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

[Guest]

DWA,

 

Do you have any doubts about eyewitness accounts? After all, it is a bit too easy to file reports nowadays, given the proliferation of Bigfoot web sites that always say something like, "do you have a sighting to report - click here." How well are the sightings vetted? I know in many cases such reports have follow up investigations. But many of these investigations conclude with something like -- "Witness seems honest -- see no reason why person would lie." That is about as much of a vetting most reporters get. Does that satisfy you?  

 

Does it bother you that the little vetting done with eyewitness accounts is performed by confirmed proponents? Would you call this circumstance ideal? Or do you think it would be more advantageous to discovery if the vetting was done by neutral investigators?

 

Does the issue of consistency trump the issue of plausibility when you examine eyewitness accounts? For instance, if someone reported a creature consistent with the general description of a Bigfoot, but reported it seen behind a casino in a town in Oklahoma that is nestled in open farm land, would you be open or inclined to accepting this report as true? In other words, would you be inclined to believe it because: Some one said they saw a creature consistent with the popular idea of Bigfoot and that carries more weight with you than the implausibility of such a large creature living and moving around homes and farms and casinos undiscovered locally, as well as unknown to verified knowledge of nature? 

 

Do you ever wonder why Bigfoot sightings have proliferated geometrically in the last few decades? As a kid, and a kid very much interested in Bigfoot, I can tell you that the idea of Bigfoot living in Texas or Oklahoma was an absolutely foreign idea. As a kid I hunted in places that now have Bigfoot sightings. There were not even rumors of Bigfoot afoot. In the area near and around Area X in Oklahoma, I had relatives who camped and stayed at area lakes. Back then, in the 60's, they knew I had a keen interest in Bigfoot. They, themselves, kept an open mind about Bigfoot in the PNW. But nary a word, not a peep, not a rumor of a rumor of giant apes in the local forests ever reached my ears. Where indeed is the documentation that anomalous apes were known to live in such areas as Area X prior to the popularization of the idea of Bigfoot through entertainment venues?

 

Have you ever wondered why books by the likes of Meldrum and Krantz are not replete with eyewitness accounts? Have you ever wondered why they present mostly other types of evidence and give eyewitness accounts much less space? Is there a reason for this?   

 

I'm sure you have pondered such questions. What do you think?  

[Old Dog]

  Just because I might not be able to explain your anecdote to your satisfaction (or even mine) does not mean that you saw a real, live bigfoot. 

 

Conversely, it also does not mean that they didn't see a real, live Bigfoot.

 

There in lies the rub.

[Guest UPs]

Sas.....based on the evidence cited, is your opinion the same as the MDNR? The Huron Mountains is a very interesting area that is mostly privately owned and probably a very good area for a breeding population to call home. I simply do not know what is required to establish scientifically that a breeding population exists, but the MWC and residents have been convinced that a breeding population exists and has existed for years and evidence of any cougar in Michigan has been dismissed by state officials for many years. I also think the mistrust between residents and state officials has been earned.

The reason I posted this was to show what bf researchers are up against as far as getting bf recognized as a real animal. In the cougar case, there were many sightings simply dismissed by the DNR as mistaken identity or hoaxes, but eventually, the MDNR had to take it more seriously. Will the evidence for bf ever get to the point?

[Guest]

 

  Just because I might not be able to explain your anecdote to your satisfaction (or even mine) does not mean that you saw a real, live bigfoot. 

 

Conversely, it also does not mean that they didn't see a real, live Bigfoot.

 

There in lies the rub.

 

Thereby rendering anecdotal data unreliable to prove the existence of an otherwise undescribed species.

1. Sas.....based on the evidence cited, is your opinion the same as the MDNR?  . . .

2. The reason I posted this was to show what bf researchers are up against as far as getting bf recognized as a real animal.

1. Is the MDNR's position that there are cougars in the Hurons but there's been no confirmed breeding there since probably the mid-20th Century? Based on the information presented in the linked article, I would agree.  If there is additional information that would suggest a breeding population (e.g., game cam photos of juvenile cougars, road-killed adult cats of both sexes) I would disagree with the MDNR's position.

 

2. Researchers aren't "up against" anything that every field biologist since Linnaeus hasn't also been up against: If you want to prove that something exists, you need to demonstrate a piece of that something.

 

3. (off topic) And what the heck happened to the quote feature here during my hiatus?

