Moderated Bigfoot- Anybody Seen one?

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Jodie;

Bigfootery is a complex issue. With complex issues some people will focus on one particular aspect of it and wonder if "there might be something to it." In 2004 I felt this way about the "dermals" issue withing Bigfootery. While I was highly skeptical about most everything in Bigfootery, I felt that "there might be something" in what Jimmy Chilcutt was saying.

Eventually I worked out to my own satisfaction (and others) that Chilcutt was mistaken. Not long thereafter I encountered Dr. Wroblewski's analysis of the Skookum cast. From there it was clear to me there there was simply nothing about Bigfootery that was "compelling" as Jeff Meldrum likes to say.

If you would like a systematic skeptical treatment of the subject instead of the hit-and-miss of internet forums, I would HIGHLY recommend David Daegleing's book. It came out just before the dermals and Skookum cast claims could be included, but otherwise it's an excellent overview.

Regarding fossils:

Bigfooter: "We know Gigantopithecus was real because we have the fossils. Bigfoot could very well be Gigantopithecus."

Skeptic: "But we don't have any Bigfoot fossils."

Bigfooter: "Fossils are very rare, and we shouldn't expect to find them."
 
tube said:
Jodie;

Regarding fossils:

Bigfooter: "We know Gigantopithecus was real because we have the fossils. Bigfoot could very well be Gigantopithecus."

Skeptic: "But we don't have any Bigfoot fossils."

Bigfooter: "Fossils are very rare, and we shouldn't expect to find them."
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.. and the acidic soil of their primary breeding/burial area would preclude that their bones might be readily discoverable "

SK: But Native American anthropology is going on in that area and other animals bones have been found also ?

BF'er: Sure, but NA and other animals dont hide their remains like BF. We are not even positive yet if they even bury their deceased ?

SK: What do you mean "we are not even positive yet".. prove they exist first ?

Bf'er: Of course they exist ! Dont you realize how many sightings there have been ? Even my great uncles third cousin has seen one !
 
Jodie said:
I'm actually trying to get the basics down first before making the psychological leap to the low probability for the existence for bigfoot. My point is to try to dissect the fine points of the argument as much as can possibly be done. That's why I drifted over to JREF, I want to hear what you have to say. If you are right, I will conceded your point. I'm not that committed to my POV these days.
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Rubbish. A person who is interested in learning something is a voracious reader on their own and doesn't need to be spoon-fed the simplest concepts. Once you have been told of wildlife enumeration science, with the tiniest bit of initiative on your part you would already know quite a bit about it.

It makes no logical sense for me to consult a hot dog vendor about wildlife other than to ask about the quality of the meat in the hot dogs, likewise with maintenance. I also found my own links that support both of our points if you are interested in reading them.
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You decided to pretend doing research by waiting around for a friend that is an employee of a park, as if that was some kind of significant effort when at your fingertips are peer-reviewed journal articles on wildlife enumeration.

Amazingly you found links that support bigfoot, while supposedly looking for material on wildlife enumeration. Oh really? Talk about hilarious. Show the google search terms that came up with that.

Seriously. Show me. What that is going to do is demonstrate the level of honesty involved here.

I'm not seeing much of the intelligent discussion from your end that you insisted I provide.
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One of the things manipulative people do is set themselves atop the throne and demand everyone else submit at their feet the evidence sufficient to convince them their absurd positions should be changed.

Then they blame others for not working hard enough to please her highness. When people give me this crap then what they're good for is a laugh, not for serious discussion.

Don't hold someone to higher standards than you are willing to live up to, that's rather hypocritical. I'm trying to give you what you asked for but if you aren't interested, that's OK too, because it makes no difference to me if it is you or another poster that's willing to discuss the topic.
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You showed a glimmer of hope by actually making some calculations with acreages and park visitorship, but I have a one and two year old already to interact with at the level you are demonstrating now.

Don't play games with the "I have some stuff that supports bigfoot but I won't show you unless you play nice with me" garbage. Intelligent and sincere discussants don't act manipulatively like that. It took you more effort to write these paragraphs above than it would have to provide a link to something you claim deserves inspection. When someone is calling me stupid enough to fall for this kind of behavior then they should not be asking for respect in return.
 
Jodie said:
I can't rule out misidentification, but he was face to face with this thing, I don't think it was a hallucination.
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It's good to know you concede the possibility that your father might have mistaken some other animal -- say, a bear -- for a bigfoot. Concluding that indeed, a claimant might simply be mistaken is the beginning of rational, critical thought regarding bigfoot sighting reports.

Before you reject the next possibility, namely hallucination, may I suggest that you do some reading on the topic? Entirely sane, rational people can and do hallucinate sounds, sights and smells on occasion. Some bigfoot sighting claimants refuse to accept the possibility that they may have hallucinated because of the stigma attached to the phenomenon, as though experiencing a hallucination marks them as mentally unstable, insane, etc. However, nothing could be farther from the truth. I recommend you yahoo- or google-search "hypnagogic hallucination" and/or "hypnagogia", and determine for yourself whether your father's story matches any of the known and studied precursors to those experiences.

