On the Topic of Encounter Reports

[WSA]

8 hours ago, Twist said:

 

 

Either come out with your ideas on this or not.  You are coming off as if you have some superior knowledge in regards to ciphering randomly submitted reports.  The air of arrogance does not suit you well. 

Waardenburg.

 

 

[WSA]

Or other oculocereberal traits, or other attributes of albinism in general. What is obvious to me is the witness identified, without naming them, several characteristics  attributable to a likely congenital defect. 

 

[Twist]

Thanks glad you finally clued us in.  I'm not familiar waardenburg but now I am reading up on it.  

Edited June 14, 2017 by Twist

[WSA]

My apologies...I can get overly Socratic. I should know by now this group does that not so much.

 

But the larger point I'm trying to make here... 

 

No sighting report (with the likely exception of the PGF) is proof of Bigfoot. They are not nothing though. Collectively they are a pretty big something. What you get out of them though is only what you put into reading them, and this is but one example. 

 

I was privileged enough as a young man to have the tutelage of a number of very talented legal practitioners who taught me this skill by example.  (I've also had any number of juries double-down on that lesson and school me the hard way) Those lawyers could read the same deposition, expert witness report, medical chart or other bit of evidence, and while it would warrant only a shrug from me, they on the other hand could pull out any number of unassailable inferences and conclusions. While the sighting reports are not sworn, they are testimony and they are vulnerable to giving up their consistencies and inconsistencies in exactly the same way.

 

So, you can read hundreds of these things and only get as far as, "He said he saw a BF, but that is not possible, so nothing else in the account is worth examining". This is where most of the public, most of the scientific community and many members of this Forum land.

 

Then, you have geeks like me and a few others who are never going to be satisfied with such an unexamined conclusion. I'm not claiming to have some super acumen, I'm only emphasizing it is learned skill that won't just happen. You have to be intentional about it. 

 

The question I always want to ask is: Once you get past the obvious details that any hoaxing witness could provide (i.e. "I saw a huge bipedal hairy thing with white hair that stood and stared at me...) can you find other, much more subtle details which a hoaxing witness is very unlikely to either think of at all, or find the need to include if he did. The report in the OP fits that description for me.

 

What the reports describing an albino creature should trigger, I believe, is some consideration of the congenital traits associated with albinism and some of the genetically related syndromes associated with the recessive gene inhibiting melanin in mammals. I mentioned only a few above.  Things like deafness, poor vision, hypermobility of the joints, etc.  All of which are subject to some conjecture, I grant you. Still, if you stop at "that's impossible", you wall yourself off to a huge trove of supporting observations. 

 

 

     

[Yuchi1]

IMO, the events of life can and do result in manifestations of appearance that are outside the common perception of what a BF "looks" like. With multiple races of Homo sapiens what is illogical about BF being in the same circumstance?

 

Interracial breeding and inbreeding could possibly be foundational in the witness report. 

 

Paradigms can cause such a hidebound condition that it becomes absolutely impossible to see the forest but for all those **** trees.

[WSA]

All valid points Yuchi1. Just one of many possible inferences you can make.

 

Mine: 

 

This guy is sitting on an idling dirt bike when he spots this beast.  Wait a minute...right? BF are notoriously wary of their surroundings. A Suzuki 185, a 2-stroke engine, described by the witness as having a "stinger" exhaust.  Even at zero-throttle, something as notoriously skittish as a BF couldn't fail to notice. Only if that BF had normal hearing.

 

The witness said the critter "squinted and snarled" at him. Typical hoaxer embellishments, right? Until you consider the narrowing of the eyes, which appeared as a threat to the witness, could be explained by congenitally weak eyesight.  That snarl might be explained by the animal trying to get a better whiff of his scent, or the exhaust from the bike. Flare your own nostrils wide and feel how that pulls on your upper lip.  Are you snarling, maybe?

 

Then there is the hyperextension of the knees the witness notes. I'd have to do some research to give any kind of opinion on whether this is a trait typically observed in only albino BF, or if it is something sometimes noted in non-albino sightings. If only in albinos, you can find many references in the medical literature for this characteristic in congenital abnormalities related to albinism, or closely related syndromes. Either way though, does anyone really think our typical hoaxer would supply this little detail as a long-shot attempt to bolster credibility?           

