What Is The Statistical Probability That All Sightings Are False?

[Guest COGrizzly]

I seem to remember a topic much like this, but cannot find it. Perhaps it was on the old BFF. Sightings date back 100's of years, if not more.

Can EVERY single sighting be incorrect?

I am gonna go ahead and go "out on a limb" big time and tell you this. As a few of you know, I have seen 2 "UFO's" in my life, One when I was in 8th grade (late 1980's) and one in 2005. The one in 8th grade could not have been anything other than something from outside of this world. I was with a buddy riding 3 wheelers watching the stars and we both saw it at the same time. It hovered over some trees, no noise/sound at all, and as soon as we started to wonder what it was, boom, it was gone...zigged to the left, to the right, then off into space.

We witnessed it. No question in either of our minds. Scared spitless, we raced back to the farmhouse and hid.

This is one of the reasons why I still hold out on Sasquatch being real. Witnesses. Sasquatch is the same. Tons of credible witnesses. Plenty of people on the BFF that have seen one.

Funny thing for me is, I am not a member of ANY "UFO" forum. Don't need to be. I know they exist. Are they Aliens? That I cannot say...I just know that aircraft did something impossible to our knowledge of physics.

So. Of all the witnesses of a Sasquatch, can ALL of them be mistaken? I don't think so. The fact that ALL of the witnesses cannot be "misidentifying" a bear or whatever.

[Guest MikeG]

............and it is that argument, as well as the footprint evidence (and Henner Fahrenbach's distribution curve of said footprints), which has me on the "expecter" side of the scale, rather than being a nay-sayer. I'm not with you on the UFO thing, BTW, but that's another discussion.

Mike

[Doc Holliday]

Excellent point COg, & possibly one that gets overlooked in most "discussions".

Even though I'm not 100% totally convinced in BF,I figure there is something to this BF business,but not sure just what.

Despite the BF world being full of BS in the form of the hoaxers,attention & $$ seekers, the odds that every single sighting from day one being completely false are,imo, are about as equally unlikely as them being anywhere,everywhere & yet undiscovered.

Perhaps,as with a lot of things,imo, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

[indiefoot]

The best witness reports are the ones you get first hand. The ones you get to hear from the person who had the experience. You can see the fear, the confusion, and decide for yourself if they are telling you the truth as they remember it.

[Guest]

Look, I'm about as skeptical as you can get, some days are worse than others. But there HAS to be some phenomena at work here.

Let us say, for a minute, that everyone who thought they saw a bigfoot instead actually hallucinated it. That right there would be a completely fascinating phenomenon worthy of deep and broad study. That would be Phd fodder.

Let us say they LIED about it! That also would be amazing, and worthy of study.

I don't see it. I don't see people lieing about it, and hallucinating it. People swear they saw what they saw, the story doesn't change, the investigators find them believable, there's sometimes corroborating evidence in the form of footprints or other witnesses, unrelated to the first. It all adds up.

I just don't see that many people hallucinating the same thing time and time again over the course of thousands of years. Especially when we KNOW through the fossil record, there's been other intelligent hominids on the planet, multiple species in parallel, in recent history.

Certainly some hallucinated. Some are lied about it, and continue to do so, but not everyone, not by a long shot. So there must be something there, something worthy of investigation, hopefully capture and display in a zoo!!

[slabdog]

As someone who describes himself as a "skeptical hopeful", I always love this question!

In my opinion:

Do a lot of people lie about seeing Bigfoot? - Yes

Do mentally ill people hallucinate about seeing Bigfoot? - Yes

Do people misidentify another animal as Bigfoot? - Yes

Do high school kids dress up in Bigfoot costumes and make honest people think they have seen Bigfoot? - Yes

Do some in the hopeful crowd will themselves to "see" Bigfoot? - Yes

Do people put on fake feet to make other people think they saw the tracks of Bigfoot? - Yes

Do lonely people say they saw Bigfoot for something to talk about with a researcher or on line? - Yes

BUT...

Do I believe that many average, rational people - some of whom I consider good friends - have actually observed something that can only be described as a large hairy bipedal primate?

(skeptical side of my brain currently in a raging internal battle the hopeful side of my brain..POW! BLAM! KA-CHOW! )

YES!

And it drives me bonkers!

Bart C put it best methinks, when he said something along the lines that "80% of this field is BS".

It's that pesky left over 20% that really gets to me.

[Guest MikeG]

.................. hopefully capture and display in a zoo!!

I was 100% with you............

..........right up to this point.

