Consistency of Evidence, Eyewitness Testimony and Cryptid Primates

[MikeZimmer]

Several on this site have maintained that the consistency of existing evidence should lead to the conclusion that there is a cryptid primate, the Sasquatch, extent in North America, and perhaps other places.

 

Existing reports may be of creatures, track ways, casts, other imprints, stalking behavior, tree shaking, rock throwing, calls, scat, hair, blood and other things. These may be documented through personal recollections, trace evidence collection, photographs, videos, sound recordings, thermal images, old newspaper reports, native stories,and various other means.

 

The reports may be due to:

 

1 – fraud

 

• fraud by the informant

• fraud by other parties

 

2 – mis-identification and other mistakes

 

• mis-identification due to pareidolia and perceptual distortion, poor viewing conditions, wishful thinking, overly brief sightings

• mis-identification of vegetation, natural formations

• mis-identification of other known animals

• mistaken reports due to apparent mental incapacity

• second and third hand distorted reporting of events

 

4 – real creature

 

• it only takes one real report of a real creature for the cryptid to exist

 

 

I would like to examine what this claim of report consistency entails, and where it might lead us. My initial thoughts are to look at the following:

 

• Types of evidence
• When eye-witness evidence is useful, and its limitations
• The pervasive nature of anecdotal evidence in life
• The real meaning of proof and its (limited) role in science
• The role of controlled studies in wildlife field research
• What it means to be consistent
• To what extent the evidence is consistent
• What mechanisms might account for any observed consistency
• What patterns are evident in the reports
• Evaluation of odds derived from thinking about the evidence
• What does the evidence and consistency imply for the existence of the creature

 

This could be a big project, and although I have ideas on this, I imagine others have better ones. I will be disappointed to get a rehash of the Patterson-Gimlin film backstory, or evidence-free assertions that it is a "bloke in a suit." I would expect that those who have a good understanding of the existing literature, current and historical, will be able to make the most valuable contributions.

 

If no one else participates, I will have to talk to myself I suppose.

 

 

 

 

Edited August 30, 2016 by MikeZimmer

[OkieFoot]

Mike, under the "reports may be due to" part, could you elaborate more on number 3?  

 

You have some good points worth further discussion; such as "fraud" reports, patterns, plus others. 

Edited August 30, 2016 by OkieFoot

[WSA]

One of DWA's recurring points, one I agree with wholeheartedly, and which is always important to note: The animal has been observed doing things any other animal has been observed doing, lots and lots of times. There are very few outlier accounts of BF doing anything extraordinary. Walking, running, hunting, watching, eating, drinking, hiding, lurking, shadowing, calling, foraging, intimidating, sheltering...these are things an animal does, and the evidence says this is a typical animal, doing typical animal activities.  

 

We seem to overlook this completely ordinary story and get hung up on BUT IT IS LARGE, AND SCARY, AND IT WALKS ON TWO LEGS LIKE US!!!! 

[MikeZimmer]

11 hours ago, MikeZimmer said:

 

2 – mis-identification and other mistakes

 

• mis-identification due to pareidolia and perceptual distortion, poor viewing conditions, wishful thinking, overly brief sightings

• mis-identification of vegetation, natural formations

• mis-identification of other known animals

• mistaken reports due to apparent mental incapacity

• second and third hand distorted reporting of events

 

4 – real creature

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I incorrectly numbered the points This is probably a failure in editing, and definitely a failure to proof read well. I don't have much skill at the latter, although I generally re-read and revise any longer piece of writing several dozen times. I seldom catch all of the mistake, even sometimes the glaring ones.

[MikeZimmer]

Cleaning the Rust from Old Saws and Sharpening the Toolkit

Here are some idea presented on the list from time to time. Some are useful and probably true, some are pernicious and probably false, and some of these are used as thought stoppers, bludgeoning folks so they can't think clearly. I will try to give my take on each of these in turn, in subsequent posts.

• Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
• There is no evidence
• Evidence, yes, but there is no proof
• Eye witness testimony is unreliable
• Anecdotal evidence is not part of science
• Correlation does not imply causation
• Controlled experiment is the only approach to scientific knowledge
• Consensus gives truth
• Peer review is necessary and useful
• Only quantitative data is useful
• Data quality is so bad, we can not use it

[MikeZimmer]

1 hour ago, WSA said:

One of DWA's recurring points, one I agree with wholeheartedly, and which is always important to note: The animal has been observed doing things any other animal has been observed doing, lots and lots of times. There are very few outlier accounts of BF doing anything extraordinary. Walking, running, hunting, watching, eating, drinking, hiding, lurking, shadowing, calling, foraging, intimidating, sheltering...these are things an animal does, and the evidence says this is a typical animal, doing typical animal activities.  

 

We seem to overlook this completely ordinary story and get hung up on BUT IT IS LARGE, AND SCARY, AND IT WALKS ON TWO LEGS LIKE US!!!! 

 

 

That is the most interesting thing, is it not? It covers the behavioral aspects of the animal. There is consistency for the most part, but there are occasionally strange outliers, particularly in the much older stories or the first nations stories.

