APB9999…so what you’re saying is this (and I am genuinely curious and interested, asking out of ignorance and not debating your statement…by the way, I appreciate that you explain the basis of your skepticism in a reasonable tone, not simply dismissing the concept with a snide put-down): the biggest stumbling block in regards to the existence of North American apes, Sasquatches, etc., is their means of getting there in the first place? I, myself, find it telling that the two regions of the world traditionally purported to harbor such creatures are eastern Asia and a slight crescent of land running from western Canada and into America’s Northwest. What do these areas have in common? The land bridge you mentioned. You seem to know a lot about the subject, so I’d appreciate your continued commentary.
[Moderator Hat: ON]
Recently Digested said:
If you have trouble understanding the difference between describing something that was said and directly insulting a person, I will gladly explain it to you in e-mail.
David B, SDMB Great Debates Moderator
[Moderator Hat: OFF]
I recall reading recently about previously undiscovered herbivores and primates being scientifically identified in SE Asia and S America. In the reports I read, these species were “new” only to the outside observers. Indigenous peoples were well aware of their existence, and provided scientists with skins and helped them find live animals. Yet we are to believe that in the continental US, Florida no less, a species of large primates exists in numbers large enough to reproduce, yet incapable of irrefutable identification?
As Lemur noted,I am routinely amazed at the photos I see in National Geographic of rare and elusive (and small) species. I am regularly amazed at what dedicated scientists, artists, and thrill-seekers accomplish. I see no insurmountable obstacle here.
Heck, there are an incredibly small number of Florida panthers, yet folk manage to tag them, and they occasionally show up as road kill.
And given today’s technology, I am extremely dubious that intense analysis of a hair or stool sample would yield no more detailed analysis that “unknown animal”. Cite please?
No, these photos are NOT clear! The palm fronds are clear. The shape behind it is not clear. It could be anything. All I can see is a blur with two spots that could be eyes. I have no idea if this is a guy in a suit. It could be a photoshop image. It could be a dummy. I don’t know where you are getting the “grin” from, I don’t see any grin.
No. If you bring in a carcass, we can look at the teeth, the organs, the skull. It would be very very easy to prove that a Bigfoot carcass was a previously undiscovered primate. And the zoologist who published his work on the type specimen would be instantly famous. Do you think scientists hate fame? No. Do you think scientists are scared to upset the conventional wisdom. No. Actually, upsetting the conventional wisdom is the BEST WAY to advance your career, so long as you are right, or at least are wrong in interesting ways.
Are you saying that these are good photos? Ha! No, they suck, the don’t show a thing. OOO, the creator of the photos knew enough to include red-eye! Wow! Apparently this person has used a camera with a flash before! And what are you talking about, evidence rejected because it’s too conclusive? There is no conclusive evidence. You can point to hair, but where’s the DNA analysis? You can point to fecal samples, but how can you prove they came from an unknown species of primate?
Bah. My point is that hunters shoot lots of animals, and who is more likely to stumble across this creature than a hunter? And hunters have rifles, so why hasn’t one of these creatures turned up dead?
Says you. I see them all the time, I’ve got samples, I’ve got specimens. No, YOU can’t see them, with your Western Pro-science skeptical attitude. You wouldn’t believe them even if I showed them, so I’m not showing them. I only show my evidence to people who already believe in unicorns. See?
No, “inconclusive” doesn’t prove it can’t be true. It means that there is no reason to believe it is true.
No. Was the person who discovered the Golden Bamboo Lemur ostracized? Or was she taken seriously? Why, amazingly, yes Patricia Wright was taken seriously!
http://notes.cc.sunysb.edu/CAS/icte.nsf/webform/resprojects
Huh, here we have a brand new species of lemur, and zoologists are begging to go study the damn thing. This doesn’t seem like the behavior of the scientists you know. Perhaps you don’t know very many.
