Bigfoot - The Patterson-Gimlin Film

Status
Not open for further replies.
UrsulaV said:
It's a good question, demonologist, and one we've hashed out at great length a coupla types. The short answer is "Unfortunately, they've had an amazing run of luck."

The longer answer is sort of a confusing jumble goes something like: Since bears don't get hit by cars as often as, say, deer, and Bigfoot are more like bears than deer, but rarer than bears, the fact that there aren't many roadkilled bears means that there should be even fewer roadkilled Bigfoot, and so it's okay that there are no roadkilled Bigfoot.

Any attempt to point out areas where big, and even rare mammals are routinely hit by cars--bears, for example, do get whalloped regularly across the country, and cars are one of the major causes of mortality in the hyper-rare Florida panther--is shouted down on the premise that none of those statistics could possibly be from the Pacific Northwest, or at least a Bigfoot heavy area of the PNW.

If you then point out that damnit, we don't need hundreds and hundreds of roadkilled Bigfoot, just one stinkin' one mashed on a grille will be plenty, more than enough, all you could hope for, the Footer will then usually say "Hey, I'd like to see one too, believe me!"

Some of them will then mention reports, usually sans bibliography, of how someone claims they DID hit a Bigfoot with a car, although no body or sample was recovered. Attempts to track these reports back to a source often makes the Footer grumpy and inclined to sulk.

At the end of the day, the skeptic yells "But you haven't answered my question!" and then the Footer yells "Your question can't be answered! You won't be satisfied with anything but a body, you lousy cynic, because every time I say something, you ask more questions!" and the skeptic yells "But we have to ask questions! What the hell is science if we don't ask questions?!" and then they glare at each other across the room for awhile and retire to their respective corners and David Attenborough does the voice over about the cycle of forum life being complete for another day and somebody rolls the credits.
Click to expand...

Well that's a somewhat reasonable excuse (if you assume a lot of luck) for this one possible accident. But there are many others, like I said. Bigfoot breaking a leg and getting attacked by wolves or simply bleeding to death. Bigfoot falling off a cliff to his death. Bigfoot having a heart attack on one of his hiking expeditions. I don't care which accident you pick, when you add them all together there has to be some accidents that take place where a human will someday walk past.

It sounds to me like you are saying that they simply dance around the question answering little as possible before finally ignoring it altogether when you press them.
 
demonologist said:
If you just wanted to dodge the question you should have simply ignored it. A sarcastic goofy reply doesn't help your case.
Click to expand...
Just me, not Ken, right? Yes, I didn't recall having a case but you feel free to assume so. I do think I was making light of the fact that as opposed to a quick peek, one would actually have to actually be familiar with this massive thread to have some quick answers to your questions (at least here, anyway). BTW, this is the 100th page on a bigfoot thread, so don't mind the goofiness too much.;)
 
Correa, I saw that "Cat trees bear" story and sasquatch was the first thing I thought of. :D

Apparently, even New Jersey still has ample woods and food for bears to do well, despite hunting.

Yet sasquatch can't seem to increase it's numbers, despite having vast resources and no competition.
 
LTC8K6 said:
Correa, I saw that "Cat trees bear" story and sasquatch was the first thing I thought of. :D

Apparently, even New Jersey still has ample woods and food for bears to do well, despite hunting.

Yet sasquatch can't seem to increase it's numbers, despite having vast resources and no competition.
Click to expand...

Yet another thing to add to the mountain of stuff that points toward..

...Bigfeet being Bull Crap!!

I think a list of Anti-Bigfeet evidence needs to be compiled all in one place so Bigfoot Fan can take it all in and attempt to refute the entire chimichanga rather than just bits and peices at a time.

Time to go googling!!
 
Last edited:
Hey Madness, this might not be exactly what you're looking for but I remember over at the BFF they had this best evidence for bigfoot top ten list that was extended quite a bit. If it hasn't been posted here before it might be a good idea to link it and see how it looks after going through it. I'd be interested to see that and I've thought of posting it here to see what people think but everytime I looked for it I couldn't find it. Hey Huntster, you know what I'm talking about, right?
 
In which board is it ? Can't find it...

ETA : ha, I understand now, you are also searching for it ! Sorry Kita. I am now looking on BFF searching the 16 pages of post with "list" as keyword. i am already in page 3. WTG.

I looked everywhere but the best I found about evidence is this, which speaks for itself :

toroughly empty board of evidence

And this is really, shall I say, ironic.

