I just read on "Bigfoot Encounters" that Peter Byrne was quoted as saying "out of 3000 bigfoot witness reports, 5 turn out to be legitimate". Is that true? Do any of you think that? Then at the end of the paragraph there is a statement that I guess is Bobby since it is her site and its not attributed to anyone else, that says "Byrne's quote supports what I've been saying all along, which is, - there simply are not enough sasquatches left in the wilderness to support the high volume of reports regarded as 'true' by various organizations." Are there really that many people out there that would do this sort of thing, just flat out lie. Why would anyone do that. Maybe I am to optimistic about the honesty of the average person but I just can't see there being only 5 honest people out of every 3000. What is your opinion on this guys??

I agree with you, Leeloo. I have a very hard time believing that only 5 out of 3000 reports would be deemed to be legit. It almost seems that you'd have to stack the deck to get those kinds of results. And while I don't have any data to support this opinion, I'd be willing to make a SWAG that at least 75% of all reports are probably legit. And by legit I mean that the person making the report is convinced that they saw what they saw, even if it in fact turned out to be a misidentification of a known species.

I just don't believe that there are that many hoaxers in this arena.

FYI: SWAG = Scientific Wild-Ass Guess

Hey Fish I am going to steal your term SWAG. I like that and I actually do that a lot. Make wild ass guesses I mean. They are always based on sound female reason though.

I'd have a tough time believing that one too. Considering there's sighting from all differant kinda a people from all over North America. And if you listen to the reports, most of them describe a similar appearance, similar behavior, similar sounds. Most involve the same types of rugged terrain. Maybe not all, but that type of terrain is always nearby.

For that to be true 2995 out of 3000 would have to be spending their time scouring the internet reading sightings reports like us. I just can't buy that. If it's true Sas is the hottest conspiracy in history. I'm sure there's a lot of cases of misidentification. OK, and you gotta toss out the ones with horns and associated with UFO's too. And many obvious hoaxes. But 5 out of 3000 would be way too low IMHO.

Mark

I agree with ya’ll… I don’t think there are that many hoaxes being perpetrated out there…

Sure, there are some sightings or reports that are undoubtedly a result of people pulling jokes on their friends or the local townsfolk, or by someone making intentionally false reports just for some kind of perverse pleasure or even by some wise guy pulling on a dumbull!

But the sheer volume of these reports suggests there is much more at play here…

I venture to guess that at least 50% of potential Sas sighting reports are authentic…

I also swag that no more than 10% of authentic Sas sightings are, or have ever been reported in such a way as for the general public (card carrying member right here) to be aware of them.

If you use the 3000 as a baseline number for Sas sightings in a given period… 50% of 3000 is 1500… now multiply that number by 10 (the 10% thing I mentioned)… and you have a potentially actual number of Sas sightings for the same time period of…

15,000 actual Sas sightings…

I propose the actual number of Sas in the lower 48 to be much higher than we might think… based on my swag abilities…

An actual sighting number that high would suggest a population of… well, certainly more than 5,000…

More like 25,000… and possibly as high as 50,000…

Of course, I have absolutely no scientific data or proof to support this hypothesis…

And that’s why they call me the swagman… oh yes, I am the swagman…

Steal away, Leeloo! That's where I got it too.

Hey swagman...coo coo ca choo!

I think more like 50% are true, or like Fishbone said, these people honestly believe they saw something that was not the norm. Misindentified bears and persons included.

Definitely not every report is true, but in the long run, most of those are eventually exposed as such because of the nature of the reportee. They are looking for attention to begin with and won't stop at one simple report. They'll push it again and again until they run out of credibility.

You just have to learn to be observant to every detail the person relays and keep it for future reference, they will almost always trip themselves up.

More SWAGIN' for ya....

oh oh. Math. uhh... 0 - 100 divided by 2 = 50
5 - 100 = 95/2 = 47.5 that sounds cool. So I will go with that as my SWAG.
(It ain't scientific really but its my SWAG so.. ).

I know that the older guys like Byrne don't think much of the online reports.
That's ok. I think they are interesting and useful. Just not some people's .
it could be way more or even less than that number, got no clue.
Certainly depends on what report cluster you play with. If you are lookin' at ALL of em
across the board ?

maybe they got grant funds to compile that kind of information .

I think we have to many reports to say they are all liars is just wrong! I don't think all of these people are liars. There might be "like Arky says"some that are a mistaken identity or they think they might have seen something , but I don't think that many people lie about seeing something that is not the norm. They have to be seeing something! I for one am one of those people who has had an encounter,and my Mom seen one and I think there is more out there than people realize! You don't see bears all the time but they are out there. The same with cougars, you know they are there but you just don't see them eveyday and some don't believe when you do see them. The same goes for sassy. If we have that many reports of people seeing them then just think of the ones that don't report them. There must be a lot of people afraid to say they seen them. I know of some that don't want to admit they believe in them for fear of being rediculed........

