Bigfoot Research – Still No Evidence, But Plenty Of Excuses To Explain Why There’S No Evidence

[dmaker]

^^ And just to add to Drew's comments. Once one reaches that conclusion, Oh I saw a Bigfoot, then the mind could easily start filling in some details that were not even there. If the mind call add a red barn where there was no barn at all, it can't add some details to make the memory of an event more Bigfoot like?

Edited February 11, 2013 by dmaker

[WSA]

Sure, I agree it could explain some of the sightings, although my "gut" tells me it is less than 10%. I think your explanation is logical only up to a certain point though, which is: When the ridicule and disapprobation a witness receives in their community by going public exceeds the de minimus (not to mention, non-public) consequence of admitting they are hallucinating. In other words: Immediately.

I also note a disproportionate number of these dissociative types live in S. Il, GA, WA and FL. I mean, what's up with that?

But we've highlighted here exactly why you'd want to know as much as possible about the witness making the report. The BFRO investigators do a journeyman's job of the f/u, but I always see statements just begging for additional questions. Guess that will be the state of things unless/until resources are allocated to do that. Now, when somebody conducts a study of reported BF witnesses and finds some correlative and relevant personality and/or organic disorder shared amongst them? Well, I'll jump on that. So far, all we have are the descriptions, and whatever we can glean from them.

^^ And just to add to Drew's comments. Once one reaches that conclusion, Oh I saw a Bigfoot, then the mind could easily start filling in some details that were not even there. If the mind call add a red barn where there was no barn at all, it can't add some details to make the memory of an event more Bigfoot like?

Dmaker, we're obviously "BF conscious", wouldn't you say? Ever even come close to hallucinating something that looked like a BF with a level of detail like you find in these reports? Or has anyone you know personally? Me neither. I loved dinosaurs as a kid too. Would have loved for one of those to show up while I was playing in the woods at dusk....no such luck. I think I'm pretty typical. When thousand of people are "hallucinating" identical details across time and distance, we have a special word for that. It is called "reality."

Edited February 11, 2013 by WSA

[Drew]

When you make a Bigfoot report, you don't people to think you are wasting their time, the report gets embellished.

Instead of "I heard something crunching through the leaves", You say "I heard something BIG crunching through the leaves, and it broke a stick"

When an investigator comes out to visit the site, instead of saying "it broke a stick", you say "It broke a stick about this big, I know because I came out here the next day and broke some until it sounded the same", you don't want them to think you are wasting their time. It is human nature.

When the investigator asks: "Do you remember any sort of smell?", you might say "Yeah, now that you mention it, I think I did" It is not really lying, you convince yourself you did smell something funny, and just forgot about it. You think those people that have the Ghost Hunters out to their house aren't embellishing a little bit so they get on the TV?, same with the Finding Bigfoot crew, they go to those town halls and those people ALL know that they have to nail their story to get on the TV.

[dmaker]

@WSA, I disagree, obviously. I believe there to be some nugget of shared experience that results in your identical details. Even the case you linked today. The eyewitness jumps to the conclusion of Bigfoot. Or at least that is the way the report appears to me. The eyewitness reports "..this figure ( Bigfoot) stood up..." He didn't report "...this figure (I don't know WTF it was) stood up.." This would indicate to me that he was not a Bigfoot neophyte. He had had some exposure to this shared myth in the past. Maybe, like a lot of us here, it was the PGF over laid with Leonard Nemoys voice. Or the rather scary ( at least for me as a kid) Legend of Boggy Creek. Either way I believe he saw something he could not immediately classify and his mind pulled in details from his past and filled in the rest.

Think of all the people that saw JAWS when they were young. Suddenly an entire nation is afraid to go swimming. Even in fresh water in a lot of cases. And when they do every little whitecap, shadow, rock, or log is a man eating shark. It is not natural for our minds to leap to that conclusion or to turn a perfectly normal object into something extraordinary. But we'll do it when we're primed by something noteworthy in our past, and we'll do it if we suffer from some of the sub-clinical tendencies mentioned in the psychology study. I am sorry, but just because there are so many details in common in the reports, does not ( for me) create a compelling reason to think that it's an animal at the root of it and not some shared experience via media, or story telling, etc, coupled with a completely normal case of an undiagnosed, sub-clinical dissociation or ADHD.

Edited February 11, 2013 by dmaker

[WSA]

I'd prefer to leave the whole FB dog-***-pony show out of it, if you don't mind, but yeah, obviously that gives motivation to some.

Did you also see the report/photos posted today to BFRO of very definite snow tracks found by linemen? Apparently, these guys manifested these while embellishing their story, those whacky mad-caps! Jeez, some people, eh?

