Moderated Bigfoot- Anybody Seen one?

[Vortigern99]

But you should have already known that no Bigfoot fossils exist. Bigfoot fossils would be a front page science news topic. No such science news topic appeared.

ETA: Maybe I should say that you never had the personality type of a true Bigfooter. When a simple "no fossils" argument can convert you... you ain't no Bigfooter material.

On the matter of fossils, at the time I was convinced by the Glickman argument, namely that areas of montane forest provided poor strata for fossilization to occur. Now I know and understand that this is an exaggeration and a red herring; mortal remains and fossils of animals are routinely recovered from such areas, and of course BF is reported all over the US, not just in the PNW.

As to the "no fossils" argument convincing me, that was only one element of my realization. Part of it was the demolition of my conviction that the PGF was real, based on a number of factors including 1960s muscle-suits (which despite my interest in creature costumes I did not know existed prior to Baker's Kong work in 1975), and on the fabric folds which I can perceive in the lower legs of the film subject.

Another element of my realization was KKZ's careful discussion with me about the animal requiring x amount of calories per day, similar to a bear, but somehow obtaining such vast quantities without being unambiguously photographed or seen by biologists, wildlife professionals, or persons with scientific credentials.

It's a complex matter, BF belief, and cannot easily be extracted from a believer's neural pathways without careful and thorough rebuttal on several fronts. The "believer" must also be open-minded and capable of critical thought, which are also learned behaviors acquired over time through study and focus.

 

[Apology]

I'd have to say that the lack of ecological impact changed my mind from "I suppose it's possible that Bigfoot exists" to "Not a snowball's chance." Of course, I wasn't terribly interested in Bigfoot to begin with. I just had a very "There's more betwixt Heaven and Earth blah blah blah" attitude towards the world prior to examining this fact.

It's very possible that I would have missed any Bigfoot news. I was never a big fan of television and specifically the news. Most of the stories reported on the news are depressing stories about issues I have no power to change. I'm a little more interested now that I have more free time. I think working in the advertising department of a newspaper really helped foster this anti-news sentiment. After an 8 hour day surrounded by newspapers, the last thing I wanted to do was watch the nightly news LOL!

 

[William Parcher]

It's interesting to me to think that the basic powerful arguments against Bigfoot would have been applicable way back in 1958 (the birth of Bigfootery). In spite of the North American population being smaller, we should have had a type specimen by that year. No video, but people did have still and motion film cameras in the wilderness. Guns, oh my goodness they had guns. Trapping and poisoning of large animals was rampant in the old days. The systematic process of the extermination of the grizzly bear ought to have yielded numerous Bigfoot carcasses as well.

Yeah, Bigfoot was a ridiculous proposition in 1958.

 

[Telaynay's G'son]

Don't you think Bigdongidae is more fitting based on the witness reports?

E Pluribus Unium

 

[DennyT]

I think of Mt. St. Helen's eruption as a pretty good experiment to prove to that no bigfoot exists, although I have not been able to obtain any real idea of what the loggers and others found when they went in there later. Did they find a lot of dead elk, etc, or did they just find nothing at all?

 

[William Parcher]

Did they find a lot of dead elk, etc, or did they just find nothing at all?

Cite

57 people lost their lives... And 5,000 black-tailed deer, 1500 Roosevelt elk, 15 mountain goats, and 300 black bears also perished.

 

[The Shrike]

here is report no. 27,000 odd from the BFRO: while this isn't child abuse in any legal sense, I'm appalled.

While I'm a huge advocate for getting kids into the woods, it sounds like this clown took some unnecessary risks with a 6-7 year old.

 

[Drewbot]

Cite

Very nice citation, but which government agency made them take out the Sasquatch casualty numbers?

 

[William Parcher]

I think of Mt. St. Helen's eruption as a pretty good experiment to prove to that no bigfoot exists,

Men In Black took them away. The Government's Bigfoot Recovery.

On May 18, 1980, one of the largest volcanic eruptions ever witnessed by the western world in the past hundred years, Mt. St. Helens sent clouds of ash and smoke into the air and killed millions of creatures inhabiting the areas of wilderness nearby. In the following weeks federal and state agencies cooperated to make the land habitable again and move to quickly recover the bodies of any dead creatures found within the devastated ecosystem nearby. It was during one of these operations that there is a very prolific legend that two bodies were recovered in the Cowlitz River by the Army Corps of Engineers. Thought at first to be the remains of a large animal of some sort, a helicopter was sent to recover the bodies. They were rushed away. But the story goes that the team that originally recovered the body said that the creatures they recovered fit the description of the elusive sasquatch.

