Seeing Cryptids: The Problems

[EHocking]

<respectful snip>If you want to make a scientific claim, you are obliged to be able to support it with data.

This is actually the crux of this current discussion.

It is NOT up to us to disprove the plausibility that Giganto etc might have migrated from Asia, it is up to the proponents of this "theory" to provide valid scientific evidence that would cause a reasonable person to consider the "theory" in the first place.

Again. The burden of proof is on the BF proponents, not the BF sceptics.
e.g, I believe that you have this statement arse-end about.

Plus, a lot of people are reversing the process. Some people in this thread are starting from the conclusion that bigfoot doesn't exist, and are looking for data to support that conclusion.

I am one of those people, but you have the mechanism wrong.

I am starting from the conclusion that bigfoot doesn't exist.
Because there are no data to support considering bigfoot to be possible.

Once someone comes up with some decent data on the subject of bigfoot - pondering the existence of this imaginary animal has no scientific validity IMO.

 

[jerrywayne]

I'll try even though I'm not optimistic that I'll get my point across.

We do not have a living Bigfoot in a zoo. We do not have a dead Bigfoot in a laboratory. We do not have established DNA for Bigfoot. We do not have any fossil remains of Bigfoot. We have no hard evidence at all for Bigfoot.

We have countless reports of people seeing Bigfoot. We have numerous tracks that are attributed to Bigfoot. We have recordings of vocals attributed to Bigfoot. We have film purported to be of Bigfoot. We have mountains of secondary evidence for Bigfoot.

The "we do not have" outweighs the "we have." If "we have' were conclusive, we would not find "we do not have."

But is "we do not have" conclusive? I would say no, not absolutely. It is reasonable to argue that "we do not have" gives us the right to say Bigfoot probably doesn't exist. Probably.

But we skeptics tend to ignore "we have" as if it doesn't exist; As if it is not a counterbalance at all to "we do not have." We airily dismiss, even scoff, and too easily call out "we have" as nothing but lies. It's an approach that I think satisfies only the hard core and those who have no interest in the issue.

 

[EHocking]

...But we skeptics tend to ignore "we have" as if it doesn't exist; ...

I don't think that this is true at all.

The "we have" is not ignored by sceptics.
The myriad threads just on this forum is evidence of that.

It's just that the "we have" is mostly rubbish, hearsay or hoaxes with little or no provenance and very, very, very, little scientific substance.

Dismissing rubbish evidence as rubbish is not ignoring the "evidence".

 

[William Parcher]

very, very, very, little scientific substance.

Scientific substance in Bigfootery means accurately measuring the length of a fake footprint.

 

[EHocking]

Scientific substance in Bigfootery means accurately measuring the length of a fake footprint.

Indeed.

But apparently, ignoring such rubbish "evidence", is sufficient to label your thinking unscientific.

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

I'll try even though I'm not optimistic that I'll get my point across...


But we skeptics tend to ignore "we have" as if it doesn't exist; .

Glad to have you hear because you make a lot of good points. Not here, though.


We absolutely do use the evidence to demonstrate overwhelmingly that this is the province of con men and LARPers. To say we ignore evidence is absurd. That's all we do is look over the very things you say we ignore - the videos, the casts, the stories - all of it.

This is offensive, frankly. Because it is a willful strawman personal attack, that you should know better from making. Saying we don't look at the evidence we are always discussing here. It's ludicrous. Nobody mulls the evidence over more than we do. So to say we don't even consider the very thing that is most central to our conclusions - it is not good behavior on your part frankly.

There seems to be an angle you like to play - the fallacy of the golden mean - where you pose two sides as extremes and say that you are the one in the middle, which logically makes you superior. That is the act almost always put on by bigfoot proponents here, so to think this is a point you are going to get across has extremely low chances, yes. We have heard this ad nauseum.

I hope this is taken as frank but honest and genuine exchange here. Pleas stop misrepresenting us in this way. It isn't even remotely true.

 

[William Parcher]

We airily dismiss, even scoff, and too easily call out "we have" as nothing but lies.

There you go again with the "nothing but lies" bit. Is this your 17th time now? Can you see that the general skeptical view is that it's mostly lies and some mistakes? Or do you need skepticism to call it all lies in order to suit your stereotyping?