Without knowing more about your father's sighting report, I can't offer much more guidance than that.

However, you've neglected to address the other possibilities: namely, victimization of fraud and perpetration of fraud. It is entirely possible that someone in an ape suit hoaxed your father. Gorilla suits are known and documented to have existed in the mid-19th century for use in the "Girl-to-gorilla" sideshows and travelling carnivals. Certainly from the early 1930s they were manufactured for use in movies and sold to the public as "gag" costumes.

And while you may be reluctant to concede this point, it is also possible that your father fabricated the story, and/or exaggerated a real event. Lying is, again, a known and documented phenomenon, whereas bigfoot, to date, is not.

Jodie said:
I've looked for records of any kind of primate ownership or possible escape back in that time for that area. I can't find any documentation if it exists. They may not have kept records for such things back then. This was the only thing I found that was even remotely interesting but probably not related:

http://www.deq.state.ms.us/mdeq.nsf/pdf/Main_OctoberNewsletter08ext/$File/Vol.%205%20Issue%2010ext.pdf?OpenElement

[snip quote from linked article]
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I fail to understand how reports of a tiny, palm-sized primate from 2008 bear any relevance to a bigfoot sighting report from 70 years ago.
 
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GT/CS said:
Lighten up Francis!
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Someone who uses pejorative names for another board member while pretending to be an ad-hoc moderator ought to look at the mirror in order to see what a hypocrite is.

It doesn't bother me because the opportunity to point out your hypocrisy is quite entertaining. :)
 
Jodie said:
That would make two of us, I haven't seen a bigfoot either, and I hope I never do.
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Jodie – a bit off-topic; but do you mind my asking -- ? (Not meaning to be snotty, am just genuinely interested.) You say this – also say in a previous post, which I can’t seem to find, that you have no wish to see a bigfoot unless it’s dead. Why do you wish thus? The world’s fauna are to me, endlessly fascinating, even if scary. I don’t know of any potentially dangerous animal which can’t be secured so as to make it, at the time of viewing, not dangerous; plus, if bigfoot exists, such experience as there is would suggest that in the main, it does not offer physical violence to humans.

If the creature exists, I would love to have a first-hand bigfoot encounter (I almost certainly never will – am on the wrong side of the Atlantic, for one thing). There’s almost no creature, known or “problematic”, shall we say, that I would not wish to encounter first-hand. Perhaps the dog-sized or pony-sized spiders which some on the “crypto” scene speak of in certain tropical-forest locations; but then I’m arachnophobic. (Not saying that I necessarily believe in the existence of these monster arachnids, or indeed that it’s possible for them to exist.)
 
Most likely if a person says he was face to face with a bigfoot, he is either lying or hallucinating. Since we know that all people lie, and that only a small minority hallucinate, then without more detail, I would say that lying is more likely. One of the struggles of growing up is realizing/admitting that your parents do things you'd rather not think about. Lying is one of those things. Again, the issue is probability, which is a mathematical way of looking at Occam's Razor, an expression that footers have somehow appropriated to their use/abuse, while not understanding its meaning or how to apply it. To a footer, Occam's Razor means "if someone tells you they saw a monster, then they saw a monster. Can't get any simpler than that. Occam's razor. QED."

Pseudoscience.
 
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I never read this thread but I'm so excited I had to post this -sorry if someone already announced it but ... Bigfoot has signed up as a JREF member!!
 
parnassus said:
... Since we know that all people lie, and that only a small minority hallucinate, then without more detail, I would say that lying is more likely. ..
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Skeptics have spent way to much time with bigfoot proponents on this board trying to convince them they had an hallucination. WGBH is one example who comes to mind. I agree that lying is far more likely.
 
parnassus said:
The fossil thing has been gone over time and again. It's just like all the rest of the ad hoc* "bigfoot" arguments. There are no large animals in North America that do not have a fossil record. I challenge you or anyone to tell us one. Bears supposedly have the same habitat as 'bigfoot" and we have plenty of bear fossils.

*ad hoc: since A could only be true if B is true, then since we assume A is true, then B must be true. And since B is true, then A can be true. The problem is, we have no proof for either A or B. Some call it bootstrapping.
Now you will say, oh, but what about the chimpanzee? only recently were fossils of chimps found....
That is pseudoscience. Grabbing a factoid which is off point and pretending it applies. It doesn't apply because chimps don't live in North America, they do not have a near universal distribution across a continent in a wide variety of soils and geologic history in a temperate climate where thousands of rockhounds and scientists and hikers and boy scouts and 5th graders live and find interesting things at regular intervals, inclding a fossil record of every extant large animal. Even Jeff Meldrum has done it. (And besides, we DO have chimp fossils).

Saskeptic and others have explained this repeatedly at BFF and are met with the fingers in the ears/can't read response. Here it is again:

Capiche?
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I know Parn, that's why I saw no point in rehashing it over again. I see both sides. One could just post a Pro/Con list and leave it at that and you still wouldn't get a consensus. I think the probability is low that there are fossils, just not absolute zero.
 
tube said:
Jodie;

Bigfootery is a complex issue. With complex issues some people will focus on one particular aspect of it and wonder if "there might be something to it." In 2004 I felt this way about the "dermals" issue withing Bigfootery. While I was highly skeptical about most everything in Bigfootery, I felt that "there might be something" in what Jimmy Chilcutt was saying.

