I know, I know, we've been over this a million times before. Me and Mrs Crew Chief (Donna) have steped up to those fancy headlights that go on your head for night running of the hounds. Now theres three different lights up there, halogen white, red and blue to save night vission. WE've noticed that coming in to us at night the hounds eyes match the color of light we are useing, man they glow a pretty red with the red one on and a blueish green with the blue one. Does this mean that animals eyes shine back the color you are shining or are we missing something here??? With the halogen white they look just like deers eyes do in your vehicles headlights!!!

Crew Chief

Light is made up of a spectrom of colours but we can classify them into red, yellow, blue. My understanding is that the colour you see with your eyes is result of the amount of light that is absorbed versus reflected on any given surface. So the reason grass is green, all of the red, some of the yellow and some of the blue are absorbed and the rest of the spectrom of light is relected. Our eyes see what is reflected. That's my basic understanding.

Roadrunner, Do you believe the stories of the bigguys eyes glowing red in headlights??? I don't!!!!

Crew Chief

I don't think I'am in a position to comment on whether or not they glow red. Nothing can glow unless it produces its own light source, what we see is reflected light. I can understand red 'glow' off of tail lights maybe, who knows? I also understand that photos can show our eyes to appear red, for reasons I do not understand.

Thats my point Roadrunner!!! Those stories are bulls--- and my hounds proved that to us a few weeks ago at night!!!!

Crew Chief

hate to tell you but your dogs eyeshine proved only that dogs have a differnt rod to cone ratio in the retinas than primates do. Thats already known.

Damn, I wish I could sneak into the atlanta zoo gorrila area some night to check this out further with my mag lite!!!!

Crew Chief

You don't even have to go that far. Just look at the 'red eye' in a photo that comes up from an external light source being reflected back.

I have a cat that each eye reflects a DIFFERENT color! One yellow, another more red, WITH THE SAME LIGHT!
I still don't know what is going on there!

Posted before,but here.
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/5...wildman/eye.htm

http://www.wonderquest.com/cat-eyes.htm

Speaking of eye shine. Anybody know what would have eyes that shine emeral green and can climb a tree. I am not talking about green like a deer but much deeper green.
It seemed to be bigger than a racoon going by distance from us and distance between the eyes. It also blinked often.

Mike (watch1)

My wife - when she's really , really mad at me.

I figured you'd be the one climbing the tree in that case.

I guess night hunting is safer cause human eyes don't shine!!! This will cut down on the friendly fire incedents quite a bit!!! Damn hounds had me and the wife out till midnight last night,, we ain't never gonna get a shot at the bigguy with them with us!!! Its so peaceful in the woods at night and just to add we've never seen any other eye shine other then like a deer in your headlights. We shine the tree tops alot now just in case there's a bear around, anybody know what color they shine???

Crew Chief

PS Jimf, I see the same red in my dogs eyes in photos but its not there with the mag lite at night. Human eyes've got that red too in photos but our eyes don't shine???

Anybody hear about Scott Herriot's account of eyeshine back in the early '90s. He saw in daylight two red "glowing" eyes in a deeply wooded area not but a few feet in front of him. He has video of it (See A&E's Bigfoot special). From the video I can't make out much of a "glow", but I do see what could pass for a set of primate oculars. Eyeshine in daylight, hmmm?? How often has that been reported? Obviously, eyeshine is light being reflected back at the source of light, the color of which is determined by what part of the spectrum gets absorbed. I've seen everything from red to green to yellow to white in the woods--not always knowing from what creature the eyeshine is attributed to, so the accounts I hear from eyewitnesses regarding eyeshine always seem to fall within that range. Seems credible enough to me. But what about our buddy Scott. What accounts for a 'glowing red' eyeshine in the day? Any guesses? (And I've met Scott. He seems sober enough to me

Eric Penz

Maybe the wooded area was alot darker than the surronding area? The creature could have been looking in a direction with very little light, then suddenly turn in the direction of the light source. The eyes wouldn't have adjusted to daylight, the light gets reflected back off the retina into the direction of the person, as is the case with many nocturnal animals. Just a thought.

My mom had a cat like that once. Was blind in one eye.