 

[LTC8K6]

We have countless reports of people seeing Bigfoot. We have numerous tracks that are attributed to Bigfoot. We have recordings of vocals attributed to Bigfoot. We have film purported to be of Bigfoot. We have mountains of secondary evidence for Bigfoot.

Seeing bigfoot? If you can see a giant hairy biped, then you can photograph it, film it, or shoot it.

Attributed by who?

Purported by who?

Mountains of what???

I don't attribute or purport tracks or vocalizations to anything but tomfoolery.

What film is purported to be of bigfoot by anyone who is not believer?

Your "we have" is an empty hand, imo. A bluff without the cards.

 

[Resume]

We airily dismiss, even scoff, and too easily call out "we have" as nothing but lies. It's an approach that I think satisfies only the hard core and those who have no interest in the issue.

Who says "nothing but lies" ?

jerrywayne, I know you're a member over at the BFF; think about the habbers and those who claim to have mutiple contact with ole footie. Do you think they're mistaken or is it something else? Sure, some are deluded, and some are just lying for BFF status, some to pimp their blog or podcast or "foundation"; but what sort of argument can you make that mutiple sightings are honest mistakes?

I'm certain that there are many that let their imaginations run wild and "see" footie or dogman just as sailors used to see mermaids and superstitious folk saw werewolves; it's just that mermaids and werewolves didn't have instant multimedia to push their legend forward.

 

[tsig]

I'll try even though I'm not optimistic that I'll get my point across.

We do not have a living Bigfoot in a zoo. We do not have a dead Bigfoot in a laboratory. We do not have established DNA for Bigfoot. We do not have any fossil remains of Bigfoot. We have no hard evidence at all for Bigfoot.

We have countless reports of people seeing Bigfoot. We have numerous tracks that are attributed to Bigfoot. We have recordings of vocals attributed to Bigfoot. We have film purported to be of Bigfoot. We have mountains of secondary evidence for Bigfoot.

The "we do not have" outweighs the "we have." If "we have' were conclusive, we would not find "we do not have."

But is "we do not have" conclusive? I would say no, not absolutely. It is reasonable to argue that "we do not have" gives us the right to say Bigfoot probably doesn't exist. Probably.

But we skeptics tend to ignore "we have" as if it doesn't exist; As if it is not a counterbalance at all to "we do not have." We airily dismiss, even scoff, and too easily call out "we have" as nothing but lies. It's an approach that I think satisfies only the hard core and those who have no interest in the issue.

The same argument is made for the existence of god.

 

[William Parcher]

Who says "nothing but lies" ?

I have found a post that may imply that...

If the sissies in this video were truly scared, and ran like rabbits at some noises in the woods, had reported this as a BF encounter, they would be lying about their "encounter". Anyone who claims that such noises are BF are lying. All they can truthfully say is they heard some noises they could not identify.

For some reason it seems very important to you that there be "something" behind BF besides lies and hoaxes. Why is that?

 

[jerrywayne]

There you go again with the "nothing but lies" bit. Is this your 17th time now? Can you see that the general skeptical view is that it's mostly lies and some mistakes? Or do you need skepticism to call it all lies in order to suit your stereotyping?

Parcher,

Am I correct, is this your thesis on sightings: Well over 90 percent of sighting reports are fabrications; a very small number of the reports are people misidentifying other people as Bigfoot or people having hallucinations?

You and I both know that your thesis is not demonstrable; it is just opinion. I assume it is reflective of how you think about the Bigfoot phenomenon, that it is primarily, overwhelmingly dishonest. So the "mostly" is a "virtually." My complaint.

I think your take on sightings is a negative image of the True Believer's. A TB hears or reads about a sighting and thinks it must be true because no one can be that mistaken about what they said they saw. You hear or read about a sighting and think no one can be that mistaken about what they said they saw, so they must be lying. In both cases, a literalism prevails.

Sightings of anomalies can basically be tricks our minds play, where memory, imagination and expectations color how we perceive what we saw. A brief view of a standing bear or the back end of a moose moving away through brush might be converted in one's memory as a sasquatch. It is my opinion that if you (virtually) allow only the chance that people are misperceiving other people (since sasquatch are supposed to be human looking) as sighting explanations, you are looking at the issue too literally and don't allow for the profound tricks our minds can play on us.

