I'd take Joe Sixpack over the city boy any day, and if Joe Sixpack hunts regularly, I'd give him the same credibility as the biologist.
No one is prepared for a first encounter, and people who live on the land generally have better knowledge of it than someone who does not, no matter what their education level.
It is a bias to consider rural people to be less intelligent or reliable than any other group of people.
Which person is relying more on a belief system? A previously skeptical witness that has had a close visual sighting of BF and knows they exist or a skeptic scientist who declares them not there because science does not accept them for lack of proof. One is relying on personal observation and the other is spouting scientific dogma of "mistakes and fabrication" to justify their beliefs. Which is science and which is dogma?
Arrived in North America 100,000 years earlier than previously believed, but only got to Central and South America in the last 20,000 years due to traffic in LA, probably...