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Each and everyone on the fence that wants to know for themselves do not have to wait for science. Get out in the field in an active area and look for yourself. No guarantees but most that spend the time and sweat equity eventually will have enough experience to make up their own mind. You could spend decades and never have an experience but might just be one of those lucky ones that have it right out of the gate. If anything, you will be out in nature, getting good healthy exercise, and see things you have never seen before. The answer to your personal question about existence is not in any movie, data base or thousands of reports; it is out in the field waiting to be found. Go out and try to find out for yourself.

The key to learning where they can be studied, such as it is, is to stop ridiculing habituators. It's not just the scoftics and denialists, honest skeptics and outright believers who insist on "ape camp" thinking are just as much part of the problem when their rude jabs drive away the very witnesses that have the information that could solve the puzzle. Quite a few years ago now a researcher suggested we'd be ahead to look at cultural anthropology instead of wildlife biology. That is insightful even today but it was radically insightful at the time and drew no end of ire. I agreed then, I agree now. The behaviors I've experienced are not the behaviors of mere dumb animals. There's a gray area inhabited by big, hairy, seemingly technologically primitive, but otherwise quite sophisticated bipeds. We can't see them because on the whole we refuse to look where they are, we only look where we dare to find them ... in the confines of the paradigms we're comfortable with. MIB

I figured you had to be close to wild habitat, and closer than I am for sure. I can see how hogs and bears can be confused. I've seen plenty of hogs in my southern expeditions, but not one bear so far, not even tracks and not even in southern La. where there is suppose to be a population of them. One thing is constant in my experience, you'll hear what wildlife is there 10 times more often than you'll see the actual animals.

This is also good information, but the story is much sadder than Lightheart's. I think that's true, but there's an added wrinkle to it all. He's not only trying to prove that the hairy people exist; he's trying to vindicate himself. This is my greatest complaint about the BF "community". The finger-pointing and screaming of "hoax" -- the shaming behavior -- more often than not results in the accused redoubling his efforts to kill another BF, bringing still more screaming and shaming and increasing the person's desperation, and sometimes causing more tragedy and bloodshed. (That did not, of course, happen with Yuchi1. Yuchi1 is a most wonderful exception to that rule.)

I don't know, looking at a bigger picture of the area sure makes me think an elk made the impression and not a bigfoot.

I believe that the skeptics will become overnight experts, painting themselves as the only individuals to take a restrained, measured approach to the topic.

I only read a few pages of this thread, but it was enough. I should just say that I don't believe bigfoot is real - I know they are real. I saw them in Area X. If someone doesn't like it, tough luck. I simply don't care. That's more of what of a few of you should be doing. Ignore them - don't respond. Why anyone spends their time talking about something they don't believe in, I don't get. I certainly don't spend my very valuable time on a unicorn forum - but then again I like to feel productive at the end of the day.

In closing I will say this, we proponents have failed to provide proof to science that this creature exists. Its not all our fault as DWA points out from a Bindernagel point of view. We are laymen with jobs, children, spouses, house payments and a giant laundry list of reasons why our time in the forests of NA is limited. Science for the most part agrees with those that say there is nothing left to be discovered here. But as I said before, discoveries are being made, very important ones that advance our knowledge about the bushy tree of primatology today. And I do not see this slackening, perhaps if a fossil discovery was found in Siberia or Alaska that would support that perhaps other homonids made the same trek we did? Science might sit up and take notice, or at least that is my hope. I will continue to pack a rifle in my scabbard in the off chance I run into something interesting, after all its the journey that counts. Later.