Why Are You Interested? Do You Care If ANYONE Else Ever Believes? Do You Care If Anyone Ever Believes If You KNOW They Exist?

[Frisco85132]

I often wonder why some people are interested in Sasquatch/Bigfoot.  Personally, I had no interest in the subject, or any cryptid subject past seeing "In Search Of" when I was in grade school, or "the Legend Of Boggy Creek" when it played as the second feature at a drive in when I was in high school, and to me it was nothing more than a low budget "Mockumentary".  I played baseball, threw the discus and shot in track, and had a full class load and none of it was on my radar.  I hunted, fished, and did all the outdoor activities we could do in Michigan.  I was born in Arizona, but went to high school in Michigan and lived with my maternal grandparents and even the idea that Sas/BF would even BE in Michigan, let alone Arizona was nonsense to me.

I came back to Arizona, literally the day after I graduated from high school and worked once again for my paternal grandfather on the family ranch and at his Chevron station while I got ready for college at University of Arizona in Tucson.  This was 1985.  College went by, and I went year round and graduated in three years.  I went to work as a police officer and used my vacation time every year to go to Michigan to deer hunt with my maternal grandfather.  On November 13th, 1993 I had a face-to-face encounter.  In one second, I went from 0 to 100 in the "not interested to knowing they exist" scale.  I only ever talked about it with my grandfather because back then my job or anyone associated with it would have thought I was nuts.  Even if they would have believed that I BELIEVED I had an encounter, they would have given me a rubber gun and a plastic badge and stuck me in the evidence room.  So, I kept quiet about it for YEARS and packed it DEEP down in a box in my mind and never thought about it.  But, my relationship with the outdoors had changed.  I still fished, but I didn't hunt in Michigan anymore, I only hunted in Arizona and then only in the desert.  Any time I went to the mountains in northern Arizona and was out of Prescott, Flagstaff, or Show Low...I was uneasy.  I wasn't even uneasy about Sas/BF...I was just finding myself looking behind every tree like I was working a felony warrant, or clearing a building on an active alarm call.

Then all the internet sites and documentaries and all the information became available on the internet and I started following the work of Dr Krantz, Dr Meldrum, Dr Sarmiento, John Green, John Bindernagel, Renee Dahinden, and Thomas Steenburg because they all appealed to my "Just the evidence" cop brain.  I still didn't talk about it though.  I sifted through a LOT of chaff and sensationalism and the "woo" and read all the books I could but STILL didn't talk to anyone about my encounter because I still thought people would think I had stepped out of my mind. 

It was getting bad though, I was starting to have nightmares and almost like a PTS over the encounter.  I had been in lethal force incidents during my career and none of them affected me the way this had.  Finally, I decided I needed to talk to someone so I talked to a counselor who specialized in PTS who was independent of the department.  I hadn't retired yet, so I was still keeping my piehole shut to anyone else.  I did the counseling, went back to Michigan where the encounter happened to face "my own ****", finished law school while I was recovering from a line of duty injury before I retired, and once I retired felt like I had put it behind me.  But still....I didn't talk to anyone about it outside of the counselor I had seen.  It was like..."Okay, dealt with".

Then I heard Kerry Arnold on a podcast talking about his own encounter and it was like he was telling my own story.  The time and place were different, but from an intellectual and emotional perspective...it was almost like a catharsis for me.  The whole phenomena was still generally full of recondite information and speculation and the two ends of the spectrum from the "strictly zoological to the woo" seemed to be having continual clashes over who owned Sasquatch.  Still, I kept my mouth shut until I finally had a talk with Kerry and he and I spent about four hours on the phone and he and I "trauma bonded" over our experiences, but I STILL didn't want to talk about it outside a very, very, very small group.  He hadn't started his own podcast yet and I was retired from the department but was working at a law firm so STILL didn't want to come out of the woods in a public forum.

Kerry encouraged me to put it on paper, so I did and eventually shared it and felt a weight come off my shoulders even though I took a bit of troll heat and then of course was contacted by some people who I thought were more than a little nutty telling me how they were "raising a bigfoot infant" and all sorts of other things that my mind as an "open minded skeptic" without corroborative evidence found hard to....buy into.  But what I did do was start going to places like OR, WA, NorCal, ID, etc where high clusters of sightings had occurred and started hanging out camping with my dogs and just being something to MAYBE attract some curiosity.  I couldn't do a lot of roaming because I have two artificial knees and an artificial hip due to my former career, so being a field researcher was out and hauling my horse across country was impractical.  So, I don't consider myself a researcher, just a curious KNOWER who is at the point where I don't care if anyone believes me, what happened happened, and I don't even care if the "world at large" ever believes or if a specimen is ever taken to "prove" it to mainstream science or to force "da gub'ment" and "big timber and tourism money" to admit it.  

So, that's why I care, or I am interested in new credible evidence...for my own satisfaction and my own continued learning.

Sorry about the long post, you can wake up now and flame away if you want to...but I'm curious....why are YOU interested?

 

[Patterson-Gimlin]

Interested in mysteries, monsters and cryptids. I  saw the PGF in the local cinema in 1967.

In recent years studied the available research progress. 

Wrote it off as fantasy. Then with more available evidence and having family members say they have observed the creatures. I am open to the creatures existence or at the least extinct creatures. 

Some Footprints seem to be unexplainable as fraud. 

The Patterson film subject appears virtually impossible to be a mime in a suit. 

 

Edited 5 hours ago by Patterson-Gimlin

[Frisco85132]

1 hour ago, Patterson-Gimlin said:

Interested in mysteries, monsters and cryptids. I  saw the PGF in the local cinema in 1967.

