I have thought about this for a while now. What would be really useful would be for someone with the time and ability to put all the reported sightings into a database, not just from the Google Earth information and the BFRO sightings, but also the sightings from all the other individual websites like this one, and NABF, the MABRC, and Ohio, Georgia, Arkansas, Oregon, Washington organizations websites, and many others I have not mentioned, as well as books like the Bigfoot Casebook and John Green's Sasquatch book.

If all this information was combined into one database, with some graphics like time lapse maps of active areas which could change and show some kind of images coming and going over the years, then we MIGHT have an inkling of patterns of movement and migration, if indeed these creatures do migrate.

Any takers?

Nobody out there who wants to do this?

Just giving it a boost to get it up on top. I really think it's a good idea, but I have no idea how to do it.

No body else likes this idea? I know, it would be a ton of work.

Since the validity of the majority of sightings is unknown - any conclusions based on a study of those sightings would be useless. IMHO
Poor data = spurious conclusions.
Basic science.
Or to put it another way - you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

I have been thinking about that too. What if you only took the most authentic sounding sightings in a specific area, like northern California, or a very active area in Oregon or Washington state?

Of course verifying the authenticity of any sighting is necessarily going to be opinionated, but it may yield some fascinating results.

I do like the idea, Robert. And yes, it would take a great amount of time and work but MIGHT give us a lot of useful data. Rockinkt has a very valid point in that we don't really know how many of the reports are true. There is probably some type of statistical correction that could be applied, and I don't remember who it was (but will find out) but a couple of researchers were using trig to analyize Patty and Bob H. footage. Maybe one of them would be able to shed some light on how to correct for invalid reports. I'll look over some threads I was reading yesterday and try to find the mathematicians among us.

Didn't Mangler do something like that?
It had sightings from 5 or 6 different sources

Hopeful,

Thank you for your support! I am not a math whiz, statistics specialist or computer programmer, and these are some of the basic skills that would be needed. I am an English teacher, and can only think of this in terms of what I would like to see the finished product to look like.

It would need to be some type of map, maybe a topo map, or a satellite image, or a combination of the two. There would be a slide bar at the top or bottom so that you could move forward or backwards in time by seasons or months, and the sightings would be represented by little blips of color that would appear and disappear.

It would be best to do it in stages.

First, determine which criteria you want to have data fields for, i.e. date, time, location, type of sighting, description, etc.

Second, the data must be inputted into a database like Microsoft Access. A web interface may help to spread the (volunteer) labor.

Third, the data must be analyzed. Using a graphical time lapse output as described above would be ideal.

Someone on this site has posted a Google earth map that attempts this. I had difficulty with it because you could not use the time slider in small enough increments. But, I think the author must have first compiled a database. I would sttart there.

Gigantofootecus was the one I was thinking of possibly knowing of a way to correct for invalid reports among the database.

Drew and jheard, are you both refering to the same thing? Did Mangler do the Google map?

Invalid reports aren't the major problem. Biased sampling is the big problem on the national scale.

Much of the distribution of reports is driven by investigator availability. If there's not an active investigator in an area, even submitted reports to a national database like the BFRO's will languish outside of the public eye collecting dust, valid or not.

National sampling also doesn't account for individual differences in likelihood to report that can be influenced by things like internet availability or prevalence of Bigfoot in the local lore.

You can't have reports where there aren't any people. Who knows how many reports would come out of Alaska if it had the same population density as Washington state?

Focusing on one area (like one big state) where there are active investigators, plentiful reports for a big enough sample size, no reports languishing, and some degree of uniformity in the personal demographics helps to get around some of these issues. Inter-sample reliability testing can address the issues with reports that are suspect as far as whether they are skewing results or not.

Even then, you need to be careful. Let's say bigfoot sightings occur at lower elevations in winter compared to summer. Does that say something about bigfoot migration patterns, or about human tendencies to stay at lower elevations in the winter?

