Well, history gives me considerable grounds for pessimism.

To get this far with the collective mind of mainstream science pretty closed on this matter isn’t too encouraging.

C’mon, TBRC, is all I can say.

Well, not all. Even “Finding Bigfoot” seems to be spurring reports that appear as genuine as anything else I’ve read. I’m only guessing from the substantial spike in current-year encounters on the BFRO database. Although “FB” is regrettable, BFRO’s hearts and, generally, minds seem in the right place. One doesn’t have to be a crack scientist – as “FB” shows they aren’t – to maintain a database. That’s not Bobo talking, that’s North America – the entire spectrum of race sex class literacy and socioeconomic condition. That’s virtually impossible to fake; but if it is somehow all false positives it’s the Great American Novel and should get a Nobel.

Without mainstream attention it stays the way it is, unless we get stupid lucky. But public opinion might actually get involved in this before long. Thanks to (aaaaaargh!) television.

Until then…c’mon TBRC.

So. Less pessimistic than maybe history warrants. (And we don’t seem to have a tendency to find anything just AFTER it went extinct, although there’s a sea mink tapping me on the shoulder at the moment.)

And it’s been fun. So can’t fault that neither.

First of all, I’ll let you take up with Loren the correct plural of “Bigfoot”. So much for “looking into the matter”.

More importantly, “in all probability” = “in my imagination”. That is ALL it means.

Besides, this hurts your case. If Bigfoot are rare, the lack of compelling evidence is easier to accept. One of several valid reasons people have mentioned for doubting the extraordinary claims of the Carter farm is the fact that no photos were taken, nor was any physical evidence collected. If Bigfoot are being seen “on a daily basis”, why are we stuck looking at Youtube videos of pranksters in gorilla suits, or regular human beings walking too far away to be clearly identified, or thick knots of underbrush that are, in all likelihood, thick knots of underbrush? The claim becomes as doubtful as the Carter farm.

The late Ivan Sanderson liked to point out that much of North America is far less known now than it was 150 years ago, during the age of exploration. Now we have places that don’t see human beings for very long periods of time. Some places probably hardly ever see one.

Thanks. That makes more sense as I was wondering how Cayce would have even known what those terms meant. I never knew about this modern version of Cayce until now.

After all it was “inevitable” that geometrical spectra would be nailed down as a neurological condition. It wasn’t so “inevitable” that after first being clearly reported and diagnosed, it would vanish, utterly, from the medical literature for about a century before Oliver Sacks “discovered” it again.

(Bindernagel uses that and similar examples to significant effect in his “The Discovery of the Sasquatch.” In fact, he thinks that something fairly similar actually did happen with the sasquatch. Worth a read.)

But this Sierra Kills story has smelled like a dumpster full of last week’s tuna catch from the very beginning. And history tells us what pretty much inevitably happens there.

However, this “Sierra kills” story has too many problems for anyone to expect that the solid physical proof will come from it.

As I said, reported sightings are all we can chalk up for anything.

It’s just logical to propose, if the overall context indicates that sasquatch sightings might be something worth taking seriously (which it clearly does), that there is significant incentive for many to go unreported. Which is implied by the reactions that sighters report when they try to tell what they saw.

Whether this is actually true or not, who knows? But one isn’t on sound logical ground presuming that sightings equal or are less than reports, any more than one would be for bears.

Sightings of bears, for example, are also under-reported. My dad has seen bears along the highway or in his back yard several times, but he doesn’t bother phoning them in to the Game and Freshwater Fish Commission. Why would he? The bears weren’t causing a problem, and everyone knows there are a few bears in those woods. It is not really possible to know which sightings are more under-reported.

Regardless, if it is hard to evaluate the quality of sightings that ARE reported, it is IMPOSSIBLE to evaluate the quality of those that ARE NOT reported. For the purpose of determining whether Bigfoot even exists as a real animal, unreported sightings are simply not data at all.