Based on the number of 5 out of every 3000 reports being real,most of us here on this board,who have seen "something",are lying or misidentified what they saw.Then there are those of us who have found prints tracks or some other variety of evidence,are we lying also ?are we mistaken?I've seen Jon and oltimers evidence and the evidence others have presented,so are my own eyes lying to me also ?by the number allowed in that scenario there is only one real bigfoot going around the entire U.S who is responsible for all of the sightings,all of the tracks,hair samples,etc. But wait if that were true were stuck back with EBs theory of supernatural or ufo BFs that would be the only way to explain how quickly some of the sightings occur in time and space over so many miles.but then why would they need to leave tracks or be seen at all ?theres to much evidence in the way of track prints from different individuals alone to make that number rediculous.imo at least.

How would you prove or disprove a sighting? Is it based on a SWAG , or a scientific gut feeling when you question a witness? What is the criteria some of you guys use?
Pegleg

Doesn’t it seem to make sense that Peter Byrne would actually want to underestimate the number of legit Sas sighting… to downplay the number of Sas in the wilds…

All in order to make him look less of a failure when he didn’t shoot one…

Also, if you downplay the actual numbers of this creature… would it not then possibly decrease the potential competition that Peter may have been concerned about?

lol RB alla sudden dumbbulls is EVERYWHERE, panhandler on th corner of 6th and texas tried to sell me one this morning.

im pretty sure that th dad and his brothers had encounters long years ago growing up in th thickets. i say pretty sure cause they would never look ya dead in th eye, neither of th two living when i thought to ask about it after th spate of sightngs to home in th early eitghties. neither flat out denied it. uncle asked me why i was asking, had i seen somthing wierd? dad got all serious and tole me dont wander over by hickory grove or over to segno without at least th 12 gauge and a couple loads of buckshot in pocket.

later actually went booger hunting with th dad after a lady lived over by th creek come to th house one mornin all scared after spending a night huddled in bed with upstairs bedroom door locked with hound dogs shivering as something tore up th thicket in back of her place screamin, came up on her porch and left a nasty nasty smell. was pine sampling thicket with lots of berryvines, hard to get though. was trail down to th creek, this ladies house sat where th creek does a horshoe and she had creek on three sides of th house. we walked th sandy banked creek alla way round. ..nothing.

fourth side of house was pretty much bloced by huge beaver pond. only way in to house was th road runnin in front of house which went on to one more hous right in th point of th horshoe.

daddy was talkin panther or a bear. was amazing to watch old jungle stalker go all alert and ready like that. he had hunted japs in th pacific back to a time before then and it was real scary to see my gentle dad just radiate death like that. get a shiver thinkin about it.

could be completely wrong though, maybe they never saw anything unusual. and sure they pulled those dumbbulls a time or two and so did we when we was growing up. but th kid from wisconsin is th only time we ever used one on somebody. that was up in town and him being a yankee city boy(no offense intended) we prety much figgered he didnt have a rifle or shotgun beside him sittin out on th porch. so we did it. i know i had mentioned th older brother and his buddy skeering folks, but he is 14 year older than me so i wasnt in on that.

to actually go out and follow someone around in th woods and pull that thing? forget that noise, just about one hunnert percent chance of gettin shot doing that.

i guess what im saying is perhaps sometimes a joke gets alive and snowballs. nobody meant to cause any harm or get any researchers excited. but it happens i guess.

Not sure about the relevance to this thread but in Greens " year of the sasquatch" (1973)he has his file cards broken down for the PNW as this.I guess it shows that he at least lent these reports some credibility to include them.Based on his 497 report up till 1970

Even if there were 3000( I don't believe so) reports in just the early years of research by these numbers are still near 25% of every 1000 reports being true to at least Green.And like RB said we're always left to guess how many real sightings go unreported for one reason or another.

I think there may be some confusion over the use of the word LEGITIMATE.

Legitimate means authentic or genuine. Not legitimate does not mean that a bigfoot report is a hoax, but it could simply be a mis-identification of some other animal.

But the quote does trouble me. If bigfoot does exist, there had better be more than five out there.

There were have to be or they would have been extinct by now for sure. The population has to be large enough to sustain itself. If they were that small in numbers and spread out like they are, they would never be able to reproduce.

I usually include a trip question in the interview.

Byrne was a speaker at Ray Crowe's Bigfoot Daze II conference in 1993. Ray reported on his remarks in Track Record #31, p. 3, thus:

So he wasn't commenting on the % of invalid Internet reports. Even scoftics have not have the brass to quote this estimate against us, realizing its context.

