@HarryHenderson. I now put the odds of Bigfoot’s existence at 1 in 10, down from my 9 in 10 (implicit) estimate of over a dozen years ago. Here is the “con” card from my dueling pair of double-sided business cards on the dispute:
23 Reasons Why Bigfoot’s Unlikely
1. Little hard evidence: No bones or fossils [2–6 fall under this]
2. Few ape-like forest-traces (nests, etc.)
3. No body—not even one has been killed
4. Few photos, & those vague or questionable
5. Patterson film phony, says primatologist J. Napier
6. Hair, prints, & dermal ridges could be faked
7. What does it eat? Few rich foods in Pacific NW
8. Winter: Why rarely seen then?; Harsh some places
9. Sustainable population = 9000, but sightings rare
10. Locale-appearances are unnaturally irregular
11. Some dogs should have run it down by now
12. Doesn’t fit well into fossil-record & primate family
Witnesses assert unlikely things [13–18 fall under this]:
13. Sighted outside PNW, but too few to breed there
14. Sightings in far north, and even in UK & Europe
15. Witness’s descriptions are inconsistent
16. More sightings than footprints—suspicious
17. // “Sightings” of Eastern cougar & UK Big Cats
18. 15+ hominids seen world-wide
19. Mankind has a psychic need for mythic monsters
20. The media has primed the populace to “see” BF
21. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable
22. Sightings: mistakes, hoaxes, inventions, or delusions
23. Sum of objections has a collective weight
Witness pool is tainted; so NO such data is acceptable
BF, being tall, would be impeded by tree limbs
Here’s a fuller exposition of some of those items. This was written over a dozen years ago and before I wrote before the boiled-down list above:
REASONS TO BE SKEPTICAL OF BIGFOOT:
This list doesn’t include certain reasons skeptics think are weighty, but I don’t. I’ll deal with them in another post. Nor does it include several reasons I’ve thought of in the past, because I’ve forgotten them. (I hope readers can supplement this list with additional considerations that wobble their belief in Bigfoot.) As I said to EO, either informed belief or informed disbelief must involve agony; there is no clear-cut resolution to the debate. It seems almost equally impossible to believe and to disbelieve, though belief seems more parsimonious.
What does it eat? Its environment is not rich in high-calorie foods. And there are seasons when food is scarce. To say that bears thrive ignores the fact that they have claws to dig in the ground & tree-trunks for roots & grubs. And rural residents are not reporting many food-raids on their gardens & outbuildings.
What does it do in the winter? Its tracks are rarely seen in the snow. Winters in some areas where it is seen are very harsh—it would need to find a cave—but there are none. Or hibernate—but hominids don’t do that (so far).
Wouldn’t Bigfoot, being tall, always be impeded by tree limbs? A bear can move through a forest because it’s low to the ground, where branches don’t interfere with it. (The retort is that Bigfoot’s so strong he just brushes them aside.)
Why aren’t there more traces of Bigfoot left in the forest? Compared with the many nests and stripped branches left by gorillas, Bigfoot seems to have a suspiciously low impact on his habitat. (Of course there are twisted tree trunks & branches—but some or most of those might have been created by deer & elk.)
How can it be so elusive? Apparently most dogs refuse to track it, and those that do either get killed or come back whining. But there must be some with the right blend of boldness and caution to track it and then keep their distance, the way certain dogs that track other dangerous animals do. (There’s something promising for a BF organization to follow up—finding a couple of dogs that will track a BF so they can be quickly taken to sighting locations.) Why hasn’t one of them been killed, of the two dozen or so that have been shot? Why have no road-kills turned up? Why have no other cases of accidentally killed Bigfeet occurred? The woods can be dangerous—for example, why hasn’t a Bigfoot stepped on a bear trap, or slipped and fallen from a cliff, etc.?
Why haven’t there been more sightings? If there is a breeding pool (as there must be), there must be thousands of Bigfoots, so we could hardly avoid running across them more often. (My comeback to this is that the size of the breeding pool may be much smaller than we think it must be. But it’s still odd that there are so few sightings—only one a day in N.A., on average.)
How can it survive outside certain favorable environments? There are sighting reports from every part of the U.S. & Canada. It stretches credulity that they are living in areas where there is little cover or food. In addition, in the past 20 years there have been a dozen sighting reports from Britain, and a dozen more from Europe. All these outlier reports call into question the believability of the central reports from the Pacific Northwest and parts of the South and Midwest. (A partial comeback to this is that the sightings mostly occur in the traditional areas where there is good cover, food, and mild winters. But this answers only part of the objection.)
How can there be a dozen or so varieties of undiscovered hominids world-wide, as reports imply? It stretches credulity that they could all be real, and yet not one of them be confirmed.
Why aren’t reporters’ descriptions more consistent? Here’s what bipto had to say on this over a year ago:
“The glowing vs. not glowing thing is strange, but when I used to have a cat most of the time his eyes didn't glow, but other time they did and quite strikingly. Here's a few other discrepancies that strike me about some reports:
> Pointy head vs. round head
> Big, muscular build vs. thin, scrawny build
> Sometimes stinky, sometimes not
> Prominent brow vs. sloping forehead
> Long hair vs. short hair
“I can understand variations in color and height, but some of these other things seem like they should be more consistent. Either there's a large variety of body types out there or there's more than one type of bigfoot.”
Who are its ancestors in the fossil record? There’s only gigantopitecus, and it’s not a very likely candidate because it was probably not bipedal. (The comeback to this objection is that the great apes aren’t found in the fossil record either. Still, it weakens the case for Bigfoot that he seems to be an evolutionary outlier.)
Why have appearances in particular locales been so irregular? For example, consider this year 2002 quotation, from the weirdnj.com site: “AFTER A TWENTY YEAR HIATUS, Big Red Eye is back in town. Bigfoot, or Big Red Eye as he is locally known, is no stranger to New Jersey. He's been prowling about since the turn of the century. There were more than 50 sightings of Bigfoot in the 1970's and these were in Sussex County alone. Then as mysteriously as Big Red Eye appeared, he dropped out of sight for nearly twenty years, only to resurface again recently in isolated appearances, such as the five known sightings on Layton Road in Wantage starting from around 1995.” This hot-and-cold pattern seems similar to UFO flaps (i.e., possibly paranormal), and dissimilar to sightings of natural animals.
Perhaps eyewitness testimony is less trustworthy than it seems. Apart from the standard objections to such testimony, perhaps witnesses are seeing something like Mothman or a Chupacabras—something that has apparent reality, but seemingly pops in and out of our world from somewhere else. This possibility is strengthened by the BBC’s recent technological scan of Loch Ness, revealing it to be empty of large critters. Other cases where reliable witnesses saw something that nevertheless may not really exist include sightings of the Eastern cougar and Alien Big Cats in Britain (for which there is insufficient supporting evidence in the environment) and a handful of sightings of “True Giant” Bigfeet over ten feet high (too much, I hope). So whatever the witnesses saw may have come from Elsewhere.
Can ALL the strained “explanations” [i.e., explainings-away] of the above be correct?
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Oh, BTW: I put the odds of the PGF’s authenticity at 2 in 3.
Incidentally, the Hendersons had just left Index, Washington when they ran into Harry. Index is about 30 minutes NE of Seattle. (The sentence where Index is mentioned is only muttered.) I’ve been to Index twice, to go up Deer Mountain and observe Deer Lake, where an acquaintance who was with me said he had had a sighting years earlier.
But let's not get distracted too much by this post and diverge for long off topic (Heironimus).