Finding and describing a new vertebrate species, especially one as unique as a native North American ape, would be the pinnacle of success for a zoologist. There are only a few out there, vs. thousands of zoologists. The only reason you insist that zoologists don’t want to discover new species is that they haven’t discovered this particular species. They also haven’t discovered any pixies, nixies, kelpies, goblins, hobgoblins, gorgons, sphinxes, unicorns, phoenixes, swanmays, selkies, kobolds, chimeras, hydras, hoop snakes, hippogriffs, or champchurches. Ah, but the reason they didn’t discover these creatures is that they were close-minded! They refused to consider the evidence! What evidence? Nevermind that, they refused to consider it! Because they were cowards! Those damn skeptical scientists!
{Fixed skunked code. --Gaudere}
[Edited by Gaudere on 02-13-2001 at 01:02 PM]
AHHHH! The skunk apes messed up my coding! Damn skunk apes! Nooooooo!
Lemur:
I didn’t say that the scientists didn’t WANT to search for the sasquatch…I said that they would be ostracized for doing so, if only because of the conotations “Bigfoot” carries. By the way, tell me…what inspired the search for this new lemur? What were the circumstances that prompted the investigation?
Sigh.
This is tiresome. I’m going to let someone else take over.
http://members.aol.com/Mtgjudge/BigfootFAQ.html is an exhaustively researched FAQ I encourage everyone to read, regardless of your opinion on the matter. Dogmatic disbelievers and the credulous are especially urged to take a look.
From the FAQ–
On DNA/Hair samples:
"Dr. W. Henner Farenbach is among those scientists actively testing hair samples for identification using genetic material. While many of the hair samples have been determined to be of synthetic origin (e.g. “fur suits”) or of known animals (e.g. bear, deer, etc.) a few of the results have yielded an “unknown primate” (based on similarities in DNA base sequences) as the source of the hair.
This news is bittersweet, however - since a bigfoot specimen hasn’t been recovered, we have nothing to compare these hair sample data to. Dr. Fennerbach can’t tell for sure that it’s bigfoot hair without a “real” bigfoot for comparison, but he can determine what it’s not - and these hairs didn’t come from any animal currently known to science."
{Edited for copyright concerns. Do not post large chunks of presumably copyrighted material; post links and small excerpts only. --Gaudere}
With the above quotes, I neglected to suffix each and every misspelling with “sic.”
The writer’s laconism borders on the droll, and his methodical, step-by-step dissection of the uninformed, blanket denials that so often make these debates impossible, make for eye-opening reading.
[Edited by Gaudere on 02-13-2001 at 02:06 PM]
http://members.aol.com/Mtgjudge/BigfootFAQ.html is the correct addy. Oops.
By the way…Lemur, you only see a blur and two eyes? In the first picture? It doesn’t look very blurry to me. I think you’re exaggerating for effect again.
So, let me get this straight: There aren’t a lot of them, and we don’t know where they are, but we know that they are nocturnal, what their eating habits are and what their social structure is. And, despite the fact that they are nocturnal “to some degree”, the most famous moving image of one depicts it strolling casually around the woods in broad daylight.
So, basically, we can’t catch one or get a good photo because they’re elusive, and we know they’re elusive because we can’t catch one or get a good photo. But we still know what they eat and how they live. Wow, that’s really good research.
Anyhoo, the thing in the picture looks like a plain old orangutan to me, with maybe some Photoshop work done on it. Could even be stuffed.
Tsugumo: Could I please have some cites on those “genetically altered” crops and the government forcing people to 'fess up to making circles? Thanks in advance.
“Extinct” insects found in Australia.
So, lemme get this straight: Scientists can find three (count 'em, three) six-inch-long insects on an island near Australia, but they can’t find a seven-foot-tall man-ape?!?!
(chortle, giggle, snicker, SNORT!)
Just as an aside, on the other set of pictures, the ones where the guy hammered in his car window? That must be a pretty remarkable bit of “space junk” since, per the page, it flew out of the garage, leaving a hole in the wall. Unfortunately, if you look at the hole, the hole was punched into the garage, not out of it.
