A Gift For The Bff

[hiflier]

Hello All,

I'd like to bring the nature of research to the surface a bit. I do get the impression that many members here on the BFF would like to see a good picture of the Sasquatch dilemma above the usual round and round dialogue that goes on to the frustration of more than of few of you. The Habituators are out of reach for the most part as they keep things fairly off limits for most being a cadre of secretive folks for their own good reasons. We've all seen the maps, charts and graphs that look good and help with a kind of sightings layout but offer little in the way of gaining a foothold for most who want more in the way of a solid look at the the true situation of what it is to deal with a Sasquatch.

There are databases but they are set up more for interest than research. One can click on a report or a series of reports for an area with a timeframe attached but it's succeeds only in providing a thunbnail of the whole view with many details simply too removed to see anything in the way of patterns or characteristics without spending hours wading through each report individually. Even if one did invest the time? Then unless the details were actually written down on paper for each event, or someone could miraculously keep all the factors organized in their head as they went down the list, gaining an overall perspective of the Sasquatch issue is pretty much out of reach for most.

The ones working on the BFF SSR database are to be commended in taking on a monumental task. That being classifying the various reports into a massive database. There are other databases out there too and I saw one member wishing all of them could be combined into one; I also would like to see that happen some day. My sense though is that by the time that happens there will be a type specimen secured. I don't see that kind of a comprehensive database combination happening within ten years or so if it ever happens at all. It may in fact exist but not for us. Nonetheless some data is available now for members to look at that I think will go a long way in keeping a reality check alive and well on the subject of Bigfoot.

For myself,I have been working hard on the John Green Sasquatch database for a while now in an effort at get it into a format that anyone can view. The website that offers it does so in two formats: one is MS Access which is a relational database that has and older .mdb extension which is difficult to convert to a working format and is a read-only file. The other is a spreadsheet type file with a .csv extension which is a workable file but it has it's own set of problems. The chief one being that it comes with no headers at the top of the columns on the sheet so if one is looking at numbers of say, creature ID's, or even something as mundane as altitude, it's almost impossible to make sense of what one is looking at.

Now John Green did an amazing amount of data gathering, and an even more amazing job of organizing it. Truth be known the database is almost TOO big because of all the categorized details in each report! It is truly a remarkable piece of work an few have actually seen it. All I ever wanted to do was be able to look at it but was unable to because of the download issues already mentioned. I have now solved those issues and as a result can now offer the database here to all of you to look at, sort categories as you wish, and genarally have in your hands a great tool in which to see exactly what N A W A C and others are up against in their quest to prove to science, and all of us, that Bigfoot is real. Feel free to ask questions about what you are about to see, and also how to use this database to help you organize the data in ways that I'm sure some of you have never had the opportunity to see or do.

The witness descriptions are a real eye opener when it comes to understanding just what the guys in the field are up against, and why their goals are so difficult. After you look through the data perhaps cutting the "hunters" in the field some slack will come naturally I'm sure. It may even help in generating a greater respect for their endeavors as well. I hope you take the time to go through this stuff as it is set up differently that what you are probably used to seeing and working with. In my opinion it is how a database should look, operate, and be presented to the public. After you see it you'll know what I mean. It isn't a very "pretty" database but all the maps and charts in the world will not give you what you will soon have when you load this in.

In the near future I will also make available a broken down short version of the whole thing which will contain only the pertinent details for a quicker and more efficient reference. I will also be breaking out the data by state and discuss further breakdowns in order to perform more detailed sorting than what is available in the database in it's current form. An example would be when a report says a Sasquatch was next to a creek it never says WHICH creek, so that would be a detail in the short version that would not be necessary. Location, Color, Size, Gender, and so forth however WILL be included, along with other more critical details for easier overall research. The database only goes up to the year 2000 but in my opinion it's still "current" when one thinks about the estimated longevity of these animals.

