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Originally Posted by QuikSand
I'm at a loss.
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I know it's de rigueur to accept the skeptical viewpoint as the baseline, but in fact it is not intellectually rigorous.
And we should stop using the UFO analogy because its not a one-to-one analogue.
Here's the why for both statements above.
For the existence of bigfoot we have these categories of evidence, all of them well attested:
1. Thousands of sightings from eyewitnesses. One would be wrong to throw these out, even as a skeptic. No one case proves anything, but the sheer number of people should alert one to something unexplained going on. And the consistency of detail is astounding if one wishes to believe these are all misidentifications and hallucinations. We have years of reports that correspond with each other, many with details researchers didn't appreciate well enough until recently.
2. Tracks that show anatomical details no hoaxer would have bothered to create (at least until they became a "feature" of what is considered a legit track). The number and distribution of tracks suggests, as author and researcher John Green pointed out years ago, that if it is a hoax, there is a worldwide organization committed to creating and sustaining the hoax. These tracks are often found in places people are very unlikely to go, suggesting that there are many more hoaxed tracks never found. How do skeptics explain this?
3. Hair samples. There is a collection of hairs now that show internal consistencies but also they do not come from any known animal. The most interesting feature of the hair samples is that they appear to be human in most respects, but they do not have the toxins our hairs do as a result of our living in our toxin rich society.
4. Fecal samples. Some as large as coke cans. (I've seen one of these in a picture with the coke can next to it.) They are from no known animal, and when tested for DNA come back as "likely human".
5. Photographic evidence. By itself it isn't much, but it does support the other evidence.
6. The Patterson/Gimlin film. If one spends the time to analyze the film, especially if you have one of the stabilized images you can get from other boards, you will notice many features that argue against the subject being a man in a suit. As a whole, these features simply overwhelm the contradictory evidence.
7. Secondary evidence arising from analysis of the evidence we now have; for instance, the foot size distribution comes out as a bell curve, suggesting a real population of animals, not a hoax (since one assumes hoaxers wouldn't know each other and wouldn't make enough prints of different sizes to create the impression of a population -- unless you accept the worldwide hoaxing organization theory, which is absurd!).
Simply apply Occam's Razor -- what is the simplest theory that can account for the conglomeration of evidence without creating more unaccounted for features?
That there is a real creature out there producing the evidence.
Though not many really know about it, the case for bigfoot does not rest on a couple of guys telling stories that may be tall tales. We have
thousands of reports. The fact that we have physical evidence in the abundance that we have it goes far beyond the case for the UFO.
I'm not saying anything about what I think about the UFO phenomena by saying that, just that it's apples to oranges comparing them to bigfoot.
The reason the authorities don't tell you what they suspect is out there, from my conversation with several National Park Rangers, is they've been told not to, and they'd lose their jobs if they did. We have asked ourselves why this would be for some time, and have a couple of answers.
1. Admitting a large, potentially dangerous, creature is living in the woods would create a panic and the government would be forced to do something about it. They have done the cost/benefit analysis and regard the bigfoot as harmless enough to want to avoid this scenario altogether.
2. Some bright spark in the defense industry one day had a thought about training bigfoot for defense purposes (they do it with dolphins!) Once someone proposed this idea, the very existence of bigfoot would be classified, and studies show that once the government classifies something it tends not to unclassify it unless forced to.
3. The existence of bigfoot is a scary thought if you aren't prepared for it. The human mind may simply reject the notion altogether until it comes face to face with one, which created a culture in which the folks in the field learn something which the folks in the office reject out of hand. Over time, the field workers have learned the best thing to do when you learn about bigfoot is shut up about it.
Since many Rangers have been only too glad to tell us what they know, I suspect that number 3 is the main reason, though all three could be in operation at once.
I've seen enough to know that bigfoot is out there. If it is *not* a flesh and blood creature that lives and dies in our woods, then we really do live in a strange strange world.
Someone asked where to find a good resolution copy of the Patterson/Gimlin film. The entire film is appended to the video "Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science", which you can buy from the BFRO on this page:
hxxps://secure19.activehost.com/legendmeetsscience/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=2
In that video you can see more about the evidence I was talking about, and even some scientists who come right out and say what they believe.