N A W A C - Field Study Discussion

[Guest]

What are the accounts involving bigfoot you guys don't believe?

This is getting way off topic. There are literally thousands of completely bonkers accounts. That's a topic with a wide enough scope to be its' own thread.

 

As far as the whole 45 foot leap discussion, I will say this..... Because of the nature of my work, after a couple of decades of estimating and doing takeoffs, I've become fairly adept at (reasonably) accurately judging length and distance. It has been my experience that most people are thoroughly clueless when it comes to accurately gauging distances visually. It seems to me that most people will exaggerate or over estimate length or distance in almost any context in which they are asked to "eyeball" it.

 

I don't know that someone possibly misjudging distances is reason to disregard their entire statement. For an account like that, someone is going to have to be **** convincing to be interviewed multiple times, and leave the interviewer believing that the subject truly believes what they are saying. I have several family members who chose careers in Law Enforcement. Any detective or trained investigator will tell you what poor liars most people really are, especially if you have numerous opportunities to question them face to face. I don't know what kind of training the typical TBRC investigators have had, but I'd wager that a large percentage of reports are rejected. And I'm sure they are quite aware that there are folks would love to make them look foolish.

Edited July 25, 2013 by Irish73

[Guest]

What are the accounts involving bigfoot you guys don't believe?

 

Unlike the critical thinkers, I usually don't spend any time on reports or stories I think are bogus and remember little if anything about them. 

I don't know that someone possibly misjudging distances is reason to disregard their entire statement. For an account like that, someone is going to have to be **** convincing to be interviewed multiple times, and leave the interviewer believing that the subject truly believes what they are saying.

 

The reason this report is public is because the witness (with whom we have continued to have contact over the years and whose story hasn't wavered been enhanced) was compelling and in every way seemed to have had a genuinely unsettling experience. 

[Drew]

Yes it has. By an employee of the US Forest Service who, in her line of work, has learned how to look this kind of stuff up. 

 

OK- I submit maps to you, produced by the USFS.  

Now, please remember that the Virgin forests of the Eastern US, had mature, old growth trees, hundreds of years old.  They blocked out the smaller non marketable trees from the understory.  The natives burned this understory regularly to keep the growth back.  A virgin forest looks nothing like the gnarled mess that we see in our national forests today.   Most of the trees in an area of Virgin forest were marketable, they were continuous tracts of huge Pine and Oak trees, with very few smaller trees below

 

 

 

http://www.cartoko.com/2010/05/area-of-virgin-forest-1926/

[Drew]

Here is an example of what a Virgin Longleaf pine forest looked like.

 

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PSM_V85_D357_Virgin_forest_of_long_leaf_pine_in_georgia.png

 

A typical virgin Oak forest

 

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/30538287

 

My point of course being that if you took the marketable trees out of a Virgin forest, you are in essence, clear-cutting it.

Edited July 25, 2013 by Drew

[Guest]

Again, it goes to the definition of "virgin forest." Kathy states that trees had been selectively logged so that means the forest was no longer virgin. You have often said the area was clear-cut making it impossible to support an animal like a wood ape. Clear-cut and non-virgin are drastically different things.

 

My point of course being that if you took the marketable trees out of a Virgin forest, you are in essence, clear-cutting it.

 

WRONG. Your interpretations are screwy and your assumptions are based on ignorance of the facts. 

 

Let's go back and re-read Kathy's post in answer to your often-repeated charge that the area stripped of forest.

 

I just spent the last few hours pouring over the logging history of Oklahoma and the Ouachita National Forest.  According to the facts that I found, of the original 13 million acres of forested lands in Oklahoma (as recorded in 1804), 8 million acres remained in forest cover by the time the National Forest preserve was established in 1908.  Commercial logging in OK began in 1880, but didn't enter many areas until 1898. In fact, the Indian Territories (including Area X) are described in 1898 as "vast unharvested timberlands." Logging in those areas didn't start until 1907. By 1908, the Forest Preserve that would become the Ouachita National Forest was established and protecting lands from over harvest.  I further found that only certain trees were ever harvested (mainly pine), leaving plenty of unmerchantable trees standing.  This is hardly the view that every single tree in OK was cut down and no habitat was available in the 1800s to the 1900s.

