The demand for perfection will not allow the progress allowed for in the pursuit of the good.
What you and I both do is not worthless because it is not yet proof.
And when we do have that proof, what is now dismissed by some will be properly re-evaluated and reconsidered as to its relevance in on-going studies.

You’ve twisted my words. I didn’t make as strong a claim as you implied. I didn’t say that a witness’s saying that he saw a rock thrown in conjunction with his finding a footprint “corroborated a report”—i.e., provided proof. That’s your strawman. I said he had “corroborative evidence”—which didn’t imply proof, but merely evidence that strengthened his other evidence. IOW, in most cases of a thrown rock there would be a mundane explanation: a prankster, a recreational rock-thrower, even a rock deposited long ago in a tree by a volcano falling to earth. But if the thrown-rock occurred in conjunction with a sighting or footprint find, that strengthens the likelihood of its being connected with that occurrence.


I believe that such inferences are common in scientific work, at least when the conclusion drawn seems reasonable, and the inferential leap is small. But larger leaps are common in fields where there is little data and no way of conducting experiments, as when dealing with distant objects and the distant past. Scientific publications on matters like the Big Bang, the extinction of megafauna in North America 13,000 years ago, global warming, and evolution by natural selection, all make large inferential leaps. They are not thereby excluded from publication in scientific journals. Leading-edge scientific consensus in such fields is not a matter of absolute proof, but probable opinion—and even speculative opinion.

From what I’ve seen of scientific papers, there is a Findings section that sticks to the facts, and then a Discussion section that infers, or logically connects, or speculates, or does all three, as to the meaning of the findings. IOW, there’s not such a tight inferential linkage between the evidence and the conclusions as you assert. There’s a good deal of subjectivity and "slack" involved. Here’s a quote that supports my position:




Another strawman. I didn’t claim that a report like the one I cited provides proof; and furthermore I don’t think that a thousand such reports provide proof, or anything near it. (Indeed, once past a certain point, the more reports there are, the less convincing they are collectively, because such frequent sightings imply that there should be more evidence of their existence in the form of spoor, photos, etc.)

I.e., I don’t think we believers have enough to “go to trial” with. But we do have enough to meet a lower bar: there’s enough evidence to warrant a publicly funded investigation, similar to the investigation last year in Arkansas to try to confirm the existence of the Ivory Bill woodpecker. In my past posts, made before you joined, I’ve stated more than once that we believers have only got 20% of the way to proof, and that all we can claim at this point is that there’s enough smoke to justify checking for a fire.


I’m not assuming, or anyway not just assuming. That is, I haven’t willfully, arbitrarily, and baselessly come to a conclusion. Instead, I think the existence of several cases where witnesses have reported stone throwing in conjunction with a sighting are unlikely to all be due to coincidence or fraud or incompetence--especially not cases in which investigators have vetted the reporting persons to some degree and not found them seemingly credible. There’s enough to warrant a more intense investigation of the matter—a funded investigation.

There are degrees of tightness between the evidence and the inferences that are made from them. In “frontier science,” where not all the evidence is in, where the validity, quality, and meaning of the evidence is disputed, where lab testing is impossible (or anyway limited), fairly large, tentative inferential leaps must be made. Numerous conflicting theories of the causes of various diseases, for instance, are propounded and argued in this manner. There are many schools of thought on such matters. None of them are unscientific just because they aren’t airtight. Only well-established textbook science, or scientific journals in fairly settled fields, and fields where certain knowledge is obtainable, hew closely to air-tightness.


That’s only the first step away from certainty on a continuum that has many gradations of increasing uncertainty. All such inferences are respectable, provided they don’t label themselves as proof, but rather indicate their degree of uncertainty by using terms commonly found in scientific writing like “suggestive evidence” or even a mere “puzzling anomaly.” They are not utterly dismissible just because they aren’t proof, which is the essence of your argument—and a key scoftical dogma. (It’s the hidden trickery involved in the “extraordinary evidence” dogma: All evidence that doesn’t amount to proof therefore means zero and deserves no further attention. But, in cases of episodic phenomenon where investigation requires money and expertise and a social imprimatur, it’s unreasonable to demand that “the claimant” cough up proof. It’s society’s job to look into such matters, just as it’s the CDC’s job to look into claims of weird new diseases.)

