UFOs and Bigfoot
Posted by: Nick Redfern on July 24th, 2012
Yep, another controversial post, but what the heck. Controversy is good. Here’s how my new Lair of the Beasts post at Mania.com begins:
“Right now, I am putting the final touches to a new book – to be titled Wildman! – that will be an in-depth and extensive study of a very strange and controversial subject: Bigfoot in Britain. Not a subject that you hear too much about, but one that very much exists. It is, however, the nature of that existence that is important. Many researchers of the phenomenon are convinced that people do see such creatures in the UK, but that they are not the flesh and blood beasts they appear to be. One of the people I have interviewed extensively for Wildman! is Ronan Coghlan, the author of a number of acclaimed books, including A Dictionary of Cryptozoology and – with Gary Cunningham – The Mystery Animals of Ireland.
And here’s how the post continues.
About Nick Redfern
Punk music fan, Tennents Super and Carlsberg Special Brew beer fan, horror film fan, chocolate fan, like to wear black clothes, like to stay up late. Work as a writer.
Wow.
Why does this kind of thing keep happening?
There is no one in science more boring – which means a ton of boring scientists – than the one who goes “nature is wondrous enough without this Bigfoot nonsense.” Right, check. Get a color monitor some year, OK? Oh. Crack a book.
That said.
There are times I almost – no, that’s wrong, I don’t get it at all, it’s, well, boring as all get-out, and just plain odd to boot, I mean do I go to crop-circle sites just to yell PROVE IT in big letters?, no – but there are times I can at least see why people with absolutely nothing but nothing to do AT ALL might want to check into a crypto site and shout to the world, in effect, I AM IGNORANT, AND YOU ARE WRONG.
This would be one of those times.
Anytime someone comes up with Piece of Evidence One worth, well, squatch that Sasquatch are Saucer People, or shape-shifters, orb-masters, pyramid-power surfers or professional coelacanth fishermen, I promise to call them nothing but squatches from now on. Actually, I might even start exclusively calling them “Bobofays.”
John, Jeff, I’m really sorry. I don’t think I really have any idea what you all have to put up with.
(Nice track cast!)
The idea that big foot and other strange/unidentified animals are somehow connected to UFOs makes a lot of sense to me. It would explain the amazing lack of evidence. Plus there are many well documented sightings of interaction between the two.
Big foot simply can not be a real flesh and blood creature. There is nothing one can point to and say AHA that is proof they exist. A couple of hairs collected? This is supposed to be a very large hair covered creature. Yet it seems to lose less hair than my small 18 inch 6 pound cat. And she is a short hair variety. The foot prints are meaning less. Far to easy to hoax or be from a known,common animal and mis-identified,whether by mistake or on purpose. Eyewitness testimony has been shown in many,many legal proceedings to be rather unreliable. And a number of studies back this up as well.
With all the modern photographic equipment and techniques not one definitive picture or video has been put forth. Yet all over the world large unknown animals have been discovered in recent years using these techniques. We have fossils of humans and all kinds of various offshoots of our family tree. But not even a toe bone or a tooth for big foot has been found.
Also it should be noted that there has been a very large rise in interest in this topic the last few years. There are probably more people than ever before out looking for this animal. Yet again no one has found anything.
Given the discoveries in physics it makes more sense,to me at least,to think IF this animal is real it is somehow coming in and out of another dimension/time/universe.
The evidence to support that this is a real flesh and blood creature is beyond lacking. It does not exist.
Resorting to insults and name calling of those you disagree with,IMO,is not in line with the spirit of this site. Would it really be that difficult to just agree to disagree?
Having read this site for a few years now its fairly clear who the top dogs are around here. And on what topics they seem to be most interested/knowledgeable. With few exceptions disagreement between members are often resolved with humor,well thought out discussion and on occasion the ability for one one to even change their mind and long held beliefs. But to read this tonight…….
Anytime someone comes up with Piece of Evidence One worth, well, squatch that Sasquatch are Saucer People, or shape-shifters, orb-masters, pyramid-power surfers or professional coelacanth fishermen, I promise to call them nothing but squatches from now on. Actually, I might even start exclusively calling them “Bobofays.”
I must admit I do not like what that implies and the direction being considered by you.
