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

[Guest DWA]

Actually, the way I put it is the way I have heard it at least half the times I've seen a similar expression made. 

 

It's one of several ways the alleged mainstream "consensus" (based on no review of evidence, but hey) is used by bigfoot skeptics as evidence against.  I've heard it both ways, but as I said, that one is frequent.

 

And what I am saying

 

(something I have felt for as long as I have been thinking about this; I mean, proof is required for proof, something bigfoot skeptics seem to think is a monumental concept but I accept as a tautology)

 

is not acknowledgement but indictment.  When science is operating, it pursues evidence to a conclusion.  It doesn't sit on its hands and wait for weekenders.  Nothing else has amassed so much evidence in its favor without being accepted as real - never mind being accepted as possible.

 

 

BTW:  expecting each individual piece of evidence to be either the toe tag for a bigfoot or useless is not exactly applying one's expertise to the evidence.

[Guest]

DWA,

 

Here is a statement from you: "Nothing else has amassed so much evidence in its favor without being accepted as real - never mind being accepted as possible."

 

This statement confirms what I've suspected for a while. When Bigfoot enthusiasts bemoan the inattention Bigfoot gets from mainstream science in general, I have wondered what it is they want from science. The standard answer is usually something like: "Acknowledge that Bigfoot evidence is worthy of investigation, and investigate." This sounds high minded and dovetails into an aspect of science that drives "discovery" (the thrust of Bindernagel's argument, btw.) 

 

Your comments reveal what I think is really behind the enthusiast's call for science. The Bigfoot believer, enthusiast, proponent, etc., wants science to accept the existence of Bigfoot, even if tangentially, prior to the true confirmation of its existence, i.e., securing a specimen. In other words, the enthusiast really wants science to legitimize his/her belief in the existence of Bigfoot, verbally, if not quite substantially. This is the borderline where science becomes pseudo-science and science is used erroneously to confirm personal belief. The same could be said of "scientific creationism," for instance.

 

Getting back to sightings. We have accounts where Bigfoot sightings have been revealed to be mistaken. We have yet to have Bigfoot sightings that have been confirmed as real. That is why finding mistaken sightings may give us an understanding as to what is behind at least some of the recorded accounts that have no support other than the sighting report itself. You find the video I posted suspect, so how about this written account by John Green himself:  http://www.nabigfootsearch.com/albums/album_image/6905109/5477215.htm

 

People Booger,

 

Many sightings are momentary and thus are fraught with possible misinterpretations, especially if one is acclimated to Bigfoot lore or belief. You make a good point that some Bigfoot sightings are not likely to be judged mistaking one animal for another because of the proximity or duration of the sighting. 

 

Two types of Bigfoot sightings can be exampled by the accounts of William Roe and BFF's Bipto. Roe's sighting is close range and of a duration that would give us no option of misidentification as a solution to the sighting. Bipto's sighting is fleeting and seriously ambiguous. Bipto's sighting is very much open to interpretation, even though he seems now to be as convinced he saw Bigfoot as Roe seemed to be (or should I say "wood ape" -Bipto, or "sasquatch" -Roe).

 

With a Roe-like account, two options are available to us (overlooking another explanation: hallucination). In the Roe case, for example, either he lied or he told the truth. In Bigfootery, eyewitnesses are all George Washingtons "unable to tell a lie." In truth, all folks lie. Some more than others. We have different motives for different lies. The idea that people who claim to see Bigfoot up close and personal cannot and would not lie is unrealistic. More unrealistic, to my mind, than saying people who claim to see Bigfoot up close and personal are lying.

[Guest Llawgoch]

General question

:

What proportion of people do you think are capable of lying about seeing a Bigfoot, be it because they're insane, having a joke, looking for attention, maliciously toying with Bigfooters, whatever reason?

 

Let's say 1 in 100 people, one per cent. After all, in 2008 more than one in a hundred people in the USA were actually in jail, so I think that's an underestimate.

 

 

Population of the USA - 315 million.  Say 200 million adults.

 

1% of that is 2,000,000

 

Therefore there are 2 million people walking around the USA who are morally capable of lying about seeing Bigfoot.  