Mike

[Guest exnihilo]

There is a chance that all of the sightings are false, but I wouldn't want to put a probability on it. I think the BF witness / hoaxing phenomenon -- supposing no physical creature exists -- is far stranger than a perpetually elusive wildman and requires an elaborate explanation itself. But, some skeptics seem to find this possibility as little more than a self-evident confirmation of their normal expectations of humanity. We've all got our axes to grind it seems.

[BobbyO]

0% chance, to answer the thread title..

But, some skeptics seem to find this possibility as little more than a self-evident confirmation of their normal expectations of humanity. We've all got our axes to grind it seems.

Now THAT is a very interesting point.

Kind of like how i perceive some of the Forums most " notorious " skeptics as having rather large ego's, kind of coincides with each other i believe.

[Guest]

No I don't think it's improbable everyone is lying or deluded. Only three times has there been real incentive for ordinary people to come forward for their percieved 15 min of fame.

1-after the PGF was released

2-the 80's when BF became popular with the advent of the TV show Sightings, and Unexplained Mysteries

3- Recently since MonsterQuest and Finding Bigfoot

When you look at it, trading a quick 15min of fame for being forever branded that ''Crayzee Person'', even accounting for attention-hogs the reality of the trade off of your reputation, and having your sanity forever in question just doesn't add up. Too many people kept making reports regardless of the acceptability of BF.

[Guest]

CO Grizz,

The probability that all BF (and various other worldwide similar creatures) sightings are false .. is zero ( 0 % ). Consider all the witness sightings, before the internet, the PGF, and any of the TV series about the topic. I think the same goes for UFO sightings. I am a UFO witness also (1978 over airbase in the Philippines), but don't connect the two phenomenons together. I know something is out there that could be BF related. I know UFOs exist. What i don't know.. is if what i saw is of this world, or something alien. Judging by how myself and six other witnesses were treated, after the word got out (yes, one airmen blabbed) .. I tend to believe what we saw.. was of this world.

I don't actively partake in any UFO forums, but do read sometimes. There is nothing I can do to answer that question, besides talk about it with the other witnesses. There is something i can do here in field, regarding the BF question (other than post on the internet about it). Get out in the woods, and try and find some answers for myself. How am I doing so far ?.. just more questions..lol

I do consider what others say here, and the questions Slabdog asks, regarding that many sightings are made up and mistaken. I have no idea on how to break that down into percentages, and who really does ?.

[JDL]

It takes something special to conclude and then try to convince the world that every person who has reported a sighting is either prone to hallucination; is unable to distinguish the difference between a bigfoot and a man, bear, etc.; or is a liar.

Obviously, by whatever metric you choose, as long as the possibility that bigfoot exists is assigned a value greater than zero, the probability that all reports are false diminishes with each added report.

Each die in a set of Yahtzee dice has six sides and six numbers. If I roll one of these die, the chance that I do not roll a six is five out of six, or 0.8333. If I roll all five dice, the chance that no six comes up on any one of them is 0.8333 x 0.8333 x 0.8333 x 0.8333 x 0.8333 = 0.4019.

Where bigfoot is concerned, however, skeptics' dice don't have sixes. On that face of the die is a zero. So when I roll a die, the chance that a six does not come up is 100%, and it remains 100% no matter how many die I roll or for how long.

So the real problem is that many skeptics emphatically refuse to assign a value greater than zero to the possibility that bigfoot exists. To them it is impossible until you produce a body. Once they are forced to acknowledge that bigfoot exist, then they'll be happy to assign a value greater than zero and discuss the statistical probability of how many reports are accurate.

For the more open-minded, though, even if you say that 99 out of 100 reports are false, and you have 1000 reports, the chance that every single one of them is false is 0.000043, or 0.0043%

[Guest Bipedal Ape]

If 1 report can be false then potentially all of them can.

[JDL]

That's part of what I just said. Even if 99 out of 100 reports can be false and I have 1000 reports, then the potential that all 1000 reports are false is 0.0043%. They can all be false. The probability that they are all false, though, becomes diminishingly small with a large enough sample size.

[Guest]

What I find interesting, and hasnt been mentioned once in this thread- is the number of people who've seen something and have said nothing.

If you have thousands of people claiming to have seen this large hairy biped, how many more thousands are out there who've likely seen something and just dont want to talk about it ?

It just happens to be my opinion that in some instances, the people shouting the loudest about what they've done, and what they've seen are unfortunately some of the least credible.

You find the quiet folks that arent blowing their own trumpet, and dont want to talk about what they've seen- those are the ones I find more believable.

As to answering the OP's title- I too go with 0% chance that all of the accounts and experiences are being made up.

Art