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Slipped my leash yesterday and got out into the field. Talk about social distancing, I never saw another human. The objectives were to visit my old research area and show my companion as many of the contact locations as I could. Both to add context to my encounters and look for any signs of present activities. I pulled into the road leading to the NEON site, and a large sign indicated that the area was now off limits due to the COVID 19 thing. Worried about something getting the virus? I wonder. What was puzzling was that I passed a popular county park getting there and it was packed with vehicles and people hiking around. I nearly blew off the trip but being so familiar with the area, knew a way in, that would not take me near any warning signs. We parked and hiked in. The first location was where I had been subjected to chest beating because I had peed in front of a watching bigfoot. I have mentioned, that after reporting that encounter to the BFRO, I noticed two trees had been marked with blue paint about a month later. When I pointed that out to my hiking companion I noticed for the first time that the paint on both trees had a blue FU. Now I am wondering who did that and what FU means. We slipped around a locked gate and hiked into the area on an abandoned logging road. The next location was the collapsed lava tube and the spring that bubbles out of it. Near that was the log which I was hiking past that got me zapped. A tree had blown down and now rested on top of the rotting log. It is larger than I remember. It is about 4 feet in diameter and a BF could easily have hidden next to it and not been seen. The stick that I had found inside the log and left there was not in it but laying nearby. The log is definitely full of termites. I could see the side of the log full of termite borrows. No indication that it had been messed with further since I had last been there, other than the stick was no longer inserted into it. From that point we went to the location where I got growled at. While there was some down threes when that happened, there were many more there now. When you clear cut, the trees at the edge of it are exposed to unrestricted wind and blow down at horrific rates. Some of the root balls were 20 feet in diameter. After traversing the clear cut, we went into a area where a creek runs downhill in a forested area and I have found many footprints crossing the human trail. Another human had been there recently, but no BF prints. The next location visited was where I had my first encounter. Standing in the same spot, I described the approaching whoops, pointing in their direction, and how I was standing in the trail with no nearby cover to hide behind. I just stood there, expecting to be run over by the producer of the heavy footfalls headed right at me. When I finished telling about the event and we took a different route back to the truck. My companion was surprised that I knew the area so well. On the abandoned logging road, I showed the location where I was hit on the back pack by a rock. The wonderful thing about the area was that is was so active yet was in just a few square miles. I was really lucky to have found it. But at the same time it hurts to have it go inactive. We managed to get back to the truck and be home before night fall.

Couldn’t agree more Norseman. As well, there sometimes is a similarity between the way the missing persons cases get dismissed and the dismissal of Sasquatch encounters. Not saying these two things are necessarily related causally, mind you. Just saying there are sometimes seen the same remarkably similar approaches to both. When you say, “Oh, he got lost”, or “Another hunter shot him and hid the body””, you are not that far away from the same tired approach Sasquatch skeptics employ when they say, “Oh, he saw a bear”. Both defy the logic of the situations and the evidence and equally impugn the intelligence of the witnesses. At the end of the day, people see Bigfoots. At the end of the day, a significant number of people have disappeared in the wilds of NA under unexplainable circumstances. That we don’t why either of these things are happening is no license to deny they are.

Don’t you think certain cases like the Martin case, far outweigh any fringe cases that may or may not be hypothermia? Regardless of your opinion of Paulides? I will say this. Without him? I wouldn’t know about these cases.

A bit of both. Not just skeptics, though, but also proponents (including "knowers" like me). On semantics, a science paper has a very rigid format for presenting the information. Ketchum has an advanced degree. She has followed that format many, likely hundreds, of times, else she wouldn't have gotten her degree. And yet she refused to do it with something this important .. why? The main breakdown was that the conclusion for the paper has to reflect and interpret the experimental results. She flatly failed to connect those dots. Her conclusion was a rambling opinion piece without substantive connection to the rest of the paper. On evidence, on paper content, she fell flat in two ways. First, she claimed to provide data for full genomes. She presented less than 10% enough volume of data to represent a full genome. There is no way around this simple fact. She is truly a subject matter expert, she cannot NOT know this. She did it anyway which gives the appearance of deliberate deception .. scientific fraud. In the second way, there was something flawed in her methodology. She came up with gibberish data by using the "next gen" sequencing on DNA sequences that were too short to correctly assemble. She ignored what should have been red flags regarding her intermediate results and rather than back up to reconsider her methods, she plowed forward putting forth irrational assessments of the data. I truly wish Ketchum had been right in concept and forthright in presentation. She was not. I would love to have a private confab with her to see if there is some way I'm overlooking something. I wouldn't expect it to turn out well. So far, when confronted with these seemingly irrefutable facts, rather than address the substance of the question she has attacked the questioner. That is the behavior of a sociopath and narcissist, not a scientist. In the end, bigfoot is still out there to be discovered. What Ketchum accomplished, rather than providing the protection she said she was trying for, she made proof of existence almost inseparable from putting one or more on a slab. DNA and pictures might have been enough before her. They no longer are. If you want to prove existence, you're going to have to kill one. Thanks, Doc. Thanks. MIB

"Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!"