284 replies to this topic

[pokingjoker]

Now im a fan of cryptids and the what if thought line, and i personally believe bigfoot, sasquatch,  yeti, yowie, or whatever name you want to give them are a real possibility. Just because you dont see something doesnt mean it isnt real. i mean cultures all around the world from early man to modern man have tales of sightings, stories, of these creatures, similar to the great apes of africa  which we didnt think existed all that long ago. But i digress my reason for posting is simple, id like to get a feel for the people thoughts. So do you think bigfoot exists, why, why not. Please no bashing on others thoughts. thanks!

[Eldorado]

Are there gay bigfoots that are better groomed and smell nicer than the usual stinky ones?.... is summat I've been wondering.  Bigfoot with a quiff, that sort of thing.

[Likely Guy]

You said, a 'real possibility' while I would downgrade that to 'a possibility'.

People that live in an urban setting can't perceive that a creature such as that couldn't have been found yet. I live near the end of the road, next to the great unknown. Believe me, there's still a lot of land out there.

That's why I believe that it's still a 'possibility'.

[Slave2Fate]

pokingjoker, on 08 November 2012 - 04:02 AM, said:

Now im a fan of cryptids and the what if thought line, and i personally believe bigfoot, sasquatch,  yeti, yowie, or whatever name you want to give them are a real possibility. Just because you dont see something doesnt mean it isnt real. i mean cultures all around the world from early man to modern man have tales of sightings, stories, of these creatures, similar to the great apes of africa  which we didnt think existed all that long ago. But i digress my reason for posting is simple, id like to get a feel for the people thoughts. So do you think bigfoot exists, why, why not. Please no bashing on others thoughts. thanks!

There are cultures all over the world stretching back to early man that also had folklore about dragons. Are we then to believe that dragons are real? Personally I don't put much stock in folklore depicting real or true events or creatures. Chinese whispers alter a story just between a small handful of people, imagine how much a story changes through generations of telling and re-telling.

[Likely Guy]

Slave2Fate, on 08 November 2012 - 05:17 AM, said:

There are cultures all over the world stretching back to early man that also had folklore about dragons. Are we then to believe that dragons are real? Personally I don't put much stock in folklore depicting real or true events or creatures. Chinese whispers alter a story just between a small handful of people, imagine how much a story changes through generations of telling and re-telling.

(Off topic regarding dragons) Were the Chinese maybe speaking about dinosaur remains that they knew to be real? Aren't Komodo Dragons real, which were unimaginable until western cultures authenicated them, just a couple hundred years ago?

I don't believe, definitavely, that there are Sasquatch, just in the possibility that there may be.

Edited by Likely Guy, 08 November 2012 - 06:02 AM.

[pokingjoker]

While I  do see where your coming from. many cultures did indeed perceive a dragon type animal alive and out there why...the obvious answer is there were many skeletons and bones found of dino and newer but unexplained to them. a society that has no real notion of time....stories passed from great great great grandfathers versus thousands to millions of years, so bones must come from a creature of now. Science believes dragons are an instinctual fear of giant snakes and birds of prey combined. Stories of bigfoot date back centuries and persist into to todays modern society and cultures.

[Clobhair-cean]

Bigfoot is nonsense. Firstly, there is no contemporary evidence for it. A few pieces of shaky footage, some footprints and hair samples that don't have DNA in them or are contaminated are not evidence. Secondly, we have no evidence from the fossil record that any ape-like creatures existed in North America. We have a pretty good idea, for instance, about the pleistocene fauna, but there is no bigfoot in the La Brea tar pits, not even a monkey.

Thirdly things about it just don't make sense. Thousands of people have been looking for it in the last fifty or so years, without any success. Let's compare this with another large ape, the Bili Ape. One researcher went to the Congo in the mid-1990s to investigate native stories about a large ape that's not a chimpanzee or a gorilla. On his first trip, he found a skull and managed to buy perfect quality trail camera photos (This one: http://img180.images...oapenormqi5.jpg compare it with the blobsquatches), take casts of footprints and collect fecal samples. He gathered more evidence in one trip that exists about bigfoot altogether. In 2000, he went back and found ground nests belonging to the animals. After the end of the civil war, yet another trip saw the animals, confirmed them to be an anomalous, isolated population of huge chimpanzees that have been studied ever since. Why was Karl Ammann successful? Because the animals he was looking for were real.

But there are other things that make no sense about bigfoot, all of which have been discussed ad nauseam on these boards. Every anima (including humans)l in the US is hit by cars from time to time, but not bigfoot. There is no sign that bigfoot eats anything, because our understanding of the ecosystem doesn't seem to have an ape-shaped gap. Most bigfoot sightings are near large population centres, which suggests that someone would have taken at least a clear photo of it. Everyone has cameras now.

And I don't really buy that cultures all over the world have such stories. There is a "hairy wild man" archetype in folklore, but its existence doesn't have to refere to anything real (animals are hairy and are wild, so a wild man would also be hairy, to distinguish it from just "man"). I also believe that bigfoot proponents consciously and unconsciously interpret all such stories as bigfoot-like, while in reality there aren't many similarities between the stories, they just project their biases onto these tales.

