Why can't we find and study Bigfoot?

[Arvedis]

I didn't get a malware alert but the contents on the page seems like junky, unsubstantiated misinformation. I'm going to have to dig around on Ray Crowe but I seem to recall he may be a far fetched researcher.

Edited December 15, 2020 by Arvedis

[jayjeti]

This article explains why its so difficult to get a sasquatch body or bones.

 

http://sasquatchresearchers.org/blogs/bigfootjunction/2014/11/03/test/

[Doodler]

On 1/11/2020 at 9:37 PM, sheri said:

knuckle

 

[Doodler]

On 1/11/2020 at 9:37 PM, sheri said:

knuckle

 

Ignore my replies, lol, I don't know what I did to reply twice with no text. Ill try and delete the replies

[Doodler]

My untrained and undereducated $0.02 speculation on the question of why is that there's too much land, too few of them and too few of us. All our ducks have to be in a row, we need to roll a nat 20 and they need to roll a nat 1, just to be in the same acre. They need to lose a saving throw just to be seen, let alone filmed. (Nerdy analogies) My theory is when random person sees one, it's that bigfoot's worst day, and that hiker's best.

 

I think this because natural selection put us on divergent evolutionary paths, and we are far enough apart To be alien To each other. close enough to share diseases, but far enough apart that our common ailments are debilitating diseases to them, and one of them unlucky enough to catch our cold could kill their whole tribe.

 

To improve our odds, I'm a technology guy, and lazy, I want force multipliers. Thermal is one, drones, drones with thermal, silent drones with thermal, drones shaped like birds, who fly programmed patterns at high altitude, and transmit images to a filtering site where humans review each frame, non-IR illuminators, non-IR triggers to cameras (maybe pressure plates or just a different frequency of radiation on the triggers to trail cameras, that are invisible to all mammal species), mechanical triggers like black thread, passive systems like remote cameras that are sound activated or long range lenses that are hundreds of yards away, "shot spotters" spaced out over an area passively listening for knocks or vocalizations that communicate and triangulate, then launch a drone equipped with thermal and visible light cams,  of course all this really translates to $$$$.

 

My opinion is these tools are already in use and regularly work for government forces, yes I'm one of those who think uncle Sam knows and is either protecting or exterminating, not sure which or why. It's a conclusion I've drawn from decades of observation of the way this and UFOs are treated by .gov, very similarly. Nothing more.

 

[SWWASAS]

The fact that BF and UFO’s are treated so similarly suggests to me that they are related somehow.   Throw in UFO and BF sightings in the same area and timeframe and you have to wonder what is going on.  Maybe BF are agents of some alien civilization that have been bio engineered to perform tasks on earth.    Watch us,  look for minerals and metals, and test defenses?   All kinds of possibilities.  Above all avoid humans.  

[Arvedis]

1 hour ago, Doodler said:

My untrained and undereducated $0.02 speculation on the question of why is that there's too much land, too few of them and too few of us. All our ducks have to be in a row, we need to roll a nat 20 and they need to roll a nat 1, just to be in the same acre. They need to lose a saving throw just to be seen, let alone filmed. (Nerdy analogies) My theory is when random person sees one, it's that bigfoot's worst day, and that hiker's best.

 

I think this because natural selection put us on divergent evolutionary paths, and we are far enough apart To be alien To each other. close enough to share diseases, but far enough apart that our common ailments are debilitating diseases to them, and one of them unlucky enough to catch our cold could kill their whole tribe.

 

To improve our odds, I'm a technology guy, and lazy, I want force multipliers. Thermal is one, drones, drones with thermal, silent drones with thermal, drones shaped like birds, who fly programmed patterns at high altitude, and transmit images to a filtering site where humans review each frame, non-IR illuminators, non-IR triggers to cameras (maybe pressure plates or just a different frequency of radiation on the triggers to trail cameras, that are invisible to all mammal species), mechanical triggers like black thread, passive systems like remote cameras that are sound activated or long range lenses that are hundreds of yards away, "shot spotters" spaced out over an area passively listening for knocks or vocalizations that communicate and triangulate, then launch a drone equipped with thermal and visible light cams,  of course all this really translates to $$$$.

 

My opinion is these tools are already in use and regularly work for government forces, yes I'm one of those who think uncle Sam knows and is either protecting or exterminating, not sure which or why. It's a conclusion I've drawn from decades of observation of the way this and UFOs are treated by .gov, very similarly. Nothing more.

