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I submitted a paper to RHI last November, but it's still in peer review. In the meantime, here is a YouTube video of my presentation at the Kiamichi Mountains Bigfoot Conference in May: The first few slides, omitted here, were about DNA and the microphone was not on and so were not recorded. Nothing new in them that you probably don't already know.

Agree. Agree BUT .. Agree BUT !!!! ... I think the quality and detail of information on the non-forum platforms is somewhat lacking. Or maybe you could say the signal to noise ratio is lower. So while forums may be perceived as old fogey stuff they're still where to go for better quality. The others are fine if you're primarily there for entertainment but if you are trying to do research .. nah.

Several years ago, when I was active on the JREF/International Skeptics Forum, I ended up betting that Sasquatch would be scientifically proven by X date, which was a couple of years in the future. In the negotiations, I was able to talk them into giving me odds of 50,000 to 1, so I put up $50. That X date came and went and I paid $50 to a charity of his choice. It was fun and added something to the back and forth banter that I dealt with on that site. I wasn't ever going to collect $2.5 million if science finally proved they exist, but I was willing to put my money up for the cause.

True. But the Smela case followed Backdoc's suggested scenario almost to a T, only failing because Smeja and his partner failed to take and distribute pics immediately. Which is the precise reason cited by Smeja as to why they left the scene immediately. This should be no surprise, especially in the current litigious society, and especially with a creature that might very well be a feral human or human subspecies.

Real or Fake? Is it a biological life-form? Or a rubber dummy stuffed with pig guts? I can say with complete conviction that it doesn't matter. Why? No physical evidence. And that video has made the rounds on social media. It did not matter.

It is now proven that government didn't need to silence Patterson and Gimlin. All they needed to do was place tighter controls on access to the Bluff Creek area. BTW, the area is closed all winter long, when tracks in the snow can tell their tale. Every year. You really don't have to "cover it up". All you have to do is officially ignore it and occasionally make a silly joke to make believers look stupid. Your scenario is fine, and if it went that way, it would essentially out the squelches. But, like I wrote, that's essentially what happened with Smeja, but without the videos and body parts, but of course, that's because he figured he'd be arrested...................and he was right................... I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

and I was told this forum was dying. great thread. thanks all.

If anyone goes they should come see me in Newport! I am still healing up from surgery.

Probably the appraised auction value like with antiques because of all the fossils we have here we call members, speaking for myself in the antiquarian sense too

Ive watched your videos with you and your wife doing research together. Quite frankly with a Discovery camera crew? You guys are every bit as good as any other TV show out there. And maybe thats the secret to the BFF? It needs a media front to funnel people back to the forum. And same goes for the WV crew and Lane County crew. Also a shout out to everyone that posts in the Field Trip section. Looking at pictures and video of beautiful mountains and forests and possibly evidence is always a highlight for me personally.

I haven’t posted in ages and rarely comment, but I am watching. Willing to bet there’s a lot of others on here doing the same. Casual lurkers make up sizable chunks of any forum

Thank you for sharing. No matter what that impolite poster said.

I feel like this person(s) has 10 more sock puppet accounts loaded in his gun.

Well, I did do an online business lookup of the Bigfoot Forums which revealed that this site is worth over $1,000,000!!! Amazing how fast those $20 contributions to the cause add up. Also amazing? How wrong online business lookup sites can be.

Any audio, video or photos posted here are stolen by internet keyboard warriors. Posting is a choice. Keep in mind that this forum is an internet message board, not a research site. I think that newbies visit expecting instant answers. There are a lot of smart people on the BFF and there is no expectation to post daily, weekly, monthly or longer. Just keep checking back. There will always be haters. Trolls self destruct on the BFF, some sooner, some later.

Do you think contributing to this forum is making posts about hoaxes, circle jerks and insulting researchers? And this question also goes to our members that liked his post? Or where do we draw the line with “Troll derangement syndrome” as Foxhill put it? Why do you do it? Why can’t you be amicable?

