Forget about a body...what about one decent pic?

[Redbone]

33 minutes ago, Cotter said:

1) dig camera out of pocket or purse (do folks still use the belt clip-on deals for their phones?)

2) swipe, or otherwise unlock the screen from their phone

3) access/open the camera app

4) point camera in direction of subject

5) Hope it doesn't auto-focus on something closer

6) take pic or vid

I can activate my phone camera instantly by giving it a twisty motion twice.

Still, if it's in my hand and I try it still take ups to 2 seconds to actually take a picture, which may still be unfocused. That can still be too slow.

 

In October 2014, I was following up on recent activity in Iowa that was spelled out in a thread on this forum. (link to my part of the 2014 discussion is here)

I had an action cam on and recording, mounted at the top of a walking stick. I went down into a creek bed and started up the other side when I spooked up something dark and fast.

Instead of keeping my eye on it to verify what it was or wasn't, I turned to see where my camera was pointed and very quickly turned it toward the subject in question....too late.

Whatever I saw was not in the video. I missed it in less that 1 second.

Because I turned my attention to the camera, I can't even identify what I saw. I was more concerned about the proof then the experience. I don't carry that camera anymore...

I do still carry my phone though... you never know.

 

As to Matt Moneymaker's tweeted image I posted earlier... I guess that has been around since 2015.

I've been staring at it today. Even If it's real, its still not good enough.

In my view we'll need two or three picture to show movement.

This could be a staged photo with a cutout, but they did a pretty good job if it is.

A second image would tell us a lot (as would an onsite follow up investigation)

 

[ohiobill]

Cotter - I can't speak for all skeptics but for me it means they hold no weight, just as I said. I can listen to a story about your friend, Harvey, the giant talking rabbit but I reserve my right to be skeptical until it's proven. It's a story until proven otherwise, like an alibi that hasn't been checked out by the police - possible but unproven. You seem normal and sound trustworthy but a diligent police officer will check your alibi if needed. Certainly no need to call you a liar until they check but if you're not telling the truth...you get tougher questions to answer. 

 

 As far as scientists trusting each other's results it needs put into perspective...you can't claim the kangaroo you're studying can leap 300' in a single bound without video and offering up a spot in your lab to observers. NAWAC can't claim woodapes are overrunning a 10 acre study site without proof and be taken seriously. Cold fusion met some pretty stiff skepticism too and rightfully so as it turned out. Do you feel that's accurate and fair?

 

Speaking of police and your earlier post ^, I believe that law enforcement would hand out bigfoot pictures without hesitation. (Maybe Masterbarber can step in as well on this - ) FOIA requests, reporters and cops are old friends and I find it pretty far-fetched that an officer would risk their pension on holding back a photo of a bigfoot they probably don't believe in anyway. I'll defer to those in the field but I have a few friends I can ask as well.

 

 

 

 

Edited July 24, 2017 by ohiobill
Avoid confusion due to intervening post

[hiflier]

2 hours ago, JustAGuy said:

 

Hiflier, in regards to the case you mention: I actually work in San Bruno (and live next to San Mateo). I can look in the San Bruno public library for that paper. I am traveling this week but will be back next week. I can look then. 

 

That would be great JustAGuy! The photo was actually taken in 1975 and to tell you the truth I've not been able to even find a newspaper called the San Mateo San Bruno Herald. Hopefully you'll hve better luck- it may be defunct without a public archive available so good luck in your search. This guy John Beckjord (Beckford?) interviewed a Joe Speck at the timr. Here is the report:

 

"Joe Speck showed Beckjord a super 8 film taken from a stream bed in Samuel P. Taylor State Park, showing a dark bipedal animal. He said he was taking a nature-type test film for a television show when he heard a "screech-neigh" and looked around for a horse. He saw a large grey-black bipedal animal, massive, striding slowly over logs in large steps and uttering this sound. Height estimated 87 feet. Film out of focus at extreme zoom. Shows profile of manlike animal with upper part mostly hidden by leaves, taking four steps. An indistinct full frontal shot shows blurred massive black bipedal being. Walk reminiscent of Patterson film, but slower. Animal much wider than it is thick. NOTE: Al Chase, Daly City, has a snapshot taken in 1975 near Alpine Lake in Marin Cty (lake not on map) showing distant figure that could be a sasquatch. Picture in San Mateo San Bruno Herald, July 13, 1979.)"

