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Thyould I or thyouldn't I? OK, I dood it. I understand the OP's perspective, but have a different take. If you're going to shoot one, you need to have a plan for what you're going to do afterward. You should also have a reason for shooting one in the first place. Pre-planning involves actively hunting one. What's your reason and what are you going to do when you succeed? The plan should include how you will control the situation between pulling the trigger and pulling away from the scene. Contingency planning involves intentional shooting given the opportunity. Again, what's your reason? You're in a riskier situation between the shot and packing out. Then there's the Smeja approach. Don't plan and consistently make as many bad decisions in sequence as possible. It may not require a body to prove they exist, but a body is most likely to achieve this objective. A body is required if you just want a trophy, or choose still photography as your method of proof. A body, by definition, may also include a sedated subject, but then you have to be an even better planner. Personally I think that bigfoot as a species kill more people than people kill bigfoot. And I believe that discovery, and a body, serve the larger public good. This position stems from my belief that the government knows of them, and even with a prominent environmental agenda, chooses not to disclose them. This implies a heavy downside to disclosure from the government's perspective, which leads me back to the beginning of this paragraph. The probable government downside to disclosure is the public recognition of a threat the government can't control. A threat from a bonafide Boogey man. The ultimate lurker. So if you can't control the Boogey Man, control any chance of viable proof leading to "discovery", which includes any body the government comes across. Which takes us to the furball control division of the "Men in Black". Assuming that the government will attempt to confiscate a body, this has to be part of your plan if you shoot one. Rapid media exposure and public disclosure seem to me the best countermeasures to this, and necessary to planning. Most importantly, you should have an attorney on hand from the moment you pull the trigger.

Ahh but many more reports told the real story.

(Fish. Meet bicycle) The evidence I have from personal experience dmaker, I don't believe you would be able to comprehend, and that is where this fetches up time and again. If you think just being/sleeping somewhere remote is my whole point, you miss it completely. What I'm suggesting is go and deliberately immerse yourself in a world you only think you know, as I thought once as well. Leave the safety net of your preconceived ideas at home. You and I have never had that conversation (like so many conversations you won't get to have here) because there is absolutely no point in it. We speak languages not alike, and that won't change. Well, it could, but you see no value in undertaking that, as you have every right to avoid that if you choose. If you have some hope though of convincing me of anything, you should understand in what regard I hold your experience. I think you are a nice guy, as far as I can tell, but I've yet to hear anything from you that I couldn't read from a book. That kind of knowledge is not hard to come by, and is valuable, but I don't come here for that kind of knowledge. You may not care about how I feel, and that is fine too. Others may find value in what you post, and of course I'm only just one guy, so I'm not saying what value it would have for others.

I have pretty good low light vision. Smokers generally do not. While stationed at Ft. Lewis, and being one of the few non-smokers on battalion staff, I would sometimes amuse myself by messing with the smokers on dark nights. Our special ops folks are generally well trained in stealth, but bigfoot are better at it and live by stealth. That said, there's nothing bigfoot do, that our special ops do not also do from a stealth perspective except that bigfoot can physically access more different types of terrain and are better at taking advantage of vertical displacement, so they tend to sometimes position themselves where we would not think to look. I believe that the best way to bring in a bigfoot is by using special ops trained personnel and technology. It is becoming feasible to instrument an area in a manner that may bear fruit.

As to myth building, I'd just say if one were to discount something as myth, one might want to acquaint oneself with what happens in those locations, and what doesn't, and that requires a degree of personal risk. Absent that investment, the credibility of that person, despite numerous affirmations to the contrary, is essentially of small interest on this topic. I take my evidence, or not, from those like DWA who have logged thousands of hours on the ground in N.A. woods, and others like him who have done the same. You might as well try to explain a bicycle to a fish than try to be coherent with somebody who lacks that essential experience. There is a barrier to understanding that you will hit each and every time. What I have experience personally in my time outdoors in my life is not explainable to somebody who hasn't shared that experience. The more people we breed on this planet who lack that experience, the harder it becomes for any similar experiences to be shared on any meaningful level about a wood dwelling, ultra secretive primate. Here, just the most recent example is all.

People have found many crude structures that have been attributed to bigfoot. Some are small, some are large. Sometimes you'll find a flat shelf on a slope where the earth is trampled and packed and a hole stuffed full of vegetation and small animal remains (a midden) is at the back of the area where the shelf ends and the slope starts going up again. Downslope you can usually find loose logs and branches strewn about as if someone had built a structure on the shelf, then dismantled it and thrown the pieces down. I offered a theory a while back that they have middens in their mid to large size dens where they use a combination of wet, rotting vegetation, animal remains, and their own waste to create a heat generating compost pile. In the Sierras, they regularly find disintegrating tree stumps. I think that these may also be the remains of middens, where a stump at the right stage of decay is used as the basis of a midden and a shelter is constructed around it. Afterward, most of the stump would be eaten away by bacteria during a winter of use, and disintegrate into coarse dust once the shelter is deconstructed. Someone a while back posted a video of a crude shelter with steam rising out of it during a snow thaw. I think this may have been such a shelter. When the packed snow covering the outside of a shelter melts and the water leaks into the shelter onto the compost midden, it could produce a significant amount of steam. The use of a rotting midden for compost heating would also account for the dead and decaying odor they sometimes carry with them (not the same thing as the stench we've talked about).