What happened to Champ here?

Please move and/or continue your discussions and polite disagreements about skepticism and scofticism to the one on “scoftics,” here.

Thank you.

Ever notice what happens to all these video flaps?

No one figures out what it is. No one comes to any conclusion. The clip sinks out of sight, and the conversation dies away. (With whatever it is totally unidentified.) Over and over again.

This serves, um, what?

Scofticism. Expanding the World’s Knowledge That Nothing is Worth Knowing.

Your statement “If their claims are legitimate they”ll eventually be proven and accepted as such” is patently false. This will never happen as long as the public’s kneejerk response to anything like this is to stifle debate by tossing out uninformed IDs that aren’t backed by anything, and to kneejerk laugh (because that’s how you show you are “with it” and “cool”) at any other opinion.. Scoftics (it’s a word; see that thread; sorry ) live blissfully unimpacted by evidence. That’s ignorance, posing as arrogance, and I’m calling folks on it.

“If a bigfoot researcher or any other cryptozoologist considers him or her self a legitimate scientist, then he or she has to be willing to have their every finding and theory intensely scrutinized.”

And if scofitcs (WORD!!!) insist on unplugging their brains before opining, they need to be prepared to be mercilessly – how say in Ingles? – raked over the coals for it.

I hate anti-intellectual thought. (Not sure thought is the word I wanted there.) Scofticism (WORD!!!) fills that bill. Don’t slide to that level. You don’t want to disappoint me, do you?

I don’t like it when people whose posts blatantly show they have done far less homework than me start lecturing me. Don’t take that personally either. Proponents have gotten used to it. We skeptics will have to as well.

For now.

I did not ask for nor do I want any apologies from you. If your intent was to insult me, you have failed. Your attempts to paint yourself as “the TRUE skeptic at this site” are generally pretty amusing. Frustrating? No. at worst, mildly annoying. You’re like any other True Believer; the one thing that you refuse to believe is that you are a True Believer. Calling yourself a skeptic, and then immediately jumping on the bandwagon of “it’s ill-defined and I can’t immediately identify it as any known animal, so it must be a cryptid! Can’t be anything else, ’cause I say so and I’M a SKEPTIC”. Sometimes it seems like you’re deliberately trolling to elicit reactions.

As for Patterson, anyone who perpetrates a hoax deserves to be thoroughly questioned, investigated, hounded, whatever it takes, yes, in the name of Science, to get to the truth. If they feign insult when their hoax is questioned, that’s tough. If their claims are legitimate they”ll eventually be proven and accepted as such.

Legitimate scientists rake one other over the coals and pick each others’ papers apart in the effort to strip away the fluff and get to the truth. If a bigfoot researcher or any other cryptozoologist considers him or her self a legitimate scientist, then he or she has to be willing to have their every finding and theory intensely scrutinized.

If that video looked like a deer, all the way through, except for about ten seconds, do you think anyone on here would come on here saying anything other than deer?

I hear lots of speculation about what this is. But I haven’t heard anyone who has seen these animals in the water, in the wild, as I have all of them, defend their speculation with evidence. I saw the otter video; and the head and neck – and the size – are all wrong. Bear was slam-dunk wrong, both from the video put up here and from what I have seen of bears in the water.

This whole clip, you can’t tell what it is. And everything else in the video – including the water surrounding whatever-it-is – is clear, more than clear enough.

The reason that proponents can submit evidence more solid than anything short of actual proof, and get laughed at for it, is: we simply think that a cryptid is so unlikely that ANYTHING else – regardless the amount of actual evidence that it is truly that thing – gets consideration first, rather than simply putting, What is that? First and going from there. This isn’t science, people; it’s belief. And science can’t be about belief.

It’s just that most can’t seem to see that, when the shoe is on the other foot, is all.

This is why you need skeptics. Happy to oblige.

P.S. Can’t apologize if you feel insulted. What was done to Roger Patterson was an insult, to him and to science; and I like to make sure everyone gets to feel that way occasionally.

I’m always open to evidence, when it’s presented. All I am looking for is one piece of evidence pointing to any of the speculated ‘known’ animals.

Point me to one. Point me to one piece of evidence that this animal looks like, or behaves like, any of them. (That video is not so unclear that a deer would in no frame look like a deer.)

It’s a common scoftical misperception that the proponents have to provide all the evidence, while their beliefs require none.

That’s just wrong, it’s all. But it didn’t make your post any less amusing to read.

And I should add.

If my posts frustrate you as much as they appear to….well imagine how a PROPONENT must feel.

I’m a skeptic; who sticks up for the side presenting the evidence. A little heatedly, when the other side gets silly enough.

You’ll never get what you call evidence telling you you should rule things out, because you refuse to believe that there is any such evidence, even when it’s presented. You explain it away as less enlightened people than yourself misinterpreting the data, or even as (in your characterizations of them) “jilted” “former true believers”; people willing to overlook your interpretation of data because they have siome kind of axe to grind, or a grudge they hold. It couldn’t be that their viewpoint differs from yours because >>>shudder<<< they may be right.

Your interpretation must surely be the “right” one, and anyone who disagrees with you is being petty, I suppose. The evidence is there. The problem with this particular video is its low resolution & poor lighting … as well as its ?coincidental? occurrence right before a “Lake Cruise” is set to sail. The animal itself can be easily explained as any number of more or less common mammalian inhabitants of the area.

That’s not being a scoftic (a made-up word that has no meaning). It’s called being a realist. I examined these films six ways from Sunday. I absolutely believe, on the basis of the evidence in the film, that it is a deer. Bear - maybe but not likely; I’m going with deer.

I see people’s basic incredulity at work here, rather than an attempt to analyze what is on the video.

I have seen every known animal that has been guessed at on this thread, in the water, swimming. This one looks and behaves like NONE of them. I get the feeling that instead of thinking, what IS this? Hmmmmm….like I’m doing here with a few other people, a lot of folks are thinking: this can’t be unknown, so it’s a….hmmmm….
No. You don’t want your mind so open that your brains fall out. But we all have an inner scoftic; I think crypto brings it out in most of us; and brains can fall in unsuspected directions. People seem, to me, to be closing off possibilities – like there could be something in this huge lake that the demonstrably error-prone antics of scientists could have overlooked – to come up with something, anything, known.

Is it conceivable that this is a known animal? Sure. It could be a diver pushing a dummy. But it behaves and looks like nothing that has been speculated here does in the water.

I believe that the inner scoftic is something that has to be educated away, and that it is possible that it’s engaged when one thinks one is being objective. Indeed, I think that many consider a cryptid to be so remote a possibility that ruling it out, out of hand, is, to them, being objective.

Just a thought. I try not to engage my basic incredulity on anything. If you have evidence, show it to me; but I don’t rule things out without evidence telling me I should. Which I am not getting here.

That there are only three, though, tells me that ‘fake’ isn’t the most-likely scenario for any of them, but instead distinctly against the odds. And what it could be other than genuine cryptid or fake, I have no idea. I still can’t make myself see any known animal - even otter - so far suspected for this one.

(and on P/G I suppose I should note the scientists in relevant fields who come down on it with me; and that no one who has attempted a skeptical analysis has even halfway succeeded. Just tossing that in. Oh. And: read Bill Munns. )