I've noticed in a dark room, if there's a light source behind my cat, I will get eye shine from the light reflecting off my glasses and into the cat's eyes. Not real strong, but I guess that shows that you don't necessarily need a strong light source to elicit eyeshine in certain animals. It seems to me, given the stories of bigfoot eyeshine, that their eyes reflect in situations where there is extremely low light directed at them, as my cat's eyes demonstrated. I have even noted daylight eyeshine in cats outdoors if they were in a shaded area, where there was only clear sky behind me, not the sun or any other point-source light.

I think that in this story the darkness surrounding the subject aided in the ability to see the eyeshine, and set up a similar situation to that which I experienced with cats in shadowy areas.

I stumbled upon an interesting paper that gets to Crew Chief's original question on PubMed:

The spectral reflectivity of the cat's tapetum measured in situ.
J Physiol. 1953 Jan;119(1):30-42. No abstract available.
PMID: 13035715 [PubMed - OLDMEDLINE for Pre1966]

Unfortunately I cannot find the full paper online. I think it might be an interesting read. Then I found THIS at Wiley InterScience:

Spectral sensitivity and photopigments of a nocturnal prosimian, the bushbaby (Otolemur crassicaudatus)
Jess F. Deegan II (1) *, Gerald H. Jacobs (2)
(1) Psychology Department, California State University, Bakersfield, California
(2) Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Research Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, California

The abstract is fascinating! Wish I had access to read the whole paper. I think these articles might lead to some interesting, legitimate hypotheses about eye morphology and function the putative sasquatch. However, I'm not sure since I don't have access to read either.

Out of curiosity, I checked PLoS Biology, since it is open access, but nothing when searching on 'tapetum.' Bummer.

Hmmm, time to do a little research...


Thig

The "Red Eyes" Phenomena

Many night time reports of Bigfoot seem to speak of the
animal's eyes as "Glowing" with a type of "Red Light" quality.
This is actually a very common attribute in reference to nocturnal animals.
There is a layer at the back of the retina termed the tapetum lucidum which acts
to improve low-light vision by reflecting light. The tapetum lucidum is a
reflective layer at the back of an eye. This layer reflects light that was not
absorbed by the rods and cones (of the eye), back to the rods and cones, to
allow more light to be absorbed. This gives many animals the ability to see in
very low-light conditions.

Human eyes do reflect light, as all flash photographers know--they just don't do
it very well. The distinctive "eyeshine" given off by cats and deer and
crocodiles, among other species, comes from this mirrorlike layer of cells in or
behind the retina. This structure is found mostly in nocturnal animals, for whom
it serves as a kind of light amplifier: The retina captures some of the light
that enters the eye, but some passes through. The tapetum lucidum bounces it
back at the retina, giving the animal a second chance to "see" it. So why don't
humans have this handy adaptation? Probably because we evolved in sunny climates
where too much light, rather than too little, was our problem. Anyway, because
the tapetum lucidum usually lies behind the retina, the light it reflects is
slightly out of focus. Maybe you'd be willing to swap accuracy for night vision;
our species apparently wasn't.

That's the basic explanation for the "Red Eye" effect encountered in many
sightings

Eric, I bought the video and I love it. I think Scott had something there but those outlined pictures sucked and looked nothing like a sasquatch. The video was preety good. I saw what looked like a head moving around, and I could see what looked like eyes. One could diffinitely see color in the eyes(looked dark red to me) when the supposed head moved. I wouldn't say they were shining though. Deer eyes are a dark brown/ black. What if sasquatch eyes are dark red? Maybe that would explain the glowing appreance as opposed to a shine or reflection. Or maybe the big guy is a supernatural monster?

I am interested in finding out more about eyeshine in primates, hominids and sasquatch, because it occurs to me that the creature in question most likely has a low sensitivity to light at those frequencies.

If we could determine what color light the big guy is insensitive to, then we'd have a better chance of catching him with camera traps or wide area monochromatic floodlighting.

I've often heard it said dogs are colorblind, so it would not surprise me at all if their eyes shone red green or blue according to what frequencies the incident light was strongest in.

About human redeye, I've heard it's due to being reflective in the near infra-red, which film and digital sensors are quite receptive to, but the human eye isn't. Would be good to know how far into the infra red old sas can see also, we might be able to use that info too.

Flash.

crewchf, you hunt hounds? I hunt hounds. what do you hunt for in Powder Spring GA? We hunt cougars, bobcats, bear and coon. The law says i cannot hunt all of those but my dogs can't help themselves. What i like about hound hunting is; it is the only form of catch and release hunting!

The 1 i saw had blueish green eye shine. I know it wasn't a deer as deer aren't 7-8 ft tall.

