Bigfoot is dead, age 84 . It seems that Bigfoot has joined crop circles as an explained phenomenon. Or perhaps not. Is this really sufficient evidence to discount the ‘skunk ape’? People have believed without evidence for ages, is this enough to change minds?
Bigfoot is “debunked”? What, are you joking? Even after the guys who made the crop circles admitted how they did it, and even demonstrated it on camera, people still refuse to believe it’s not aliens.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Bigfoot will be with us forever, no matter how many folks come forward to admit that they faked it.
Sniff. I remember the first Bigfoot book I owned. It had a picture from the Famous Patterson film. I read it front to back and then read Von Daiken’s Chariots of the Gods followed by The Mystery of the Devil’s Triangle, and the Amazing book of ghosts. I read several dozen books on similar topics. Then more.
Oh it set my mind aflame with wild thoughts of ancient astronauts and pyramid power, and strange monsters lurking in the unknown places of the world.
The 70s were a great time for this stuff. Then I grew up and started to question some of the things I read. By the time I was 20 I gave up the ghost (PNI) and when I head about the faking of the famous Loch Ness picture, the real account of Flight 19 and that was it, the fakery of the crop circles that was that.
That was a personal revelation for me and it wasn’t hard as I had nothing at stake in those previous beliefs.
But those who have devoted their lives to Bigfoot "research’ will not go down without a pig headed fight. The sad truth is after more than 25 years of “Serious investigation” the best they can come up with is a couple of suspect plaster foot casts and a lot of wild stories.
The question is not whether there is evidence to discount the big hairy dude but rather there is any evidence that he was ever there at all.
I mean I could spend my entire life funded by believers stomping around the Northpole looking for Santa’s Workshop that doesn’t measn it is up there.
And yet there are thousands of sightings recorded here: http://www.bfro.net/ including photos. Surely this one infirm old man was not the cause of all of them. Are all the sightings the caused by hoaxers? Possibly. The dead guy in question claimed to have faked stuff for years, but alleges he was not a participant in the Patterson film. He claims the Patterson film is a fake and knows who faked it with details, but doesn’t share them. In view of his faking so many things, for unknown motives, I think we can conclude that he is not reliable beyond that he personally liked to fake stuff.
Do I think Bigfoot is a giant ape in North America. No. Do I think that thousands of people have seen something for over a hundred years (yes, newspaper accounts go back that far). Yes. I think they’ve seen a bear. I think a lot of modern sightings are either hoaxers playing pranks on the unsuspecting, entirely faked accounts, or bears.
I will only change my mind upon a full Bigfoot autopsy. Until then, its just not believable.
There was a friend of Wallace that was interviewed on NPR. And he said that while Wallace loved to play pranks, he based bigfoot on Indian legends that predate European arrival to the Americas and the PNW.
You guys take life just a tad too seriously, if I do say so myself.
Bigfoot? The Snowman of the Himalayas? Nessie? Crop circles? La Chupacabra? UFO’s
Man, this stuff is great!
You gotta admit, it’s entertaining
Exactly! It’s a game. Of all the zoocryptology stuff out there, I figure that Bigfoot/Yeti is the only one with even a billionth of a chance. So I try to figure out what the hell these people are seeing? Drunken hallucinations? A prankster running across a dark road in an ape suit? Yogi? And then I think of all the people who are making a buck off it.
Well, there’s still the Jersey Devil.
Hmmm people out camping alone in the woods, hearing strange sounds seeing strange shadows. Must be a real monster right? After all their imaginations couldn’t be playing tricks on them.
Let’s not forget the Skunk Ape.
These things are “sighted” in almost every state.
That’s why I mentioned him. There’s the Skunk Ape, the Yeti, the Abdominable Snowman (Hey, he’s buff), Bigfoot… who else?
Seriously, I was vaugely hoping, hey, here’s the start (Is this the start? Are there any earlier sightings of ‘Bigfoot’, and not ‘legendary manlike monster of the indians’?) of something like the Crop Circles thing. Where, every time it gets brought up, someone can say, “Nah, see, these two guys in england faked it all.”
Cryptozoology, by its very nature, is a study of what has not yet been documented scientifically to exist. I suspect that (a) there are indeed creatures that really exist that are at present solely cryptozoological, and (b) Sturgeon’s Law applies in spades to the subject matter.
