Almost correct. Of the misidentifications, I speculate that that most of those are of people but also include things like animals, shadows, trees and foliage, geologic formations and hallucinations. I regard hallucinations as misidentifications because the observer has failed to properly identify Bigfoot as actually being a hallucination.
Of course it's just opinion. In reality it could be that 100% of the reports are fabrications. I don't know and you don't know. It would seem logical that some would be mistakes instead of lies.
Then you can also look at a real example like the Jacobs Creature. Is that a real misidentification or a lie?
It's always speculation because you cannot know exactly what a person is thinking inside. It is also speculation that True Believers exist. There may be none. It would seem logical that there would be some True Believers but we don't really know that.
It might be best to evaluate encounter reports on an individual basis and to discuss them specifically. Many encounter narratives are written in a way that essentially rules out misidentification if the story is taken literally as it is written.
You are describing a hypothetical skeptic/denialist and not an actual person - one who thinks that misidentifications can only result from seeing other people and cannot include animals or other things (see above).
I don't and I don't know of anyone who does. Do you know of anybody like that?
I don't have any Bigfoot books so I haven't read Daegling. I have read countless excerpts and discussions of his book online. If his opinion is that Bigfootery is not predominantly composed of lies then my opinion differs from his. FWIW, I frequently criticize published "professional skeptics" because they often don't seem to properly understand what is going on with Bigfooters.
Does Daegling reduce the phenomenon to anything at all? Does he suggest that it cannot be reduced? I want you to know that I regard it as having complex explanations with a variety of reasons existing for why people are compelled to both believe and to pretend to believe.
I wouldn't disagree with a lot of what you posted here.
For clarification: it appears to me that many folks here are using the "dishonesty card" as a trump card when discussing the Bigfoot story. I periodically challenge this mistake, as I see it, only to be told I'm overstating my criticism. Hey, I am told, here we allow for a small amount of honest mistakes to creep into Bigfootery, there is no reducing the phenomena to just lies. Then, guess what? Life goes on and page after page of Bigfoot threads go like this: so and so is lying when says he saw Bigfoot; so and so is lying because he says Bigfoot is real; so and so is lying because he thinks the Patterson film is real; on and on and on. No real analysis most of the time, just dismissals based on alleged bad faith dishonesties.
I challenged folks here to address Meldrum's arguments and not just call him a liar. The best reply I saw (before I had to sign off because of my move to Mexico) was by ABP who simply restated Meldrum's position on Bigfoot issues (such as we have tracks, hair samples, sightings...) and then called Meldrum's BELIEFS the knowing LIES of Meldrum's and patted himself on the back as if he had said something meaningful and had refuted my position, even as he had unwittingly confirmed it.
And I was surprised that it appeared that no one had even bothered to read Meldrum's book. (And the response I'll get to this remark will be something like this: we don't need to read his book, he's a liar.)
If we analogize Bigfootery with spiritualism of the late 1800s and early 1900s, we can see that spiritualism was given continuous impetus by fraud and hoaxes, like the Bigfoot story today. But if there had been an internet then, to be analogous to Bigfoot skepticism, believers in spiritualism would be largely dismissed as liars, Alfred Russell Wallace, Conan Doyle, William Crookes would be called liars, and etc.
My main point which is forever overlooked is that believers believe things that unbelievers find unbelievable. Because belief may be unbelievable to you doesn't make it a lie by the believer. I give Bigfoot believers the same right I give to myself: the right to be wrong.
