Re IN and IL habitat – absolutely. Where I’m from there are woods aplenty even though corn and soybean fields break them up. Hence the popularity of all kinds of hunting (including my own preference – mushroom hunting).

Also agreed re it being likely that reported sightings lag behind total sightings. The person we spoke to hadn’t ‘gone public’ until after retirement due to fear of any consequent ridicule affecting his career (which is a theme I’m sure you’ve heard before).

My experience in IL and IN is primarily driving on interstates.

FROM THAT ALONE, I can tell you that the popular perception of those states as A Wheatfield is way wrong. There is habitat, lots of it. Bears would love it…and they’re showing it.

And of course, something that is being seen – and in cases like this, reports can be bet upon to lag behind total encounters – isn’t, well, “never seen,” or “100% avoiding” anything.

(Indiana, 73 on the BFRO database; Illinois…187.)

“Every sighting I am aware of is right on the boundary of, or in, a large contiguous tract of what would appear to be excellent habitat, or at least a viable travel corridor amenable to the passage of a large, solitary animal with reasonably good people-avoidance software (which most wild things have). ”

Yes. Prior to us visiting a witness and viewing some track casts, my husband plotted all online-available Indiana Bigfoot sightings on a map, and guess where most were? They were clustered in and around the one part of Indiana that is still covered in big chunks of forestland – Morgan Monroe State Forest and the Hoosier National Forest in the south-central part of the state (there are also smaller woodlands nearby, such as Brown County and McCormick’s Creek state parks).

So although the state as a whole is characterized by agricultural land, small towns, and some cities, BF sightings happen where you would expect them to happen if this is a forest-dwelling animal – in or near what forested areas remain.

I’ve just skimmed the other comments so far, but in one I noticed Nick mentioning a lack of Bigfoot skeletons. I was recently in southern Indiana and was shown daylight CCTV snaps of a bobcat. The bobcat is now recognized by Indiana’s DNR as being present in low densities in this part of the state. However, how many Hoosiers will have come across an intact bobcat skeleton while out walking in the woods? Not many, if any. Nature doesn’t leave these things lying around for long.

(Yes, unlike with Bigfoot, we do have bobcat skeletons to study. But my point is about the likelihood of stumbling across the corpse or skeleton of an uncommon animal. It requires being in the right place at the right time, and this can’t be determined in advance.)

Was wondering if it’s ever been postulated that BF’s pheromones could have a similar pyschoactive effect/ component… could explain some of the supernatural type qualities attributed to it.

My own recent article on Tim Dinsdale being a firm believer in the paranormal yet trying to steer a “flesh and blood” route for the creature shows that two theories can be held in one worldview by a cryptozoologist (which I am sure Tim would have described himself as).

I used to take a paranormal view of Nessie, but a few years back I decided to go back to the “conventional” and see how far I could take it. So far I am still on course.

The question for me as a Loch Ness researcher is “how long do I give that paradigm”? How long does one keep searching before giving up on metaphorically hooking that 30 foot beast?

Clearly some in the Loch Ness cryptozoology domain have concluded the near 80 year elusiveness is purely down to the fact that there is nothing there except perhaps an itinerant sturgeon.

Does thinking Nessie is a sturgeon remove you from the field of cryptozoology? As one sturgeon advocate once said – Loch Ness has very little to do with cryptozoology.

I clearly do not agree with that statement.

I would like to two examples to your statement here.

“Next time you see, say, a coyote or fox – animals that don’t show themselves a whole lot, but enough – just imagine no one believing you when you say you saw one”

One I lived in the country for a good 20 years, never saw a fox, and I did a great deal of nature walks and hiking. My parents who still live in the same place saw one fox, I’d say a few years back, so that’s a good thirty years. Animals who want to hide do.

Now about creatures bigger than a rat, there was a tribe of humans just discovered in South America in 2011.

Point is, large intelligent creatures can hide in dense forest.

Nothing supernatural about it, just the desire to avoid outsiders.

“That’s my issue,. Not the location, the habitat, but the 100 percent elusiveness – an elusiveness that covers every single angle possible that might otherwise allow us to prove it’s flesh and blood.”

This talks past the evidence.

As I have said more than several times here, the sasquatch has left every kind of sign that we associate with animals. Every kind, from hair and bones to feces and blood. To say nothing of thousands of trackways and sightings, and conjunctions of the two that have led to a refereed paper connecting the track and the animal.

But to paraphrase a recent eyewitness, when you’ve had it pounded into your head since you could talk that something isn’t real, you don’t react the way people assume you will. And you make tons of assumptions – the most glaring being that somebody who finds evidence of this animal is just going to walk in with it. (Presuming he/she even knows what it is. Most folks aren’t scientists.)

This thing – if it’s real, which at this rate we may never know – is not particularly elusive at all. Thousands of eyewitnesses show that. It stays in the shadows of our refusal to acknowledge it. People – as we see here – seem unusually incapable of getting their arms around this. Next time you see, say, a coyote or fox – animals that don’t show themselves a whole lot, but enough – just imagine no one believing you when you say you saw one. Now imagine everyone who sees one having the same issue.

That simple. But one needs to be conversant with the evidence to know that.

What I am quite understandably incapable of doing is getting my arms around the notion that an animal, leaving zoologically testable evidence and lots of it, is a supernatural entity for which we have to cook up causes that automatically preclude science from doing its job, and push it farther and farther away from the question.

Talking past the evidence is not what zoology is about. It shouldn’t be part of cryptozoology.

But then, cryptozoology was born of science’s failure when put in the hands of human beings. We might want to try to fix that. One way to start:

Gorillas aren’t high strangeness. Chimps aren’t either. And apes aren’t, in general.

And go from there, with science leading the way.