Forget the amusement part for now. Hoaxes can provide valuable information. If someone creates a fake trackway and a "Bigfoot investigator" declares it legitimate, then we all learn that the investigator is incapable of determining real from fake (see the title of this thread). In that sense, each hoax is a kind of experiment.
Investigators such as Meldrum, Green and Krantz have carved feet and done experiments to determine just what kind of prints they do make. This is considerably cheaper than jumping into the Jeeps to drive hundreds of miles to see what kind of job a hoaxer can do. If hoaxers were to be under threat of, say, boiling in oil, they might not be a need to tell the difference. Of course, capital punishment never stopped murder, so maybe it wouldn't help much, except to take some hoaxers out of the population.
Remember the bus driver that swore he pursued a stinking Bigfoot. That was a hoax. We all learned that a reserve Vancouver city police officer (the driver) thought that a guy in the suit was a real Bigfoot. We all now know that police officers can be wrong about Bigfoot.
No we don't. That was a well-executed hoax, by the way, with prints (16, wasn't it?) and walkie-talkies. What the driver reported running into certainly doesn't sound like a normal human being in a suit. His intent was to unmask the guy and he was chasing after him, so why would he suddenly become that afraid?
Dahinden asked if a real Bigfoot could have shown up just at that time. He seemed to be serious.
Just how many hoaxes like that have there been? The perpetrators came forward. We even had a poster on BFF confess to being part of it.
But what about the smell he reported? "The first thing I noticed was the smell...a horrible smell like very rotten meat..."
Could have been a dead animal nearby. Maybe he was so scared he had a moment of fight or flight reflex, like Dr. Johnson reported.
If the guy in the suit wasn't carrying rotten meat, then what are we supposed to think of that claim? Is it even possible that the police officer busdriver lied about the smell to make it more believable? Had he already heard that Bigfoot is supposed to stink?
See above.
Grover Krantz mentioned encountering an overpowering odor while he was doing one of his nighttime drives on a dark forest road. At first he thought it was related to a loose sphincter (his own). The odor is often described as a combination of feces and sweat. George Schaller describes the gorilla "fear scent" as being like that and has said he can tell when he's within 100 yards of a troop by that smell.
The witnesses reported 300 lbs. and 7'. If I were into conspiracy theories, I might suggest local government put the young men up to "confessing" to avert a panic. But I'm not.
One case Byrne investigated involved a motorist who saw what turned out to be a snag. Peter had to show him his tire tracks where he'd backed up and taken off in a panic before he believed it.
Maybe the bus driver took off in hot pursuit, ran into a snag and dreamed the rest while temporarily unconscious. Who knows?