 

hiflier note: Mr. Chase's snapshot of the 8 ft.heavy-looking dark-haired creature was taken on an early morning in 1975 according to the full report.

[norseman]

There are tons of "decent" photos and videos out there that show an upright walking hairy Primate. In other words one can plainly see it's not a Bear, or a stump, or a bush, or a human in black sweats.

 

The incredible thing about the PGF isn't just the film, but we know where the film site is, we have investigators that shot film of it giving us something to compare to. And we know who shot the film as well. A far cry from an anonymous YouTube video upload.

 

What you will never do.....never ever do with the good ones, is know for certain if it's a hoax or not a hoax with a picture or a film. Even the grainy wobbly ones. Some are suspect because of the people who shot the film. Which is usually the modus operendi of the skeptics. Dismiss the bad ones and with the good ones, attack the camera man.

 

This medium is meaningless to science, and also to a jaded public, who do not believe such a creature could still existence.

 

We are well past the hope of ever making people take this subject seriously through a picture or video. We need hard physical evidence. Maybe the fossil record will be kind to us. Homo floresiensis, Denisovians.......and now it would appear that a 120,000 year old Mastadon kill in California may place a Hominid here before the Clovis people. 

 

Exciting stuff.

 

And maybe somebody will get lucky with a rifle as well. Or not, only time will tell.

 

But don't bore me with the decent photo schpel......

 

[Martin]

Eric Beckjord was an eccentric bigfooter.

 

He claimed Patty was a morphing alien shapechanger. 

 

While he did have a early copy of the PGF he was not a reliable source for information.

 

He had a "museum" which I believe he called "The Bigfoot, nessie, ufo, crop circle museum".

 

 

 

 

Edited July 25, 2017 by Martin

[xspider1]

"This is really a mathematical or statistical question and designed to provide hard data for the case against existence."  

 

Good luck.  These animals are apparently far more intelligent than any other animal that we know of and they are obviously at risk from humans (who can be very stupid.)  It's really no wonder that they evade detection so effectively.

[Trogluddite]

13 hours ago, Starling said:

This is really a mathematical or statistical question and designed to provide hard data for the case against existence.

Should a mathematical or statistical question start out with the preferred result (proving non-existence) selected in advance?

 

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.... 

Regardless of what proponents claim, encounters, are a remarkably frequent occurrence

They are?  Since 1977 (40 years ago) there have been 633 reports in the northeastern United States (north of the Mason-Dixon Line) and Canada east of the St. Lawrence Seaway.  I'll give you 1,000 to account for uncatalogued reports in that time and space, which gives one encounter (not necessarily sighting) every two weeks in 170,000 square miles - and throw in 10,000 square Canadian miles for that eastern portion of Canada.  So - where are you going two weeks from now to photograph that bigfoot?   

 

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...

for a creature that's yet to be photographed in a way that is neither indistinct or demonstrated definitively to be beyond human mischief. 

 

Of those 633 reports that are categorized, 107 (16%) occurred while witnesses were driving.  Only 20 (0.03%) occurred when people described themselves as being in situations where one would expect cameras to be at the ready (generally, bigfooting or bird watching).  This is important because over one half of these encounters (329) lasted 1 minute or less.  There are many other factors, such as time of day, weather conditions, distance, and the degree of concealment, that further reduce the likelihood of getting a good photograph.  

 

I'd like to work out how many more years we can we go without a decent photograph or video of a sasquatch before the statistical probabilities of sighting-plus-good photo start to weigh heavily against existence?  Not a statistician, but given these numbers, I'd say "quite a few." 

....

[Martin]

I hesitate to mention game cams and would be willing to consider that bigfoot could possibly pick up on some "oddness" of a device in the forest. Oddness could include noises, IR, small electrical currents, odd shapes and colors or whatever.

