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October 4, 2007 5:51 PM

Bigfoot researchers have a rather obvious problem, though we usually gloss over it. I know Chris Murphy once touched on it in a blog post, but heʼs since suspended that blog and I canʼt find a link to the original. But itʼs basically this — after more than 50 years of searching, we are no closer to proving bigfootʼs existence today than we were at the beginning. So what are the major problems in bigfoot research, and how do we answer them?

WE DONʼT HAVE A BODY:

Ok, thatʼs true, and without it, a whole lot of people are never going to believe in bigfoot. The common answer to this criticism is that it is very difficult to find a body of anything in the woods, even things that are much more common than bigfoot is supposed to be. This is true. While I have occasionally turned up a deer bone, or the bones of a small mammal like a squirrel or a raccoon, I have rarely turned up anything bigger than that and when I have itʼs been deer or cow exclusively. And the same is true for people who spend more time in the woods than I do. Bear remains are only very rarely found. The reason for this, as I understand it, is because bears are much more scarce than the smaller animals. There arenʼt as many carcasses to find, and those that are out there decompose long before anyone comes across them. Also, it is said, when a bear knows it is sick, it goes off into hiding and invariably dies where it hid, which is not out in the open. And after it has died, there are a number of forest animals that will ensure that the body and bones are well disposed of in a matter of weeks. But this is not a very satisfying answer, because bear remains are found, even if only rarely, while there are no bigfoot remains anywhere for us to examine.

Now this fact does not mean that none have been found. I have seen a number of stories, some of the best of them second hand, that detail remains being found. In some of these stories, the people who found the remains (it is more accurate in most of these cases to say that they produced the remains) became afraid and either left them where they were, or buried them. The usual reason for their fear has been some form of, “I thought they looked so human that I would be in trouble for murder.”There are a couple of other cases, some of them fairly convincingly documented, of a skull or other bone having been found and sent to a university. In two of these cases that Iʼve heard of, after some initial excitement from the scientists who viewed the remains communication ceases and the bones are never recovered. And there are anumber of stories from the 18th and 19th centuries that mention large skeletons being found, some described as big as 12 feet tall. But these reports lead to nowhere. If you try to look for the museums mentioned in the papers, youʼll find they donʼt exist under the names given. Did they at the time of the writing, or were there misprints in these cases? Or were all of them simply made up by reporters at a loss for good material? Whatever the reasons, none of these stories, not the news reportsfrom last century, nor the more recent accounts, has ever borne fruit.

So we donʼt have a body, we cannot point to anything more tangible than hair samples and footprints. While these are suggestive of a real creature living out in the world, they will not persuade the staunch skeptic by themselves.

WE DONʼT EVEN HAVE A CONVINCING PHOTOGRAPH:

This is not as true as it once was, though there still is no totally unambiguous picture. And there never will be, for the figure in the picture can always be said to be a man in a suit, or a product of computer graphics programs. With that said, there are some pictures Iʼve seen over the last year or so that are pretty good. One of them was taken with a trail-cam strapped to a tree. There are many trail-cams out there, and there are rarely any pictures of anything that can be said to be a bigfoot obtained with them. In the case Iʼm talking about, taken in late 2006, the camera was mounted without any flash or other lighting near it. The picture is therefore backlit from the house about 50 yards away, and the purported creature shows up in silhouette. Itʼs a good picture — some have said too good, and suspect it was made with computer graphics, although there is no evidence of this. But because itʼs backlit, and with no easy reference for size, itʼs impossible to see in the picture itself enough that will make you say, “Aha, the hairy fellow is caught at last!” Comparison photographs help, but I suspect if you were a skeptic before you saw that picture, you will be a skeptic after also. So thereʼs a real sense in which this category of fault can never be rectified. Itʼs true we donʼt have any truly awesome pictures, though we do have some very good ones; but even if we did have the truly awesome pics, nobody would believe them that didnʼt already feel sympathetically inclined toward the matter.Thatʼs the era we live in now. Itʼs too easy to fake photos, and there are too many people interested in testing their skills at fakery.

HAIR AND FECAL MATTER, ETC., WHEN TESTED, ALWAYS COMES BACK AS LIKELY HUMAN:

For some people this is a real problem. Itʼs true that the hairs, such as those thought to come from bigfoot, which are lacking a medulla, rarely produce useful DNA, but there have been other materials tested and few of them have had results that were unambiguous. The usual result is “contamination from human DNA has spoiled the sample.” The reason for this might be very simple: perhaps bigfoot is a close relative of humanity? This is my best guess, but saying it isnʼt proving it. If this isnʼt the case, then there has to be some explanation for why the results always come back without a satisfying conclusion. Until we have an answer, this question is going to be a thorn in the side of all bigfoot researchers.

