Misidentification

[Guest]

Sorry Antfoot, I didn't mean to be disingenuous. I was trying for amusing to keep the heat out of this discussion and get in a dig at one of my bugbears which is the bottled water industry. $5+ for water ? Where they getting it from - the Fountain of Youth ! How gullible and profligate do you have to be to buy that as some kinda designer accessory. Think I've mentioned my wife previously.

 

My point was that whilst I don't doubt dehydration can lead to hallucination that would explain a very small percentage of sightings as not everybody has an encounter whilst spending a lot of time in the wilderness where such might occur. Hallucination as a catch-all explanation because human beings have a propensity to experience such and not realise it just doesn't chime with what I've come to think about reality and life. I can see that imagination would have been a step forward in the evolution of our species but not being able to distinguish what is real and what is not?

 

The points raised about witnesses and memory are fair enough. Recall fades over time. But can I suggest that the more dramatic the encounter the longer the memory lingers especially the central experience. For instance I can't remember what year,date or exact time I saw that lion but I can say it was a Saturday [ I was only in Blackpool on a Saturday night to go to a disco there] and it was late [toward 11.30pm as we then used to go on to an all-night club] and it was between '75-'77 [ mates I was with at the time] but that hazy recollection of those facts does not mean I was wrong about the lion.

 

I think Leftfoot the miscarriages of justice are not really that telling in what I'm trying to get across. I don't know the cases you are referring to but the witness, and you have to assume this is the person who did see the crime for your example to work, still saw an event that was shocking. He knows what he saw but he misidentified the perp. Isn't the crime the thing that will stick in your head ? With bigfoot sightings that is the focus. With a crime you have the act itself and the perp. Concentrating on the one might lead to poor recall of the other.

 

I agree also that witnesses can be lead in court cases and bigfoot investigations. I'd choose you and Roguefooter over Bobo any day of the week. And I'd put the emphasis on the reliability of the witness rather than if what he describes fits in with bigfoot lore.

 

Finally I'd just like to add that thank God we don't have rattlesnakes over here. I did save that bird and mouse and let them out. I've had a really strong word with Lottie the cat, without much joy really. Asked her if she could just refrain from the "red in tooth and claw" aspect of her nature. Just looked nonplussed and replied "Me ? How ?

 

ROD

[Guest DWA]

^^^Well speaking of rattlesnakes. 

 

A Brit of my temporary cyberacquaintance once said of my main outdoor stomping grounds in Shenandoah National Park "Wilderness with people and shops is brilliant."  He might have had no idea how right he was.  Taking one of those mix moments that the Park allows one in abundance, I had just lunched handsomely at Loft Mountain Wayside, and had just and I mean just hoisted pack to continue my overnight in the South District.  At the very start of Patterson Ridge Trail - almost precisely one hop, one skip and one jump from the Wayside - I heard the telltale buzz.  He was upset, and I quickly located him and determined that a simple strollpast was NOT going to be a good idea.  I thought about this for some time.  Picking him up with a trekking pole that he probably outweighed by twenty-eight times not seeming the best, I took a deep breath and the longest - in every way one means that - step of my life, giving him as wide a berth as I could and I knew I wasn't near striking range limit away.

 

Whew is all I can say.  Then there's the time I stopped my brother's foot when it was literally descending on one...you don't know what you're missing...

[MIB]

To paraphrase a certain commander Data that shall remain nameless: In science 'I don't know' is a valid answer, I don't know what he really saw. Maybe he saw, as he suggested, a pile of dirt. Maybe he saw a bear, a tree stump, maybe there was nothing there at all to see and it was the product of a half-sleeping mind (as another poster suggested). I do know what he thinks he saw, and maybe it is what he saw.

Does this answer your question?

 

No, I think it evades answering my question.     Which is itself answer enough for my purposes.