 

If we are to give bigfoot credit for being is so sensitive to these very small ""oddnesses" in his environment and able to avoid them then it would only be a natural progression to eliminate sightings claiming visits to residential yards. There is far more "oddness" around a home.

 

There are thousands of people who flood the deep forests year after year just to attempt to photograph rare wildlife. See Audubon Society. Hikers document tons of wildlife and many are prepared to get a quick picture.

 

Maybe one of our SSR Project members could give us a breakdown of visual sightings by duration. 

 

Edited July 25, 2017 by Martin

[hiflier]

2 hours ago, Martin said:

Eric Beckjord was an eccentric bigfooter.

 

He claimed Patty was a morphing alien shapechanger. 

 

While he did have a early copy of the PGF he was not a reliable source for information.

 

He had a "museum" which I believe he called "The Bigfoot, nessie, ufo, crop circle museum".

 

 

 

 

 

Since Bekjord didn't take the alleged video, nor the photo that was submitted to the newspaper, (two different people did) I didn't consider him to be a factor one way or another. All he did was interview the gentleman that took the video. So Beckjord to me was a non-starter.

[guyzonthropus]

Coffee- what a brilliant solution to "why No pics!" Simple and straight  e point!  You might wait till you stand up before you tell to get the the picture, though

 Just awesome!

[Guest Starling]

On 24/07/2017 at 4:30 PM, Cotter said:

Well, there are a lot of 'rumblings' about how folks have good pics and videos, but don't share them.

 

 

I find this the only vaguely plausible possibility. That the decent pics footage/exists and have been suppressed to either avoid the media storm that would ensue or perhaps to help protect the creature.

 

 

On 24/07/2017 at 4:38 PM, ohiobill said:

Interesting question, one that can only be answered in the most general of ways I think. The formula can be put to paper but the factors involved are incalculable without better data and obviously would still always be subject to outliers as possibilities. I'm thinking of the thylacine as a real world example, the formula would put the probability near zero but the possibility always remains. Even if the formula is perfect it still remains a picture and remains subject to interpretation and ambiguity. 

 

For me, the more important question raised by your premise is how much weight can be given to reports. It's the variable that has to be answered before any serious attempt at an answer can be made.

 

I agree the variables are extremely wide but I was thinking of a formula that would make the assumption (for the sake of argument and also has proponents would have it)  that at least a small percentage of reports were real. Many of the ones I've read that people here hold store by would fall into what I'd call EDEs or Extended Duration Encounters...sighting that last longer than a few seconds.
 

Quote

 

IOYZA: Take a crack at working out an actual formula for any of this, I'll be back to poke a thousand holes in your assumptions.

 

 

As  ohiobill points out you can draw up an equation making guesstimates on some of the variables. The major variable would be to what degree you assess sightings to be genuine. Even taking a conservative percentage of reportings per year this would give you a flat line base with which to measure probabilities. You could also cross-reference data from other species such as the giant squid which by the turn of the century remianed one of the few megafauna to have never been photographed alive. It finally happened in 2001 I think. 

 

Of course that was an animal that was known to exist but the point here is after a century and a half of photography and the continuing development and sophistication of photo technology it was really only a matter of time before they captured the sucker. The same rules I would argue apply to Sasquatch. If it's not, as I believe it is, a figment of our social/folkore imaginations.

 

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And fine, I see your point on formulating odds - though it's kind of a nit-picky point of semantics. The impossibility of assigning odds to all the factors involved was entirely my point. This doesn't address dependent probabilities either; say, the length of time of the sighting prior to the sasquatch fleeing into cover depends on whether or not the witness is holding a phone or camera. That's a complication in the formulation itself, not just yet another impossible-to-estimate parameter.

 

Impossible to estimate to any fine degree but surely there has to be a point whereby if, bigfoot doesn't exist, the continuing lack of validated photograph evidence becomes scientifically valid evidence for that non-existence. In other words you can't prove a negative but you can lay odds on it. Certainly that number may never be zero but it could, in my view, help calculate the odds in any good betting shop.  

