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I think that the urban reports, if credible, are likely transient exploratory activity. Fact is that most urban waterways have sufficient cover for one of them to move about along the waterway in the dark. These waterways likely also have any number of places that they can hole up during the day, from dry culverts to a bank of brush. They are also below road level, offering an encroaching bigfoot plenty of cover from passersby.

Right! The way it's been stated, the assumption is that a valid report requires a population to live right there where the report came from. Faulty logic. Doesn't apply to us, doesn't apply to them. For travel, viable long term habitat is not needed, cover is enough, and sometimes they choose to bypass even that. MIB

This is the elephant in the room that makes analysis of Bigfoot sighting report databases so challenging. You can never be certain which reports were honestly submitted and which are deliberate fabrications. If some of the reports you're working with are fabricated, a pattern you see in the data may be due entirely to those fabrications, and may not actually exist in reality. Simplistic analysis strategies such as plotting all of the reports from a database on a map, or finding out when the most sightings are reported, will produce doubtful results for this reason alone. Similarly, I am inclined to discount observations to the effect of, "There are many reports of characteristic X" or "Lots of reports of behavior Y." What if the "many reports" being cited in such cases are fabrications? Attempts to filter out individual hoaxes, report by report, depend almost inevitably on recognized or unrecognized assumptions made by the researcher. You have just as much chance of introducing systematic errors due to your assumptions as you have of actually filtering out any hoaxes. So we are left with major limitations on what we can actually learn from the data. Essentially, our problem is this: Find real patterns, trends, and correlations in a large dataset that is polluted to an unknown degree by false data, without being able to actually identify and filter out any false data. The bottom line requirement is that the analysis produce valid results regardless of the accuracy of the data used in the analysis. Clearly researchers need to start getting creative with analysis methodologies. I suggest that Glickman's analysis of an earlier publication of the Green database was a good first step and an example of what can really be inferred from the data.

I've seen a hand close up, though I was groggy at the time. I've mentioned that I was wakened by our puppy in 1974. It had pressed up against my head, shivering in fright as a bigfoot was attempting to grab it by reaching into the tent. My first impression was that someone was sticking a large branch with a glove on the end of it inside our tent. The arm was six feet in length. The thumb of the glove cupped inwards, as I recall, rather than forming a plane with the palm. As I woke and spoke to the puppy it began to withdraw it's arm giving me a view of the hand from about twelve inches. The puppy then passed in front of my face, burrowing into my sleeping bag and obstructing my view. When I looked back for the branch and hand it was gone, so I thought I had dreamt it and that the puppy was simply shivering from cold. When I realized that my exposed shoulders weren't cold, adrenalin kicked in and I looked around to find a hulking shadow outside the tent at my feet. After a staring match through the wall of the tent, I decided that the motionless shadow was cast by a boulder from reflected moonlight from the lake and laid back down. As soon as I did, the bigfoot stood up, gave a disgusted "humph" and walked away, passing directly between the full moon and the tent, casting a huge shadow across the top of the tent, which was five feet in height. The hand had black hair fringing it from the back and was lighter tan color on the palm and inner surface of the fingers. It was a full moon with ambient light shining through the roof of the tent.

I can recall reading such reports. Here is one: http://www.bfro.net/gdb/show_report.asp?id=45296