 

From this you have to conclude that anonymous databases of sightings are worthless. All that matters in any sighting report is the credibility of the witness and the credibility of the story.  Those who harp on about eye-witness evidence being used in court seem to forget that in courts the reliability and the story of the witness will be ruthlessly critically examined.  Without that process, eye-witness evidence has no value.

 

If you have ONE convincing story told to you first hand by a person you trust, that is a decent reason to look further into the subject.

 

Hundreds of anonymous reports filed on the internet are not.

[MIB]

The claims of lies does not stand up.  Yes, there are some.   However, consider it statistically.   People making up BS about boogy men and bug eyed monsters do not conspire to create a pattern that follows a bell curve.  The BF reports generally do.   Anyone who is postulating that the bulk of reports are lies has to account for that curve where there should be none.   Anyone postulating that the bulk of reports are misidentifications has to find some existent species with roughly the right characteristics and behavior to fit the curve. 

 

Without that, the claims that bigfoot reports are bogus are just as bogus.   It goes both directions.

 

MIB

[Guest]

^A "bell curve" of what?  Do you mean that the made-up stories that appear in databases of alleged bigfoot encounters describe creatures that look like bigfoots? 

 

If you developed a sightings database for the HPRO ("Hockey Player Research Organization") and invited people to report their encounters with hockey players, you would find a remarkable statistical artifact:  Almost every one of those thousands of reports would describe some kind of humanoid being of bulky build, on skates, and carrying a stick. There's no way thousands of people could've made up stories and submitted them to the HPRO with that kind of consistency unless they were actually seeing re - Wait a minute. . . Okay, nevermind.

 

"Wildman" mythology goes back a long way.  It predates Roger Patterson, William Roe, Albert Ostman, etc. If you tell a tale about a big, two-legged, hairy man-monster, it'll be included into the bigfoot canon for all time.  People do tell those stories, and from what I can tell, they've been doing so since there have been people.

 

The amazing thing to me is that some people also tell stories about mothmen, Jersey devils, thunderbirds, pterosaurs, mermaids, fairies, etc.  The people who tell those stories are often as sober, educated, and credible as any bigfoot "witness".  That fact is often brushed aside by bigfooters because they think that the number of bigfoot stories is far greater than the number of stories about these other creatures, and they can't wrap their heads around the notion of a large number of people claiming something that isn't true.  They assume that because their perception of the number reported is large then some number of those reports just have to be true.  I call this the "Wal-Mart" fallacy:  It's assumed by many in big cities that people in rural areas love to shop at Wal-Mart.  Most of them don't; there's just nowhere else for them to shop.

 

Bigfoot is the Wal-Mart of crypto-creatures, but just because it's the biggest doesn't make it any more likely to be real.

[Guest Llawgoch]

The claims of lies does not stand up.  Yes, there are some.   However, consider it statistically.   People making up BS about boogy men and bug eyed monsters do not conspire to create a pattern that follows a bell curve.  The BF reports generally do.   Anyone who is postulating that the bulk of reports are lies has to account for that curve where there should be none.   Anyone postulating that the bulk of reports are misidentifications has to find some existent species with roughly the right characteristics and behavior to fit the curve. 

 

Without that, the claims that bigfoot reports are bogus are just as bogus.   It goes both directions.

 

MIB

 

 

If I were going to make up a Bigfoot story I would read other Bigfoot stories first and then say something like what is in them, perhaps with a couple of embellishments of my own, perhaps not.  I wouldn't be making it up from a blank slate.  Of course there would be a pattern to them if people were making them up.

 

And if my embellishments went down well among people reading them, you can bet that there would be a wave of Bigfoots reported doing whatever it was I'd said.  It would be interesting to study Bigfoot reports for 'fashions' of this kind.

 

 They assume that because their perception of the number reported is large then some number of those reports just have to be true.  I

 

 

My main problem with this is the position that  "Ok, there are 10,000 reports, I accept most are mistakes or false (especially the ones that don't fit my personal theories), but they can't all be".  

 

Which is stating "I accept that 5,000 people would make up or misidentify things, but I can't accept that 10,000 people would".  Why on earth not? Once you accept that there are large numbers of people lying or mistaken when reporting Bigfoots in places you consider unlikely, why assume that the people who claim to be seeing Bigfoots in places you consider likely aren't lying or mistaken?

