Leaderboard

Has technology helped or hindered? It's done both. I'm a huge believer in using a thermal imager. It's better than seeing during the day because at night a sasquatch may let down its guard a bit. It feels safe because the little hairless ones have never been able to see in the dark before. It is transformative. Technology can be a hindrance especially when you're humping power banks, smart phones, audio, and video equipment on your back. Uh oh, I forgot to recharge the batteries and the power bank is only at 25%! Did I bring the USB to USB connector? They can be an enormous distraction. Hopefully, we can stay focused on what's important by controlling it rather than the oppsite. In the end, we're not going to get that glimpse or hear that distant howl if we're fiddling with electronics.

Except in winter. The great equalizer. Frozen earth plus 6-8 feet of snow at mid elevations in the west. Lakes frozen over. Many things have either gone into hibernation or flown south. And the snow. You can be the greatest Ninja stealth warrior in the world. The snow records your every step, every time you sit or lay down, every time you make a kill and blood splatters upon it. It records everything. The only safety net is nature’s great eraser which is another dump of snow. A Mountain Gorilla eats 40 lbs of vegetation daily living at high elevation. Now imagine a primate twice as big. That’s a lot of tree bark! Moose do it. But their winter areas look like a train wreck. We find thousands of tracks, scat, horn sheds. We see them! Does every Bigfoot from the interior make a bee line for the Pacific coast before the first snows? Ive seen ONE set of snow tracks in my 50 years on this planet. And I’ve spend my fair share of time in the woods in winter. And so has lots of other people in my neck of the woods. Either they are almost absent from the landscape? Or they are holed up somewhere? Without fire they cannot cure meat. So that leaves what? Dried berries and roots? Has anyone ever discovered a LARGE cache of food that didn’t look like it was intended for a human? I flatly reject that these things are actively hunting in winter like a cougar. Because we jump on snowmobiles and can go cut cat tracks. That’s how houndsmen hunt cougar. Then put their dogs on the track. Again I cannot go reliably cut Bigfoot tracks. This is the nut to crack. With modern snow bikes? There is NOWHERE they cannot go. Even a Bigfoot in deep snow is as a biped at a extreme disadvantage. It cannot hide it tracks in snow either. So either it caves up or it leaves. Intelligence can only take you so far. It’s not a SF soldier operating behind enemy lines. Well supplied, in comms with HQ, and focused on a mission, with a defined exit strategy. These things live out there full time. They breed, they give birth, they pack babies, they grow old, they die. They also break bones, get arthritis, catch colds, have sore throats, get into fist fights, fall in love, get bit by mosquitoes, black flies, ticks, chiggers, so forth and so on. No radio, no medic with a modern kit, no lifeline. As I said before? We are missing something. Bigfoot and Bear sign can be rather tough to define sometimes in summer. In winter? Should be pretty easy because Bears are asleep. So where is all the Bigfoot sign? If your finding let’s say 10 GOOD castable tracks in the summer. 10! You should easily be seeing 1000 times that many in winter. Think about how many GOOD deer tracks you see in summer. Compared to how many you see in winter? We are all friends here. I’m just thinking out loud. 🙂

What you mean is scientifically peer reviewed and independently verified. I can publish a scientific paper about the black hole that resides in my living room? But unless it’s peer reviewed and verified it’s science fiction, not science fact. And that’s where unfortunately Ketchum’s work resides in.....fiction.

