DozingConsciously
Student
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2011
- Messages
- 31
I think this is a fundamental point. Perhaps the only difference between the skeptics and the believers (as opposed to the priesthood) is the relative ease with which they are able to accept these possibilities. I think, in general, the more skeptically-minded tend to be those who've come to consider not-being-right a good thing, an opportunity to improve by learning from a mistake. I can certainly remember a time when I didn't necessarily think that way; that being inferentially wrong was an emotional slight which should be guarded against and rejected rather than inspected and enjoyed as an opportunity for education.
I (and I suspect many others) had something of a turning point with regard to the ease with which the brain can be mistaken. Most of my life, I'd heard all the stories (without particularly searching in any depth for evidence) about how easy it was for the brain to be fooled, but I never really bought into or believed them; to whatever extent they were true, it was something that happened to other people, less canny than I.
Then, one day, about 15 years ago, I had what I'd call a 'perspective mirage'. We've probably all had trivial examples of them; they often occur when looking at grid patterns or dots -- for example looking through fencing -- where your depth perception gets fooled for a little while. It's amusing but not necessarily an earth-shattering revelation.
On this occasion, I was driving in the mountains, the sun was very low but bright in the west and I was heading eastwards on a tight mountain road. I drove around a bend and slowly came up behind something that I had a devil of a time identifying. I'd had plenty of sleep, was wide awake (apart from the mollifying effect of having spent three solid hours driving), was decently fed, was not ill, had not had any alcohol or other perception-alterants and was not on medication, but for all the world it looked as if, a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet in front of me, there was a children's steel climbing frame floating / flying slowly down the middle of the road. It wasn't travelling very fast -- perhaps 20 mph -- so I braked to match its speed because the road was so narrow that there was no over-taking opportunity, and followed it for at least 10 to 15 seconds increasingly mind-blown and uncomprehending as what I was seeing. That's quite a substantial amount of time when you're constantly looking at something that seems impossible.
At the end of this straight-ish section of road, we started to turn around a bend and the illusion shattered because the light and consequently the shadows moved and my brain was able to pattern-recognize the actual pattern. Instead of a steel climbing frame, it was an old man wearing a tweed jacket, tweed cap and tweed trousers pedalling an old-fashioned bicycle-and-sidecar. The sidecar had steel trimming at its 'seams' and contained some kind of grid -- perhaps a piece of fencing or a large barbecue grill; and perched on the back of the bicycle was a short (5-6ft) aluminium ladder. The effect of the bright, low, sunlight behind me had been such that the grill, the sidecar seams, the mudguards, the suspension, the rims, the ladder, the seatpost, the reflectors of his lights (which were off) and the strip of grey hair visible beneath the back of the cap had all 'glared', severely messing with my depth perception and resolving into a sort of 2D tableau of 'brightness' that my brain had failed to resolve and thereby come up with the next-best interpretation. On top of this, the tweed clothing was an almost perfect tonal match for the faded-brown mountainside which was the backdrop, and along with the tyres partly being concealed by hedge-shadow was practically invisible against the contrast of the glare.
I had one of those, "Oh, that's what they mean" moments. It was phenomenally educational in the ways that the brain tries to make sense of its inputs, even if that 'sense' isn't really that sensible. What's particularly interesting is that, if we'd been interrupted before we reached the end of the relative straightaway -- e.g. if some wildlife had run into the road and I'd had to brake, or my phone had rung, or a car had turned out in front of me -- and my view had been blocked before we went around the bend and the old fella had turned into a sideroad, I wouldn't have been in the position I was to see the illusion shatter, and I'd have spent the rest of my life cogitating about just what the hell it was I saw up on that remote road.
Consider also the skeptical explainability of it. Who on earth would ponder a be-tweed-en old man and the perfect configuration of shining steel on a sidecar-ed bicycle as the right explanation? If I'd been prone to the mysterious (e.g. "I saw a UFO"), owing to its inherently convoluted nature you'd get laughed out of 'plausibility court' for having the temerity to suggest the correct cause.
I think this is particularly relevant to bigfoot as forests are one of the worst environments for generating the types of conditions that give rise to these kinds of experience: you have vertical barriers (the trees) at normally-distributed (seemingly random) depths and sizes; these have myriad other semi-random barriers (the branches) in all manner of configurations, and the tonal backdrop is a noisy myriad of browns, greens, reds, blacks, and golds, with scattered lightless patches, leading to multiple 3D 'windows' and the illusion of windows in the gaps between them. It's easy to confuse the natural parallax of a distant brown tone (a tree trunk) viewed through a 'window' with motion of something large and brown closer-up.
TLDR: It's VERY easy to misidentify things.
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The consistent manipulators know that to say it enough will spread it and become accepted if it is spoken as fact. It's an interesting phenomena to watch, the wood knocking, rock throwing and stick structures are good examples of rumor becoming fact and part of the lore which must be included in most all reports.
I felt the same way and was having fun with the notion that something like a BF could be real, hell what does a city kid know about the country. It wasn't until i joined the BFF and started to dig around that I became aware some were very dishonest and using the myth to make money anyway they could.