Guest CT Seeker Posted March 14, 2012 Share Posted March 14, 2012 Hopefully my response to SY will clear up my position, CT Seeker. I'm no less prone than anyone else to hallucination, misidentification, hoaxing, etc., so having a sighting myself would not necessarily convince me. You seem pretty lucid to me so personally, I would factor out hoax if you were face to face with a creature--I think you would know if you were looking at a costumed human--the face at the very least are usually pretty easy to discern, then of course you could probably see muscle if you were up close. Misidentification? Sure. But you even attempting to put it into a BF category is what I find interesting and why I want to hear more about it. I see many animals pretty often and I have never seen anything close to resembling a bipedal hominid. Hallucination? Sure. However I think that people throw that out there a lot as if it is a plausible explanation whereas actual hallucinations are something to be concerned about in and of themselves. I think that bucket is used to contain a lot of explanations which just don't belong there.See? I have more faith in a skeptic's BF story than the skeptic himself does! Irony can be so ironic sometimes... (or something) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted March 14, 2012 Share Posted March 14, 2012 ^Take "faith" completely out of the equation, and then you might be onto something. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest CT Seeker Posted March 14, 2012 Share Posted March 14, 2012 "Credence"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest MikeG Posted March 14, 2012 Share Posted March 14, 2012 Now we're talking! Bad Moon Rising, Green River, Have You Ever Seen the Rain? Rolling on the.................oh...........OK..............not that Creedence............. Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted March 14, 2012 Share Posted March 14, 2012 I read somewhere that we really don't see with our eyes but with our brains. In other words, the brain takes the signals from the eyes and constructs an image. The brain does not copy or record the light as it goes through the eyes like a camera such as was used to film patty. As I understand it, the brain will file in gaps. There is a trick where you can put a dot on a yellow piece of paper and run it across you sight the dot will disappear because it passes through a blind spot. What happens is that the mind fills in for the missing information. Instead of seeing a blind spot you see yellow where the who is. Ask any magician, the eyes (actually the brain) can easily be fooled. That is why multiple witnesses are always good. Especially if they have not had a chance to talk to each. other. If you worried about bears and never considered a bf and you catch a glimpse of a bf walk right in front of you, your going to think you say a bear. The opposite can occur due. However, bears don't leave bigfoot tracts and vice versa. On a side note, I am thinkkng about doing a dna study on some samples that came from bear country. My hypothesis will be that bigfoot is actually a bipedal bear whose dna happens to fall in the range of your modern black bear. One last side note, am I the only person who gets irrated because my spell check wants to capitalize the first letter in "Bigfoot" because it sees bigfoot as a proper noun rather than a species? Remember Smoky the Bear said put out your fires. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest JiggyPotamus Posted March 14, 2012 Share Posted March 14, 2012 Just offering my 2 cents on hallucinations; I would confidently say that a very small percentage of sightings could be due to this effect. But the problem I have anytime someone attempts to use hallucination as an explanation is that the majority of normal people do not experience hallucinations...of any kind. (that I know of, but I'm not a doctor either...unless watching every episode of Doogie Howser qualifies me...which it does. Honestly, something that interests me greatly, although I am not sure what place it has in bigfootery, is the effect of an external electric field in close proximity to certain areas of the brain...Having had two paranormal experiences in my life, I am thinking there is some type of connection...Neither one had to do with bigfoot though. One was when I was about 6 or 7, and the other about 8 years ago... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted March 14, 2012 Share Posted March 14, 2012 ^Wiki claims about 10% of people - who are NOT mentally ill, impaired, under stress, etc. - might experience a hallucination at some point in their lives. Add to the number of people who ARE mentally ill, impaired, stressed, etc. and that adds up to roughly a metric buttload of potential hallucinations every year. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
