Bigfoot Research--Still No Evidence (Continued)

[Guest Tontar]

Who's basing belief on anything? I want to know what's causing the evidence. And no one here can compete with what Meldrum, NAWAC and the rest of the scientific proponents are doing confronting the evidence. So, my bet's on them, because they are the only ones making a bettable proposition.

Sorry, I honestly don't believe you. You do not want to know what's causing the evidence, because if you did, you'd find the answer in seconds. People are making the evidence. They always have been. It's really that simple. It's not at all complicated. People manufacture the myth of bigfoot, while others buy into that product and service with their suspended disbelief.

Dr. Meldrum has bought into it as well, hook, line and sinker. The fact that he maintains that a known set of hoaxed tracks are authentic, and even sells them, seems to me to be clear evidence that he has suspended a good deal of critical thinking to continue the myth. And with all these supposed scientific proponents, what are they coming up with? Noting tangible at all. More field trips, research, new ways to play with new toys in the woods, and still no bigfoot evidence that is reasonable. It's a hobby, a fun time. Like the SCA folks role playing medieval world on their weekends. It's fun, harmless, and a kind of fantasy escape. Such is bigfoot research. Researching something that will never be found. A good time in the woods is worth it. But is it real science? Of course not, since the research is built upon a foundation of an animal that does not exist. so coming up with new tools to look for something that has never existed is just fun and games.

[Guest DWA]

^^^Serious deficiency of critical-thinking instruction; flaw in educational system; might be TV overload (read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985) for more information; thank you; note the BOOK, Mr. Sulu...!!!)

Edited April 2, 2013 by DWA

[Guest Tontar]

Blah, blah, what? Speak English, my man. I may write long, but I have a really hard time deciphering what you write.

You're trying to say bigfoot exists by what means other than presenting any tangible evidence?

Edited April 2, 2013 by Tontar

[Guest DWA]

Meldrum writes marginally more words. He says lots more good stuff. Money.

[WSA]

Tontar...I live in the Deep South of the U.S. now, but have lived all over the continent, North and East. My appreciation for the possibility is driven by 40+ years of walking remote areas of N. America, sometimes alone, sometimes for a week or more without seeing anyone. But no, I've not encountered a Sasquatch. A mountain lion where none was reported to have existed in 1.5 centuries? Yep. Strange stuff I didn't comprehend then or now? Check. The common denominator of all of these experiences is that I learned I really don't know squat of what I thought I did, and as I close in on the end of my 6th decade that appreciation only grows stronger. (And I recall my elders telling me the same thing when I was a kid). If you are a young person, you can count on that in your future too, if you are fortunate enought to live long enough to find out. If so, you won't have to thank me for the tip because I'll be long gone!

You and those who are devoting their time to something you peg as 0% probable is more than passing strange to me, I have to tell ya. Whatever cranks your Alys Chalmers, I say, but just a friendly observation... If your time scale for assessing the probability of something occurring, or not, is just your own short lifespan you've failed to appreciate the arc of human knowledge in a very profound way.

Edited April 2, 2013 by WSA

[Guest DWA]

Tontar: Oh, you understand me quite well. That's when you shift to short, frustrated posts.

Edited April 2, 2013 by DWA

[norseman]

Who's basing belief on anything? I want to know what's causing the evidence. And no one here can compete with what Meldrum, NAWAC and the rest of the scientific proponents are doing confronting the evidence. So, my bet's on them, because they are the only ones making a bettable proposition.

Sorry, I honestly don't believe you. You do not want to know what's causing the evidence, because if you did, you'd find the answer in seconds. People are making the evidence. They always have been. It's really that simple. It's not at all complicated. People manufacture the myth of bigfoot, while others buy into that product and service with their suspended disbelief.

Dr. Meldrum has bought into it as well, hook, line and sinker. The fact that he maintains that a known set of hoaxed tracks are authentic, and even sells them, seems to me to be clear evidence that he has suspended a good deal of critical thinking to continue the myth. And with all these supposed scientific proponents, what are they coming up with? Noting tangible at all. More field trips, research, new ways to play with new toys in the woods, and still no bigfoot evidence that is reasonable. It's a hobby, a fun time. Like the SCA folks role playing medieval world on their weekends. It's fun, harmless, and a kind of fantasy escape. Such is bigfoot research. Researching something that will never be found. A good time in the woods is worth it. But is it real science? Of course not, since the research is built upon a foundation of an animal that does not exist. so coming up with new tools to look for something that has never existed is just fun and games.

i think there are certainly hoaxes......absolutely.

but i also know for a fact that there is evidence that is impossible to hoax.