For instance, if evidence for the existence of the Ivory Bill woodpecker is taken seriously and given weight, that’s a larger inferential leap than the one made about an apparent gorilla bed most likely being made by a gorilla. An Ivory Bill is a known species, but is presumed extinct. And yet it’s a respectable leap for a scientist to make—provided he remembers that he is in relativistic, probabilistic (“most likely” or “it’s possible”) terms.

A similar situation exists when the tracks of Out Of Place animals are found, such as Alien Big Cats in Britain, or Eastern Cougars.


The IBW does have such a distinctive tap, according to the experts in the matter.





Name a dozen. (I.e., provide a dozen mundane explanations for an encounter with multiple reinforcing features, like a footprint and a stone-throwing.)

Then give a mundane explanation for a collection of similar reports with the same constellation of features.

If your explanation is that the witnesses are lying, mistaken, fantasizing, copying the reports they’ve read by others (unlikely in the early cases) and/or incapacitated, then provide some evidence for your claim. You have a burden of proof, if you make or imply such a claim.

To obtain such evidence, an intense investigation of the persons making reports, and the circumstances of their reports, including numerous psychological tests, would have to be performed, as Barbara Wasson urged thirty long years ago. Let the chips fall where they may. That sort of check-out is needed to get to the bottom of the mystery. Or at least to exclude a few ways of dismissing it as unreal. But it requires public funding.


Your analogy lacks any relevance. A proper analogy would be a case where a gorilla bed is found in association with gorilla poop, gorilla odor, gorilla hair, etc. Or where an Ivory Bill is heard tapping in conjunction with being heard making its distinctive call and in further conjunction with a sighting.


As I’ve said above, a direct linkage is not needed, provided all one is doing is calling for an investigation, not an indictment.


No, it’s just “explaining away,” which ignores the context. This is a key tactic of scofticism.

Let’s say there are two witnesses to a Bigfoot who, unknown to each other, sight the animal miles or days apart and report that it had the same characteristics as regards hair color and length, height, sex, bulk, etc. Or suppose there were half a dozen witnesses to a sighting who made similar descriptions when interviewed. The similarity of their descriptions severely undercuts attempts to explain away their reports in terms of hallucinations, incapacity, lying, etc. When this context—the similarity of reports—is ignored, that’s what results in a fiction, despite your blustering capitalizations to the contrary.

Similarly, the context of numerous witness sightings “adds up”—they can’t be collectively be dismissed in the same way each individual case can be. Here’s why not:


On the contrary Bigfoot science and the Bigfooter consensus has emphatically and nearly unanimously rejected MK Davis’s bloody pool and thigh-shot hypothesis—as have I. (They look spectacular, but just because something looks a certain way doesn’t mean that it is a certain way. Context must be considered, as well as more likely alternative explanations.) Scott Marlowe’s attempt to put Gimlin on trial has been even more emphatically rejected. This is just another of your strawmen—it’s unrepresentative of Bigfoot science.


Euclid employed indirect reasoning, I recall. It’s recommended in guides to critical thinking like Polya’s classic How to Solve it (pages 162-171 in my edition) and Anthony Weston’s A Rulebook for Arguments. It’s such a basic and obvious device that I’m sure it’s used in science and law as well, where appropriate. For instance, it stands to reason that if the defendant’s alibi can be ruled out, that indirectly proves that he’s guilty. For example, OJ’s alibi that he owned no pair of the unusual Bruno Magli shoes, whose prints in his size were found at the murder scene, was discredited when a photo of him in them surfaced. That destroyed his credibility and established his guilt—at least beyond the 50% level required in a civil trial. (However, because legal cases involve real life, not a controlled experiment, such a conclusion isn’t airtight.) I regret that I don’t have any scientific cases handy that I can cite. I hope to bone up on this subject in time and have a better comeback.