I used to think something like this would be useful. Now I think it's fraught with too many confounds.

Whether you think the data is good or not, here's the answer for Robert's original post:

Mangani's Bigfoot Maps

Mapped sightings from BFRO, IBS, TBRC, EOBIC, PBS, VBRO, SRI and others. Viewable online and as downloadable Google Earth KML files. Dunno who Mangani is, but thanks!

Regarding the validity of the reports, a person familiar with statistics did point out something to me this weekend. Given enough data points, details will tend to converge on an "average". He described a traveller to a foreign land visiting, and returning with a description of the people there, say their height and skin color and other things. If enough people visit and return with descriptions, the appearance of those people can be estimated based on the "average" of all the the descriptions provided by returning visitors, even if some are kinda "out there."

I think some very general information may be retrieved from bigfoot reports in a similar manner. Mark Banta did something similar in an article on the SRI site: 2005 Cross Reference Study - Sasquatch Characteristics in South Central US. (Disclaimer -- I'm an SRI associate.)

Something to consider anyway.

The trouble with your example - IMHO - is that it presumes that all the tourist reports are made without knowledge of what the other travellers reported.
If the tourists are merely repeating what they remember the others have reported - then there is no statistical validity to any conclusion.

Also - ensuring that the people have actually visited the foreign land and are not just mistaken (shoulda' took that left turn at Albuquerque) or lying may not be a problem in your example - but ensuring that people who report sasquatch sightings are not mistaken or lying is a huge problem. IMHO

You put a lot more faith in human nature than I do.
You also put a lot more faith in the so-called "investigations" than I do as well.
The vast majority of "investigations" that I have read are totally insufficient to establish the credibilty of the sighting to any reasonable standard of critical thinking. IMHO
I am not disparaging all the investigators who spend a lot of time, money, and work hard at what they do.
The fact of the matter is that it is darn near impossible to investigate each and every one of the reports in person and to the depth necessary to be able to say with any sort of credibility that they have established to a reasonable standard that the person is not mistaken or lying.

edited to add - People may become adept at phone interviews - but that is still a very poor substitute for an in person interview. Anyone who thinks differently need only ask their local policeman or lawyer or judge for an explanation of why this is so.

No, it's not faith per se. Reliability testing splits up a sample in any number of ways and looks at whether you get the same result with the subsets. Suspicious reports vs. the rest, Class A vs. Class B, multiple witnesses vs single witnesses, BFRO vs TBRC, whatever... If the sample is big enough and you split it up enough ways to test if you get a different result, the same result tells you that noise (which will be present in any sample) isn't skewing the overall results.

Imagine that you had (making up numbers here), 100 reports distributed in California verified to be multiple witness sightings. You've got another 400 California reports from single witnesses that you aren't so sure about, and they follow the same pattern as the 100 sightings. That tells you the 400 aren't skewing things.

It's certainly not perfect. You need a big enough sample to split up into smaller subsets and a way to differentiate between those sets regarding which you might have relatively more confidence in versus not. If there are none that you would give more weight to based on any criteria, it won't work.

John Green did something along these lines in one of his final chapters in Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us. He only did one subset. I forget how he split them up, but found the results were no different either way.

I'm not saying the validity of reports can be ignored. Rather, I'm saying that biased sampling is the much bigger dragon to slay here. That's why the information yielded is of limited value.

Thigmo,

I have seen Mangani's maps, and they are excellent, but not exactly what I had envisioned.

My idea is to make a map that changes over a set period of years, by season or by month, to show what time of year most sightings occur in a particular area, and where, and if they have changed in frequency or location over time.

It's the idea that these creatures are more active at certain times of the year (or are simply seen more in the fall because of hunting season) and might migrate south, or east, or north or west, depending on the time of year.

