If I provide two hair samples. One from my own head and one from some unknown source, and you have the DNA analyzed, they will be able to tell you that my hair came from a human only because they have a DNA record for human hair. The unknown sample may come back unknown but there would be no way to tie it to a primate without the adequate history to compare it to. It may be primate “like” but that’s it. The primate-ness of the samples is pure conjecture on the part of the “experts” performing the tests.

Matt Bille

Well the metals content analysis of the alleged Yeren hair sample goes farther – those analyzing the results said they indicated “unknown primate”. That tends to cut down on the “ambiguity”. I know mainstream science and the mainstream media have a mental block and herd mentality when it comes to this, but this approaches the ridiculous. One could say there is more hard evidence for some cryptid hominids than the Ivory Bill. Especially since the Pileated is so similar in appearance.

That evidence still can’t be conclusively tied to any creature that we can definitely say is Bigfoot. Until it can be definitely associated with a known creature, it remains ambiguous evidence.

That’s why we need to actually capture one and get biological samples, or to find a dead one reasonably fresh and intact. Notice I did not say “Bag a dead one”. Modern biological research methods methods don’t require the sacrifice of a rare, sentient creature.

For what it’s worth, the best scientific writer ever on UFOs, J. Allen Hynek, wrote that most witnesses tried very hard to fit a sighting into some recognized category before deciding they had seen something unidentifiable. That does not mean the “convinced UFO” witnesses were right – even Hynek agreed most of them were still wrong – but it does matter as an illustration of human psychology. [The applicability of the analogy is somewhat limited because we know what an ivory-bill is supposed to look like (and, in more general terms, what a bigfoot is supposed to look like), while a UFO is, by definition, something that does NOT look like anything we know of.]

It’s interesting that most of us who have been in the crypotozoology business, even armchair researchers like myself, know someone who is convinced they saw an ivory-bill, and often a very good witness.

The bigfoot comparison comes up a lot in ivory-bill literature, and in a lot of ways it fits. In one critical way, though, it does not: there is no question the ivory-bill did live in North America decades ago. That an ape big enough to account for sasquatch sightings lived on another continent hundreds of millions of years ago is not the same at all when it comes to making current sightings plausible. The standard of proof is, and should be, higher for sasquatch. That said, the standard of proof some experts demand for the ivory-bill is unreasonably high, darn close to what they would demand for a sasquatch.

Matt Bille

It makes perfect sense for many people to convince themselves they have seen a Pileated woodpecker rather than an Ivory-Billed. In the same light, thunderbirds become storks, cranes, herons or oversized turkey vultures, and bigfoot, especially from a distance, becomes a bipedal bear, or simply humans in dark clothes or a ghillie suit.

Well not really. Gigantopithecus (to which I think you are referring) was not bi-pedal. Sasquatch supposedly is. I have never liked this notion that giganto was or is bigfoot. Giganto was a giant ape not a bipedal hominid.