[Twist]

37 minutes ago, WSA said:

My apologies...I can get overly Socratic. I should know by now this group does that not so much.

 

But the larger point I'm trying to make here... 

 

No sighting report (with the likely exception of the PGF) is proof of Bigfoot. They are not nothing though. Collectively they are a pretty big something. What you get out of them though is only what you put into reading them, and this is but one example. 

 

I was privileged enough as a young man to have the tutelage of a number of very talented legal practitioners who taught me this skill by example.  (I've also had any number of juries double-down on that lesson and school me the hard way) Those lawyers could read the same deposition, expert witness report, medical chart or other bit of evidence, and while it would warrant only a shrug from me, they on the other hand could pull out any number of unassailable inferences and conclusions. While the sighting reports are not sworn, they are testimony and they are vulnerable to giving up their consistencies and inconsistencies in exactly the same way.

 

So, you can read hundreds of these things and only get as far as, "He said he saw a BF, but that is not possible, so nothing else in the account is worth examining". This is where most of the public, most of the scientific community and many members of this Forum land.

 

Then, you have geeks like me and a few others who are never going to be satisfied with such an unexamined conclusion. I'm not claiming to have some super acumen, I'm only emphasizing it is learned skill that won't just happen. You have to be intentional about it. 

 

The question I always want to ask is: Once you get past the obvious details that any hoaxing witness could provide (i.e. "I saw a huge bipedal hairy thing with white hair that stood and stared at me...) can you find other, much more subtle details which a hoaxing witness is very unlikely to either think of at all, or find the need to include if he did. The report in the OP fits that description for me.

 

What the reports describing an albino creature should trigger, I believe, is some consideration of the congenital traits associated with albinism and some of the genetically related syndromes associated with the recessive gene inhibiting melanin in mammals. I mentioned only a few above.  Things like deafness, poor vision, hypermobility of the joints, etc.  All of which are subject to some conjecture, I grant you. Still, if you stop at "that's impossible", you wall yourself off to a huge trove of supporting observations. 

 

 

     

 

I owe you an apology as well, it was past my bedtime when I posted that and I was overly aggressive, I was really just wanting to know where you were taking this.  Turns out I learned something from it, again my apologies for being grumpy.

 

We are on the same page regarding sighting reports.  They are not proof of BF but should be utilized to find patterns that will aid in figuring out this enigma wrapped in a mystery.

 

 I've spent a lot of time reading reports in the BFRO database but admittedly I'm most likely not on the level of some when it comes to ciphering some of the little nuances that trigger certain flags for legitimate vs. hoax.

Edited June 14, 2017 by Twist

[Guest DWA]

11 hours ago, Branco said:

DWA: I understand your point exactly. I talked to the witness many times, and tried to zero in on his description of the eyes, head shape and that odd leg configuration. He was steadfast in his belief that the eyes were closer set than he would have expected. As for his head shape, although he did not say the word, nor did I even mention it, I believe what he meant was that the chin was wide and the head tapered to a coned peak. The thing about the "backward flex" of the legs, I could not figure out exactly what he meant, nor could he describe any better than he did.

Some times you just go "and there we must leave it."  One problem I have kind of come to accept about this is that when you have accepted the reality of the animal, you might not grill a witness as much on things that either you have accepted and know what the witness is talking about, or just seem like they might be outliers due to perception. Since details aren't going to get reported so much when you saw what most people might think a unicorn, we don't know everything involved with the sasquatch stride; some unusual muscle/tendon/bone configurations might be part of it. After all, our knees "lock." Theirs might, simply, not.  And as to eyes, well, we're doing that all the time with people:  sunken; wide; big; small; wide-set; close-set...these things aren't a whole lot less variable with the apes we know about than they are with us. There are consistencies, but there is also a range.

 

Now having said that, I want to state that his description of the leg movement is not unique. In a report I investigated from near the Robert F. Henry Lock & Dam in Lowndes County, AL two witness saw a BF crawl over a guard rail and started to cross the road in front of them late one night.They said when it stood upright its legs at the knee joint moved as if the animal had been injured by a vehicle. They slowed down because they thought it was crippled. Once it took a wobbled step, the legs straightened and it ran quickly across the road and stepped over the opposite side guard rail. 

