Bigfoot Research--Still No Evidence (Continued)

[Guest]

 How much good clean fun, not to say "SUPERfan," is in store for somebody reporting a bigfoot sighting?

 

I already provided an extreme example: television exposure.  What about the benefits of admiration of one's peers in the bigfoot club?  What about the people who will sit in rapt attention as you tell your tale at a bigfoot conference?  What about the satisfaction of seeing your encounter story reproduced in the BFRO database or discussed at the BFF?  What about this notion that "bigfoot chooses you", i.e., there is something wholesome, true, and enduring about your spirit that the bigfoot allowed you to experience it in the wild?  What about the feeling of helpfulness that submitting your sighting to a database might eventually lead to laws that will protect the "bigfoot people"? 

 

To deny that people would be willing to risk ridicule to report their bigfoots would be to deny that people do odd things merely "for attention".  Attention and status are extremely powerful motivators for human behavior.  Just because attention might not be a powerful motivator for you doesn't mean that it isn't for someone else.  My television seems to be rife with examples every day of people doing odd things for attention.

 

 

And once again you misrepresent my position.  Why do you insist on doing that?

I don't, and if I have it's unintentional.  Perhaps my difficulty is that you seem to be contradicting your own positions.  You will claim that science is at fault for not following up on anecdotal accounts, then you will claim that many anecdotal accounts are bogus, then you will claim that no one would report an anecdote that was bogus.  You're all over the map.

 

 Show me Patterson's payback for a MOVIE OF ONE, ferpetesake.

1) Why do you assume Patterson's motive to hoax a bigfoot film was monetary?

2) From what I've read, Roger and DeAtley made a rather tidy sum from the film.

Got to ask, Saskeptic....what was the bird you added to your life list on that expedition?

Hypothetical.  Good examples might be the Black Rail and liter of blood lost to mosquitoes one night at Saxis Marsh in MD, the Great Cormorant at Montauk Pt. one frigid spring break, Red Warbler on a misty mountaintop in Oaxaca, Mexico . . .

[WSA]

Sas, you do get around. Those are some nice locales, to just do anything at all. My bro-in-law is an avid birder, He lives in Charlottesville. 10 minutes after setting foot in my backyard in Birmingham he had i.d'd about 20 birds, including a great blue heron, which flew up from the creek as soon as he stepped out. I swore to him I had nothing at all to do with that.

 

You and DWA should PM on the marshes of E. Maryland, he haunts them during the colder months. Mosquitoes being the main reason for that schedule!

[Guest]

^They were biting through my jeans that night at Saxis Marsh . . .

[Incorrigible1]

Mr. 'Keptic,

 

Hope you'll pick me up this coming early spring and we could head 150 miles west to catch the sandhills crane migration. Carry on until then.

[norseman]

I enjoy ruffed grouse and rice in a Dutch oven......does that count?

Edited June 28, 2013 by norseman

[Incorrigible1]

Twice, if you share the recipe.

[norseman]

WSA

It's interesting, there is some interest there. With that said there is strife about how it should be done. Add egos, tempers and self proclaimed experts into the mix? It can be lively.

But I don't see us growing larger than the bfro anytime soon.

I've set the site up as a resource for pro kill people. So it's not my way or the highway. People can form their own teams and test their own strategies as they wish. I'll even set up private team forums for them so they can plan expeditions in private.

But I haven't been flooded with people by any means.

[Guest]

Then you are reading skeptical sources. Maybe you are curious after all. Apparently you have read many skeptical sources that say most Bigfoot sightings are of bears. Yes? Sources, please?ap

Well, the inimitable Ben Radford.  JREF.  Bindernagel and Meldrum run into it so much that they devote chapters to it.  But again:  that this explains even one of the reports I've read is something that I just highly doubt.  They simply aren't describing bears is all.  I just can't devote much time to assertions not backed by evidence.

Also, I think your take on skeptical explanations is muddy. For instance, if the skeptic uncovers roadside sightings that turn out to be humans in costumes, we can certainly conclude that such things do happen and are possible explanations for other similar sightings. This is common sense, as well as generalizing from the particular, which is not faulty methodology.

Well, it is if I can't find a report in which I think it is likely that the person filing it saw a human in costume.  What people describe is so very clearly different from what every man-in-suit I have ever seen looks like to me that I simply don't think the generalization works.  It's like seeing two kids in a zebra costume and suddenly doubting the zebra.

