There are plenty of “concrete” examples… OK, plaster, but close enough. Trackways are one of the most common and studied forms of BF evidence. Scientists whose academic credentials make them supremely qualified to judge, Grover Krantz and Jeff Meldrum, find the evidence extremely compelling.

Eyewitness reports, when taken in isolation, are highly unreliable… but when they meet certain criteria and are taken in aggregate, they can be more reliable and accurate than the observations and opinions of experts (see Surowiecki’s, ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ – you don’t have to read the whole thing, just look at a summary and see how it can be applied to the BFRO or other such databases). If you are interested in the subject, you should read the reports from a purely academic perspective and make your own observations and determinations.

Then we have the reason we are all here, biological samples and DNA…

Some reports can be explained by folklore, misidentification and a culture of hoaxing… but all of them? Especially the ones from people with community ties/ reputations to protect and the ones who are able to observe and recall with accuracy even amidst the stress of life threatening situations (policemen, soldiers, doctors, EMTs etc…). Here’s one of my new favorite BFRO sighting reports.

Personally I think the likelihood of a relict hominid living in the wilds of North America is more likely than a guy running around in the woods at night with a ghillie suit and a top secret and hitherto unheard-of portable “less than lethal” crowd control generator. The output of these generators is patterned after the ULF (ultra low frequency) sounds created by large predators, the sounds are felt more than heard and create a distinct feeling of unease and an urge to vacate the area… to the point of loss of motor control/ small muscle coordination after prolonged exposure.

This could help explain the multiple accounts of people trying to shoot them and failing. In one report an experienced hunter recounted emptying his lever action rifle at one… he did, but somehow he didn’t pull the trigger on a single round. Also, one of the most common answers to “Why didn’t you shoot it?” is, “I drew a bead on it, but couldn’t pull the trigger… it looked too human.”. The inability to kill one’s own kind is a built in response (See Grossman’s Pulitzer nominated, “On Killing”) and would not be triggered by a bear or other similar animal.

So, you say all Bigfoot sightings are folklore? Tell us, where is your data that supports that? How would you propose to test that? (Hint: Application of circular reasoning is not testing)

A real honest to goodness informed Bigfoot skeptic? I don’t believe you… I need a see a body.

Again, italics are my emphasis, not his.

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The bigger issue though is that you’re confounding “delusion” and “folklore.” You’re assuming that people who report bigfoots (that I say were never there) are suffering from delusions, i.e., they really thought they saw a bigfoot, but they really didn’t. Yes, some who’ve reported bigfoots have been deluded, but many (most?) who’ve reported bigfoots have simply been participating in the beloved bigfoot folklore. You spin a yarn around a campfire or report it to an online sightings database. If you want your report to have maximum effect – say to help convince someone based on your info that they had seen a bigfoot too in a nearby area – then you make the bigfoot in your story generally conform to what folklore says bigfoots are and what they do.

The bigfoot of folklore is a creature of the forests: so says Albert Ostman, William Roe, Roger Patterson, Paul Freeman, Boggy Creek, Harry and the Hendersons, Jack Links Jerky – forest bigfoots one and all. While everyone would put their own spin on their bigfoot, if it deviates too much from the folklore (like, if “yours” had a tail) then it’s not going to be considered a bigfoot and it won’t end up in the BFRO database. So, to me, the “bigfoot correlates with rainfall” stuff is about as compelling as lake monsters correlating with the distribution of lakes.
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So here is what this guy thinks, right in his statements:

1. He states his a priori bias early on (that I say were never there) .
2. He presumes delusion and happy yarn-spinning. His evidence is….?
3. He presumes that “bigfoot folklore” includes things like: they live in forests; they live in areas with x annual rainfall; they are sighted in X places…and that everyone who has a sighting (who isn’t deluded) is all read up on this so they can make their sighting sound believable.
4. He doesn’t address at all how the folkloric presumption that they live in forests addresses those sightings that occur away from forests. (Presumably these people are all wildlife biologists who know what “riparian corridors” are.)

