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

[Guest DWA]

So if at least some scientists have looked at bigfoot evidence, that would negate your argument that scientists aren't or won't look at bigfoot evidence.

Could it be the evidence isn't as impressive as you think?

RayG

How will we know the answer to that question? Wait until science confirms it by finding the remains of the last one?

And no, it didn't negate my argument, which has always been pretty much as I laid it out there. When something is declared "unlikely" or "a 5% chance" or "we would have to have [found fossils; shot one; found a skeleton; hit one with a car; confirmed it; etc.] by now," that is looking the way I might expect the mailman to do it, but not the way I'd expect a scientist to do it.

Edited December 12, 2012 by DWA

[Drew]

Yes DWA,

Scientists don't look at BF evidence

Scientists that DO look at BF evidence are ridiculed

Nobody would hoax WAY OUT HERE

Bigfoots can sense cameras, and guns, but don't have a problem with Mobile homes and Casino dumpsters

They don't get hit by trucks, but they lay down in roads and let a truck drive around them

We know all those, but they are not flying anymore.

[Guest DWA]

Sorry, dude. Yours are the excuses. Just the way the cookie crumbles.

OK. Level with me. When did your True Belief in Patty start to go south on you?

Will say this, though: that 'graphic' does illustrate the quality of the hoaxes, rather well. And at least you agree with me that nobody would get that far out into the woods to do that. Twelve-step program, man.

Edited December 12, 2012 by DWA

[Guest]

And it couldn't have anything to do with the information you were sharing with me. Oh, OK.

It could, but I can't tell because your responses are garbled messes of mangled hubris that as far as I can tell are based on uncritical acceptance of anecdotal accounts and an unhealthy attachment to anything Bindernagel has said (as opposed to something Bindernagel has done, because that supported my point).

A conviction that something isn't real, when the evidence says otherwise, and a continued refusal to....well, respond to the points I make (he says again), is likely to trigger a response that might be suboptimal.

Make one clear point at a time and I'll be happy to respond to it. As you can see, I've been doing that with others in this thread.

Recall that this exchange began with me responding to your point that science won't address bigfoot. I responded and provided evidence that indicates that many mainstream scientists have addressed that evidence. (RayG has just one-upped me in that regard.) You ignored that evidence, made a bunch of lame excuses to dismiss it (check out the "No True Scotsman" fallacy when get a chance), accused me several times of being no good at my job, devoid of imagination, etc., and generally threw a protracted hissy-fit.

I don't think.

[Guest DWA]

Haha.

Your characterization of my position on the anecdotal evidence and Bindernagel is...well, no, let me say what someone's real position on it is:

uncritical rejection of anecdotal accounts because of a preconceived conclusion and an unhealthy rejection of anything Bindernagel (or any proponent scientist) has said.

if I'm not right, I'm as accurate as you are, and I've given far more evidence for my stance than you have for yours.

[Guest RayG]

How will we know the answer to that question?

We already have our answer. Like it or not, the evidence either turns out to be from other sources, such as hair samples that turn out to be from presently classified/cataloged animals, or is such that it's next to useless, like tracks that can't be matched to any foot, or another anecdotal account. As they say, the plural of anecdote is not data.

Wait until science confirms it by finding the remains of the last one?

I've been waiting over 40 years and still no bigfoot. Given the evidence presented so far, I suspect that when I die sasquatch will still be unproven.

And no, it didn't negate my argument, which has always been pretty much as I laid it out there. When something is declared "unlikely" or "a 5% chance" or "we would have to have [found fossils; shot one; found a skeleton; hit one with a car; confirmed it; etc.] by now," that is looking the way I might expect the mailman to do it, but not the way I'd expect a scientist to do it.

Do you have a plan for how and where these scientists are to do this, given the poor evidence presented so far?

RayG

[Guest]

Sorry if you think I'm arrogant. I'm not changing. And I've been responding to ignorance posing as arrogance for way too long (don't mentiion the words "Ben Radford" around me) to tone down now.