That's interesting, that's at the higher end of the spectrum, which would kind of make sense if reports that it can see in the near infra red are to be beleived.

Using a Night Scope, all eyes appear a bright green due to the shine of the infrared light. That is what I like about using it, even if something is standing behind some brush or even a log, you will see it's eyes when it peers around or over it to look itself.

The encounter I had, was we smelled a real horrible smell, heard the movement in the parabolic listening devices and then I seen it raise it's head and shoulders about two feet above the creek bank and check us out, It's eyes were bright green and it's size (Head, shoulders and neck) were twice my size and I am pretty hefty sized myself.

rhinohunter,, Rabbits for sure and we don't shoot em, just run em for fun!!!!

Crew Chief

PS I hate shooting rabbits,, now the bigguy is open game!!!!

I saw a reference a few days ago that stated that primates do not have a tapetum. I could find no definite statement for the presence of photopigments in primates. Large eyeballs, iris that can open very wide, few or no cones, and a rather flat front surface of the eye seems to be the only known mechanisms available for enhancing nigth vision in primates at this time.

Just some of my random thoughts on eyeshine reports with sasquatch . . .

*strong eyeshine usually associated with strongly nocturnal animal; so many reports of sas active during the day seems to indicate that they wouldn't be _that_ nocturnal.

*as primate close to us evolutionarily, we would predict that high definition color vision has been important to them, as it has for humans and all extant apes. Color vision usually thought to be incompatible with well-developed night vision - only so much room in there for rods and cones. There are nocturnal primates (owl monkeys in South America), and I don't think they have great color vision.

*woodland creatures that DO have red, glowing eyes: Whipporwills and ChuckwillWidows. These guys show forward facing, glowing red eyeshine. Owls can reflect red too. You get a barred owl looking at you with red-reflecting eyes from his perch on a low branch and you see two red eyes on a face from about 10' up in the woods. How many sas reports sound like that?

*green eyes in the woods (also vaguely "facelike") in the dark belong to a possum. Possum in a tree = 2 creepy eyes looking at you from bigfoot head-height.

*blue eyes cryin' in the rain - that's something else entirely.


So, the whole glowing red eye thing is a glowing red flag of a dubious account, to me . . .

I remember seeing a whipporwhil flying at night and all you could see for the most part was the "glowing" eyes. That was pretty freaky looking. I think the large number of BF sightings in the daytime are more a function of when humans are normally awake and wandering around the woods. Even though they are nocturnal, you still see plenty of deer, and other nocturnal animals in the day especially near dawn and dusk and this is a similar pattern with the bulk of bigfoot sightings in my opinion. For me, it is a no brainer that BF are nocturnal but I still read well informed intelligent people who think the evidence is not that compelling. It is interesting and surprising to me that a higher primate would be nocturnal and I agree that it is really surpising that they would lose (or reduce) their color vision. In addition, because the the tapedum lucidum reflects light back onto the rods, it tends to blurr the vision slightly for day vision. We have a membrane behind our retina that absorbs light that apparently helps to keep our vision sharp. If bigfoot is nocturnal, which I believe the bulk of the evidence suggests, then something in its environment made it become nocturnal. It must have been something more important than seeing vivid colors and seeing very sharply in the day like most other primates. One likely thing that I think may have pushed bigfoot into the dark was competition with or being hunted by humans. By becoming nocturnal, they would compete less directly with humans and would therefore be more likely to survive, perhaps.

Check out the controversial evolution thread here at the BFF, it will just confuse you more, obviously the twigs got bent on the family tree of this cat somewhere along the line, cats sitting down with mice and sasquatch for parlor games must have gravitated into a much more intimate situation.

Which thread would that be?

And why do you find this hard to buy???

Yeah I agree with you completely, and would like to expand on some of your points.

As far as my knowledge extends, I think that the little film that reflects light (tapetum lucidum) is only present in the prosimian primates, which includes the lemurs. One of the traits that makes the Tarsier distinct from other prosimians is a lack of a tapetum. It's still nocturnal, so its eyes became larger over the years to allow in more light.

Owl monkeys, as you mentioned, are the only truly nocturnal higher primates. They too lack a tapetum, which they make up for in an increase in eyesize and more rods with fewer cones (More info on owl monkeys for those interested).

So it seems probable that if sasquatch exists, it would not have a tapetum and its eyes would not reflect light like a dog or cat or lemur.

