Everybody goes overboard occasionally in the cryptid game, even Krantz (”no man is built that broadly”). Radford just more than most. But I wasn’t so much calling Nickell a liar as saying (read it again): either he made that up, or a scientist was saying something she should have known she shouldn’t have.

Now, your question, a fair one:

Do you believe or think eyewitness reports alone verify (for you) the existence
of an indigenous, giant, bi-pedal ape that is widely distributed throughout the
North American continent, and unknown to science?

The multiple choice answers are:
1. Yes
2. No
3. Maybe

My unequivocal answer is, and has always been: No.

Because eyewitness testimony, by itself, can never be counted as proof. In fact, proof is only proof if the scientific mainstream says it is; and that’s their rule, too.

But it CAN say, and I think it does, a very very convincing: Maybe. It says that in a way that, whenever the scientific mainstream sees it, they keep looking till they find it.

Only question, to me: when they will see it. ’cause if I do, they should. They’re SCIENTISTS.

Health and skepticism, always, amigo. On to the next thread.

I’ll be brief. (Or try to).

Read my post again and notice paragraph six from the top. I point out that Radford does NOT state Olsen edited his video to hide an explanation. In fact, he states the opposite: the video is NOT a hoax in his estimation. (Read his article if you doubt me). He does say “perhaps” the video was edited; any real investigator would be obliged to note that possibility. Bottom line, though, Radford does not think Olsen is engaged in hoaxing. So much for YOUR reading skills. (Smile).

Now, let’s look at your first post, paragraph one and two. I read it. I read it again. And again. It sure looks like you are calling Nickell a liar. Unless it’s just a sloppy pronouncement on your part, you are stating that Nickell lied about his consultation with professor Marsden. Now if this is a correct interpretation of your statement, then you are guilty of a far more egregious infraction than the one you accuse Radford of!

Yes, I have seen deers.

The “centaur sighting” was only included for folks to relate it to eyewitness issues, or not. I would like to pose this question: if the young man had sent his sighting to a Fortean site, or even to a local newspaper, would they have dug deep enough into his belief system to know how it colored his perceptions? Maybe not, and some centaur enthusiast would eventually use this account to argue “people see what they say they see.”

I don’t believe eyewitness testimony is crap. I say only that it is fallible and cannot be trusted absolutely. There are many, many pitfalls in treating eyewitness accounts as some kind of Holy Writ, and it takes an article of faith to accept such things as Internet sighting reports without a grain of discernment or criticism.

This is my last post on this thread. I read your posts, but must admit I find them sometimes more obscuring than not. (Maybe its my fault, or maybe it’s yours). Anyway, I probably seem to you not to address your arguments. But for future reference and to help me understand your view, I’ll ask you this simple question and please answer it simply without qualification.

Do you believe or think eyewitness reports alone verify (for you) the existence of an indigenous, giant, bi-pedal ape that is widely distributed throughout the North American continent, and unknown to science?

The multiple choice answers are:
1. Yes
2. No
3. Maybe

(No hard feelings right back at you, amigo).

(And my apologies again to you Richard888 for throwing you under the bus for the sake of a parody).

Radford accused this guy of editing out stuff. On what evidence? NONE. Why in the hell would he want to do that? Radford all but accused him of lying; everyone knows that if you introduce something like that, it is with intent to discredit. What a hipshot. Come ON. It’s the same thing as my inferring that Radford does crap like that to scare off scientists and boost sales of his magazine, the National Enquirer. COME ON. (Tit for tat, wot?)

If you think that is any member of the deer family, you have never seen a member of the deer family. I don’t know what it is but I know one thing it is not.

That whole thing you wrote to R888 and me amounts to, well, not reading. It all but says that witness testimony is crap. Really. I am not holding my breath for the day witness testimony is pronounced inadmissible. How do you think the groundwork for DNA examination gets laid? No sane person ever says that human observation is infallible. What casual experience of any given hour in one’s life does tell one, however, is that it is damned reliable, most of the time. That it is never and never will be 100% (and that people do, for various reasons, lie and accuse folks of turning off the camera as the animal leaves the lake, you know, stuff like that) is why you have things like DNA testing. (And followup investigation, but neither here nor there.)