 

Go find me pictures of the moment in which the entire Ouachita mountain range was clear-cut. The one that shows all the peaks for as far as the eye can see being totally denuded of trees. Because that's what you've stated on several occasions the conditions were. No forest. All gone. All at the same time. Therefore, all animals dead or discovered. Now you're trying to change your position to say selective logging is the same as clear-cutting. Besides being totally and completely wrong, it's not been what you've been saying all along.

 

You can't have it both ways. And even if you could, you'd still be wrong. 

Edited July 25, 2013 by bipto

[Drew]

In 1907 the Arkansas National forest was declared.  It did not include the Oklahoma portion of what was later to become the Ouachita National Forest until 1926.

You can continue to think Kathy is correct.  She mistakenly though Oklahoma was included in the original declaration of the Arkansas National Forest, but it wasn't.

 

 

 

In 1926 President Coolidge changed the name of the Arkansas National Forest to the Ouachita National Forest. Additional land was added, extending the forest into 

Oklahoma. Because of uncontrolled hunting, change of habitat, and over-cutting, most of the wildlife was gone from this area by the mid-1920s. The U.S. Forest Service 

began to work with other state agencies to restore the wildlife to western Arkansas and reforest the land. The Forest Service hired men to work as forest rangers. Their most 

important job was fire protection. Riding horseback through the forests, they also acted as game wardens and tried to manage the land. Local farmers resisted efforts to alter 

their traditional activities in the forests, such as yearly burnings to keep the forest open for travel and grazing cattle. During the Depression the federal government provided 

work in the Ouachita National Forest building roads, bridges, lookout towers, recreational facilities, and buildings, and planting tree seedlings.

 

http://www.naturalheritage.com/!userfiles/The_Ouachita_National_Forest.pdf

 

[Guest]

Your interpretations are screwy and your assumptions are based on ignorance of the facts. Show me the evidence that the Ouachitas were completely denuded of trees all at the same time and every animal fled or died. This is your claim. Back it up. Stop prevaricating. 

[Drew]

I've already shown you that the deer herd in Oklahoma was down to 150.

I've shown you that that Black Bear, Cougar, Bison, Wolves were completely wiped out.

I've shown you that Kathy's statement that Oklahmoma's Ouachita Forest was protected in 1907 is incorrect.

I've shown you a 7th grade lesson plan from a National Heritage website says the forests in the Ouachitas were so decimated that few animals lived there, and the trees were over-cut, and burned every year by cattle farmers.  

 

My interpretations are spot-on, and not based on ignorance.

[Guest DWA]

What are the accounts involving bigfoot you guys don't believe?

Not the way to ask the question. What marks the evidence as compelling to those who think it is is its volume and consistency. Some stuff rings different from others but who knows why that is?  It's pointless to niggle over individual bits of evidence, as the 45-year-plus wrangle over the P/G film - no drop of evidence that it's a fake but that doesn't seem to stop some people - shows.  It's the body that makes the case. 

 

All of that being made up by, in the main, non-biologists, yet it all hangs together as a major head start on the biology of an unlisted primate with at least two potential ancestor candidates in the fossil record?  You can believe that.  It's one heck of a whopper to me.

Edited July 25, 2013 by DWA

[Guest]

[...]

I tend not to underestimate animals.

 

Nor overestimate the abilities of humans...

[Guest DWA]

...

Your interpretations are screwy and your assumptions are based on ignorance of the facts. Show me the evidence that the Ouachitas were completely denuded of trees all at the same time and every animal fled or died. This is your claim. Back it up. Stop prevaricating. 

Down with that.  Come ON now, Drew.  Address what is actually going on in X, right now not 1900, and give those of us who know the people working there one shred that makes what you're saying worth our time.

Nor overestimate the abilities of humans...