[Drew]

Older cousins telling you about Bigfoot in the woods when you were 7 years old?

That is how I got it in my head.

[WSA]

Dmaker....

Hey, here's another possible explanation: He knows about BF because his neighbors, fellow deer hunters, church members and some esteemed members of the local Ruritan's have been consistently reporting and sharing information about them in the area for decades. Yeah, I know, beggars the imagination, doesn' it? Silly rubes. :-)

[dmaker]

^^ WSA, Well shared myths are by their very nature, shared are they not?

[WSA]

Ummm....sure. Here's another kind of sharing.

In the mid-1980's, I found myself living on a remote mountain ridge in VA. Several locals I came into contact with "shared" the "myth" of a cougar in the vicinity. I make no point of whether this cougar might have been an introduced one, a migratory cat from the West or a true remnant of the E. mountain lion population believed to have been exterminated back in the 19th century. My point is only the story was shared, by several locals, with me, of something everyone should have "known" couldn't exist. Being an impressionable young scamp, I didn't think to insist they were only embellishing a sighting of a house cat, and set out to see for myself. I heard a panther scream near my cabin one very dark night...and, fool that I was, I didn't think to realize I was only exaggerating a tree frog's croak in my gullible mind. Later, when I and another visitor both saw the cat we should have had the sophistication to realize we were suffering from hallucinations brought on by fatigue or inhaling swamp gas. Oh well, live and learn, right? I feel so much better having confessed to this youthful indiscretion..

Edited February 11, 2013 by WSA

[norseman]

Older cousins telling you about Bigfoot in the woods when you were 7 years old?

That is how I got it in my head.

I got it into my head when I was a bit older following my father into the woods to harvest a x mas tree for my mother.

[dmaker]

^^ @WSA, Not sure what your story was supposed to invoke in me, but it didn't work. I'm not impressed with stories of elusive cougars. I live in Ontario. we were not supposed to have them for the longest time too. I grew up with stories of them too, just a few miles outside my home town, out on the Six Nations Reserve. I didn't dismiss the stories. They were exciting, and more importantly dealt with a real animal, so it's no where near the stretch of imagination that a Bigfoot is. I could go to a zoo and see a real, live cougar after all. Well guess what? They have now confirmed cougars in South Western Ontario with an actual cougar body. Go figure. It was shot and killed in Muskoka after it mauled a dog. Now where's that Bigfoot body again?...oh yeah, Rick Dyer has it

Edited February 12, 2013 by dmaker

[norseman]

When you make a Bigfoot report, you don't people to think you are wasting their time, the report gets embellished.

Instead of "I heard something crunching through the leaves", You say "I heard something BIG crunching through the leaves, and it broke a stick"

When an investigator comes out to visit the site, instead of saying "it broke a stick", you say "It broke a stick about this big, I know because I came out here the next day and broke some until it sounded the same", you don't want them to think you are wasting their time. It is human nature.

When the investigator asks: "Do you remember any sort of smell?", you might say "Yeah, now that you mention it, I think I did" It is not really lying, you convince yourself you did smell something funny, and just forgot about it. You think those people that have the Ghost Hunters out to their house aren't embellishing a little bit so they get on the TV?, same with the Finding Bigfoot crew, they go to those town halls and those people ALL know that they have to nail their story to get on the TV.

Agreed. People are grand standing to be noticed...........I get that.

But it's still dishonesty,.........they ARE lying.

Yanno I went through a RECON school as a civilian.......the major theme of the school was to report EXACTLY what you see. If you don't know? YOU DON'T KNOW.

S-Size

A-Activity

L-Location

U-Unit

T-Time

E-Equipment

Higher/higher isn't asking your freakin opinion or speculation...........you report what you observe, nothing more, nothing less.

[Guest LarryP]

Correction, a select few modern Native Americans exposed to the Bigfoot culture.

Proof?

You just can't make blanket statements like they are fact without presenting very specific proof of same.

Author Peter Matthiessen interviewed hundreds of Native Americans for decades doing research for his books long before there was a "Bigfoot culture" and all of them described the same creature or being.

This quote nails it.

"They exist in another dimension from us, but can appear in this dimension whenever they have a reason to. See, it's like there are many levels, many dimensions. When your time in this one is finished, we move on to the next, but the Big Man can go between. The Big Man comes from God. He's our big brother, kind of looks out for us. Two years ago, we were going downhill, really self-destructive. We needed a sign to put us back on track, and that's why the Big Man appeared".

- Ray Owen, son of a Dakota spiritual leader from Prairie Island Reservation in Minnesota, to a reporter from the Red Wing Republican Eagle:

[dmaker]

^^ And you have proof of this dimension hopping Bigfoot?

[Guest]

Yep, clearly they aren't talking about physical beings.