I agree that a lot of Bigfootery is tomfoolery. There are many hoaxes and deceit mixed into the raw ingredients of the phenomena. I grant you the Ostmans, Roes, Pattersons, Marxes, Dyers and so forth. They were deceivers. I just don't think you can virtuallyreduce the entire thing to knowing dishonesty.

I'll close with this appeal to authority. If you read or examine the arguments from published skeptics on the subject, such as the anthropologist David Daegling, you won't find the phenomenon of Bigfoot sightings virtually reduced to knowing lies.

 

[dmaker]

I think where the honest misidentification reveals its true nature is in the subsequent actions. I believe this has been expressed here several times. Let's use the case of NL to illustrate:

He claims that he has seen or interacted with what he is positive is a bigfoot on more than one occasion. One event was a thermal blob, the other the now infamous candy tossing story. He has also mentioned other details of his life such as the financial burden of putting children through post secondary education. He believes, based on his comments here, bigfoot to be a creature roughly 9ft tall and very large.

When you look at these claimed interactions, and the startling ( relatively ) regularity that NL and his group can experience them, you begin to detect the dishonesty. If someone truly believed these interactions they would, I think in fair estimation, do one or more actions, such as:

Alert the authorities to the clear and present danger presented by a 9ft, hulking primate in our midst.

Make a concerted effort to capture proof and enjoy fame and fortune enough to remove all financial burdens.

Crap their drawers and never return to claimed encounter location.

And so on...

Failure to do anything remotely like the above exposes the honest misidentification as nothing more than the conjured justification for entry into the LARP. Claiming to encounter bigfoot is your ticket to the game.

I realize none of this is strictly demonstrable, but actions speak louder than words in some cases.

ETA: I don't believe that all encounters are fabricated entirely from nothing. Many, and most likely NL, are likely examples of a form of self deception. A person eager to believe and enter the game as a "knower" would be more inclined to transform the common or ambiguous into a bigfoot sighting.

 

[The Shrike]

If you read or examine the arguments from published skeptics on the subject, such as the anthropologist David Daegling, you won't find the phenomenon of Bigfoot sightings virtually reduced to knowing lies.

. . . And that's where I was in my early years as a bigfoot skeptic, participating on the BFF. I acknowledged that there's always the possibility that those claiming to see bigfoots were lying, but even I dismissed it as probably a minor component of the phenomenon. I ran with the basic claim that thousands of people think they've seen bigfoots and I devoted my energies to exploring the reasons they were were wrong about that. My perspective made me everybody's favorite skeptic at the BFF, and it was the middle ground that every pointed-headed academic takes to appear fair-minded. In doing so, I gave the 'footers exactly what they wanted: attention.

Ultimately, the claims got wilder and the knowers got louder. The inescapable solution had to be that the majority - not the minority - of the claims were complete fabrications. There are the obvious whoppers that are the hallmarks of bigfootery: Ostman, Patterson, etc. There is the scientific champion of all things bigfoot, Don Jeffrey Meldrum. There is the entire infrastructure of the BFRO - the place that is the repository for all those crazy stories. (Think about the rush for the sophomoric or the attention-starved to submit a story to the BFRO and get it posted to Moneymaker's awesome bigfoot website.) There is every habituator and knower out there. There's Ketchum and Smeja. All of these people are playing fast and loose with the facts (at least) or just bald-faced lying - soup to nuts lying.

So who is left? How many of the claims of bigfoot are actually just somebody saw something bigfooty like you suggest? It seems to me that the great majority of the annals of bigfootery are associated with the truth benders referenced above. These days, I have no problem at all assuming the lie first, but it took me years to get here. Have Daegling interact daily with some of the BFF characters for a few years and then see if he changes his tune.

 

[comncents]

Jerrywayne,
I happen to agree with WP about BF sightings being lies. In fact, "misidentifying _____ as bigfoot" (person, bear, whatever) is technically a lie. In a misidentification scenario, the honest answer would be something like " I saw something that looked like it might have been a bigfoot. It looked tall, hairy and like it was walking on two legs, but I didn't see it well enough to know for sure". As soon as this person who actually saw _____ (person, bear, whatever) says "I saw bigfoot" then it is a type of lie - they actually don't know what they saw. When they start adding "statements like "I know what a bear looks like...and it wasn't a bear" then they are just embellishing their lie.