My apologies for the length of this post. I don't think something like this has ever been offered to you for free before so I hope it's a good trade-off for my ramblings. The file is set up to run on Excel or any free software like LibreOffice and bottom line? The database isn't going to cost you a cent! It's a zipped file so after your download extract the files and save them into a folder or somewhere easily accessible. Call up whatever spreadsheet program you use and load the files for viewing . Get ready for a deeper look at what everyone has been talking about, and at something that may give you a greater insight into the world of the Sasquatch phenomenon.......Happy hunting and ENJOY!

Edited October 1, 2013 by hiflier

[Trogluddite]

^^^^^^^^^^

 

Like Christmas in .... wait, what month is it?!  Oh yeah, September. And my frau thinks I'll be getting work done if I'm furloughed tomorrow. Great work Hiflier.

[1980squatch]

Thanks much Hiflier!

[BobbyO]

This is great H, really great work..

 

Thank you.

[Guest JiggyPotamus]

I think you are spot on in your analysis of the current situation. I have been convinced that the best available evidence is in fact the sighting reports, and that there is still new information to be learned by establishing patters in just the data we have available now. But as you said, there is not a comprehensive source for this data, and very few people have attempted to solve the problem. And I suspect some of those who have did not make their work public. I just downloaded the file and am about to check it out. Good job.

 

Edit to Add:

 

Something that I found extremely amazing is the fact that so many of these reports were either directly from a news source, or were gathered by the man himself. This is completely different from a database that contains reports that were submitted online, even when the report is followed up on by an actual investigator. I have always thought that there were few hoax reports filed, but I'm sure they do occur. It is more difficult, and takes a different type of hoaxer, to blatantly lie to someone directly in front of you, as opposed to filling out an online form.

Edited October 1, 2013 by JiggyPotamus

[chelefoot]

Awesome!

 

Thanks Hiflier!

[Guest]

Just downloaded and started perusing... Many thanks! I have always wanted to look at this data and couldn't...

[hiflier]

Hello All,

 

You are more than welcome and thanks for the kind words. You must know that class time will be fast approaching as I gather some research questions together. Such as.........After studying the database a bit can anyone who now has it downloaded tell me (us) if whether or not an ape/humanlike face equates with a large flat nose/small/humanlike nose and then which gender each is likely to be associated with? If you don't wish to play then that's fine but this question is a good exercise in getting around between at least two of the three files and using the Creature/Incident ID references to each.

 

Now I don't know the answer to this as I haven't even looked it up myself but I will- believe me.

 

P.S. A word of caution? The database can be altered- it is not a read-only type file. I suggest making a copy before doing things like sorting for different things like chronology or other categories. You can of course always delete the file (s) if it gets too disorganized and reload it from here.

Edited October 3, 2013 by hiflier

[Branco]

You obviously have a LOT more patience and computer skills than an old woods rat like myself. Great work! Thanks for all the effort and time expended. 

Edited October 5, 2013 by Branco

[hiflier]

Hello Branco,

 

My pleasure, thanks for the kind words. The amount of time and effort that John Green gave over in shepherding the database needed to be brought to the surface so everyone could appreciate what he had so freely given the public. In reading his introduction on his website I do believe that that was his wish. 

Edited October 5, 2013 by hiflier

[hiflier]

Hello All,

 

If some of you have not visited the website it is here:

 

http://www.sasquatchdatabase.com/

 

The intro reads thus:

 

"As the owner of a small-town paper in British Columbia it was back in 1957 that I began looking into local reports of encounters with giant, hair-covered, bipedal creatures, long known in Canada as “Sasquatch.†A year later “Bigfoot†broke into the news in the United States and I saw for myself, beside a creek in a California forest, enormous humanlike footprints sunk so deep into a solid sandbar that no one who saw them could come up with a way that humans could have made them. Ever since then I have been on a lifelong quest to establish what is behind the sighting reports and how those footprints come to be. 

