Yep, the arrogant-keisters issue is always the $64K question.

All I ask mainstream science to do is drop the arrogant part. They can stay on their keisters for the time being. All I want them to do is to stop deflecting legitimate attention from the question by reacting to it with kneejerk, ignorant scorn.

That is nothing to ask, I don’t think. No scientist worth his degree has any business acting like an uninformed fool. And every one I’ve heard pronounce negatively on the sasquatch demonstrates, quickly, that he is unqualified to hold his opinion. Not having looked at the evidence will do that to one.

I also agree with you about the ten times unreported for every one that is.

I suppose the critical issue is exactly when will science “know” they’re there and when they’ll get off their arrogant keisters and set those protocols in motion…

“I have to take exception to Wiseman’s comment -”From that point on, more and more of them would be captured “.

“I’ve heard this comment often. Why? It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s been a few hundred years since the earliest reports of white men encountering sasquatches and they’ve been wiley enough to elude us this far. Why all of a sudden would the event of finally “getting” one, regardless of the method, suddenly make it easier to make subsequent acquisitions? If anything it would make them even MORE skittish around humans and even HARDER to find. Another 100 hundred years might go by before we’d find one again.”

Wiseman’s right.

Grafikman’s statement makes a common – and very incorrect – assumption: that we’ve just been combing the woods for sasquatch for like ever. “We” haven’t. Just a few of us have; they’re without exception part-timers and almost exclusively amateurs. I say this over and over: IN TERMS OF BIGFOOT EXPEDITIONS, PATTERSON AND GIMLIN ARE IT. They are the list. They are the only ones who spent the time that – if they’d had the technology or the team with them – could reasonably have resulted in getting proof. Everybody else? A weekender, and not too damn many weekends at that.

Once science is on the case, that will change, big time. They’ll be out there in numbers, full time, using the latest technology. And they will develop search protocols quickly. The sasquatch hasn’t “eluded” us at all. Plain old Joes and Janes see them, pretty much all the time, to read the reports. OK, not as often as deer, bear, or even mountain lion perhaps. But about as often as wolverine and wolf, if not more.

Once science knows they’re there and starts seriously following up, we may be surprised how many we suddenly start knowing about. Remember: for every sighting on a database, there are at least ten – I might go for several times that – that go unreported.

Again to my earlier point, it’s not the preferred method. I would love for someone to sink a considerable amount of money and resources into a long-term expedition for Bigfoot. And I would love nothing more than for that to lead to High-Def indisputable video footage of Bigfoot, along with hair samples and the like.

But until that happens, if that even happens, I’m hoping a hunter gets lucky in the woods or a Bigfoot gets unlucky crossing a highway.

What if it is a human, or proto-human? What if it has the intelligence of a mentally slow human being? What if it has language? What if it bloody well is a different type of human?

Then, in my eyes, and in the eyes of not a few witnesses, killing it would be murder.

I am not saying that killing an animal is murder–I am saying that killing something that may well be as smart as we are in some ways, something which may have culture and language is murder.

I’ve heard this comment often. Why? It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s been a few hundred years since the earliest reports of white men encountering sasquatches and they’ve been wiley enough to elude us this far. Why all of a sudden would the event of finally “getting” one, regardless of the method, suddenly make it easier to make subsequent acquisitions? If anything it would make them even MORE skittish around humans and even HARDER to find. Another 100 hundred years might go by before we’d find one again.

And as to the intelligence of them. Sure, they’re not going to win a prize at the local high school science fair or solve any algebra problems. But imagine something smart as the aforementioned intellectually challenged human, with all the woods smarts and instincts of any predator or higher mammal. You’re not going to traipse into the wilderness and conk one on the head like it’s a cow. Just not gonna happen. It’s a creature of its environment, perfectly suited to hide from, get away from, intimidate and scare the crap out of humans who it deems a threat. And that’s apparently worked for them for countless centuries or however long we’ve coexisted.
I also think their intelligence is the only reason why there HASN’T been any witness dead by sasquatchicide. They’re certainly capable of -and having the threatening demeanor to- making short work of a human. Though I think they’re intelligent enough to realize (perhaps even by prior experience passed on to later generations -just my own thought), that if they hurt humans, more humans come. And that’s the very last thing they want.

I’m not advocating the wanton destruction of animals.

Mountain Gorilla, discovered after being killed and examined.
Coelacanth, discovered after being killed and examined.

There’s precedence for killing animals in order to study them scientifically and to create proper conservation.

I think its great that some want Bigfoot to stay in Legend and Myth, there’s something very romantic about that. I’d rather Bigfoot show up on the cover of Time magazine as the greatest zoological discovery in the history of mankind.

But, I do not think I could shoot a hairy hominid in cold blood any more than I could shoot a human in cold blood.

If it was self-defense, that is one thing–I could shoot a human intruder in my home who was bent on doing harm to me and mine without remorse. I could do the same with a large rare animal such as a grizzly bear, even though it would sadden me a little to do it. If it is a matter of survival for myself or my kith and kin, that is one thing–and if a Sasquatch was attacking us–well, I could shoot.

But I ask this–what if the Sasquatch has intelligence beyond that of a chimp–what if it has the intelligence of perhaps not a Rhodes Scholar, but of an intellectually challenged human? What if it has the intelligence of a human child?

It would be wrong to kill it in that case–it would be murder. And the glory of bringing proof to science of this species would not be enough for me to remove the remorse of having committed murder in the name of truth.

I suspect that there are others like me in the world. There are accounts of hunters saying they had guns but they could not use them because it would have been morally wrong to do so, because the creature was so human.

How is that so hard to understand?

I’m one of many who just laughs at that “nobody’s shot one” line. First of all, folks have reported doing so, at least two that I am aware of fatally and at least a couple others seriously wounding their target. And the reasons the killers didn’t “bring back proof” fall squarely in what could be predicted from the most cursory overview of human nature.