LOL, wut?
You mean the game of lights and shadows between trees and bushes in daytime, especially when people are looking for bigfoot, wondering if there's a 3m-tall bipedal ape lurking around is not a similar -actually a better- condition for a "sighting" than the one I described?
Smell? Quite common in the bushes they are, the good and bad ones.
Signs and evidence of a physical subject? Oh, please, if you folks had them, we would not be wasting bits and bytes on this. Nope, blurred pics, faked images, those casts, mounds of grains, broken twigs ans trees, these things are not evidence of a sighting. They are evidence of mistakes, pranks and frauds.
Where are the HD images of bigfoot faces taken from 5m away you said you shot in 2010? We need a NDA to see them?
There are enormous difference between the night time unknown lights sighting you pointed to and a sighting of Bigfoot.
The first would be sound, any sound heard when viewing lights in the night sky would still be only speculation by the witnesses, they could simply be talking themselves into another wrong conclusion.
If you hear a stick break in the woods or brush breaking, associated with the sighting of an unknown living something, you know it's a stick, or brush breaking. These "sounds" can be used to determine if what being seen is a physical biological being or not. Something is making those sticks break and brush break.
Are sounds evidence of an unknown species? Yes, unknown sounds recorded during a Bigfoot encounter that do not match any known animal sound are evidence of an unknown. I'm sure you already know that every living thing that emits sound does so at a measurable frequency. This frequency is used to determine what made the sound.
For further info on sound you can contact WKU Biology Department's wildlife sound recording project or specifically for Bigfoot sound analysis Texas A&M.
The second is smell. Lights in the night sky would likely not give off any smell. However, many Bigfoot sightings report experiencing odors. Some report a strong wet dog smell in association with their sighting, some report a very musky skunk like odor, some report other smells and some sightings report no smell at all. I think this would qualify as secondary evidence of sighting a biological being.
Those two factors would tend to set apart Bigfoot sightings from a group observation of unknown lights. That's the problem with the group observation theories being put forth here. This one and also Dinwar's. They seem to want to compare a Bigfoot sighting in like to that of the rumor game played by children. To where a line is formed, the first child is given a specific phrase and that phrase is whispered from one child to the next down the line until the end. When the last child repeats the phrase it is completely different than the original message.
I will also point out other reactions to have been reported in association with many Bigfoot sightings. Nausea, extreme fear, weakness etc. Although these may well be due to the fear factor of the sighting.
So we don't get to see the HD video taken from 15 feet away?
Some day.
Oh my goodness, of course movement would make them easier to spot. Whether it's seasonal or annual migrations, or daily feeding movements, it's these predictable patterns that allow humans to successfully harvest all manner of game from deer to bear to caribou. Since all animals (including man) exhibit such patterns, so would footie, if it existed.
They do seem to have some similar behavior patterns with other great apes. Steve Kulls has eluded to some of the similarities in his book "What would Sasquatch Do?"
I will agree with you that some animals exhibit similar behavior patterns. But I don't think anyone has
all their behaviors pinned down yet. The best we can do is use what we know to try and find them for further observation.
I see no reason to believe that a group of people constantly re-enforcing their own a priori beliefs regarding some sighting would be any more reliable than an individual. Remember, we're not talking about people who have never encountered one another; these stories are shared. And sharing means evolving. Any hunter, martial artist, or bard can provide proof of that.
You've failed to factor in a few things.
First, there's a vested interest in making bigfoot stories evolve in specific ways. The more amazing the story, the more the community praises you. This has POWERFUL influence on how people remember events. Even honest people can be swayed when there's that powerful an driving force to do so--often without their knowledge.
Second, the events I alluded to are widely-known events where crowds of people claim to have seen the same thing--only, there's no proof any of them did. Many alleged miracles fall into this.
Third, again, I've seen stories evolve in exactly that way. I've seen groups sitting around talking about things that happened in SCA battles that clearly didn't happen. I even saw a bard object to someone correcting it-"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story", was the objection. For a bard, that's perfectly valid; the message is important, not the details. However, in biology (and you ARE doing biology, at least allegedly) the opposite is true. And humans just aren't wired that way.