By contrast, in your view, we would have to know that every particular roadside sighting was proven to be a human in costume for us to credibly argue that roadside sightings are inconclusive (because any one of them may be of humans in costumes.) No generalization is permissible. Never mind that you have set conditions for the skeptic that cannot be met, in principle.

 

No, I would like to see so many of the reports I have read proven to be a human in costume that I seriously doubt the rest are authentic.  But you are seeing the point:  when I am getting evidence from the proponents, it isn't derailed by suppositions but only by debunking the evidence - showing me that it isn't x but in fact y.  Until that happens the evidence remains unassailed, particularly when to me it appears far more likely than the alternative hypothesis:  that all these people were that badly wrong.  I simply cannot believe a man in a suit would make most of us do anything but chuckle after no more than a moment's consternation.  I'm not filing a bigfoot report over that.  I suspect most wouldn't.

 

I have always said:  if the skeptic cannot prove his case, he must wait for the proponent to prove his.  After all:  I can wait.  Belief isn't what this is about.  Until the evidence is proven or debunked, it stands unaddressed.  I can't accept the skeptics' invitation to just assume they are right.  That's not skeptical.

 

You will probably want to fall back on the assertion that not all roadside sightings can be attributed to humans in costume. You would be correct, probably, but irrelevant to the point I'm making.

 

Well, they can't be.  Witnesses are describing something more athletic, by a lot, than humans in track suits much less ape suits.  Never mind one heck of a lot bigger.  If the point you're making doesn't debunk the evidence that has me leaning to the proponents, then it's irrelevant to what I want to know, for sure:

 

what is causing this.

As to the bear attribution: I think you have two things confused. Yes, I have seen statements to the effect that bears are the most likely animal to be mistaken for a sasquatch, for obvious reasons (big, hairy, same habitat, etc.) But this is not the same thing as saying almost all Bigfoot sightings are attributable to bears. So Dmaker is correct to criticize Bindernagel if the scientist has indeed characterized skeptical objections to Bigfoot sightings in such a simple way.

If you disagree, then please, I ask again, give me a specific source from a skeptic that attributes most Bigfoot sightings to bears.

As to road hoaxes. Here are two, one verified by John Green, the other accepted by Rene Danhinden.

http://www.nabigfootsearch.com/albums/album_image/6905109/5477215.htm

http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/canadianhoax.htm

For good measure, here is a classic example of suggestible eyewitnesses (but not related to the Bigfoot issue).

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/your-brain-is-not-your-friend.html

Your view on sightings is a type of fundamentalism: it is too literal. You cannot imagine Bigfoot sightings attributable to anything but Bigfoot because you accept every word in a sighting report as given in a most literal way. For instance, if someone says he saw an 8ft. tall humanoid forty yards away, moving up an embankment as he drove by, you would say -- what 8ft. tall humanoid could it be, except a Bigfoot? But, how do you know it was 8ft. tall? How did the eyewitness under those conditions know it was 8ft. tall? (Given that there was no way to measure height -- so it was just an impression).

In the real world, eyewitness accounts have problems. Eyewitness testimonies are not rewound and played videos of an event. They are memories tempered by emotion, preconceptions, ego, anticipations, and other impediments, including such things as faulty vision and imagination filling in the blanks. But, in your world of Bigfoot sightings, none of these things apply. Like any fundamentalism, your literalism is the guiding principle that gets you where you want to be and not open to alternative explanation.

Notice how in the hoax discovered by Green one eyewitness thought the subject (a teenager) moved too fast to be human. See, that happens. Yet according to you, it can not happen. People are not that dumb. Right? Trust me. We are all that dumb on the right occasion.

[Guest DWA]

Again, you are asking me to accept a supposition backed by no evidence:

 

If we can prove one was this way, we must accept that all were this way.

 

No we mustn't.

 

To me all of the skeptical notions are just angels-on-pin talk.  I want to know what is causing this stuff to happen.  Suppositions won't work there.  I want proof.

Just as with all sightings, stories are just that.  They don't prove anything.

Sas, you do get around. Those are some nice locales, to just do anything at all. My bro-in-law is an avid birder, He lives in Charlottesville. 10 minutes after setting foot in my backyard in Birmingham he had i.d'd about 20 birds, including a great blue heron, which flew up from the creek as soon as he stepped out. I swore to him I had nothing at all to do with that.

 

You and DWA should PM on the marshes of E. Maryland, he haunts them during the colder months. Mosquitoes being the main reason for that schedule!

Well, I've been there in the warmer months too.

 

After one bout, the inside of our tent, after an hour or so of swatting, looked as if we'd had a knife fight inside.

