Bigfoot Police / Wildlife Reports.

[Guest DWA]

"As far as myself, I got into it like Meldrum after reading hundreds of witness reports and examining footprint evidence."

 

The absolute minimum anyone must do to have any idea what the heck is going on here.

 

Except to note some of these police reports, in which officers who hadn't done any of that *still* wound up shaking their heads.

[dmaker]

  I feel that my group of BF know what I am up to and do not like it.  Their behavior towards me has changed with time and is getting more hostile.     I am aware of habitation situations that are very similar to a Goodall situation,  but the women involved are not scientists, are more interested in protecting BF from mankind than learning from them, and I do not think anything will be learned from their experience. 

 

Proof is not easy and is probably beyond the efforts of any individual no matter what his credentials are.     You don't see scientists lined up to examine Meldrum's footprint casts.     If they already have interest or belief they come and look, but worry about their own reputation and may not even do that.      If footprints prove anything Meldrum will get the credit.   So why would they stick out their neck and do parallel study?   Certainly if they thought Meldrum wrong, they would love to show that.    Nothing delights a scientist more than blowing some other scientists theory out of the water.    They are just like many here.       Randy  

Does anyone else in your area also see these bigfoots?

 

Proof is certainly not beyond the efforts of any individual. Anyone can stumble over a corpse or hit one with a car or pick up some skat. 

Edited June 5, 2014 by dmaker

[WSA]

Randy, you speak much truth, but I do disagree with your assessment that philosophical debates won't further science. It has, and it will.  Now, grant you, it is a very slow process and one that would be rendered moot by the finding of bodily remains, but consider some history. I came of age in a world where the link between smoking tobacco and cancer was also considered merely "anecdotal. I remember manysimilar debates to the ones we are having right now. Did science lead the public to the link between smoking and cancer, or was it the other way around? I know what I recall. Despite the revision of history the AMA would have you read, you can't escape the fact that many, many people in this country died knowing their cigarettes gave them cancer, whether their doctors would "officially" recognize that as a fact, or not. It was a monumental failing of a profession to pay attention (and yes, lots of money was at stake too) but it is only one such example, and probably not the most recent.

 

As more and more citizens are able to consider the existence of BF without the knee-jerk "that's just nuts" response, the critical mass of public curiosity and demand for quality investigation becomes that much closer. The internet has accelerated this process, and it gathers momentum quickly. We all do what we can, no?

[Guest DWA]

Underrated factor, the internet.

 

People say it's made it easier to fake.  But when one reads the reports, and compares them to one's experience of people and the outdoors, one realizes that the more important factors are:

 

It's made it easier to report, and to learn.

 

And that critical mass is coming.  Slowly but it's coming.

[SWWASAS]

WSA I must be older than you,    I remember cigarette ads telling how good it was for you.     Many people may have gone to their deaths knowing the cigarettes did it, but as things often happen there were powerful financial forces at work keeping the effects of cigarette smoking from the public.     Notice that they are still for sale?     Government loves the tax revenue.    As I recall certain activists and some doctors had suspected the link and it was not until one of the major tobacco companies got caught withholding results of tobacco related health studies and manipulation of nicotine levels that the government was reluctantly forced to demand health warnings on the packages.    That is about the weakest response that I can think of.   Like I said they are still for sale but probably 90% of the cost is tax.     

 

I am afraid that the public is so apathetic on a lot of issues I really cannot see much demand for investigation of BF.     There is probably more demand for UFO study or release of information where there already has been congressional intervention, but nothing has happened there either.    If government cover up is already in place,  barring massive citizen demonstrations in Washington DC where legislators fear for their life,  I cannot see much interest on the part of Government to do much.     Most universities in the US are public and therefore part of State Governments.   Federal grants control the direction and focus of much research.     The deck is pretty much stacked against anything but privately funded research. 

