VickyCaramel wrote:
It is a little more interesting than that, a phenomenon in of it's self.
A lot of these guys say, "The are just boogers, there have always been boogers, everybody has always known about them". So basically, much like native Americans, they say they are just part of natures.... and if you don't believe in them, that's your problem.
That's not a very scientific approach. It's like saying "the earth is flat, everybody has always known it's flat".
So they are giving up on trying to prove them to "science", and they do have a point, short of dragging one of these things out of the woods dead, what evidence would be accepted? And as they are 900lb, they don't much fancy trying to drag one of them out of the woods.
This isn't true. Bones (better yet a complete skeleton), fur, teeth, fangs are far more easy to retrieve than an alive exemplar. Today a DNA analysis could easily clarify that bones, fur or teeth belong to an unknown animal.
However they are trying to be more scientific, but not in order to prove bigfoot exists, but in order to understand it's behaviour. And if you don't believe they exist, they say, "I don't THINK it exists, I KNOW it exists, and if you don't believe me, go see for yourself".
This looks more like creationism than science to me. I can understand that they're trying to be more systematic and technical in their approach, but many creationists are systematic and produce sophisticated arguments. The problem is that they never contemplate the possibility that their beliefs are wrong, and set out only to confirm them, not to deny them.
In a certain way a more systemic and detailed approach to what is basically dogma is worse than tall tales, because it creates an illusion of competence. It's far harder to debate with a creationist or a conspiracy theorist who already has a systemic theory, because they're more likely to be convinced that the evidence is on their side and to ignore that they evidence they have is weak and that their models are based on flawed assumptions.
I find this kind of interesting, you could say this is an evolution of the cult, or you could say this is how you would expect people who know a real creature exists would behave if they weren't believe... to carry on regardless of what skeptics demand.
How do these people know, exactly? They might have seen "something", but they don't have any real evidence about
what they've seen.
Frankly, I do think most of them are sincere, although there are others who very obviously aren't. And then there are others who are batshit insane.
I can believe that these people are sincere and have seen
something in the woods. The problem is to understand
what they've seen. It's suspicious that no skeletons of unknown animals and/or no bones, fur, teeth or other body parts have been produced and identified as from an unknown animal. Where do those creatures sleep during the day, if they're mostly nocturnal? Where do you hunt (do they leave behind teeth)? Where do they mate or scratch their backs or drink?
There are many methods to study behavior of unidentified animals according to the maps to create models as where it's more likely to find them. I've found this
paper, titled "Predicting the distribution of Sasquatch in western North America: anything goes with ecological niche modelling".
The abstract looks interesting:
The availability of user-friendly software and publicly available biodiversity databases has led to a rapid increase in the use of ecological niche modelling to predict species distributions. A potential source of error in publicly available data that may affect the accuracy of ecological niche models (ENMs), and one that is difficult to correct for, is incorrect (or incomplete) taxonomy. Here we remind researchers of the need for careful evaluation of database records prior to use in modelling, especially when the presence of cryptic species is suspected or many records are based on indirect evidence. To draw attention to this potential problem, we construct ENMs for the North American Sasquatch (i.e. Bigfoot). Specifically, we use a large database of georeferenced putative sightings and footprints for Sasquatch in western North America, demonstrating how convincing environmentally predicted distributions of a taxon’s potential range can be generated from questionable site-occurrence data. We compare the distribution of Bigfoot with an ENM for the black bear, Ursus americanus, and suggest that many sightings of this cryptozoid may be cases of mistaken identity.
This is a map with a distribution of the sightings of Bigfoot in the states of Washington, Oregon and California:
http://i.imgur.com/Qjber1t.jpg
Map of Bigfoot encounters from Washington, Oregon and California used in the analyses. Points represent visual/auditory detection, and foot symbols represent coordinates where footprint data were available. Shading indicates topography, with lighter values representing lower elevations.
These other maps are comparison of predicted distributions of bigfoot under the current climate and a possible climate-change scenario, along with a predicted distribution of black bears:
Predicted distributions of Bigfoot constructed from all available encounter data using maxent (a) for the present climate and (b) under a possible climate-change scenario involving a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels. Results are presented for logistic probabilities of occurrence ranging continuously from low (white) to high (black). Differences between (a) and (b) are shown in (c), with whiter values reflecting a decline in logistic probability of occurrence under climate change, darker values reflecting a gain, and grey reflecting no change. A predicted distribution of Ursus americanus in western North America under a present-day climate is also shown (d). White points indicate sampling localities in California, Oregon and Washington taken from GBIF (n = 113 for training, 28 for testing; compare with Fig. 1) used for the maxent model with shading as in (a) and (b); black points indicate additional known records not included in the model.
The conclusions of the paper contain relevant observations:
The general similarities between distributions of the two ‘species’ [the alleged bigfoot and black bears] are clear (Fig. 2a, d), despite the much smaller number of available black bear coordinates. Furthermore, the exact same bioclimatic variables (see above) contributed most to the ENM when evaluated using maxent’s variable jackknifing procedure. We used the I-statistic (Warren et al., 2008) to quantify the degree of similarity between the two ENMs using the program ENMTools. The observed value of I = 0.849 indeed indicates a high degree of overlap, and falls well within the null distribution generated from maxent runs for 100 randomizations of Bigfoot and black bear coordinates (Fig. 3; P < observed = 0.32). Thus, the two ‘species’ do not demonstrate significant niche differentiation with respect to the selected bioclimatic variables. Although it is possible that Sasquatch and U. americanus share such remarkably similar bioclimatic requirements, we nonetheless suspect that many Bigfoot sightings are, in fact, of black bears.
Does this
prove that
all bigfoot sightings are actually sightings of black bears? Of course not. Does it, however, suggest that there's probably a strong correlation between the two? It seems likely. Sightings of black bears, many of them in non-ideal conditions (at night, quick encounter, at a distance, of atypical individuals) could surely explain why people sincerely believe in having seen something while not necessarily confirming the theory that a cryptozoid lives in the area.
