Unique Sighting Report - Ability Of Bf To Hide In Plain Sight

[Guest]

BFS,

I get the notion of this thread and whole-hearted agree with it: If you perceive something to be part of the landscape say a stump (at relative distance), it will look like a stump if it fits your preconceived notion of what a stump should look like. Not attempting to derail this thread, but there’s a huge problem with this guys story. He claims to have sighted the bigfoot @ 250 yards and observed it for 45 minutes. He claims that it filled half the field of view of the scope. Even if he had the glass cranked all the way to 9, his bigfoot would need to be a minimum of about 25 feet tall and 10 feet wide for his description of how big it appeared through the glass to be remotely accurate. Just to be as half as tall as the field of view at 9 power at that range, his ninja squatch is going to need to be around 14-17 feet tall. Yet he estimates it to be 8 feet tall? Those numbers simply do not compute. In this case it wasn’t like those estimates were made in haste on a fleeting encounter. He’s claiming 45 minutes.

I’ll buy someone realistically describing an 8 foot tall bigfoot as “dwarfing†an elk, even an adult Roosevelt. But something that is 8’ tall or even 10’ tall is simply not remotely going to fill anything but a small percentage of the FOV @ 9X and 250 yards. His own words are self-contradictory.

I can’t buy this Colonel’s story as anything but pure bunk and I really don’t think this account adds credibility of bigfoot’s reputed ninja-like ability to “hide in plain sight†at distances as short as 15 feet.

Field of view on a 32 mm 3x9 scope(most popular tube size on standard variable power scopes of the time) at 250 yards would be around 30ft on 9 power (give or take on scope brands). 15 ft would fill half the scope, a little exaggeration by witness or investigator, or if the investigator missed some details of the interview (ex: it almost filled half the scope) just leave out "almost" in the report and would make a difference, or if it was closer than 250 yds, would also make a difference.

The other hunters being 15 feet away could be off by the witness also, it's hard to judge distances while viewing something under such a hi magnification.

You make a good point, but i don't think it's enough to deep six the whole story.

Edited July 4, 2012 by zigoapex

[Painthorse]

I find it difficult to believe that a hunter wouldn't notice an object with hair if he looked right at it and it was only 15 feet away. That's really close and at that distance hair would stick out like a sore thumb.

t.

Terry, do you have a friend that owns any cammo? If you do, go into the woods with him and tell him to find a spot where he blends in with the trees and brush and to stand still. See how quickly you can spot him.

Now the difference with what I wrote above is that you would actually know someone was there, it's not exactly the same as just walking through the woods and possibly walking right past one of these animals.

[JDL]

I find it difficult to believe that a hunter wouldn't notice an object with hair if he looked right at it and it was only 15 feet away. That's really close and at that distance hair would stick out like a sore thumb.

t.

The mind recognizes patterns. A bigfoot pretending to be a stump, tree, haystack, or something else is not part of the pattern recognition database most of us carry around in our heads. So when our mind encounters an unknown pattern it automatically defaults to the thing it looks like most. This is all subconscious. It takes conscious effort to overcome this conditioning and recognize something out of place, or reconditioning to establish new subconscious patterns.

When people say, "All of a sudden we realized the woods were completely silent", it's because they were the last living things in the woods to catch on to the fact that there was an imminent threat. The more urban we get as a species, the less woods sense we have as a species.

Edited July 4, 2012 by JDL

[Sunflower]

I know for a fact that the little ones eat cottonwood tree leaves. And as far as seeing them even in the daylight, that could be difficult. Their hair has a strange quality, almost transluescent, and then factor in the coloring. Some are solid colors but others have a variance like a mottled look.

[Guest BFSleuth]

This one was observed doing very similar behaviour to the one in WA that this initial thread is about, very similar.

http://www.bfro.net/...rt.asp?id=23171

I could add a dozen plus reports of this behaviour, Sasquatches hiding behind Tree's, big Tree's.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply BobbyO, and thank you for the link to that sighting report. I'm encouraging anyone that has sighting reports to provide links in this thread so we can explore the phenomenon.

Your sighting report link made me think of a report I'd read some time ago of a sighting in moonlight. The witness said that the hair had an iridescent quality to it, changing according to how the creature changed position. I can't find that report right now and perhaps someone else can find the link. I did find this report that mentions the iridescent quality (observed in daylight):

http://www.bfro.net/GDB/show_report.asp?id=21951

[Guest]

I have seen some great you tube video's of stumps that where there, then not there, or some interesting video's of them hiding motionless.

[salubrious]

Humans have the ability to hide in plain sight too. Tom Brown Jr. teaches the technique in his primitive survival skills classes. But many hunters can tell you one of the ways to clue your game that you are there is to look straight at them....

[Guest Coonbo]

BFS, Just to be as half as tall as the field of view at 9 power at that range, his ninja squatch is going to need to be around 14-17 feet tall. Yet he estimates it to be 8 feet tall? Those numbers simply do not compute. In this case it wasn’t like those estimates were made in haste on a fleeting encounter. He’s claiming 45 minutes.

willinyc: Your numbers are correct in that the BF would need to be 14 to 17 feet tall to fill half the vertical field of view (FOV) at 250 yards. However, I wouldn't toss the report out on a technicality like that without further analysis. His estimation that the BF appeared through the scope to be around 40 to 50 yds away is also in error. In actuality, if at 250 yds at 9 power, it would have appeared to only be about 28 to 30yds away, depending on brand of scope. BUT, you gotta cut the guy some slack in his estimation. The booger was walking in brush, and he didn't have a rangefinder. IF the booger was in a clear area, AND standing upright AND not moving, AND you could easily see his feet and head, AND you had a good steady rest for your rifle AND could easily bracket the booger with your crosshairs at 9x; to fill half the vertical FOV an 8 ft tall booger would be at around 150 yards. In addition, most folks badly UNDERestimate range in the field. I know this for a fact from training and from the fact that I used to run a survey crew right after I got out of college. Without the aid of good reference points, untrained folks usually underestimate ranges by 30 to 50%. This guy's error was right at 40%. Smack in the middle of the expected range of error for a field estimation. Also, if at 150 yds., at 9x the booger would have appeared to his eye to be at 16 to 18 yds. That's only about 50 feet or so and it would have looked BIG to him. Put yourself in his position. Have you ever tried to accurately bracket an animal in a scope's.crosshairs from a field rest (or NO rest... we don't know what kind of rest he had)? it's very often quite difficult.

Edited July 4, 2012 by Coonbo

[Guest]

I liked this:

“The public in general, and the scientific community more importantly, believe there can’t be any such thing,†says John Green, a retired British Columbia newspaper publisher who has researched Sasquatch for a half-century. “Some call themselves skeptics. How can you be a skeptic when you’re just trumpeting what everybody believes? They’re not skeptics. Skeptics are people like me who don’t accept what everybody believes.â€

[Rockape]

He claims that it filled half the field of view of the scope.

Actually he said "about half the scope".

[JDL]

Okay, who took all the nits?

[Guest Coonbo]

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming:

BFSleuth: This hiding in plain sight is a subject that has dogged, bothered, and intrigued me for years, because I'm convinced that they've done it to me and I knew they were there, really close, but just couldn't find them. Twice they've done it to me and I DID finally find them and they were unbelievably close.

Several times when I've felt that I was really close to them, I've smelled a strong, sick-sweet smell, and there were no flowering plants in the area, no rotten or decomposing fruit, absolutely nothing that I could find that could account for the smell. A sort of overpowering flower-like smell. Absolutely NOT the super strong, rotting meat, sewage, urine, musky, skunk smell that they emit at other times. Other researchers I've worked with have experienced the same thing. When it's happened, it's usually been late spring or summer, which made me look even harder for the source of the smell, as well as the BF I suspected was there.

Then I found a report somewhere, maybe on BFRO, where a couple were camping and a BF was snooping around in their camp. They were hunkered in their tent in their sleeping bags and IIRC, the BF came up, crouched down and was looking in through the mosquito net window, just inches from their heads. They could smell its breath and it was a strong sick-sweet smell.

That makes me think that at least some of the times we've smelled that smell we were close enough to the booger that we were smelling its breath. I know.... sounds pretty far fetched. However, on one of those instances when I DID finally find the booger, just seconds before, I got a strong whiff of that sick-sweet smell.

If any of you have ever experienced something like this in the field I'd like to hear about it.

[Guest thermalman]

That's the beauty of a thermal camera. It would detect the different temperature variances, thus exposing the squatch.

[Guest Coonbo]

thermalman; You're right. I've seen them reveal hidden boogers that we wouldn't have otherwise seen. But I'm not sure they're really that useful up close. It definitely changed our tactics when we used one. It allowed us to spot the boogers from a distance and then to move towards them and other times it allowed us to spot them moving in towards us. However, they stopped further out than was usual for that area. I'm pretty sure they saw the thermal camera and were wary of it.

The best success we had with it was at a location where we were able to spot one moving into a small grove of trees where there was a low spot overgrown with honeysuckle and other vegetation. The booger buried itself up in the honeysuckle but we could still see it with the thermal imaging. We were able to ease in within 50 feet or so of it, but still couldn't see it even with flashlights. But at about that range the danged thing started hissing at us. The only time I've ever seen that. When we tried to ease closer, it definitely let us know we were close enough.

[Guest MikeG]

Coonbo.

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Mike