 

It goes back again to quality of evidence, not quantity.  The fact that huge numbers of people are lying or mistaken about seeing Bigfoots is accepted by just about everyone.  To say "Ok, hundreds are wrong or lying, but that still leaves hundreds, and hundreds wouldn't be wrong or lying",  is just utterly illogical.

Edited June 8, 2013 by Llawgoch

[Guest]

I personnally know people who claim Bigfoot sightings and interactions whom I do not believe and whom I would advise others to not believe. The personal dispositions may be quiet, humble, very level headed individuals and using my own criteria for believeability in people these would quailify. But I do not believe them in regards to Bigfoot because they are also highly excitable and easily influenced especially by those they feel may be more educated or smarter than them, and apparently sometime in their past they have been influenced by those who have a strong belief in Bigfoot. In my case I know that they did not see what they said they did, knowing details I wont post here I know they were hoaxed, at least for some of their encounters. The reason they were hoaxed was because they let someone find out they were easily infuenced and highly excitable and as such were perfect candidates for practical jokers. But, in their case, even after the hoax was revealed, and the hoaxer confessed to them they refuse to believe it and count those encounters as real and as the most impacting in their squatchy careers. These guys look believeable but they are not.  And I'm sure there is a good percentage of Bigfooters that may share those qualities and I recognize that.

    The rub, to get in that old adage lol, is that I also know people whom I most certainly believe who have said they saw an unknown creature. People as solid as a rock emotionally and without anything to gain by making something that weird up in regards to the respect and believeablilty  they would lose in the telling of to their wives, friends, familiies, workmates etc. And I think that this subset of individuals having sightings is also a good percentage of reports.

    I realize that one hundred percent of people can indeed be wrong about anything unknown. But my own personal sense of reason and logic asks the question: What are the odds that each and every report is false, hoaxed, or mistaken, and what are the odds that your trust in or belief in those you believe is wrong?  Sans really hard evidence, it condenses to a question of belief, at least on my part, in my ability to correctly read or know others. Fallible of course. But I think many solid witnesses see these things. Hence the question of the thread.

 P.S. I was not involved in any hoax of anyone, at any time, regarding the story above. lol

[Guest DWA]

DWA,

 

Here is a statement from you: "Nothing else has amassed so much evidence in its favor without being accepted as real - never mind being accepted as possible."

 

This statement confirms what I've suspected for a while. When Bigfoot enthusiasts bemoan the inattention Bigfoot gets from mainstream science in general, I have wondered what it is they want from science. The standard answer is usually something like: "Acknowledge that Bigfoot evidence is worthy of investigation, and investigate." This sounds high minded and dovetails into an aspect of science that drives "discovery" (the thrust of Bindernagel's argument, btw.) 

 

Your comments reveal what I think is really behind the enthusiast's call for science. The Bigfoot believer, enthusiast, proponent, etc., wants science to accept the existence of Bigfoot, even if tangentially, prior to the true confirmation of its existence, i.e., securing a specimen. In other words, the enthusiast really wants science to legitimize his/her belief in the existence of Bigfoot, verbally, if not quite substantially. This is the borderline where science becomes pseudo-science and science is used erroneously to confirm personal belief. The same could be said of "scientific creationism," for instance.

 

Getting back to sightings. We have accounts where Bigfoot sightings have been revealed to be mistaken. We have yet to have Bigfoot sightings that have been confirmed as real. That is why finding mistaken sightings may give us an understanding as to what is behind at least some of the recorded accounts that have no support other than the sighting report itself. You find the video I posted suspect, so how about this written account by John Green himself:  http://www.nabigfootsearch.com/albums/album_image/6905109/5477215.htm

 

People Booger,

 

Many sightings are momentary and thus are fraught with possible misinterpretations, especially if one is acclimated to Bigfoot lore or belief. You make a good point that some Bigfoot sightings are not likely to be judged mistaking one animal for another because of the proximity or duration of the sighting. 

