Creatures, Myths & Legends

Fake monsters in creature report experiment

By T.K. Randall
February 24, 2015 ·  27 comments

How would you report a sighting of Bigfoot ? Image Credit: CC BY-SA 2.0 ArtBrom/Flickr A team from the University of St Andrews in Fife, Scotland have been conducting a series of experiments to better understand how people react to sightings of cryptozoological creatures.

For one experiment a volunteer dressed up in a Bigfoot costume and skulked around the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, a site that was chosen due to its abundance of Redwoods which are common in the US forests where the creature is typically sighted.Visitors to the garden were divided up in to two groups, one that was sent on a route that would guarantee an encounter with the fake creature and one that wasn't. Both were then asked to write a report about what they'd experienced once they'd completed the trip.

"It's a serious study of people reporting things," said statistical ecologist Dr Charles Paxton who previously cataloged every recorded sighting of the Loch Ness Monster.

"I'm trying to see if there are statistical patterns. All my work gets published in proper scientific journals. All I do is with the aim of getting proper results."

Source: Sunday Post | Comments (27)

Tags: Cryptozoology, Bigfoot