Based on what you said to Munns on this matter, I infer that what you’re implying here is that, since it is theoretically out of the question for Bigfoot to exist (there’s little hard evidence, how does it survive the winter, what does it eat, why so few tracks in the snow, why aren’t there more encounters if it’s so widespread, etc.), then it doesn’t matter if Patty doesn’t look like a suit; she can be ruled out on a priori grounds.

I, personally, admit the weight of such arguments against Bigfoot’s existence. Indeed, I even posted here somewhere that if Bigfoot is confirmed, I won’t say, “I told you so,” I’ll say, “Hey wait a second, that’s impossible.” I even created a list of 23 Reasons Why Bigfoot’s Unlikely, printed it up onto double-sided business cards that I distributed at a talk I gave, and posted here. I didn’t go along with the rebuttals that were offered by believers here—I thought the collective weight of the Reasons was strong, even if each one of them wasn’t airtight.

I’m of two minds about the Bigfoot phenomenon. I can’t dismiss the objections to Bigfoot’s being real, because they seem strong, but I can’t dismiss the evidence in Bigfoot’s favor either. I think attempts by disbelievers to do so are very unconvincing. I’m on the fence, but leaning toward belief, even though it’s hard to justify.

(What I think is really going on is that the Pranksters Above are trying to rattle our cages, both believers’ and disbelievers’. My main conclusion is that the evidence justifies the establishment of a Department of Weird Things, dedicated to gathering, collecting, and critiquing such oddities. There’d be a skeptics’ wing in this department. Who knows, maybe that tail would wag the dog.)

Therefore I don’t think it’s right to give no weight to findings in favor of Patty’s authenticity. I think the honest thing to do is to admit that the phenomenon poses a real puzzle, with strong considerations on both sides. I’ve said here that I believe more in Patty than in Bigfoot, contrary to the usual believer’s position. It’s illogical, but it makes a certain amount of sense.


You can argue that there might well be something wrong with an individual case. But that doesn’t scale up—it’s implausible to dismiss a large collection of cases:


There's another justifiable reason for believers' seemingly uncritical acceptance of wobbly evidence, which was neatly put by Green in Apes among Us, p. 236: "If one report is true it is almost certain that most of them are. ... If you find yourself forced to accept any of the reports as valid, you lose your basic reason for questioning the validity of others. … Then there is no reason to doubt that most of the people who think they have encountered one have actually done so.”


My comment followed your world-weary sigh of exasperation, “And people wonder.......” That posturing and attitude-striking, which you failed to quote, is what I suggested you save for JREF, its natural habitat. I wasn’t referring to your entire post, as you pretend.


What I should have said was that I used it here as an attack on the arguments you employed, not on you personally. That’s all I did. (In other cases I usually employ it as an “aside,” talking in the abstract (impersonally) about positions taken by the group of scoffing skeptics I call scoftics.) I referred to your tactic of dismissing evidence without considering its context when I used that word.


The term implies that capital-S “Skeptics” are not dedicated to truth first, but to debunking or scoffing at virtually any cost. My use of the term is well-supported by the articles I linked to a couple of weeks ago, and by the arguments of Marcello Truzzi, a CSICOP co-founder who left the organization in disgust. He also renounced the phrase he had coined, “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence,” because of the way it had been mis-employed (see my comments above on it) by what he called “pseudo-skeptics,” whom he described as scoffers, not true skeptics. I’ve just mashed together his “scoffer” with “skeptic” to produce a less unwieldy tag.

As for ad homs, scoftics have been the leaders in that regard, with numerous and frequently employed abusive terms. I’m just trying to even the balance. You guys just don’t like it when someone turns the scorn on you.


Not so, it’s ad rem. It speaks to the character of the arguments, not the character of my opponent. Here’s what I said:



One thing I’d really like to see would be a critique of what you scoftics imagine science to be by a panel of scientists reviewing various scoftical books and websites. Your position seems to be an uncritical scientism, which is the position that science, and only science, is entitled to speak with authority about truth. I don’t think that science has that much authority. I don’t think it has much to say about decision-making in military or legal matters, where an insistence that only evidence that had been completely validated could be given consideration would lead to disastrous outcomes. And I think your idea that science is something objective and above all inference and human foibles is unsustainable.

