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As I have said before, my intent is to write a book someday. I am sitting on some things because once I publish it here, anyone can claim it was theirs and I stole it from them. There is no honor in thieves. I don't know about you but I try to avoid paying lawyers as much as possible. I am not the only one doing this on the forum for similar reasons. My purpose here is not to convince skeptics but to exchange information with those have some to exchange. Put up or shut up does not apply. If it did, none of you skeptics could be members because you cannot prove non-existence. Sadly what Norseman says is correct. It will take a body or at least a skeleton to prove anything. Pictures will never do that at this point.

It seems we got a little off track with the government involvement issues. But some interesting questions were asked at the beginning of this thread that I thought needed some further attention. Norseman asked about how much usable habitat there was between the Puget Sound and the Cascades in the winter. I am not very familiar with that area so I looked at the river drainages in the southern Cascades of Washington that I am familiar with. We have the Lewis, Kalama, Toutle, Cispus, Wind and the Cowlitz to name a few. I did a quick survey of the upper reaches of the rivers which included the smaller tributaries. I calculated the approximate square miles below the average elevation of 2500'. This being about the average lower level of continuous snow coverage most winters in this area. Most of the upper reaches of these rivers are in the GPNF or surrounded by closed Weyerhaeuser land. So there is little to no human population in these drainages in the winter. Most of the smaller creeks in these drainages are roadless, gated, or just plain inaccessible in the winter because you have to pass through higher elevations to access them. Some access is also limited because they are elk wintering areas. The habitat in these drainages ranges from 40 sq. mi. For the Kalama or Wind to 80 sq. mi. or more for the larger ones. As I said the elk winter in these areas, as well as the resident deer. In the area we do research in one of these drainages we've found 2 dozen elk that have died for whatever reason. From the evidence at each site the meat was utilized by various animals. The elk are still there. Their population is still healthy and this is only in a couple square miles. How many dead haven't we found? How many more are up and down the drainage that we don't know about? These drainages also contain herbaceous foods as well that aren't covered by snow. So the food stuffs are there and available, but we aren't in most of these drainages in the winter. So who's to say what is utilizing and moving up and down these drainages, with the occasional excursions into the higher elevations where you would find tracks? Maybe the trackways we do find are just single individuals moving from one of these drainages to the next. I'm certain that many of the winter sightings that are reported by residents happen when BF move down these same drainages into more human populated areas. Of course, I know this may account for sasquatch in western Washington, but I know it doesn't account for them where snow lingers even in the valleys year round. We should see more of their tracks in snow if they are there. Who knows, maybe we would in more isolated drainages away from human population. Somebody mentioned above that elk herds are very good at covering tracks. I am in full agreement with this thought. Only elk tracks last for any length of time in elk country.

Those who actually know have access to understanding those of us who don't know don't have. We have to consider the possibility they ARE doing the right thing, we're just naive .. and letting our feelings of entitlement interfere with careful judgment. Until the WHOLE public can deal with the truth, a level of secrecy is necessary because there is no way to separate the public who can from the public who can't. You can do great harm to those who trust you by making mistakes about who you, in turn, trust. Life isn't always conveniently black and white, especially when you have to deal with real people with real human flaws. MIB

With all due respect, I would bet the farm there are those out there that are content to have their picture or video. They say, "I know what I saw and I know what my picture shows, but I don't want to be subjected to the cruel underbelly of public scrutiny. The freaks come out and debate me not the picture." Why should they? I am exactly like them. There is no person on this forum, nor any human alive, that I need approval from. I know what I've seen and I don't need anyone else to accept it. Honestly, I don't what is difficult to understand about that. People don't want to be a sasquatch pinata. I ain't buying what you ain't buying.

Interesting. I just searched and got 28 entities using "Bigfoot" in their corporate title. It looks like only 9 are in some type of research/entertainment effort - the rest are pizza parlors, hotels, car dealerships, etc. Of the 9 that may be research/entertainment groups, 6 have been cancelled (which appears to be voluntary) or suspended or forfeited f/failure to comply with necessary filings. That just highlights some of the difficulties of organizing a research organization. Solely as an observation (I am NOT trying to bash the BFRO), MM does own things and the fact is that the BFRO is not a not-for-profit organization designed to cure cancer or find bigfoot. It is a for profit organization designed to profit the owners (or owner, MM), in exactly the same way as if it were a coal mine. From a for-profit business's point of view, all the BFRO has to do is continue to enable the owners to make a profit. Assuming that MM, the sole proprietor, is not a trust-fund baby and hasn't won mega-millions, he needs to have money coming in to pay his bills somehow. Honestly, until Finding Bigfoot began airing, I don't know how you could monetize this - maybe start a website and keep the best stuff behind a pay wall? (So that's how the staff vacays in Barbados every other month!!) And the smoking man stays just off-stage, behind the curtains ....

