How Many Normal (Relatively) Intelligent, Adult, Witnesses Without A Prior Agenda Does It Take To Have Any Provative Weight Towards The Unknown?

[Guest DWA]

Find the witness.  Interview the witness.  Take the witness to the site and re-create.  Talk to the witness's friends and relatives.

 

If at some point the witness cracks and recants, or gets told on by people who provide evidence that they're right, boom, disproved.

 

Repeat.  (That will be a lot of repeats.)

 

If that is too much work, well, I would rather find out what is causing thousands of them to happen than just sit there and make presumptions about large numbers of people I do not know that don't scan with anything most of us acknowledge about human nature.

 

(Much better strategy, outlined times out of mind here:  go to places where there are lots of recent reports, prepared for a long-term stay and multiple forms of documentation.)

 

If you aren't satisfied with that - and it should have been obvious - then just admit there's nothing but a body that would even make you take this seriously.  Seems a significant waste of time to me.  But to each his own.

[Guest Llawgoch]

Find the witness.  Interview the witness.  Take the witness to the site and re-create.  Talk to the witness's friends and relatives.

 

If at some point the witness cracks and recants, or gets told on by people who provide evidence that they're right, boom, disproved.

 

Repeat.  (That will be a lot of repeats.)

 

If that is too much work, well, I would rather find out what is causing thousands of them to happen than just sit there and make presumptions about large numbers of people I do not know that don't scan with anything most of us acknowledge about human nature.

 

(Much better strategy, outlined times out of mind here:  go to places where there are lots of recent reports, prepared for a long-term stay and multiple forms of documentation.)

 

If you aren't satisfied with that - and it should have been obvious - then just admit there's nothing but a body that would even make you take this seriously.  Seems a significant waste of time to me.  But to each his own.

 

 

Ok, so nothing remotely possible in the real world.  I thought as much.

 

How would you "much better strategy" even approach disproving eye witness reports?  It might prove Bigfoot, if Bigfoot exists,  I can't see any way it would disprove eyewitness reports.  You keep on about proving Bigfoot, when I'm not asking you about Bigfoot.  I'm asking you about how to disprove eyewitness reports from remote areas, as you seem to want this done.  Nobody else, just you..   And your answer is "interrogate them and see if they crack"?  

[Guest DWA]

I - and why am I not surprised you wouldn't see this? - don't care about disproving eyewitnesses.  They make their own presumptive case, obvious to anyone who pays close attention and is well versed in the subject areas - wildlife; the outdoors; people; that sort of thing - involved.

 

The required mental software must have BS-detection features and be user-installed.

 

If what I just told you isn't possible in the real world...well, that shouldn't have surprised me either.  YOU ARE THE ONE WHO WANTS TO DO THIS, NOT ME...and, well, no you don't...

 

But it did help me make another assessment about whom to take seriously here.  Thanks.

Edited June 14, 2013 by DWA

[Guest Llawgoch]

Incidentally DWA, I'd like to know why you often insinuate  that Saskeptic is coming on here and lying about being a scientist, and about how much Bigfoot evidence he has read.  Why, if you accept that someone would come here and lie so pointlessly and outrageously, is it difficult to accept people might make up Bigfoot stories given that all the stories you put faith in you have received  from reading them at third hand, not from seeing anything yourself, or talking to anyone who has?

 

I - and why am I not surprised you wouldn't see this? - don't care about disproving eyewitnesses.  They make their own presumptive case, obvious to anyone who pays close attention and is well versed in the subject areas - wildlife; the outdoors; people; that sort of thing - involved.

 

The required mental software must have BS-detection features and be user-installed.

 

If what I just told you isn't possible in the real world...well, that shouldn't have surprised me either.  YOU ARE THE ONE WHO WANTS TO DO THIS, NOT ME...and, well, no you don't...

 

But it did help me make another assessment about whom to take seriously here.  Thanks.

 

 

No.

 

YOU are the one who keeps telling people they must disprove eyewitness stories.  YOU brought this up.  Over and over again.  Read back over your own posts if you've forgotten.  I'm not going to do your work for you.  (see what I did there?)