Unfortunately, I’m not well-read enough in the field to do a good job of this myself. And I’ve been so busy with other stuff that I haven’t been able to read most of the books I’ve bought. But I’m convinced I’m in the right by a couple I’ve dipped into, such as The Golem: What You Should Know about Science, by Harry M. Collins and Trevor Pinch. The editorial review on its Amazon page reads:




Tsk tsk. Persons referring this post in the future, as you suggest below, will tend to put that label on you for your mad invective, name-calling, numerous strawmen, typos galore, uncritical scientism, bombastic belligerence, etc.


Nurse, the cold compress.


Pathetic.

The similarity of their descriptions severely undercuts attempts to explain away their reports in terms of hallucinations, incapacity, lying, etc. When this context—the similarity of reports—is ignored, that’s what results in a fiction, despite your blustering capitalizations to the contrary.

And, lucid dreams I might add

Hi

We were only talking about BF Fingerprints and stuff, What happend to the little thread we had going ??

Peace
Tim

**tweet**!!
Personal foul. Unsportsman-like conduct.

...and perfection is not realistic.

from the guidelines for those who haven't read them...

You can find the rest of the guidelines here.

http://www.bigfootforums.com/index.php?s=&...st&p=374964

Back on topic. Don't make me have to pull this thread over and spank somebody. lol

Basically Tim , it's what always happens. See there are quotes thrown around from books and other sources presented as if they were fact based usually on the sole word of one person with no corroboration whatsoever.

In this case we were discussing 'lifting ' print of alleged Bigfoot from alleged rock or other alleged objects being thrown.

Here's where the problem starts , no one even kept the rock in the first place, much less even attempted to dust for prints or anything else. ( likely didn't check the area for other corroborative evidence either based on most of those types reports I've read.) But it's always interjected that there are reports dealing with it , so it must be real. Despite no other actual evidence than the report itself which may or may not have been investigated and even then in many cases not very thoroughly.

It then digresses into an argument over the reality of the reports and of what value they represent, again in most cases by people who want good stories but could care less about detail or accuracy in a report or even if the report is real if it interferes with what they want to believe. Hell, I'll bet you 25 dollars that most of the people arguing on the belief side of it, have never actually seen a Bigfoot , attempted to investigate a report , and even fewer have attempted to follow up on what they allegedly had happen by checking the area for further 'evidence' ( hair/tracks/physical being) or weren't prepared with even a camera in most instances of where they did have a "maybe" or "possible" something happen.
Still want to call themselves "Bigfoot researchers " though, it just sound cooler than telling your friend and family that you're the county Tiddly-wink champion.

The other thing I've noted, not just in this thread, but others as well that digress into a belief/skepticism debacle, is that it always falls into the what constitutes evidence debate, however subtle that may be. In this case it's about reports of alleged occurances, when the reasons noted above would show they are not true. If I'm wrong about that , and someone can point out to me where someone actually did lift a Bigfoot fingerprint , that was proven ( I'll settle for even likely) to be such off of a rock or other thrown object, please educate me on it. The exposed fakes by Hallmark don't count , and if you think they do, then you need to educate yourself first , not others.

But here , my dear Tim, comes the tricky part. When you have only someones word that something happened, which is then to varying degrees of accuracy investigated and published , and then repeated and published again though this time missing a word here, a sentence there , how accurate is it in reality? And exactly how does it constitute anything evidentiary when the original intent of the report may at that point be lost , ( and that's if was even investigated at all.)

I also don't recall anyone of a skeptical nature ( myself included) asking for perfection , but as BM in my opinion noted about good not being good enough , do better if you want it taken seriously. Not talk about it. Do.

There are, as oft said a lot of expectations regarding Bigfoot, and what is considered " evidence" to be better than it is, to have it taken more seriously by science or other authorities , but the burning question is, have you actually done anything about it ? When you go out do you carry a camera/ Video cam ? Tape measure? Hydrocal ? Do you even go out ? Because quite frankly , the biggest problem in the Bigfoot field as far as expectations and suggestions go, is that there is someone else who who will do it for you so you don't have to.

