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The Valley of the Wood Apes

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jerrywayne said:
The tracks were identified by the local constabulary. You can take it up with him if he's still around.
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Cops don't know about cougar tracks. There was no cougar there.

This Fouke Monster thing is a bunch of made up stuff. It's hillbilly fun.
 
Pterodactyl said:
That story from Brown, about the black dots moving up the hill, is a textbook wild boar observation. To the extent that hogs are known to run directly uphill when spooked. They would be in this area.

Their recordings of the "rock rain" are quite obviously squirrels feeding in the trees above the cabin. You can even hear one chuffing at the end of the clip they played on the bigfoot show.

I do generally agree with your point about their actually believing some of their claims. They whip themselves up into thinking all kinds of mundane things are bigfoot related. Fact is, none of these guys spent enough time in the woods to be able to tell the difference. Case in point, on the NAWAC page, Brown describes himself as a "naturalist". Yet on an episode of the BFS, he states that he is from LA, and went into the woods basically for the first time in the early 2000s. And that's the group's leadership.
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I'd bet almost all of these folks are bigfoot believers to some extent, but I also feel that after being immersed for such a long time, they have to realize they haven't been encountering an undocumented bipedal ape, but are embellishing encounters with common wildlife, or humans having them on. Some of these humans likely being part of the "team."
 
Pterodactyl said:
That story from Brown, about the black dots moving up the hill, is a textbook wild boar observation. To the extent that hogs are known to run directly uphill when spooked. They would be in this area.

Their recordings of the "rock rain" are quite obviously squirrels feeding in the trees above the cabin. You can even hear one chuffing at the end of the clip they played on the bigfoot show.

I do generally agree with your point about their actually believing some of their claims. They whip themselves up into thinking all kinds of mundane things are bigfoot related. Fact is, none of these guys spent enough time in the woods to be able to tell the difference. Case in point, on the NAWAC page, Brown describes himself as a "naturalist". Yet on an episode of the BFS, he states that he is from LA, and went into the woods basically for the first time in the early 2000s. And that's the group's leadership.
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Thanks. I agree.
 
Pterodactyl said:
Their recordings of the "rock rain" are quite obviously squirrels feeding in the trees above the cabin. You can even hear one chuffing at the end of the clip they played on the bigfoot show.
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I thought the rock tossing happened at night - when squirrels aren't doing that.
 
William Parcher said:
This Fouke Monster thing is a bunch of made up stuff. It's hillbilly fun.
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All of bigfootery is hillbilly fun; it's just gone mainstream now. It will eventually fade back to the niche hobby/campfire story thing because of the no bigfoot anywhere thing.

Like the Fouke Monster, bigfoot is a figment.
 
jerrywayne said:
This was related by a researcher who spent some time at Fouke. He was told this by Smokey Crabbtree, hardly a monster debunker. It was published in Fortean Times. I no longer have a copy, but if you would really like to read it, it might be online somewhere.

The nosy horse story is also related in Blackburn's book, also a source that is not into debunking Bigfoot, but who spent many years, on and off, interviewing people in the Fouke area.
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So these are anecdotal stories without any evidence. Some changes and embellishments could have occurred at any time after the supposed events as well.

It's rather speculative to say that any of these people really thought that they had a Bigfoot or other monster in their midst.
 
Resume said:
I'd bet almost all of these folks are bigfoot believers to some extent, but I also feel that after being immersed for such a long time, they have to realize they haven't been encountering an undocumented bipedal ape, but are embellishing encounters with common wildlife, or humans having them on. Some of these humans likely being part of the "team."
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It would be interesting to know exactly how long they were in the Area X location before the good stuff began happening. It seems to me that they spent some time there setting up trap cameras and monitoring them and came up empty. No one saw anything until Coyler saw his apparition. Then the dam broke.

Did the rock assaults and tree knocks occur early on or later?

Btw, I'll ask this question. If you were a strong believer in Bigfoot, and someone gave you this choice as how to interpret what you were experiencing in Area X, no Bigfoot or yes Bigfoot, which answer would you be inclined to accept?
 
jerrywayne said:
...Btw, I'll ask this question. If you were a strong believer in Bigfoot, and someone gave you this choice as how to interpret what you were experiencing in Area X, no Bigfoot or yes Bigfoot, which answer would you be inclined to accept?
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In order to say "yes Bigfoot", the bleever would have to consciously lie to themself.

This is, and as a fellow birdwatcher The Shrike will back me on this, a common problem for birdwatchers going to a new area looking for a specific bird. Especially an uncommon one and one they have not seen before.

You are so geared up to find the target species, you see them in every sighting you have. If you are honest with yourself, you'll mark your potential sighting as ??. You always question the veracity of your sighting and only mark it as firm when you are absolutely sure you've eliminated all other confounding (and often more likely) species and even then, you may only end up with a "possible".

I believe that this may well be what happened with the Ivory-billed Woodpecker farce. They were so determined to see an IBWP, that they "did".

For anyone to convince themselves that they are seeing bigfoot they have to be consciously lying to themselves in order to believe.
 
jerrywayne said:
Btw, I'll ask this question. If you were a strong believer in Bigfoot, and someone gave you this choice as how to interpret what you were experiencing in Area X, no Bigfoot or yes Bigfoot, which answer would you be inclined to accept?
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The problem with asking someone to put themselves into the shoes of a true Bigfoot believer is that you are asking them to try to think while using flawed rationality and reasoning.

What would I do or say in that situation? The wrong thing. Whatever that would be.
 
William Parcher said:
So these are anecdotal stories without any evidence. Some changes and embellishments could have occurred at any time after the supposed events as well.

