# Could Bigfoot be real? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 31, 2014, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680 "2014-05-31T02:52:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2014, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/21 "2014-05-31T20:31:52Z")
> [@Farin](#): > > To bring it to a more personal level, do you ever see, for instance, squirrel skeletons? I live in an area with enough squirrels to choke a squirrel and I’ve seen a dead squirrel twice in 20 years (including one someone shot, as evidenced by the bullet hole). So, while my personal experience frame may be way too narrow in this regard, not finding a body across the [Pacific Northwest](https://www.google.com/maps/@48.8814393,-124.222709,1528905m/data=!3m1!1e3) where people are sparse doesn’t seem like a whole lot of evidence against having a bigfoot there. I see roadkill squirrels all the time, and some of them are partially skeletonized. Turkey buzzards eat a lot of them, and they have small bones, so their bones get eaten. A primate larger than a human would probably get eaten my some scavengers out in the woods, but it would have huge femurs, and large, hard skulls, so I think we’d find some of those, particularly considering how hard people have been looking. Is bear hunting legal in the area bigfoot is supposed to exist? If it is, I think that at some point, someone would have accidentally shot a bigfoot, mistaking it for a bear. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2014, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/22 "2014-05-31T20:43:24Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > (save for the intervention of something like the WWF, that maintains them on the brink of extinction). Well, that would explain the existence of John Cena, Bray Wyatt, and others, (although I think the WWF is the WWE, now). 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Gatopescado](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gatopescado/32/5711_2.png) [@Gatopescado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gatopescado)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2014, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/23 "2014-05-31T21:09:03Z")
No. ---
**Author:** ![johnpost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f17d59/32.png) [@johnpost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/johnpost)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2014, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/24 "2014-05-31T21:39:15Z")
> [@blindboyard](#): > > Possibly improbable, but probably possible. Same goes for the Yeti, the Yowie, the Orang Pendek, the Almasty, and any others. the sasquatch is a humanoid of a different color. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2014, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/25 "2014-05-31T23:01:48Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > Normally I’d say the idea of a large biped hidden in the Pacific Northwest to be a bunch of hot air but I have read some stories from credible witnesses including “Survivorman” Les Stroud. (link: [http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2011/06/repost-survivor-man-les-strouds-bigfoot.html](http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2011/06/repost-survivor-man-les-strouds-bigfoot.html)). On my other board one of the members described an experience with some sort of creature in 1978 so I feel confident “something” is out there. > > Whatever it is is extremely intelligent and very good at staying hidden. Kinda like, oh I dunno… Other people? > [@Urbanredneck](#): > > BTW, I think the Patterson film was a fake and most other encounters are fakes and hoaxers. > > What do you all think? No remains or fossils ever found. Let that one sink in… ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2014, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/26 "2014-05-31T23:07:50Z")
Of course there are large bipedal primates in the Pacific Northwest, and of course those primates are the origin of Bigfoot sitings. ---
**Author:** ![Yllaria](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yllaria/32/3452_2.png) [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 1:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/27 "2014-06-01T01:00:02Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > By now, one would have fallen off a cliff and onto a highway, and we’d have the body. . . . . Or[by now](http://www.redwombatstudio.com/product/strong-opinions/) . . . ---
**Author:** ![David42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5f9b8f/32.png) [@David42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David42)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 1:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/28 "2014-06-01T01:13:38Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Another vote for “If it was real hard evidence would have been found long since”. We have an occasion we can agree, Der Trihs. Not that I advocate any other theories, as I call them laughable myself, but I’d like to add this lack of evidence only concerns a premise that Bigfoot lives like an animal in the Wild. I have heard some kooks say he is an outer-space alien and someone here even mentioned he is a being from an alternate dimension. There’s no evidence for these claims either, but at least the hypothesis explains why we can’t find any “wild-Animal style” evidence. But there is also the possibility that (again this is nothing but speculation) Bigfoot IS in fact a colony of beings that lives in caves and seldom ventures out, and is intelligent enough to realize they need to pick up after themselves in the outdoors, so the reason we can’t find any evidence is because we haven’t looked in the right