Why do I see no inkling of your professed positivity in one of the posts you've put up before that last one? Like Oscar, I do judge books by their covers.

The evidence says: Mainstream science is the very place to start making it OK for people to tell people they actually saw an animal that actually exists.

Dude, you make this thread worth reading!

[Guest DWA]

We already have our answer. Like it or not, the evidence either turns out to be from other sources, such as hair samples that turn out to be from presently classified/cataloged animals, or is such that it's next to useless, like tracks that can't be matched to any foot, or another anecdotal account. As they say, the plural of anecdote is not data.

Maybe not, but when it behaves like data, then it just might be data. It's certainly not "not evidence." In a courtroom one would follow it to a conclusion; that should be done here too.

I've been waiting over 40 years and still no bigfoot. Given the evidence presented so far, I suspect that when I die sasquatch will still be unproven.

At the current pace that's a good bet, although you might be surprised (depending of course on how old you are).

Do you have a plan for how and where these scientists are to do this, given the poor evidence presented so far?

RayG

Actually, read the Operation Persistence thread. The TBRC is doing it. I'd been an advocate of their approach for some time before they started it. Worked for Jane Goodall.

[Guest SquatchinNY]

-

(edited for a glitch that made one big textberg)

Plussed for the sole reason of the word "textberg", lol.

[Guest DWA]

I'm just gonna cherrypick back.

If the bigfoot data in your sample come from something like sightings reports in the BFRO database, then it would be impossible to fail to get a correlation. You'd see a similar correlation with rainfall and porcupines, red-backed salamanders, and black-throated gray warblers: rainfall correlates with trees, so species that occur in forests - including mythical species generally associated with forests - will correlate with rainfall.

This shows how someone who presumes the animal isn't real treats evidence. How in the heck would you do such an analysis if the data in your sample were not from sighting databases? Know why the correlation works with all those animals? They live in the same places. It would be impossible to fail to get a correlation because - a curious person might think - we see the animals where they are, not where lots of us are. That you get the correlation with sasquatch shows that you can expect them where you expect other forest-dwelling animals, in forests. If the data were bogus the reports would come from where you see the most people. Greater people concentration = greater liar concentration, simple as that. Unless of course all the liars were wildlife biologists. Or - as John Green puts it - people's imaginations just dry up where there's 17 inches or less of annual rainfall.

Read up, pro bono: http://texasbigfoot.com/index.php/about-bigfoot/articles/67-ecological-patterns

Point 1: We can cherry pick a species for which the fossil record is poor and try to make the connection that the fossil record for bigfoot would be poorer still. I prefer to think about it more objectively and consider contemporaries of bigfoots in time and space that might have occurred in similar population densities and been about the same size. When I do that, the giant short-faced bear pops out as an excellent proxy. We have fossils of short-faced bears from more than 100 different locations in North America.

Open and shut? No. Damning? Heck yeah.

Damning? Try irrelevant. We have been here before, numerous times. Looking in rocks for things that are not there is not the way to deal with a large, consistent body of evidence for something that lives now. Where are all the lesser pandas in Tennessee? Or the giant pandas in Spain? (Google.) To presume that things get fossilized at the same rates or that if we had this we'd have that presumes...well, one heck of a lot of faith in a pretty durn random process, which is what fossilization is. Why haven't we found all the dinosaurs? Right.

And this says nothing at all about what is lying, uncatalogued, in museum collections; or what might be if somebody hadn't said: listen to me, that's a cow, and you are going to make those bones disappear. Got it? Conspiracy theory? Hah, that's simple I-don't-want-to-deal-with-what-makes-me-uncomfortable, for which, of course, we have no evidence at all in all of human history, suuuuuure.

