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Just a casual observation, but aren't you using the term 'skeptical' where 'cynical' should be? Or can someone who gives credence to the possiblility never be a skeptic?

Hi Crow - can you please link me to some report (newpaper, website, or what have you) that describes a law enforcement officer or forest service type personnel that claim to have seen a unicorn? Can you please show me where PhD's are actively out searching for unicorns or testing purported unicorn DNA? Can you please show me a culture where they have lore of unicorns living amongst they woods they inhabit? Now, I've no idea if any of those things exist, but if we are to make the association, shouldn't the commonalities be more widespread? If they do not exist, why do you choose to ignore those unique situations when considering the unicorn and BF phenom to be the same? I mean, I can look at a watermelon and agree it's 97%, I can look at a cloud and agree it's 99.99% water. I can't look at both of them and agree they can be interchanged. :-)

Ahhhh what a surprise, the comment was " a bit of hyperbole ". Hyperbole (/haɪˈpÉœrbÉ™liË/ hy-PUR-bÉ™-lee; Greek: ὑπεÏβολή hyperbolÄ“, "exaggeration") is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. It may be used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, but is not meant to be taken literally. A complete waste of bandwidth, as per usual.

I got started awhile back using this handy explanation, and it works well. http://sasquatchbioacoustic.blogspot.com/2011/10/using-audacity-spectrograms-to-review.html However, it doesn't address how to quickly find the interesting stuff in the near distance, as you say. When I dropped that link off in BigTex's thread, I noted "don't overlook the subtler sounds", but how is the question. No easy answer, but practice, I guess. I'm finding that if I highlight a short segment (maybe 5-15 minutes) as instructed in the link, I can see some of the low level sounds and listen more directly. With repetition, I can "see" bird noise or dogs barking, for instance, although each recording is different. HTH

Five pages based on a mis-quote. Oh well. It gave people a chance to cover the same territory...one more time.

What is most instructive here is that the above "quote" is actually an excerpt from the article, and not a direct quote from Dr Meldrum. Whether this was understood by dmaker when he started this thread is something I can only speculate about. Context is key in cases like this, and as Meldrum's email to Wingman1 shows, there was no context because he never made the "quoted" statement to begin with.Soooo... Five pages debating a statement that was never made. Bigfootery is nothing if not consistent.

Here is something that may help clear all of this up for you folks. I emailed Dr. Meldrum earlier today regarding his comment that sparked the 1 in 10,000 debate. I asked him if he could elaborate a bit more about his comments about the 1 in 10,000 sightings reports are likely to be true. The following is what he wrote back to me ---- I said something to the effect that the animal most likely to be misidentified as a Sasquatch is probably a bear. In an unrelated comment on estimates of population size, concerning the rarity of Sasquatch, I indicated that there could well be 1000, perhaps even 10,000 bear for every one Sasquatch in a given state, e.g. Idaho. That was a bit of hyperbole -- Turns out Idaho has about 20,000 black bear (http://www.blackbearsociety.org/ bearPopulationbyState.html).I have suggested Idaho may have 50-75 sasquatch by my rough estimate. So that's what, 250-400 bear for each Sasquatch? The point is, Sasquatch are in all likelihood very rare and an encounter with more common wildlife is more likely and must be discounted objectively, before concluding an encounter with a Sasquatch. Hope that clears things up. Jeff Meldrum, PhD Professor of Anatomy & Anthropology Dept. of Biological Sciences Idaho State University 921 S. 8th Ave., Stop 8007 Pocatello, ID 83209-8007 It clears it up nicely for me.

You know , once you are up close and see these creatures for what they are numbers do not mean a thing. Numbers are just a way to settle one's own doubt if they are real or not. For those of us who have seen them this means nothing nor will it change what we all have seen or even believe (if you want to use that as terminology) for some thing that has been seen as flesh and blood.