PS: Kita I can't even search for top ten because it is less than 3 character long...
 
Last edited:
Yeah, the three character thing is what gave me a hard time, too. I remember that it was meant to be a thing you could print and keep in your wallet that was made in response to the same thing being done with a list supporting paranormal BF's (I hate to even type that 'cuz it makes me think the P word'll set of nutboy's radar). Or am I getting it mixed up? Hopefully Huntster will come to the rescue. Jeez, I guess I have to go look again, too. *sigh* ETA Any BFF posters know what I'm talking about? Diogenes? RayG? Anybody?
 
Last edited:
Last edited:
I need to look at the FAQ...

...For a ROFL Emoticon. because the first 8 reasons are laughable. We have as sighting much for fairy than sasq (photo, 200 and even 1000 years of sighting), appeal to authorithy (policemen and goodall), appeal to incredulity (hoaxing location are too remote (why ??? If those evidence were collected, it was by human. If human evidence collecter were there, why not hoaxer?)), height hoaxing (never mind that before blue screen special effect costume industry had to come up with work around for big aliens), impossible to reproduce such a costume (which explain why certain people are so adamant on that part if those were the best evidence).

The 8 further aren't better. What they don't realize is that most DNA lab will give "inconclusive" as report or "unknown animal" if you do not give them sample to compare. The rest is at best being generous circunstencial evidence. At worst, it isn't even circonstencial...

Now really if only those 16 "evidence" are available, I think I was not far off categorizing Sasq existence as a "belief" and "faith".
 
Last edited:
My advice:

Footers, you've gotta do better than that. The "best evidence" is very weak (PGF, dermal ridges, sightings, inconclusive DNA). And it seems we've already discussed it all at the bigfoot threads. Wanna believe bigfeet are real? OK, its your problem. But don't try to masquerade this as a "conclusion based in analysis of reliable evidence". Footers can repeat their mantras endlessly, but this will do nothing to turn bigfeet in to real creatures neither convince people with higher standards for evidence quality. On the contrary, they will just continue to make fools of themselves. And even if bigfeet were real, this sort of behavior only turns people that could really contribute in a positive way away from their cause.

Get a pack of cats and go hunting for bigfoot.
 
OK, I'll be the whipping boy (mind the face, love) but while most of that list is quite laughable, there's just a couple things that came to mind. First, I don't find it unreasonable to say that if someone claims BF sightings by some thirty police officers a better reaction than calling an appeal to authority would be to ask for detailed, verifiable info on each of these claimed sightings. Certainly no one should imply infallibility on the part of the officers but it's a claim that I don't think should be brushed aside. Nevertheless, I've read plenty of reports involving various rangers, police, military that were more than a little dubious. Though the one involving the psychologist in Oregon always bugged me. *ducks* The other thing I found kinda irritating is with the mention of hair analysis, there too I would like to see some specifics. That and the problem of DNA analysis of hairs being useless with out a type specimen. If two separate samples from widely separate locations were collected under good conditions ruling out hoax, contamination, etc. I think that would be pretty interesting. Of course someone bringing in a frickin' body would be far more interesting.
 
So I'm getting into this late and I should probably go back and read this thread more... but SETI has a podcast on their website with an interview with a researcher who found the guy who claimed he wore the costume, and the guy who made the costume. What is the cover for these two witnesses? Lying?
 
Well, Jane Goodall is, by all accounts, a terribly nice person...but that doesn't change the fact that this is an appeal to authority. Very smart people can be wrong. I respect her work enormously, but that wouldn't stop me from calling her a loony if she acted like one. I respect the late Dian Fossey's work, too, but by all accounts she was a complete whackjob.

As for thirty policeman--pffff! Cops are regular human beings, and just as prone to delusion and misidentification as the rest of us. There are cops who believe in the Loch Ness Monster, too, but nowhere on the little badge does it say "To Protect and Serve and Accurately Report the Existence of Relic Plesiosaurs."

A thousand sightings sounds like a lot, although has been pointed out by others, compared to crop circles and UFOs, not extraordinary. I'd need to know more about specific individual sightings to speak to their ability to support the case for Bigfoot.

As for historical sightings--well, there's the Devil Mowing crop circle print from the Middle Ages and people who claim that aliens hit Nuremburg in 1561. Guess the aliens got here before Bigfoot.