 

Certainly the arguments for what constitutes evidence are always valid in science.     Sadly that probably will not be much of a factor until someone forces recognition of species.   There is a lot of data available already that is not being looked at by science.       Dmakers road kill and scat examples have already happened.     Road kill disappears when the authorities show up.   I can think of several reports where that has happened.    Unless the driver is a BF researcher, and knows what will happen,  the authorities will always be notified, and the proof will disappear.         Scat is like an hourglass with fine sand.     It is only good for a few hours before the bacteria present destroys DNA.    Then you don't know if the producer of the scat ate the DNA or it was it's own.     I keep having to remind people that BF DNA is not typed.    In other words does not have an accepted DNA signature.     If you send a DNA sample to a lab, the best thing you can hope for is an "Unknown Primate" result.   If BF is a human hybrid,   the result will most likely be contaminated human DNA or simply contaminated and not determinable.     Typed DNA requires a sample taken in controlled lab conditions from a body accepted to be the species Bigfoot. That it itself would be a long process.     Several DNA samples would need to be taken and processed at different labs to have any credibility.    

 

    The Sykes study was very misleading.    He may be a DNA expert but the best thing he could have come up with is,  "I don't know what it is".      He probably would not have stuck his neck out much further than saying a sample it does not match any known species.   He did not test or report on all the samples submitted.    Perhaps results of anything unknown were ignored.     Anything he would have found would instantly be questioned because of the unknowns in collection, storage, transfer of custody, of the samples.     The whole thing smacked of some sort of publicity driven grandstanding stunt to me.    But there is a lot of that going around.       Randy

Edited June 5, 2014 by SWWASASQUATCHPROJECT

[southernyahoo]

But you are not testing the anecdote, you are testing an audio sample, which is of course falsifiable. So, yes I think I do see your point that while the anecdote itself may not be falsifiable, i.e. I heard an animal making a strange noise last night, but it may contain something that is, at least, testable. But in itself the original anecdote is evidence of nothing more than people claim to hear sounds. If you travel to the location and fail to hear sounds it does not disprove the original anecdote as that is impossible.  Just like if the claim was I saw bigfoot in my backyard last night is followed up on and no bigfoot found, does not prove bigfoot was not in your backyard. And conversely if bigfoot is found, does not prove bigfoot was actually in your backyard when you claimed he was. See what I mean?  The truth of an witness report is impossible to ascertain scientifically. Therefore they cannot be considered scientific evidence. They can be used for follow up which may lead to something testable, but the story itself could never be nullified.

 

My question was about testable information in the reports, and you've confirmed that some of it can be in at least that certain experiences can be replicated with objective evidence collected which is observable to the senses and falsifiable on the claim it is evidence of a bigfoot. This meets the scientific requirement. 

[ohiobill]

Medicine didn't do too bad with proving a causal relationship between smoking and cancer much earlier than is usually realized but reliance on bad anecdotal evidence slowed down the public's acceptance of what science had to offer (sound familiar?) and lawyers made billions delaying actions that could have been taken. Medicine had a fairly good grasp on the smoking link by 1929 although industrialization, the 1918 Flu Pandemic, and the widespread use of poison gas

in WWI hampered efforts to isolate smoking as the main culprit. The Great Depression and WWII intervened but by 1954 there was a clear causative link.

Had lawyers not started hiding information from the public beginning in 1953 millions of lives could have been saved. 

 

The Special Privileges of Tobacco

from The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer
by Richard Zitrin & Carol M. Langford
Ballantine Books, 1999

 

        The attorney-client privilege is hardly a new concept. It goes back to ancient Rome, where slaves doing their masters' business were prohibited by law from disclosing their masters' secrets. But while there are strong historical and social bases for the individual's right to this privilege, these did not apply to corporations. The entire idea of a personal right to speak to a lawyer in strictest confidence simply doesn't fit the corporate model. But although there remains no such privilege in Europe, and while our Supreme Court didn't formally approve the privilege until 1981, over the last 100 years corporations have used the attorney-client privilege to hide all manner of wrongdoing.