^^ Cannot give no explanation for why we cannot find them in the winter. I can say that I have found tracks in the snow in my area of searching. They were large tracks and also small tracks. The small tracks were the ones that got my attention. Since they were the size of a small child and it was at night and they were bare footed. Now who would let their child run out in the backwoods in the middle of the woods. It had such a long stride that I could not even create the stride even if I tried to run. But this track went on for some length down the trail at the same stride. At the time I never had seen any deer in this area . When at a time there were allot of deer in this area. I be walking through the forest and be jumping deer every so often through out the forest. When I started finding these tree structures is when the deer population went down. It then decreased after I started to have my encounters in that area. I also started finding dead decomposing turkey kills that seem to be eaten as well as possoms. I would find these bones near large blown downed trees. The bones were not spread out but piled together. The other things that I would find would be these nuts. I think they are called hickory nuts. The shells would also be piled up in certain areas of the woods . Not like a deer or any other animal would or could carry all these nuts to that spot. But from where these nuts came from were not even in the area of where they were cracked and eaten. I felt like what ever was eating this stuff was a single animal. But then the news started to report of horses being attacked by animals. The horses belonged to the sheriff department. They reported as being coyote attack. But from what i was experiencing and from what encountered I felt differently. I was hunting and it was evening so I walked back to my truck. As I got to my truck I found a paper on my truck. The paper said that this farm on the corner of where i hunt was missing a horse. Well as I was walking back from my hunting spot I heard some thing large following me back parallel to me. The strange thing was that what ever it was , was making these horse sounds. So when I saw that paper on my windshield of my truck I called the number on the paper. I told them of what i heard and they seemed that they did not want to find if it was there horse. The other incident was that of a missing dog. I seen this dog earlier in the day with it's trainer. The dog had one of those beeping neck collar where the trainer can press the transmitter. Well we were out there bigfooting and we could hear the beeping of this dog collar the whole time we were out there. It started getting late so we walked back to the trail. so that we could walk back to our cars. When we seen the trainer and he asked us if we seen his dog. I told him that I had heard him beeping way back in the back woods.The people that were with me had left and i stayed behind to help this guy find his dog. We waked out in to those woods on the trail . The trainer kept pressing on the transmitter so that he could hear the beeper. we kept hearing the beeper but it kept fading away. But we kept following it until we were deep into the woods. He said that his dog was faithful and that the dog would always return. It was his bird dog so it was trained to fetched. He kept pressing the transmitter and beeper kept going off. Then all of sudden the beeper stopped and it no longer beeped. This was now 2:00 am and it was foggy and the dog was not barking nor beeping. We spent four hours looking for this dog. Not sure what happen to that dog but i am assuming that it was food to what ever was out there. I some times wonder why i have not been food for them. I sure felt like it one or two times when i was hunting in that area. There could have been many times where maybe the police would have fund my truck parked there but not me. In fact that has been my biggest fear of finding a decomposed human body out there. There has many times that i have smelt that dead smell out there where i just did not want to check it out. These things are freaky.

I know your pain! How many times have you been on the side of a mountain... at night... fumbling with chargers and cords... trying to check your battery status on a recorder without laying your thermal down into the mud...and in the middle of it all realize that you need a piece of gear that is currently buried deep within your pack? Oh, and it looks like an unexpected storm is now moving in. Ghost hunters don't know how easy they have it.

If they are in your area in any numbers in the summer that suggests they migrate out in the winter if are not seeing winter tracks. .The snow line here in Western WA is about 8 miles east of were I live. I live at 300ft and much of the winter the snow level is about 2500. There are several high ridges that connect the Western Cascades and the interior mountains like Adams. When you examine those East West ridges, there are defined and well used trails on them None of them are on a USGS Map. They are not old logging roads either. I have wondered if rather than trudge through all the tangle and down wood of the Columbia, Lewis River, and Toutle Drainage, if they get high on the ridges and migrate out of the interior in the fall. Right at the snow line is bearable in the Western Cascades in the winter and in the winter there are few humans in the woods, especially at or above the snow line.

I mix up Dr Hart's contributions here with those of another member so I hesitate to identify one as the author when it was the other. I'm not sure what you mean by "open to interpretation". In a sense yes, but it's already been done over and over so in a way it's 5 years too late unless you find something that hasn't already been considered. Private funding, yeah, that's part of the issue. I think the motivation was to have ownership of credit for discovery. I think the real answer is not a publicly funded project but rather many projects separately funded, privately or otherwise. Any sort of centralization of control brings the possibility of corruption. Only in absolute independence do we have some chance to avoid undue influence from a small number of people with a shared agenda.