Edited June 14, 2013 by Llawgoch

[Guest DWA]

As both WSA and I have taken pains to point out, Saskeptic has one of the oddest takes on the evidence of anyone of which we are aware, doubly odd if he is everything he says he is.

 

He does seem to show enough knowledge about, well, the knowns in his field that we may just have to accept that assessment.

 

I don't put faith in anything.  Evidence is my lodestone, guide and map.  The ones who are exhibiting the faith here are the ones who can accept with childlike credulity that a phenomenon utterly unique in Western annals is the product of a bunch of random people all lying out of thin air about the same thing because of an undiagnosed illness the primary symptom of which is a raging desire to be made fun of.  And a secondary symptom of which is a solid understanding of primatology and wildlife biology.

 

Aren't you working overtime?

 

That requires, well, maybe faith isn't the word. 

Incidentally DWA, I'd like to know why you often insinuate  that Saskeptic is coming on here and lying about being a scientist, and about how much Bigfoot evidence he has read.  Why, if you accept that someone would come here and lie so pointlessly and outrageously, is it difficult to accept people might make up Bigfoot stories given that all the stories you put faith in you have received  from reading them at third hand, not from seeing anything yourself, or talking to anyone who has?

 

I - and why am I not surprised you wouldn't see this? - don't care about disproving eyewitnesses.  They make their own presumptive case, obvious to anyone who pays close attention and is well versed in the subject areas - wildlife; the outdoors; people; that sort of thing - involved.

 

The required mental software must have BS-detection features and be user-installed.

 

If what I just told you isn't possible in the real world...well, that shouldn't have surprised me either.  YOU ARE THE ONE WHO WANTS TO DO THIS, NOT ME...and, well, no you don't...

 

But it did help me make another assessment about whom to take seriously here.  Thanks.

 

 

No.

 

YOU are the one who keeps telling people they must disprove eyewitness stories.  YOU brought this up.  Over and over again.  Read back over your own posts if you've forgotten.  I'm not going to do your work for you.  (see what I did there?)

Do you not understand

 

"You do that if you're so inclined, it's obviously not worth my time"

 

when I put it in so many words?

[WSA]

Well, my friend Saskeptic, I sort of figured knowledge on this topic was verified by how much one read, not by how many posts one could spit out. Me, I spend much more time here and other places reading and not writing. All you had to say was you didn't feel qualified to comment on details of Meldrum's analysis, and that would have been fine by me. If you stated that in post  #2,349, sorry to make you repeat that, but I missed it. 

 

But, I think I might have offended you, and I apologize if I have. I'm not all that invested in what outcome (if any) we'll get from this discussion, but it does provide some amusement on slow days.  I think you're probably in that category as well, so there is no point in us bashing heads over it.  Sometimes though I get the idea this site provides an outlet for some to merely express their disdain for amateur naturalists and their zany beliefs, and nothing more.  At any rate, thanks for your response, and no, I was not baiting you. 

Edited June 14, 2013 by WSA

[Cotter]

 

@Llag:  You just choose to believe that 99% of the folks that have had clear sightings are making it up?  How did you come to that conclusion?  Additionally, that 1% that didn't make it up, well....there you have your bona fide sighting.

 

Of the 3 people that I've had an opportunity to sit down and discuss their sightings with.  1 of them had mis-ID'd a trout fisherman (yes, I was able to do diligent investigation to determine this, took some luck, I admit, but I got there), 1 of them didn't even want to discuss it with me b/c of the amount of ridicule he had suffered after the sighting originally (why would he make this up, so he can be ridiculed?), the last person, after his sighting spent large amounts of time and money to try and convince the BLM and Fish and Game of their existence, then eventually gave up.

 

The latter 2 were clear sightings within 100 feet, the first about 125 yards.  In my examples, why do you think someone would make these up?

 

Without knowing the people or the circumstances of the encounter it is impossible to say.  What is clear is that people do makes things up (or convince themselves of them).