Most folks don't even KNOW they are drinking the Kool-Aid or that they have swallowed the Blue Pill. Makes me wonder what it is about a person DOESN'T drink the Kool Aid or swallow the Blue Pill. In a certain weird way the ones that don't drink the Kool-Aid experience a mildly miserable existence , especially where Sasquatch is concerned.

That's not disinformation. It's not desperation, it is frustration that comes from having to coddle FOOLS. There are two kinds of authority. You're (deliberately?) mixing them up. There is authority from power and authority from qualified expertise. Truly, bucking authority-of-power takes courage and is commendable when that authority is wrong. However, you're attacking authority-of-qualification as if your personal subject matter ignorance excuses you from the need to get it right. You are, when it comes to fact, WRONG. What you're doing is either fundamentally dishonest and manipulative or it is rooted in the grossest of ignorance. There is truth .. somewhere. It's not in the bottom of a cool aid jug, neither proponent nor denialist. You do more harm to others' search for truth when you treat everything like it is bigfoot than the scoffing denialists do when they try to get honest seekers to not look at evidence at all. Their deception is confrontational while yours is insidious. The path to finding that truth, whatever it is, is to ignore the extremists from both ends of the spectrum as the frauds they are and follow the data rather than the delusion. The bottom line is the test results came back bear because what was tested was bear. Guess what? Bears are real. Yep, I've seen 'em. That has no bearing on the existence of bigfoot at all. It only needs to for the grossly insecure. MIB

Explorer : "I have also observed that issue of diminishing BFRO reports from California. But, I don't think it is due to lack of BF sightings or BF activity. I think the diminishing number of reports in CA is primarily due to lack of reporting and secondarily due to lack of investigation. Even in BFRO outings that I have gone in CA, I meet people who had encounters and did not report. In Northern CA I have met people who had sightings who don't want to be bothered. They don't need to prove it to anybody and they don't want anybody nosing around their small town. I agree that some of those reports coming out of the woodwork resulting from the Finding Bigfoot show eventually will make it to the database, but they need to be investigated and written up. This has to be done by volunteers on their time and dime. Also, I have noticed a lot of burnout and turnover among the BFRO folks in CA." I think the CA situation is the same or worse in most of the country. The reasons you list, including infighting in the BFRO and lack of investigator members in certain areas, have been passed on to me as relative to the Washington State situation. For sure if an individual makes a report and is never contacted by an investigator that pretty much ends further reporting from that individual. Those that report, know that investigator contact is part of the process. So if never contacted they know their report has been ignored. So if someone has multiple contacts, they never get into the data base. Just that could explain dwindling reports. Most people, and there are exceptions, if the encounter does not scare them out of the woods, go back out looking for more. This will chap BFRO members here, but if there is a problem getting and keeping investigators, why is the organization run more like a religious cult than a scientific research organization? If you pay for several expeditions, and it does take several, and get the secret nod or is it a handshake, you are allowed to become an investigator and get access to reports. At the same time there are people here with science backgrounds, who do investigation on their own, who would never be considered without paying for the privilege. Just the requirement to pay hundreds of dollars before being considered, pretty much eliminates most who would honestly volunteer. And then there is the necessity to preach the party line or face getting thrown out. They threw Thom Powell out, or was he excommunicated? . Like I said, it is more like a religious cult than anything else I can think of. As often happens, in organizations where individuals get too entwined and controlling, perhaps it is time for the BFRO to install new leadership before the organization implodes? MM may think he owns things but he does not own the members.