@norseman Cool. I'm down in that country (north of the border) for the first time in my life this week - the last part of BC I haven't spent time in. A few days of work in Cranbrook and Fernie, about 100 miles north of Kalispell. Man, it is beautiful down here.

For the record, Reddit is a dump, designed to elicit one word replies and ruled by leftist statist trolls who would as soon set you on fire as entertain your opinion if you don't strictly follow the populist zeitgeist. R/Bigfoot is thus a cesspool of short attention span theater with constant repeating deluge of AI garbage, repeated photo posts and people who can't be bothered to Google something. It's fine that it exists, it keeps that kind of idiot off here.

By Jove, I think you've got it.

I would create a separate variable to code a report as either a likely hoax or not, so that I could see at what level hoaxes are happening most frequently. There are at least 2 possible forms of hoaxing when it comes to witness reports. One is the witness as the perpetrator of the hoax and the other is the witness as the victim of a hoaxer. For example, did the witness create the fake print, or is the witness playing into the hand of a hoaxer? I suspect this latter scenario is very difficult to confirm. I suppose there's also the "accidental hoaxer" -- that Bigfoot researcher banging on trees, making Bigfoot calls, and scaring the hell out of nearby campers who subsequently submit a report to the BFRO!

My name is Shelley and I recently had an encounter on a BFRO expedition. I have always been interested in this subject, but this experience has motivated me to learn as much as I can about this subject. I appreciate being added to the Bigfoot Forum and I hope to learn from some of the experienced researchers here. Cheers!

Computer guy here. High scale, petabytes scale, and higher. Tens of thousands of servers and hundreds of thousands of "containers" scale. And of course loads of old and recent machine learning and AI experience. It's a tool. It's fed poorly, limited information from limited sources, sources that are biased towards certain answers and limited in many ways. I am curious as to what it would regurgitate if it were trained in all US government archives, like one had access to a trove of secret documents. For example, I use an SDK or software agent to deliver log files and metrics to time series databases, that SDK and agent have libraries written for it. When asked how to plumb up certain technologies with the SDK, some AIs will make up answers out of whole cloth, faking a reply. For me it's not a huge deal because the libraries are protected by many layers but for other tools a bad actor could write that fake library and use it for compromising systems. Unreliable. But teach it to only reply with proven libraries with digital signatures signed by some author and your answers improve. I suspect that if we ever let it in to truly hidden archives, the secrets it would out would far sooner start WW3 than expose a cover-up of cryptids, but that's the only way something like this would be revealed by AI. We would have to plumb the archives of a dozen agencies to get access to the mundane reports from the field and even then have to piece it together ourselves. Archives that won't be made public anytime soon. The current language models are trained on mundane stuff, unfortunately. But, someday, you'll stumble into some university archives only accessible via secret username and password, and pass that login information and URL to an LLM and feed and prompt it, here's a URL and the login ID is Joe, password is password123, digest all you can find and summarize the reports mentioning Bigfoot, Sasquatch and any other similar species... And only then will it start to get fun. The question is who lets one in first and who writes the first prompt to expose it.

^^^ i think Bill Miller’s scenes in Bigfoot’s Reflection are in that area I plan to watch this documentary tonight. Thanks for posting

I take it you didn't view the proffered video. Question: What did Lazar (notice the spelling) have to gain from leaking his information? Why was the government obsessed with him?

