Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Bigfeets Exist! DNA proof-

I will be surprised if Mr. Big turns out to exist. But pleasantly surprised!

As us denizens of the PNW know, the Coast Range has areas that are virtually impassable. And, if Bigfoots are indeed part human, then they may be quite I intelligent- IE not really animals per se. So expecting to find them the way we find animals may be silly.

I believe he took a job in LE somewhere.

1. I totally agree that misspelling and typos on an internet forum have no bearing on a person's intelligence. That's a stupid argument, and just makes it look like the person is reaching for a reason to be right.

2. I agree that it's 99% probable that bigfeet are just scary stories from our tribal days to keep us in the village after dark. Or something like that. But all I'm saying is that there is NO PROOF that bigfoot exists, and likewise, there is NO PROOF that it doesn't. No proof ever exists until it does. My post was only meant to illustrate that the possibility exists and can't be counted out. Large animals live in the wilderness without detection quite often. It's not unreasonable. Just not probable.

Fair enough, we get the point....you don't know much.

Too much common sense and logic in your post, Pira. Some people just don't get it.

PS I;s caynt spill er tipe will eeder.

Some will have to "deel wid it"

To many folks, "there is no proof" really means "I haven't seen any proof that forces me to accept it � and I won't."

If what I've heard is true, university anthropologists have shelves of "Bigfoot" track casts and photographs that they've accepted, shelved, and forgotten with a yawn of disinterest. (Not collected in the field by them, that is, so of course those things don't mean anything.) A reasonably sane and reliable outdoorsman-hunter friend of mine discovered and collected something that he considered evidence, took it to the head of the state university's anthropology department, and watched the guy nonchalantly add it to an impressive collection of similar "nonprofessional" evidence.

Do I conclude that since I haven't seen it, or any TV news report or YouTube video about it, it doesn't exist? No, I'm content to leave that kind of "thinking" to the smug fools who dote on it.

I'm waiting to see what eventually evolves that no one in his right mind can refuse to acknowledge. I won't need a blood-covered dead Sasquatch in my bed to convince me that Sasquatch is (or was) real. But some folks wouldn't even recognize such a thing as that as proof of something that they don't want to believe.

I do not buy (or even accept as a gift) the popular practice of "reasoning" backward from a conclusion to a delicious premise and then blabbing that premise as if it's a "logical conclusion."

Of course it's possible, even remotely plausible, that something resembling a Big Foot lives in the wilds of North America (after all, the African mountain gorilla was for a very long time thought to be mythological). The question is the existence of good evidence, of which there appears to be none.

This lady's conclusions that it not only exists, but that it's a hybrid human/ape is quite simply absurd, as even if there was a million to one shot of one ever being conceived and born, it would be an extremely unhealthy creature, and would certainly be sterile. Tigers and lions are genetically more closely related than are we to any primate, yet they are only rarely able to produce a hybrid offspring (and then only under specially controlled circumstances), and their hybrids tend to suffer serious health issues.

And that is quite simply absurd also.

To say that something is possible and remotely plausible is hardly an endorsement of a theory that said thing exists. It's unlikely in the extreme, lacking solid evidence. And the human/ape hybrid theory is absurd on its face.

It was a screw up by one of the people involved. Thanksgiving day he released a statement. The rest should have just let it go and pretended not to notice, instead two others tried damage control and it backfired, flushed out his screw up, the whole thing is going viral.

Jeff, I'm in agreement with you on both points. I would be pleasantly surprised if it turned out that there is a population of sasquatch out there. But I remain highly skeptical at this point.

As I posted earlier, my first question is "Where did they find these alleged tissue samples, and what were they?" I mean, did they find a jawbone? A hank of hair caught on a thornbush? Parts of a decomposing corpse?

Then I'd want to know how the evidence was collected, and by whom, and the whole chain of evidence thing.

Because I've done enough bench research in DNA/molecular biology biochemistry to know there are LOTS of ways to fabricate evidence. I'm not accusing the researchers and labs in this story of fraud, understand, but I know that if someone who really knew their way around the ol' molecular bio lab wanted to fabricate a "sample" and pull a hoax on the scientific world, they could do it. God knows my fellow grad students and post-docs and I, back when I was in grad school, pulled off some world-class hoaxes while we were sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for the end of a centrifuge cycle or a long HPLC run... I mean, you're stuck in the lab at 2AM waiting on results, and somebody says, "We could really bugger up ol' Lorscheider's such-and-such study if we injected his rats with thus-and-such"... and the next thing you know 3 or 4 giggling scientists have sneaked into the animal care center and are injecting a bunch of rats with something. Not to really screw Lorscheider's research, of course... just half a dozen rats, so he'd have all this normal-looking data, then the half-dozen crazy outliers, and he'd be pulling his hair out for a couple days until somebody'd point out that he'd been punked.