No perfection is not likely attainable or realistic , but better certainly is . And if you're fine with how things are done , how 'evidence " is presented and how it's not taken seriously, by all means feel free to sit here arguing the same old thing ( written or done by someone else) and defend it's reality for the next ten years if you want. Because IMO that's exactly what you're going to be doing.

Now before anyone gets off on some kind of stupid "scoftic" or "armchair researcher" remark realize a couple of thing, I've probably investigated more reports than you, spent more time in the woods than you, and been "researching" Bigfoot longer than you. I've been involved in , heard, seen and been part of some things you probably only wish. I don't say that as a matter of bragging or out of some false sense of ego. I say that because I'm the dumb-ass who stupid enough to go running down a 65 foot steep-assed river bank in the dark in an attempt to catch either a hoaxer or the real deal. Take it for what it's worth and believe or don't that fact as you see fit , there are people who know and people who never will.

One last thing ( as if anyone cared at this point ) regarding: I've said it before. Don't assume what my tone, mannerism or context is unless you can see me or hear my voice. The only tone designation is the one that you've assigned to me in your own mind and may not be how I'm speaking or thinking.

I realize that. That's why I stated:




Yes, the year—1978—that Green published his Sasquatch: The Apes among Us.


There’s a difference between not having facts and not providing the publication date of a cited source. In what you wrote above, you ignored my source-citation for the sake of a cheap point-scoring attempt. As a result of this and similar cheap-shot remarks of yours that I cite below, I’m tuning you out (filtering you) after this exchange.

The sort of response I’d have made in your place would have been this: “I’m assuming you are alluding to Green’s 1978 opus, Apes among Us, correct?” If so … [and I’d then have gone on with whatever objections I had to using that as a cutoff date].

It should have been obvious what I was referring to, because that was the book I referenced earlier in the thread when citing his statistics on rock-throwing incidents, and because that is Green’s magnum opus—and hence the book one can infer is being alluded to when a non-specific reference like “Green’s Book” is made. Its date of publication is a matter of common knowledge, since I assume every Bigfooter has a copy. It’s also his most recent book (aside from his recent re-issue, The Best of Sasquatch/Bigfoot).


I’m basing it on Green’s book, which contains the following introductory paragraph at the start of Chapter 25, which summarizes the statistics he’d collected:

On page 13, Green implied that he got into Bigfooting in 1957. Presumably his reports also included a fair number of reports from dates prior to that year. It’s too bad he didn’t give a breakdown by time period for his reports. (E.g., “1955-59: 10%,” etc.) Ideally there should have been two columns, one for date of the encounter and another for the date the incident was reported. It would be interesting to see if there was a trend over time in the features reported that suggested that more copycat reports were being filed. (I hope whoever inherits his computerized files will attempt such an analysis.)

For instance, was there an increase over time in the % of reports containing standout elements of encounters—dramatic or highly notable features that a TV producer would tend to disproportionately select to give his audience Hot Stuff, and that would stick in a viewer’s mind--as opposed to the more forgettable features? If so, that would indicate a copycat contamination problem. Examples of standout features would be odor, rock-throwing, loud howls, and maybe stick-banging. Comparatively reclusive features would be hair color and length, palm color and size, and degree of stockiness.

Since the seventies were the height of Bigfoot mania, at least in terms of TV specials and book sales (of books by Byrne and Green, primarily), it’s likely that some reports were contaminated, or inspired, by details of accounts of encounters that had appeared in the media.

The way to get to the bottom of this, or at least to peel off a few layers of the onion, would be (as I suggested a few hours ago) to intensely examine a lot of Bigfoot-reporters psychologically, check their backgrounds, and subject their accounts to intense scrutiny. That would give us at least a ballpark figure for what % of reports delaminate under examination and can be considered either “bad” or “unreliable.”

I haven’t done any witness-interviewing myself, but I’m aware that it’s dangerous to trust any particular witness implicitly. One of the posters here, who’d done a lot of digging-up of witnesses in his area with ads on bulletin boards, etc. told me how disillusioned he was when he discovered that some of the witnesses whom he’d considered golden embroidered their stories when he re-interviewed them a few yours later. That doesn’t necessarily mean (to me) that their whole story was made up—maybe the witnesses just got tired of hearing themselves say the same damn thing every time. But, when dealing with this phenomenon where so much is uncertain, one wants to give credence primarily, or maybe exclusively, to witnesses who have strictly down-to-earth, just-the-facts personalities, not those with a creative streak.