place–his lair. There’s a lot of animals it is hard to come up with physical evidence for until we find their lair, where there is a lot of evidence. But the likelihood of any large mammals existing on the earth we don’t know about is incredibly tiny. ---
**Author:** ![David42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5f9b8f/32.png) [@David42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David42)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 1:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/29 "2014-06-01T01:20:55Z")
> [@Farin](#): > > An honest question, but how many skeletons of animals do we have that we didn’t kill (usually for the skeleton/embalmed body)? From what information I have read over the years, animal bodies/skeletons are fairly hard to come across, even when we are studying the animals. > > To bring it to a more personal level, do you ever see, for instance, squirrel skeletons? I live in an area with enough squirrels to choke a squirrel and I’ve seen a dead squirrel twice in 20 years (including one someone shot, as evidenced by the bullet hole). So, while my personal experience frame may be way too narrow in this regard, not finding a body across the [Pacific Northwest](https://www.google.com/maps/@48.8814393,-124.222709,1528905m/data=!3m1!1e3) where people are sparse doesn’t seem like a whole lot of evidence against having a bigfoot there. > > Don’t get me wrong, I won’t believe it until we can find one/find a body either. I just don’t think that line of reasoning is one to hang a hat one. I have a long list of animal skeletons I have seen–some of which have caused some lively debate in my family over what they were. The real question about squirrels is how many squirrel dens did you climb up into trees to look in? I once witnessed a squirrel get hit by a car, and two other squirrels came and helped the injured squirrel back into a tree, where it may have easily died. They are known to be social, bringing sick members food and water they keep in their cheeks to bring them. The squirrel “hospital” is in a tree. Did you look there? ---
**Author:** ![David42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5f9b8f/32.png) [@David42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David42)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/30 "2014-06-01T01:23:59Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > I am willing to concede that humans coexisted with gigantopithecus, which stood 9" tall, and may have gone extinct in Nepal and China only 100,000 years ago, and that could easily be the source of the Yeti legend. Or, at any rate, people probably found skeletons, or fossilized skeletons of gigantopithecus, and made up the Yeti legend. > > However, what could be the source of a bipedal animal in the Pacific Northwest? Apes migrated here from somewhere, left no populations between their original place, and what is now Washington State, yet established a population there that has continued, viably, for thousands of years, despite being a very small group? That just doesn’t happen. Small groups either dwindle away, or expand (save for the intervention of something like the WWF, that maintains them on the brink of extinction). It happens because that’s the way genes work. A small population over many, many generations is weakened by inbreeding. > > Unless “bigfoot” isn’t a primate, in which case, it’s the occasional bipedal walking bear. You do get an occasional bipedal bear, that has deformed front paws, or some kind of problem with its hips. I’ve seen a photo of a female adult bear that was followed by naturalists for a while. She was missing one forepaw, and walked bipedally a lot. > > Encountering a bear on two feet, for whatever reason-- it was trying to see over a fence, or it has learned to intimidate people that way, is probably really scary, and if you don’t expect to see a bipedal bear, it may register on your memory as primate-like-- something you do expect to see on two legs. Human memory is not a camera. > > The term “bigfoot” comes from a hoax; some guy made fake feet, and used them to make huge footprints, and that started the whole story. Save for that hoax, we wouldn’t use the term “bigfoot.” We might still argue about whether there was something bipedal living in the Pacific Northwest, but without the need to try to reconcile bears with the idea of something with big, human-like feet, I think it would be a lot easier to accept that what people see are probably 80% bears, 18% deliberate hoaxes, and 2% something else that stands up to a perfectly reasonable explanation other than an unknown large species-- like for example, a cold-weather hiker wearing fur, or a small animal casting a large shadow. Could the Yeti legend, 100,000 years old, have been carried across the Bering sea land bridge with the peoples who came from Asia? ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/31 "2014-06-01T01:30:29Z")
Clearly, some remnant population of Denisovans migrated form Asia along with the proto-Amerinds, giving birth to the Sasquatch legend. “Sasquatch” being the Denisovan word meaning “Our People”. It’s the only Denisovan word that survives today. But it’s absurd to believe there is an extant population living in North America today. ---