 

And for it to take off like that? My bet would be that what they saw was standard, and not a deformity or an injury.

 

In the long report I wrote about a female BF the local folks called "The Black Thing", that BF was either born with a birth defect or badly injured at some time to cause her eyes to be vertically offset. Her feet were also shaped much differently than  typical BF's, more like that of the combination of a chimp's and ape's foot, and curved like a banana.

 

Deformities are reported.  Bossburg for only one.  Shoot, the Shipton yeti tracks were likely an individual with macrodactyly.

 

I firmly believe that in some cases inbreeding causes some of the unusual characteristics sometimes reported by witnesses.  

And until we know more, no reason to rule that out.

 

9 hours ago, Branco said:

When asked questions about certain features or details a witness might have seen during an encounter with a creature he/she had never believed existed, and that person thinks for a while and says, "I'm sorry, I just don't know", that means a lot. 

Nobody thinks about people just being people when they see things, particularly things they've never seen before.  Your gestalt - holy ****what IS THAT - is gonna dominate perception, particularly for people who didn't have the foggiest notion that something like this was possible. But I think various people are variously armed against that gestalt, and they will pick up details others might not.  Just the way it is.  And you still have the consistency of description, even with all this variability in witnesses.  That means a lot too.

[Guest DWA]

1 hour ago, WSA said:

My apologies...I can get overly Socratic. I should know by now this group does that not so much.

Really.  For the most part they go, proof, or trash?  Duh, TRASH, and that's it.  Man, I'd be here for more than that.

 

1 hour ago, WSA said:

 

But the larger point I'm trying to make here... 

LOOK OUT, they ain't so much on larger points neither...

 

No sighting report (with the likely exception of the PGF) is proof of Bigfoot. They are not nothing though. Collectively they are a pretty big something. What you get out of them though is only what you put into reading them, and this is but one example. 

Exackly.  People make fun of that - why I like joining in with you like this, it's kinda twisting the knife a bit - but they have not Foggy Ideer One what reading them *means.* You read them the way a scientist does:  slotting them in with others you've read; noting consistencies; dropping outliers as stuff-happens; drawing normal distribution curves of 2000 reports in your head as you go.  Not too many can read like that; I can, which is how by the time I read Meldrum and Bindernagel and Krantz, I pretty much knew what they were gonna say.

 

I was privileged enough as a young man to have the tutelage of a number of very talented legal practitioners who taught me this skill by example.  (I've also had any number of juries double-down on that lesson and school me the hard way) Those lawyers could read the same deposition, expert witness report, medical chart or other bit of evidence, and while it would warrant only a shrug from me, they on the other hand could pull out any number of unassailable inferences and conclusions. While the sighting reports are not sworn, they are testimony and they are vulnerable to giving up their consistencies and inconsistencies in exactly the same way.

And many say of jurisprudence and eyewitness testimony:  jurisprudence ain't science, and, DNA, and done.  Well there is nothing in our society *more* scientific than jurisprudence.  Science itself frequently falls short of the scientific standards of jurisprudence.  Like, you know, this topic.

 

So, you can read hundreds of these things and only get as far as, "He said he saw a BF, but that is not possible, so nothing else in the account is worth examining". This is where most of the public, most of the scientific community and many members of this Forum land.

Rule of Science, and I didn't make it:  volume and consistency = COMPELLING.

 

Then, you have geeks like me and a few others who are never going to be satisfied with such an unexamined conclusion. I'm not claiming to have some super acumen, I'm only emphasizing it is learned skill that won't just happen. You have to be intentional about it. 

Another reason I have started to wonder why we think someone with a science degree is a scientist.  You had sums and canon drilled down you.  Did you learn to think about things you *don't* have expertise in the way a scientist would?  Most very obviously DIDN'T.  And don't.

 

The question I always want to ask is: Once you get past the obvious details that any hoaxing witness could provide (i.e. "I saw a huge bipedal hairy thing with white hair that stood and stared at me...) can you find other, much more subtle details which a hoaxing witness is very unlikely to either think of at all, or find the need to include if he did. The report in the OP fits that description for me.

