Here's my main problem with all that is Bigfoot related.
This thing doesn't behave like any other creature on Earth. If you get near its children, it just picks them up and walks away. If you go into its territory, it doesn't confront you, just walks around your tent at night. It eats meat but it doesn't behave like a carnivore or even appear to have the necessary physiological equipment necessary for hunting and killing. It's a primate of some sort but doesn't live in packs. It's seven to sixteen feet tall but blends seemlessly into the landscape. It has no mating season apparently, doesn't shed, or leave **** piles. It has no fear of humans when we're nearby but never approaches a scientist looking for it.
There've been about four scientists out looking for them that I can think of. The 8' male that left the Skookum 2/3 body imprint was fairly close to the late Dr. LeRoy Fish, a zoologist on the expedition. (The imprint was pronounced to be that of an unknown hominid primate by the country's leading primate anatomist after four examinations. The news story didn't get out of Denver.)
There are a few reports of them being sighted by campers, but they don't often walk around tents at night. One reached into a tent in one report, though. As I recall, the fellow in the tent was a wildlife biologist or something. I'll have to look it up.
They are very well camoflaged for life amongst the trees in the dark forests of the PNW. There are reports of them hunkering down and resembling stumps. A pair was seen to freeze on a Canadian beach. If they'd been in forest they would have "seamlessly" blended in. And what would stop them from stepping behind a tree? They evidently can move very rapidly, so pursuit is useless, and what would you do if you caught up with one?
They're omnivores and may scavenge. (It's thought our earliest hominid ancestors scavenged, BTW.) Chimpanzees relish meat when they can get it, but they lack the "necessary" equipment too, except for hands, teeth.......(it took Goodall months to find a troop even though they were rather boistrous and confined to an accessible valley, BTW). There are a number of reports of Sasquatches after fish and one report I just read of one going after a wounded moose. They're opportunistic, it would seem. One rather grisly report involved the twisted-off heads of deer.
Bindernagle notes reports of rock-throwing and the similarity there to Great Ape behavior. It would seem they do defend territory at times. They've been seen in pairs and small family groups. A group of six was seen crossing a Canadian highway. There are other primates that live this way rather than in "packs" - us, for example.
Seems you're misinformed on a couple of points. They do leave feces, by the bucketload, and some has been analyzed. The heights are more in the 6'-8' range although there were sightings of exceptionally tall animals within 100 miles of Big Horn Dam, Alberta, Canada. Steenburg thought these reports were exaggerated by frightened witnesses, but they stopped in 1984. He found that even more interesting than that all the reports were from the same area.There've been reports of normal-sized individuals from the area as well. He speculates there could have been a few exceptionally tall individuals (happens in our species, too) that died off, although he still thinks the reports were exaggerated.
Sasquatches are hominids. I can think of one other hominid that doesn't have a mating season. However, due to considerations of weather and the young being at risk there probably is an optimum time for mating and a gestation (9 months?) that would allow for some growth of the infant before hard weather sets in. Needless to say, more evidence is needed.
Now, I'll concede that Bigfoot is possible but that doesn't mean it's plausable. I'm about %95 certain it's a giant hoax. Considering the modern era of Bigfoot fascination was all kicked off by a guy who was later proven to be a practitioner of hoaxes involving Bigfoot, I really don't think there's any reasonable conclusion except to say that it's highly unlikely such a creature exists.
Would that be Ray Wallace? He didn't kick it off. There were giant tracks found around one of his operations in 1958. Jerry Crew took a cast to the local paper and the name "Bigfoot" was born. Investigators were on to Wallace with his tall tales and fakery for years. He never confessed to faking the 1958 tracks; his family "just knew" he did and they "confessed" for him after his death. The story was picked up and distorted by the media:
"The story was hot, and it was everywhere -- on TV, newspapers, and radios around the world -- in December 2002. It proclaimed that "the truth can finally be told about Big Foot". Virtually every major newspaper and broadcaster in the United States fell for it. A family had "finally come forward to reveal the truth". They claimed their deceased father had started the whole legend. It was all him. He was Bigfoot. They said they knew it, and they had the fake tracks to prove it.