ALL YOUʼVE GOT IS WITNESS TESTIMONY, AND WITNESS TESTIMONY IS UNRELIABLE:

This is not such a good objection. Itʼs true that some who claim to be witnesses can be liars or con-men out to make a buck, pull a prank, or make themselves feel important, but there are too many witnesses, from the current era going back centuries, who are unconnected yet who provide details that correspond with each other perfectly. Unless you subscribe to John Greenʼs idea, offered in jest, that there is a worldwide bigfoot hoaxing cult at work (and if you do, bigfoot is the least of your worries), you have to explain these stories. A skeptic stops here and says something along the order of, “I donʼt have to explain every fantasy created by the ignorant and delusional.” Well letʼs be clear here. We are not trying to explain sightings of elves, fairies, gnomes, unicorns, werewolves, or anything else of that nature. Itʼs true some people claim to see some of these kinds of things. But the numbers are extremely low, and if you bothered to collect stories about these sightings, you would likely finda great variety of described characteristics. I donʼt know this to be a fact, but thatʼs my best guess. And Iʼm not characterizing anyone who has seen such a thing — I donʼt know what they saw, but what I do know is that their experience is of a different order than a sighting of bigfoot. Bigfoot is seen all over the place in the United States andCanada, by all kinds of people, most of whom had no idea of or opinion about bigfoot before their experience. These stories are remarkable for their consistency of detail.

A skeptic will say at this point, “Thatʼs because everyone knows by now what they are supposed to see.”

Letʼs stop for a second here and really unpack that kind of statement. What is the skeptic alleging, actually? That the witnesses are making their stories up, and shape them to conform to whatʼs expected? That we receive thousands of reports each year and they are all lies? Leaving aside the rudeness of the thought behind the unspoken assumption, for certainly no one appreciates being called a liar or hoaxer when that is in fact not true (and letʼs not forget that itʼs an accusation made without any proof), what are the chances that there are several thousands of people each year who would contact someone to report a spurious bigfoot report? Bigfoot researchers do receive hoaxes each year. One remarkable hoax was perpetrated bya teacher who wanted to show his class how easy it was to fool bigfoot researchers (but the hoax was discovered). Another was pranked by parents on their child, who would not believe bigfoot existed, so they had someone dress in an ape suit and run across the back yard. The poor kid filmed it and tried to get researchers interested. Both of these hoaxes were discovered by the researchers involved, as most hoaxes of this sort are because the people who are doing the hoaxing donʼt know a lot about bigfoot. I think this shows the lie to the idea that “everyone knows what they are supposed to see.” Actually, it appears that often enough they only know the most general outlines, not the details.

And thatʼs not even the best reason to believe the witnesses are telling the truth. Look at the effect of the experience on their lives. Several avid hunters I know completely stopped hunting, or stopped hunting alone, after their encounters. All of them refuse to go back to the area of their encounters except during daylight and refused to stray far from the vehicle. I personally interviewed three veterans who all said a version of, “I saw a lot of scary stuff in the war, but I never saw anything that scared me worse than bigfoot did.” I know of one young witness who has been traumatized by nightmares for months after a sighting.

For all of that, some people will claim that anecdotal evidence has no scientific value. That may be true, but if we were putting the matter of bigfootʼs existence on trial, the case for itʼs existence would win.

IF BIGFOOT DOES EXIST, THEN OUR GOVERNMENT SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IT:

I hear this one all the time. I think they probably do know, at least the parts who would have an interest or direct exposure, like rangers in the field and their supervisors. Why wouldnʼt they tell us? The reason the authorities don’t tell you what they suspect is out there, from conversations with several National Park rangers, is they’ve been told not to, and they’d lose their jobs if they did. We have asked ourselves why this would be for some time, and have a couple of answers.

1. Admitting a large, potentially dangerous, creature is living in the woods would create a panic and the government would be forced to do something about it. They have done the cost/benefit analysis and regard the bigfoot as harmless enough to want to avoid this scenario altogether.