 

If you have met those people and formed the impressions that they are honest and reliable, I can see how that would colour your view.  I however have not met them.  I have said before that knowing one person you trust who has told you that they have no doubt they have seen a Bigfoot is a good reason to keep your options open on it.  Hundreds of anonymous accounts on the internet, not so.

 

Hi  Llag:  Absolutley agree with what you say, and I don't expect you to take my word that these people appeared reliable and trustworthy (actually, I had red flags springing up when I interviewed the witness whose sighting I was able to debunk - he didn't make it up, just got a bit hyper-vigilant).  One of the individuals I don't think APPEARS to be honest and trustworthy, he IS honest and trustworthy as I have spent a lot of time with him where our lives were in each others' hands.  And it is b/c of this person I got involved in the BF phenom in the first place.  There is  VERY little doubt that this person did NOT see a 7 foot + tall hairy hominid at close range for several hours.  (He and his pal were 'trapped' in their vehicle by this creature at the end of a dead end road, they were afraid to drive around it.)

 

I just hope that you, and other skeptics do not openly ridicule those that claim to have had an experience (openly, as in real life, not message boards), because I can guarantee you that you will never get a witness to approach you to share their experience if they even remotely think that you will use that to belittle or tease them.  Because someday, you just might be surprised who may have had an experience that is near and dear to you.

 

I can't explain why there is no proof yet, I can't explain why there aren't boat loads of pics of these things.  All I know that if (small 'if') these animals are real, there is a lot to learn about them, as well as the human races' attitude toward the unknown.

 

Finally, I can offer explanations as to why people are claiming to see these things.  1.  Mis-ID, 2. Lying, 3. Hallucinating, 4. Seeing a BF.

Edited June 14, 2013 by Cotter

[Guest Llawgoch]

 

Do you not understand

 

"You do that if you're so inclined, it's obviously not worth my time"

 

when I put it in so many words?

 

Did you not understand I have asked you a thousand times how to "do that", because you keep saying "doing that" is the only  way you will ever discount the stories?  You have now said that questioning every witness personally, presumably even the anonymous ones (the majority)  MIGHT disprove their stories, if they crack.  And you still don't think your position is untenable?

Edited June 14, 2013 by Llawgoch

[Guest DWA]

What's untenable about my position?  [picks teeth]

 

Aren't you working overtime?  [looks at nails]

 

I see what we're doing.  Um, no thanks.  I'm here to discuss sasquatch.  I'm not sure what you're here to discuss.

 

Oh, I got quite the tenable position, thanks.  Scientists in very relevant fields share it.

 

Um, you?  [looks at face in mirror DAG that guy's handsome]

Saskeptic:

 

Hardly.  I've been here for years participating in discussions of anecdotal accounts, footprints, videos, audio files, photographs, elk lays, mangy bears, bigfoots in freezers, DNA, fossil hominids, wildlife discoveries, peer review, a certain piece of film from Bluff Creek, CA . . . Do you actually think that you and DWA are introducing material here that I haven't already hashed over with those who came before you?  Look up "Huntster" in the canon of bigfootery on the Internet.  You guys are junior varsity in comparison.

 

WSA:

 

 . . . But then, when that evidence confronts you, we get a very weird result. Namely, we get nothing of substance, and the number of times me, DWA and others have pleaded with you and other experts here to take on things like Jeff Meldrum's analysis of the track data on a point by point basis, we've been met with a roaring silence.

 

What "number of times" have you "pleaded" with me to provide such an analysis?  Good Lord, have you any idea how many pages I've written here about things like Fahrenbach's "track distribution analysis"?  It's pretty rich for you with less than 400 posts to presume to know the contents of my more than 4,000.

 

DWA:

 

Oh, dunno, sounds to me that we've done a pretty adequate assessment.  I don't think WSA was baiting you; he seems to be right on; I wouldn't accept anybody's junior-varsity assessment of me who seems to sidestep my every point; and "is this piece of evidence the toe tag to a bigfoot?  No?  Toss" is still what you're putting up here after 4,000 posts...I mean, all due respect, but come on.  You just don't have a correct assessment of the situation on the ground, and that leads pretty much inevitably to stagnant discussion and name-calling, not what I come here for.

