If you want to break it down, pretty much anything and everything has a subjective side to it. Artists who draw recreations may well stick to the details given, but they are also biased by their own perceptions to a degree (and I’m giving fair balance to those who try their best to keep their own perceptions in check).

With BF, people are seeing something and it’s an animate creature walking bipedally (most of the time) and so on. I’ve read too many accounts on the BFRO site recently where people found the site and wrote in. Some were questioned after the account to bring out more details, but the similarities between so many people without individual interactions leads me to believe there’s a creature out there.

My own personal perception of hypnosis is akin to going back to leeching as a means of healing instead of current medical practices. Hypnosis certainly has no more respect among the general public (not to mention the scientific community–not that I’m all that concerned or worried about the opinion of the scientific community these days) than present methods of investigating BF and introducing it into the “investigative repertoire”, to me, is only adding more hokem.

Yeah. Let’s keep it clean and by the book. Investigate, get as many details as you can and move on to the next account until we can pin down enough information to anticipate and give our investigations an edge in the field so that we can get the “proof” we need to set this to rest.

People are seeing an animal. They saw it cold sober and are describing it, very consistently, in cold sober terms.

It’s bad enough that this topic has been conflated with the paranormal. Let’s not make it worse.

I remember reading in one of Vallee’s books how he speculated that aside the usual objections being given to the employment of hypnosis that could contaminate the memories of the witness through the use of leading questions, that there was also another possibility that would lead to contamination: the non-verbal transfer of the expectations of the enquirer into the mind of the hypnotized subject –in other words, telepathy.

What would happen if the therapist is someone convinced all Bigfoot sightings are hoaxes? Would the witness ‘remember’ through the hypnosis that the hairy creature it saw was actually a man in a gorilla suit? Would the witness even remember seeing the zipper line in the Bigfoot’s back?

So, I really don’t know if hypnosis would be a valuable tool to gain more data in Cryptozoology.

But there’s another thing: Do Cryptozoologists bother to re-visit witnesses after 10, 20 or 30 years, to find out how much the sighting of an alleged unknown creature has influenced in the lives of the witness? I think the only ones who have been interviewed so extensively have been Albert Ostman and Robert Gimlin, and the focus of those interviews have only been to test the deviation in the original accounts through the pass of time.

East Texan I believe the reason it dropped off with Bigfoot was because the professionals conducting the regressions are basically getting the same descriptions all the time with little deviation so it becomes a cost benefit ratio question.

You should have a word or two with Jeffrey Kripal, Loren.