 

I was walking behind a female friend on another day; noting man she had hairy legs, but then again Germans don't shave them so much...then realized ...that wasn't hair...

 

Yeah, winter is preferable.

[Guest DWA]

As to the bear attribution: I think you have two things confused. Yes, I have seen statements to the effect that bears are the most likely animal to be mistaken for a sasquatch, for obvious reasons (big, hairy, same habitat, etc.) But this is not the same thing as saying almost all Bigfoot sightings are attributable to bears. So Dmaker is correct to criticize Bindernagel if the scientist has indeed characterized skeptical objections to Bigfoot sightings in such a simple way.

If you disagree, then please, I ask again, give me a specific source from a skeptic that attributes most Bigfoot sightings to bears.

Bindernagel did just what he should do:  he showed that the bear characterization is simply untenable and showed why.  He's done.  So am I, until we start seeing waves of sightings dismissed because it is proven that people are seeing something else.  Skeptics keep talking about proof but providing none. 

 

Once again, if one can't prove all sightings mistaken, one must wait until investigation proves what they are.  I got time.

Your view on sightings is a type of fundamentalism: it is too literal. You cannot imagine Bigfoot sightings attributable to anything but Bigfoot because you accept every word in a sighting report as given in a most literal way.

 

No it's not, and no I don't.  As I have said many times:  when thousands of people are seeing something I want proof of what it is.  Suppositions backed by no evidence do nothing.

 

For instance, if someone says he saw an 8ft. tall humanoid forty yards away, moving up an embankment as he drove by, you would say -- what 8ft. tall humanoid could it be, except a Bigfoot? But, how do you know it was 8ft. tall? How did the eyewitness under those conditions know it was 8ft. tall? (Given that there was no way to measure height -- so it was just an impression).

 

Nope; I'd wonder what he saw.  You would know that it's a six-foot human.  Diff'rent strokes.

In the real world, eyewitness accounts have problems. Eyewitness testimonies are not rewound and played videos of an event. They are memories tempered by emotion, preconceptions, ego, anticipations, and other impediments, including such things as faulty vision and imagination filling in the blanks. But, in your world of Bigfoot sightings, none of these things apply. Like any fundamentalism, your literalism is the guiding principle that gets you where you want to be and not open to alternative explanation.

 

Nope; I wonder what they saw.  You apparently know.  Your proof, any time you are ready.

Notice how in the hoax discovered by Green one eyewitness thought the subject (a teenager) moved too fast to be human. See, that happens. Yet according to you, it can not happen. People are not that dumb. Right? Trust me. We are all that dumb on the right occasion.

 

One teenage eyewitness says one thing; and so police officers; park rangers; lawyers; long-haul truck drivers; biologists; and I could go on and on are all doing the same thing?  Your proof, any time you are ready.  The "right occasion" is not when one wants to suppose something backs one's argument.  Um, how do we know the folks on the bus weren't playing along?  How hard would that have been? 

 

Not.

 

And again, the pitfalls of taking a story literally (then chiding others who aren't doing it for doing it).

 

[Guest DWA]

 

 How much good clean fun, not to say "SUPERfan," is in store for somebody reporting a bigfoot sighting?

 

I already provided an extreme example: television exposure.  What about the benefits of admiration of one's peers in the bigfoot club?  What about the people who will sit in rapt attention as you tell your tale at a bigfoot conference?  What about the satisfaction of seeing your encounter story reproduced in the BFRO database or discussed at the BFF?  What about this notion that "bigfoot chooses you", i.e., there is something wholesome, true, and enduring about your spirit that the bigfoot allowed you to experience it in the wild?  What about the feeling of helpfulness that submitting your sighting to a database might eventually lead to laws that will protect the "bigfoot people"?   ar

 

How many are getting this exposure and being feted as SUPERbigfootfans back home?  How many are making money off this?  And then there are the reports, which, well, you know, I read; and I can hear what's happening.  That this is a Superfan phenomenon is a stretch beyond any I'm comfortable making (never mind an assumption unbacked by evidence that one should consider it seriously).  I don't care what the motivation is for people to report to databases when it reads as if what they are reporting is an unlisted animal.  "Bigfoot chooses you" people are laughed at except by other BCYs.  And I chuckle, very least, at "bigfoot people."  Oh.  The entire body of sasquatch evidence can be chalked up to an "extreme example"?

 

Then there is this supposition that thousands of laymen are randomly lying, hoaxing, misidentifying and hallucinating a biologically and ecologically plausible hominoid with at least two plausible ancestor candidates in the fossil record.  You can believe that whopper.  I want proof.