Actually, I think bigfoot skeptics WAY overestimate not so much human abilities as the human inclination to run all over hell and gone using world-class anatomical and suit-making chops to fake a giant ape.  Pro bono.

Edited July 25, 2013 by DWA

[Guest]

We don't even know why Patty looked that way.  Maybe she was pregnant; maybe she was fattening up for winter like bears do.  Speaking of which, anyone who saw a bear in the wild and didn't know anything about them would be sure he could outrun one.  He wouldn't know they can climb a tree faster than he can run. 

 

Guy standing next to me, Custer State Park, South Dakota, watching some bison.  "Sure glad we can outrun them," he says to me as they get closer.  I look at him.  It's pretty obvious he runs, likely competitive marathons.  So I don't even say what I'm thinking:  if they came for us, bud, you wouldn't be fully turned around before one was walking up your back.

 

I love the things people just know animals can't do.  Sure bumblebees can't fly.  Shooooooooooooooooooooooooore.

 

Critical thinking and fore-thought before you speak is just not part of the normal resume today. (As is admitting that you might now actually know something... but that is a separate issue...) If someone like that thought, just for a minute, about what they were about to say before saying it, they wouldn't look so stupid (although we might miss some chances at humor). But, alas, we are not teaching "think before you talk" anymore...

 

There is a reason humankind needed to invent tools and use our intellect to survive: we are the weaklings of the animal world. Nearly every wild "animal" out there of comparable size/weight is much stronger than us, and more capable in nearly every measureable category of physical activity. Comparing what humans can do to what sasquatches are reputed to do is a useless exercise on so many levels. As is comparing what sasquatches are reputed to be able to do to other known animals. Until we "get" one and know it better, declariing what a sasquatch can or cannot do, in analogy or comparison to known animals, is just one more example of the same mindset of the bison observer above. Might be fun for speculative conversation, but to base an argument on it is not productive and a waste of time.

[1980squatch]

Why is this thread no longer pinned?  What do you have to do around here- habituate a physic squatch who contributed a sample to the Ketchum study??

[Guest DWA]

And now it's off to Cali-for-nye-ay for three weeks.  Sierras; coast; Central Valley inland to I-5 for as far as we can stand the heat.

 

(Highs on the coast near Ventura:  in the sixties.  Shoot, 80 is happening here in the DC suburbs and I thought fall had arrived early.  It's been H-O-T,)

 

If I see something...you'll have to wait 'til I get back.  ;-)  Keep the pot boiling.

[Guest]

Drew, this is just like your argument that every last large mammal in Oklahoma was wiped out. Have you considered the state of cartography in 1640. Have you looked at maps from 1640 compared to satellite imagery of the same charted areas? It looks like a six year old trying to draw an accurate US map by memory. The handful of what were considered to be skilled cartographers of the time were generally working for Royalty and wealthy traders charting newly discovered coastlines, etc. And charting coastlines was far more accurate than trying to chart areas with poor line of site, and constant elevation changes.

 

There is a lot of estimating that goes into documenting historical records like this. Someone had to take several layers of other peoples estimations and suppositions, and superimpose modern political boundaries over those and come up with a number. They may have even had their own motivation to skew the numbers. If someone heading the project of producing these projections was an greenie eco-nazi, they might have skewed it towards looking like more forest were destroyed then ever actually existed. Whats next, are you going to tell us how many actual trees there were in Oklahoma when Columbus landed? Do you have the 1640 deer count?

 

Even if they did semi accurately chart particular areas of forest, you need to consider that animals don't know about state lines, and that there is a large mountain range which wasn't clear cut back then. There have always been forest fires, and the animals that don't perish, do the same thing animals do when areas are no longer suitable to inhabit.....they move over a biit to where things are suitable.

 

How many times are we going to rehash how all of the animals in Oklahoma were wiped out, and all of the forests were cut. How did the Bears get there? Nature is resilient. It endures. How are there so many animals on remote islands that were formed by volcanic deposits instead of tectonic plate shifts?