[Guest DWA]

Tontar...I live in the Deep South of the U.S. now, but have lived all over the continent, North and East. My appreciation for the possibility is driven by 40+ years of walking remote areas of N. America, sometimes alone, sometimes for a week or more without seeing anyone. But no, I've not encountered a Sasquatch. A mountain lion where none was reported to have existed in 1.5 centuries? Yep. Strange stuff I didn't comprehend then or now? Check. The common denominator of all of these experiences is that I learned I really don't know squat of what I thought I did, and as I close in on the end of my 6th decade that appreciation only grows stronger. (And I recall my elders telling me the same thing when I was a kid). If you are a young person, you can count on that in your future too, if you are fortunate enought to live long enough to find out. If so, you won't have to thank me for the tip because I'll be long gone!

You and those who are devoting their time to something you peg as 0% probable is more than passing strange to me, I have to tell ya. Whatever cranks your Alys Chalmers, I say, but just a friendly observation... If your time scale for assessing the probability of something occurring, or not, is just your own short lifespan you've failed to appreciate the arc of human knowledge in a very profound way.

Precisely. What strikes me most about these they're-not-skeptics! is (1) their constant insistence that one can't prove a negative (2) combined with constant attempts to prove (or preemptively certify) one (3) combined with insistence on proof now (4) which directly contradicts their long-and-loud assertions that they do TOO know how science works. You and I attack this subject with the verve and drive and cogency of the true skeptical academic. They address it with...a driving something, for, um, sure there. I had something like it for a week once. Glad I kicked it.

[norseman]

These have been reported as long if not longer than bigfoot and perhaps even wider distribution worldwide...well documented in art and history.

Anybody believe there are any if these in your backyard?

http://www.livescience.com/25559-dragons.html

there is always a kernal of truth with these things. in this case if you were a bronze age man digging up dinosaur bones? what would u call them?

cyclops equals a mammoth skull so on and so forth......

not sure how this equates to something people report walking around but as ive said earlier the hobbit was a myth until it wasnt. are they still walking around? who knows but bones dated 15k years ago blew conventional wisdom out of the water for H Erectus

Apparently dragons were reported walking, flying and dying by people who truly believed what they saw and experienced....and it perveals to modern times....there are reports by US servicemen sightings in New Guniea as recently as WW2 but that doesn't make them proven to be real.

If I see Bigfoot or a dragon tomorrow it will be real enough for me but I don't expect anyone to accept that as proof.

interesting i did not know that.

but keep in mind that natives were seeing little apish men running around flores island in recent history and that came to pass as proven.

so not all myth end up as fairy tales

[WSA]

To address the rest of your question Tontar....I've made a fairly good living out of sizing up people's ability (or should I say inability) to lie and applying my critical thinking skills to a given set of facts. I do it without even thinking too much about it, and I brought to my working profession (I'm told so anyway) a predisposition to think that way. This field offers a huge opportunity for someone with those skills to size up the evidence, and I have. You ask a fair question, but you might as well ask a doctor how he knows when his patient doesn't have long to live. You just do. I suppose that anyone could learn it if they were so inclined. Not many are in this field, but it is not unusual. I leave the mathematics and DNA analysis to those good with numbers, and I never have been. What I rely on is something not so quantifiable.

[Guest DWA]

Dr. Meldrum has bought into it as well, hook, line and sinker. The fact that he maintains that a known set of hoaxed tracks are authentic, and even sells them, seems to me to be clear evidence that he has suspended a good deal of critical thinking to continue the myth.

Oh wow, thank you fo's op'nin' mah aaahs! [uproarious cackle] And know what? That Eisenstein character was full of it too! Relativity. [snort] none a mah relatives kin do that! [cackle cubed]

[Guest Tontar]

My age shouldn't matter at all. But for what it's worth, I'm not that young. :-)

And certainly I would not simply base my conclusions about bigfoot on the amount of time I have been alive, however many decades that has been, nor my own personal lack of experiences of bigfoots in the wild. I don't need to. Facts should not be subjective, if they are indeed facts. My son can go into any grocery store and pick up a candy bar made of chocolate. Chocolate has been around far longer than his few years, but it doesn't matter to him, it's still chocolate. It exists. he can see it, touch it, eat it.

With bigfoot, neither you, nor I, nor John Green, nor Jeff Meldrum, nor anyone else can go anywhere in this world and see, touch, or photograph a bigfoot. Neither could our grandparents, or great, great grandparents. Nobody can, and nobody has. At least as far as anyone can tell for sure. Stories are just that, stories. Anecdotes are just that, anecdotes.

