This might be a strawman criticism of my position and opinions.
I don't think Bigfootery is always reducible to lying. But liars cannot be put aside as not being fundamental to the birth and perpetuation of Bigfoot belief.
With genuine eyewitness misidentifications I personally doubt that bears are responsible for a significant percentage of errors. The Jacobs Creature represents a bear misidentified as a Bigfoot but that is a single still image and not an eyewitness encounter. We can imagine that a person standing where that camera was would easily see that it is a bear cub walking in front of them.
My opinion is that some people see other people in the wilds (or not so wild areas) and come to believe that they are seeing (or saw) a Bigfoot. This kind of misidentification constitutes more than 90% of all genuine mis-IDs, in my opinion. It also makes more sense because they are seeing an actual bipedal primate but the error is that it's the wrong species.
This may not be a good comparison. You can look at the same fencepost and see what looks like "the Virgin" (figure or face or whatever) represented on it and therefore have evidence that they are not lying. I've seen pictures of Jesus et al represented on various objects and foods. Often it really does look like what they say. But Bigfooters don't offer anything like a fencepost when they give you the remembered story of their Bigfoot encounter.
Did you ever see one?
Rene Dahinden may have done that with the PGF. He may have had good reasons (or knew) that the film was a fake but he promoted it because he had financial stakes and saw that people would pay to see it regardless of its authenticity. But there still is a certain kind of honesty that he had because he never ever claimed to see a Bigfoot and he certainly had the opportunity to lie about that if he had wanted.
No, I just think it is overrepresented and especially when compared to mistakes involving fellow humans for Bigfoot.
I don't think she saw a bear. She may have seen some guy. But anyway she may have outright lied. Her reasoning may have been to get attention and/or because she desperately wanted to leave and needed a working excuse other than "I just don't like it here". She may have seen a bear, knew it was a bear, but then lied and said it was a Bigfoot thing. It's even possible that what she really had to say is nothing like what we have been told.
Parcher,
Thanks for clarifying issues for me. I’ll try to reciprocate by making my points clearer.
Bear
I do not think Bigfoot sightings are to any great percent due to the misidentifications of bears. It does happen, I think, but not to the degree that it could be considered THE explanation for Bigfoot sightings.
Some folks confuse these two different statements. 1. Bears are the most likely candidate for the mistaking of a known animal for Bigfoot. 2. Bears are the primary cause of Bigfoot sightings (misidentifications.) The first statement would be true, the second not, imho.
For a bear to be mistaken for a Bigfoot, I think two conditions would be necessary. First, the sighting is brief, even fleeting. Second, the person who has the sighting is either a Bigfoot believer or aware of Bigfoot lore. Mathew Johnson claims to have seen a Bigfoot at the Oregon Caves National Monument, and the sighting famously changed his life. While hiking with his family, Johnson broke off to relieve himself when he heard a whooping sound and fleetingly saw a large figure moving between two trees. Writer Michael McLeod investigated and found that the Park Service people didn’t think he saw Bigfoot and one Service person volunteered that Johnson may have heard a grouse or fox.
McLeod found that a Bigfoot website was contacted by Johnson. He also found this update on the site: “5 July 2000 --- Oregon Caves, Oregon. Update: Oregon Caves hiker actually encountered a black bear, investigators now say.” McLeod considered if Johnson saw a bear imperfectly, he may have became stressed and then filled in memory blanks with the idea of Bigfoot; even simple perceptions “are a complex interweaving of sensory data, emotions, and cognitive information” McLeod says. Or maybe Johnson knew he saw a bear but “gave himself psychological permission” to tell a story (lie) to the public for purposes of inculcating the idea in public that “the mysteries of nature are alive and well in the forests of the twenty-first century.”
You make the common sense argument that most Bigfoot sightings, if they are at all sincere, are misidentifications of humans, the real bipedal primate. Obviously, accounts such as the famous William Roe story, given that he could not have been mistaken about what he saw, are of a “believe it or not” variety, with the wise opting for “not.” Other sightings, though, such as at least one NAWAC sighting where the eyewitness thought he was seeing another team member down the trail, only to then believe he saw a “wood ape” when the other team member was located elsewhere, are certainly explainable by the idea Bigfoot reporters are really seeing other humans.
I disagree with you about the Ruby Creek sighting, an important story in the Bigfoot canon. You seem to go to lengths to question a bear interpretation. Your possible suggestions: Mrs. Chapman didn’t see a bear; she did see a bear but lied about it; she saw some guy; she just lied about everything; she didn’t lie but her story was misreported later. Anything, apparently, is acceptable, except an account of a bear being mistaken for a sasquatch.
Why is this so? I’ll tender an answer. You are looking at this story too literally. Of coarse, if we accept Green’s account, or Sanderson’s, or even Ms. Chapman’s later revised recounting, there is no way she saw a bear. But we shouldn’t take their jacked up accounts, over ten years after the fact, as literally true. The earliest reporting of this event, in a local newspaper, suggests Ms. Chapman got just a glimpse of some hairy creature standing on two legs and then fled with her children. To deny the possibility she saw a bear, you are ignoring the fact the local authorities believed she had seen a bear, one of her children alerted her to the fact that a large animal was coming down the mountainside (the child said it was a big cow which implies it was four legged), tracks were found all about, a fish barrel was broken into, and a tracing of one track was taken to a university scientist by Green and identified as a bear track.
Mrs. Chapman believed she saw a sasquatch; she said she remembered (essentially bogeyman) stories about sasquatch told to her when she was a girl. With this belief as part of her worldview, it is no stretch at all to assume she saw, briefly, a standing bear, a position a bear might attain if looking for the source of commotion from agitated children, and fled with her children away from the scene. Why is there absolute resistance to this explanation?
Belief
I know my views about the nature of Bigfoot phenomena are not generally accepted here. Here, the idea is that most of the phenomena consists of lies, hoaxes, and lies (Harry, is that you?) This has always puzzled me. While it is true that lying and hoaxing are important parts of the creation and continued perpetration of the Bigfoot myth, like most myths, to reduce it all, or most of it, to knowing dishonesty is a convenient, but insufficient, explanation.
My example of the “religiously devout” seeing the Virgin in a fence post was meant to show how BELIEF is an integral part in what would otherwise be seen as an odd belief. Your reply, again, is looking too literally at the issue. It’s not that you can see the likeness of the Virgin too that’s important. What’s important is that the devout would see something more in the image than you would. You might see the likeness and think it unimportant as just a coincidence or pareidolia. The devout sees the same image but finds it miraculous and inexplicable except for a supernatural explanation.
Hoaxing and lying might juice up the Bigfoot myth, but it is the will to believe that is its underlying cause.
And, to answer your question, no -- I never saw a Bigfoot. They don’t exist. Remember.
A gorilla! Yeah. You are going to phone in a gorilla is on the loose. I can see it now. Dispatcher asking you where, what time, describe it, are you SURE its a gorilla. Then at that point you could say you REALLY think its a Bigfoot, but figured that it COULD be a gorilla, and that you`d at least send someone out to try to capture a gorilla. 