2. Some bright spark in the defense industry one day had a thought about training bigfoot for defense purposes (the same kind of thing they do with dolphins, forinstance). Once someone proposed this idea, the very existence of bigfoot would be classified, and studies show that once the government classifies something it tends not to declassify it unless forced to. This is a weak answer, though, because by now youʼd figure theyʼd have discovered it was an idea that canʼt work, because if it did work, people like me would get a visit from men in dark sunglasses advising us to drop it for the good of the nation. Well I don’t know of many bigfoot researchers who have gotten those visits. If there is no present national security issue, there wouldnʼt be an incentive to keep the lid on tight now. Previous national security classification wouldnʼt explain why people are actively suppressing bigfoot information now, except that maybe there is a lingering culture of secrecy surrounding the subject.

3. The existence of bigfoot is a scary thought if you aren’t prepared for it. The human mind may simply reject the notion altogether until it comes face to face with one, which has created a culture in which the folks in the field learn something which the folks in the office reject out of hand. Over time, the field workers have learned the best thing to do when you learn about bigfoot is shut up about it, because the folks in the office arenʼt going to believe you, in fact they might think you are crazy. It will certainly not enhance your prospects for advancement. So when rangers tell us theyʼve been told not to talk about it for fear of their jobs, perhaps itʼs not because thereʼs some top-down effort to keep it secret, but because rangers have learned what happens when you do talk, and theyʼve discussed it amongst themselves.

Since many Rangers have been only too glad to tell us what they know, I suspect that number 3 is the main reason, though all three could be in operation at once.

HOW CAN YOU EVEN EXPLAIN THE WEIRDER ASPECTS OF BIGFOOT SIGHTINGS, LIKE THE SELF-LUMINOUS EYES?

Well thatʼs a good question, actually. We really canʼt explain it. I have not seen this phenomenon myself (itʼs called eyeshine among researchers). At least, I have not seen it and known that was what I was seeing. I did once see a strange light bobbing through the trees that cast no beam, in an area where there shouldnʼt have been anyother people. But since whatever was making that light was turned perpendicular tome, I only saw one light, so I canʼt say that it was eyes. But I know several people who have seen this sort of eyeshine, that is, eyes that give off a low light without any apparent light source to cause a reflection. Some of them describe it as a slow glow, with a sort of “roiling” effect to the light, as if it were generated in a cloudy liquid. It takes time to get to full intensity and then fades. Scott Herriott describes his own sighting of a bigfoot giving off eyeshine during the daytime, in the shade of thickwoods (an account of Scottʼs experience can be found here — looking for that lead me to a potentially interesting paper on “Hominid eye shine” right here ). Herriott is a fairly skeptical fellow, if his online persona is an accurate representation. He doesnʼt strike one as the type to hallucinate something and then believe it. And I trust the associates that have described eyeshine to me, too. So while I havenʼt seen it forsure myself, I accept that it happens, but what it is, I canʼt say. And since it sounds like some kind of paranormal effect, I understand why people who hear about it throw their hands up. But I think it probably isnʼt a paranormal thing. I suspect that it is a heretofore unknown example of bioluminescence. I learned, for instance, that certain shrimp are able to produce a light in salt water with a sound they make. I hypothesize that bigfoot uses a sound as the energy source, and the salt water in itʼs eyes as the medium. We donʼt hear the sound, I assume, because it is ultrasonic.This is something that might be tested in the field if the bigfoot would cooperate bylighting up while we had recorders running.

On the general question of how you explain what seems to be anomalous evidence — for instance, the commonly reported phenomena of feeling you are being stared at before an encounter, or a feeling that something is behind you, or a general sense that you are observed and disapproved of, we have more theories, but no solid evidence of any sort. Enough people report the sense of being stared at that I suspect that it isnʼt just a case of nerves. You might hypothesize that bigfoot is making a sound, for instance infrasound, that you canʼt hear but your body can feel. Or you can guess that bigfoot is throwing out a pheromone. In both cases, it would be a useful defense mechanism for the sasquatch.

As researchers we have to realize that these strange phenomena are thorns in our side. They are very hard to explain. People just arenʼt inclined to believe them. Yet they do happen, and weʼd be less than true investigators if we tried to suppress the information.

AND THAT ENDS my very incomplete list of problems in bigfoot research. There are many more, certainly. Until we find some explanations for these problems we are pretty much stuck on the fringes of science. But that does not mean that we are looking for something that isnʼt there. Perhaps we are getting nearer to a discovery,or set of discoveries, that will advance science. After all, it is through having to explain anomalies that science makes its great leaps forward

 

 

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