You’ve heard of the “magic bullet”? This must be the “magic meteor”
Fenris
Come one pldennison! You know that most of our information about Bigfoot comes from the science of Remote Viewing. The Government has been spying on Bigfoot for years this way…and WE’RE NEXT!!!
Ah, one of the advantages of having a Really Good System at work! From the deformation around the hole, whatever punched that hole came from the inside of the garage. Not melted, like the person says, but punched from the inside. In one blow, by the looks of it. That the holes seem to have been made by an object the same size as a sledgehammer is a different issue.
I’m sticking with the chimp theory for monkey boy. The reddish highlights on black fur are more chimpish than orangish.
[giggling madly, DDG fires up the search engine]
“crop circles government”.
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Cavern/5268/crop.html
http://www.lovely.clara.net/education.html
“crop circles genetically”
http://www.ufomind.com/ufo/updates/1998/aug/m13-008.shtml
And finally, Paul Vigay, The Man Himself, the source of this particular factoid.
http://www.cropcircleresearch.com/cgi-bin/CCR?a=FAQ&m=R
You’re welcome. 
(And I can’t even see anything that looks like an orangutan in the pix, but hey, that doesn’t mean they aren’t there! 
)
DDG: Thanks for posting cites, heh…and so many.
And like Recently Digested said, if you say “I’m going to go look for Bigfoot!”, you’re going to be mocked and ridiculed and if you’re a scientist you probably don’t want that. I mean, hell, just look at the response in this thread from even CONSIDERING the POSSIBILITY that the things exist…Instant “you’re an idiot for believing that” type replies. So why would a scientist want to go hunting for the thing when that’s the first bunch of replies he’s going to get?
And as for a body of the thing…What if they bury their dead? We do it and they have the limbs to do it too. There are zillions of dead human bodies in the ground right now, but I have yet to be walking down a dirt path and trip over someone’s hand sticking up, or be digging in a sandbox and find a head staring up at me. If they grow up in forests/mountain areas, they’re going to KNOW those areas and they could bury their dead in the back of a cave, where we’d never find it because we haven’t even explored that much of the land. We have arial photographs and such, but looking around on the ground for upturned dirt where a body may be?
And if the thing can smell us or has excellent vision to detect movement, then surely it could avoid us. If a group of hunters was approaching one and it smelled it (like a dog can), it could sidestep them, duck behind some bushes until they go by, and just avoid them…especially if it grew up in the area and knew the surroundings.
As for one that stumbles by clumsily, maybe it just woke up.
Yeah, the odds against the thing existing are great, but a lot of them can be explained…If you saw a bird for the first time, and told someone, they’d say “there aren’t any footprints! Everything makes footprints! It can’t exist without footprints!”, but it just has different attributes…
Anyway, I won’t say they exist until there IS a body sent into a lab and such, but if we can find new species all the time that we’ve never seen before, I don’t see how you can say it’s impossible…
- Tsugumo
Case in point: the onza, reported for years and confirmed (with a carcass) in 1986.
I didn’t know that the movie Harry and the Hendersons was a documentary.
What if they eat their dead? Bones and all? and they eat everyone who sees them? and their cameras?
If we play the what-if game long enough we may stumble upon the clue that allows us to find them so we can train them to do labour…
You know, there are a heck of a lot of people who have actual jobs in the ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest. Amazing how the world’s largest primate has avoided the notice of every forest ranger, logger, and eco-freak for the past century…
But burying the dead isn’t that unusual and wouldn’t take that much effort to do (whereas eating people and cameras would). And would YOU report a Bigfoot if you saw one and knew everyone was going to mock you and call you a liar anyway? Heh…
- Tsugumo (never heard of the Onza thing before…funky)
Burying the dead isn’t unusual? Are you kidding? AFAIK, only humans do it. Correct me if I’m wrong.
To be honest, the first thing that ran through my mind when I saw that picture was, “I would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling kids”.
Hello!? Didn’t you ever see Planet of the Apes?