Sasquatch vs. Environmental DNA

[MIB]

I wonder about fires sometimes.    Seems a bit paranoid, but when I look at the pattern of fire in SW Oregon since 2000, I do have to wonder because it has cut off paths of cover between large area.   

 

They ****ed around with the 2017 Chetco Bar fire, put a national incident command team over it who actually interfered with the local USFS effort to put the dang thing out, 'til the Tincup Creek drainage, which I identified as a core area for bigfoot, completely burned.  THEN they started fighting fire, but by that time, the early fall winds had kicked up and the fire grew by over 30,000 acres a day for a sort time.  If the wind had blown one more day they'd have lost the town of Brookings.   It sits in the nozzle of a foehn wind blowtorch.   Funny timing ... the year that burned, a volunteer crew had just reopened the trail accessing that canyon, it'd been brushed shut for 15 years making it inaccessible.    Coincidence, or not?

 

At the same time, the 3 of about 5-6 big fires around Crater Lake National Park was burning a swath that cut off cover used for north-south migration along the cascades.    Hmmm.    Coincidence or not?

 

2018 a pair of big fires grew together, Klondike and Taylor Creek, slamming up against the Chetco Bar fire scar, cutting farther toward the coast into even more potential bigfoot "habitat" .. places I'd identified as worthy of research.    Couple other fires up east of Eugene burned a pair of my backup / someday hoped for places that summer. 

 

Sounds crazy but places I identify for research have a real bad habit of being hit by lightning and burning up just before I can get to them.    I'm starting to get the idea that if I want  to check out an area, I need to keep my mouth shut about it, even among my extra cautious friends.    Makes me wish for access to the lightning strike maps to see if lightning really set the fires or if it was just a convenient cover story.  Coincidence or not, it happens often enough to be a little creepy.

 

MIB

 

[hiflier]

It does sound a bit creepy. I don't really enjoy coming off as paranoid either but if this creature exists, and you have seen them, then the stakes are very high indeed when it comes to discovery. So not to get too far off topic but is it better to risk a fire  when the wind will send wildlife in the direction that one desires than risk having a Sasquatch wander into a neighborhood when the cutting begins?

 

I know, I know, ridiculous question since proof of existence just isn't there. But for you, SWWASAS, bipedalilist, salubrious, BobbyO and other members who have had encounters proof for yourselves IS there. So if secrecy regarding existence is to be maintained in a time when cutting and development, along with all other activities, happens then maneuvering Bigfoots away from such areas could make some sense. Highly outrageous as it sounds.

 

In the "olden" days wouldn't a well planned prairie fire with the wind to it's back push bison to a desired killing ground? Or maybe some strategic pinch point? What if authorities wanted to corner a Bigfoot for some purpose? If they knew a clan was living in a ravine then just set the fire at the mouth with the proper wind and let the natural shape of the terrain do the rest. DANG! I need to stop this  I'm not paranoid and never have been, just mistrusting.

[MIB]

1 hour ago, hiflier said:

then the stakes are very high indeed when it comes to discovery.

 

I'm not arguing one way or another, but my internal dialog ... I truly wonder what the stakes really are, what stakes could be high enough for the necessary threats to maintain secrecy this long.   It requires people willing to kill anyone who might talk, and actually preemptively killing those who they can't intimidate.    Is that really happening?   And if so .. why have I not been threatened .. or killed?    This leaves me with a lot of doubt about any sort of conspiracy.   But if there isn't one, why hasn't the proof come out?     Makes me wonder ... can I be that far off track that what I think I know isn't a threat?   Or ... heck, I don't think it hurts to say that I'm on several watch lists ... that my responses are predictable enough not to be a threat to suppression of evidence?  Frankly, I'm baffled, because things out on this limb don't add up, not bad, not good, just .. not.   I'm missing something, some piece, necessary to understanding what is going on.

 

MIB

[Huntster]

Passive disinformation to the public, intentional inaction, official discouragement to other agencies and organizations like academia. Government simply not responding is huge in and of itself. 

 

And the media..........oh my, the media..........