 

Two types of Bigfoot sightings can be exampled by the accounts of William Roe and BFF's Bipto. Roe's sighting is close range and of a duration that would give us no option of misidentification as a solution to the sighting. Bipto's sighting is fleeting and seriously ambiguous. Bipto's sighting is very much open to interpretation, even though he seems now to be as convinced he saw Bigfoot as Roe seemed to be (or should I say "wood ape" -Bipto, or "sasquatch" -Roe).

 

With a Roe-like account, two options are available to us (overlooking another explanation: hallucination). In the Roe case, for example, either he lied or he told the truth. In Bigfootery, eyewitnesses are all George Washingtons "unable to tell a lie." In truth, all folks lie. Some more than others. We have different motives for different lies. The idea that people who claim to see Bigfoot up close and personal cannot and would not lie is unrealistic. More unrealistic, to my mind, than saying people who claim to see Bigfoot up close and personal are lying.

Actually, no, not really.

 

Most of science's advances - pretty much all of them - have involved accepting possibility and examining to obtain proof.

 

How does science advance when it waits for things to be proven to it?  Proof is science's job.

 

The evidence says, very clearly:  something is happening here, and it looks to be very consistently reported.  What is that something?

 

Science is supposed to step in at that point and find out.  Just the way things are.  When they're working, that is.

 

You're comparing "cannot and would not lie" to "they're lying," when really one has no evidence to point to either possibility, other than that lying happens.

 

That lying happens means I can call you a liar?  Not last time I checked.

 

In other words:    what we have here is an extremely uncertain proposition - that is leaning in an extremely obvious direction.

 

(Contrast with the whatsit? in Loch Ness.  That's a whatsit?  The evidence says so.  The sasquatch, according to evidence, is a member of the Hominoidea, a primate family most people don't know anything about, but they're consistently describing something that, from appearances, clearly belongs there.)

 

(And with black holes, a mathematical construct for which there is no direct evidence.)

 

HUGE difference there.

[Guest UPs]

pb post 112

That is a pretty reasonable post and I most of what you said. You have to remember that there are those that have already concluded that bf doesn't and never has existed so all of the eye witness reports have to be inaccurate for whatever reason they can come up with no matter how unlikely. To me, this is a backward way of reasoning. I read a post a few years ago by someone who even went to the extent of lecturing to some USFWS employees on why they should not take bf sightings seriously. This could have been a joke, but it wasn't worded as one.

In many reported sightings, there are multiple witnesses and also many that had never considered bf to be anything but a myth. These are some of more difficult reports to ignore. If you compare witness reports of mothman, tooth fairy, werewolves, or mermaids to those of bigfoot, the glaring difference is numbers. In bf were simply a myth like these others, I would expect the volume of reports to be on the same scale and that is simply not the case. Another glaring difference is in the title of this thread, the number of very credible folks that have come forward with their own sightings when it will obviously hurt their credibility and reputations.

One thing that I do not agree with is that among the 1000,s of reports, some have to be true. There is always a small possibility that even with so many reports, bf may not exist at all, but it would be statistically improbable. We can have a million credible eyewitness reports and that still will not prove to science that bf exists and instead, it will take either a body or a piece of a body. What all of the credible eyewitness reports can do is to provide motivation for scientists and enthusiasts to solve this mystery. Even if you believe that bf doesn't exist, the mystery of what made sounds like tree knocks, screams, and howls, footprints and trackways, and a host of other evidence left in very remote areas, needs to be solved. If not bf, then it must be a conspiracy of some kind and that is just more bizarre than bf existing, IMO.

[Guest]

The opening of this show is a 911 call. This sounds like a real 911 call on a 'big (all black) guy 6-7 ft tall'. So now there are people pathologically reporting big hairy people calling 911, which is at least a misdomeaner if your faking it. I wonder how many 911 BF calls there are out there?

 

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ohiobigfoothunters/2013/02/13/ohio-bigfoot-hunters-radio-1

 

 

Still looking for 'proof' of pathological hoaxing going on out there.