The highlighted part renders the rest irrelevant. If you don't know much about human sensory errors, including hallucinations, you CANNOT say "an elephant is an elephant". But elephants aren't actually a valid comparison, either. We can test statements about elephants. We can actually observe them in the wild, or in a zoo, or inspect a corpse. That's what biologists do--and that's how they overcome the errors that human brains inevitably bring to the table. We have NO record of bigfoot. NONE. AT BEST we have the types of photographs that any half-way competent photographer would delete for being too poor-quality to bother with (hearsay DOES NOT count as evidence). That's kind of an enormous difference--the difference between a fairy tale and real science (no insult intended there; I have a strong suspicion that many fairy tales are rooted in real events that got completely mangled through the centuries).
First off, no you're not. You're pointing out reasons YOU PERSONALLY dismiss them. You've not pointed to a single flaw--all you've done is the equivalent of saying "I don't believe you", while demonstrating your unfamiliarity with the concepts in question.
Second off, you've misinterpreted (I'm leaning towards willfully) my statement. For the purposes of that statement, and those on the nature of the evidence made in this post, I'm merely pointing out the utter worthlessness of the evidence bigfoot researchers as a whole have brought to the table. Not "inadequacy"; worthlessness. And that may in fact be too generous a term. "Evidence" of the type thus far provided actually HARMS serious inquiry into questions by necessitating the sorting out of dross and chafe from the actual data, and can cause researchers to reject conclusions for flat-out wrong reasons.
What I'm saying is simple: we have NO data, we have NO evidence, we have NOTHING upon which to build a scientific opinion. The widely-known and well-documented flaws in human cognition and perception are improperly downplayed or ignored by bigfoot "researchers". We CANNOT accept your statements. Not without abandoning reason itself.
Add total ignorance of bushcraft to that list above.
Not anywhere I've seen hunters. I've seen deer stands that allowed a hunter to stay put for a full day (bathroom breaks were an issue, they admitted, but I grew up in Ohio; some people took that stuff VERY seriously).
Besides, roads are a fantastic place to find wildlife. Well, former wildlife; the "life" part is typically inapplicable. Given the way highways and roads impact ecosystems, those are your best bet for finding pretty much any organism. There's a term for it in taphonomy....Thenatocaen? Thenatocene? Something like that; I haven't found my copy of "Life History of a Fossil" recently, so it's hard to look up. Anyway, areas where lots of stuff gets killed tend to build up bits of dead things. I know of two outcrops that exhibit this behavior--one in the current issue of Paleontologia Electronica, and the Horned Toad Formation (the famous Tar Pits in La Brea don't count, really, as they're also a conervat lagerstatten so weird things were obviously going on there). At any rate, roads kill large numbers of organisms. Ignoring that, edge effects due to the cutting of larger ecosystems by roadways would have profound effects on any real organism's behavior, from foraging patterns to migrations--happens to literally everything else, so bigfoot cannot be an exception. There's absolutely no reason to believe you'll have better luck finding bigfoot away from roads than at roads; we find every other megafauna species I know of as road kill.
Most of this was addressed in my comments above.
I would like to comment on your statement of "Total ignorance of bushcraft"
I wasn't aware you had hunted in KY and know the hunter's usual MO here. I suppose your time in OH qualifies you as a KY hunter expert. Well, I don't believe you are, further I don't think you're qualified. You're grabbing at straws here so I'll enlighten you about average KY hunters. Deer hunters here rarely go further than a couple hundred yards away from their truck. Stands are placed with this in mind as the average hunter here does not want to drag their prize more than a couple hundred yards back to the truck. It's that simple. We're lazy. With the deer population here it's no problem. We hunt early mornings, go home not long after sunrise, and then return in the evenings, go home not long after sun set. Any argument otherwise is simply foolish especially by those not qualified to argue the point either way.
Using the argument to dismiss Bigfoot by establishing there haven't been any killed by cars is flawed. Have there been sightings reported from roadways? Certainly. I wish it were the case that one could simply bee bop down the road and view Bigfoot from the safety of their vehicle anytime they please but unfortunately, that's not the case. It takes a hell of alot of walking. I'll stick with at least 2 miles from the roadways to look for Bigfoot.
Now, if I was looking for deer I could see all I want by driving. In fact I usually have to dodge a few while driving my vehicle about once every two weeks or so. When deer season opens they're everywhere. A deer hunter here has about as much chance of hitting a deer with his truck on the way home as he has taking one from his stand.
Chris B.