       Nowhere has this protective shield been more widely and successfully used than in the tobacco industry. From the mid-1950s through the late 1990s, tobacco companies compiled an extraordinary record of denying the public access to information on the dangerous and addictive properties of smoking, while at the same time claiming that no one had ever proven these dangers.

       Documents finally uncovered in a 1992 New Jersey case against four tobacco giants described the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), and its "special projects" unit, supervised by lawyers rather than scientists. Lawyers were given decision-making authority over both the hiring and firing of scientific employees and the selection of research projects to be pursued. Hon. H. Lee Sarokin, the judge who presided over two New Jersey tobacco cases, quoted one CTR memo as acknowledging that it had been set up as "an industry 'shield' ... a front," and another CTR participant as saying, "When we started CTR Special Projects, the idea was that the scientific director of CTR would review a project. If he liked it, it was a CTR special project. If he did not like it, then it became a lawyers' special project.... We wanted to protect it under the lawyers. We did not want it out in the open."

       Other documents reveal how scientists routinely sought approval from lawyers for research requests -- and amended them as counsel required. Some projects were simply vetoed by the attorneys, such as a study of how tobacco damages a body cell's genetic structure, because the results might help the "other side," or the "enemy." Lawyers suppressed a mid-1970s research effort of a scientist who believed he had found a way to remove carbon monoxide from cigarettes. And as far back as 1953, lawyers prevented circulation of a "volume of material which 'indicted' cigarette smoking" as unhealthy. As Minnesota Attorney General Hubert H. Humphrey III concluded, "Tobacco lawyers, not scientists, were the gatekeepers controlling research on smoking and health."

 

Excerpted from pages 100-103 of The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer: Truth, Justice, Power, and Greed, © 1999, Richard Zitrin rzitrin@usfca.edu & Carol M. Langford langford@usfca.edu. All rights reserved.

      This critically acclaimed book, about how the legal system allows lawyers to define "ethics" as what they can get away with rather than how they should behave, is written by two noted legal ethics professors who write frequently about ethics and morality in the legal profession.

[Guest]

Medicine didn't do too bad with proving a causal relationship between smoking and cancer much earlier than is usually realized but reliance on bad anecdotal evidence slowed down the public's acceptance of what science had to offer (sound familiar?) and lawyers made billions delaying actions that could have been taken. Medicine had a fairly good grasp on the smoking link by 1929 although industrialization, the 1918 Flu Pandemic, and the widespread use of poison gas

in WWI hampered efforts to isolate smoking as the main culprit. The Great Depression and WWII intervened but by 1954 there was a clear causative link.

Had lawyers not started hiding information from the public beginning in 1953 millions of lives could have been saved.

 

The Special Privileges of Tobacco

from The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer

by Richard Zitrin & Carol M. Langford

Ballantine Books, 1999

 

        The attorney-client privilege is hardly a new concept. It goes back to ancient Rome, where slaves doing their masters' business were prohibited by law from disclosing their masters' secrets. But while there are strong historical and social bases for the individual's right to this privilege, these did not apply to corporations. The entire idea of a personal right to speak to a lawyer in strictest confidence simply doesn't fit the corporate model. But although there remains no such privilege in Europe, and while our Supreme Court didn't formally approve the privilege until 1981, over the last 100 years corporations have used the attorney-client privilege to hide all manner of wrongdoing.

       Nowhere has this protective shield been more widely and successfully used than in the tobacco industry. From the mid-1950s through the late 1990s, tobacco companies compiled an extraordinary record of denying the public access to information on the dangerous and addictive properties of smoking, while at the same time claiming that no one had ever proven these dangers.

       Documents finally uncovered in a 1992 New Jersey case against four tobacco giants described the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), and its "special projects" unit, supervised by lawyers rather than scientists. Lawyers were given decision-making authority over both the hiring and firing of scientific employees and the selection of research projects to be pursued. Hon. H. Lee Sarokin, the judge who presided over two New Jersey tobacco cases, quoted one CTR memo as acknowledging that it had been set up as "an industry 'shield' ... a front," and another CTR participant as saying, "When we started CTR Special Projects, the idea was that the scientific director of CTR would review a project. If he liked it, it was a CTR special project. If he did not like it, then it became a lawyers' special project.... We wanted to protect it under the lawyers. We did not want it out in the open."

