Sasquatch

By: Hotshot - 19th August 2015 at 08:45 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

I don't know it you've heard of Dr. Jeff Meldrum, who is a Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at the University of Idaho. He is a specialist of the anatomy of the foot and has been studying the sasquatch for about 20 years. He has large collection of Bigfoot casts, and he is convinced they come from real animals. His casts come from all over North America, often from remote places, so it is hard to imagine it could be all hoaxes. Also, he and Dr John Bindernagel, who is a wildlife biologist who has been studying Bigfoot for about 30 years, have looked at the question of whether the habitat can sustain such a large animal, and they have come to the conclusion that probably yes.

It is exasperating that Bigfoot research is such a mess. Some people are obvious hoaxers, and they give a very bad reputation to the subject. Also when people see shows like Finding Bigfoot, it understandable that they think it's not a serious subject. But that's what happens when you deal with a farfetched subject like that, it will attract all sorts of weirdoes and incompetents. The theories about telepathy, paranormal abilities are also examples of obvious BS.

People really see a creature that is way to big to be a man in a suite. Witnesses often say that it is even hard to describe how big it is. The animals runs also very fast so it is hard to imagine someone with a suite running that fast. Sometimes, the animal is seen by several people, and sometimes one person sees several bigfoots. Sometimes it is seen from close, and the witness sees many details, like the muscles under the hair, the lips moving when it shows its teeth and so forth. It is clear for the witness that it is an animal.

As for remains of a body, the animal is very rare, buch rarer than bears. It is already quite rare to find bear carcasses in the wild, so it is likely extremely rare to find a Bigfoot carcass.

I try to be objective, and I think discounting all the witnesses, the casts, etc, is not really scientific. At least one should really look into it. That being said, I certainly don't have all the answers and I am not sure it exists, I am just puzzled.

By: Hotshot - 23rd August 2015 at 12:27 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

I am not an expert but I don't think they are seen in areas where there is no forest, like the great plains. There seems to be hotspots in east Texas, and Arkansas however, but in wooded areas. Other than that, there seems to be hotspots almost everywhere, from Florida to Ohio and Vermont, in the Rockies and along the west coast up to Alaska.

'Sasquatch' is the name given to the creature by indian tribes in BC.

Almost every tribe has stories of Bigfoot. They are all familiar with it and continue to see it in some places. For instance I listened to this interview the other day about the Navajo reservation:

There is also an interview of an indian from Montana on Sasquatch chronicles ( around episode 60 ), and it is pretty much the same kind of story.

It is interesting to note that in the interview the Navajo guy had an experience with sasquatches throwing rocks. This is a common behavior of the creature that has been witnesses by a lot of witnesses. Quite often in fact the witnesses say that the rock is way to big to have been thrown by a human.

By: Hotshot - 23rd August 2015 at 12:38 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

A swamp cat was knocked down in Hayling Island in 1988, marginally bigger than a large domestic cat but hardly comparable with the usual statements from eyewitnesses - they will insist they saw something 'lion-sized' yet would not be able to describe just how big a lion is.

Meanwhile, all those Americans wandering around with guns and they still haven't managed to shoot a bigfoot...!

It has happened that apparently some bigfoots have been shot at. There are also a few stories of sasquatches getting killed.

It does happen that hunters have encounters with the creature. Most of the time the witness is extremely scared, his brain suddenly is in survival mode and doesn't react as you would expect. For instance people don't think of taking pictures, or even shooting at it. Hunters say there is no way their hunting rifle could kill such a big animal, so they prefer not to shoot. Injuring one would only result in getting killed a few seconds later, either by the one that has been injured, or another one around.

Hunters and witnesses in general prefer not to talk about their encounters. They learn very quickly that they will be ridiculed. Also many hunters say they stopped going into the woods after, because they're too scared. Some people finally, after a few years usually, return into the woods, but not alone, and armed.

Seing a sasquatch is quite a traumatizing experience, and witnesses have noone to turn to usually because nobody would take them seriously. That makes the experience even harder to deal with.