 

It may be that the current reporting system from organizations such as BFRO filters out outliers. Since I don't really understand their methods, and don't know how good their procedures are, or just what their procedures are, I cannot say just how many odd reports are excluded because they are out of line with BFRO thinking.

 

When I look at the work by Green, or Steinberg, I do see some consistency, both within and across the two sets of reports. Is this because they do a lot of vetting of reports, trying to eliminate those that seem preposterous? I know that Green has recounted some stories that do seem unlikely to me, such as the Toba Inlet stuff. However, even that has some elements of consistency with other reports, and it comes from a time that was pre-Internet.

[norseman]

I'm going to reply to this from a Project Grendel mindset.

 

Reports:

 

Individual reports are misidentified and faked, no two ways about it. But there is very little useful data in a single report anyhow. What becomes interesting is report clusters by different people that seem to support each other. An added bonus is seasonality of these report clusters as we work on predictability. 

 

We have really smart guys working on this. Moon cycle, elevation, date are very important in order to plot the pins on the map. And where do the pins go through out the year? 

 

Anothet major factor one must take into account is that the Sasquatch is only one half of the report. With the human representing the other half. No human equals no report. So I'm sure there are very good remote areas where humans just don't venture into often.

 

And yes we find consistency in the reports. Elevation can be predicted fairly accurately from month to month for example.

 

Evidence:

 

Basically there are two types of evidence. Trace and physical.

 

Trace evidence is sign of the creatures passing, which hopefully aids in tracking the creature. Such as footprints or broken foliage.  Physical evidence is things like hair or scat. Which could lead to proof through discovery, but may not based on limitations of the specimens themselves. For example Sasquatch hair seems to lack a medulla.

 

Conclusion:

 

So between the report maps worked up by our numbers guys and trace evidence observed in the field. We go out alone or in small groups in our local area in order to collect a type specimen. My own MO is either driving logging roads or riding a horse behind locked FS gates or trails in the back country. 

 

We are after a type specimen because we feel it's the most expedient way to provide proof to science. None of these other methods have seemed to have produced results for one reason or another. I have been working with caloric intake numbers for a large primate recently and what I have concluded is that I don't think where they live is conducive for large groups of them to remain in one place long and remain undetected. They must be dispersed loosely and travel often. An 800 lbs primate eats 10% of its weight in vegetation per day. Meat consumption would be in the low teens lbs per day. Any winter prep would be above those numbers per day.

 

We are searching for a needle in a haystack.

[MikeZimmer]

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

9 minutes ago, MikeZimmer said:

Cleaning the Rust from Old Saws and Sharpening the Toolkit

• Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

 

I think that this notion is sound. Sometimes we get claims, sometimes quite ham-handedly made, that since we have not found a body, the creature therefore does not exist. Sometimes, we get the related claim that since "proof" has not arrived according to some invented schedule, we must admit that the negative case is proven. Both of these represent pretty sloppy thinking.

5 minutes ago, norseman said:

I'm going to reply to this from a Project Grendel mindset.

 

....

 

Excellent response noresman. Thanks

[MikeZimmer]

25 minutes ago, MikeZimmer said:

Cleaning the Rust from Old Saws and Sharpening the Toolkit

• There is no evidence

 

It amazes me that anyone could maintain that there "is no evidence." However, I have seen this claim made more than once on this site, and its predecessor, if memory serves me. It sometimes does. There is video, there are sound recordings, there are myriad multiple witness reports, some of extended duration, there are behavioral reports, there are track ways and other impressions. The list goes on, but these are the most defensible categories.

 

So, there seems to be lots of evidence. We may disagree over its interpretation, its reliability, its provenance, its worth, its implications, and so on, but evidence there is. What is more, I maintain that there is consistency in the evidence, and this is best explained by the existence of a real creature. This position is not a total slam dunk, since we can argue that the consistency is illusory, or that it can best be explained by other means, such as a common set of idea about Sasquatch percolating in the culture. This latter point loses its force when we start to consider the breadth of reports over the continent, the geographical dispersal, and the persistence over a few centuries.

 

Again, I would like to say, echoing Nietzsche, that there are no facts, only interpretations.

[OkieFoot]

3 hours ago, MikeZimmer said:

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

 

I think that this notion is sound. Sometimes we get claims, sometimes quite ham-handedly made, that since we have not found a body, the creature therefore does not exist. Sometimes, we get the related claim that since "proof" has not arrived according to some invented schedule, we must admit that the negative case is proven. Both of these represent pretty sloppy thinking.

 

Excellent response noresman. Thanks

 

An obvious question is: If the creature does not exist because we have no body, then what is making all these tracks that have been discovered? Tracks that can't be simply brushed aside as human made. Especially these long trackways; I feel the more fake tracks someone tries  to make in some particular spot, the greater the odds they will give themselves away.