And I went over this centaur thing with you before. (You didn’t read it and so didn’t know that. ) What you didn’t tell me at that time is the additional info about this guy, info that would have me wanting real solid evidence of anything this guy saw that seemed out of the ordinary before I thought anything of it other than, whoops, here he goes again! Most sasquatch sighters laughed at people like this. They probably still do. There’s something they saw, however, that isn’t “paranormal,” and they’d like to know what it is.

As to the tall-bipedal-figure-on-road: Most sightings seem to be of this type. Almost every single one I have read allows one to comfortably rule out a human, and come down very firmly on: sasquatch sighting, or Just Plain Lie. Know why? There is MUCH more, in almost every account, than “tall bipedal figure.”

Know how I know all that stuff?

I examine evidence. Among other ways of doing that, I READ.

(No hard feelings.)

However, except for the ears problem, this image cries deer member to me. Generally, it looks more deerlike than anything else I can think of. If not a deer member, then some other terrestrial animal, for it seems to ride too high out of the water for an aquatic species. I really don’t have too much confidence in the shifting image of the thing to say with certainty that it cannot be a deer, as others have. The fact that the subject’s image morphs somewhat suggests to me a resolution problem, and hence, an identification problem.

Does this image appear to be a turtle? The least I can say is that I have never seen a turtle swim with that much body and head and neck out of the water. And I have seen many a snapping turtle, and alligator snapping turtle.

Given that some folks here think it is a deer, or possibly so, I wonder why Radford is taking so much heat? In truth, he may be right. (I do think he is wrong to POSITIVELY identify it as a deer). If we had only two options, deer or “super otter,” which option would be more sober? The video subject does not seem to move like an otter, as otters are very frisky water acrobats. And, it should be acknowledged, “super otters” are not known to exist anywhere except on the page, in books written by cryptozoology theorists.

Are we looking at the legendary Champ when we look at this video? What is Champ, anyway? Roy Mackal has argued for a zeuglodon identity of “lake monsters.” Does Olsen’s video remind anyone of an ancient whale? For that matter, does Mansi’s still shot look like any kind of whale? Mansi’s photo does look like a plesiosaur, but are we looking at the same type of animal in the recent video? Or are there two major cryptids in the lake? How plausible is the survival of an ancient reptile (plesiosaur) in the cold and sometimes frozen over Champlain?

It should be pointed out that Radford only suggested “perhaps” Olsen edited his video to exclude an emerging deer. In his piece, he makes it clear he does not believe Olsen’s video is a hoax.

And an aside: the eyewitness issue and the courts. I will argue in the fashion of mi amigo: “Richard 888 and DWA, ya’ll need to stop running your mouths about something you guys know nothing about. Don’t ya’ll know there is a movement afoot in various jurisdictions to allow expert testimonies in the courtroom to show the
UNRELIABILITY of eyewitness testimony? Jiminy Cricket, guys, pull your heads out, Google “unreliability eyewitness,” check the current news about DNA overturning convictions by eyewitness testimonies, study the scientific method and know how it is fundamentally different than courtroom tactics, stop being bitter and angry because your favorite cryptid is always “seen” but never found, and know that I’m right and you are wrong.”
(Apologies, Richard888! Couldn’t resist DWA! [SMILE!]).

Ceroill makes some relevant comments about the eyewitness issue. A brief response: If someone driving at night sees for a few seconds a tall figure apparently moving on two legs along the side of the road, and he is not sure what was really seen, he may convince himself by trip’s end that he saw bigfoot, especially if he has a belief in the reality of such an animal. On the other hand, a sighting like the famous Roe account cannot be attributed to mistaken identity or errors in eyewitness perception and must be taken at face value, and believed or not.

Once I knew a young man who swore he saw a “centaur!” Before we dismiss this out of hand, I should point out Karl Shuker includes a centaur sighting in his book From Flying Toad to Snakes with Wings. The young man saw this horse with the head and upper body of a man only briefly on a park trail in broad daylight. He worked with me for a year or so and we discussed his sighting on many occasions. He did offer a mundane solution. He followed the trail and found a man walking a large dog (a Dane?), instead of a centaur. He did allow that this might explain his sighting, but he said that the man and dog really didn’t look like the centaur he thought he saw. Later, I learned more about him and that he had a paranormal view of the world. He would tape sounds at a graveyard at night to try to capture sounds of the dead, for instance. Once, he told me he saw a large ominous shadow crossing the ground on a sunny day and it frightened him. He saw a mundane event (moving cloud shadows) and reinterpreted the event as paranormal.

