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The huge majority of 19 year olds that I have worked with still act a lot like goofy kids. They are idealists who have much to learn about life. The people of her generation have a HUGE disconnect with the natural world, having experienced it through Discovery Channel, movies and video games, all fantastic constructs that lend nothing to the beauty and brutality of an outdoor experience. American culture is young and inexperienced as well. It has no rite of passage, so young people have a difficult time understanding who they are. This young woman embarked on her own ritual of self discovery, and had no elders to guide her. It's dysfunction upon dysfunction. Military, first responders, firefighters, police, etc., put their safety on the backburner to help their fellow humans. The heroism of 911 says it all. It's the same with those searching for this woman. You either do it or you don't. As a wilderness first responder (WFR) and an eagle scout, I've stepped into a number of situations to help people and will never regret my choices. Some made very stupid mistakes, like the woman who fell off a waterfall while trying to walk across it. She landed on a ledge and we had to lower her to the bottom on a litter after treating her compound fracture that she sustained. The extraction took 12 hours with many of us standing in cold mountain water, along with a rain shower that popped up. At one point, our evacuation pack fell into the pool at the bottom. I had to wade in to find it, and if it wasn't for my dog who pointed it out, I'd have been in there a lot longer. While carrying the litter, a group stumbled into a yellow jacket nest. One problem after another. The article that I posted a few pages back addresses the need to reimburse the SAR groups so that they can continue to function. I get that. Yet the one who truly understood compassion that night was my dog. When the soaked, stung and exhausted members of the team finally removed the woman from the waterfall and lowered the litter to the ground, my dog walked over to her and began licking her face, as she could tell that the patient was in a great level of pain and discomfort. How much money does one charge for such a service rendered?

Saskeptic, just to expand on your comments a bit. When you say the accounts are fascinating to you, do you mean in the sense they reflect just a probable psychological/sociological phenomenon, or as possible evidence of what they claim to describe? Me, I do consider a hoax/hallucination/folklore component to be present, and a careful reading of most of them can give one a good feel for those probabilities. Example: Recent report of man in N.C. who got up from a computer after a long session of on-line gaming in a dark room, looks outside and sees a BF in his front yard. To me, I've got to rule out a persistence of vision explanation first. (Can't recall if there were also physical manifestations in this report to account for, but you get my point) Other reports just won't be crammed into that box. My whole premise of my latest posts is there is this frank mystery we all see, and some won't acknowledge. If you share my ignorance, I welcome that. I think it is foolish to think a bunch of us here could solve this riddle (and after how many hundreds of thousands of words written?), but I think I would count it as progress if we could come clean on both sides and say, "I don't know", and just leave it at that for now. The discussion long before I showed up got polarized as a " What Science Requires" vs. "The Strength of Human Credibility" argument, and to the extent I contributed to that, I think it was ill-advised. I now have come to conclude it is some of both, or if it is one thing, it doesn't necessarily preclude the validity of the other. I have no hesitation to say, "I don't know." If you, or anyone else here says they do know, I will assiduously avoid them, and this thread can just extend into perpetuity without me!

Sure, we have discussed it often. He knows of my interest but he doesn't know I have become a skeptic. He is quite adamant about what they saw (he was with another), and when he retells the story, of course I have to reconsider my stance...especially because we are close and I doubt very much he would lie to me, or shy away from telling me he was not telling me true after all this time. My cousin's experience aside. One of the problems I have with eye witness accounts stems from experience. Back in my BF interest peak, I had a friend of a friend approach me because he knew of my interest. He had a story he wanted to relay to me so I listened. Without remembering all the details, he was out with friends for a weekend on what he referred to as a 'bushwhacking' weekend. Their thing was to drive out to the bush on some logging road and randomly park their vehicle, put on their packs, and just plow through the bush and find a place to set up camp for the weekend (actually sounds like a decent way to spend a weekend...but I digress). His claim was they saw what they thought was BF. At the time he seemed very detailed in his recounting of the experience. At that time I had been in communication with an actual BF researcher who was living in Calgary at the time (I have seen him post here), so I asked if I could relay the story and pass on their contact info because said investigator may be interested in contacting them. With their approval I did just that. Problem was, when they were contacted they totally denied the story and pretended to not know what the guy was referring too. When I found this out, well of course I looked like a chump (even bigger than I am today). When I asked them why they had done so they again denied the story to me, all the while having been totally passionate and convincing of the story in the first place. Go figure. A) Either the whole story was bogus and they got scared when someone seeming to act in a official manner contacted them. B )The whole story is true and again they got scared when someone attempted to talk to them about it. C) The group was not convinced at what they saw as a whole, one member reached out and the rest pulled him back in. "You told WHO? You idiot!" Separating the wheat from the chaff can be tricky, and one can only guess someone's motives as to why they would want to make up a story like that. Obviously I would want to see some form of collaborating evidence to back up their story. I.e. A trackway, a photo, something......... Or I may choose to just go out there and do a "snoop and poop".......no harm, no foul. I don't think any anecdotal story should change anyone's mind. Either you've had a compelling experience of your own or you haven't. But if you have I suppose these stories do at least interest you in taking a harder look. I had a lady in Colville tell me her sighting story, all the while in the back ground her husband belittled her. She has lived there all her life and I believe she easily can tell the difference between a Bear, a Moose butt and a upright Ape. And she is absolutely adamant about what she saw. And the area she saw it in is well.........."good" country. It's vast, underpopulated and borders the Kootenai region of BC. It's my personal opinion that if she was telling a lie, with all of the verbal beatings she was taking from her husband about the story? She would have dropped it a long time ago. It's just one of those things.........it's either compelling to you or it's not. It always seems black and white in here........either your a true believer or a staunch non believer, well I honestly think there is some gray area in between those two posts. I do not know for a fact they are out there, but I find it compelling enough to go look, and carry something with me that if lightning does strike? I'll be prepared. Also, I think skeptics are more compelled than what they lead onto.........I mean why this subject? There are a million fanciful subjects out there to go onto a forum and proclaim them to be utter fantasy. But they continual come back to this one over and over again. In many ways they are exactly like the true believer, willing to hash on this subject against one other I guess forever......... Batman needs a Joker sort of scenario. I would guess that what compels them is that they feel sort of let down by it all. And that they need to feel like they are getting some sort of revenge on the subject that sucked them in..........yanno what? I get it. I do.......it's the reason why I'm doing what I'm doing. I feel let down as well. But having a experience of my own I cannot explain, I simply want to cut through the baloney, the three ring circus if you will known as Bigfootdom, and get right to the chase. Science has said all along..........what they need. It's time Bigfootdom listens or else continue stumbling around in the dark looking like buffoons. And if my time is non productive? At least I enjoyed the ride........

As of today, not a single "type" has been proven to exist, let alone two or more. In order to prove different "types", I assume there would need to be a sample of each for comparison. There lies the problem. Remember what Frank Zappa said "The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe."