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

[Guest BFSleuth]

I would like to have a link to that documentary, or at least the name of the documentary to see if I can find it.

I did a google search about perceptual blindness and came up with this wonderful article in the Fortean Times:

http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/science/20/questioning_perceptual_blindness.html

Note that they debunk the idea that the Indians couldn't see the big ships. Some were simply overwhelmed with the size of the big ships, but did react when they saw the smaller boats with men landing on their shores.

While perceptual blindness may be possible in this example of not seeing a BF, I think the folks that have postulated that human perception is all about cataloging your environment into preconceived neat concepts. If you see a large low object that is about the color of tree bark it would be quick and easiest for your brain to simply say, "Tree Trunk" and move along with your eyes. How often do you really contemplate tree trunks when you are hiking? The forest is a complex perceptual environment, and human perception tends to focus rather than take in overwhelming stimuli easily.

[Guest]

I have no idea what the name of the doc was it was a long time ago. Just that one part always stuck out in my mind about the people who couldnt see the ships. Thanks for the link its good to clear up my facts.

[Guest Coonbo]

Very interesting reports BFSleuth and Mudder. And the observation about the effectiveness of camo is spot on, especially if the person sits still. Last time I was pronghorn hunting in WY, I was using my binos and glassing a small valley that had a pond in the bottom of it. I spotted a patch of blaze orange on the pond dam. I got to wondering what it was. I finally pulled my spotting scope out of my pack. I looked at it through the spotter and it still took me a little while to figure out that it was a hunter's cap. Then I noticed a faint darker line near it. I zoomed in a little and finally figured out that I was seeing a rifle barrel. Further study suddenly revealed the hunter sitting there on his butt, in plain sight, but he had on Army digital camo, and as long as he didn't move he was nearly invisible, even to my Swarovski binos and a Leupold spotting scope from only about 500 yds away.

Back in the early 90's, I was talking to an old farmer in his 70's down near Sunflower, Mississippi. He was the grandfather of a guy that I had gotten a sighting report from. He was telling me about the "hairy man" that used to live around there. He said that back in the late 30's he was working for a big landowner on one of the big plantations in that area. He and about 15 other folks were chopping cotton (using a hoe to manually chop out and kill the weeds that grow in cotton fields) and were taking a break under some shade trees in the southeast corner of a big cotton field. There was a creek that bordered the west side of the field and a strip of woods with blackberry briars that bordered the east side. He said it was a hot day in June or early July and the heat waves were shimmering over the field. He said that as he was looking north along the east edge of the field, the "hairy man" stepped out of a place where the blackberry briars were especially tall and thick, about 75 yards away. Before he could say anything, someone else sang out with "Look at that!" He said the "hairy man" immediately stopped and turned to look towards them, but that when he froze, he just disappeared into heat waves. He said they sat there looking towards where he was but couldn't see him. "Where'd he go?" somebody asked. Several of them got up with their hoes and started towards where they'd seen him last. He said that before they'd taken very many steps, suddenly the "hairy man" reappeared out of thin air, walking westward towards the creek.glancing back towards them periodically.

He said that a couple of folks in their group were down at the creek and suddenly they noticed them coming up out of the creek bed and trees at the southwest corner of the field. Somebody hollered at them to warn them about the hairy man coming sort of in that direction. But as they looked the hairy man stopped and disappeared again. He said that it never reappeared that day and when they got to that part of the field, they were very reluctant to hoe that area, but the "boss man" convinced them to go on and do it anyway. He also claimed that years later, in the late 40's or 50's he was on a tractor working a field in roughly the same area and had another encounter with the "hairy man" and it disappeared into heat waves just like before, and when he got close to it with the tractor, that it reappeared out of thin air and went running off.

I can see something disappearing into a mirage of heat waves, sorta like the ending of the Clint Eastwood movie "Pale Rider". But to then reappear out of thin air - I just don't know about that. These boogers sure raise a lot of questions. That's one of the things that keeps me going in my study of them - the more I learn about them, the more things I realize that I don't know about them.

Again, great topic BFSleuth.

Edited July 6, 2012 by Coonbo

[Guest]

BFSlueth

I'm pretty sure this is the account you were talking about with the fishermen who took the wrong "Y" in the trail. It happened in the Allagash in northern Maine. Pretty interesting to listen to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCL8Pz0EAzE

[Guest BFSleuth]

Thank you drodrigue, that is the sighting report I was thinking about. Quotes from the interview:

"... when it started to turn it flashed white and then went to black with a shiny coat. Almost like it was sprayed with oil..."

"When it started rocking I could see the hair on its arms slinging back and forth..."

It sounds like in this case I misremembered whether the creature seemed to disappear. He was talking about the shiny nature of the hair.

[Guest MikeG]

I've written before about various aspects of our inability to see what is straight in front of us.........being 5 or 10 yards from an elephant in thin bush in Africa, and no-one in the car saw it until it flapped its ears...........my daughter sitting just a few yards off a well-walked footpath in open woodland doing fieldwork observation of birds, wearing a bright red coat, and noting (because she was bored) how many people saw her (around 3%).........and me sitting at a waterhole in Namibia watching a group of 4 young male lions drinking after a kill then going to lie down separately in the shade, and "disappearing" to the extent that other cars would pull up, look around, think there was nothing to see, and drive off again. I knew where they were so I could still see them, just.

This isn't some crazy artifact of their coat, or weird light-bending phenomena.........it is a combination of our awful abilities in the wild, and animal camouflage developed over millenia.

Mike

[Guest]

Maybe the BF have a multi billion dollar defense budget and have come up with something like this.

[JDL]

Here's an excerpt from the Army Camouflage Manual http://rk19-bielefel...vival/FM/21.htm

And here is a more general manual http://www.scribd.co...ment-and-Decoys

I've always been taught that the first principle is to break up your outline. That way when you're stationary, the eye follows the wrong lines and cannot identify your silhouette.

At sea, against visual identification, a ship can be concealed at a distance in broad daylight if it simply aims a spotlight at the viewer. The eye picks up the glare in an environment that already has lots of glare, and the ship "disappears". Another simple technique is to position yourself in a spot where there is uneven light, under a tree, at the edge of light ad shadow, etc. Still another is to stay in a less well lit area. When we are in the open, in brighter light, we have trouble making out objects in areas with lower light, just a few feet back into the trees, for example.

When light strikes an object, some wavelengths are absorbed, some reflected, and some refracted (scattered). Look at a tree with leaves on it sometime and you'll see some of the effects that are described for bigfoot. You have many leaves, some shiny, others not, all oriented in different directions at different angles to both the light and to the observer. As you watch it, different features of the tree will fade in and out as the light "plays" on it. Watch the surface of a lake with even small waves, and you will see the same effect where features fade in and out.

Hair can also absorb, reflect, and refract light (scatter it). If the light itself is also uneven (from heatwaves, or from the play of light and shadow such as that created by moving leaves), then the effects of refraction are magnified. If a bigfoot intentionally or instinctively chooses paths that move through these areas, then that would help it when it simply wants to stop and go still.

An additional simple, but unusual, natual adaptation would be hair that can polarize light the way sunglasses do, causing wavelengths of light oriented in one direction relative to the hair to be blocked and others to not be. The hair would simply need a series of structural features that are oriented the same way along its length, or repeatedly around its circumference in rows along its length. Hair of this nature would create a clear outline when it is all lying straight in one direction, but if the bigfoot could slightly "fluff" its hair at will (imagine your hair folicles prickling or your hairs standing on end), causing its individual hairs to stand out from its skin at hundreds of different angles (sort of the way a porcupine does with its quills), then it could further break up the light that hits it and further confuse its outline.

Bottom line, it could be a combination of the environment, bigfoot's physical adaptations, bigfoot's behavioral adaptations, and our own limited perception.

I wonder. Have any of those who study possible bigfoot hairs analyzed them to determine how light behaves when it hits the hair?

Edited July 6, 2012 by JDL

[Rockape]

I've written before about various aspects of our inability to see what is straight in front of us.........being 5 or 10 yards from an elephant in thin bush in Africa, and no-one in the car saw it until it flapped its ears...........my daughter sitting just a few yards off a well-walked footpath in open woodland doing fieldwork observation of birds, wearing a bright red coat, and noting (because she was bored) how many people saw her (around 3%).........and me sitting at a waterhole in Namibia watching a group of 4 young male lions drinking after a kill then going to lie down separately in the shade, and "disappearing" to the extent that other cars would pull up, look around, think there was nothing to see, and drive off again. I knew where they were so I could still see them, just.

This isn't some crazy artifact of their coat, or weird light-bending phenomena.........it is a combination of our awful abilities in the wild, and animal camouflage developed over millenia.

Mike

Agreed. I remember a report where the person (who was quite close to a BF I believe) said they thought what they were looking at was a stump until it stood up and walked away, and only then realizing it had been there all along.

[Guest BFSleuth]

I wonder. Have any of those who study possible bigfoot hairs analyzed them to determine how light behaves when it hits the hair?

That is a most excellent question. The Maine sighting (video above) noted how shiny the hair looked in the moonlight, almost oily, with black hair turning to white when it moved. If light reflects off the hair or is absorbed into it then it may aid in how it can blend into its surrounding environment.

[Guest Coonbo]

Holy Moley, drodrigue!! But, I wonder if the soldier is running so fast that the camera just can't capture it well. We don't really know how ambient light there is when this was taken. Sorta like the "rods" phenomenon that turned out to be just bugs and birds because the video cameras were blurring the images of those relatively fast moving objects, making them look like something they weren't.

Edited July 6, 2012 by Coonbo

[Guest BFSleuth]

I agree, that Maine sighting report ranks right up there on the SPS (soiled pants scale). Even with his voice altered you can still hear the emotion as he recounts the story, especially the moment of the sighting.

Thank goodness the other BF whistled in time to make him stop before he basically would have walked right into the BF.

[Guest Mudder]

Somebody above pointed out about the science of human camo about breaking up the outline. This is true. Another science of camo design is to make the eye "see right through it." This is why most camo these days are designed to have darker colors layered on top of lighter colors. For example, a basic DIY gunstock camo pattern consists of a lighter color for the base, then a second darker color, then a third even darker color pattern layered over that. This makes the eye "see through it" making the person think he/she is seeing objects (the darker color) in front of a background (the lighter color). I should also point out that using black in a natural environment is not an intelligent idea because black doesn't exist in almost every aspect of nature. The fact that most reports say that BF is brown or grey would make BF even more camo than if BF was black. Millions of different colored brown and grey hairs on a BF could be almost the best camo ever, especially if the "outer" coat is darker than the inner coat, or if the hairs are different colors in different parts of BF's body.

One time, I shot a fox squirrel (one of many), and looked right at it where it fell out of the tree while reloading my gun to finish it off with a headshot. I walked the 30yrds up to where it fell out of the tree, and it was gone. It shocked me that I didn't see it walk off. Btw, I eventually found it 30 more yards away where it ended up.

Edited July 6, 2012 by Mudder

[Cotter]

Here's a little blurb about hysterical blindness.....

"Hysterical blindness is a psychological condition in which trauma from an injury or illness renders a patient unable to see temporarily. Medical professionals classify hysterical blindness as “conversion disorder,†a condition that causes you to show psychological stress in a physical manner. While there are many causes of this disorder, most of them point to some type of anxiety or other psychological trauma that triggers this temporary blindness. When determining whether you may be suffering from temporary loss of vision due to psychological distress, it can help to pinpoint some of the symptoms of hysterical blindness and explore some treatment options."

[Guest]

They can seem to disappear.. In one of Rusty Wilson's stories, a bush pilot lands in a super remote spot in Alaska and three golden sasaquatches approach the plane.....when they stop they disappear, then reappear as they walk again. Report after report says sometthing along these lines.

This is partly why people think they are "paranormal." But there is no paranormal, there is only science we don't know about yet. The mental messages, all that, I am not addressing that. I dunno about that stuff. Also in reports aplenty.

When you catch them unawares, i.e., in motion and.....you look away and then back, they hop to a new spot and freeze, and seem to have vanished. Bet FLIR could find them.

I think it's some kind of optical/light camouflage kind of thing. After that, I defer to the physicists and shrinks.

You cannot see them when they are right there.

For some reason in videos you can see them better, but in photos, better yet....it catches them in one spot and you can study it. And in the photos they can be made out even if they are "invisible." Sometimes, anyway. A shimmer, a blob, a wavy blurry spot. Think about it: why would a spot be blurry? Why would there be a lot of mist where there really was none? . (This is how they might photograph.). And look where you'd hide if you were gonna hide

If you increase the photo color saturation to compensate for the wash out you'll get, fiddle with the contrast and brightness, little at a time, to see if you can bring them out of hiding.

You are not adding anything, just bringing out what is there.

Edited July 7, 2012 by Kings Canyon