The issue of bigfoot existing comes down to a big problem of a serious, as in a total lack of confirmable evidence. There simply is zero proof they exist. Not just in my life time, but in yours too, and in the history of our nation, and beyond that to the historical record of human kind on this earth. It's nice to ponder and wonder and all that, but the bottom line is that there is not one single piece of biological material in anyone's hands that would suggest that a real unknown primate like bigfoot, or yeti, or ooh mah, or anything else like them exists. The yeti was what, a goat? The sasquatches shot in California were what, bear? Human (as in Justin).

While there are mysteries yet to be discovered, I think that there's nothing in the world to suggest that there's even a halfway decent chance a giant ape lives undiscovered on this planet. And certainly not this continent. I think that the only way to envision that they might is through whimsy, and definitely not through science. Remember, it's not just my youthful (thanks) ignorance, nor my wishing they didn't exist. Old people who really do wish they exist still can't pop on any tangible evidence, can they. There isn't any. All the hair, poop, skin and blood touted as evidence they exist, has all fallen prey to DNA analysis, which has never supported a bigfoot conclusion. Bear is not bigfoot.

[Guest guillaume]

The issue of bigfoot existing comes down to a big problem of a serious, as in a total lack of confirmable evidence. There simply is zero proof they exist. Not just in my life time, but in yours too, and in the history of our nation, and beyond that to the historical record of human kind on this earth. It's nice to ponder and wonder and all that, but the bottom line is that there is not one single piece of biological material in anyone's hands that would suggest that a real unknown primate like bigfoot, or yeti, or ooh mah, or anything else like them exists.

Well, I guess my first two posts will be cheerleading. I think Tontar nailed it here.

If I might add a point... If we accepted tales as a legitimate basis for establishing reality, then we'd need to invent science to test and move past them. Since we in fact invented science several hundreds of years ago, we don't need to accept tales of implausible things.

If there is a bigfoot, then show us.

[Guest DWA]

That's not a scientific attitude. A little investigation would show one that science - in the persons of a select few actually practicing it on this topic - is engaged in precisely that activity. That the proof isn't happening on one's required timetable, science cares not a fig about.

[Guest Tontar]

A little investigation would show one that science - in the persons of a select few actually practicing it on this topic - is engaged in precisely that activity. That the proof isn't happening on one's required timetable, science cares not a fig about.

Name a time table then. Pick a year, a decade, a century. This subject has been scientifically investigated for a very long time, and still nothing yet. The biggest DNA testing of samples ever has been conducted, and ya know what? Bear. Known persons. Dogs, raccoons, who knows what else was submitted as legitimate bigfoot samples, yet all have come back as what? A joke? A total mess? A hoax? What would you call it?

The proof is always just around the corner, just around the next bend. Almost there, just a little longer. It's been hundreds of years that people have been here. If people, regular people, hunters, gatherers, tribal folk, settlers, soldiers, hikers, campers, high tech endowed bigfoot researchers, if none of these people over hundreds of years have been able to come up with a "specimen" of any kind, not even a finger nail or tooth, then what exactly do you hope for from practicing scientists delving into the matter just now?

Are you putting your hope into this new balloon surveillance project? I will bet $100 that it amounts to nothing. Not just that the basic design is flawed beyond practicality and usefulness, but that if some version of it ever gets off the ground that it turns up noting more than what we have now, which is nothing.

Or are you putting your faith into some other project that someone is talking about? Like I said, my problem is not that I read too little it's that I read too much. Seems to me that most "projects" have ended up crashing and burning one way or another. What about that place that was supposedly some compound or refuge where they had several different sub species of bigfoots in captivity? Lots of hope went into that one. A lot of chest puffing went into defending it as the real deal. same with a lot of other projects over the past several years.

So what do you think will be the game changer? What do you hope that proponent scientists can bring to the table that will confirm bigfoot exists? Some new,unarguable theory? Because that's all we have now, theories. Plenty of theories, but none of which pertain to any animal we have to compare those theories to. Sure, one scientist can theorize on and on about how bigfoots feet are made, or another can theorize about what they eat, that they eat shellfish from the shorelines, but all that is just adding material to the existing mythology, because not one bit of that theorizing has ever been substantiated. Substantiated with an animal that does those things, or is built that way, or knocks on wood or runs on all fours, or anything at all.

So just pick a time frame, and pick a reasonable sciencey solution to this problem of bigfoot not existing. It hasn't happened in the past 1,000 years, the past 500 years, the past 400 years, the past 46 years, the past generation of humans, and it won't happen in any of our lifetimes. Not that I'm in any hurry, but are you happy to go to your grave knowing that bigfoot cannot be documented as even existing in any physical form?