^^^ Made up stories can have elements of truth. But part truth is still not the truth. My hotel receipt or speeding camera picture in my rental car is convincing I was in Chicago on some date and time. It doesn't mean I saw Elvis alive while I was there if I made such a claim. People tell untruths sometimes innocently and sometimes for some other motivation. The problem comes for someone who NEED that person or needs to believe them. It's just like how Greg Long needs Heironimus so he overlooks the changing suit, stories, timelines and so on. They can't walk away when these witness' stories don't add up. They should, but they don't. In this case of the Bob Lezar thing, some NEED him. In the event the storyteller is exposed by massive holes in their story, those who need him will say, "Wow, the government was SO powerful they convinced him to lie for them!" For them, that government can even somehow remove him for yearbooks. I wish this didn't have to spin into a UFO forum. Just so you know, Mike Farrell's UFO show in the 1980's tells me Aliens like ice cream; especially strawberry. Got to be true, right

well in the 90s the sport of fly fishing saw a huge swell of interest after the movie 'A River Runs Through It' came out. Many casual observers were not long term committed to it though. I suspect the same thing has happened with FB. It comes and goes. Only the long timers, adventurers, researchers, and theorists hang on for the long haul.

This is especially true today. Video is too easily created deceptively. You simply can't believe what you see on video.

To: "the Government knows" crowd This is for those who think the Government knows about Bigfoot and is keeping it quiet I have a Question: Scenario: A person is hunting a carrying a cell phone. They shoot Bigfoot and kill it. (Choose any reason you wish. Mistaken Identify, an act of self-defense or whatever). 1) They take pics of it and video with the cell phone. 2) They post the selfies on Facebook and various social media. 3) They call the cops and others 4) The cops show up. At this point (a) everyone on social media is sharing the pics and vids (b) those who show up are regular cops and game warden types who just minutes before were worrying about someone having an updated fishing license or littering. At no time do these 'cops' know they are somehow supposed to know they are supposed to help the government keep Bigfoot quiet. 5) While these local cops sort things out, the videos and pics on social media continue like wildfire. 6) These guys fill out a report and call DNR type people as well as a coroner. Who knows, maybe even the state university to see if there is some primates expect who can come down. My Question: What actions could the "Government" take to put the horse back in the barn in this example? I am suggesting any effort- even if such a government wanted to silence the story- is too late. There really isn't anything in my story problem that is unrealistic. In fact, I think I am even making any steps the government would need to do to silence the story to be much easier than it actually would be. Please tell me how the Government keeps things quiet in this scenario.

I gather a set-up akin to a bowfishing rig on a crossbow with low power draw and tipped bolt that has a stop, like the business end of a ski pole or somesuch. I'm sure it's doable, it's getting it into the hands of a prepared individual, in the right place, at the right time--the usual wrench in the works...

You posted: That is opinion, not fact. I stated my experience. You can accept it or not, but you cannot claim your opinion as fact. But I consider it arrogant that you would publlcly post that I'm seeing things that are not actually there and is all in my head. That does not say that they disregard potential existence like what you claimed. There's nothing in the statement that demonstrates that they're discouraging the possibility that it exists like what you claimed. But that statement, too, is factual: It is not opinion. The U.S. Forest Service: 1) Does not confirm Bigfoot's existence 2) They maintain open spaces and wildlife habitat therein 3) And those lands could potentially include habitat for such a creature should it exist Isn't that true?

What does Tom know about paranormal bigfoots? We do have a section on UFO reports and I haven't snooped around there yet. If you go to a 'Flash of Beauty' and find two fellows from Coquille, Oregon. One has a blue shirt and a slender man has a red shirt and they speak of a paranormal bigfoot that they ran across on a mountain road.

Thanks. The Garmin plan was too expensive and too inflexible for my liking, so I went w/Zoleo. The advantage that I can see is that I can basically suspend service for awhile w/out paying outrageous fees. Knock on wood that I don't need it.

I love this forum... I wander in once or twice a month and check stuff... With the help of this Forum chat in 2012 I met my wife... ( The problem is not the forum but the lag of news... Even when you go to presentations on bigfoot events you will not hear anything really ground breaking... Since years they all telling the same stories over and over again...just my opinion )

Appreciate it, man.