Me too; and you noted things (below) that I hadn't thought about, even how the eye color might say:  albino. I'm just used to variable eye color - we have it, why wouldn't' they? - and missed that.

 

What the reports describing an albino creature should trigger, I believe, is some consideration of the congenital traits associated with albinism and some of the genetically related syndromes associated with the recessive gene inhibiting melanin in mammals. I mentioned only a few above.  Things like deafness, poor vision, hypermobility of the joints, etc.  All of which are subject to some conjecture, I grant you. Still, if you stop at "that's impossible", you wall yourself off to a huge trove of supporting observations. 

 

 

     

 

[ShadowBorn]

WSA

I am stuck with this creature being albino BF. Now saying that this creature is a albino BF which means that these creatures are rare in it self. How many albino creatures are there in our national forest? I would say that there are not that many so this in it's self is an odd event. The other thing that stick out at me is that the witness thought when he saw the creature was he thought it was another biker moving south as he was moving east.  So the movement of this creature must have been so smooth that it looked liked like another motorcycle driving south. This is some thing that has also been reported on other reports about how these creatures move through the forest.  It is that smooth gate of movement that is ghost like which appears to be like a floating appearance. I have also seen this in other animals of the forest like deer, squirrels and other critters.

 

You are right the creature did flare it's nostrils to scent check the witness. Creeks are great hunting spots for deer and this creature might have been hunting at that time when he was biking through.  Depending at what time of the day they were jumping this creek bed  and what time he decided to follow this trail. Well either way they must have disturbed this creatures hunting spot.  Just like my self when hunting on public land and other hunters walk on my spot I would be pissed  too. All the deer in that area would be pushed out of that area by the human presence. Now this is all speculation but the albino part is what has me thinking. Since they have been sighted in Ohio but I am not sure if any where else .  But if they have not been sighted any where else then this would make it easy to track their movement and their age since they are rare. 

[WSA]

Great points Shadow Born. I think you've drawn some great inferences there.

 

The idea of albinism in BF is by no means a stretch either.  The fact a population of mammals can produce albino individuals is beyond question. How those individuals deal with the adaptive pressures their appearance and sensory deficiencies bring with them is a fascinating thing to consider, and doubly so when you are talking about an albino Sasquatch.

 

I've not done any kind of analysis of the sighting reports, but it would seem obvious a white BF would be easier to spot, and the number of albino BF sightings may be disproportionate because of that. I certainly have read my share of reports describing a white/gray individual. As well, the diminished hearing/vision of an albino would certainly be a handicap for any animal trying to avoid contact with humans. So, logically, they would be easier for us to spot, and harder for them to detect us.

 

[Yuchi1]

Albino characteristics would be almost invisible in snow landscapes and maybe albino's in lower latitudes are a genetic throwback to those that may have migrated from the north in times past. Right now, whitetail deer in this locale stick out like a sore thumb with their reddish coats contrasted with all the greenery.

[Guest OntarioSquatch]

One could say there are too many credible instances of white Bigfoot sightings for that phenotype to be a result of natural albinism. I've personally lost count of how many I've read up until now, and I'm guessing there are more that I haven't read.

[dmaker]

Do you have a theory as to why the aliens would have created white bigfoots, OS?

 

[Redbone]

2 hours ago, dmaker said:

Do you have a theory as to why the aliens would have created white bigfoots, OS?

 

 

ethnic diversity... The aliens who created humans did it too.

 

2 hours ago, OntarioSquatch said:

One could say there are too many credible instances of white Bigfoot sightings for that phenotype to be a result of natural albinism. I've personally lost count of how many I've read up until now, and I'm guessing there are more that I haven't read.

 

There are 78 reports of white hair in our database and 152 reports with gray hair.

Robert Swain is writing a book and has compiled 1100 Arkansas Reports. Of those 16% report a white or light gray creature (source - stats start at about 14:15) (colors start at about 18 minutes)

(If you want to see his whole presentation, start with Video #1, then Video #2)

 

 

Edited June 14, 2017 by Redbone