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July 12, 2009 9:51 AM

I was on vacation last week so I didn’t see Wednesday’s MonsterQuest episode until this morning. I thought it was an interesting show, but I knew most everything they talked about already, except I hadn’t seen the maps they used for the bigfoot sighting distribution, and how well that correlated with the annual rainfall amounts in various places.

The connection between bigfoot and annual rainfall goes back at least to John Green’s writing, though I’m not sure where he first proposed the link. And I’m not certain if he was the first to propose it. I was intrigued enough to go looking for more information regarding maps for us to look at, and I found a couple.

The first thing to make note of is that the MonsterQuest episode did not use a map of all reported sightings since 1967. They used some selection criteria that they did not tell us about in the episode. I learned this fact by reading this thread on the BFF, where Mangini demonstrates it by posting one of his GoogleMap images. I’m going to reproduce that one here, and also an annual rainfall map for the US so we can compare them ourselves.

I can’t find the MonsterQuest map to reproduce it, but one thing I noticed during the show is that the south seems to have been under represented. You can see plenty ofdata from the south in Mangini’s map. In the thread at the BFF, Mangini notes that there seemed to have been an artificial demarcation at the state line between Ohio and Pennsylvania that is not indicated in Mangini’s map. (The bigfoot just move from state to state as if they are not even aware there is a state line there! Imagine that..)

Unfortunately, the GoogleMap image is curved and does not show the state lines, so it’s hard to make a one to one comparison, but you can see that there is a general trend toward areas that get good rainfall. The voids seem to correlate to areas that aren’t getting much rain at all.

In response to the comment that bigfoot sightings seem to correlate with population centers, Mangini had a detailed answer, which is worth going over (and preserving) here:

To some extent there is a general overlap between large regions with higher population density and regions with reported sightings. We would expect this [because it's necessary that there be both people and bigfoot present for a sighting to occur]. However [Mangini's correspondant is] over generalizing when you say the maps are “very similar”. That’s a conclusion you might jump to if you look only at the images you and I posted, where the scale doesn’t reveal much detail at all.

But if you drill down and increase the scale to look at local regions in detail (e.g., with my maps on Google Earth), you’ll see plenty of exceptions.

e.g.

Very few reports around densely populated areas such as:

• Chicago

• Las Vegas

• Phoenix

• Boston

• Raleigh-Durham

• Charlotte

• etc.

Plenty of clusters of reports in low population density areas such as:

• the Chuskas along the NM AZ borde

r• along the Mogollon rim in AZ

• the vicinity of Senneca Rocks – Spruce Knob, WV

• the Mescalero and Jicarilla reservations in NM

• central Ohio• northen Michigan• northern Minnisota

• northern Wisconsin• the Canadian Rockies• the Blue Mountains of WA & OR

• the rain coast of the Alaskan panhandle & British Columbia

• southeastern Oklahoma

• east Texas

• etc., etc.

(This reminds me of the map in Franzoni’s book that showed, when population density is factored out of the equation, that the highest density of bigfoot would be clustered north of a certain parallel and along the continental divides. How do these two maps correlate with each other, if at all?)

I would say that the correlation between sightings and rainfall distribution would be another fact that argued against most sightings being hoaxes. I read one poster onthe BFF thread to say that the inclusion of bogus reports makes Mangini’s map useless, but that’s not accurate. You would expect hoaxes to come in a random distribution mixed in with legitimate reports. That you can find any order at all in the distribution strongly suggests there is an underlying pattern that is not explained by the hoax hypothesis.

Now remember our map of black bear distribution?

Even with the understanding that black bear distribution might be a little wider than this map proposes, I would think that black bear distribution does not explain bigfoot sightings either. For one thing, there are places on this map where bigfoot is seen, but the black bear is not. For another, there is a whole section of Canada with no bigfoot sightings, though the black bear is prevalent throughout.

But those are the two favorite answers given by skeptics to explain away bigfoot sightings — hoaxes and misidentifications. I think that old canard is, and always has been, untenable.

 

 

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