“A group of serious biologists coming face to face with thses creatures will find it hard to ignore. They’ll likely try to collect what evidence they can in an acceptable manner for scientific review (after first changing their shorts, I imagine ), even though it wasn’t the original purpose of their research.

Lots of new species have been discovered in this way.”

Now THIS is how to frame the assertion “why wouldn’t a scientist want to make the discovery of the century?”

Because one of them, by himself, won’t. That’s why one of them, by himself, wouldn’t.

It almost seems as if a mutual-dare mentality needs to take hold in the scientific mainstream. Like a game of zoological chicken. A group of scientists, who have decided that the Uncomfortable Silences around the office, and the knee-jerk, hip-shooting dismissals, have gone far enough, say: Hey. Why don’t a few of us go on stakeout? We’ll keep each other honest. If there is something out there – and all three (5, 6, 13, 55, whatever number) see it, or we are satisfied that more than one of us did, l think we might get ourselves some notoriety, some fun (read, A WHOLE LOT OF FUN), and a little less likelihood of black lung from the library stacks. Wot say?

Geez, mainstreamers, think of it as a debunking exercise with an edge. Do your homework and you’ll see how much of an edge.

Wouldn’t this be FUN? (And think of the fun your dry cleaners will have when you come back!)

Something else that might be a good addition to your debunk software.

When somebody tells you it was Photoshopped, tell him to do it.

This has been the best response to the P/G film critics for 40 years. No one has been able either to duplicate it acceptably, or even to provide a decent postulate for how it was done.

Photoshop is standard-issue software; anyone who’s a competent user should be able to show you how a fake was done. Anyone who says he doesn’t know how to show you that isn’t competent enough to assert that something was Photoshopped. Anyone who can do it, will do it, to show you up. No they WILL; human nature is at work, and you are talking to someone who knows human nature. Anyone who begs off, you can blow off, because he is simply making an assumption, based on zero evidence, that he cannot defend.

I didn’t have to resort to this to tell off the tech guy I was arguing with the other day. I just told him: your assertions don’t hold water. Those aren’t Photoshop effects; they’re what a video looks like. He couldn’t get past his simple(minded) assertion that no, they WERE. Well, no, they WEREN’T. My kind has been evolving as a hunter for 3.5 million years; and unlike some who spend too much time indoors looking at screens, I am one of the ones who hasn’t forgotten that. If I think it was not Photoshopped, it was not. And if you cannot show me, you cannot assert that. You simply lack the technical knowhow to even make the assertion.

One of cryptozoology’s biggest handicaps is that it doesn’t tell off scientists (like that Eugenie Scott person who’s been showing up here lately) who come to the discussion without having done their homework. Cryptos need to fire back. They’re shooting, they should know, at an opponent who is unarmed.

OK, yeah, most all of that stuff is in most all of the fakes I’ve seen. But the other extreme to the “amazing incredible sttooooopenyoopus!!!!!!!!” tack is the one that says: saw this on the way to work this morning. Just wondering what you all think.

Those are fake too. I know because I read sighting reports – essential training for anyone who wants to be able to spot fakes. The reactions you read in the Youtube fakes bear no resemblance to what people filing reports tell you they felt.

(BFRO.net; Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy. They’re the best sites I’ve seen.)

But anyway. I read where people are imagining all kinds of stuff that ain’t there. One of the standard fake labels – the camera panning, as if the shooter has ESP, to the place where the ‘animal’ walks into the frame some moments later – was pulled out for critiques of the Peguis, Manitoba video. This video (it’s on Youtube), for my money, is the only one I’ve seen other than Patterson-Gimlin that I think could be the genuine article. And everybody says: the camera went to the spot and waited for the critter to show up! Well, yeah. Because, if you read the backstory, the driver told the passenger to dive into the back for the camcorder when they saw it crossing the road. By the time he came up with the cam, the critter had gone behind a hillock in its direction of travel. You can hear the shooter mutter “I don’t see it” and start panning back to the road, when suddenly the head pops out from behind the hillock. No way a hoaxer can time that. (Oh. Looks to be about nine feet tall, walking in snow off road. Tough to fake.) Peguis looks feels and sounds like an actual encounter – the only video other than P/G (which has no sound) that does, to me. I argued Peguis the other night with a guy – an IT tech no less – who kept telling me it looked Photoshopped. I thought he knew more about computers and I know he knows tons more than me. Peguis ain’t photoshopped; it beats P/G if it was. The things he was telling me were the indicators I could tell, just looking at the video, weren’t. Too many people invent Photoshop artifacts that just ain’t there.