Point 2. While the fossil record of humans might be small in terms of its total biomass (geo-mass?), the archaeological record of humans is enormous. Bigfoot is supposed to still be here. Thus it's not just its absense from the fossil record that is a serious problem for bigfooters, its also the absence of bigfoot material in more recent strata. For example, there are no bigfoot teeth on some brave's ceremonial regalia, no bigfoot scalp among the vast amount of Native American, First Nations, or any other aboriginal people's artifacts. That alone is an enormous gaping hole in bigfootery.

Might some cultures have had taboos about trading in bigfoot artifacts? Maybe, but I'd bet there's be others for whom such items would've been highly prized and briskly traded.

Remember, the first people to colonize North America seem to have hunted mammoths to extinction using Stone Age technology. Bagging a bigfoot is a walk in the park to people who eat elephants by hunting them at arm's reach.

Again, irrelevant. There could be any one of a number of reasons bigfoot trophies didn't survive. Or were not traded, sought, or collected. Once again, I don't care what the fossil record, the archaeological record, or Scientific American says about something that appears to be here now. (Done that panda research yet?)

And anyone who thinks that bagging a bigfoot is somehow easier than a mammoth ...well, needs to tell me how they came to that conclusion. What's, you know, your evidence? You might want to consider that the latter would just keep on grazing...and the former might track you back home and 'graze' on you and your buddies. Do we know? No we don't. About any of it. So to presume anything - much less call it 'damning' - simply reveals, if not insufficient reading, insufficient thought about what one has read.

I already went through this with JREFer's, but sightings and footprints are evidence. Maybe not good evidence, but still evidence.

Sightings and footprints are outstanding evidence when they have the breadth and depth they do for sasquatch. As Meldrum's ichnotaxonomy paper makes clear. Krantz, for his part, believed that the trackway evidence from the PNW alone was tantamount to proof, even, as he put it, if not one of the sightings had ever occurred. Napier was with Krantz. Swindler became a proponent on the strength of the Skookum Cast alone.

Proof? No. Not yet. But more than pretext to search for something that appears to be there? Oh yes.

(Take a scientist who has studied it over anyone who hasn't, every time.)

The simple fact is that the OP (and Drew, and anyone else who makes these claims) is wrong.

Every time these "why isn't there [evidence type x] questions come up it comes back to the same tired old Skeptic trick:

1. Claim "no evidence".

2. Dismiss/ignore every proffered piece of evidence.

3. Repeat claim of "no evidence"

I would call it "high-school debating", but that would be an insult to high-school debaters. No one who has even a rudimentary knowledge of logic and/or debating falls for this chorus of psuedo-skepticism.

*ETA* The thing about cameras, surveys, etc is particularly annoying, but understandable in that the average person's knowledge of such capabilities by government agencies is "informed" by spy movies and police proceedurals where just a few clicks of the mouse gets every cruicial piece of evidence right to hand in a matter of a few seconds.

I just had to re-post one of the best posts on this thread.

Yeah, I did notice that phrase, "...especially in light of no other scientific literature suggesting the existance of a breeding population of cougar in Michigan" as being a familiar refrain. This speaks to the issue of science progressing only if the majority of the science community agrees on an issue, with somewhat circular reasoning that says if nobody else has observed this before then it must follow that the new observation has to be wrong.... and we thought we had it tough only in the world of BF?

....and another really good one.

I would think that if 1/100th the money spent to find the Higgs Boson were spent on BF research we might already have solved this mystery 20 years ago. While the OP does make a point that as yet we don't have proof, the fact is we have substantial evidence that ought to be of interest to open minded scientists to put some serious research effort into conclusively establishing the new species. Lack of effort from the science community and lack of major funding are issues that have been hindering the effort.

How many amateur self taught researcher hobbiests were involved with the Higgs Boson effort in the face of overwhelming scientific inertia? None that I know of, it was the purview of established scientists and enough funding from governments to pay of the national debt of small nations. While the field of BF research has been the purview of weekend warriors whose day jobs are less ... recognized, shall we say?