It could be a log - if a log could somehow rotat while moving along it’s long axis, for some period of time. That would require energy inputs which I don’t have an explanation for. Otherwise the change in ‘head and neck’ and ‘back’ appearance could be explained.

The main thing is snapping turtle behavior in general. They tend to prefer shallow water and lurk in the muck at the bottom. They of course will come to the surface for air, but when they do, they just poke their head out and then drift back down to the bottom. They will also on occasion stalk water fowl under the surface, but in these cases they do not expose a significant portion of their body above the water. Snapping turtles just are not good surface swimmers, and do not swim with really much of their body exposed and visible above the water. They are primarily bottom dwellers.

So snapping turtles do surface, but they do so fleetingly and much prefer the bottom. What would be unusual for them to do in my opinion would be to casually swim along for a long period like the animal shown in this video, and they would not be showing so much of their back above the surface if they did. They would also not have a neck stretched out so far and arcing over the surface as the neck of the creature in the video seems to be doing. What I would expect to see with a swimming snapping turtle would be just the very top of the head poking out and perhaps a bit of the top of the shell rather than the whole back raised up like we seem to be seeing in the beginning of this video.

Besides, I just do not get the impression that we are seeing any evidence of a shell or turtle like head and neck here. The neck of this mystery animal seems to sweep up directly from the body in a reasonably smooth line, not indicative of a turtle with what would be quite a big shell. The neck is also extended too far over the surface for a turtle. Why would a turtle be doing that and expending the energy? They would be either getting air, or hunting, which would not require that amount of extension over the surface. Yet in this video, the animal spends a good amount of time with its head poised over the surface. Snapping turtles will stretch their necks out, but they typically do it underwater to reach towards the surface for air or go for prey. When they are swimming at the surface, a good portion of their body generally remains submerged and just a bit of the the head juts out, not a considerable portion of neck like we see here.

I do think that some stills from this clip look reminiscent of a large turtle, but when watched in motion, the video does not seem to show a turtle in my opinion.

But I did address this, I guess, up where I said that it says not so good things about us that we pay so much attention to the pseudo-analysis we tend to get from scoffers. There seems to be a need to scoff in us that is much more prominent, I think, than the alleged “need to believe in monsters.” Which, frankly, I have never seen much in evidence at all. It’s more the opposite. We need to deny that which makes us uncomfortable; and we tend to turn those things into monsters, when sometimes, well, they’re just, I don’t know, apes. The public image of the sasquatch and yeti – and of Champ – is of a monster. The actual evidence for the former two says no, they’re not; and Champ …well if that’s him on this video, didn’t scare me too much.

I think we scoff out of irrational fear; we follow up cryptid evidence out of curiosity. I know which camp I would rather be in.

And I think you sum up well what I think about folks interpreting what they see. They will go for something known before they go for something unknown. When they are describing the latter, it’s totally reasonable to expect - as a significant possibility at least - that that is what they saw.

And when something is a significant possibility, and folks are seeing it a lot, following up on that evidence seems an eminently reasonable thing to do. Particularly for a scientist reviewing such evidence.

And you know? The more I look at this video, the less I know what it is. But blob? Can’t go that far. There is a definite something there; and with mystery_man, I tend to tilt to it being something living.

As to eyewitness testimony, yes, it has been shown to be of questionable reliability, especially in highly emotional circumstances. This is why in criminal cases they try to find multiple witnesses. By comparing the similarities and differences between accounts they can often find very good information. If a car is dark colored 3 may say they saw a green car while 2 might say blue and 2 black.
However- what WON’T happen is 3 saying they saw a green sedan, 2 saying they saw a blue delivery van and 2 a black horse cart. They might differ on exact model and year, exact color, speed of travel, but not about the basic nature of it being an automobile.
I might be more amenable to the idea of species misidentification only if it can be shown that A) the witness has no knowledge of large animals, and/or (at the very least) no familiarity with the animals commonly seen in the region where they live. Then I might consider a man mistaking a bear for something else, or a swimming deer for something else. But in general I don’t lend much credence to the suggestion that people will fill in incomplete patterns (quick spotting of something unknown) with the extraordinary in preference to the ordinary. If someone sees a large upright hairy thing that looks more or less and moves more or less like a bear, I think it much more likely for them to say it was a bear, not a large upright primate. Even if they were in a very emotional state. Just as I see it highly unlikely that a man would claim he saw a delivery van if he saw a sedan.
Ok, I’ll sit back down now.