John Green has frequently pointed out that sasquatch reports distribute evenly over day and night, and since less people are active at night it stands to reason that the alleged animal would be nocturnal. That could be, though I would think that darkness would also greatly increase the likelihood of a misID, of which you list several possibilities.
Another alternative would be that the animals act more brashly in the cover of darkness, increasing the chance of being spotted. I suppose for the sake of parsimony, it's easier to stick with the latter.

Just for the purposes of argument, as I have had an upclose sighting of a nonhuman bipedal with green eyeshine, I will elaborate on the context of the eyeshine event I witnessed on 7-8-07. I obviously can't speak to the red eyeshine, but my sense is that it is NOT a "glowing red flag of dubious accounts". I have a research area, I had picked up on many clues that there was something to research over the course of many months.....such as the typical stick structures, things moved, things lost and returned, things deconstructed and reconstructed in differing ways, complex structures photographed, tree crashes, etc. Well over those months I became aware of elevated off the ground green eyeshine in two pairs, elevated on the side of a mountain.....near a central research location. It was a predictable nightly occurrence for weeks, the eyes would move back and forth as if on a shoulder/head of a bipedal above small sapling/shrub cover and they would "flash" or sparkle different intensities of green light. After making a conscious decision to place myself closer to these pairs of green eyes one night, I was actually approached by three bipedals hunched over and not human (height difficult to judge as hunched over they seemed smallish 4 1/2 -6 ft. range). One stationed as a sentry below me. The one below me could clearly be seen as bipedal, it clearly had the same green eyeshine and flashy sparkly movement on head turns as seen on the mountainside. It did approach me directly from 35 ft. away. It did close within 5-6 ft. while the green eyeshine continued to be evident for most of this ascent toward me. I am going to quote an email I sent to a fellow researcher to describe the rest of the situation.

"Yes, the two eyes, both individually had a cone of light such as a small white search or spotlight, not faint or dim but not super bright blindness, but enough for the creature with gradually intensifying illumination...to search the ground as it slowed and stopped before the peanut trail (beams/cones of light were present while it slowly moved and while it stopped, but they extinguished through dimming I believe before it began to move again). It was hunched over, kept its head down and presented more a left shoulder to me as it passed my front so that I could not make out facial detail (it was dark). It started out about 35 ft. from me only in the last 8-10 ft. did it slow some, eye lighting of the foreground was seen at 5-6 ft. directly in my front. I did not do an actual count but sense that it was less than one minute near 20 to 30 seconds. My whole sense of time during this encounter was colored by extreme adrenaline pulses with two behind me and the one closing on my front rapidly." I'm presenting this account for eyeshine discussion only.

I believe that witness sightings of unusual eye function.color of Sasquatch or Bigfoot have substance and are a true accounting of a freak of biology and visual structure.

I am not going to place a report under sightings/encounters thread and am not going to respond to the challenges of a sighting report at this time. What I saw and witnessed was a direct account of a planned attempt to gain closer access to the visitors with green eyeshine. I'm a professional in my community with a long time residence and 30 years experience plus in my field. As this is not a typical eyeshine event (either in color or manifested emanating white light) I throw this out as I have corresponded with other researchers in this regard. I am not stating that this was a sasquatch/bigfoot encounter either, but the simplest explanation is that it was one. If anyone has had any similar occurrences of green eyeshine and/or small white perceptible cones of light emanate from eye structures near non-human bipedals you can either contact me PM or if you wish respond to this thread or forum. I will respond by anonymous email if you wish to correspond that way too, just send me your email and I will reciprocate.

I have to agree wholeheartedly with the points brought out here. What I would be interested in knowing is whether the side-to-side swaying movement made by sasquatch would have anything to do with this nocturnal visual apparatus or setup as described by you Jim? Can you think of a way that could be an adaptive strategy for a rod-bound nocturnal primate? Could it be it somehow makes up for the fuzzy vision brought on by the lack of sharpness due to the absence of that membrane described in humans above? My understanding is that the tapetum actually allows for a double pass of the light back to the foveal area for sharper night vision but I could be wrong there.

Hi

There ya go,

Peace Buddie
Tim

I was with my grand mother, it was around 11pm. We were on her back steps. ( 1975 or 76. She lived in Preston Co. WV) She was holding a small revolver and a regular small flashlight with a clear bulb. Two creatures. Their eyeshine was red.
I was 10-11 years old at the time. I never went out to play in the backyard there again. All of us kids would crawl on the floor past the windows at night to get to our rooms. I will never forget it.