But, in the end, what cinches it is the figure. My read of many many sighting reports makes one thing very clear: sasquatch don’t look human, or like people in suits. If something does…then it IS.

I’ve been doing private, recreational research on cryptozoology subjects for the past couple years. I’ve been to YouTube, searched for sasquatch vids, and similar stuff, and I’ve come across some obvious fakes.

At least THIS one pretends to be legitimate.

To DWA: thanks for the list of stuff to look for. I never noticed or thought of that before. I’ll keep it in mind.

Right now, for many scientists, the evidence just has not made much of an impact on established paradigms. That may change, but not anytime soon I think. It’s sort of a vicious cycle that the evidence that would be collected and presented in an acceptable manner won’t likely be found unless someone does a study, and the study won’t happen without the evidence. Those who want a serious study done are going to have to do it out of their own pocket for the time being.

I’m much more hopeful that well funded research on other animals or habitats will perhaps turn up “spin off” findings related to sasquatch. For example, a group of biologists out studying bears might come across sasquatch or solid physical evidence of one. A group of serious biologists coming face to face with thses creatures will find it hard to ignore. They’ll likely try to collect what evidence they can in an acceptable manner for scientific review (after first changing their shorts, I imagine ), even though it wasn’t the original purpose of their research.

Lots of new species have been discovered in this way.

I agree with you that private individuals funded privately are the thing for the moment. Indeed, all I ask from the mainstream is for them to stop pooh-pooing without even looking at the evidence. “I haven’t looked at the evidence, but I haven’t seen proof yet either” is as negative as I think a scientist should get on this topic. I mean, science lives by evidence. How can you pronounce what you are doing true to science when you aren’t even examining the evidence?

Not too much to ask, is it?

And of course, with reports, there’s much more where those came from. Candy, I tell you.

I think the best bet for such a long term study to come together right now is for some intrepid researcher to get private funding and have at it. The more evidence they then come up with (if anything) that is solid and peer reviewable, the more credibility that line of research would gain in the eyes of the greater scientific community. Right now, we need scientists who are willing to break the mold and commit to such an endeavor on their own dime, it seems. One thing is for sure, complaining or moaning about it (as tempting as it may be), is not going to be the thing that sways anyone within the scientific community.

Believe me, finding a sasquatch would make a biologist’s career. They are not going to willingly ignore and turn down the chance to make the biggest zoological discovery in history if they think there is a chance it could be out there. As soon as they are more convinced that something is there to be found, funding will start to come in.

grafikman- Thanks to you too for sharing that information.

Since you asked about CO, and that’s the state this thread is about, here are some of the more compelling accounts I’m aware of from there:

1. The woman who got a very good, close-up look at one, while backpacking. It was about eight to twelve feet from her; her look was good enough for a pretty evocative artist’s sketch. Her description of the face is the best I have ever heard, given what I’ve seen of conceptions of it: “just on the human side of halfway between a human and a gorilla.”

2. The elk hunters who flushed one near the end of a long day in the Routt National Forest. It raced up the opposite slope of the canyon they were in, grabbing trees and brush to pull itself up the slope at a very high rate of speed. One of the hunters got a good look at it through his rifle scope; he had no doubts. Not that the others did, either. The three hunters thought enough of their encounter to (1) follow the roughly three-mile cross-country route of devastation the critter left in its wake – they were bone tired before they started this – and (2) report their sighting to a ranger, who went right out and got classic footage. (Riiiiight. You know what the ranger said; and liquids of the kind popular at loud parties figured prominently.)

3. The father and son who had no doubt what kind of huge, bipedal, muscular creature with vivid eyeshine was caught in their headlights one night – but were so flabbergasted they couldn’t get out the word to tell the investigator what, precisely, it was.

4. Hunter and wife in Moffat County, who heard one: “This sound was so primal, so intense, so big, that it raised the hair on my arms and the back of my neck, and I was chilled as I have never been before in the wilderness. I know what bear, elk, raptors, and big cats sound like in Colorado, and I assure you, this was nothing like I have ever even imagined.”

5. From Pitkin County, more eyeshine: “As a comparison, later in the trip we were camping and had a fire burning when a whitetail deer came into our view. The full-grown doe was approx. 20 feet from me, and looking straight at me. The doe’s eyes were no more than one-quarter the size of the eyes of the critter standing 70 feet away from me that I’ve mentioned above. In other words, the eyes were big. Also, I stand at 6-foot-1-inch and this thing had to be over 8-feet tall.” Only one bit of detail from a detailed report with more incidents on one night of backpacking – including a sighting of more than eyes – than you can shake a tree at.

For starters.

Oh. CO has 99 reports on the BFRO database. Pretty healthy, actually.