However, I think there is some safety in numbers—i.e., in a large collection of reports, such as Green and Bindernagel have amassed.


Green appeared from time to time on a talk show in Vancouver, which led to listener-witnesses contacting him with their accounts. Probably the accounts sent to him by mail by other Bigfoot researchers in the sixties and seventies made their way into his files as well.


OK, let me rephrase that: Your response ignored my qualification. It implicitly dealt only with relatively recent encounter reports, because it used the present tense and it charged me with inexperience in interrogation. And I know where you’re coming from on this matter, from your famous post a few years ago of a phony but authentic-sounding report that you made up for illustrative purposes. You emphasized there that it would be easy for a hoaxer to cobble such a story together after browsing the Internet. Such a readily accessible source of thousands of reports and their typical story elements wasn’t available at no cost back in the day. Therefore my qualification was very germane, and it was disingenuous of you to fail to quote it.


What’s a very weak argument? Where have I used it, whatever it is, more than once? You’re the one who chided me for not being specific enough in my citation of Green’s book, but you’ve provided nothing specific here.


OK, here’s your entire quote:

What I did was to reply to the assertions in that comment one phrase at a time, in four pieces. The entire comment was present and could easily be reconstructed by a reader. It wouldn’t have worked to boldface the part I disagreed with as you suggest, because I disagreed with four parts, so bolding four phrases would only have amounted to clutter—nearly the whole paragraph would have been bolded. It’s easier on the reader for him not to have to repeatedly refer back to a whole paragraph, or to try to keep the whole thing in mind at once.

I wish other posters would use this technique as well—it makes things easier to follow, and makes it easier to quote and respond to the appropriate bits in a Reply. Otherwise, when there are four points in a paragraph, and the Replying poster wants to respond to a few of them, or even to all of them, the quoted material and response and response-to-the-response can get spread across several screens, because small bits are not being dealt with one at a time, and because the responder often has to insert context-establishing “lead-ins” to keep the reader on the rails. I don’t employ this technique to obfuscate, as you insultingly asserted, but to clarify.

Anyway, getting back to the specific paragraph I supposedly mutilated with an out-of-context quotation, what need was there for any context in the use I made of it? The phrase I quoted implied that you, in contrast to me, possess critical thinking skill, did it not? So I’m entitled to quote your pretension against you when I detect one of your transgressions.

Your attempt to manufacture a comeback on this issue is disgraceful.


About 18 months ago I did a thorough search of my original posts for instances in which I used the S-word in any of its variants. I computed a lot of statistics and either posted it, or saved it to one of my documents. Unfortunately, an hour of searching for it has been unsuccessful.

What I recall is that about 10% of my posts qualified, but only half of them contained the word in the post itself—the other half contained it in a post of mine that I’d quoted in a subsequent post. So, if I used the word in only 5% of my posts, that’s a low rate of use. Of course, since I’ve made over 4000 posts, the absolute number would be high—something like 200. But that doesn’t disprove my contention that I’ve rarely (5% of the time) used the term.


It’s natural to have some neutral term to use to refer to disbelievers—and skeptic is the standard term. Of course I use it in a negative fashion, because I disagree with their position. But I haven’t used it in a sneering fashion to dismiss an argument I couldn’t cope with otherwise, as you assert. You’ve “lost me” as a reader of your posts with this sort of nasty and unscrupulous misrepresentation.


You didn’t specifically state that “everyone here thinks it makes you sound like you have no critical thinking skill …” OTOH, you didn’t specifically state that “I think it makes you sound like you have no critical thinking skill …” By leaving out that qualification, you were implying that you were making an objective observation that anyone would agree with. It was like saying, “You sound like Donald Duck”—the implication of which is that the person being addressed sounds that way to everyone. But I guess I over-reacted a bit here, since you were only talking about appearances (“sound like”).


