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International Bigfoot Symposium
DaytonCIM writes "Yup, that's right the creature that took on Steve Austin (no, not the drunk and bloated pro wrastler, but the REAL Six Million Dollar Man) has legions who gather to debate and discuss his furriness. The International Bigfoot Symposium is going on right now.
SFGate also has a nice article on the grand meeting."
BigFoot is not real I don't care how many PhD's are duped into thinking it is. Obviously a Native American Ape would be a great find, but alas, it's not true...
Proof is in the pudding
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
This makes me think... I can see both way's points of view. I see that there is a LOT of evidence for Bigfoot' existence and that some of it might be hard to fake, but we must wonder: why haven't we got more than 1-2 pieces of video footage of the damn thing? We really should just thouroughly comb the woods where it is supposed to be. Even if we don't find it, we'll probably find some drug caches and convicted felons on the run... It's worth a try
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
I have a relative who is really into the Bigfoot scene. The Bigfoot believers are quite committed. They make a lot of mistakes because of that, though. What is really interesting to me is how so many of the same thought errors get made in radically different areas of human belief.
Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World is an interesting investigation of the entire phenomenon.
It is a terribly complex mental exercise to absorb all of the information in modern life and make intelligent decisions. The fact is that there are far too many claims to investigate for anybody to examine all of them with the necessary care. So we have to rely on the consensus of experts to make decisions. And the organizations necessary for consensus have the same flaws as all human hierarchal bodies.
Here are some of the various brands of kooky ideas that I have come across:
The AIDS Myth The medical analysis is surprisingly deep. A lot of qualified people have weighed in on this idea.
Carbohydrates not calories. They claim that our genes are still adapting to the modern high-carbohydrate diet, and that is why so many of us are so fat. (Enter Atkins.)
Democracy is not good government
Global Warming. Discussed on Slashdot a number of times
Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare Joe Sobran thinks that the Earl of Oxford wrote everything attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon.
Race and IQ Probably true, but kooky nonetheless.
Multiregional Evolution You can find most of Wolpoff's papers that are cited here somewhere online. I recommend "Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution" and "Modern Human Ancestry at the Peripheries: A Test of the Replacement Theory." Wolpoff is kooky because there are very few anthropoligists left who will side with the Multiregional theory over the Out of Africa theory. (Wolpoff technically supports an Out of Africa theory, but that is how everyone refers to the debate.)
And here is one that I will actually advocate: Bohmian Mechanics It is about as kooky as you can get for a physicist, but I am convinced that it beats QM on the merits.
Our local newspaper published that there are no chipmunks in our county. I called a reporter out to see and photograph the chipmunks on our property in said county.
(Unfortunately, a couple of months after that, our 3 cats wiped out the entire population. We buried their little celebrity bodies with full honors. True story.)
My point is, it's virtually impossible to prove non-existence -- trivial to prove existence.
computerlady - a brand new Slash-daughter - alone, but no longer invisible, in the
Actually, no. There is very much credible evidence that the giant ape 'Gigantopithecus blacki', which once flourished in Asia, made its way to North America, and this is the main theory that the scientists, yes, _real_ scientists, have been going on.
At the same time period, Homo Sapiens crossed the land bridge from Asia, as did thousands of other species. Many primate anthropologists agree that is very possible that the Gigantopithecus made it to North America, and some say that it's almost unlikely that they *didn't* make it here.
The existence of hoaxes does not make all other claims invalid.
read my above post about faith.
let's be clear, shall we ?
1 - I never said I believed in bigfoot. That's your assumption. Neither about the loch ness monster.
2 - yes, ironically, it's exactly 'faith' is what sub-atomics is based on, at its lowermost level.
3 - 'science' in the 1600s brought us to think that Newton's Laws were the de-facto, universal models on which mechanistic principles rely on. We now believe MUCH differently, when it comes to, well, things like nuclear power. The fact of the matter is neither you or I know if there's a new species of animal somewhere in Northen Canada or Sri Lanka, for that matter.
what I have been arguing is that logically following, hoaxes don't make a theory invalid, and faith has plenty of place in the scientific method. I'm not talking about "GOD", I'm talking about belief in something you cannot measure, or detect. That's all.
Ivan T. Sanderson cameout with one titled Abominable Snowmen which was at the most comprehensive discussion available. Heuvelman's is interesting because it really cover a range of very interesting possibilities in as yet undescribed large animals. Heuvelmans includes photographs of the skin of a spotted lion (African) and the photograph of the body a large, female ape from South America.
One of the more interesting points of Sanderson's study was a large number of footprint-cast illustrations. One of the ready hypotheses that could be framed after looking at those casts, is that if there are such critters, the "Yeti" and the "Sasquatch" are different genera. The Himalayan prints resemble a large primate's prints, but the N.A. prints are Hominid.
Its always kind of entertaining to watch the true believers and the true unbelievers hack at each other.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
When I was a young boy growing up on the Oregon coast, I personally met and chatted with one of the two guys whose hoax could be credited with starting the whole Bigfoot scare. Their "Bigfoot tracks" were the first to make the papers, and were the subject of investigation by many "qualified" anthropologists, etc., who pronounced them genuine.
They later were implicated in the hoax and confessed. Apparently, it all happened just like you'd expect. They cut giant feet out of plywood, strapped them to their shoes, and went clomping around (in the snow? don't recall), then brought their friend to see the tracks they'd "found", as a gag. When the friend got the papers to come look at the tracks, they decided they might get in trouble if they confessed, so they hid the plywood feet and kept mum. They thought the anthropologists were hilarious.
Let me reiterate. They eventually confessed. Freely. In the newspaper. To this day, some folks still believe those tracks were real.