Oh, I’d be surprised if a hundred people didn’t see it. OK, fifty. Twenty, at absolute rock bottom minimum.

But some – indeed many, possibly most – might not have gotten near as good a look as this witness got, not enough to be really sure of anything

Now. Who’s gonna be the nut who steps forward and says they saw Bigfoot?

Looks like we got at least one. Just kidding. Maybe more will come forward now. Bless that driver’s heart.

No kids playing in the streets, nobody coming home from work, etc.

“I take issue with the statement that she saw anything. From the account it appears that she glimpsed something instead. “The entire incident had lasted just several seconds”, and apparently consisted of 3 distinct views, each of which must have been very brief indeed.”

I read past the first sentence. Many times. I say, emphatically: she saw what she says she did. Or: she’s lying. Or: they need to put her in a really-long-sleeved coat.

Most of the animals I see, I identify, conclusively, in far less than a second. That’s not particularly fantastic; we tend to do that with stuff, all of us do. The witness is emphatic on the subject’s color and bipedality. When she compares, only two subjects come up as possibilities, both emphatically rejected by the witness: human, or human in costume. And several seconds is a huge amount of time in which to do that.
What she describes couldn’t be a deer. Not if she is sound of body and mind as anyone driving a car needs to be. I’ve never seen a deer I didn’t identify as one, instantly. And I think that’s average.

Unless I see evidence that tells me the witness could be lying or unhinged, I consider what the witness saw a high-order possibility. A moment’s reflection on how all of us depend, instant to instant throughout our lives, on what our eyes tell us should tell us that this is reasonable to do. Unless all of us start doing that, i.e., believing that witnesses are not automatically to be doubted, a sasquatch is going to have to walk into a zoo and lock the gate behind it before we start coming close to confirming what people are seeing.

I mean, it’s just an ape. What could the big deal be here?

Final note: I can’t “take issue with the witness’s statement that she saw anything.” She was there. Were you?

Does it seem likely the witness saw anything different from what is claimed?

Do anomalous details seem prominent enough to put this one in the “junk” category?

Does the witness seem from the account credible enough that the account can be taken seriously?

This one seems to pass on all three counts. The neck detail doesn’t, to me, disqualify it. If skeptics think witnesses can misidentify known animals to come up with something like a huge bipedal ape, they certainly have to go with the possibility that a witness – in the heat of a rapid-fire, stressful encounter – could misconstrue details of an unclassified animal. Not to say that we know enough about this one to know whether the witness in fact misconstrued it; it’s not the only time I’ve seen a report that wasn’t a no-neck animal.

Other things seem consistent with numerous reports I’ve read.

Until I know more about an account than I know about this one, I use the reasonable-man standard. That is, I presume a witness that has gotten this far in her life driving motor vehicles, among other things, isn’t certifiably insane. Which markedly escalates, absent other info, the possibility that she saw exactly what she says she did.

I take issue with the statement that she saw anything. From the account it appears that she glimpsed something instead. “The entire incident had lasted just several seconds”, and apparently consisted of 3 distinct views, each of which must have been very brief indeed. Other parts of the story are clearly intended to make us believe that she had plenty of time to notice all kinds of details, like whether its ears were visible, but that seems inconsistent with the description of the time she had.

The biggest argument against a deer being mistaken for bigfoot is that the brain is more likely to fill in the details as something commonplace, like a deer along the side of the road, rather than exotic. On the other hand, we seem pre-wired to see people. I find it easy to pick out faces in the floral patterns of wallpaper, for example, and I think many ghost sightings are explained by this tendency.

OK, let’s put it this way. If she did, she should never get her license back, and should probably not be permitted to walk around unattended, either. Or she’s making up the least likely lie a person would make up to account for bad driving.

As I said: for an encounter like this, there is no “mundane” explanation that sounds mundane. If she didn’t see a bigfoot, she’s stranger than what she didn’t see. Just sayin’, and everything in that account backs me up.

That’s like taking a description of an orange and, seeing that it’s round and textured, pronouncing it to be a golfball. Bit of a logical leap, or at least it seems like it to me.

Seriously, the long neck and black eyes sound like a deer. Everything else does NOT, though; but maybe seeing it in an odd posture for some reason and expecting to see a human she may have given an anthropomorphic interpretation of the deer.

““The eyes were at least twice the size of a human and circular in shape. The eyes were dark, possibly black in color, wide set, and “wild looking.” There was “no iris, no whites.” ”

I’m not sure about it but it does not sound like this fits most decsriptions of Bigfoot eyes that I’ve heard of. ”

That actually squares with a lot of accounts I’ve read. The “lack” of whites and iris may not be so much one at all, but just that these may not be picked up by some witnesses because a different eye structure from humans makes them harder to see, especially given viewing angle, time of day, and…well, a host of other factors, but the first two would be prominent I would think. (A number of accounts do mention seeing whites.) The sasquatch seems to be primarily nocturnal; a very large proportion of sightings are at night, when we are less active. (And very unlikely to be active at all in the places in which these animals are usually seen.)

Alanborky makes the point that “long” can be in the eye of the beholder. And again: we’re primates too. And if an alien picked up almost any two of us at random, she might think she was dealing with two different species. I’d expect – and reports seem to bear out – a lot of individual distinctions within the “type” sasquatch description.