southernyahoo Posted March 14, 2012 Share Posted March 14, 2012 That sounds about right, but you might be missing some subtleties of context. In post 3412 this morning, I was referring not just to the experience of me seeing a bigfoot, I was referring to the specific, scientific claim that "bigfoot is real" based on my sighting. I'm drawing a distinction between "I saw a bigfoot" and "I saw a bigfoot and that proves bigfoot is real." Regardless of distinctions, both claims would hypotheticly have the same degree of certainty and evidence to an objective evaluator, atleast until something can pass peer review. Sure that process can get started in the face of doubt. I doubt bigfoot, but if I ever find a piece of one during my field work, you can bet that I'll follow up with it. I'm not convinced you would know you had a piece of bigfoot, so what would you do with a hair sample? How far would you go to follow through when doubt says you've likely found hair from a cow, bison, bear or hunter? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest slimwitless Posted March 14, 2012 Share Posted March 14, 2012 (edited) I wonder why people aren't hallucinating leprechauns or unicorns. Why are most of the sightings (assuming hallucinations) so...well, boring? Shouldn't these visions fly or speak in the voice of a dead relative or be wearing clown shoes and women's underpants? I dunno. Maybe it's my philosophy minor speaking but what if I told you I saw a fox outside my office building. A fox is a real animal but it can be hallucinated as easily as a sasquatch. What reason do you possibly have for believing I saw a fox if you weren't there and I didn't collect physical evidence? Only semi-serious here. It's up to the reader to decide which parts. Edited March 14, 2012 by slimwitless Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JDL Posted March 14, 2012 Share Posted March 14, 2012 Bad Moon Rising, ^^^ Ringtone assigned to ex-wife Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted March 14, 2012 Share Posted March 14, 2012 Regardless of distinctions, both claims would hypotheticly have the same degree of certainty and evidence to an objective evaluator, atleast until something can pass peer review. That's why I wouldn't make the latter claim without first passing it through peer review. I'm not convinced you would know you had a piece of bigfoot, so what would you do with a hair sample? How far would you go to follow through when doubt says you've likely found hair from a cow, bison, bear or hunter? I'll let you know after I get my next research project going this summer - we'll be doing track plates, scent stations, and hair catchers to obtain density estimates of mesocarnivores. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gigantor Posted March 14, 2012 Admin Share Posted March 14, 2012 Maybe you should contact "Dr Juice" for some of that famous scent... maybe do an informal parallel study a few hundred yards from your research area. Just a thought. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 So Saskeptic, seriously what would be the odds that a black belt in science like yourself, who in decades has never once hallucinated anything, would in fact experience his first one right at the moment of truth, when what you've been debating every day for I don't know how many years is settled right before your eyes? Vegas odds have to be at about (+675000). Would you seriously pull the hallucination card on yourself ahead of trusting all of your senses that you were in fact face to face with a Sasquatch? Wouldn't you collect yourself, get on your iPhone, and change your name to Sascertain? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
southernyahoo Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 ^ Here I thought you were mostly a bird guy Saskeptic, mesocarnivores ...hmmmmm never know where you might find those. Cedar trees seem to be natural hair catchers too, but tend to grow on forest edges and in clearings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 I think it is important to distinguish between hallucination, mis-identifications, optical illusions, and changed memories. For example, I read somewhere that actual studies of where people thought they were when they first heard of the Kennedy Assisination or the Shuttle Disaster are not particularly accurate. Hallucination is seeing something that is not there. The other three on my list is seeing something something there but not seeing it accurately or remembering it accurately. That is why one sighting of a bigfoot is never great evidence of a bigfoot at that time and location. Several sightings over a time period or multiple people seeing the same thing are better evidence. I defend car wreck lawsuits for a living and I can tell that no two people under oath will have the same recollection or observation of the same accident. It is just human nature. I am a skeptical beliver and I don't discount all sightings. I just think caution should be used in how much weight you put on a sighting. One more thing, I was disappointed in finding bigfoot that they featured the sights have children that had occurred a few years back. Probably the least reliable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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