Also, you could use two different icons to indicate if it was an actual sighting of the creature itself, or the discovery of tracks. You could also make a third icon for sounds, like howls or wood knocking if you wanted to.

hey everyone very interesting new sasquatch thread & above replys as well. thanks bill green

Maybe you could apply for a goverment grant; get some research money, take a couple years off and whip the maps out. That of course leads to the problem that the gov. doesn't believe in BF. So you will have to research something else, like a hairychested warbler or something. The BF data could be a sidebar.

You are making the same mistake that the example Thigmo provided does.
Unless you can eliminate the possiblity that the reports are merely echoing other reports or stories that they have heard - your conclusions based on a statistical analysis are spurious.

For example:
I report that I saw a giant marshmallow rolling down the street and it was bright red and had blue eyes and weighed about a thousand pounds. I further add that it had a box of Rice Krispees in it's hand and was singing the theme song to High Noon while plugging quarters into every parking meter it passed.
The newspapers, TV, popular magazines, and the internet all report my story. My story is circulated over the years and it becomes a popular story that people tell around the campfires to their friends and children.
100,000,000 people have now heard my story - or parts thereof.
500 of those 100,000,000 people decide that they want to gain some notoriety and falsely report that they too had a marshmallow sighting and use what they know, remember, or copy from my original false report.
Using your logic - the fact that those 500 people reported pretty much what I originally reported suddenly makes my original report and the other 500 reports somehow credible???

Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say. ~William W. Watt


edited for spellliingz

That's why I said this:

John Green, back in the day, did a casual version of this with his data set. He did a frequency analysis of some basic behaviours in a subset of reports that he thought were very reliable, and then compared that to a frequency analysis of his entire data set.

The frequencies were basically the same, so Green, very reasonably, suggested that the large majority of his reports were probably the real McCoy.

rockint, the idea that a lot of reports could just be "copycat" submissions is indeed important, especially if you accept every single report, without discretion, as in your marshmallow example.

I hope you'll at least recognize that groups like SRI and AIBR are trying to do things a lot differently than others have in the past. There are not many reports published in SRI's CoRE database. The reason (besides the fact that we're not as high-profile as a certain other group) is that we're not interested in a large quantity of trash reports, but in quality reports investigated to the best of our ability. Investigating reports is hard, and we're earnestly committed to doing our best before we put something out there for others to see. Will we be perfect? No, but our data will be far, far cleaner because of our care and diligence. And, I hope, one day useful for people asking questions like Robert.

You might also be interested to know that bigfoot enthusiasts aren't the only ones soliciting sighting reports. Eastern Cougar does it, too. Is it somehow valid if you're looking for a known animal, but totally invalid to do it if you're looking for something unknown? Why? (Besides the fact that bigfooters are popular subjects of hoaxing and ridicule. We're quite aware of that.)

Now, getting back on topic...

Robert, you might notice that Mangani has also date-coded the information in the Google Earth .kmz file. Exactly the data you are looking for is in Mangani's map data. You might just have to do a little more work to get a map that does what you want -- it's all XML, but that means it's consistently coded in a way that it can be manipulated. This might be an interesting project to tackle, but I'm up to my eyeballs in other programming right now. Good luck.

Yes. You could. Have you actually looked at my file in Google Earth? It has separate icons for creature sightings, track signs, and auditory reports, as well as distinguishing colors for the souce organization. You can filter out reports you don't want to see by report type or source. It also uses the Google Earth 4 timeline to animate the report display by date. Anyone with the ability to write a macro in a text editor could change the years of all the reports to the same year and thus be able to use Google Earth to animate by season, month, etc. In other words it is a lot closer to what you are proposing than you imply. No offense intended, but it is easy to propose what someone else should do, but first you might consider spending some time doing some thoriough analysis with what is already available (or even helping to add to the project).

I was certainly not referring to SRI's database.
The analysis I was referring to was one concerning hundreds of "investigated" reports - which - to my knowledge - the SRI does not have.
There is no way that I could accept the vast majority of reports from the BFRO as being as high as those standards that I saw in the early stages of the SRI.
But - until there are hundreds of high quality reports based on adequate investigations to substantiate the claims made - analysing the BFRO's data base will continue to be like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. IMHO of course.