By: Hotshot - 23rd August 2015 at 12:50 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

Not long ago I was involved in interviewing people who claimed to have seen big cats in Britain; this was the non-native, non-domestic big cat, not your standard fat lap cat.
Whilst the witnesses were quite convinced that they had seen something out of the ordinary, not next doors old black tom prowling in the undergrowth or a stray dog by a gate post, the facts just didn't support the idea of a large, wild cat in the wilds of rural Britain.
A zoological contact, with experience of tracking African cats, said that there just wasn't the means to support even 'small' big cats without their presence being noticed: things like savaged sheep and cattle, or chicken farm break ins would be constant indicators - a single cat needs a lot of food to stay healthy, a colony would need a hell of a lot more - but the overriding thing for him was the absence of scat and lack of territorial spray markers. If you've ever had a stray tomcat pay your garden an unwanted visit then you'll know what that means, but the bigger the cat the more there is, the worse it smells. Yet there was never anything to show that there were any predators around other than the usual foxes.

It is the same with sasquatch, bigfoot, yowie, the yeti and all those other humanoid bipeds that apparently inhabit the worlds less populated areas. A few blurry videos, the odd grainy photograph, lots of witness reports from one or two people (never big groups), yet never any really good, hard evidence that might prove once and for all of their existence.
Of course, it is easy to hide something - or for something to hide - in dense forest where it is extremely likely that there is no human presence within a hundred miles or more nor had there been for several dozens of years, but the beasts that have recently been discovered or whose existence has been proven are small, the size of mice and smaller; there are animals thought to be larger that are only known due to the witnessing of decomposing copses, or aboriginal hunters dismembering an animal being photographed by an observer who later tried to identify it. As it stands currently, the vast majority of unknown creatures will be invertebrates.
Now, had the concept for an (as yet) undiscovered, larger creature been from the sea...that would have been much more understandable.

There is still a lot of wild wooded areas in North America with rempote places where people rarely go. It is not comparable to the UK. California alone is almost twice as large as the UK, or British Columbia is like 4 times larger. The fact that there cannot be a large unknown predator in the UK doesn't mean there couldn't be one in North America.

By: Hotshot - 23rd August 2015 at 17:34 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

I try to be open minded too on several subjects, like UFOs for instance. All too often people mistake having 'a healthy dose of skepticism' with being stubborn and close minded. Also some people are so convinced that certain things are impossible that they will just debunk the subject instead having 'a healthy dose of skepticism'. These people unfortunately are taken seriously by a portion of the population, who are lead to believe there is nothing interesting in those subjects.

In the past 20 years there's been several discoveries in paleo-anthropology that have surprised scientists. It turns out there are more subspecies of homonids than previously thought. It is also likely that some branches of the evolutionary tree have not been discovered, and even possibly never will. So even if we don't know the origin of Bigfoot, its existence cannot be ruled out.

Also, it is very common that species of a particular family or subfamily come in a wide variety of sizes. Think felides for instance, bears, etc... Concerning humans, homo floresiensis was very small compared to other humans.

LB1's height has been estimated at about 1.06 m (3 ft 6 in). The height of a second skeleton, LB8, has been estimated at 1.09 m (3 ft 7 in) based on measurements of its tibia.[2] These estimates are outside the range of normal modern human height and considerably shorter than the average adult height of even the smallest modern humans, such as the Mbenga and Mbuti (< 1.5 m (4 ft 11 in)),[25] Twa, Semang (1.37 m (4 ft 6 in) for adult women) of the Malay Peninsula,[26] or the Andamanese (1.37 m (4 ft 6 in) for adult women).[27]

By body mass, differences between modern pygmies and Homo floresiensis are even greater. LB1's body mass has been estimated at 25 kg (55 lb). This is smaller than that of not only modern H. sapiens, but also H. erectus, which Brown and colleagues have suggested is the immediate ancestor of H. floresiensis. LB1 and LB8 are also somewhat smaller than the australopithecines from three million years ago, not previously thought to have expanded beyond Africa. Thus, LB1 and LB8 may be the shortest and smallest members of the extended human family discovered thus far.[citation needed]

Apes come in all kinds of sizes too, so why not a giant one. Gigantopithecus is the proof that it is possible. The Sasquatch might be gigantopithecus, but even if it's not, that doesn't rule out the possibility that it could be something else.