QUOTE(Saskeptic @ Nov 8 2006, 02:23 PM)
Why would a print be unlikely to have been hoaxed just because no one had (apparently) confessed to making it?
The claim has been made by many skeptics, you among them, that hoaxing is rampant, etc.
My response was (in effect) that
rampant hoaxing implies a multitude of hoaxers, which in turn implies, especially after many decades, at least a few substantiated confessions and realistic track-making demonstrations in soil, similar to what has occurred with crop-circles. (Although the confessions by circle-makers have been mostly made in private to crop circle investigators.) Since such track-making confessions and demonstrations are essentially lacking, hoaxing is unlikely to be rampant. Therefore some or most of the footprints are genuine, probably.
IOW, I'm talking about the collective pattern of evidence, and the probabilities related to that pattern. Probabilities come into play when there are a large enough number of cases to permit reliable statistical inferences. As Holmes said, "While the indivdual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty." Your focus on the individual case is irrelevant.
QUOTE(Saskeptic @ Nov 8 2006, 02:23 PM)
Why couldn't a partial print just be one that didn't "take" from the hoaxer's print-making apparatus?
That's a possibility--a likely possibility. But a hoaxer who wanted to fool a lot of people would be sure to include at least one good print in a trackway as well. Yet most footprint finds lack that one good impression. My article below makes this point:
Who’d Fake a Forgettable Footprint?
Roger Knights
(Printed in Bigfoot Times, March 2006)
John Green pointed out that a hoaxer needs to make an
outstanding statement: “A built-in pitfall for people with fake stories is that they have to make them sound too good. Reports of ordinary sightings are a dime a dozen. They don’t attract the kind of attention that would justify bothering to make them up.” (
Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, p. 182)
This applies to footprints too. A photo of a faint or blurred or partial print won’t wind up in the local newspaper. (Imagine the media’s indifference if Jerry Crew had had only a half-print to show the camera.) Nor would a cast of such an item be featured in a museum’s collection or a Bigfooter’s book. So a hoaxer wouldn’t plant fuzzy or fragmented prints at a site. (Aside perhaps from a few as substantiating elements or accidentals at a full-track site.)
And yet most footprint sites DO contain nothing but marginal, “3F” prints (Fuzzy, Faint, or Fragmented). For instance, T. A Wilson wrote, “The striking thing about the tracks was that ninety-nine out of a hundred people would have overlooked them.” (
In Pursuit of a Legend, p. 35) And John Green wrote in 1973, “In the past five years … I haven’t seen a good, fresh, unmistakable Sasquatch track anywhere.” (
The Sasquatch File, p. 48.) Therefore few of them were hoaxed. Therefore many were authentic. (Putting aside a few “blob-prints” that were wishfully imagined to be more foot-like than they were.)
(It might be objected that faint, fuzzy prints would have resulted from the “snowshoe effect.” And yet all hoaxers would first have made test-prints in their backyards before trying to “make an impression” elsewhere. And, if they’d found they couldn’t make clear test-prints, they’d have used a heavy hammer to pound them in, or restricted their track-hoaxing to mud or soft sand (near bodies of water), or to snow. (Prints in snow are the easiest to hoax and the most likely to be noticed; therefore their rarity—only 25% or so of total track-finds—indirectly supports the proposition that print-hoaxing is rare.))
This is a neat paradox. The
unremarkable cases (many, anyway), seen in this new perspective, suddenly become the remarkable ones. The
unconvincing cases are, collectively, the convincing ones. It’s like looking at an optical illusion in which, when one shifts ones attention, the “field” swaps places with the “figure” and becomes the significant element.
It’s characteristic of us Westerners to focus our attention on things that stand out, like “good” footprints: Salience = Significance. (According to Richard Nisbett's book
The Geography of Thought—e.g., pp. 90 & 109.) It rarely occurs to us to shift gears mentally and consider that the “good” prints might be the worst (the most likely to have been hoaxed) and the “bad” prints might be the best (unlikely to have been hoaxed). Only rarely do we see that insignificance or non-salience might be highly significant. Exceptions: Holmes—“Only one important thing has happened in the last three days, and that is that nothing has happened”; Luke—“Sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.”
(This off-centered viewpoint is, however, characteristic of East Asians. They’re too polite to say so, but maybe
everything we know is wrong. (Whee!))
PS: Reports of Bigfoot encounters also “shade off” in a similar fashion. There are a few good sightings, then a multitude of marginal sightings, and then an even larger number of near-encounters: cries, noises in the bush, smells, disturbances in the environment, etc. Here again, the “good” cases, precisely because they’d attract attention, are the ones a hoaxer (or hysteric) would be most likely to have created, and the unremarkable, undramatic cases, considered as a whole, are the least likely. The unremarkable cases in turn give some support to (most of) the good cases, because if Bigfoot is real then there
should be a humdrum matrix of fleeting or fuzzy encounters from which they emerge. If encounters were the work of hoaxers in ape-suits looking to make an impact or attention-seeking witnesses, there’d be far fewer “marginals” among the reports.
PPS: Someone else has observed this paradox long ago:
QUOTE
In fact that’s how I was sure it was a ghost: if it had been doing romantic things [like moaning or rattling a chain], I might have suspected that someone was pulling my leg; but hammering nails into walls and sweeping floors, there could be no trick about that; no one would make it so dull.
—Lord Dunsany, “Jorkens in High Finance”
)