 

Look around at the media's role in our local, state, national, and international political morass. It's difficult to determine whether the politicians own the media or if the media own the politicians. Note how they collaborate with each other, all coining identical key phrases in their team approach in "guiding public opinion" (brainwashing and propaganda, whether it's political, social, commercial, or ideological)). Now with that in mind, consider this quote from John Green in a 2004 interview with Gerry Matthews:

 

http://www.bigfootproject.org/interviews/john_green.html

 

.........JG: Oh, I missed one phase. There was a phase there when any scientist who showed an interest was news. We've now reached the extreme where some of the world's very top people in the relevant fields are very interested and are saying publicly that there should be proper investigation and this is not news. The only thing that's news is that the whole thing has proved to be a fake. The demonstration of that is very clear when this absolute nonsense story about Ray Wallace faking all the foot prints went all around the world in exactly the same time period the Denver Post ran a major article and sidebars on these key scientists who were saying it should be investigated, the Associated Press wouldn't even carry the story. It never went anywhere beyond Denver.

To me as a newspaper man, this is absolutely shocking. I tried to contact some of those at Columbia University's long-established graduate school of journalism who keep a tab on the press and the response was, "Nobody here is interested in taking this up." In other words, for 40 years we've been butting our heads against a barrier manned by the scientists saying there can't be any such thing. Now they're stepping away from the ramparts and the media is stepping up to take their place. Absolutely fascinating. The media is seeing to it that this heresy does not get to the public. 

 

BIP: It seems to be the case when you can bet that someone who has bigfoot living up in that attic would get more press than something like the Skookum cast would. 

 

JG: Well...

 

BIP: They seem to want to relegate this to the tabloids and that's where the story stays. 

 

JG: For example, right now, we have the proof - absolute and indisputable - that the Patterson film is genuine. The newspapers refuse to carry anything of that. It can't be sold so therefore they're not going to be taken in therefore they're not going to run the story. As a result of this silly book where people are claiming that they were involved in making the film we've gone back to looking at the film and realize that, although you can't establish beyond dispute the size of anything, you can establish the relative size of things that are right there in the same film frame. This creature has an intermembral index - the comparison of the length of the arms to the length of the legs - that is totally outside the human range so it cannot be a human in a suit, but it is also totally outside the range of any other known primate of any size at all. Therefore, it has to be an unknown primate. This can only be ignored, it cannot be argued against. All you can do is say, "Well, you can't measure properly on the film." Well, you can't measure precisely, but the different is so slight that it doesn't matter. The human intermembral index is around 70, all of the great apes are over 100, this thing is in the high 80's. The question of the angle of this segment of the arm to the camera and so on, if you look at enough frames, you've got to be able to get to it. And on top of that, we have a forensic animator who worked on the "Legend Meets Science" DVD. He says that they established beyond any question the relative length of where the joints were as the thing was moving and the intermembral index was pretty close to 90. This is a man who says when he was hired to work on the film he took it for granted it was a man in a suit..........

[ShadowBorn]

Once a hoax is a hoax ( Wallace ) But that differs with todays.  These young scientist do not even have a chance at making a  name for them selves since they do not even have the money to make it. They are left with government funding and what do you think sets the rules for them. They have to go total rogue to accomplish what is needed in this field with out the gov knowing what they are doing. Once this is done then they need to go public with their findings. It is the going public that helps them and make it become protected. The more open they are about their findings the more protected they will be.  It sucks that t has come down to this point. I am sure that they do not want this in the open.  They will try what ever It takes to shutdown the truth to be revealed . This has been their mission. Spooks are spooks and that what they do best.

[hiflier]

And reading that (thank you Huntster!) I have to agree with MIB. There is something really off about this whole thing. Officially saying nothing says everything. What it tells me is that even if e-DNA was applied the results would be unreported. Either that or slammed so hard as to scream contamination and/or hoax. There seems to be no way passed the wall. For me it has been the holes I've seen in research that has raised my red flags and that goes all the way to the weirdness surrounding the nesting site. I never hear even the vertebrate zoologists at Washington State University show any public interest in these nests. PhD's that study animal behavior and everything else about mammals and wild animals and.... Nothing. Not a peep from anyone.