 

 

Quote

 

Hiflier : For instance, it may be easier and faster for someone living in a certain state to access their library archives than it would be for someone who is not a resident of the state. One example of this is a newspaper called the San Mateo San Bruno Herald in California (around the San Francisco area). There was a photo of a supposed Bigfoot printed in that paper back on July 13, 1979. So the job is really two-fold: Research to find incidents where and when photos were taken of an alleged Sasquatch then, after that, finding where and when the photo was submitted to a public outlet like a magazine or newspaper- or even a TV news broadcast.

 

 

 

I can't help but think that if such evidence existed to be archived somewhere  it would already have made the news big time. What I'm looking for is something lacking  the frustrating question marks that is the absolute hallmark of, IMO all bigfoot photography.

 

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OtarioSquatch: What so many "skeptics" fail to understand is we're dealing with an entity that's incredibly elusive.

 

But no so elusive that they're not seen pretty much all the time and, by the accounts of some here, all over the continent?

 

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OS, you've answered your own hypothetical, I think, with your observations about the PGF. The quality of that film is extremely good. It is long enough to not leave you wondering what the subject is...it is out there in plain view. A large, hairy, moving, bipedal animal. In good light. No obscuring brush our trees. No obvious or telltale indications of a hoaxed event. And yet, it wasn't enough, and if we are still debating that document from a time that pre-dates digital manipulation, do you think for a minute some high-res photo is going to do it for all the skeptics? In your dreams pal!   

   

If the quality made it beyond question (as I think would be the case if someone got decent hi-def images of this thing at a reasonable range and in motion) ? Absolutely.

 

But you're right. It's not going to happen because the PGF was a hoax and the creature doesn't actually exist.

 

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Ohiobill: What we need to be looking for is what's missing - where's Starling's missing pics & vids, where's the scat, the hair, the remains, the nest sites, the kills, vegetation feeding sites, the conflicts between different clans or humans?  In short, where's all the evidence we can theorize should be present if sassy exists? We don't need all or even any particular sighting to be true, we just need one that provides actual testable evidence. Until then, let's at least be honest, call them stories and stop pretending they hold any weight. 

 

 

 

Precisely. Not having one unquestioned piece of photographic evidence weighs heavily against bigfoot's existence. We've seen more Giant Squid than we have this giant hairy hominid that must impact it's environment in a hugely tangible way.

 

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Cotter:

 

1) dig camera out of pocket or purse (do folks still use the belt clip-on deals for their phones?)

2) swipe, or otherwise unlock the screen from their phone

3) access/open the camera app

4) point camera in direction of subject

5) Hope it doesn't auto-focus on something closer

6) take pic or vid

 

 

This is old school thinking. Most of the impressive and rare natural events captured in the past decade, from meteor falls to whale's breaching and falling on yachts, orca's pleasure surfing behind motor boats, shark attacks, plane crashes etc have been captured by digital cameras that people have running constantly on their dashboards, helmets etc. Add the duration of trail-cams and reaction time just isn't a factor.

 

This fundamental change in the nature of how people capture events is part of my point. The chances of someone 'luckily' capturing one of these events has gone up exponentially and therefore the probability of a well-documented bigfoot encounter has, too.

 

But still...nothing worth writing home about. When does the mathematics of this start becoming significant to more than just the skeptics?

 

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Norseman: What you will never do.....never ever do with the good ones, is know for certain if it's a hoax or not a hoax with a picture or a film. Even the grainy wobbly ones. Some are suspect because of the people who shot the film. Which is usually the modus operendi of the skeptics. Dismiss the bad ones and with the good ones, attack the camera man.

 

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We are well past the hope of ever making people take this subject seriously through a picture or video. 

 

If an elephant was a cryptid and had only ever been filmed from a blurry distance and then you got some Natural History quality hi-resolution footage I don't think even in this day of digital wizardy anyone would be in any doubt that the animal was real.