[Guest]

If that is a crank call, the perpetrator did an excellent job of acting and voice inflection control. I too wonder how many 911 calls on the subject are out there. On another thread someone posted a site where all the participating public band radio traffic was recorded. I did go to the site but there were only two transmissions recorded in my area, neither uncommon, an airplane pilot asking directions or something and a non emergency police call I think. I wonder how one could find the 'creature' call nuggets among those recorded calls.

[Guest]

 

 

Still looking for 'proof' of pathological hoaxing going on out there.

Coincidentally I am still looking for "proof" of an 8+ft apeman running hog wild from the Florida panhandle to western Alaska...and everywhere in between.  Where is that guy?

[norseman]

 

 

 He made a noise, startled the bear who suddenly flipped around 180 degrees with amazing speed and dashed into and under some rocks. My Dad stood up, got a better look and laughed. He wasn't yards away from a bear, he was feet away from a  marmot.

With the land sloping up, and the animal silhouetted against the cloudy sky, with only the stunted growth of vegetation near the tree line to gauge size, he had misjudged the mass of that animal by about 5000%.

 

When otherwise intelligent people can make huge mistakes, and otherwise honest people tell massive lies, anecdotal evidence is just not that reliable. I don't discount people who see black cats, but I don't think that does much to certify bigfoot sightings. I know cats exist. I know black cats exist. I can't say the same for sasquatch, color morphs or not.

 

Well, one guy, and two animals that - size not taken into account - look much more alike than a bear and a bipedal ape.  That no one thinks is real.

 

I haven't read a sasquatch report that makes it likely to me that that kind of messup is happening.

 

Inconsistencies allowed, volume and consistency do count for something.

 

It is my contention that the large numbers of attributed sightings are bogus. Seems I've read from folks like Meldrum and L. Coleman that they consider a majority of reported sightings probably false or mistaken, for various reasons. If you scale back a majority of sightings, take the accounts off the table, you are left with a majority of accounts that report only fleeting glances or sightings lasting only a few seconds. And a minority of reports would have a substantial sighting, like for instance the famous William Roe sighting, that leave us with only two options as explanations: fake/hoax or true/real.

 

I would contend that the fleeting glances or short sightings may indeed be misidentifications, seeing known animals and believing you're seeing an unknown animal. The following video illustrates my point. Even though this is misidentified via a video, it is based on someones claim to have shot video of a running sasquatch and the video's captured comments suggest the fellow really didn't understand what he just captured on tape. As the misidentification is made known, it seems obvious --- but only after the fact. 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rPsUJH3NHY&feature=player_embedded

 

 

Your video shows a Moose.

 

What perplexes the commentator as to what it's "carrying" under it's arm? Is actually it's right leg.

 

The legs of a moose are not dark chocolate, but a tawny light brown.

 

So sure, we can take into account mistaken accounts......but what about these?

 

http://www.bigfootencounters.com/sbs/keller-WA09.htm

 

Instead of taking someone's word on a grainy photo? You have something right in front of you that defies explanation. So if they are hoaxed? How did they do it? Eight feet apart? There are no vehicle tracks that pulled someone hopping along behind a pickup truck. Is the hoaxer wearing stilts and walking in snow?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ijmMKu1e3w

[bipedalist]

 

....Your video shows a Moose.

 

What perplexes the commentator as to what it's "carrying" under it's arm? Is actually it's right leg....

 

 

 

I think Norse meant the other right leg LOL or the left hind leg in that vid. of the BF Moose

 

"How do you explain that?"  the narrator says, heck you can see the broadside silhouette of the whole moose at the base of the hill, what more needed to be said when it was slowed and stabilized?!

Edited June 9, 2013 by bipedalist

[Guest DWA]

 

 

 

Still looking for 'proof' of pathological hoaxing going on out there.

Coincidentally I am still looking for "proof" of an 8+ft apeman running hog wild from the Florida panhandle to western Alaska...and everywhere in between.  Where is that guy?

 

Well, so are we all.

 

So.

 

We have two unproven claims here:

 

1) that the most unusual and wouldn't-bet-a-penny-odds concatenation of lies, hoaxes and misidentifications has been going on pretty much since European settlement, and is right in line with Native reports (find another similar case.  You wont);

 

or

 

2) that primate is real.

 

We delegate the proofs for such things to science.  Whenever they finally get on it is OK with me.