I know, it sounds juvenile, and I guess it is. But scientists are nerds, and have a nerdy sense of humor. The Far Side exposed us for what we are!! And some of 'em are crazy psychopaths, and want to screw up other people's research, really badly. These are the kinds of people who make up computer viruses... malignant twerps who really don't have a life... people who make TRH look almost normal, to give you a frame of reference.

So it seems to me that if a very smart, well-trained, but ethically-adrift and psychologically disturbed person(s) decided they were going to punk the molecular-biology world with some fake Bigfoot tissue "samples", based on what little I've done/known about DNA bench research, they could do it.

You have to look at more than just the fact that they've found sequences showing mixtures of human and "unknown primate" DNA. Example: how do you explain away the effects of hybrid sterility? As others have pointed out, hybrids between species more closely related than we are to any other primate species, tend to be fragile health-wise, and more important, sterile. If Bigfoot is a primate "mule", he can't reproduce. Example 2: viable population threshold? We know that for a species to maintain reproductive viability, a certain minimum number of individuals must exist in the breeding population. For primates, that number is certainly in the thousands of individuals. A population of 20 sasqatches in the PNW would not be sufficient to maintain viability.

Which begs the question: if there's 1000 sasquatches in the PNW, how come we're not seeing dead sasquatch carcasses, game-camera pictures, or any other evidence of living creatures, other than that 40-year-old 8mm movie they show about 5000 times a year on Discovery Channel? A population that large is awfully hard to conceal.

Not to mention the fact that there is NO primate species in existence that lives in strict solitude, like grizzlies, do. So we should expect to find troops or tribes of sasquatches, if they are true primates, and larger groups of any species are easier to pin down than solitary animals like jaguars, or grizzlies... and we have no problems finding individual big cats, even in wild areas like the mountains of northern Mexico and Arizona, do we?

Take all these matters in to consideration collectively, and it's just too much of a stretch, at this point.

But I would very much like to be surprised to find that my skepticism is wrong.

it wasnt a small deer, it was a 200 pound primitive ox....actually most would be surprised at the list of land animals over 100 pounds that have been found in the last 30 years....one of the Southeast Asian rhino species was found not that long ago where no one thought they were a long, long way from the rest of the animals population....1500 pound animal living in an area with fairly high population density and no one knew it was there...

if anyone is truly interested in "hidden animals" the book"The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals" is an interesting read about animals that have been discovered in the last 100 years....surprising as hell just how lil we know of certain areas like the Amazon, "jungle Africa" and Southeast Asia....

http://www.amazon.com/The-Encyclopaedia-New-Rediscovered-Animals/dp/161646108X/ref=pd_sim_b_13

this is another good one: Shadows of Existence: Discoveries and Speculations in Zoology

http://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Existence-Discoveries-Speculations-Zoology/dp/0888396120/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354299091&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=Shadows+of+Existence%3A+Discoveries+and+Speculations%2C+Cryptozoology

they go off some into the possibility of things like Bigfoot and the like but the majority of them are on real critters and their speculation on the rest is based off o the other stuff thats been found....one neat fact in one of them, a type of manta ray completely unknown to science was "discovered" by a marine biologist watching the opening credits to the TV show Survivor....a ton and a half animal discovered cause of "stock footage" filmed for a TV show...

Good post.

A handful of Vikings spent a few years in Canada - about a thousand years ago - and we found all sorts of proof.

The odds of an entire race of hominid existing in North America - without ever leaving so much as a single bone - anywhere - is approaching the infinitesimal.

Humans leave structure remnants and artifacts. Animals don't, so, although I too am a big foot skeptic, yours isn't a particularly good argument, IMO.

More likely the locals didn't know it was "missing".

ScottF, you are at laest being reasonable in not screaming "its real its real!"

However the issue I have is that all of the testing clouds the point of the validity of the samples. You can run a sample thourgh any wiz-bang tech DNA sampler machine you want, analyze it across multiple fields and platforms... great.

All talk of the analysis of the samples... no talk of who and where they were found and collected.

Where did the sample come from?

I figure some bright college kid is engineering screwy samples that they are running very elaborate tests on.

Then where do these exhibits of bones and fossils, we see in the museums of prehistoric critters come from?

actually anymore you would be surprised how clueless locals can be depending on the area....have read a number of stories by DIY hunters in Southeast Asia where except for a few ribes they could not rely on the locals, western influence has been enough that even moderatly sized villages no longer rely on the jungle for the majority of their living....one guy constantly surprised locals by shooting tigers within a stones throw of the village....villagers were saying there hasnt been tigers around for a generation or more...