Everything you said: right on.

And a guy (his word; and his report sounds plausible) in Manitoba shot a sasquatch dead, in 1941, with one shot. Thinking it was a wounded cow moose he’d been tracking.

Mistaken identity does, as you note, happen.

But the way you would expect it to go is this: guy sees something unknown. And pigeonholes it into the categories he knows. In other words: you see a sasquatch, fleetingly (or even not), and you go: bear. HAD to be. Please, HAD to be…

That’s what many sighters try to do: that CAN’T be what I think it is. It CAN’T. And they keep looking, and nothing they see tells them anything but: it IS.

People reporting sightings aren’t tentative. They are INSISTENT that they saw what they saw. And they describe it consistently with others who have seen, apparently, the same thing.

People don’t do that and be mistaken about it. People don’t do that when they’re really looking at bears, moose, or stumps. Not people in sound mental health.

Not only can’t you say they’re all innocently mistaken; you can’t say they’re all crazy, either.

And a combination of the two? Think about it. That’s even MORE implausible.

Sure. Right.

Mountain lions in Iowa. No way it happens. People scream ‘panther’ at tabbies and bobcats all the time. And wolves? Travel in packs. It was alone, you saw a dog, a coydog, or a big coyote.

Period.

Iowa has 40 sightings on the BFRO database. Many of them are by people who claim your expertise in the woods. 40 listed sightings, reported by people who know how the public will treat their sightings, implies hundreds by people who didn’t report.

Curious, and anybody who knows this chime in.

How many reported mountain lion or wolf sightings in IA in the last 30 years?

My point is not to pooh-pooh your sighting. To me that is precisely what is wrong with so many “experts’ on why the sasquatch is impossible. They pooh-pooh. I have spent more than enough time in the woods to know that your sightings are plausible.

But I have also seen photos of coyotes that, when the animal was ID’d I went, I thought that was a wolf! And the other way around, too. And I pride myself on knowing the difference. (And I have seen both in the wild. And yes I do know that, for sure.)

I can, in other words, see you mistaking a big coyote (or a mix of the right dog with a coyote) as a wolf.

The IA sighting reports involve, many of them, hunters, like you, who could not, from their descriptions, have been looking either at a human or at any known animal.

And there’s as much evidence for what they saw - their word - as there is for what you did - your word. Although in some cases, we have tracks, in places someone hoaxing just wouldn’t leave them.

In other words, I have no more reason to disbelieve them than I do you.

If the sasquatch is real - and my read of hundreds of reports tells me to bet that way if I ever have to - then many people, in IA and many, most all, other states, are seeing them. and

1. Saying nothing, fearing the consequences;
2. Saying nothing, ’cause now they know and don’t care who else does;
3. Saying nothing, ’cause it COULD possibly conceivably I could win the lottery tomorrow too have been human;
4. Saying nothing, ’cause at a distance it didn’t look unusual enough over the brief course of the sighting;
5. Saying nothing because [many other reasons I could list];
6. Reporting it (40 on BFRO’s database in IA alone).

Just sayin’. No more reason to doubt them, than to doubt you.

With that having been said, I truely feel that for Iowa to be populated by a large upright mammal, the number of sighting would be astronomical. Iowa is very open. I realize there are areas where the woods run for miles and the food supply would be endless. But let’s be realistic. If there was a 6 foot or taller, hairy mammal walking around on 2 legs, someone I know would have seen it. I simply have too many friends who hunt, camp, drive the back roads both day and night for none of us to have seen it.

I must admit that if this creature does exist, it must be of higher intelligants than most wild animals, ie, deer, coyote, fox, etc. So that would give it an advantage as to how to stay out of sight. But to be able to roam Iowa freely without hundreds of sighting would be highly unlikely.

Plenty of other journeys could be made through the state, too, using the river and stream passages and also the very large system of parks, preserves, etc.

If one doesn’t want to be seen, there is plenty of timber, river bottoms, and more to use for passageways and hiding/living. There have been people who have gone missing and not been found for years… sounds strange for Iowa, but it happens. A few years ago an experienced hunter actually got lost and died of exposure.

Iowa does get the odd bear or moose wandering down from northern Minnesota every couple three years. And a cougar in north central Iowa, I’d guess a kitten from the denning mother up by Mankato. And they are seen, and everybody knows about them. A large primate is not going to evade detection, especially not if it is living in the area with a breeding population.

You have to realize that population density isn’t the only factor. How well the people living there know their surroundings is another, and the line-of-sight open distance is an additional factor. Rural Iowans not only know their surroundings out to the horizon like the back of their hands, but they are -aware- of them, too.