And if the creature does not exist, what are these thousands of people that have reported seeing something hair covered (with the hair color varying among the reports), the head having somewhat of a crest on the top in some reports, walked on two legs and had arms unusually long, of upper body width much wider than normal human size;  what are they seeing if it's not a Sasquatch and they're not all lying.

 

Norseman, you mentioned ".. I'm sure there are very good remote areas where humans just don't venture into often."  I know I've mentioned this a few times before but the Mt. Baldy, MT track report posted by DWA in the "5 Most Compelling Pieces of Evidence" thread are an excellent example of this. The trackway was 15 miles from the nearest road in a very remote area and if those weren't real Sasquatch tracks, I'll eat my shirt for lunch tomorrow.

[MIB]

For a quick summary of the data to see consistency, go to BFRO's site and look at the papers written by Henner Fahrenbach regarding bigfoot weight, height, foot size, etc distributions.    Notice the data typically follows a bell curve.   If you have any background in biological sciences you'll know that this is a characteristic of a real living breathing thing.   Fantasies, including hoaxes done to draw attention, do not, instead, the hoaxers / delusional attempt to one-up each other non-stop producing a scatter or linear plot.  

 

I'm not a biologist but I took a lot of biology classes from some very good professors.   The graphed data, for anyone with even a modest background and understanding of population biology, should cause their head to snap back around for a second look so hard they get whiplash.    Not seeing it demonstrates ignorance of biology, not just bigfoot.

 

MIB

[norseman]

But here is the catch.

 

Most of us here are sane, rational people that have seen evidence of this creature. That's why we are here. Dr. Bindernagel points out repeatedly that science has enough evidence to act on this unknown creature......but they don't.

 

So without science to help? It's up to us layman. No sense bellyaching about it. We have to raise the bar on ourselves and ask the hard questions.

 

Tracks are cool.....but if they do not lead us to physical evidence? Then they are worthless to proving the existence of the creature. Same goes for a lot of other evidence we have, such as photos, recordings, tree breaks, etc. If they do not help with building a better mouse trap? No help.

 

I think the current popular night time investigation complete with whoops, wood knocks and audio equipment is BROKEN. Dead, stick a fork in it. Outside of the box thinking is needed here while keeping an eye on the end game....which is what WILL science accept as proof?

 

You don't hand the ball off to your full back on fourth and forty with thirty seconds left to tie the game. 

 

You throw the Hail Mary pass.

[MikeZimmer]

1 hour ago, OkieFoot said:

 

An obvious question is: If the creature does not exist because we have no body, then what is making all these tracks that have been discovered?

 

So, possibilities seem to be:

• the track ways are faked (this does not pass the smell test for remote track ways),
• the witnesses are lying (a possibility, but that means there are multiple liars reporting track ways, and perhaps providing photographs),
• the tracks have been misidentified, or
• they are real, and they need to be explained as being generated by a real non-human creature.

Merely asserting some explanation for a track is insufficient. The onus of proof for any proposed explanation is at least as strong for the skeptical position as it is for the proponent position.

 

Some people believe that the default position is to provisionally accept the report from an informant. I would not go that far, but when we have multiple similar reports, we should perhaps consider the consistency worthy of note as well.

 

This track way evidence should be compelling to anybody. However for some, perhaps those with an agenda, it seems easy to ignore. We have the odd flaky sort of rebuttal to this sort of evidence, such as scaffolding, weighted feet, people pulled behind trucks, and so on. Many of you have seen this stuff I am sure. People posting such absurd ideas should be put on ignore, they give skepticism a bad name. In my own view, we give them a credence they don't deserve by responding.

 

 

[MIB]

Norseman -

 

This is a place we likely have some agreement.   I don't believe the "Finding Bigfoot" techniques produce anything of use to either of us.   A knock or whoop might trigger a response knock or whoop.   So?   We have those.  More of same.   The knock or whoop is quickly followed by an exit of the area ... no further evidence.   No interaction for me, no "target practice" for you.     It is "exciting" for a participant, it makes good TV, it engages the interest and imagination, but it doesn't move the science or understanding forward.

 

MIB

Edited August 30, 2016 by MIB

[OkieFoot]

1 hour ago, MIB said:

For a quick summary of the data to see consistency, go to BFRO's site and look at the papers written by Henner Fahrenbach regarding bigfoot weight, height, foot size, etc distributions.    Notice the data typically follows a bell curve.   If you have any background in biological sciences you'll know that this is a characteristic of a real living breathing thing.   Fantasies, including hoaxes done to draw attention, do not, instead, the hoaxers / delusional attempt to one-up each other non-stop producing a scatter or linear plot.  

 

I'm not a biologist but I took a lot of biology classes from some very good professors.   The graphed data, for anyone with even a modest background and understanding of population biology, should cause their head to snap back around for a second look so hard they get whiplash.    Not seeing it demonstrates ignorance of biology, not just bigfoot.

 

MIB

 

I saw Dr. Ferenbach on a Bigfoot TV show years ago where he talked about his study of about 700 supposed Bigfoot tracks.  It was exactly as you said; the graph he showed of the track sizes formed a bell curve which he said indicated the tracks were from a real, living species.