 

We have a true and obvious problem on our hands. People here have seen these creatures. The nests and how they were made speak for themselves. E-DNA samples were taken and that whole this was a mess too. I spoke to a PhD last Summer, retired from Ohio State. I had wondered if he had heard of the nest discovery and he told me that he hadn't. He told me he had spoken to Dr. Meldrum the year before and told me Dr. Meldrum never mentioned the nests to him. His conversation with Dr. Meldrum was a full three years AFTER the nests were discovered. IDK, maybe an NDA kept Meldrum from saying anything?Something just isn't right about any of it though and I've been saying that for almost a year now. I think it could be time to start asking people within our own ranks what the real story is.

 

Or....just humor me and tell me it's all in my head. 

[MIB]

1 hour ago, hiflier said:

IDK, maybe an NDA kept Meldrum from saying anything?

 

Well, now that you mention it, I did hear about NDAs.   Had something to do with the DNA, about papers that were to be written, about not making Ketchum-esque mistakes talking about your results before peer review.   It is hard to tell because the outcomes are the same whether there are NDAs to protect those papers or whether there was nothing to write the papers about after all.   

 

MIB

[hiflier]

Check out this program: https://ucedna.com/our-mission

 

I emailed them and Yeeeees, asked them point blank about Bigfoot. They wrote back very quickly and said:

 

"You're inquiry is not unscientific at all. We actually have collaborators working on eDNA to detect the Loch Ness Monster. I'm copying xxxxx here, who is leading that project, who may be able to briefly explain the method of using DNA from known references to infer the presence of something unknown."

 

^^ The underlined above is an intriguing statement. ^^

 

I sent a follow up because I STILL think e-DNA is the way to pursue Sasquatch in this day and age. I made them aware that, to my knowledge, there is no Sasquatch DNA in the record for comparison but I am going to stay with this to see what if anything could be done.

 

I am curious about other programs in other states or areas that will train volunteers to tank samples from the environment and send them in for testing. The program in the link provides the training as well as the equipment for doing the field samples. I'm curious if anyone trained in the technique could take a few samples from Bluff Creek. Would be pretty cool.

Edited December 21, 2019 by hiflier

[MIB]

Sweet!   It would be interesting to know what they have to say about how to recognize that there's an unknown "afoot" and how much they can infer about it from the knowns they have to work from.

 

MIB

[hiflier]

Good comment, MIB. I'm hoping to learn about that very thing if the person "leading that project" gets back with me. I was a bit surprised about the Loch Ness monster comment because I thought that had been pretty much wrapped up as no Nessie. Possibly very large eels, though, since they apparently got a lot of eel DNA. That study was supposedly concluded last September but may they are still testing samples? They took a ton of them from the Loch.

 

I got the impression that this California program isn't apparently afraid of finding something unknown which seems kind of amazing in and of itself. 

[gigantor]

5 minutes ago, hiflier said:

I got the impression that this California program isn't apparently afraid of finding something unknown

 

That's what real scientists do.

[hiflier]

Yes, gigantor, that's what real scientists do.

 

And I've spent the last solid year and a half looking for those scientists. Who knows, maybe the search will bear fruit this time. After all I did say the name Sasquatch in my first email and it didn't seem to scare them off. It could be the e-DNA people see the possibilities more so than say, the vertebrate zoologists and osteo-forensics people. We'll see.......

[Twist]

Could be a great find.   Wouldn’t be surprised to find out if you follow their funding back it’s funded by land conservation groups or certain lobbyists. 

[hiflier]

That could very well be true, Twist. In their mission statement they stated:

 

"California's wildlife is particularly at risk because many of its species are endemic (only found in California) and over 70% of natural habitat has been lost due to development and land degradation."

 

I got the impression that if they could find something rare or unknown then maybe something could be done to slow or halt the progress, if progress is what one would call it.

[Twist]

Ulterior motives but a shared means.   It could work.