Of course, I disagree with you. I don't believe there is any organized coverup and I have seen bigfoot within the last 4 years or so and tracks since then. I think you're going off the deep end driven by the same frustration that leads people to embrace the woo. Real life doesn't fit in one hour episodes or 30 second sound-bites. It just takes as long as it takes. MIB

I think what is up in Washington is unprecedented logging in State owned forests. I cannot speak for the whole state, but in SW WA, state owned forests are being logged at a rate I have never seen before. How the State gets by with it when there is so much political power directly engaged opposing logging of any type, I find amazing. Perhaps it is not being done close to the Seattle area so the apartment dwelling millennials are totally unaware it is happening because they do not come to this part of the state to recreate? My research area has been mostly clear cut. The cutting started at the North end and swept through it like a plague of locus. My own BF contacts have ended. BF had no choice but to move East out of state forests into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest where logging is rare and human access is more difficult. With that move, human contact and reports have dropped dramatically. Sadly for BF, the environment towards the East is much harsher. Elevations are higher, it is colder in the winter, gets lots more snow, so winter related illnesses have to increased in the BF population. I would imagine infant survival rates have fallen. None of that can be good for BF numbers.

I agree with the oft-repeated notion that statistical analysis won't resolve this question, but I believe that it puts one "explanation" to rest. If you theorize that this is an elaborate hoax, with proponents making up reports to keep interest going and to fill their websites, then you have to believe that, from the beginning the hoaxers had a coherent theory of a biological entity and seeded their reports out among, or coordinated reports between different groups in order to come up with a mass of data points that created the snapshots we're now getting. I don't know how reliant the SSR is on specific databases (e.g., John Green and BFRO), but mine has at least 10 different sources. So these ten unrelated entities either: a) coordinated their reports since about 1960, or b: lucked into creating a set of data that indicates that Bigfoot eases into the Canadian northeast and Maine in the spring, is out and about moving around through the summer and fall, and then leaves in the winter. While other factors could still be in play, the "explanation" of widespread creation of false reports seems to be eliminated.

I know that this has been discussed ad nauseam here, but I wanted to give my thoughts on the subject... For quite some time now I've been considering if I truly have a place here and whether I should end my participation on the BFF. My two main sticking points are the fanatical "Bigfoot exists", "No they don't", "Yuh-huh!", "Nuh-uh!" echo chamber and the insistence by both sides that the issue must be proven one way or another. There has been much debate recently about the participation of the skeptic/scofftic/denialist (referred to hereafter as SSD's) on the forum. Often quoted is this paragraph from the intro to the forum's Rules & Guidelines: None of this is given as a binding rule, but the principle that if one comes here with "preconceived and immovable notions about bigfoot" then there can be no expectation of "thought-provoking debate" is quite clear. The two viewpoints are mutually exclusive. Without conceding the possibility, no matter how small, that bigfoot might, might exist, then any "discussion" will inevitability devolve into a grade school ***-for-tat that stifles discussion and frustrates a significant portion of the membership who simply want to talk about bigfoot.What is also vital to the debate is the idea that the above principle applies not only to the SSD, but to the True Believer (TB), those who are 100% certain of bigfoot's existence without a sighting of their own. If the TB's cannot bring themselves to admit that someone might have a legitimate reason for not believing that bigfoot exists, we are at loggerheads again. That leaves us with the Knowers, those who claim clear, unambiguous, unmistakable sightings of an unknown large hairy biped. There is no respectable way to deny these claims, and not being present at the time of their encounter, I am happy to accept their claim barring other facts which come to light to contradict it. For the sake of argument, the Knowers exist as an entity unto themselves, and have no real bearing on the endless SSD/TB vicious circle. It seems to me that the FMT, the other administrators, and the Steering Committee here need to decide if we can allow those on both sides of the debate (who staunchly refuse to give any quarter to the other side) to continue their blind-arguing-the-blind antics. The fact we must all face (Knowers excluded. They have their personal proof) is that there is no proof either way. I am a proponent who tries to remain skeptical in the truest sense, and respect those who have thoughtfully reached a different conclusion. What I can't abide is the disrespectful and dismissive dogmatism of both the SSD and the TB, as well as their ongoing feud which serves only to derail many otherwise reasonable discussions, and poison the well here on the BFF. I understand that more rules here would further burden the good folks who volunteer their time as moderators, but unfortunately see no other alternative. Please understand that I am not advocating a stifling of debate. The behavior I am describing, and arguing for the banning of such, is not debate or discussion in any reasonable sense, but is instead merely a peeing contest between two immovable and closed-minded factions who refuse to give one inch to the other side. I am interested in any respectful discussion or views on the subject.