The Sasquatch Genome Project is Melba Ketchum. That was a very active topic here on BFF while it was happening. There were a lot of sketchy things going on regarding that "study", a lot of scientific and procedural irregularity. Though many labs apparently participated, none were allowed to independently release their results, rather, all had to pass their results to Dr Ketchum for release thus every single report of the results ultimately goes back to her. If she's lying, there are no independent fact checkers to trip her up. I think DNA is a valuable tool but we need to do good science in the sense that we need truly independent verification (missing), independent reporting of results (missing), and repeatability (missing). MIB

As you and everyone knows, DNA has been a sort of holy grail for many researchers in the past. So much has gone under the bridge that has been attempted and failed. But I need to say this, and I certainly hope it sinks in on this Forum, it isn't the DNA technology that has failed. It has been the quality of the samples that have failed. Everything from hair, blood, tissue, and who knows what else. DNA technology is sound and reliable. Studies have been done using e-DNA and game cameras in the same areas to compare what gets caught visually on cams with what has been sampled- almost entirely from water sources. The comparison the two has shown that e-DNA for the most part is in alignment with what the camera traps pick up. Neither, so far as we know, has detected a novel primate in North America. But then we have discussed rarity and remoteness of the creature so where and how samples are collected is the issue. Oh yes, and then there is the conundrum of where to take samples for testing because without securing that then there's no motivation to even collect samples. But don't worry too much about that because I have not given up on that particular angle and have not stopped in my quest of that very important goal. And while I have no updates to share in that regard at this time since things are moving slowly, the Forum should know that I am making headway. In truth, its a cautionary tale that has needed discretion.

Well, not a bad topic at all Believer57 Technology has definitely swung the pendulum in our favor and we've certainly been jerked around enough to ignore, ir at least disregard 95% of what comes at us. Researchers have done more than simply walk around the woods. They have educated themselves, not only in the value of technology, but also have outfitted them selves WITH technology to level the wilderness playing field. We KNOW what the best tools are and that alone has helped whittle down what we will accept as evidence we can hang our hats on. We've also learned from each other's research into equipment and electronics, not to mention firepower for defense and what constitutes sound evidence of existence. Norseman mention how virtually impossible it is for any ground bound creature to not leave tracks in snow. And as simple as that may sound, because it would seem so obvious, it's a great point that is heads above finding a questionable print in soil. Especially if the season is amenable to Humans bieng barefoot. This is the kind of detailed thinking that has made us, or should have made us, more wary of what good evidence is. There's no question that our tools and technologies deployed in the field help keep the focus on what constitutes solid evidence in as much as it can be determined.

Depends on how you look at it. It hinders us with our chances of personal discovery sometimes... Many people report that they have activity in areas when they go in unequipped, but when they introduce technology to the equation that activity ceases. But, it is a game changer as far as pursuing evidence which can be shared others and possibly advance the idea of these creatures' existence. Technology levels the playing field to a great extent. It lets us see that which we could otherwise not see. It lets us hear that which we could otherwise not hear. It lets us record images and sound remotely. Thermal scopes and digital sound recorders are great tools.

This is a very good point worthy of serious consideration........and an upvote But then most of the 30,000 Black Bears in Maine never get seen either. Oh yes, and that goes for the 70,000 or so Moose as well. A sighting needs a Human. And that Human needs to report it.

Let's face it, predation is violent. Even a Robin getting a worm is a violent act. And as humanely as we try to hunt, or science collects a species, they are violent acts. It's the way of the world. We cannot all be Jainists who practice Ahimsa.

@BeansBaxter78 Let us know when it is released. I will show my support and buy a copy of the paper back version.