**Author:** ![David42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5f9b8f/32.png) [@David42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David42)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/32 "2014-06-01T01:59:00Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > Clearly, some remnant population of Denisovans migrated form Asia along with the proto-Amerinds, giving birth to the Sasquatch legend. “Sasquatch” being the Denisovan word meaning “Our People”. It’s the only Denisovan word that survives today. > > But it’s absurd to believe there is an extant population living in North America today. But Denisovans were just peoples with a legend of the Yeti, right, though no gigantopithecus actually made it to North America? Which extant population do you mean? Of course I think either would be absurd. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 2:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/33 "2014-06-01T02:18:13Z")
> [@David42](#): > > But Denisovans were just peoples with a legend of the Yeti, right, though no gigantopithecus actually made it to North America? > > Which extant population do you mean? Of course I think either would be absurd. I was joking. Denisovans were a species of _Homo_ that lived in Siberia (and elsewhere) and that were contemporaneous with Sapiens and Neanderthals. We don’t know a lot about them other than they were neither Sapiens nor Neanderthals. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/34 "2014-06-01T02:36:34Z")
I’ve read of some police districts in Nepal still attributing “death by Yeti” to some unsolved cases. Really. ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 2:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/35 "2014-06-01T02:46:32Z")
> [@Farin](#): > > An honest question, but how many skeletons of animals do we have that we didn’t kill (usually for the skeleton/embalmed body)? From what information I have read over the years, animal bodies/skeletons are fairly hard to come across, even when we are studying the animals. There’s lots of folks who bushwack, hiking off trail. When you do so you stumble across all sorts of skeletons and corpses, not to mention lots of spoor and other evidence of creatures. There are just too many humans in the woods for something like this to go unnoticed. ---
**Author:** ![David42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5f9b8f/32.png) [@David42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David42)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/36 "2014-06-01T02:48:26Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > I was joking. Denisovans were a species of _Homo_ that lived in Siberia (and elsewhere) and that were contemporaneous with Sapiens and Neanderthals. We don’t know a lot about them other than they were neither Sapiens nor Neanderthals. Right. I kind wondered where you got that “Sasquatch” word theory from. I’d a thunk we don’t know any of their words or even if they talked at all. This of course does little to explain whether the Amerinds might have brought a gigantopithicus oral story with them to eventually become the sasquatch legend. ---
**Author:** ![susan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/susan/32/17537_2.png) [@susan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/susan)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/37 "2014-06-01T02:49:04Z")
I never understand comments about not seeing skeletons, not seeing dead birds, and the like. I see them all the time. But then, I see a lot of things\* that many people don’t seem to see, like dead animals, coins, live birds, acorns, ants, flowers, etc. I walked to work Thursday. On my walk I saw a skeletonized (except the tail) squirrel, a dead, partly-eaten jay, another dead squirrel in the road, a dead cat, and part of another dead bird. I also saw several interesting species of waterfowl, a large number of ants pouring out of holes between sidewalk sections at my building, jasmine on trellises, a live cat, and any number of Subaru Foresters. When I traveled to Botswana, people who had been there assured me that there weren’t any birds there in winter. I saw something like 79 species. When I traveled to the Dominican Republic, people who had lived there for two years as Peace Corps volunteers assured me that there were no birds. I saw at least 20 species within an area of a few acres, mostly a town. But people I was with didn’t see birds even when I pointed them out–it wasn’t their area of interest, and they they may not have been very observant of detail in a more general way. Start looking for skeletons. If you’re not looking, you probably don’t see them. If you’re looking, you might well. \*(that are in fact there–I’m not hallucinating) ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/38 "2014-06-01T02:49:23Z")
> [@Telemark](#): > > There’s lots of folks who bushwack, hiking off trail. When you do so you stumble across all sorts of skeletons and corpses, not to mention lots of spoor and other evidence of creatures. There are just too many humans in the woods for something like this to go unnoticed. Indeed. I’ve never understood how grown adults could even for a moment seriously entertain the notion that Bigfoot could be real. But then, I’ve never understood how grown adults could believe in UFOs or ghosts either. ---
**Author:** ![David42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5f9b8f/32.png) [@David42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David42)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 3:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/39 "2014-06-01T03:13:05Z")
> [@Siam\_Sam](#): > > Indeed. I’ve never understood how grown adults could even for a moment seriously entertain the notion that Bigfoot could be real. But then, I’ve never understood how grown adults could believe in UFOs or ghosts either. Or that Bigfoot is a ghost who lives on a UFO. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2014, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680/40 "2014-06-01T03:15:16Z")
:rolleyes: Oh, grow up! Of course Bigfoot’s a myth. Unlike the [Florida Skunk Ape](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Skunk_Ape). He’s real. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-bigfoot-be-real/689680.md?page=3)