 

WSA's right.  You have a lot more to contribute here than you do.

[Guest]

Thanks for the apology WSA; gratefully accepted.

 

I think what you missed from my comparison of post counts is not that it's a urination contest, but that I've had an interest in this phenomenon for a very long time.  My posts are often very thoughtful, and the information I present is the product of a great deal of literature review.  Usually it's easy Googleable stuff, but often I am going directly to the published literature on these topics.  I can do that efficiently because I have excellent library access through my university.  Sometimes I even share pdfs of those papers in my posts.

 

Just yesterday we got into a discussion of Gigantopithecus dispersal.  Before making my post explaining why I wouldn't expect that genus to have dispersed through Beringia I did some research on sea levels, Plesitocene vegetation cover in the region, fossil beds in Beringia, known distribution of Giganto fossils, etc.   It took a lot of work to write that simple post because I vet my statements so carefully, but it was worth it because it was more interesting than what I was working on at the time.  So yes, READING is very much a part of my posting behavior. I'm not sure how many sources I've read over my thousands of posts, but I think it might be in the hundreds.

 

As for Meldrum's analysis, we can't expect me to school him on his scholarly papers any more than we could expect him to school me on mine.  Thus, while I can offer differing interpretations to his footprint analysis, those interpretations would not be my original work.  I can say that his best case for bigfoot (judging from his 2007 ichnotaxon paper that I just read again) is completely reliant on the authenticity of the PGF. That's an acknowledgment that there's nothing about the footprints themselves that can prove the reality of the creature that made them.  They're hoaxable, so Meldrum builds his case from prints he thinks were collected where corroborative evidence was also collected.  The delicious irony of course is that I see "hoax" in both the film and the prints, so tying the best print evidence to the PGF only strengthens his case among that subset of people who are convinced that the film is authentic!  Thus, one can't really refute Meldrum's analysis without also proving the hoax of the PGF, and I think you've been around long enough to see that no one is going to do that.  (Short of a Gimlin confession to that effect, I don't think it is possible to prove that the PGF was hoaxed to the satisfaction of bigfooters.)

[Guest]

 You just don't have a correct assessment of the situation on the ground,  . . .

1. There's lots of evidence that some people attribute to bigfoot.

2. That alleged evidence provides insights into potential behavior, distribution, and ecological relationships of such creatures as bigfoots.

 

What am I missing?  What is this situation?

 

My motivation is to determine 1) if we have now and 2) if we ever could have in the future physical evidence sufficient to describe "bigfoot" in the scientific literature.  If you direct me to the latest cool story you've read of someone's alleged encounter, then I've read yet another cool story of someone's alleged encounter.  What I want to know is if there's a likelihood of obtaining physical evidence.  If not, then it doesn't add anything to the phenomenon that we don't already have now: hundreds of people who've claimed to see bigfoot from all over North America.  I could go interview the alleged witness, talk to friends and family, etc. and come up with an assessment that this is the most trustworthy person imaginable, and all that would do is demonstrate that an apparently trustworthy individual thinks he saw a bigfoot.  But if we want to advance bigfootery, then we're going to need a piece of a bigfoot.

[Guest DWA]

 

 You just don't have a correct assessment of the situation on the ground,  . . .

1. There's lots of evidence that some people attribute to bigfoot.

2. That alleged evidence provides insights into potential behavior, distribution, and ecological relationships of such creatures as bigfoots.

 

What am I missing?  What is this situation?

 

My motivation is to determine 1) if we have now and 2) if we ever could have in the future physical evidence sufficient to describe "bigfoot" in the scientific literature.  If you direct me to the latest cool story you've read of someone's alleged encounter, then I've read yet another cool story of someone's alleged encounter.  What I want to know is if there's a likelihood of obtaining physical evidence.  If not, then it doesn't add anything to the phenomenon that we don't already have now: hundreds of people who've claimed to see bigfoot from all over North America.  I could go interview the alleged witness, talk to friends and family, etc. and come up with an assessment that this is the most trustworthy person imaginable, and all that would do is demonstrate that an apparently trustworthy individual thinks he saw a bigfoot.  But if we want to advance bigfootery, then we're going to need a piece of a bigfoot.

