February 8, 2006

John Green on People who see Bigfoot Everywhere…

This article was originally presented at the 2003 International Bigfoot Symposium by John Green. This is the 5th 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 other thing I have to say that may well upset some of you is this:

There is nothing new about people claiming that they have been able to make detailed observations of sasquatches and know all about their appearance and behavior. People with stories like that have turned up numerous times in the past 45 years, and so far the end result has always been disappointment. If you are involved with such a person, be cautious. I have watched former colleagues get so deeply committed and then so sharply disillusioned that it soured them on the whole subject and they dropped out.

Similarly, there is nothing new about people believing they see or hear or smell evidence of sasquatch presence almost every time they go out in the woods.

But unidentified sounds and smells are just that, unidentified sounds and smells, and shapes found in photographs that could be sasquatches could also not be. There are other agencies besides sasquatch that can take food, make beds of vegetation, break trees and branches, move rocks, pound on things or make interesting depressions in the ground.

There have been cases where people have gone far beyond any reasonable extreme to fool someone with manufactured evidence of sasquatch presence, and also cases where people have gone pretty far to fool themselves. Try not to add to that list.

All of us surely hope that some day some such story will be proved to be true, and at my age I tend to wish very hard that it will happen soon, but my experience offers no reason for optimism. Many years ago I decided that people who saw so much and knew so much were a long way ahead of me, so they had no need of my help and I would just await definite results. I am still waiting.

For anyone hoping to persuade mainstream science to take on this quest and provide the expertise and resources to bring it to a conclusion, episodes of this sort do real harm. Those who take them seriously end up looking foolish, and the prospect of looking foolish is surely one of the main reasons why few of the scientists that we know have an interest in this subject do anything about it, and why there is no financial or institutional support for those that do take it up.

Rick and I addressed these types of people previously here on Cryptomundo. Rick’s dissertation was titled, “You say it’s all a hoax?” Mine was titled, “Addendum to ‘You say it’s all a hoax?’“.

To be continued tomorrow…

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