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Just a little wee quibble here, but belief does matter in science, in fact in everything. You don't build a particle accelerator worth millions to detect previously undetected particles, for example, unless you believe they are out there. http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/science/higgs-en.html Scientists believe in their theories or hypotheses. Good scientists don't hold on too tightly to those beliefs though, because they could be mistaken. And many have made the mistake of doing so.

Of course that is a scientist's definition of the word. There are probably hundreds of thousand more laymen in the woods than scientists, and thousands of them have "observed" bigfoot. Only in very, very recent times has there been any real scientific effort made to collect and scientifically describe these creatures, and science has generally ignored evidence gathered by laymen. Had science ignored the reports of natives of other countries about their sightings and knowledge of unusual (unclassified) animals as they have bigfoot on this continent, those animals might still be "unobserved".