However a recent (two-year-old or so) Skeptical Inquirer article on 50 Years of Bigfoot Evidence (it's 45, but who's counting?) quoted Loren Coleman's estimate that 80% of reports are bad. (I'm relying on my memory for this.) I wonder how he'd know? (EDIT: Maybe he was referring only to raw reports received by bfro, not the reports bfro publishes, 80% of which I SWAG to be valid. If so, and if that should have been evident from the context in which he spoke, congratualtions to the scoftics for quoting out of context. )

Have any of the big research groups, like BFRO, or the major writers on the subject made any estimates of how many sightings, on average, are reported each year? And, of that total, how many are worthy of serious consideration?

I don't think I've seen any estimates on this anywhere. I'd be curious whether the number of reports has gone up over the last decade or so, and whether researchers feel it is from the ease of reporting via the Internet or whether acceptance of the subject is growing and more people feel free to talk about it.

Webhead: In July I started the following thread: I'd Like Members' Estimates of Hoaxing. The first seven replies were insightful, but then discussion got onto a tangent about the Memorial Day footage & the Robo Affair. What's needed is more feedback from Members, plus feedback from some of the big name authors and organizations on this matter, which really should be clarified, to make the case for Bigfoot more compelling. Anyway, here's what I wrote at the start of my thread back then:

One thing that Iv'e noticed when reading reports is that quite a few of them that have been reported in recent years date back 10,20,30 years ago. Thought to myself, well, if they were bogus, then why go through the hassle of posting something that happened soo long ago. Don't agree with the low percentage.

Hi Rog, I like the way you dividied up the report classes to break down the method of reporting. It makes me think that it'd be a huge step forward if there was a standard reporting system in place. The problem, of course, is that without some sanctioning body such as those found in scientific or academic areas you have to pull diverse groups and authors together to come to an agreement.

Not being personally involved with any frontline research efforts, I can only say my gut reaction is that it would be next to impossible, but I may be entirely wrong. If the really serious voices could come together to agree on methodology for investigations it could strenghen the effort as a whole and perhaps make it easier to get mainstream science involved someday (which I do believe will happen eventually).

Reading reports on other sites, I am generally impressed by the sincerity of reporting witnesses. Course, we're just seeing the reports that passed muster for groups that maintain set standards, filtering out the flakes and hoaxers.

Well, just to play devil's advocate here, if I was going to make up a story about bigfoot, I'd probably put it as far back in the past as anyone would accept so 1) there'd be no physical evidence to trip me up, and 2) my story could change slightly with each telling and I'd be able to chalk it up to the length of time that had past ("oh yeah, well I just remembered").

I'm not saying that everyone who says they had an experience 2, 5, 10, or more years ago are making it up. I'm jusy saying if I was gonna lie, I'd do it that way...

Bipto, I agree on the points you stated, I guess it just all depends on the validity, witnesses, etc.

I dunno, if i was going to make a fake report, i'd make it recent. Sounds better that way.

Sounds better, huh?

Question?????? Anyone know of any instances where a witness has been asked to take a polygraph test? If yes, did the witness agree or disagree to submit. If agreed and one was taken, what were the results? I think it might be an interesting tactic to ask a witness that swears without a doubt that they had a clear sighting. (Not a sighting that the "subject" was partially hidden or too far at a distance to get a clear visual) Got curious and opened up my old phone book (don't have a local one yet) and did find a polygraph service, so I guess there are ways of getting a polygraph done other than through law enforcement. Even though it may be pricey, it may be one way of weeding out the true verses fiction reports. Especially some of the reports where people swear that they have had repeated visits. Another thing to find out also, is if a person is in a state of la la land and truely believes something that they have made up, would a polygraph just be a waste of time and expense? Or would it still give a legitimate reading?

A polygraph was given in the movie/docudrama " mysterious monsters" to John Green..no not that John Green ..A native american fellow who claimed a bigfoot sighting along a river while fishing...he passed..I always thought the coincidence of the name was the coolest part..

Polygraphs are garbage. Very subjective in interpretation.

HM
(who has actually undergone a poly)

Here's an interesting hoax-detection technique, described in Track Record #97, p. 2, col. 2:

Now you know, I've just gotta ask....

I like that trick Roger, very quick way to wrap up
a BS session.

No Stac I wasn't strapped up for doing anything wrong,
it was simply job related. I stand by my statement tho.

I would never think you were!!

The question begged to be asked though, other Stace.

Wanna know the other COOLEST thing about that? My uncle Bill Stenberg is the one who did the testing!

Belle