 

MIB

[ThePhaige]

I feel that the the reality of what all this shows is that we all take much more on faith than we are willing to admit. Certainly human beings are fallible and certainly the account of a happening does in fact get somewhat distilled as it is told and as time passes. Most people are aware of the exercise from communications 101 where one person has a story, and then tells it to another...who in turn tells it to another...so and so forth until it reaches the last person perhaps 10 persons down the line, and by now the story is very much different. Now in these cases it is one person telling the same story...but I myself can admit there are facets to my story that I could include and because I cannot explain them adequately I leave them out, or there may be another piece I leave out because I am embarrassed to reveal that particular component. Like for instance ending up naked during an encounter.  At the end of the day it doesn't matter to me if you find me to not be a liar or not, I am not here for that kind of acceptance or character building, I am here to share with others who already know what I know and want to gain a deeper understanding of the whys, whats and hows of it all.

 

It is true that there are innocent men in prison....but when you use that kind of logic and apply it to this argument it makes absolutely no sense and has zero relevance...that would mean the prisons are full of innocents which we know is not the case. It would also mean that every single SSq sighting is a misidentification which I can also say mathematically just doesn't jive. So again it really boils down to what you believe, even in the cases of things we think are settled business and/or science.

[Guest]

I agree also that witnesses can be lead in court cases and bigfoot investigations. I'd choose you and Roguefooter over Bobo any day of the week.

Thank you! I also agree that Bobo is absolutely the wrong person to be conducting an interview with witnesses. The number of times I've seen him do the stand in and lead the witnesses with overly obvious telegraphing of cues makes me shake my head sadly. The entire cast of Finding Bigfoot is guilty of it to some degree, but he's the worst offender by far.

Detroit Soul said:

And I'd put the emphasis on the reliability of the witness rather than if what he describes fits in with bigfoot lore.

Agreed. A lot of what fits exactly with Bigfoot lore comes off as sounding rehearsed in my opinion.

No, I think it evades answering my question. Which is itself answer enough for my purposes.

MIB

How did I evade the question? I can't come to a conclusion based solely on what little I read so far, so the only legitimate answer is "I don't know." Edited April 5, 2014 by Leftfoot

[Guest]

 

It is true that there are innocent men in prison....but when you use that kind of logic and apply it to this argument it makes absolutely no sense and has zero relevance...that would mean the prisons are full of innocents which we know is not the case. It would also mean that every single SSq sighting is a misidentification which I can also say mathematically just doesn't jive.

Your argument only makes sense if you misconstrue my post. My argument isn't that all witnesses are wrong or lying, it's that they are not always reliable.

Another poster (I think it was either you or DWA) related a story where they interviewed a witness and they identified dogman as what they saw and when they were shown a photo/drawing of Bigfoot they also identified that as being similar to what they saw. Were this a murder investigation, it would be enough to call into question the reliability of the witness. Why is it so different when talking about Bigfoot sightings?

[ThePhaige]

My point here is that there are no absolutes, and we are not talking about 3 reports here we are talking about many thousands...only one has to be accurate and I am sure that mine is not the only one that is. Also before I had my own experience I could easily see that the mathematical probabilities to support either position are not applicable. At this point it is not whether they exist that is at play, it is more a wonder as to what percentage of all the reports are not misidentifications. From my position you must understand how ridiculous these arguments sound.

 

That must have been another poster it was not me.

[JDL]

Tell me JDL have you ever heard of a man named Kash Register?  He was a black male falsely imprisioned and served thirty plus years of a life sentence for a murder he did not commit before being exonerated.  What condemed him to such a miscarriage of justice?  Eye witness testimony.

 

We live in a world where eye witness testimony can condemn the wrong men to life sentences, even executions as in the case of Kirk Bloodsworth.

 

If you don't think that should cause people to be hesitant to accepting eyewitness testimony then you're the one with a problem.

 

Furthermore, studies consistantly show eye witness testimony to be incredibly fallible. 

 

 

Which begs the question, how much of what Bigfoot witnesses are what they actually witness and how much of it is it the investigators leading the witness?

 

 

That's because people suck as witnesses. I can't tell you the number of times I go to verify something someone has told me and when I get out there they got no clue what they were talking about. It's not always their ability to perceive as much at it is an inability to communicate adequately. 