[Guest]

I made a similar post a few weeks ago. No 'scientific proof' of mental disorder that thousands of people have that they need to go report squatch sightings. They can't all be mistaken identity. There aren't that many people that would do a 'hoax' report. Hoaxing would fit into numberous psycological terms. (although with all the exposure, hoaxing will be a larger % of reports, say from 5% to 12% or something).

 

There is simply no evidence that hoaxers exist on a large scale. (Therefore, BF exists) and so on...

Edited June 4, 2013 by Wag

[Guest]

However the topic equates to the existence of Bigfoot, the fact remains that academia, at least in my state for whatever reason do not recognize the existence of a popularly know animal. And the where's the body argument is null here. There have been bodies. One hunter killed one, called the state wildlife officer who arrived looked at it and told him it wasnt a black panther. The hunter asked him what the hell was it then. He said I dont know big ass housecat, not a black cougar they dont exist. got in his truck and left. I ve seen pictures. I've seen these animals. all my men saw these animals. probably half of south Alabama has seen these animals. This is not a question of belief, it's got to be something else. If a government can deny whats laying on a slab in front of them, what else can they deny. The Auburn animal guy either knows better, and I hope he does, me not wanting another Auburn Man to be that uninformed, or that's what they still teach zoological students. Anybody can see these things I guess. Go spend some time in South Alabama, hang around Fort Rucker, Hancey Gate, or anywhere thereabouts, you'll probably see one if you stay there long enough.

[Guest DWA]

DWA,

 

Do you have any doubts about eyewitness accounts? After all, it is a bit too easy to file reports nowadays, given the proliferation of Bigfoot web sites that always say something like, "do you have a sighting to report - click here." How well are the sightings vetted? I know in many cases such reports have follow up investigations. But many of these investigations conclude with something like -- "Witness seems honest -- see no reason why person would lie." That is about as much of a vetting most reporters get. Does that satisfy you?  

 

Do we have proof?  No.  So not satisfied there.  But I am satisfied that the reports say there's something interesting here that deserves scientific attention.  And that's all I've ever claimed.  That the mainstream shows no interest in this is, to me, well, surprising is an understatement.

 

And no, I don't think we should just presume people are wrong or lying when there's nothing on the face of it to make us think either.  This mindset comes from the idea that sasquatch is so implausible that anything else is more likely, which simply isn't the case.

 

 

Does it bother you that the little vetting done with eyewitness accounts is performed by confirmed proponents? Would you call this circumstance ideal? Or do you think it would be more advantageous to discovery if the vetting was done by neutral investigators?

 

I think that many proponents weren't brought to this by belief, but by evidence.  I know that's true of me.  It sure sounds like it's true of Meldrum, Bindernagel and Krantz.  Now Ben Radford?  He's not neutral.  And I have read few bigfoot skeptics that are; they are hamstrung by their belief that this is impossible.

 

Does the issue of consistency trump the issue of plausibility when you examine eyewitness accounts? For instance, if someone reported a creature consistent with the general description of a Bigfoot, but reported it seen behind a casino in a town in Oklahoma that is nestled in open farm land, would you be open or inclined to accepting this report as true? In other words, would you be inclined to believe it because: Some one said they saw a creature consistent with the popular idea of Bigfoot and that carries more weight with you than the implausibility of such a large creature living and moving around homes and farms and casinos undiscovered locally, as well as unknown to verified knowledge of nature? 

 

Until the animal is confirmed, we won't know anything about plausibility, precisely the point I've been making above.  In a world in which bobcats deer and bears walk into supermarkets and houses, just what is so implausible about a higher primate being seen near them?  Primary plausibility judgments cripple the exercise of science.

 

Do you ever wonder why Bigfoot sightings have proliferated geometrically in the last few decades? As a kid, and a kid very much interested in Bigfoot, I can tell you that the idea of Bigfoot living in Texas or Oklahoma was an absolutely foreign idea. As a kid I hunted in places that now have Bigfoot sightings. There were not even rumors of Bigfoot afoot. In the area near and around Area X in Oklahoma, I had relatives who camped and stayed at area lakes. Back then, in the 60's, they knew I had a keen interest in Bigfoot. They, themselves, kept an open mind about Bigfoot in the PNW. But nary a word, not a peep, not a rumor of a rumor of giant apes in the local forests ever reached my ears. Where indeed is the documentation that anomalous apes were known to live in such areas as Area X prior to the popularization of the idea of Bigfoot through entertainment venues?