This is someone who, when he reads a report, presumes My Favorite Bigfoot Character: The Omnipotent Hoaxer, who knows just how to make it believable!

That’s a particularly complex form of denial. But there it is, just to show you it’s out there.

Hey man, just noticed something in this paragraph that deserves comment.

“20 think Sasquatch doesn’t exist (19 saying “not science” and 1 after actually examining the evidence – though I’m starting to think this one guy is even more elusive than Sasquatch, mostly I see one of the group of 20 above put on a skeptic suit and hoax a real skeptic just for the sake of balance)”

You know, I thought that one guy was gonna require peanut butter and pancakes in front of a trail cam in my backyard, at least. I have, however, ostensibly encountered one, on another forum. When he talks about what he’s read, he seems to read the right stuff and even mentions the encounter literature. Here’s an excerpt, worth quoting at length because I am aware of nothing else like it:

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Who says they [encounter reports] are ignored? I read them rather frequently and consider anecdotal accounts to be among the most interesting purported bigfoot evidence out there. The problem is simply that we can’t do anything but duly note each new alleged eyewitness account. [all italics my emphasis] I can’t write out a specimen tag and describe a new species based on a mountain of stories from people who claim to have seen said species. Jeff Meldrum would tell you the same thing.

If physical remains of a bigfoot could be confirmed, however, that would tell us that at least some of the stories contained in that proverbial mountain of anecdotal accounts are likely to have been factually accurate. How many and which ones would still be untenable, of course, but presumably whatever information might have been associated with the physical remains could help us sort that out to increase the likelihood of picking out the accurate stories from the inaccurate ones. …

…Sure, there are plenty of accounts that read like what one might expect when an uninitiated person encounters a fantastic creature in the woods. William Roe’s is in this category. In contrast, I find Ostman’s account to be complete horse-hockey. But even if we had 1000 stories of Roe’s quality, that wouldn’t tell us anything other than 1000 people have claimed to have such-and-such an encounter. The stories don’t lead anywhere. No bigfoot has ever been tracked to its lair based on information in a eyewitness encounter story, or for that matter, from following its prints. The suggestions from the stories that there is something physical out there have not panned out in terms of leading us to a physical thing.

In contrast, we now know a lot about false memories, hallucinations, and the general unreliability of eyewitness testimony. We know that people rather commonly don furry suits (or ghillie suits) and intentionally run across the road to hoax bigfoot sightings. We know that guys like Ray Wallace and Paul Freeman fooled some really sharp people with the footprints they laid down. We know that for the past couple of years, folks who report bigfoots actually have a shot of appearing on Finding Bigfoot and enjoying a few minutes of national recognition, to the cheers and backslaps of their friends.

Thus, the “real bigfoots” explanation has so far not been demonstrated by a real bigfoot, but we’ve got multiple explanations for things that could help to convince someone that they had seen a bigfoot or provide the impetus to make up a story whole cloth. Without physical evidence confirmed to be from a bigfoot, the latter explanations are far more parsimonious than the former. …

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Note how his entire orientation to the reports is: is each one proof? Did any one lead to proof? No thought – and I mean, the guy sounds intelligent – about how patterns are present in the reports that indicate that an external source is more likely than a made-up story. No effort to attach any report to others to discern such patterns. No effort to note the connection of reports to likely habitat – where there are generally few people – rather than to places where there are lots of people and, therefore, more expected liars. No effort to note that the people who report sightings are just the people one would expect to, were the phenomenon attached to a real animal.

No effort to understand that, when one looks at the reports the way one should, with no a priori presumption that they are all people making stuff up, the explanation of an external source generating authentic encounter reports is actually more parsimonious than this-is-all-fake.

So there you are. That one guy is (at least he claims) out there.

And not dealing with the information in any way other than as entertainment is why he remains that one guy.

One can’t just read the reports.

One has to think about what one reads, the way a scientist thinks about it.