 

Sure, there are people who make mistakes, but you guys carry that justification to the point of absurdity.  Just because some are mistaken does not mean that all are mistaken.  And if you believe that all people are fallible all the time, then you have to acknowledge that you, as people, are equally fallible, which means that your positions can be disregarded as fallible.

 

Smoke coming out of your ears yet? 

[1980squatch]

Well many good points raised here in this thread. Don't have much to add.

Just that I'm sure I was not hallucinating

[roguefooter]

How do you guys live in a world where you perceive everyone else's sense of perception as completely fallible?  How do you get in a car and drive?  How do you trust your own ability to determine if a woman is attractive or not?  How do you manage to actually urinate in the toilet instead of on the floor?  Do you even perceive your own flatulence to be obnoxious?

 

The very fact that you can make it through the day without a sequence of perceptional disasters is because you, and all of the people around you are, in fact, able to accurately perceive the world the majority of the time and avoid catastrophe.

 

It flies in the face of the thesis that all people are terrible witnesses all of the time.

 

Get real!

 

First of all- we live in a world where everyone's perception IS fallible, but virtually everything we encounter in our daily lives is verifiable.

 

Here we are talking about a creature that has never been proven to even exist, just like a whole slew of other creatures that haven't been proven to exist, some dating back to the dawn of man.

 

Some of those unproven 'creatures' (like fairies) have been sighted for thousands of years. Where are they? Why are people seeing them? Can you answer those questions logically?

 

Just because some are mistaken does not mean that all are mistaken.

 

 

Edited April 6, 2014 by roguefooter

[salubrious]

The fact that we are the most successful species on the planet suggests that our senses must not be that bad...

[Guest]

The fact that we are the most successful species on the planet suggests that our senses must not be that bad...

Russian proverb: "Perfect is the enemy of good enough."

 

We do pretty well because our senses are good enough for most situations. Nature made our senses good enough for most jobs in our ancestors daily lives. They did not have to be perfect. No life form on this planet is anything other than good enough for the job. There is lots of room for SNAFUs in the biological world.

[roguefooter]

The fact that we are the most successful species on the planet suggests that our senses must not be that bad...

 

Do you not realize how many people die every day because of bad decisions and faulty senses? Our species is not successful based on every human being- far from it. 

 

Every person on this planet is susceptible to human error, misidentification, and other faults of the human brain- some more than others. We are not all the same, so trying to argue by species is about as broad as you can get.

Edited April 6, 2014 by roguefooter

[JDL]

You're still entrenched in a logic fallacy. 

 

So, you've just acknowledged that "We are not all the same,...", that some members of our species are more reliable than others.

 

Yet your argument to dismiss eyewitness testimony grasps at the lowest common denominator, and then asserts that no one is any more capable than the lowest common denominator, even though this flies in the face of reason, logic, and reality.

 

Do you view yourself as no more capable than the least capable of our species?

 

If one says "yes", we can regard one's argument as put forth by someone least capable.  If one says "no", it would be hypocritical (and arrogant) to state that one is capable, but not a single bigfoot witness is.

 

Much of my career has been devoted to identifying the potential in others, specifically in the exceptional, and helping them to develop to their potential.

 

It saddens me to encounter those who seem to revel in the presumed fallability of others.

[Guest]

Roguefooter, I would have thought identifying an unknown creature close-up was verifiable to our senses ? To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes by eliminating all other possibilities leaving that which can only be the truth. Of course it's one thing to describe what you saw and another to then go on to add psychic, invisible, interdimensional  attributes to explain your experience.

 

I was watching Funding Bobo  Finding Bigfoot in Montana the other day. The musicians who claimed to have seen the creature menacing the anglers but drove on because they would have been late for a gig.  Musicians are always late. FAIL!

 

As for reports of sightings I'd give more credence to those that were made to Law Enforcement agencies or Park Rangers rather than to such as BFRO where that suggests a previous interest in the subject and maybe more susceptible to hoax or fabrication on part of witness.

 

ROD