Those are all valid categories. If you've been researching the phenomenon for a while, then you probably know that of the three listed, the first category (hoaxers/story-tellers) has the majority of claims.
While I can't prove that River's claim of all of them fitting into those three categories is false, I can give reasons for why I believe it's not true.
When it comes to sightings, I find that BFRO reports are convenient as their approximate locations are placed on a Google Earth layout, making them valuable for research purposes. Of the ones published, I think that
at least 80% of them don’t fit into any of the three categories listed in this thread. This is based on the patterns and trends I've seen on Google earth.
One of the first things that one notices when looking at the sighting reports is the number of reports coming out of the PNW. If you take Washington state for example and compare it to North Carolina, you’ll notice that NC has a higher population by about 2 million, yet it has less than 1/6 of the reports. One could claim that Washington state simply has more people who tell stories, but if you look at Oregon, you’ll see that it has a similar sightings to population ratio.
Washington – 597 : 7,000,000
Oregon - 241 : 4,000,000
North Carolina – 90 : 9,900,000
Kentucky – 101 : 4,400,000
I've gone through many of the sightings in the PNW in search of signs of phony story-telling (like what one would expect from a hoax) and found that a lot of them aren't dramatic in the least bit and don’t even include any sort of obvious visual. They lack what I have personally come to know as indications of story-telling (I've become pretty good at identifying hoaxes), so I can’t say with any sort of confidence that a large portion of the reports are the result of story-telling.
Two other interesting things I’ve noticed is the timing of the reports and the specific locations of the reports. The Ouachita National Forest is a good example of where for some reason, reports continue to come out of one area, yet other areas don’t seem to have any:
On the map, the number of reports between April to September is only 6, while the number of reports between October to March is 19. This unevenness is something I would expect from an actual population of animals that is trying to survive.
A seasonal mass hallucination would be more likely than every report fitting into one of the three categories listed here. Even more likely than that though (in my opinion), is that there's an actual animal behind many of the reports.
Contrary to what many denialists like to convince themselves of here, these animals leave signs (tree breaks, rock throws, unidentifiable vocalizations, unrecognizable smell, strange deer kills, nut cracking stations, tracks ect.). The problem is that all of these things can be attributed to something else (known animals including humans). They are things that people come across every day in forests, but don’t suspect that anything as crazy as Sasquatch could be responsible for, which is understandable. Even their bodies have roughly the same proportions as us, making anything other than National Geographic quality footage pretty much useless. The PGF for instance, as clear as some of its frames are, is still debated to this day for that very reason. All of this makes the evidence for the existence of Bigfoot unconvincing.
So basically, there are signs that this animal exists. All that's left is for a body or part of a body to turn up...