       Other documents reveal how scientists routinely sought approval from lawyers for research requests -- and amended them as counsel required. Some projects were simply vetoed by the attorneys, such as a study of how tobacco damages a body cell's genetic structure, because the results might help the "other side," or the "enemy." Lawyers suppressed a mid-1970s research effort of a scientist who believed he had found a way to remove carbon monoxide from cigarettes. And as far back as 1953, lawyers prevented circulation of a "volume of material which 'indicted' cigarette smoking" as unhealthy. As Minnesota Attorney General Hubert H. Humphrey III concluded, "Tobacco lawyers, not scientists, were the gatekeepers controlling research on smoking and health."

 

Excerpted from pages 100-103 of The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer: Truth, Justice, Power, and Greed, © 1999, Richard Zitrin rzitrin@usfca.edu & Carol M. Langford langford@usfca.edu. All rights reserved.

      This critically acclaimed book, about how the legal system allows lawyers to define "ethics" as what they can get away with rather than how they should behave, is written by two noted legal ethics professors who write frequently about ethics and morality in the legal profession.

Knowing this...for what reason can it be applied in the case of BF?

 

I wonder if during debates skeptics were crying "where's the proof" in the argument involving cigarettes?

 

So basically, it took an additional 100 years to validate that smoking was dangerous...to the satisfaction of skeptics?

[ohiobill]

Sorry DZ, I thought I had made my point more clearly. I'm pointing out that anecdotal reports can't be relied on as evidence and that reliance on bad reports is even worse whether it applies to smoking or sassy. Science isn't perfect, nothing human is, but continued reliance on anecdotal evidence in fields where it shouldn't apply just leads to wasted time, effort, and sometimes even lives. Sassy is possible but can't be proven through sighting reports and never will be. 

 

Science won the tobacco war but sadly skeptical smokers still can't be convinced. Science wins either way with sassy but I'm sure there will be groups who disagree with whatever happens. 

[Guest LarryP]

I'm not thanking you for anything. Norse asked if my request was being fulfilled. I said yes, thank you for supplying some report documentation.  Then you seemed to be repeating his question. Otherwise, what was the point of your " what say you"?

 

You're obviously purposefully ignoring the perfect NARCAP analogy between law enforcement reports of BF and Professional Pilots reports of UAP's. 

 

What say you?

Edited June 6, 2014 by LarryP

[LeafTalker]

If and when scientific acceptance happens, then the only thing I can hope to add is some observed data on behaviors.    Perhaps we need a Jane Goodall to interact and learn.  

 

Hi, Randy. What is so "only" about adding observed data on behaviors? That's a very great (and very Jane-Goodall-like) thing. I don't think it's something to lament; it would be a huge contribution.  

 

I feel that my group of BF know what I am up to and do not like it.  Their behavior towards me has changed with time and is getting more hostile.     

 

Trust you gut. I'm sure you're right about this. You're a good observer. So now might be the time to "work with them", so to speak, and stop doing the things that bother them. Jane Goodall didn't agitate her subjects, knowingly or unknowingly; she sat down and broke bread with them. You still might have an opportunity to do that, too, if you lay off the stuff that annoys them. 

 

I am aware of habitation situations that are very similar to a Goodall situation,  but the women involved are not scientists, are more interested in protecting BF from mankind than learning from them, and I do not think anything will be learned from their experience. 

 

Not sure why you think that wanting to protect BF from harm implies an inability to learn from them. Those are not mutually exclusive things. You cannot be in close proximity to someone that way and not learn from them. These are the people who are doing the most learning of all. So how could nothing be learned from their learning?

