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Revolutionize, no, not at all. Internal audience vs external audience. The uninvolved public's attention might be piqued. Ooh look big wow shiny ... for 20 seconds 'til something draws their ADHD attention. That's all hype for the superficial. To an internal audience, people who are educated and fully engaged in the topic, it is merely one more data point among many to consider. "Revolution" is shock and awe. You don't shock and awe a professional. MIB

I find plenty of scat but without a DNA test is it bear or bigfoot? It's not much use even trying for a DNA test if it's more than a few days old. Which is usually the case with most scat I find. So I agree, how do you know for sure? As for the snow issue it really isn't a problem on the west side of the Cascades. The elk follow the snow line. Not usually much snow below 2000'. Not sure what the deer do, just tough it out? That leaves a lot of real estate in western Washington and Oregon. That's just a matter of a few miles in most cases. Not really a migration. However, I do understand the issue in other parts of the west with year round snow pack. Still there are occasionally tracks found in the snow. To me that begs the question: do they just hang out in areas that are less accessible to us in the winter? If they do use meat as a large percentage of their diet in the winter. Then we could look wherever the largest number of other animals are wintering. Again, another problem we don't have the answers to.

Agreed and plussed. There should be more snow track reports than there are if the BF population is as large as some claim, at least in the interior west where there is seasonal snow pack even to the lowest elevations. My experiences from about 2005 on initially seemed to be pointing towards a fall migration towards lower elevations canyons of coastal rivers where there would be no snow but I'm backing away from that conclusion now, simply stuck with "I don't really know." MIB

PG, that duplicity of man is not something I discount, ever. Still, there is a myth afoot here, I grant you. It is the myth of the omnipotent hoaxer. At least BF has its own iconography, history and lore to legitimize it (and centuries of natural history and scientific theory to quite plausibly explain it). As for the O.H., whoever he/they may be? His/their apologists offer nothing except the usual a la carte menu of clichéd implausibility, and the solid absence of physical evidence like that offered to the contrary. I'm not taking a jab at you personally, but there is a whole contingent of people out there that find satisfaction in this view. (I think their own comfort they find in this pat explanation is not to be discounted either)

PG, you skirt the point still. It is only this: When your putative mythical animal leaves footprints, stacks up trees, and makes noises, and the only explanation you have (still) is, "Nothing here to see, because it is just mythical?" You are planted squarely across the threshold of the same scientific confirmation, the lack of which you cite as your reason for skepticism. As for falling back on the hackneyed "Evidence is not proof" non-explanation? As a statement of the obvious, it has no equal. Of maybe I just don't understand your use of the term "mythical." Do you use it the sense of something historically documented, but not proven? (In which case I agree with you), or is it used in the sense of something imaginary, made-up and not real? (In which case I don't) I presumed you meant the second usage, but correct me if I'm wrong.

But PG, do you think dismissing something that leaves footprints, stacks up dead trees and makes sounds as "mythical" might just be getting in the way of confirmation? (I've deliberately tossed out the sighting reports, because I will agree: Mythical animals get "seen", all the time. I will spare you my position as to why BF sighting reports have the congruency of actual wildlife sightings) So, there is this physical evidence. It is no less physical, or real, because we lack the confirmation of what is causing it. The only point that matters is we have no other satisfactory explanation. No, really, there isn't one. I came to this Forum years ago thinking somebody surely had the theory that would explain all this to me and I could move on to other things. A Unified Theory of Sasquatch Debunking, if you will. Instead, what I saw on display was the opponents' a la carte menu of hackneyed and tread worn half-baked responses that had no one-size-fits-all applicability that you'd think could be applied if this were such an easy problem to solve. I've wracked my brain trying to devise explanations of my own that fit my understanding of the accepted model for the natural world and predicted human nature, and I just have come up empty handed. I'm certainly not the first to arrive at this point either, by a wide margin. Well, so in the end many people here did have a plausible explanation for it, and they were all proponents. The rejoinder to their theory continues to be, only: MYTHICAL!!! That is exactly what I mean by the perniciousness of the false equivalency. It is not serving us well, at all.

Here is another account, skip to paragraph 6. http://www.bfro.net/gdb/show_report.asp?id=38155 I can vouch for this report.

MIB, there's more truth in what you say than most would realize. I've lived a few decades and some of that time was in some high risk scenarios. I'd hear some say they were "ready," or even looking forward to an engagement, and go so far as to elaborate on what they'd do. Then when face to face with a shocking realization, you couldn't find hide nor hair of them. The truth is, no one knows how they'll react in a high stress moment - until such a moment occurs. A few. A very few are suddenly busy working the problem. Most others are stopped up. Just human nature. A kid falls onto a track, right in front of a train, or steps in the road and a car is almost on him. Maybe one in a hundred will have the presence of mind to act without hesitation - and make perfect decisions, and manage to save the kid. Just the way it is.

Any first sighting is going to be life-changing in some way. Either it will affirm one's belief, confirm existence for the open-minded, or fundamentally contradict with a skeptic's world view (or at least cause a skeptic to question himself - I, myself, refused to accept that the individual I had encountered was not a man until my second encounter). After that (the "OMG there one is" moment), there is the intensity level of the encounter. Was it a sighting at a distance? Was the sighting close enough to allow interaction? did the bigfoot behave in a evasive, passive, benign, defensive, intimidating, threatening, or aggressive manner? Did the witness feel that they or someone with them was in jeopardy? Did the witness, for example, feel the need to protect a family member if the bigfoot made a move, possibly with the realization that it might be at the cost of their own life? Or worse, did the witness feel helpless to protect a child or spouse? Given the long history of legends and lore regarding bigfoot-like creatures around the world, one must also consider that over the millennia the competition between us and that class of hominids may be ingrained in us at the visceral level as well, as it is with most categories of animals that have preyed on or threatened our species throughout time. We may be hard-wired to respond at the gut instinct level to an encounter with them. I even think that this manifests as the motivation behind the behavior of the most adamant of skeptics. All of these things are potential factors influencing the psychological impact of a sighting or an encounter. One thing is for sure, a sighting or encounter is not likely to be a "so what" moment.

In hard times, huge grizzly bears eat and eat well on moths. Seems moths by the billions take refuge under rocks on bare talus slopes in Jellystone - and the bears are bagging thousands of calories just off moths. Nature has its way, while we do arithmetic that may or may not have anything to do with what something eats - and when.

Lets stick with the puzzle analogy for a sec. The pieces don't fit for you, fine. They do fit very well for me. What does that say about which one of has it wrong? You're looking at the wrong puzzle box. I don't have it completely filled out but the pieces ARE fitting into a framework. You are stuck and will STAY stuck 'til you abandon the ape-camp paradigm because of one simple little thing: it is wrong. Stop thinking in absolutes. There is a (vast) gray area between dumb monkey and going to the moon. We spent some millions of years going through it. It's entirely irrational and illogical to expect them to be any different. MIB