 

 

To deny that people would be willing to risk ridicule to report their bigfoots would be to deny that people do odd things merely "for attention".  Attention and status are extremely powerful motivators for human behavior.  Just because attention might not be a powerful motivator for you doesn't mean that it isn't for someone else.  My television seems to be rife with examples every day of people doing odd things for attention.

 

So, summing up, this whole thing is thousands of people consulting biologists - or channeling their inner primatologist - before they run out and make up the natural history of a large bipedal omnivore "for attention"?  You can believe that whopper.  I want proof.

 

 

And once again you misrepresent my position.  Why do you insist on doing that?

I don't, and if I have it's unintentional.  Perhaps my difficulty is that you seem to be contradicting your own positions.  You will claim that science is at fault for not following up on anecdotal accounts, then you will claim that many anecdotal accounts are bogus, then you will claim that no one would report an anecdote that was bogus.  You're all over the map.

 

No contradictions at all.  Scientists - science is a practice, which they aren't following - are at fault for assuming away a large body of evidence, using "arguments" that a decently-read layman can take apart.  The fault is easy to assess; it's happened over and over in the history of science.  Who's claimed here that any anecdotal account is bogus that was not proven to be?  Not me.  I only work with evidence.  Who would claim that no one would make a bogus report unless the report were proven bogus, or not?  Not me.   I only work with evidence.  That's what I mean by "misrepresenting."

 

 Show me Patterson's payback for a MOVIE OF ONE, ferpetesake.

1) Why do you assume Patterson's motive to hoax a bigfoot film was monetary?

2) From what I've read, Roger and DeAtley made a rather tidy sum from the film.

 

Greg Long would be walking the streets in a barrel then, because he would have had everything sued off for that libelous book of his.  Until I see the proof, they made nothing worth talking about in terms of motivation, because they didn't do marketing, sales, hawking, stumping or any other form of promotion for that film in any way that would make anything more than a decent hill of beans.  Which of course is why you ask 'why assume it was monetary'?  If it was, it couldn't have been handled worse.

Patterson's motivation?  Proving sasquatch.  All that's known of him says that was it.  Were it a hoax, he could not have done more to ensure that it got exposed.

 

Never mind, now, that I couldn't care if he shot his mother to get the money to rent the camera, and stole the horses, and blackmailed Gimlin.  I only care about this:

 

What is on that film?  My eyes tell me:  no ape suit.  That's a birthday suit.  45 years plus with no evidence of anything else says I'm right.

 

[dmaker]

No contradictions at all.  Scientists - science is a practice, which they aren't following - are at fault for assuming away a large body of evidence, using "arguments" that a decently-read layman can take apart.  The fault is easy to assess; it's happened over and over in the history of science.  Who's claimed here that any anecdotal account is bogus that was not proven to be?  Not me.  I only work with evidence.  Who would claim that no one would make a bogus report unless the report were proven bogus, or not?  Not me.   I only work with evidence.  That's what I mean by "misrepresenting."

 

 

 

Scientists are at fault for you contradicting yourself constantly?  

[Guest DWA]

As I said.  I don't.  Now you do, but I just try to surf that.  I'm a patient man.  No train to catch here.

 

I don't Just Believe something that somebody tells me to Just Believe.  Why should anyone do that?

 

Thanks for quoting me.  That paragraph deserves repeating.  I may just make it a cut/paste.

I would add here that I wish you'd make it interesting like saskeptic and jerrywayne do.

Edited June 29, 2013 by DWA

[dmaker]

I had assumed from your quoting of Saskeptic's comments that you were attempting to respond directly to his point. His point being that you are all over the map. Instead you respond with how scientists are wrong. Not in any way attempting to explain your inconsistency. Again, your response directly above does nothing to address your inconsistencies. But if you don't wish to, you don't have to of course.  I just thought you might want a chance to explain how science is at fault for your inconsistent statements. 

 

But this is a well used tactic by you here. Nothing new. You often quote something and then provide a response that, in no way, speaks to the actual quote itself. 

Oh, and interesting? Well I'm sorry ( well not at all actually) that you don't find me interesting. Excuse if I am not saddened by that. I am even reading the Bindernagel book a second time around since you kept bringing it up. But I guess that hold no interest for you either. 

But, regardless, arguing about one another's rhetoric is not really why any of us are here. I did ask you a direct question that you have left unanswered. I'm curious, why do you, as you put it, Thank God for Jeff Meldrum?

[norseman]

*frantically searches for channel remote*