[HMS Dreadnought]

Clobhair-cean just basically summed up exactly why Bigfoot is a myth, nothing more to add myself

[Slave2Fate]

pokingjoker, on 08 November 2012 - 06:51 AM, said:

While I  do see where your coming from. many cultures did indeed perceive a dragon type animal alive and out there why...the obvious answer is there were many skeletons and bones found of dino and newer but unexplained to them. a society that has no real notion of time....stories passed from great great great grandfathers versus thousands to millions of years, so bones must come from a creature of now. Science believes dragons are an instinctual fear of giant snakes and birds of prey combined. Stories of bigfoot date back centuries and persist into to todays modern society and cultures.

Actually there are modern sightings and stories of dragons, they persist as well. The point is that tribal folklore or legend is often allegorical and doesn't necessarily mean that the 'characters' are real. To use such stories in support of a real creature doesn't lend the mythology any credence in my opinion. The stories are nice but we have no way of knowing if they are anything other than just stories.

Furthermore I believe that it is no coincidence that since the airing of 'crypto' creature shows on channels like Discovery there has been a marked increase of sightings. Since people are thinking about these creatures consciously or subconsciously it tends to 'color' their perception. What would have been a glimpse of some animal has now been transformed into a Bigfoot sighting by way of introduced bias. The psychological aspect of cryptozoology is by far the most fascinating part of it to me.

[Gaden]

Trappers were in NW America as early as 1790. The reason they were there was to  make money by killing things and selling the hides. No one will ever convince me that these guys would hesitate to shoot and kill a large primate they came across. The rivers and streams were thick with trappers for about 60 years. No bodies, no sightings, no nuttin.

[JGirl]

i don't believe bigfoot exists. by now we would have found a body, a grave, a shelter, something! it's ridiculous to think that they could stay so hidden in so many places around the world.
eyewitness accounts are feeble at best, and one only has to watch the videos offered as proof to know it's a big joke.

[coolguy]

i know a cop in PA and he saw  one of these things years ago they are very real.
if something dies in the woods it will be eaten with in a week.
  i saw this on a tv show they put a dead deer in the woods with a camera and it was goone in 4 days

Edited by coolguy, 08 November 2012 - 05:50 PM.

[Sweetpumper]

They're real, it's just hard to pin them down when they use dimensional portals to come and go as they please.

[Slave2Fate]

Gaden, on 08 November 2012 - 05:38 PM, said:

Trappers were in NW America as early as 1790. The reason they were there was to  make money by killing things and selling the hides. No one will ever convince me that these guys would hesitate to shoot and kill a large primate they came across. The rivers and streams were thick with trappers for about 60 years. No bodies, no sightings, no nuttin.

Don't forget all of the other frontiersmen and cartographers during that era as well. North America has been fairly well covered by man at some point, even the remote areas.

[Rafterman]

Clobhair-cean, on 08 November 2012 - 07:47 AM, said:

Bigfoot is nonsense. Firstly, there is no contemporary evidence for it. A few pieces of shaky footage, some footprints and hair samples that don't have DNA in them or are contaminated are not evidence. Secondly, we have no evidence from the fossil record that any ape-like creatures existed in North America. We have a pretty good idea, for instance, about the pleistocene fauna, but there is no bigfoot in the La Brea tar pits, not even a monkey.

Thirdly things about it just don't make sense. Thousands of people have been looking for it in the last fifty or so years, without any success. Let's compare this with another large ape, the Bili Ape. One researcher went to the Congo in the mid-1990s to investigate native stories about a large ape that's not a chimpanzee or a gorilla. On his first trip, he found a skull and managed to buy perfect quality trail camera photos (This one: http://img180.images...oapenormqi5.jpg compare it with the blobsquatches), take casts of footprints and collect fecal samples. He gathered more evidence in one trip that exists about bigfoot altogether. In 2000, he went back and found ground nests belonging to the animals. After the end of the civil war, yet another trip saw the animals, confirmed them to be an anomalous, isolated population of huge chimpanzees that have been studied ever since. Why was Karl Ammann successful? Because the animals he was looking for were real.

But there are other things that make no sense about bigfoot, all of which have been discussed ad nauseam on these boards. Every anima (including humans)l in the US is hit by cars from time to time, but not bigfoot. There is no sign that bigfoot eats anything, because our understanding of the ecosystem doesn't seem to have an ape-shaped gap. Most bigfoot sightings are near large population centres, which suggests that someone would have taken at least a clear photo of it. Everyone has cameras now.

And I don't really buy that cultures all over the world have such stories. There is a "hairy wild man" archetype in folklore, but its existence doesn't have to refere to anything real (animals are hairy and are wild, so a wild man would also be hairy, to distinguish it from just "man"). I also believe that bigfoot proponents consciously and unconsciously interpret all such stories as bigfoot-like, while in reality there aren't many similarities between the stories, they just project their biases onto these tales.

Excellent post.

I would also add, if you believe the Bigfooters, these creatures shouldn't be that rare or even that hard to find.

According to Bigfooters, these things live in every single state/province in North America - and even in many other parts of the world.  That would necessitate a breedign population in the tens of thousands to maintain such a diverse population.  Where are they?  Where do they live?  What/where do they eat?  Where do they ****?  There's just no evidence of these things anywhere.

Do a little test - google "rarest mammal in North America".  You'll be taken to information about the Black Footed Ferret.  There's roughly 1,000 of these little buggers currently living in the wild.  But look what else you find - thousands of pages of really good scientific information on them, their habitat, their lifestyle, mating habits, etc. etc.  And, I might add, more than 100,000 crystal clear photographs and videos.

You'll find the same thing with other rare animals, but not Bigfoot.