So my question for you would be what percentage of the "I saw bigfoot for sure" reports do you think are real vs. lies?

As far as hallucinations go, and this is just opinion, I don't think it is a high enough number to be statistically relevant...so you can drop the "virtually" and just say "all" are lies.

 

[jerrywayne]

AREA X

Before I reply to the comments above, I want to get this in my thread.

The North American Wood Ape Conservancy claims it has located a valley in southeastern Oklahoma, they call Area X, that's home to a troop of bipedal apes. http://woodape.org/

They have been involved in this area for over a decade now with nothing to show for their effort other than claimed sightings, audio of rock assaults on their cabin, isolated tracks and audio of alleged wood ape vocalizations.

Here is what I would like to bring attention to. They were sought out and initially led to this area by a retired forest service worker named Charles Branson. Charles has a cabin said to be in a "remote" area near Honobia, Oklahoma and says he has suspected, from the noise he has experienced there, that something strange was occurring in the woods near his cabin. He is on filmed record claiming that he always knew that that part of Oklahoma is home to Bigfoot. So he invited the wood ape conservancy (at the time a branch of another. well known, Bigfoot group) to investigate the area around his cabin.

Here is a parallel story that ought to be publicized. Tom Biscardi's group was contacted by a Rick Brandon, also a retired forest service worker, who claimed the wood's behind his cabin was home to some sort of animal that he would hear nightly, an animal he was not familiar with.
http://searchingforbigfoot.com/Winter_2006_Bigfoot_Expedition_Diary_-_Honobia,_Oklahoma

I looked up property titles in and around Honobia and found both Charles Branson and Rick Branson listed. To me this is a very suggestive coincidence. Either both men have the same cabin and are engaged in encouraging Bigfoot orgs to come take a look, or they have separate cabins, seemingly far apart, and both are claiming Bigfoot habitations. I assume they are brothers. And I also assume they are trying to drum up Bigfoot tourism in the area.

 

[The Shrike]

I looked up property titles in and around Honobia and found both Charles Branson and Rick Branson listed. . . . I assume they are brothers. And I also assume they are trying to drum up Bigfoot tourism in the area.

Nice work on this, Jerrywayne.

 

[Mike!]

Before I reply to the comments above, I want to get this in my thread.

The North American Wood Ape Conservancy claims it has located a valley in southeastern Oklahoma, they call Area X, that's home to a troop of bipedal apes. http://woodape.org/

They have been involved in this area for over a decade now with nothing to show for their effort other than claimed sightings, audio of rock assaults on their cabin, isolated tracks and audio of alleged wood ape vocalizations.

Here is what I would like to bring attention to. They were sought out and initially led to this area by a retired forest service worker named Charles Branson. Charles has a cabin said to be in a "remote" area near Honobia, Oklahoma and says he has suspected, from the noise he has experienced there, that something strange was occurring in the woods near his cabin. He is on filmed record claiming that he always knew that that part of Oklahoma is home to Bigfoot. So he invited the wood ape conservancy (at the time a branch of another. well known, Bigfoot group) to investigate the area around his cabin.

Here is a parallel story that ought to be publicized. Tom Biscardi's group was contacted by a Rick Brandon, also a retired forest service worker, who claimed the wood's behind his cabin was home to some sort of animal that he would hear nightly, an animal he was not familiar with.
http://searchingforbigfoot.com/Winter_2006_Bigfoot_Expedition_Diary_-_Honobia,_Oklahoma

I looked up property titles in and around Honobia and found both Charles Branson and Rick Branson listed. To me this is a very suggestive coincidence. Either both men have the same cabin and are engaged in encouraging Bigfoot orgs to come take a look, or they have separate cabins, seemingly far apart, and both are claiming Bigfoot habitations. I assume they are brothers. And I also assume they are trying to drum up Bigfoot tourism in the area.

Don't jump to conclusions. They could also be a father and son, or possibly, close cousins too.
Or, given it's Oklahoma, any combination of the above.

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

Nice work on this, Jerrywayne.

Agree wholeheartedly, and it proves yet again that the backstory behind bigfoot LARPing is much more fascinating than bigfoot, which is childish.

 

[HarryHenderson]

Alright you guys, I can't keep up, is it BLAARGing or LARPing? BLARPing? SPLOOGing?¹


¹ Sasquatch Prefers Liberal Older OG ing