 

You have some intriguing tech ideas. I was kind of inspired by a thread on the falcon project that got me thinking about AI/ML solutions for bigfoot drone surveillance. After spinning some cycles on it, I think it would be a lot of nerdy fun to try and implement. I have no plans to do it because of the time it would take to do properly. There is an enormous amount if dedicated tech that would need to happen.  It seems easy to rig up thermal imagers on a drone and have it fly around and send quality images back to storage for analysis, but there is an expense of course and it would actually be difficult flying conditions over potentially difficult terrain. First challenge is flying a drone around at night without any BF targets hidden by obstacles just to understand the flight conditions and how to maneuver in difficult terrain. So many things can go wrong but if you can get that far, I was thinking a following phase would be making it an open source project and get community help to create the ML annotations. Finally, the hardest part is finding BF targets and trying to train your annotations to identify the proper targets on the ground, at night, in rough conditions for you and the drone.  I see it as a lot of work over several years possibly to figure out the nuances.

 

 

 

Edited January 18, 2021 by Arvedis

[hiflier]

10 hours ago, SWWASAS said:

The fact that BF and UFO’s are treated so similarly suggests to me that they are related somehow.   Throw in UFO and BF sightings in the same area and timeframe and you have to wonder what is going on.  Maybe BF are agents of some alien civilization that have been bio engineered to perform tasks on earth.    Watch us,  look for minerals and metals, and test defenses?   All kinds of possibilities.  Above all avoid humans.  

 

How about a very far-fetched idea? Like BF's being a failed experiment to hybridize Aliens with Gorillas in an attempt to make Aliens look more Human. The point being to blend in with us in a covert attempt at taking control of top government or military command positions? After the failure, the end result- Sasquatches- were left to fend for themselves with near-Human intelligence. Useless to Aliens, they now roam the wild habitats of the world. And, occasionally, we see them.

[Believer57]

8 minutes ago, hiflier said:

How about a very far-fetched idea? Like BF's being a failed experiment to hybridize Aliens with Gorillas in an attempt to make Aliens look more Human. The point being to blend in with us in a covert attempt at taking control of top government or military command positions? After the failure, the end result- Sasquatches- were left to fend for themselves with near-Human intelligence. Useless to Aliens, they now roam the wild habitats of the world. And, occasionally, we see them.

 

Now there's another good book for you! 

 

[hiflier]

Got that right, I took the idea from my notes. The story will stand on its own, but perhaps it could also be a sequel to the sequel?

[Doodler]

8 hours ago, Arvedis said:

 

You have some intriguing tech ideas. I was kind of inspired by a thread on the falcon project that got me thinking about AI/ML solutions for bigfoot drone surveillance. After spinning some cycles on it, I think it would be a lot of nerdy fun to try and implement. I have no plans to do it because of the time it would take to do properly. There is an enormous amount if dedicated tech that would need to happen.  It seems easy to rig up thermal imagers on a drone and have it fly around and send quality images back to storage for analysis, but there is an expense of course and it would actually be difficult flying conditions over potentially difficult terrain. First challenge is flying a drone around at night without any BF targets hidden by obstacles just to understand the flight conditions and how to maneuver in difficult terrain. So many things can go wrong but if you can get that far, I was thinking a following phase would be making it an open source project and get community help to create the ML annotations. Finally, the hardest part is finding BF targets and trying to train your annotations to identify the proper targets on the ground, at night, in rough conditions for you and the drone.  I see it as a lot of work over several years possibly to figure out the nuances.

 

 

I purposefully avoided ML/AI talk, as too nerdy, LOL.

 

For those who aren't familiar, ML = Machine Learning and AI = Artificial Intelligence. 

 

For the point of this thread, they're the same thing. Think of AI or machine learning as teaching a computer program something and asking it to compare new things to what you just taught it. Like when you do a CAPTCHA you've had to solve to get access to a bank or some website. Pick the pictures that contain a stop sign. Pick the pictures that contain a taxi cab. They show a 3x3 block of photos and you click on those that contain the sign. You did the machine learning part when you learned what a stop sign looks like, and you applied the machine learning part when you extrapolated that this red thing in the background of this photo with the letters STO visible is a stop sign, even though the P is not visible. When a computer does this, that's machine learning. You teach the computer by feeding it a directory full of thousands of photos of street corners or stop signs in the dirt or cartoon drawings of stop signs, and after a while, the machine can pick out a stop sign.

 

ML and AI are best at photo and text analysis. In my line of work, in a monitoring department in IT operations in a large corporation, we're tasked with using ML to identify problem areas in logs and transaction data and identify when something could go south soon. We use machine learning to determine who might have an issue, and to predict which way to route certain transactions to meet the most likely success. i.e. you start to see a certain pattern in the data that indicates "not right". We can't see the pattern because we don't even know what the pattern is or could be. All we know is a certain time range was just fine, so we use that time range to train the system on a known-good period, and then turn the AI loose on the logs to determine what no-good looks like and please, computer, just tell us when things look off. And based on the entries, the next time a certain huge transaction comes along, it'll be best to send it to the server with the most available resources, as opposed to the server that is performing fastest at this moment.