 

OK, that's a reasonable answer.

 

But you seem to think that plenty of experts are combing the American woods looking for bigfoot.  That's not my read, which has a very few amateurs, none of them dedicating sufficient time.  To me, 'sufficient' means what, say, Jane Goodall devoted in Tanzania to studying an ape we had already long known to exist. From the evidence, our ape is solitary - most of the time, anyway, pending further field time from NAWAC, whose research suggests that this might not be 100% the case - and covers a large home range, similar to that covered by grizzlies and mountain lions.

 

As much credence as I give to the research of Meldrum and Bindernagel, they are full-time academics for whom bigfoot is not paying the bills.  They are outstanding cheerleaders and guides to intelligent research into the subject.  They're the ultimate reference books on this we have at the moment (if the report databases aren't).  They are by no stretch field researchers, which the field for all intents and purposes totally lacks.  NAWAC is just settling in to Area X when everyone has to go back to their real jobs.  Other than that, it's trail cams, which I am not expecting to get lucky with a species like this when even alpha coyotes are shown to avoid them.  "Finding Bigfoot," other than the apparent boost it has given to reports to the BFRO website, is better not mentioned.

 

Bottom line?  Until the attitude of science toward the evidence changes, there is no reason to expect a piece of a bigfoot to come in, ever, barring luck that ...well, playing the lottery is better odds.

 

They are not that elusive.  Thousands of people see them.

 

But when no one is looking in a way I would call "serious?"  Well, you get what you pay for.

[Squatchy McSquatch]

The attitude of science towards the evidence isn't going to change

 

Unless the quality of evidence improves.

 

Insert what you will about trains and proof as per usual.

 

We know how this works...

[Guest]

OK, that's a reasonable answer.

I'm glad you think so.  I feel like I've given you that answer 100 times.

 

Now we're getting somewhere, and maybe we can get into the meat of the matter focusing on where our perspectives differ.  The cornerstone of the skeptic/proponent divide is that skeptics think there's been ample opportunity for better evidence and actual proof of bigfoot to have come to light by 2013 (or in my case, by about 1813).  Proponents disagree, and lament that the amount of effort expended to actually find bigfoot has (obviously) been insufficient to do so.

 

All right then.  Now we can start a series of discussions on field expeditions, trail cams, paleontological surveys, biological inventories, etc.  Each one can be a separate thread if you like. To me, what matters in these discussions is to examine how other species have been discovered, and I mean that in the scientific sense, i.e., how the physical specimen was obtained that served as the holotype for the species.

[Guest DWA]

 

OK, that's a reasonable answer.

I'm glad you think so.  I feel like I've given you that answer 100 times.

 

Now we're getting somewhere, and maybe we can get into the meat of the matter focusing on where our perspectives differ.  The cornerstone of the skeptic/proponent divide is that skeptics think there's been ample opportunity for better evidence and actual proof of bigfoot to have come to light by 2013 (or in my case, by about 1813).  Proponents disagree, and lament that the amount of effort expended to actually find bigfoot has (obviously) been insufficient to do so.

 

All right then.  Now we can start a series of discussions on field expeditions, trail cams, paleontological surveys, biological inventories, etc.  Each one can be a separate thread if you like. To me, what matters in these discussions is to examine how other species have been discovered, and I mean that in the scientific sense, i.e., how the physical specimen was obtained that served as the holotype for the species.

 

That answer has always been garnished with ...well stuff like "we should have had one by 1813."  Well, the evidence says we didn't...but it still points to the animal.

 

I never let my assumptions, bogeymen, etc. get in the way of what evidence is telling me.

 

My problem is that necessary time in the field isn't happening...but people who are spending more time than anyone else has are getting more contact than anyone else has.  If there's no reason for me to believe, for example, that bipto over on the Operation Endurance thread is either deranged or lying to me, then their contacts just haven't resulted in sufficient evidence yet...and I'm not really surprised by that.