Why We Can’t Rule Out Bigfoot

[Vasily]

Originally Posted by fisheye

There are believers that are blind to the changes since that Patterson video. Our Country is not the same and there are very few hiding places today + there will be fewer tomorrow.

I was a grad student in terrestrial ecology at the University of Virginia in the mid 1970s. One of my fellow grad students and I approached the late Dr. William Odum (those who are familiar with the field of ecology will recognize the family name) about writing a proposal to study the ecology of Loch Ness (we were interested in Nessie, but mostly in the great single malt scotches that would be available to us). He said he didn't think Nessie was plausible from a biomass budget perspective. He opened one of his file cabinets and handed us a folder; it contained his notes on sasquatch; he was a closet bigfoot fan. He said from an ecological perspective, it was more likely that there was something to the bigfoot stories than to Nessie.

We never pursued it -- but back then, I would have given better than even odds that there was a large unknown hominid in the Pacific Northwest (as did Dr. Odum). It's become harder as the decades have gone by to believe so. There's little chance that an unknown hominid exists in most of the lower 48 because of said lack of hiding places. However ... the Pacific Northwest is very wild, and there are vast areas with little human presence, no drones, few trail cams, areas that are physically inaccessible. I posted a review here of John Zada's "In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond" last year; it's about his search for sasquatch in the Bella Coola region of British Columbia. Some first nations people Zada met believed in sasquatch, some didn't -- most of them knew someone who claimed to have encountered one, however. They believed in two species: a small one, and a large one. Zada did have a few very odd experiences, but nothing definitive.

Today, I'd give a higher probability to bigfoot's existence in the Pacific Northwest than in the lower 48: say, a token 0.5% in the lower 48, a little bit more in an area stretching from northern California up to the Canadian border, 5% or so in British Columbia. And that's probably being generous. Frankly, I'd put more money on there being something to the orang pendek stories or thylacine survivals in northern Australia than to the existence of bigfoot.