Hello- My name is Bobby, currently living outside of Dallas, TX. Born and raised here in TX and i have also travelled to a majority of the lower 48 states, whether it be for work or pleasure. my entire adult life i havent had much interest in cryptids or Sasquatch/bigfoot until a few months ago.. I had a sighting in 2009 when I was driving back to school in Huntsville, TX. It was a sunday night around 10pm, i was driving south down I-45 just passed Madisonville. Both sides of the Highway are covered in thick pine trees once you get to the edge of the Sam Houston National park. I was cruising around 65mph on the right lane when i seen a very large bi-pedal creature, walk across the 2 lane highway in 2 steps. I estimate he was around 7-8 feet tall and covered in black hair except his face. He was holding what looked like a racoon in his left hand as he was walking from west to east, I was travelling south. the entire sighting lasted about 5 seconds. I was 21 years old when this happened, I am 39 now. I havent shared this moment or incident with a single person, not even my wife.. this was something i just tucked away in my mind. I didnt sleep at all that night and just kept telling myself i was seeing a deer.

What is their position of the US Forrest Service...? The short answer is this: They support things that are proven like wolves and bears. Things that are unproven are just unproven. They can't be expected to have an official position on the subject or any subject that remains unproven. For instance, I doubt they have an official position on ESP or ghosts. I say 'unproven' because that is the general consensus of science. It seems- due to the discovery of Lucy and others- science has moved from 'Bigfoot can't exist' to 'Bigfoot might exist but so far is unproven'. If I went hunting and shot Bigfoot those government forces (US Forrest and so on) would go where the facts take them. 'They' would say Bigfoot exists as soon as they saw the body. They might be a local sheriff, some DNR guy, some US Forrest guy in a fire spotting tower, and 100 reporters who happen upon the story. Someone in government making an April fool's joke about bigfoot doesn't change any position. I really don't think NORAD is trying to support or harm Christmas based on the Santa Tracker on Christmas eve. There are some on the BFF and elsewhere who see the Government as some evil all powerful conspiracy about Bigfoot and about anything else they can image. If you ask those type of people, they will attribute things to the government that take you down quite a bunny trail. This even assumes something and big as the government made up of many layers and employees are all going to move in unison under one group think direction. Not likely. Don't believe me? See how fast they are to down vote me for posting this post. Even during the moon landing times, we had different factions who argued about the very mode we would take to even get to the moon. That is a simple unified goal fully funded and yet the various opinions and growing pains were evident. Those who say the government knows all about Bigfoot being out there and, here is the key, they are keeping it hidden are ones who NEED to have this be the case. They require a certain view of Government who probably that has even more deeper intentions even beyond Bigfoot. Sorry, I can't see it that way at least as it relates to Bigfoot. The answer is Government, or the US Forrest Service probably have people who work in it that believe in Bigfoot and some that don't. Beyond that, they are concerned about Budgets, hunting season, litterbugs and Yogi bear stealing picnic baskets.

Hello all! Would anyone like a ticket to the Metaline Falls Bigfoot Festival? I've decided that it's just too far for me to drive. Message me. K

In my profession as a barber, I have talked to many FS workers. They see my collection of Bigfoot stuff at my work station and after a few visits, they tend to broach the subject with me. Most of them work in different departments and don't know each other, but they all agree on one thing: Bigfoot exists. They know the creatures are out there, they know where they are likely to be depending on times of the year, they play it off as a "legend" to curtail economic and regulatory fallout, and some have seen them and would be happy to NOT see them again. As I understand it, witnessing one is nearly a FS rite of passage in the Estacada, Oregon area. I was told that pre-dawn hours and dusk offered a good chance on Cascade Lakes Hwy. And I was told that there was a general "ignore them" rule. You don't bother them, they won't bother you, nobody has to explain or report anything.

There are more people than ever who are involved with investigating the topic on a pretty serious level. Lots of small facebook groups focused on trading ideas on equipment and techniques. Theories and experiences. a forum setting would probably be more suited to that type of discussion, although I guess Facebook does have the convenience factor. Heck, there might be a way to introduce the BFF to some of those folks

No. One can post what they want the public to view. Un fortunately, the entertainment genre has created a cesspool of work. The advancements in artificial intelligence are impressive but the fantastical animal creation artwork is just artwork in an era when the long term researchers want the facts......'just the facts ma'am'.