Eventually I worked out to my own satisfaction (and others) that Chilcutt was mistaken. Not long thereafter I encountered Dr. Wroblewski's analysis of the Skookum cast. From there it was clear to me there there was simply nothing about Bigfootery that was "compelling" as Jeff Meldrum likes to say.

If you would like a systematic skeptical treatment of the subject instead of the hit-and-miss of internet forums, I would HIGHLY recommend David Daegleing's book. It came out just before the dermals and Skookum cast claims could be included, but otherwise it's an excellent overview.

Regarding fossils:

Bigfooter: "We know Gigantopithecus was real because we have the fossils. Bigfoot could very well be Gigantopithecus."

Skeptic: "But we don't have any Bigfoot fossils."

Bigfooter: "Fossils are very rare, and we shouldn't expect to find them."
Click to expand...

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll get it. I was never into the dermal ridge debate just because from what little I looked at none ever looked like dermal ridges to me in the first place.

I'm not overly impressed with what they've found for Giganto, 4 jaws and some teeth. It would be hard to extrapolate that into a modern day bigfoot much less try to guess at what the rest of Giganto looked like just based on those few pieces.
 
AlaskaBushPilot said:
Rubbish. A person who is interested in learning something is a voracious reader on their own and doesn't need to be spoon-fed the simplest concepts. Once you have been told of wildlife enumeration science, with the tiniest bit of initiative on your part you would already know quite a bit about it.



You decided to pretend doing research by waiting around for a friend that is an employee of a park, as if that was some kind of significant effort when at your fingertips are peer-reviewed journal articles on wildlife enumeration.

Amazingly you found links that support bigfoot, while supposedly looking for material on wildlife enumeration. Oh really? Talk about hilarious. Show the google search terms that came up with that.

Seriously. Show me. What that is going to do is demonstrate the level of honesty involved here.



One of the things manipulative people do is set themselves atop the throne and demand everyone else submit at their feet the evidence sufficient to convince them their absurd positions should be changed.

Then they blame others for not working hard enough to please her highness. When people give me this crap then what they're good for is a laugh, not for serious discussion.



You showed a glimmer of hope by actually making some calculations with acreages and park visitorship, but I have a one and two year old already to interact with at the level you are demonstrating now.

Don't play games with the "I have some stuff that supports bigfoot but I won't show you unless you play nice with me" garbage. Intelligent and sincere discussants don't act manipulatively like that. It took you more effort to write these paragraphs above than it would have to provide a link to something you claim deserves inspection. When someone is calling me stupid enough to fall for this kind of behavior then they should not be asking for respect in return.
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I think you might find you have more in common with those bigfoot proponents you seem to detest than you realize.
 
Jodie,
Very insightful response!

After reading your posts IMHO I think you want bigfoot to be real and that desire is preventing your from looking at the lack of evidence objectively.
Making that list you mentioned a few posts back may be a good way for you to see that once you let go of the romantic part of the bigfoot belief there is nothing left.

Like most people I gave bigfoot very little thought but a few years ago I saw an trailer for a bigfoot show that claimed startling new evidence (it may have been MonsterQuest) so I watched it and was shocked that since the PGF there has been zero irrefutable evidence of bigfoot, and the PGF is obviously a hoax so it doesn't even count as evidence. That settled it for me. If no-one has found any REAL evidence in over 40 years the big guy doesn't exist.
 
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Jodie said:
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll get it. I was never into the dermal ridge debate just because from what little I looked at none ever looked like dermal ridges to me in the first place.

I'm not overly impressed with what they've found for Giganto, 4 jaws and some teeth. It would be hard to extrapolate that into a modern day bigfoot much less try to guess at what the rest of Giganto looked like just based on those few pieces.
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Fair enough. I could be wrong, but I'm gathering that what you find most compelling about Bigfoot is an account from a relative of yours. Several other individuals have suggested explanations besides an unknown primate.

In recent years there has been a great deal of advancement into understanding memory. In particular, how memory is fallible.

A PERSON DOES NOT HAVE TO BE A LIAR TO HAVE A FALSE MEMORY.

An excellent place to start when learning about this subject is the work of Elizabeth Loftus. She has written a number of popular book on the subject, and there is a lot of freely available literature on the Internet. I've read her book Memory, and can recommend it highly. This webpage offers an excellent overview:

http://ritualabuse.us/research/memo...-false-memory-research-of-elizabeth-loftus-2/

We often believe that OTHERS have false memories, but that WE do not. The reality is that we ALL have false memories. I've created a self-test for this to prove to those who doubt they have false memories:

http://orgoneresearch.com/2011/01/05/a-self-test-for-false-memory/
 
Especially as we get older and the details of what we remember from 40 years ago change and morph, and if someone tells a tall one for a long time it may become a real memory in his or her mind.
 
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