“The Blogsquatcher” – The Archives

December 16, 2008 10:18 AM

Thanks to Chris from Sasquat.ch, a fine German bigfoot blog, I have recently come across a spirited discussion that was held during the height of the bigfoot body hoax over on a skeptical blog called NeuroLogica. In it you will find a debate carried on byMatt Moneymaker and various skeptics. I thought Matt did a good job, though he didn’t convince anyone there. He also made some interesting statements concerning the Kentucky bigfoot doings of 2005.

As I reflect on the posts at NeuroLogica now, I am struck by the last paragraph of the last comment there (as of this morning) by DevilsAdvocate:

If you were to pour 1,000,000 cups of weak tea (anecdotal BF sighting reports) into a large vat (BF sighting report databases), you would not magically get strong tea (quality evidence). Youʼd have a vatful of weak tea. Itʼs not the volume of evidence, itʼs the quality that matters. One piece of sufficiently high quality evidence will suffice. I suggest a body.

This is a tough nut to crack on the face of it. But I do have a problem with watering down some of the evidence into the phrase “weak tea.” Footprints need an explanation. I don’t think they are weak tea. The rest of it, stories, suspicious hair, ambiguous DNA evidence, etc. — that I grant is weak tea. All of these could be mistakes of observation. But the footprints are completely different. They are eitherfakes, all of them, or there is something very strange going on. Something leaves footprints but not any other kind of good evidence of its existence.

Those of you who have followed this blog know that my position is wavering from the attitude that there is a real, living, unambiguous creature at the bottom of the mystery to the idea that there is a serious anomaly here. We really should have better evidence at this point.

Recently I was persuaded on one point by Dr. Jeff Meldrum during our interview of him on Sasquatch Watch Radio — he said that he didn’t think there were more than 750 bigfoot in North America. With numbers that low, it really isn’t outrageous that we should not have come across a body yet. There simply aren’t going to be that many available. And if bigfoot are careful to conceal their dead — not such a leap given what people have observed of their behavior — then our chances of finding a bodywithout being directly responsible for it’s death are essentially zero.

I wish someone could do a statistical study to tell whether the number of sightings in any given year can be accounted for with 750 individuals. Perhaps they are not as careful as we have thought, but move around quite a bit. This would help to explain the “flaps” phenomena I mentioned yesterday. It would also explain why they vocalize, and why they might leave trail markers. They need to find one another.

Filed under: Blogsquatcher