Not "completely human" but human-like with some distinguishing characteristics (i.e. mutations), according to my research in eDNA.

When I drew this, I drew it from memory. Then today, I thought why didn't I google it so I could see the area. So I wrote in the drawing that the tree twists went in a line on the north east of the road, when in reality it was along the south east, running up the road to the north and I figured a half mile, however, on the map, it is around a 1/4 mile.

Not in my book. I didn't bother to research his seven posts because it was clear from just one that he didn't have the capacity, or the intent, or both, to add value to the conversation. Interesting dichotomy. Does it have to be exclusively one or the other?

Sorry Bipedalist, nothing on that area from me. The late Peter Byrne frequented those haunts, but he's gone with all his knowledge and intuition. He invited me to his house for a mid-week look-a-round in about 2008. I learned he was much more than a writer. Two of his associates still frequent the hills in that area, and to the north. I've worked the Alsea valley and to the south, but mostly the area between Mt. Hood and Mt. Jefferson, and the Gifford Pinchot between Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Adams. Once in the forest SSW of Estacada I had Ray Crow and two of his foreign guests along. We found a fresh slide very similar to the one described and drawn by Doug! It had a "butt print," skid marks, hand holds, and foot imprints when it stopped it's slide. Then it ran with long steps down a logging road shoulder, crossed the road and jumped into tall trees from an embankment. Ray and his guests took a lot of time to detail the event and he reported it in "The Track Record." My recollection of the event is logged on one of the computers the FBI "seized" { through no fault of my own, so I can't give the Forum drawings, etc.} Maybe someone can look it up in the "Track Record." We probably scared the Bigfoot while it was picking huckleberries and we approached on a hairpin curve. I still go up there and wander. Found an academic paper on chimpanzees using rock on trees to communicate. I want to look a little more of that up and I will share on the Forum. Regards, and as Peter used to end, Joe here

This one is kinda long, so I will do it in chapters. I don't like long typing sessions. Chapter one: The area and events leading up to the encounter The events occurred near the extinct townsite of Valsetz Oregon in the east side of the Oregon Coast range 16 miles from the nearest town, which is Falls City. It was in the early 90's and I was bow hunting with several different people over a period of time. On more than one occasion, we would hear wood knocks frequently above the townsite on the south east slope of Sugarloaf mountain and near the cliffside of Rooster Rock. Wood knocks were becoming common in our hunting area. We had not heard them before that we could remember and we had no idea what was making them. The incident I will relate happened to the south east of Rooster Rock about maybe three miles away on what is known as the Valsetz Flats. There are old logging roads that had grown over and was now basically wide ways with a well worn game trail down the middle. My brother and I were bowhunting and decided to walk up a gated logging road that would take us from the Flats to Fanno Ridge. We hadn't been on this road in many years, so we wanted to hunt up it and it's side roads more for nostalgic reasons than anything, though, at that time, elk were abundant in the area.