Not sure what my post has to do with your cougar referral...

Any thorough database must be held to the highest standards. At least deemed as possible by some great skeptics (critics).
When my son bicycled across the US in 2001, their first night at a state park right outside the Dalles, Ore., he was trapped in the restroom for hours by a cougar. It repeatedly tried to bash his way through the steel door. He said that is was growling, roaring constantly, like it was in heat. When he finally felt it was safe to leave, he went back to the tent assuming the worst for his two friends, who were fine. They had thought he was a goner. They stayed inside their tent. Crossing Yellowstone, entering through West Yellowstone, the rangers said that they needed a vehicle escort, no bicycle trekking allowed. One of my son's friends had his brother drive from Vancouver, Wa. to meet them. He said camping in West Yellowstone was the scariest, worse than Akron, Ohio where the police would not let them camp at all, saying they would not make it through the night (ended up camping in the yard of a fire captain). West Yellowstone was people-less. One night, they heard stomping, and low heavy breathing outside of their tent. For a long time, they just listened in fear. They did not look outside. In the morning, they found their packs emptied, contents strewn about. The ranger came and checked on them and quickly determined that it was a bear. There were no scratch marks anywhere. But, he said that when he was riding down a large hill in the park, rounding a curve, he almost crashed full speed into a group of bison that were crossing the road. One friend had made it through, barely. He managed to stop safely, but he was stuck in the middle of them. He said they were as big as vehicles, and he thought they would crush him. They didn't. His other friend had managed to stop before the herd, being the slacker. He said this was the scariest one. And yes, all encounters were reported to park rangers. It took them 49 days, arriving and taking a tour of that fateful building complex. One of his friend's mothers had arrived to greet them and told their story to security, who were pretty impressed.

The most important criterion in any analysis is the accuracy of the data. If you have suspect data - your conclusions are spurious.
Your idea of what an adequate investigation entails is obviously different than mine.
Since I think there have been very few adequate investigations in the past to establish the validity of the witness reports to any reasonable standard - and you obviously disagree with my opinion - let's just agree to disagree.
I respect you far to much to get into a nit-picking battle over something like this.

Thanks for your valuable input. Your maps are great, and you have done a lot of work.

I am an English teacher by profession, and my knowledge of computer technology is about average, but about programming and such, my knowledge is zero. All I know is you guys type in some kind of code and it gets converted into graphics, like magic.

"Any culture with a sufficiently advanced technology to a less advanced culture would be indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke.

Senore Mangani,

I have gone back and investigated your maps again, and am most assuredly mightily impressed. You, sir, are indeed some sort of genius.

To anyone who has not seen them, there is a time-line slide bar at the top of the map, which can be set to run automatically from 1811 to 2007. You can see the sightings come and go. I looked specifically at north eastern Texas and south eastern Oklahoma, and what I saw was an explosion of sightings starting in the 60's and dramatically increasing to today. This can only be accounted for and explained as the intrusion of people into a previously unpopulated area. I'm sure the Native Americans who lived there long before the white man saw these creatures all the time, but it was not until the 60s and the growth of "civilization" that the reports start flooding in.

Now, if one area where a plethora of sightings could be converted into seasons of years and run like this, we might see some seasonal pattern of movement. Much depends on the reliability of the reports, and the number, of course, but what ever the source of reports, and given some deviation for unreliability, it still would be interesting to see.

I think this is the biggest "confound" in the whole idea. The intersection of BF activity with human activity to permit observation to occur. There's just too much of the earth where humans DON'T go for the work to be statisically definitive.

Report collection (both in data form and graphic form) is an important endeavor. Even if a certain percentage are fabrications or misidentifications, that in itself is data, too.

Trends (whether accurate, fabrication, or misidentification) can yield something to work with.

Mulder,

We all know this. It has to be taken into account when doing something like this. I have to agree with Huntster.