 

In the early years it was an adventure, with considerable time spent on active searches in the woods and along ocean beaches as well as interviewing witnesses over a wide area of western North America. Eventually, however, I accepted the fact that the odds against any individual personally bringing this investigation to a successful conclusion are impossibly great, and I devoted more and more effort to exchanging and distributing information among the other investigators I had come to know, and to attempting to persuade qualified zoologists and anthropologists to take up the gauntlet. I also wrote  books on my findings, and they sold well enough to let me make researching and writing a full-time job.

 

Back in 1970, having been financed by a film company to organize a project that went  beyond sticking pins in maps and coloring tabs on file cards, I composed  a standardized questionnaire from which it was hoped that a computer could find useful patterns in the accumulating information. The team effort went well, several hundred questionnaires were completed, the data was punched on cards, and a helpful professor arranged for them to be fed into a huge “main frame†at a major university, where I was told that minions in some distant catacomb had to seek out and mount big reels of tape each time any processing was scheduled. Compared to the hundreds of man-hours that it took to get to that stage it took only minutes to establish that there wasn’t enough data to produce anything of value.

 

Twenty years later I tried again, after having filled more than a dozen looseleaf binders, mostly fat ones, with pages of information from all over North America. By this time, I was told I could have a computer on my desk which could do things that huge main frame could not have attempted. Unfortunately I still had to devise a clumsy new questionnaire myself, without the expertise that wildlife biologists and computer programmers could have provided, and despite the best efforts of my daughter, Marian Ennis, who understands such things, my aging brain never really mastered the complications of constantly adjusting the entry screens to deal with information I hadn’t allowed for in the first place.

 

If I had had any idea of the amount of time and effort that would be involved in researching many of the individual reports for which information was available but not handily contained in the file cards and binders, I probably would never have started. As it was I persevered, and after more than 10 years and about 4,000 entries, a lot of them new reports that I learned of during those years, I reached the end of the last binder. Trouble was that about that time reports new and old, genuine and bogus, had started to pour in via the Internet at a rate I couldn’t hope to keep up with, so I stopped.

 

I did use the computer successfully to find answers, some of them surprising, to a number of long-debated questions, and reported on them in brief articles that will be displayed on this website, but I did not have enough know-how, in statistics or in zoology, to progress very far. As to sharing with people who may be better qualified to use the information, I was always happy to do that, but there was a major problem. I could, and did, develop information for a few other researchers, but the software I use, Advanced Revelation, while able to handle quite complex questions, runs in long-outdated MS-DOS. Almost no one nowadays can do anything with it on their own.

 

Years have gone by while the database grows old, unused in my computer, and at least one other now surpasses it in the quantity of reports, but I do not know of any that are searchable to anything approaching the same degree. I have therefore gone to the expense of having the whole thing converted, in ways far beyond my understanding, to a form where everyone can use it, and perhaps expand it with information of their own.
I hope someone out there will make the effort and the cost worthwhile."- John Green

 

I rest my case.    

[Guest jsbelljr83]

If I get laid off next week I will have plenty of time to read this!

[hiflier]

Hello jsbelljr83,

 

If the layoff is not what you want to have happen then I hope it's at least short one. Either way reading John's stuff is a good thing to do for anyone. I've already learned a great deal more than if I hadn't.

[Guest]

Hiflier!!  That gets a plus...thanks...!  Do you see any bias in Greens reporting?

 

I'll have to access your site later, as my laptop seems not to have enough memory to open it....  

Edited October 6, 2013 by apehuman

[hiflier]

Hello apehuman,

 

Hey, thanks a mil! Yes I do believe that JG was biased a wee bit LOL but only because of how close he was to his sources. BTW the zipped file shouldn't take up too much space so the download should be fairly easy, The data expands somewhat when the thing is unzipped and the contents are extracted but not a great deal. I'd be more curious about the software program your using to open it? John Green himself said that it was difficult and would not run on anything before Windows '98 and barely viewable on Windows XP if one could open the file at all. Even today getting it off th website in 2013 wasn't a cinch. The conversion into a format that folks could not only actually view the information in but have the hands-on ability to sort the data as well is an added bonus.