Now, there -are- a lot of weirdos down by Fairfield, so ya never know

My brother actually had a sighting in southern Iowa a couple of years back and and after looking at the BFRO site, it seems there are areas that are distinctly more opportune for sightings than others, central Iowa areas and southern.

And I tend to agree with BunniesLair and Raisinofwrath, I think “ranging” is a much better description of BF activity than migration. I think like any other animal they are going to go where the food is, and at different times of the year, I would guess a BF would know when the food is plentiful in an area.

I will do some researching around here to see what “food sources” might be blooming at peak sighting areas and during times of the year. It could be that more people are out and about in these high sighting areas at certain times of the year, but it could be food drawing the cryptids down or something else entirely.

I’ll look into things and then report back to Loren here and the BFRO if I come up with anything. And like I said, I am close enough to go scouting later this year on my own, so we will see if I can put together a mini MQ of my own.

You have my curiosity up.

Anyway, another good example of the use of “research” to debunk sightings reports is the misrepresentation of some experiments on perception. For example, you have the one where you are watching a show and don’t notice that people are changing their clothes or hair, or that man in a gorilla costume has just walked across the screen without you noticing. Then some “scoftics” will awkwardly try to shoe horn those findings into sasquatch reports and make irrelevant connections.

In the first example of people changing clothes off camera, this could be seen as an example of “change blindness,” which is a sort of “inattention blindness,” in which your brain doesn’t notice even obvious changes as long as the actual change isn’t witnessed. This is because the brain simply cannot process every little thing, so it chooses what to focus on. There have been lots of very interesting experiments on this phenomenon, and none of them really pertain to sasquatch reports. It merely shows that the brain doesn’t notice changes it does not witness, not that a person has mistaken a horse for a hairy biped, or that they didn’t really see said hairy biped. If they saw sasquatch one second and it was brown, then turned away, looked back, and didn’t notice that someone had turned it grey, THAT would be more pertinent to those experiments.

The second example of a man in gorilla suit walking through the frame unnoticed (I’ve seen this clip, very interesting but irrelevant), merely shows that people sometimes don’t notice what’s right in front of them. That’s fine if the person had a sasquatch walk in front of them and they saw nothing. But these eyewitnesses are seeing the thing, sometimes quite clearly and in detail. If anything, that particular experiment shows that maybe more people have seen sasquatch that didn’t actually realize it at the time.

I understand the aim of these examples is to show that human perception is not perfect, and I’m interested in how faulty perception may play a role in sightings reports. However, all of the experiments I just mentioned involve people NOT noticing things, which is quite different than someone insisting they saw an 8 foot tall hairy hominid. Yet some debunkers still use these experiments as an argument.

I’m not a psychologist, these are just a few cases I know of. What I’m trying to say is that it’s scientifically irresponsible to use research that does not pertain to or is irrelevant to the facts in order to explain a phenomenon. I am disappointed when skeptics (which I actually consider myself to be) use such faulty arguments.

I very much appreciate a critical approach, as long as it’s done in a meaningful way supported by pertinent facts.

I agree with you that thinking they’re seeing cows or horses is absurd. But that happens too often: an unreasonable explanation (”a nine-foot vagrant with a black hoodie and black pants and black boots…in July” or a bear running, bipedally, across a road or swamp gas or your mom wears glasses, right? or beer which is NOT a hallucinogen) is given by a skeptic for something that the skeptic at least sometimes professes to believe is at least conceivable. Ever notice how Ben Radford comes on here (you remember him, right? ) and says he’s been involved in the cryptid search forever and has done all this research and hopes the searchers find one someday, straitjackets and all, yet he can’t accept as a rational explanation that people who see an animal he professes to be open minded about actually did see that animal?

Which leads me to this: if one is open-minded on a cryptid, one accepts, as one of the best possible explanations, that a person who reports an encounter with that cryptid actually had one. Unless there is something compelling - and I can think of very very few things that would work with a sasquatch encounter - that tells one otherwise.

Virtually every sasquatch encounter report I have read comes down to one of three reasonable explanations: sasquatch; 911-hospitalizable-on-the-spot mental deragement; or lie. (”man in ghillie suit”: not reasonable for one of them. Nor a man in any kind of suit, even ape.)

Oh and raisinsofwrath: I’d love to take final credit for the Iowa data…but I can’t. That belongs to sneaker98, who points up how scary bad misconceptions about how populated our country is, in general, continue to contribute to a big pile of misinformation that gets in the way on topics like this.