 

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Good luck.  These animals are apparently far more intelligent than any other animal that we know of and they are obviously at risk from humans (who can be very stupid.)  It's really no wonder that they evade detection so effectively.

 

 

 

 

Apparently? In order to account for this incredible immunity to quailty photography they have to be far more intelligent than any other animal we know of? Now we're venturing into paranormal world. They can sense any and all cameras a mile off and make sure they're particularly careful to avoid someone who's carrying one?

 

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Troggludite: Should a mathematical or statistical question start out with the preferred result (proving non-existence) selected in advance?

 

As I said, the equation (or equations -  as you could change the value of any one of the variables)  would contain an assumption of genuine sightings and work from there. I imagine the probability of a decent photograph could only go up even if some of the other variables included declining population. I've seen people have claimed the population of sasquatch is on the increase so that might be a factor in favour of increased probability.

 

 

Edited July 25, 2017 by Starling

[norseman]

Starling wrote:

If an elephant was a cryptid and had only ever been filmed from a blurry distance and then you got some Natural History quality hi-resolution footage I don't think even in this day of digital wizardy anyone would be in any doubt that the animal was real.

--------------------------------

 

A man cannot donn a Elephant suit and make it be believed as real. Not so with Bigfoot.

[ioyza]

Wait, you want a dashcam video? That exists, from a police vehicle no less. Ohhh you wanted a clear dashcam video, well now we're adding a lot more variables into the equation again!

 

I'd put a pretty huge majority of published reports as likely genuine (>95%), and even with that factor about as high as possible, the odds of any given sighting leading to a clear photo or video are still going to be vanishingly small.

 

What would your estimates, confidence intervals, evidence, and reasoning for the following parameters be:

 

1) Proportion of sightings where sasquatch is unaware of human presence at first sight

2) Average length of time for sasquatch to become aware of human presence

3) Average length of time for sasquatch to flee into cover

4) Factor by which (3) is reduced if human reaches into pockets or for some device

5) Factor by which (3) is reduced if human makes any movement

6) Proportion of sightings within 20-30 feet (any further and we're no longer talking convincing photos, or at least diminishing returns - substitute this for some kind of distance:quality scaling factor if you can figure out how to make that make sense)

7) Proportion of sightings by humans that actually have some type of camera accessible

8) Average length of time for human to be aimed and ready to shoot with thumb on the button (phones in pockets will increase this dramatically)

9) Proportion of people who actually remember they have some type of camera accessible (careful overestimating this one)

10) Proportion of people who remember, and actually still care about taking that photo

plus anything a professional photographer would consider, the particular technical specs of the camera, type and time to focus, resolution, lighting, you name it.

 

So that's me taking a stab at the "Drake equation" approach suggested by ohiobill, but it's an especially apt approach because Drake clearly didn't mean to gain any actual statistical insight into the question; rather, it was meant as a thought exercise for scientists. Overuse and misapplication of statistics and modeling is a plague of scientific reasoning right now, and that's the take home message of both these thought exercises for me.

[Trogluddite]

Starling, 

   By the way, welcome to the Forums.  Please note that I bring my work writing style (brute force bluntness) home w/me, so my post was not intended to be harsh.

 

Hiflier, JustAGuy,

   Nice teamwork guys. Hope we get to see a copy of this picture.

 

[Trogluddite]

On 7/24/2017 at 8:56 AM, Starling said:

what's the average number of reported Bigfoot sightings in any given year in the PNW?

So I just did a quick search of the SSR using the same criteria that I used to get overall numbers for the northeast from my proprietary database.  (It's really just a regular old, run-of-the-mill MS Access database, but it's kind of fun, in a warped way, to call it "proprietary...") 

 

Since 1 January 1977, Washington has 401 encounters. Oregon has 45 (I'm guessing this is due to lack of data input, not lack of encounters). British Colombia has 25 (again - sounds like lack of data).  So that's 471 encounters in 40 years over 170,000 square miles (more or less, and who knew that Oregon was bigger than Washington?) or 1/month in an area equal in size to the northeast US and less densely populated.