In recent years studied the available research progress. 

Wrote it off as fantasy. Then with more available evidence and having family members say they have observed the creatures. I am open to the creatures existence or at the least extinct creatures. 

Some Footprints seem to be unexplainable as fraud. 

The Patterson film subject appears virtually impossible to be a mime in a suit. 

 

My feeling about the P-G Film is that there is no way it could have been faked in the 60s.  The technology just didn't exist.  Then Jimmy Chilcutt, the police officer and latent print expert's opinion on the dermal ridges extant in some prints, plus the seminal work by Drs Krantz and Meldrum...I could take the case into court and get a positive finding with all that.  Plus...I saw one....so, there's my own eyewitness testimony to myself.

I appreciate your reply.  I really enjoy the discussion of the topic, even if there are differences of opinion.

[Doug]

I grew up on a country road where at least one sasquatch spent a lot of time at. We would hear screams, roars, samurai chatter and have strange encounters. During one such encounter my brother saw it. He said it looked like a man in a bear suit floating through the brush. By judging the brush and flora it was in, it had to be about 9 feet tall. I also found an out standing hunting area, especially for elk. Had all the classic type "B" encounters with my hunting partner seeing one during an encounter I was having. I had two encounters outside of those areas.

 

I don't care who believes or not and I really don't care if they are ever "discovered". I would like to see one, so I can be a knower, putting all shadow of doubt to rest no matter how slight that doubt is. If they are discovered, my reaction would be; oh, ok and move on. It would not be earth shattering to me. It would be more like finding a Jaguar in Northern California to me. Shocking to an extent and interesting.

[Frisco85132]

18 minutes ago, Doug said:

I grew up on a country road where at least one sasquatch spent a lot of time at. We would hear screams, roars, samurai chatter and have strange encounters. During one such encounter my brother saw it. He said it looked like a man in a bear suit floating through the brush. By judging the brush and flora it was in, it had to be about 9 feet tall. I also found an out standing hunting area, especially for elk. Had all the classic type "B" encounters with my hunting partner seeing one during an encounter I was having. I had two encounters outside of those areas.

 

I don't care who believes or not and I really don't care if they are ever "discovered". I would like to see one, so I can be a knower, putting all shadow of doubt to rest no matter how slight that doubt is. If they are discovered, my reaction would be; oh, ok and move on. It would not be earth shattering to me. It would be more like finding a Jaguar in Northern California to me. Shocking to an extent and interesting.

The one I saw never did the Samurai Chatter, but it made an OOOOMPH sound several times before I saw it.  It struck me as strange because the "MF" sound is not something a bear would make, and certainly not a deer.  I chalked it up to someone else in the area being a nuisance.  I would love to hear the Samurai Chatter.  Thanks for sharing.

 

[Huntster]

33 minutes ago, Doug said:

.......I don't care who believes or not and I really don't care if they are ever "discovered". I would like to see one........

 

^^^ This for me. I would love to observe one with binoculars or spotting scope for a minute or five. Hearing chatter or other vocalizations would be cool as well. I'm not sure that I'd like to sleep the night in a tent in the vicinity of a sighting, though. It's the same feeling I have about sleeping in a tent on Kodiak Island. I'm just not going to do it. 

[norseman]

1 minute ago, Huntster said:

 

^^^ This for me. I would love to observe one with binoculars or spotting scope for a minute or five. Hearing chatter or other vocalizations would be cool as well. I'm not sure that I'd like to sleep the night in a tent in the vicinity of a sighting, though. It's the same feeling I have about sleeping in a tent on Kodiak Island. I'm just not going to do it. 

Smart man

[Doug]

When I was kid, we would grab a sleeping bag, 22s, bologna  and bread and sleep all summer down there coming homing home for ta few days and then back down.

[Trogluddite]

Saw "Bigfoot" in the mid-70s in The Six Million Dollar Man and In Search Of; even did a creative writing story on Bigfoot (in 6th grade) at that time, and then completely forgot about the topic for 40 years.  Happened to have free time and available mental energy to become interested again in the early 2010s when Legend Meets Science and Finding Bigfoot came on the air.  Was bewildered that the basic question (is it all a hoax or do they exist) wasn't resolved after 40 years.  Just got pulled down the rabbit hole from there. 

 

I don't ever expect to encounter one; heck, I couldn't even encounter a moose or bear in two weeks in Alberta.  

 

Currently a skeptical believer after having compiled a lot of data that constantly fits into bell curves and doesn't fit into typical fraud patterns (except for a few clear frauds) and interviewing a witness or two.  I would probably put the actual number of "true" encounters at 25% of those reported by people to websites.  I hope to add something to the pile of evidence that is of use to others.  

[Madison5716]

 

Back in 2012, I exchanged whistles and knocks with something in the woods at my kids summer camp out in the Oregon woods.

 

In 2018, my old dog and I kept finding frosty, barefoot prints at a lake. It intrigued me mightily. I met up with Tobe Johnson, and he taught me a few things about the species.

 

For the next several years, NorthWind and I tramped all around the Oregon woods, eventually seeing two on FLIR on July 5, 2020 and one in a daylight, distant sighting in October 2020.

 

I've spent this summer honing my backpacking and kayaking skills in preparation for multi-day adventures soon, and have upgraded some equipment.

 

I used to care what people thought about my sightings, print finds, and audio, but now? Well, they exist and I've seen them. That's reality, and if someone can't acknowledge that or understand it, then that's on them; not my problem. They are free to believe what they wish, but I KNOW.

Edited 38 minutes ago by Madison5716