 

And I'm sure many of you know this, but Jane Goodall wasn't a scientist when she embarked on her studies. She met Leakey, and he hired her as a secretary. She had no scientific training whatsoever, and left school without finishing even her general studies. But Leakey understood she had the right temperament to do the kind of study he wanted to see done with chimpanzees, and persuaded her to do it. 

 

Isn't it time we all started paying more attention to our temperaments? That's the most important thing. And I didn't say that -- Louis Leakey did. 

 

The people living in close proximity to BF and interacting with them on a regular basis are just like you, Randy. Like you, they are waiting for the hysteria -- the clamor for bodies, for blood, for "proof" -- to die down. Only when there's calm can there be learning. Only when the screaming stops can the people who actually do have first-hand, ongoing, long-term experience share what they know. You can't teach someone who's red in the face from screaming. 

 

Edited June 6, 2014 by LeafTalker

[dmaker]

You're obviously purposefully ignoring the perfect NARCAP analogy between law enforcement reports of BF and Professional Pilots reports of UAP's. 

 

What say you?

Larry I have no interest in any thoughts on anything to do with UFOs.

Randy, I don't believe you have answered me yet. I asked if anyone else sees your group of BF?

[Guest DWA]

 And I'm sure many of you know this, but Jane Goodall wasn't a scientist when she embarked on her studies. She met Leakey, and he hired her as a secretary. She had no scientific training whatsoever, and left school without finishing even her general studies. But Leakey understood she had the right temperament to do the kind of study he wanted to see done with chimpanzees, and persuaded her to do it. 

 

 

Isn't it time we all started paying more attention to our temperaments? That's the most important thing. And I didn't say that -- Louis Leakey did. 

Right.

 

When it comes down to it, science is about as unemotional as a Baptist on Sunday.  The very roots of science are emotional:  man's strongest desire isn't that one, at least not the only one that separates us from all other life on earth. it's the desire to know.  Period.  That and nothing else drives science.  Well.  At least it drives all the good science.

 

Leakey - one of history's most prominent scientists - knew just how to make the single greatest advance ever made in the study of primates.  He sent a secretary with no scientific training to Africa to do what he could see she was best at doing.  That's science at it's best; and it's the reason we know about 90% of what we do about chimpanzees...and more than a little of what we do about ourselves.

 

Science is at its best when it's playing; the best science, related to us by the best scientists, sounds and looks undeniably like fun.  Anyone who misses that misunderstands the basic nature of the desire to know things.  Which is something that scientists all too frequently forget, particularly when it comes to topics like this one.

Edited June 6, 2014 by DWA

[WSA]

Thanks for the entertainment Bill. I am always flattered when the explanation for an historic inflection point is "The lawyers made us do it."

 

The idea that Big Tobacco kept the medical profession from learning the truth as they were the "gatekeepers" of knowledge is just the kind of abdication of responsibility and revision of history I was referring to, and frankly, it is patently absurd.  If such were truly the case, the Terry report would have never been possible, but somehow it was. I could say more, but the truth is the A/C privilege is real, and I can't. 

 

Again, appreciate the lift to my morning.  

[Guest DWA]

^^^^Really.

 

Smoke inhalation causes "that cool refreshment that makes me wanna reach for a pack right now"?  OH.  OK.  Could you bottle that for those of us who don't smoke?

 

Shoo.Yeesh.

Science isn't perfect, nothing human is, but continued reliance on anecdotal evidence in fields where it shouldn't apply just leads to wasted time, effort, and sometimes even lives. Sassy is possible but can't be proven through sighting reports and never will be. 

 

There is no field, anywhere, in which anecdotal evidence has been put to better use than zoology.  But once again we see the Unsinkable Molly Brown of bigfoot skepticism:  the inability to understand the difference between following anecdotal evidence to proof and accepting it as proof.  Remarkable, to an extent that makes bigfoot, to the knowledgeable, look kinda humdrum by comparison.  There must be a word in the literature for this.  Any psych types wanna help out?

Edited June 6, 2014 by DWA