 

How does this relate to the furry friends? I see a project in the future to train a machine what humans in the woods looks like with thousands of photos of people in the woods in all conditions, and then overfly a hot spot taking thousands of pictures from all sorts of angles, and then turn it over to the AI to crunch the numbers to see if there are any people or beings in the photos. It could even outline what it thinks is a person to make human review faster. You could teach it deer, squirrel, elk, bear and any number of animals, and have it draw out those frames from video or stills. You could use thermal images too, simply to identify hot spots for analysis.

 

At the very least, you would know where the elk are.

 

This eliminates some of the factors that limited success to this point. It eliminates our lack of mobility and their enhanced mobility by making observations from greater distances, it eliminates rarity of observers, by making each drone an observer capable of thousands of tireless observations a minute. Obviously it doesn't eliminate rarity of target subjects, it's just a compensating control, more surface area = higher chance of encounter.

 

What would this cost? The AI or machine learning  toolkits are free. Computers are cheaper than ever, but churning through millions of frames or tens of thousands of stills is going to take compute resources and/or time. A modern gaming PC with a good video card could process thousands of photos an hour. A drone with thermal imaging? That's not going to be cheap. if I had a few tens of thousands of bucks laying around, this is how I would invest it. I would then sell the resulting images of any location that doesn't produce fruit to hunters to increase chances of seeing elk or deer or bear to offset some of the cost. Who knows, maybe that alone is enough of a market to pay for it and your side job becomes bigfoot hunting while your full time job is thermal imaging and machine analysis. Why not?

 

[hiflier]

Doodler, you and Believer57 would make the perfect team for something like you're describing. In a way I had pushed in the real world for taking environmental DNA sample from creeks and streams that drain large areas of watershed in order to test for any primate DNA that may be present. There is precedent for such an endeavor but again it could be costly unless the right lab would be available to do the testing. A cost break on the number of samples sent in would be good and some companies even provide the equipment for taking the samples at no cost. I've been waylaid by other projects both personal and other wise and this Covid thing has really put a damper on the whole idea but I hope to revive it when things get better.

 

So ML/AI? Or e-DNA? Which do you think would be more viable at this stage of the game?

[Twist]

12 hours ago, Doodler said:

My untrained and undereducated $0.02 speculation on the question of why is that there's too much land, too few of them and too few of us. All our ducks have to be in a row, we need to roll a nat 20 and they need to roll a nat 1, just to be in the same acre. They need to lose a saving throw just to be seen, let alone filmed. (Nerdy analogies) My theory is when random person sees one, it's that bigfoot's worst day, and that hiker's best.

+1 for the DND references.   (Fellow nerd).  

[Doodler]

2 hours ago, hiflier said:

Got that right, I took the idea from my notes. The story will stand on its own, but perhaps it could also be a sequel to the sequel?

 

And secrets are unwittingly leaked by Snowden's group, wikileaks, and your main character finds outt the secret was there the whole time, but we were all distracted by all the other state secrets leaked that we never thought to consider what other evidence had been leaked, and once your main character decodes it, they open up a whole world of government cover-up and expose the systematic genocide of these creatures, only in the end, you find out that the government hasn't been genociding bigfoots, but some group of humans and the truth is even uglier than the fiction <dramatic music here> but as the scene closes, the government agent winks, indicating they were in fact murdering bigfoots the whole time. woooo I would watch that movie.

[SWWASAS]

2 hours ago, hiflier said:

 

How about a very far-fetched idea? Like BF's being a failed experiment to hybridize Aliens with Gorillas in an attempt to make Aliens look more Human. The point being to blend in with us in a covert attempt at taking control of top government or military command positions? After the failure, the end result- Sasquatches- were left to fend for themselves with near-Human intelligence. Useless to Aliens, they now roam the wild habitats of the world. And, occasionally, we see them.

Another possibility is suggested by looking at BF physiology.     They have large eyes and are capable of seeing in near full darkness.    They are large and muscular in size.   Too large to be likely an earth adaptation.     Could it be that they are natives of a star system that had a small red star that did not produce much light?     Their planet may have been more massive than ours so they neeed to be strong to overcome the gravity and move around.    A weak star could be one that is running out of fuel and soon will die.     Perhaps some gallactic federation decided to save the race and transport them to earth where they are well adapted to forest life?   The galactic saviors admonished them to stay out of sight, do not interact with humans,  as we do not treat others differnent than us very well.   Look what we did to the Neanderthol.  Explains why BF sightings may be associated with UFO sightings.    They are arriving with the next refugeees.