How could they glow with any other color than the one your using? When you are using the red lens it appears red because that is the only wavelength that the lens is allowing to escape, therefore that is the only color available to reflect back to you. It is the same with the blue lens. The only light source that will tell you what color the eye shine usually is, is a white light where the whole spectrum is available. I have never seen a bigfoot or their eye shine, but I have hunted predators and I can tell you that not every species have one color eye shine. I once called in two coyotes that came in together; one had red eyes the other green, and that was with a white light.

Choctaw

Have you seen this eye shine from Australia

Now thats skeered. Did you and anyone else in your family ever have any other sightings?



I'm glad that somebody else has finally broached this topic of individual-specific eye shine color possibility, I thought maybe no-one else besides the occasional red and green bigfoot differences had been seen.

I don't know if you can find my encounter story on here, it's more detailed.
My Grandma had something follow her one night (about 65 years ago) . She was carrying my uncle who was a newborn. They had been dropped off at the end of their lane one night by my Granddad who went for a nightcap. She heard "someone" in the woods when she started down the lane. She said she would stop walking, it would stop, she could hear it breathing. She started to run, it started moving along with her til she reached the house. It kept just inside the trees. They moved from there to the old house on my Great Granddad's property on the opposite side of Kingwood (WV).
Some years pass, My sister was then 5-6 years old, She and two cousins were in the kitchen of the old house helping with supper, the two others left the room, she heard someone walking on the back porch, she looked out the screen door and on the other side stood the "ugliest thing" she has ever seen. Big and hairy. She said it was looking through the screen door at her. I dont know if she mentioned it to anyone then, but she only relayed this story to me a few years back when i brought up the subject about what we saw there when I stayed. Two other sisters talk about the red eyes at the windows at night I am assuming the faces were not visible maybe just close enough for their eyes to reflect the lights?
It was DARK on that property at night. There was only one outside light on the property and it was attached to the garage on the right side of the old house. The back of the property was pitch black at night. I wish I could explain in pictures.
Three years ago my whole family drove there after my grandma's Funeral and talked to the lady who bought the place. None of the buildings are there anymore, and the woods has been cleared out some. I asked her if they had seen anything strange in the 25+ years they have lived there. She said no.
Amazing though how basically Nothing has changed there since we left. No development just a few more houses.

Nice photo Ozziebigfoot. Is this one of your own shots?

How far off the ground?

The eye's are 5'6'' from the ground, to the immediate right of the eyes is a sweet potato/swede that was hung from a tree limb.

I have to laugh, I had a major sweet potato incident in my research. Contact me privately about that weirdness if you're interested. Thanks for the
measurements. Thats one bright set of headlights on that beast, but the eyes have it.

This is another picture of the eyes, take notice of the nostrils below the eyes

What kind of manipulation or photoshop did you do on the original in order to bring said nostrils to the foreground, just curious?

I do believe I can make them out though. Man that thing really knows how to stay just out of flash range doesn't it???????????

Here is a case where I'd like to know the measurements of the sweet potato as it could give an excellent approximation of the distance
between pupils, an important measurement.

It wasn't done by me, some one on another forum done the enhancement.

ozziebigfoot, is that from a game cam, or were you there taking the photo yourself?

I have seen red eyeshine in deer, but have no conclusive explaination for it, maybe age. One night while I was driving home, and approaching a curve, I saw 3 does near the tree line. All three turned their heads and the largest had red eye shine, the other 2 had regular yellowish eye shine. Even while being able to say for 100% certain that they were deer, it was still very erie, and made chills run down my spine. It was a very bright deep red too, not just an orange.

I guess age because the one with the red eye shine was the largest, and seemed to be in charge. the others followed her every move. She seemed to be the matriarch.

trecker111,
The picture was taken with a trail camera

Has the non-enhanced picture been manipulated in any way, such as reduced pixels for easier posting?

If it has not, this is the enhanced pixels from the eye shine area, without using any techniques that would create blurs, or any residual bleeding of the pixels. It is highly brightened, and adjusted the contrast, but the pixels that were there were not manipulated to create residual effects that may end up giving false impressions. I see no pixels (zoomed to 3200%) that hint at the perceived nostrils in the enhanced version.



If this photo had been reduced after the tweaking done by the individual on the other forum, it would be great to see the photo they had to work with.