As I said, the Greeks had more than one genre of writing; they maintained a sharp distinction between a fable, a history, a play, and a philosophical discourse. That kind of analysis even of their own writings is a part of their culture. I am not sure if those distinctions arise in North American cultures.

You’re right that Herodotus included some pretty tall tales, but other Greeks criticized him for this. Also, it is noteworthy that the farther from Greece, and hence less verifiable, a story was, the more likely it was to have fabulous elements. Finally, he did not vouch for the truthfulness of what he was writing, only that he was faithfully passing along what he had heard when he was researching the histories. This is at least in part no doubt true, because he patenly disbelieved that Phoenicians circumnavigating Africa saw the noonday sun to the NORTH, and that the Nile originated in snows.

All this means that Herodotus is more trustworthy when he talks about the Greeks than about the Egyptians, more trustworthy talking about the Egyptians than about the Persians, and more trustworthy talking about the Persians than about the (subcontinental) Indians. There are signals both in the structure of his writing and in the way it is referred to within his culture that establishes it as a work of history, and there are signals within his work to indicate where he is most trustworthy and where he is not.

Similar markers may or may not occur in Native American tales. It would be worth knowing if the Sasquatch stories are more similar to accounts of Little Bighorn or to Fox jumping over Coyote to bring him back to life.

I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of sighting reports.

When one has done that the Carter story stands out, like a warehouse full of sore thumbs, as inconsistent, and droppable.

And not only for its details, but for this alone:

Anything that has allegedly gone on for this long; that the principals are eager to make public; and for which they have not one piece of legitimate evidence, smells ranker than a barrel of fish.

I don’t really understand your reference to Aesop, Livy, Plutarch and Herodotus. Aesop’s tales were readily acknowledged as fables, hence the name Aesop’s Fables, which is not the case with Bigfoot tales, we have to winnow through the tales and decide which are worthy of serious attention and which belong on Saturday morning TV. And the ancient Greeks, including Herodotus, were quick to believe in dog-headed men, men who had only one fused leg, pythons big enough to kill elephants, and a host of other weirdos. Does that mean we should discount all their other work? Or do we do more cherry picking?

And remember, this all started about the Carter farm, which is cherry picker heaven; some of the stories have , not a ring of truth, but maybe a dull clunk of ‘well, I don’t know, that sounds like maybe it might possibly under some circumstances in a really bad thunderstorm happen I really want to believe this’. I’d like to believe it, but I’ve cherry picked my way through the Carter Farm stories and in my judgement they are at best hallucinations.