My family and myself went on our annual Easter picnic with a group of families to the upper Mill Creek Park located mid way up the Oregon coast on the east side of the Coastal Range west of Dallas Oregon. The park no longer exists and is now a grown over clearcut, but at the time it was in old second second growth Douglas fir as well as old growth fir and hemlock. Once we were there for a while, my buddy Jeff and I decided to explore the steep hillside across the road from the park by using "elk highways" going along the hillside. These elk trails were cut into the bank and about 3 feet wide from decades of use by elk, deer, bears and all manner of critters. The park was located at the confluence of Mill Creek, Cedar Creek and Camp Creek many miles into the wilderness. The hillside in that particular spot, was very steep and filled with layers of forest duff. If you were to descend the slope, you would take a step and slide 3 to 5 feet, then take another step and slide another 3 to 5 feet on down to Camp Creek, causing quite a swath of fresh earth displacing the forrest duff. The foggy coastal air and this fresh dirt lent to preserving a butt, hand, forearm, and heel prints into the bank very well. We came across such prints and were amazed at the size of them. Standing in the heel prints the butt print as high as my shoulder blades and much wider than my back. Its forearm, from elbow to wrist, was a bit longer than my entire arm from my shoulder to my fingertips and the palm of the hand was bigger than my entire hand with my fingers stretched out as far as I could stretch them. The fingers were fairly long and spread out wide. I don't remember thinking the thumb was out of proportion. But why would I analyze that, not knowing what to look for? It had come off of the upper road, sliding down this hillside, came to rest with it's heels onto the elk trail, which caused it to suddenly stop, falling backward onto the freshly disturbed bank with it's butt and forearm and pushing off with it's hand and continued on down to the creek. We tried to rationalize every scenario we could think of, but nothing fit. Was it a giant hunter? There was no hunting season going on and the heel prints were not boot heel prints and the butt print had a distinct crack as if naked and not clothed. I giant fisherman? What fisherman would go through the difficulty of descending such a hillside, when they could easily access the creek from the lower road. And the whole naked butt, no boot print thing too. We later concluded that it had to be a bigfoot. A very uncomfortable conclusion, but the only one that made sense. I never told anyone about this for a long while. The thing that cemented to me, that this could only be a bigfoot, is what my mom had to say about 3 days later. She came into the room my brother, dad and I, were sitting and said she heard on the news that a fly fisherman was fishing one of the creeks by the upper park the day after our picnic and when he came around the bend of the creek, he saw a giant bigfoot standing in the creek. I think that is all I have on this.

This caught my attention, since my topic post w/ graph showed an observable downward trend. Looking back on my data, code, and graph, I discovered I had mistook the date field as the submission date, when in fact what the Kaggle author called 'timestamp' is actually the reported sighting date. I should have caught this. The submission date is not available in the dataset I had used. The trends that AI pulled from Reddit are based on what the Redditor called an updated dataset relative to the one I used. This updated version has a submission date and a messy sighting year field (e.g., 2022, 2014-ish, 2001-2002, 1987 and 1994, 2011, etc.). The updated version also cuts off at 2021. There are other differences between the datasets, but here's what I found in terms of AI's response: Yes, there was a spike in 2012, though these were largely Class B sightings. My guess is that this comes from heightened awareness from Finding Bigfoot, which premiered in 2011. The downward trend resumed its course after the spike in 2012. Yes, there was an upward trend but it reversed around 2005. Here's my updated graph with correct labeling (LEFT) and a graph I created from the 'updated' data linked by the Redditor (RIGHT). Note that i had fewer records to graph (on the left), as I removed any records missing a date/year value (due to the witness unable to recall the encounter date). The graph on the right, since it's using the actual submission date (rather than the encounter date), had far fewer missing values (roughly 1000 more records to graph). BFRO launched in mid-late 1990s, and this is reflected in the near-zero submissions prior to then (righthand graph).

After days of heavy rain, we finally got a nice sunny weekend, so my son Steve and I headed out for the high country. I wanted to go to a waterfall that I'd never seen before, about 4 hours from home. We set off at 11am after fueling up the Hummer and drove about 2 hours up the Fraser Canyon to Boston Bar, where we turned off Hwy 1 onto the Nahatlatch River FSR, and continued for another40 km to Grizzly Falls. The road had been severely washed out in our 2021 "atmospheric river" floods and landslides, but has since been made passable, though still a bit sketchy in places. Along the way we passed through a very large stretch of the valley that was burned out 2 years ago, but eventually got past that into the forest again, with nice views of the Nahatlatch River and lake, finally reaching the falls we were seeking. The sight and the sound made the bouncing on the potholed road worth while, and we had lunch in the cool windblown spray from the cascade. We saw no large animals along the 80 km run up and down the logging road, but did see some grouse and a beautiful red tailed hawk in flight right beside us for about 30 seconds.