Contemplate, if you will, the Nandi Bear (or look here or here. The existence of a reclusive member of an accredited family of carnivores in an area difficult of study is not totally improbable. But expeditions at least partly with the purpose of seeking it out have come up with nothing. Most intriguingly, some have speculated it to be a chalicothere, from a branch of the perissodactyls that approximated the ground sloths in lifestyle and flourished throughout the Tertiary, becoming extinct fairly late in the Pleistocene. This link discusses the possibility of that among other possible explanations.
And, of course, it is quite possible that something well known to science is misrepresented by the native stories.
Essentially, what I bring to cryptozoology is the combination of openmindedness and skepticism that one should bring to U.F.O. sitings – there is obviously something behind them, whether hoaxes, misinterpretation of known phenomena, or “real” object of discussion. Deciding which requires some careful study and will generally result in debunking, but should not be the object of automatic dismissal. (Though, of course, one can say “It’s probably not anything important” and go on to other, more important things.)
Actually, “Yeti” and “the Abominable Snowman” are two names for the same (alleged) creature, just like “Sasquatch” and “Bigfoot” are names for its Pacific Northwestern counterpart.
I pray and pray and pray they will find a small living colony of thylacines deep in the Tasmanian wilderness. It makes me cry every time I see that grainy black-and-white footage of the last living thylacine in a disgusting tiny little cage, before it died.
Funny thing, I am a complete non-believer in Bigfoot, yet I helped fuel the debate in a weird way.
I was in California and read an article in the Halloween issue of ‘Outsider’ magazine. The article was about the top 10 haunted hiking trails . One of the spots mentioned was the Cuyahoga Valley recreation area in Ohio and how reports of “Grassman” (as the local bigfoot is called) were well known for years. Well I grew up there and I certainly never heard of any ‘grassman’. So I called my mom, my older sister and my brother and nobody heard of this. I was amused and to be very thorough I called one of my oldest friends who is a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He never heard of grassman either but thought it might make an amusing Halloween story for filler. He started to research and talked to the rangers, police, locals, no luck, no one ever heard of this legend. He was desperate and finally wound up talking to the free-lance writer who wrote the original story for Outsider magazine. She found out about it on the internet. Seems these 2 guys who live in a trailer started this Northeast Ohio Bigfoot Research website with, what I believe, their tongues planted firmly in cheeks. My reporter friend wrote up this big, funny X-Files type of conspiracy-cover-up story but his uptight editor trimmed out all the sarcasm because, get this, “we have a policy not to mock other’s religious beliefs” !!! Soooo… the story was published as a simple facts-only 2 paragraph thing and it is now cited as further proof by these yahoos of “something out there”. Go figure.
Well, I read about this today (yes, I know I’m behind the times, why do you ask?), came to the SDMB to post about it, and I guess I shouldn’t be at all surprised that there are a few threads about it already.
Here’s a news cite:
… and here’s a more entertaining spot where I read about it:
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1756.htm
You know, all the pro-bigfoot sites linked here claim there was pre-Wallace sighting & evidence. But besides very vague Indian legends (some of which clearly state BF wasn’t a “real” animal), I cannot find any. Any of you pro-BF dudes want to find some links to pre-wallace BF sightings or evidence?
I wonder what the earliest written account of these “Indian legends” dates from. Are we talking something from colonial times? Turn of the century? Or do these legends conviently appear only after the Wallace hoax began?
Hey! I want my childhood back! 
Remember IN SEARCH OF…
AQhh good old Lenard Nimoy trying to creep me out with grain reinacted footage of sppoky things. The music made the show… it was so creepy.
The Format was easy
Talk about a weird occurence (say Bigfoot) reinact a scene or show the CSPOV (Creepy Shit point of view) shots. Ask if it realy happened and then drop the go onto the next anecdote. Talk to an expert show the same reinactment ask another yes no question and forget to answer it then reshow the same stuff you talked about. Conect it to something unrelated (like a show on Bigfoot will talk about Easter Island for no reason). Go back to the reinactment get Leonard to talk really creepy and say we may never know thw answer. Highten the creepy soundtrack and close the show.
Ahhh memories…