A similar tale seems to pick up where the first leaves off. It seems the pilot of the helicopter was similarly disturbed by the contents of his net that May evening. Among the creatures that they carried that evening were elk, a bear, some deer, and something else that seemed almost too unusual to believe. The reported sasquatch was said to be badly burned to the point of being practically unrecognizable. The creature was simply taken to a disposal sight where it was burned along with the other carcasses. And that is where the story of the sasquatch bodies of Mt. St. Helens ends.

 

[William Parcher]

How many have seen them?

There's probably over 100,000 sightings of sasquatch on record and they keep comin in.

Hazard a guess what the probability that hundreds of thousands of sightings over the years were hoaxes/mis-identifications/delusions?

Dude really tallies up a hell of a lot of Bigfoot eyewitnesses!

 

[Óðinn]

Dude really tallies up a hell of a lot of Bigfoot eyewitnesses!

Sheriff, that's because I gots nothin It's all wild extrapolation anyway. What's your estimate? The BFRO database is likely the tip of the iceberg of people with alleged sightings over the centuries. It's a pretty fortuitous route to get your sighting published on the web. What's the ratio I wonder, 1 in 5 gets reported? But I admit they're only numbers with arbitrary weights of relevance assigned to them. Even so, I bet they kick alien abduction butt.

 

[Correa Neto]

Ah yeah...

There are more bigfeet, bigfoots, whatever, than aliens around, as one would expect.

Or people invent more bigfoot sightings than abduction reports.


There's also that thing involving apples and oranges...

 

[William Parcher]

What's the grand total number of published BFRO reports? Did I recently see Huntster say it was 6,000? I think its been said that about 80% of submitted reports are trash-canned because they are obviously bogus. That means 20% stick and enter the database. 6,000 is 20% of 30,000. So BFRO could get 30,000 submissions... chop out 80% and be left with 6,000 that they think are goodies.


Number over the centuries? Well, I don't think Bigfoot encounter stories were being told much before the concept of Bigfoot (meme) entered the North American psyche.

 

[bikerdruid]

my brother in law saw one many years ago on the forestry trunk road in alberta.
he never spoke of it for years, because he was afraid folks would ridicule him.

 

[William Parcher]

Judaculla posted here on JREF just a couple weeks ago. Juda, why don't you post on BFF anymore?

Just a few observations....

The submission rate to the BFRO can be calculated by anyone on the outside of the organization. I've done it before, but I'll save you the search for my post.

Report 24646 was submitted on 8/31/08.

Report 22890 was submitted on 1/10/08.

24646 - 22890 = 1756 reports

Divde that by 235 days from 1/10 to 8/31 and you get 7.5 reports submitted a day, or about 2,750 per year in 2008.

Most of that is trash ('I saw Bigfoot and he was [insert grotesque and puerile remark here] ROFLMAOOOOO!!!') or has no contact information. Some of it is requests for information that come through the report page.

Assume 15% of the 2,750 has good contact information and is serious at least on the face of it. That's 410 contacts to make each year.

A handful of those will be clearly bogus after just a simple phone interview. Many will be folks reading into experiences--correctly or not--that scared them silly. There's no way to provide an absolute litmus test for these stories, and the resources to thoroughly investigate them are scarce. Volunteer investigators do all of this out of their own pockets. Additionally, it's rare that a report comes in that is hot, meaning that little time has elapsed since the incident. Why go investigate a report in the field if it's 30 years old?...

 

[William Parcher]

BFRO now has a report #28005.

8/31/2008 #24646
8/1/2010 #28005

3,359 in almost 2 years, or about 1,680 per year.

 

[William Parcher]

my brother in law saw one many years ago on the forestry trunk road in alberta.
he never spoke of it for years, because he was afraid folks would ridicule him.

Did you mean to say that he said he saw one, or do you somehow know that he did see one? Is he no longer afraid that people will ridicule him?

 

[bikerdruid]

Did you mean to say that he said he saw one, or do you somehow know that he did see one? Is he no longer afraid that people will ridicule him?

it's amazing how little we care about what others think as we grow older.
he says that he saw one and i have no reason to doubt him.
he has no reason to lie and is not the type that would lie.

 

[William Parcher]

The question of lying is not really a concern. There is no evidence that such a creature exists. If it can be observed on forestry trunk roads in Alberta it would already be in institutions and museums by now.

 

[William Parcher]

I see you are brand new here bikerdruid and thought I'd take a look at your posts...

does the u.s vivlify its enemies?

in a word....yes.
the fact that the us government would stage a false flag operation and destroy the wtc and blame it on a islamic scapegoat evidences this.
for the sake of creating an atmosphere of fear and hate, the u.s have created an enemy.

You think that the US Government destroyed the World Trade Center? This would normally be off topic in a Bigfoot thread, but I think your personal credibility is on the line. Are you a weirdo who might lie about their BIL seeing a Bigfoot?