...and another. Just mining gold for you, no thanks needed.

Edited December 14, 2012 by DWA

[Guest RayG]

Maybe not, but when it behaves like data, then it just might be data. It's certainly not "not evidence." In a courtroom one would follow it to a conclusion; that should be done here too.

Thankfully scientific evidence is graded higher than courtroom evidence.

At the current pace that's a good bet, although you might be surprised (depending of course on how old you are).

I'm closer to 60 than 50, and been following the mystery since I was about 15. About the only thing that surprises me anymore are some of the outlandish claims that get bandied about. I can't think of a single event, sliver of evidence, or snippet of 'breaking news' that has brought us any closer to the discovery/classification of this elusive animal that has supposedly been seen or reported thousands upon thousands of times.

Actually, read the Operation Persistence thread. The TBRC is doing it. I'd been an advocate of their approach for some time before they started it. Worked for Jane Goodall.

Jane Goodall got results like this...

Operation Persistence, not so much.

RayG

[xspider1]

I can't think of a single event, sliver of evidence, or snippet of 'breaking news' that has brought us any closer to the discovery/classification of this elusive animal that has supposedly been seen or reported thousands upon thousands of times.

And, at the same time, have you seen a sliver of evidence or an event to support a Scientific conclusion that every single "Bigfoot event" is bunk?? There's just no way that's possible. It's unfortunate that, to date, Science has been unable to prove Bigfoot but, that kind of thing happens all the time.

[Guest]

Damning? Try irrelevant. We have been here before, numerous times. Looking in rocks for things that are not there is not the way to deal with a large, consistent body of evidence for something that lives now. Where are all the lesser pandas in Tennessee? Or the giant pandas in Spain? (Google.) To presume that things get fossilized at the same rates or that if we had this we'd have that presumes...well, one heck of a lot of faith in a pretty durn random process, which is what fossilization is. Why haven't we found all the dinosaurs? Right.

It is very relevent. We have bears, canids, feilds, deer, pronghorn and bison in North America and we find fossils of them. Yet we don't find any fossils of non-human bipedal apes. We also find fossils of animals that are now extinct but of course that's another fact that you pull out of a hat in hopes that it proves your point when it doesn't.

Its also easy to poke at the "randomness" of fossilization but given the number of individual animals that lived its not surprising the number of fossils we get of animals of different types.

So we haven't found every single dinosaur. Therefore we shouldn't expect to find any bipedal ape fossils in NA. Okay. How deep is that hat.

And this says nothing at all about what is lying, uncatalogued, in museum collections; or what might be if somebody hadn't said: listen to me, that's a cow, and you are going to make those bones disappear. Got it? Conspiracy theory? Hah, that's simple I-don't-want-to-deal-with-what-makes-me-uncomfortable, for which, of course, we have no evidence at all in all of human history, suuuuuure.

No, its a simple I-don't-want-to-deal-with-unsupported-stories-that-are-completely-made-up-in-an-attempt-to-explain-away-an-inconvenience.

And, at the same time, have you seen a sliver of evidence or an event to support a Scientific conclusion that every single "Bigfoot event" is bunk?? There's just no way that's possible. It's unfortunate that, to date, Science has been unable to prove Bigfoot but, that kind of thing happens all the time.

Grasping at straws aren't you?

Edited December 14, 2012 by Jerrymanderer

[Guest]

That you get the correlation with sasquatch shows that you can expect them where you expect other forest-dwelling animals, in forests. If the data were bogus the reports would come from where you see the most people. Greater people concentration = greater liar concentration, simple as that.

Once again, folklore says bigfoot lives in forests, so that's where the reports come from.

Edited December 14, 2012 by Jerrymanderer

[Guest Cervelo]

Saskeptic,

Thanks for making sense it is very refreshing!

I admire you patience and am embarrassed for those that refuse your attempt to educate them.

Your students are very lucky indeed!