 

I think there are obvious reasons.  The internet is the most important; it makes it exponentially easier for exponentially more people to report.  And for people who knew nothing about others' experiences to suddenly find parallels to their own. 

 

"Finding Bigfoot" is bad for the field in a number of ways.  But I have noticed that one thing has happened on the BFRO database since that show became popular:  every report update includes encounters from the current or prior year.  There's an obvious explanation for that:  people know where to report now.  I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and no way do I think Cliff, Bobo and Matt are making those up.  If anything, they misuse the data, because they don't know how to approach it like scientists do.  They don't even sound like they're talking about the same animal people are seeing.  That's their problem.  But I see no reason to prima facie believe that the reports are a concoction.  Again, I don't deal in conspiracy theory, and I don't see myself surrounded by kooks and liars and so suspect that most of the world doesn't exactly have that problem either.

 

Have you ever wondered why books by the likes of Meldrum and Krantz are not replete with eyewitness accounts? Have you ever wondered why they present mostly other types of evidence and give eyewitness accounts much less space? Is there a reason for this?   

 

Much of what they are doing is theorizing on what those accounts are describing.  I think that, as scientists, that's their job.  When I started reading Bindernagel (who uses more reports as reference than Krantz or Meldrum), I was instantly compelled by the accounts and his interpretations.  Reason?  Krantz and Meldrum - and I - had come to the same conclusions.  I don't have any doubt what influences what they say; it seems more than coincidence that I read them, and time and time again go:  I'll be darned.  I was thinking that, too.

 

When I look at anything like this, I want to know what scientists think.  They're the ones to whom we delegate that task.  The ones that think it's real seem to be applying their expertise to the evidence.  The ones who don't, simply don't make arguments that I think a scientist should buy.

 

Simple as that.

 

 

"OK, that you consider that a contradiction shows

 

...and hasn't this been shown 1,000 times here

 

...that you do not understand the difference between evidence and proof." -DWA 

 

Actually,no it has not. But maybe if you keep saying it over and over and over and over again, people might believe you.

 

And your rationale would be?  I rest my case. 

 

(See?  I know already.)

 

Look at jerrywayne.  He and I are talking about the evidence.  Might want to step up there.  Doesn't just have to be us two, you know.

[dmaker]

Oh for Pity's Sake DWA, I talk about your evidence all the time. I just don't share the same conclusion as you, so you like to pretend that I don't. It's getting kind of old you know.

 

You're in love with the eye witness reports. We get that. I'm not. For many reasons, I'm not. You are. Bully for you. 

 

Thankfully science is going to need a whole lot more than eye witness reports to classify a creature. And to date, that is where this whole Bigfoot thing is failing miserably. No shortage of anecdotal evidence, granted, but with a complete failure to collect any physical evidence that can be tied to a Bigfoot whatsoever. Anecdotal evidence is a dime a dozen. The stuff that really counts , the physical evidence, is where Bigfoot falls flat on it's face.

Edited June 4, 2013 by dmaker

[Guest DWA]

Um hum, and I know why that is, and you don't, and I know how to solve it, and so do others and they're doing it, and you don't.

 

Got a train to catch?

 

You talk about it.  Just wish that the arguments would reflect equal knowledge bases and they don't.

[Guest]

There have been bodies. [of black mountain lions] One hunter killed one, called the state wildlife officer who arrived looked at it and told him it wasnt a black panther. The hunter asked him what the hell was it then. He said I dont know big ass housecat, not a black cougar they dont exist. got in his truck and left. I ve seen pictures.

Here's a great example of an anecdote.  What you're relaying might be true or it might not.  How can we evaluate it?  Well, one easy thing I can do is ask to see the photographs of this alleged black cougar killed by the hunter in your story.  Surely the cat was photographed 9 ways to Sunday before, during, and after its examination by the "state wildlife officer".   The claim immediately jumps from anecdotal to evidence-based if there are photos than can be linked to the claim.

 

 

 

More generally, if people see odd animals and want academics like me to "look into it", then they should have some understanding of what that means:

 

1) For a minimum, bare-bones field investigation of something like this, I'm going to need about 2 years and $60,000; a typical, basic field inventory these days is more like 2-3 years and $100,000. So I'm going to need to write a grant to get the money to do this work.  Even if we did some kind of half-baked, one year study for $30,000, that money has to come from somewhere. 