That’s another willful misrepresentation, perhaps the worst yet. All I was saying was that I wasn’t going to abandon the use of my term because my targets think, or purport to think, that it indicates I lack critical thinking skills, and therefore makes me look bad in their eyes. I don’t care for their good opinion. I’d rather not have it. Your attempt to stretch that into something with wider implications is disgraceful.


Four pages sounds like a lot, out of context. More misrepresentation.


But I’m not an uncritical believer, and you’ve been here long enough to know that. I don’t swallow everything that comes down the pike. For instance:

• I virtually never read or comment on sighting reports—at least not more than a few non-committal sentences. I haven’t gone into rah-rah mode very often. (I did get my hopes up unduly about the Manitoba footage—but that was because I expected it to be as clear as Moneymaker implied it would be.)
• Ditto for blobsquatches.
• I avoid speculating on Bigfoot’s possible anthropological antecedents—mainly because I think they’re all too much of a “stretch.”
• I’ve taken a fence-sitting position on pieces of evidence that have subsequently come under a cloud, like the Memorial Day footage, the Redwoods footage, the Skookum cast, the Penn and Teller hoax, etc. I even gave Dan Perez a paragraph to use in his issue devoted to feedback on DesertYeti’s critique of the Skookum cast, in which I said I was leaning toward disbelief as a result of reading it.
• I’ve vigorously criticized some purported evidence, such as Loren Coleman’s Fruit Giant poster from the 30s. (I said it was based on legends of European giants.)
• I criticized numerous points in Meldrum’s book.
• As a copy editor, I’ve made several “skeptical” observations about authors’ overstatements and tried to have them employ more cautious phraseology.
• I’ve posted a 23-item list here on 23 Reasons Why Bigfoot’s Unlikely, and have expressed only a qualified “belief” in Bigfoot. (See my “I’m of two minds” passage in my latest reply to LT, above.)
• I expressed caution about one piece of possible evidence I found and posted: a twisted tree—and disbelief in an accompanying stack of rocks, which looked too neat and highly stacked.
Etc. This is off the top of my head, so I’ll probably think of several more items later.


I don’t consider you a scoftic, because your criticisms aren’t based primarily on a knee-jerk display of the attitudes and platitudes inculcated by the Skeptics movement. If I considered you one of them, my wording would have been different. I’d have added the two boldfaced letters to what I wrote, “As for what it makes me sound like TO YOU, or to any scoftic, why should I care?” Instead, I distinguished you from them.


Oh sure, I’m not arguing against reasonable, informed skepticism. I applaud the efforts of those sorts of people who’ve exposed, or anyway cast doubt on, dubious claims. I even applauded Matt (Tube) when he shared with me his whiskerless Patterson photo, not because I thought it was really whiskerless, but because I thought his find displayed a keen eye and a questing spirit. I didn’t get offended because it cast doubt on the PGF.

(FYI, according to MK Davis, when a positive film like Kodachrome 2 is copied, contrast in enhanced—IOW, darks get darker and whites get whiter. In addition, the shot of Patterson casting the track was made in sunlight and overexposed—i.e., washed out. (Compare the intensity of the color of the plaid shirt in both images to see the difference.) These account for the washing out of RP’s whiskers. They can be seen in the image Chris Murphy sent me, and which I posted here, which he copied from the original strip and which shows his whiskers well. They aren’t as dark as in the image of him under the tree, but that’s only to be expected because of the differing amounts of exposure.)


What I think of how you are arguing couldn’t be printed.


I think possibles add up. Someone said, “Three possibles make a probable, three probables make a certainty.” Here’s another quote in the same vein:

I think that the Bigfoot mystery has more to do with the sort of problem-solving involved in legal matters than it does with science, which primarily deals with hard stuff it can get its hands on. The fact that it can’t come to grips with an episodic, mostly anecdotal phenomenon like Bigfoot is a result of the limitations of scientific inquiry, at least as defined by today’s scientific culture.

On the first statement, Jim : Thats why i always take the time to read and absorb your posts

Secondly : No one should just blurt out a false thought like that cause they feel the tone is no too there liking, If you feel like it might be out of line, Use the PM and ask the member whats going on........ Thats what it is there for, I use it all the time, It works . . . .

Peace
Tim