It's rather speculative to say that any of these people really thought that they had a Bigfoot or other monster in their midst.
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You are correct. It is speculation, just as it is speculation to conclude that the NAWAC stories are for the large part knowing fictions.

It seems to me that your driving instinct is to deny any and all plausible or even possible mundane explanations for Bigfoot while maintaining a hair trigger pull for the hoax/lie explanation. I remember that I suggested the famous Ruby Creek account was a bear event, and you immediately discounted this explanation in favor of "why can't we just say that the witness lied." Your explanation disregarded the fact that no one at the time, including law enforcement, thought she was making up the story wholesale and overlooked the fact that the animal left tracks all around and a tracing of a print was given to Green years later, he took it to a university zoologist who concluded it was a bear's print.
 
jerrywayne said:
Btw, I'll ask this question. If you were a strong believer in Bigfoot, and someone gave you this choice as how to interpret what you were experiencing in Area X, no Bigfoot or yes Bigfoot, which answer would you be inclined to accept?
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I'd have to lie to myself. If I saw a group of "black dots" running up a hill, I'd have choices: Bear, boar or bigfoot. If I identified the undentifiable as bigfoot, I've just fabricated an "encounter." It's that simple.
 
William Parcher said:
The problem with asking someone to put themselves into the shoes of a true Bigfoot believer is that you are asking them to try to think while using flawed rationality and reasoning.

What would I do or say in that situation? The wrong thing. Whatever that would be.
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Millions and millions of people all over the world believe things intensely that are not rationally or empirically verified or verifiable. I'm sure you have your own closet of such beliefs, as I'm sure I do too.

The interesting question is why do people believe in Bigfoot? I understand why people believe in God (they get everlasting life if they are Christians) or UFO's (powerful beings who will save us from ourselves), for instance, but what exactly do people have to gain on a personal basis by believing in Bigfoot? What is it about Bigfoot that flips their switch? Is it just the romance of monster hunting? Thinking you are right when almost everyone else is wrong, proving your hunch? What? I wish I knew.
 
Resume said:
I'd have to lie to myself. If I saw a group of "black dots" running up a hill, I'd have choices: Bear, boar or bigfoot. If I identified the undentifiable as bigfoot, I've just fabricated an "encounter." It's that simple.
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Well, that's sort of the weird thing about it though, and kind of Jerrywayne's point. Brown didnt claim to have gotten a good enough look to ID one during that sighting, but based on Kathy Strain and another person being there and stating that they did, he states he believes he has seen one, basically because they said he did.
It's not your typical "I seen him. Clear as day at 15 yards. I swear on my mother's eyes" type sighting you usually get from footers.
 
Pterodactyl said:
It's not your typical "I seen him. Clear as day at 15 yards. I swear on my mother's eyes" type sighting you usually get from footers.
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No, it isn't typical as such, but yet it is. I was a skeptic with a paranormal group and witnessed it there. Identifying the unidentifiable is a trope with these fringe believers and once you start doing that, you are embellishing the encounter. There is no other word for it.
 
Resume said:
I'd have to lie to myself. If I saw a group of "black dots" running up a hill, I'd have choices: Bear, boar or bigfoot. If I identified the undentifiable as bigfoot, I've just fabricated an "encounter." It's that simple.
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You have to ask yourself why Brown would admit to such an inconclusive sighting in the first place, if he was making it up.

Sometime after he made his remarks about the fuzzy black dots at BFF, he was saying that he knew wood apes were real because he saw them. I reminded him that he didn't really see any such thing. He saw something he could not discern, and what he said he saw didn't sound anything like a couple of gigantic bipedal apes. He curtly replied that he would be an idiot not to claim he saw wood apes when the other two or three folks there, just a few feet from where he was, said they saw scissoring legs and bent over bipedal apes. He ignored the very probable fact that they couldn't have seen any thing more than he did. As I said before; it was a confirmation bias circle jerk.
 
jerrywayne said:
You have to ask yourself why Brown would admit to such an inconclusive sighting in the first place, if he was making it up.
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I was just using that as an example. And it's a good one as it demonstrates that even though the observer may have been a believer, they were still partially fabricating the encounter.
Sometime after he made his remarks about the fuzzy black dots at BFF, he was saying that he knew wood apes were real because he saw them. I reminded him that he didn't really see any such thing. He saw something he could not discern, and what he said he saw didn't sound anything like a couple of gigantic bipedal apes. He curtly replied that he would be an idiot not to claim he saw wood apes when the other two or three folks there, just a few feet from where he was, said they saw scissoring legs and bent over bipedal apes. He ignored the very probable fact that they couldn't have seen any thing more than he did. As I said before; it was a confirmation bias circle jerk.
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If he saw black dots, he didn't see a bigfoot, period, no matter what other observers claimed to have witnessed. Assuming that this even occurred in the first place, once you've started embellishing, you've started hoaxing.

There is no way to confirm any of the NAWAC's claims and given the nature of the bigfoot hobby, there is no reason to give them any credence. Credibility is earned; proponents have done nothing to do so.
 
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jerrywayne said:
You have to ask yourself why Brown would admit to such an inconclusive sighting in the first place, if he was making it up.
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It could be a strategy for gaining people's confidence in you. You become more believable when you offer inconclusive things and hesitations.

It's how I would do it if I was making up Bigfoot stories. Unconfident confidence. I would feign skepticism of my own experiences and say "yet that is what happened and yes it appears to exist".
 
A dot is a circular thing. Why would a Bigfoot look like a circle or a dot? It should always look like a gigantic hairy humanoid.

What is this scissor leg thing they talk about? How do their Bigfoots walk differently than people do? Does scissor mean that the legs never cross?
 
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