I almost forgot. A big thank you Nick Redfern for your contributions in this small corner of the internets. I frequently read your blog as well and very much enjoy it. I have really been enjoying the cross-over things in the last couple of weeks/months. Keep up the good work.
muircertach:
Can’t help it, I get irked whenever anybody comes on here advocating SaucerSquatch because of “the amazing lack of evidence.” Whenever anybody says “many well documented sightings of interaction between the two.” (No there are not.)
Whenever I read “Big foot simply can not be a real flesh and blood creature.” And whenever I see “The evidence to support that this is a real flesh and blood creature is beyond lacking. It does not exist,” that’s just the last straw.
These are egregious misrepresentations of truth. The evidence for the sasquatch should be compelling to any scientist. It has been to every scientist that has paid attention to it. (You will cite no exceptions.) And this misrepresentation is why we don’t know what the sasquatch is yet.
There is a point at which I tire of being polite. And when people show a stubborn inability to “even change their mind and long held beliefs” based on evidence that I read up on, and so can they, that’s the point.
Jeff Meldrum and John Bindernagel and Grover Krantz and John Green, to cite only four, have unimpeachable credentials; have done an impressive job marshaling the evidence; and have placed it in front of a scientific community that ignores it, and a crypto community that appears intent on not being taken seriously.
READ UP!
The above gentlemen have to be polite. I don’t. I don’t know how they manage it.
Meldrum is a quack. His ideas are rejected by almost all of his peers.
muircertach:
“Meldrum is a quack. His ideas are rejected by almost all of his peers.”
Well: I must admit I do not like what that implies and the direction being considered by you. Resorting to insults and name calling of those you disagree with, IMO, is not in line with the spirit of this site. Would it really be that difficult to just agree to disagree?
And I suppose SaucerSquatch has the whole mainstream buzzin’!
Meldrum’s peers don’t reject his research. They haven’t read it. They know nothing about it. All I have to do is engage someone on this topic to tell whether they are informed or not. Talking to an uninformed scientist on this is no different from talking to the garbage man – unless, of course, the garbage man has read up on the evidence, in which case he is far ahead of most primatologists. And would be able to undress them (intellectually) in this discussion, in precisely the way a scientist who knows something undresses (intellectually) a layman who doesn’t, but thinks he does.
There are two extremes on this question:
1) The True Believers who will believe anything as long as it addresses the sasquatch as a Real Something of the sort they are comfortable with, or want badly to believe in. (SaucerSquatch.)
2) The True Believers who absolutely refuse to pay any attention to anything that contradicts their true belief that This Just Ain’t Real. Conversely, they will swallow, whole and without reflection, any “argument” that reinforces their opinion, regardless how silly application of science and logic shows the “argument” to be. (Almost all of Meldrum’s peers.)
The true skeptics (you are talking to one here; Meldrum is another) address the evidence, and we do so in science’s terms. Meldrum’s arguments are straight from mainstream practice. He is just applying them to evidence his peers refuse to even consider, because it challenges their deep-set beliefs.
Or as I like to say: get a scientist outside his field, and he frequently fails to either sound or think like one.
SaucerSquatch can’t be confirmed one way or another with the tools at science’s disposal. Until it can be, there’s really no reason to even think about it.
The evidence is clear; every type of it, other than a complete specimen in scientific possession, exists that exists for animals we know about. The only difference? The mainstream, without even looking at it, refuses to accept it.
And it doesn’t say SaucerSquatch.
The frontiers of science are never occupied by the majority of one’s peers.
Who, in my opinion, don’t have much to worry about in terms of me calling something a Bobofay.
I should have added to 2) above a 2)a):
2)a) The True Believers who absolutely refuse to pay any attention to anything that contradicts their true belief that This Is Whatever They Have Decided It Is, Evidence be Damned. Conversely, they will swallow, whole and without reflection, any “argument” that reinforces their opinion, regardless how silly application of science and logic shows the “argument” to be.
(Anyone who says something like “The idea that big foot and other strange/unidentified animals are somehow connected to UFOs makes a lot of sense to me” and then calls a scientist using the best information in his field to address evidence that certainly seems to fall under the purview of that field a “quack” simply because “His ideas are rejected by almost all of his peers,” despite the history of science being, in a single phrase:
Enlightened visionaries applying the scientific method to prove all of their peers wrong.)