm aware of. So, how does one know they are in fact from a Bigfoot? They don't, they just assume.

One of the most comical things I've seen, it happened on a show called Finding Bigfoot, is where they knock on a tree and get a 'response' from the bigfoot 10 seconds later.

But hold on. They've just stated they are in the middle of a canyon 2 miles across, with high walls on each side. So, a mile on each side. Sound travels a mile in 5 seconds. It would take 5 seconds for the sound of the original knock to reach the canyon wall, and another 5 seconds for it to be reflected back. 10 seconds !

I cannot help but wonder how many other 'bigfoot responses' are simply echoes.

 

[Ann K]

One of the most comical things I've seen, it happened on a show called Finding Bigfoot, is where they knock on a tree and get a 'response' from the bigfoot 10 seconds later.

I've watched a few of those shows, and had to laugh at the repeated refrain of "Sounds 'Squatchy' to me" at any nocturnal sound. I wondered just how many varieties of owls or animals they're familiar with, because the woods are full of nocturnal critters. I once took a sleeping bag up into my back yard in suburbia, to get away from streetlights so I could watch a meteor shower. I was amazed at how many different sounds surrounded me as I lay in the middle of a patch of short grass.

 

[Scaramanga]

I've watched a few of those shows, and had to laugh at the repeated refrain of "Sounds 'Squatchy' to me" at any nocturnal sound.

On a recent episode of Expedition Bigfoot they had an instance of some sound that sounded just like a Canadian Goose. But of course, it can't just be a Canadian Goose. No...it has to be Bigfoot mimicking a Canadian Goose....as the goose season had supposedly passed. But which is more likely, that a stray goose got left behind or that bigfoot can ( conveniently ) re-create any sound in the forest.

Likewise, I think in the same episode, they caught on infra-red a 'bipedal creature' walking down a footpath. Well...that's just got to be bigfoot ! I mean, it could not possibly be a deer hunter or a local resident or even some other bigfoot hunter, could it.

 

[NorCal Dave]

On a recent episode of Expedition Bigfoot they had an instance of some sound that sounded just like a Canadian Goose. But of course, it can't just be a Canadian Goose. No...it has to be Bigfoot mimicking a Canadian Goose....as the goose season had supposedly passed. But which is more likely, that a stray goose got left behind or that bigfoot can ( conveniently ) re-create any sound in the forest.

Seriously? There's a reason I don't find these show entertaining. It sounds like a goose but can't be a goose. I wonder where they were? In much of Northern California and Oregon, we have local Canadian Honkers. Geese that decided all that migrating back to a still cold Canadian summer to have offspring, then flying back to the states for the winter was a waste of time and energy. They just live here year-round.

 

[Scaramanga]

It sounds like a goose but can't be a goose. I wonder where they were? In much of Northern California and Oregon, we have local Canadian Honkers. Geese that decided all that migrating back to a still cold Canadian summer to have offspring, then flying back to the states for the winter was a waste of time and energy. They just live here year-round.

That's exactly where they are, in northern California, in the current season 5. So basically their ' it can't be a goose as they've all flown home' isn't true.

 

[NorCal Dave]

That's exactly where they are, in northern California, in the current season 5.

Ok then. IF they said it sounded like a "Canadian goose", then that's a specific call and sound the Candian Honkers make, and like I said they live all over the place year round.

If it's one of the other migrating species, like Snow geese or Speckel-belly geese, they make different sounds and are much more seasonal. Snows and Specks start arriving in September to November depending on the weather up north with most of them here by January. In the central valley of Northern California some of the fields turn white with all of them. The hunting season is from mid October through January.

However, if these guys are looking for Bigfoot up in the mountains, it's again local Candian geese that are more likely. The Snows and Specks head straight for the valley floor to fatten up.

 

[Scaramanga]

Ok then. IF they said it sounded like a "Canadian goose", then that's a specific call and sound the Candian Honkers make, and like I said they live all over the place year round.

If it's one of the other migrating species, like Snow geese or Speckel-belly geese, they make different sounds and are much more seasonal. Snows and Specks start arriving in September to November depending on the weather up north with most of them here by January. In the central valley of Northern California some of the fields turn white with all of them. The hunting season is from mid October through January.

However, if these guys are looking for Bigfoot up in the mountains, it's again local Candian geese that are more likely. The Snows and Specks head straight for the valley floor to fatten up.

They had some 'sound expert' who claimed that even though it sounded just like a goose...which it did...the sound wave signature was somehow different....then they threw in ' well the geese aren't here this time of year anyway' on top of that.

But its an utterly ludicrous step to go from looking at sound wave patterns and seeing something not quite like a goose ( even though to the ear it was identical ) to arguing that this was somehow bigfoot doing his best to impersonate a goose. I mean, there's a big toadstool at the end of my garden.....that is clearly proof that fairies exist !

 

[NorCal Dave]

They had some 'sound expert' who claimed that even though it sounded just like a goose...which it did...the sound wave signature was somehow different....then they threw in ' well the geese aren't here this time of year anyway' on top of that.

But its an utterly ludicrous step to go from looking at sound wave patterns and seeing something not quite like a goose ( even though to the ear it was identical ) to arguing that this was somehow bigfoot doing his best to impersonate a goose. I mean, there's a big toadstool at the end of my garden.....that is clearly proof that fairies exist !

I guess I'll have to try and find this amazing show somewhere and...give a listen

 

[Ann K]

Seriously? There's a reason I don't find these show entertaining. It sounds like a goose but can't be a goose. I wonder where they were? In much of Northern California and Oregon, we have local Canadian Honkers. Geese that decided all that migrating back to a still cold Canadian summer to have offspring, then flying back to the states for the winter was a waste of time and energy. They just live here year-round.

I'm in Ohio, and geese often stay around all year. But if I hear one in the night-time, it usually means the coyote pups are hungry, and when the goose stops squawking, it'll be about two minutes until the little soprano yip-yip-yips express their appreciation ...or maybe they're tasty to Sasquatch...