Cool, UrsulaV,
That's no doubt basically the same as what I would actually say. OK, let's say there's further questions by the child. Just for you, what would you feel is a good sumation of the reason why the PGF is likely a hoax? Basically same as LT? Just curious. BTW, ah man I hate to nitpick but it seems more accurate to say 'we have no proof right now that anyone's ever caught a sasquatch.' Sorry.
*laugh* Nitpick away--we're back to proving negatives. I can't prove that nobody's ever caught a sasquatch, but since you said "for a ten year old" I figured we might as well keep it short and sweet.
Why I think the PGF is likely a hoax? Well, it might be more accurate to say that I don't actually think it matters if the PGF is a hoax or not. There's so much accusation of hoaxing around it, and so much shadiness going on with where the original film is, or what exactly happened that day, and who may have had money to buy a monkey suit, and who came forward and admitted a hoax, etc, etc ad nauseum, that I feel the PGF is irrevocably tainted as a source of evidence.
To explain this, I'm a birder. Many birders keep lifelists, which are a list of all the birds seen in the wild in your whole life. Fine and good. It's done completely on the honor system. And generally, people are pretty accepting of the honor system, because birds are weird, and sometimes they show up in weirdass places, and if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time the day that a Siberian tit gets blow a hundred miles off course and winds up kicking around your yard, then life is good.
But.
If at any point, it is proved, or strongly called into question, whether you've been honest about your lifelist, that's it. It's over. There is no appeal, there are no apologies, you're done. It's fine to be wrong, it's fine to be mistaken--provided you admit your error immediately and don't do it too often--but if you lie or if there is serious question over whether you lied, that's the end of the matter, and nobody will ever believe you again. If you are too conveniently mistaken too often...well, not quite as bad, but it's not good, either. And all your birder friends will get embarassed smiles and gaze vaguely into the middle distance when you try to talk to them about the tyrant flycatcher you saw in the parking lot last week.
We can now argue about whether anybody gives a rat's ass what the admittedly peculiar subculture of birders think, and it's a valid enough question, but the end result remains that I would never put a bird on my lifelist unless I was dead certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that my sighting was good enough to stake my honor on. I've spotted birds and made a good guess, but I have to be SURE. Not because anybody will likely check, not because whether it's a song sparrow or a savannah sparrow is really all that important--but it matters to me.
Forgive this rather lengthy diversion, but getting back to the PGF. There's a lot of questions about the PGF. I look at the PGF, and I see a crappy video, and I see a lot of people pulling waaaaaay too much out of crappy video artifacts, and I see a lot of questions about the origin of the PGF that cannot be answered. If it was a bird, I'd never put it on my lifelist, and yes, I'd look down my nose at anyone who did. It's too little, too poor, and too much in question.
Now, thing is, the PGF shouldn't matter. If there's really a giant primate out there, unless Twit-boy is right, it should be a physical being that people could go out and find. People go out and find all kinds of bizarre crap in the jungle on obscure islands--I grew up in the PNW and it ain't Borneo. So my gut feeling is that if there were something there, we wouldn't have our primary source of evidence be a shaky video surrounded by shadows of hoaxing. When jaguars cross over from Mexico into AZ, we know immediately, and we have better footage than the PGF at once. I mean, the same DAY. We don't even need professionals, either--my fellow birders can find a tiny little drab bird lurking in the woods where it had been blown off course from Siberia two weeks ago, and take photos of the thing, and get the word out, using recorded hotlines in the days before the internet, so that people leap on planes and go see it. And this is a wee little thing that can hide in a teacup and FLY. (Which leads to another, if entirely subjective point--I know how at least one group goes after a mystery animal, and wow, they do it a lot different than a lot of the Footers. There's none of this "Well, we saw it, but we're not going to follow," crap. They go slinking and charging (depending on style) into the bush with cameras and scopes at the ready if anybody see so much as a potentially rare wren-butt vanishing into the bushes. My understanding of human nature is only my own, but the way that some of these Footer expeditions go after their quarry makes my weirdy-sense tingle.)
I could be wrong. If I am, I'm easily disproved--somebody just has to smack one with a car, like they do every other large mammal in North America. But until then, I just don't think the PGF is a good enough source to hang a whole hypothetical species on.
I think that was an eloquent sumation of why the PGF cannot be accepted as quality evidence for bigfoot. Regardless of my own feelings on the PGF, this was exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for and puts things in perspective quite nicely. I thought the birder analogy was particularily apt and as some 'round here know quite well, you need only mention ivory-billed woodpeckers to get some opinions.