 

2) Next I need a source for the grant money.  Most of my funding comes from . . . my state's wildlife agency.  So you want me to ask for money from the people who've already made public statements that the issue I want to study is a non-issue.  Even more problematic, I'm writing a grant this week to said agency for which their entire budget for the program this year is about $300,000.  They're going to want to fund 6-7 projects that address their highest priorities from that one pot of money.  Not gonna happen.  So where else can one go to get a grant to conduct basic inventory for an animal that some people claim to have seen?  NSF?  NIH?  NASA? USFWS?  You may not have noticed this in the news, but there's something of a scuttlebutt in Washington these days about Federal spending or some such nonsense.  Unless the Federal agencies have specific line items in their research programs for the discovery of new species that people think they've seen, the chance of getting a survey like this funded is the big goose egg.  Also, Federal grants these days need to have entire sections devoted to socioeconomic impacts, extension education, etc. built right in.  Unless it's "transformative" research, the odds of funding are exceedingly low. 

 

3) Still, maybe we can tap into that spirit of discovery and get some program officer somewhere to greenlight our proposal.  How can we best make the case that some really important aspects of what scientists know about cougars are plainly wrong and we know this because some people "saw" black cougars? (I just did a quick lit search on "Puma concolor".  There were 11,700 items listed.  That's a lot of people doing a lot work on cougars, and not one of them describing a melanistic morph of this species.)

 

Doing this kind of work takes a lot of convincing people that it's worthwhile to do before you ever set foot in the study area.  If all we have to make that case are anecdotes from the locals, then that's not very convincing. Why isn't it convincing?  This site explains it well: http://www.easterncougar.org/pages/abouteasterncougars.htm.  See the sections on "history", "hoaxes", and especially "beyond sightings to sign".

[Guest DWA]

^^^A neat capsule explanation of why we don't know more. 

 

What it shouldn't be is confirmation that the stuff that isn't getting funded is going begging because it isn't true.

 

It's obviously gonna impact what gets funded if things that aren't real, like black cougars and sasquatch, start getting confirmed.

 

But I'm kind of at a loss how that is going to happen when the attitude is "that's not real so we won't fund it."  I don't think money should tell us what's not real.

 

And given how many times the "anecdotes from the locals" have expanded scientific canon, not to give that on-the-ground component any respect at all but rather to let green bills do its talking for it is, to me, staggering.

 

I hear lots of lip service that scientists are interested.  Their takes on the evidence bely that.

 

This is all I ask, and the minimum I need to see to tell me the lip service is more than that.

 

I want to see state and Federally-funded biotic surveys go into the field with, at the very least, the following three things:

 

• Jeff Meldrum's sasquatch field guide;
• Alerts to the possible presence of melanistic cougars...shoot, given some minds, I'd settle for cougars, period; and
• The same (where applicable) for the ivory-billed woodpecker (to name just one).

Distributed without snickers, so Joe Fieldguy won't go:  I know what it'll do to my career to say I saw this.

 

I hear that doesn't happen.

 

Well, I'm gonna play skeptic and say it's pandemic, and I have to see proof that it doesn't.  And I haven't asked much.  I'm from Missouri.  Show me.

Summing up:  I can't respect the attitude "we can't fund it and we will laugh at you to boot."

[dmaker]

^^ So you believe black cougars exist?

[Guest DWA]

Um, where'd I say that?

 

OK, time for drawings.

 

 

NO WAY SUCKAH------------------------------------------------Suspended Judgment----------------------------------------------------------Evidence?  I BELIEVE.

 

 

Pick the place on the spectrum where I reside.  Just so everybody can see how well you read my posts.

 

Go.

[dmaker]

"It's obviously gonna impact what gets funded if things that aren't real, like black cougars and sasquatch, start getting confirmed."

 

"Alerts to the possible presence of melanistic cougars.."

 

 

^^ Sorry, but I took that comment to imply that you were predicting the outcome of an event. An event which seems, based on your comment, likely to happen. That event being, of course, the confirmation and presence of black cougars. But I do see where your comments are a small bit hypothetical. 

Edited June 4, 2013 by dmaker

[WSA]

I am convinced there is a high probability that dark colored cougars are likely to exist in the state of Alabama (and probably other places in the S.E.), or that they once did, yes.  I listen to the accounts and I draw my conclusions about them.  If I were a F&G guy, I'd be sure to give you the party line on this point, but I would also probably confide to you "off the record" over a beer that my opinion differs, but I'm not paid to give my opinion.   

Edited June 4, 2013 by WSA