February 11, 2006

John Green: Crunching the Numbers

This article was originally presented at the 2003 International Bigfoot Symposium by John Green. This is the 8th part of more to come. Posted with John Green’s written consent.

The first part is available on Cryptomundo here.
The second part is available on Cryptomundo here.
The third part is available on Cryptomundo here.
The fourth part is available on Cryptomundo here.
The fifth part is available on Cryptomundo here.
The sixth part is available on Cryptomundo here.
The seventh part is available on Cryptomundo here.

I have mentioned that the bulk of evidence does not support the hypothesis that sasquatch live in family groups. On what basis do I make that statement?  

Well, I wasn’t always the homebody I tend to be today. I won’t bore you with specifics, but I spent many years and traveled many miles stirring up, investigating and recording sighting reports and footprint finds, and I conducted an information exchange involving most of the investigators active at the time.

It certainly didn’t compare with what the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has done in recent years, but it went on a lot longer, and the number of reports that I had on file grew year by year from dozens to hundreds and eventually to thousands. For a while I even tried to keep up with all the information that became available after the internet got going, but that has now grown beyond what I care to attempt.

Every few years I used to go through a complex exercise in trying to analyze the information in those reports, counting tiny symbols entered on big sheets of graph paper, until that became completely impractical. Then, about 10 years ago, I switched to trying to do it with a computer—and I knew nothing about computers. 

Sasquatch hunting in the early days used to be stimulating, even exciting at times, occasionally hilarious. Entering thousands of reports in a computer is just a wearisome grind, and many a sad software story is involved before you even get to that stage. I won’t bore you with specifics, but nothing comes easy.

In any event, for the past several years I have had thousands of reports entered, currently just over 4,000, and considerable ability to get answers to questions from them.

For many questions only a minority of the reports contain any answers, but nearly all reports tell how many creatures were involved and their size. Currently out of 3,684 such reports 3,325 list single adults and 171 more than one adult. Small creatures by themselves were reported 111 times, and small creatures with one adult 37 times. 

Only 40, or just over one percent of the reports, involve combinations of large and small creatures that may have been families including an adult male and female.

Only 32 of the creatures seen alone were described as adult females, so it seems plain, assuming that sasquatch do exist, that only the adult males normally behave in ways that expose them to a risk of being seen by humans.

That does leave open the possibility that females and young are often present but remain out of sight, however it seems to me beyond reason to elevate that possibility to an assumption. The family of one male, one female and their offspring is, after all, unknown among large higher primates other than man.

It has always been my hope that someone would show up who could write a program that would set the computer, on its own, searching day and night for relationships among the hundreds of items of information until they revealed something unsuspected that would be useful. So far that hasn’t happened, but by less exotic means the computer has provided interesting answers to some frequently asked questions, and has poked holes in some of the things we used to think we knew.

Consider smell, for instance. It seems as if people are always reporting that sasquatch have a terrible smell. In Florida they are even called “skunk apes.” The numbers tell a very different story, at least for western North America. In the spring of 1995, when I had only western entries completed, strong smell was mentioned in only 72 out of 923 descriptions.  

Of course in many cases, because of distance or some other reason, there could have been a smell that the witness did not detect, so I checked the few entries where the animal was reported to be 10 feet or less away and not separated from the witness by glass or any other barrier. The result,  there were 14 mentions of a strong smell and four of a mild smell, while in 26 encounters there was no smell noticed at all. 

We used to speculate whether the lack of smell in some cases, strong smell in others, indicated that sasquatch shared with dogs an inclination to roll in strong-smelling things, but gorilla researcher Dian Fossey has provided a more likely explanation. In her book “Gorillas in the Mist” she refers several times to a powerful “fear odor” produced by adult male gorillas under stress,   and notes that they have special glands in their armpits from which the scent is emitted.

As to frequently asked questions, how many times have we heard the challenge, “If these things exist how come hunters (or loggers, or prospectors etc.) never see them?”

(An even more frequent question is “If these things exist how come nobody ever sees them?”, but you don’t need a computer to answer that.)

As to the people whose recreation or occupation regularly takes them into the woods, the answer, of course, is that they do report sightings and they do find tracks.

At the end of 1995 I had 1162 entries of sightings and track finds in which the activity of the witness was noted. Of these, 125 were hunting, 34 logging, 23 prospecting, 10 trapping and 77 involved in other outdoor occupations.

The commonest sighting report, by far, was something seen on or beside a road from a car, and the second most common was something seen outside by a person in a house. Of encounters in the wild, at least a third were by hunters or people working there.

One of the questions that we ourselves tend to ask is whether sasquatch migrate with the seasons, the hope being that they might regularly pass by the same spot at the same time of year. In 1996 I looked at the evidence of the computer entries in three different ways:

• The relationship of altitude to the time of year
• The relationship of direction of travel to the time of year
• The relationship of location to the time of year

None of these showed any consistent pattern that would indicate migration.

Altitudes were highest in summer, but lowest in the spring, not the winter.  

Direction of travel was a mishmash of inadequate numbers, but showing a slight majority heading south in the summer and towards the ocean beaches in the spring—the opposite of what the migration hypothesis would suggest.

Latitude and longitude put the center of observations in all four seasons within a circle just 30 miles in diameter.

Considering that the examples I have just given were picked because I thought you might find them the most interesting, you can see that sasquatch hunting by computer is not particularly exhilarating even after the task of doing the entries is completed.

I am glad, however, to have been able to provide data for studies other researchers have done, and perhaps I will be able to do the same for some of you in the future.

To be continued tomorrow…

Filed under Bigfoot, Bigfoot Report, Conferences, Cryptozoology, Evidence, Expedition Reports, Eyewitness Accounts, Folklore, Forensic Science, Museums, Sasquatch