Oh, yes, the "there are Native American myths about Bigfoot" card. There are Native American myths about green coyotes that live in the sun, and a lodge where the walls are covered in wild vaginas,* too, but I'm not holding my breath. The South American Yanomamo believe that if you take enough hallucinogenic snuff, the little blue men that live in the woods come out of the forest and live in your chest and give you magic, but somehow, I have missed the reports of any expeditions to the Amazon in search of snuff-smurfs.

Gaw, this one--the cryptozoology tendency towards every-myth-is-really-a-real-creature thing really sticks in my craw. It strikes me as so--so--condescending, I suppose. As if native peoples aren't allowed to just make crap up like everybody else. Ask these same people if they're looking into the existence of the Tooth Fairy, and they get all pissy, but it's the same damn thing. People tell stories. Native peoples are as big a pack of creative geniuses and artists and liars and bull****ers as the rest of us, and they made crap up left, right, and sideways. Trying to shoehorn your pet crypto or aliens or whatever into native legends is as bad as trying to shoehorn your politics or religion or anything else in. Let the myths be myths.

*cough*

Sorry, my senior thesis was on the romanticization of hunter-gatherer societies, and I'm obviously still seething about it, nearly a decade later. *grin* Weird hot-button issue, I know...


*Really. I think it was a Blackfoot myth, if memory serves, and one of the standard set about why men ruled women, rather than the other way around, as the hero...um...tamed the wild vaginas...by the end of the story...(I'm not making this up, I swear. My imagination is freakish, but this is a whole 'nother level of weird.) Had to give 'em mad props for creativity, anyway.
 
UrsulaV said:
Well, Jane Goodall is, by all accounts, a terribly nice person...but that doesn't change the fact that this is an appeal to authority.
Click to expand...
Ursula, you ever heard the NPR interview where she says all that stuff? I have and holy cow, that ain't helping anyones case.
As for thirty policeman--pffff! Cops are regular human beings, and just as prone to delusion and misidentification as the rest of us.
Click to expand...
Yeah, just as prone, no argument there but they are supposedto be better equiped to record accurately details of a given situation but yeah, there as fallible as the rest of us. Anyway, some says thirty cops saw BF, I say show me.
Oh, yes, the "there are Native American myths about Bigfoot" card.
Click to expand...
As a kid growing up in Victoria, BC I used to love going to the Royal British Colombian Museum and seeing their wicked Haida displays and looking at carvings of thunderbirds and hearing about how they ate your brains out if they caught you.
There are Native American myths about green coyotes that live in the sun, and a lodge where the walls are covered in wild vaginas,*
Click to expand...
Takin' a walk now.:D
 
Yep. Ursula summarized it all pretty well.

Cops see UFOs, bigfeet and ghosts... Cops can be fooled, so can shrinks, so can we all. Eyewitness testimony is prone to flaws. Specially ages after the "sighting" when the mind starts filling the voids with "details" that weren't there. What was once a vague indistinct shape now has arms, weird tracks become perfect footprints of a giant ape and so on.

Jane Goodall thinks bigfeet may be real. But we are looking for evidence, not for beliefs. And the Pope belives in the Holy Trinity. I could point you several PhDs with weird beliefs. So what? Beside being an appeal to authority, one could quite well point that most zoologists and biologists think bigfoot are not real. Please spare our time and do not use the "who they are", "this is not going to be settled by numbers", "Gallileo was considered nuts", "science once believed heavier-than-the-air flying machines were impossible" and similar bogus arguments. We´ve deal with them before.

The DNA stuff... Heck, "Frontiers of Science"? Can unconclusive DNA sample from site #1 be compared to unconclusive DNA sample from site #2? Unconclusive = unidentified? AFAIK we know how similar human DNA is to chimps, gorillas and neanderthals... So, a DNA sample from a bigfoot, assuming its a high primate, would be identified as being from an unknown large primate (X% similar to chimps, humans, whatever), not as unconclusive. It would be pretty neat evidence, Nature-quality material. That was Nature-quality, and not "Frontiers of Science" quality. Where's the paper? Conclusion? No reliable evidence. Not even a hint.

Ah, its so good to see someone else who also thinks the bon sauvage stuff is pure crap!!!!! 1000 kisses and hugs for you Ursula!

Now if you excuse me, I have to keep struggling to avoid making jokes about wild vaginas...
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.

Share this page

ISF - Join now!

Every member here is approved by hand. No bots, no spam, just people who care about evidence and honest debate.

Membership is free!

Create your free account

Back
Top Bottom