The Wallace family proudly exhibited some wooden track stompers to the press. They claimed these were used by their father, Ray Wallace, to create the legend of Bigfoot in the late 1950's. It was only a harmless prank, they explained, but it got out of hand and took on a life of its own, with the help of Ray.
Different members of the Wallace family told different versions of the story. Some claimed Ray only started the legend, then other people apparently faked other tracks in other areas. Various other Wallace family members claimed that Ray made all the tracks himself, anywhere and everywhere they appeared.
The media bought all of it. There was nothing the media wasn't going to believe.
Some Wallaces claimed Ray was behind the Patterson footage as well. Ray's widow said it wasn't her in that costume, and she didn't know anything about it. The rest of the Wallaces still wanted to credit Ray for the Patterson footage somehow. They could only say they were sure he had something to do with it.
Even after thousands of credible eyewitnesses had come forward over the years to report their sightings, and piles of scientifically valuable evidence had been collected, the media still continued to falsely claim there is no evidence for the existence of bigfoots. But ironically, when a rural family came forward with some far-fetched, inconsistent claims, about a man who was locally famous for being a wild story teller, and his son held up some carved wooden track stompers ... that was nothing short of unquestionable proof to the mass media, and so it was affirmed by Jay Leno of NBC, Aaron Brown of CNN, Shepard Smith of Fox News, The New York Times, etc., etc.
Many people were amazed and confused at the downright ignorance of the media. People knew that sightings, encounters and track finds extended far back into the American history. They also knew the only significance of the 1958 finds was that the term "Bigfoot" was first coined then, and that term eventually supplanted the hundreds of local names across the continent, such as the Boggy Creek Monster of Arkansas, the Skunk Ape of Florida, the Mountain Devils of Vermont, the Omah of Northern California, and the Wendigo of the Great Lakes region.
The only thing that began in 1958 was the familiar nickname most people came to remember, not the track finds, the sightings, or anything else related to this subject.
Bigfoot researchers knew more about the Wallace family's claims, because they had dealt with Ray since the 1960's:
Ray's fake tracks and stompers were on display, hanging on the walls of his roadside tourist shop for years. The Wallace family recently implied that Ray had kept them in hidden since the 1960's.
Ray himself never claimed to have created the original "Bigfoot" tracks. His family attributed it to him only after his death -- conveniently when he wasn't around to deny it, or to be cross-examined by the surviving people who had been to the site at the time. Even the locals, like Al Hodgson in Willow Creek, who knew Ray Wallace well in the 1950's, say he wasn't in that part of California when the first tracks were found. All Wallace did, according to Hodgson, was complain that the footprints were making his workers quit and driving his company out of business.
The family didn't realize that Ray's fake casts weren't even the same size and shape of the 1958 casts. The news media didn't want to complicate their hot story with that troublesome fact -- Wallace's fake casts and stompers do not match the "Bigfoot" casts. No one in the media bothered to look at the obvious discrepancies in the photos. In one photo a Wallace family member holds the stompers he claims Ray used to make the original "Bigfoot" tracks found by Gerry Crew. The other one is the famous photo showing Gerry Crew holding the large cast which inspired a local reporter to coin the term "Bigfoot". It didn't matter to the media that they are visiblly different foot shapes. The story was too hot to treat responsibly. And it was about a "myth", so it didn't require any of the usual fact checking.
The scariest 'Big Brother' anecodate from the Wallace media blitz: The New York Times story.
On January 3, 2003, the New York Times ran a front page story with the headline "Search for Bigfoot Outlives the Man Who Created Him". In the story reporter Timothy Egan painted the whole subject as one driven by foolish beliefs of people in the Northwest, and suggested there was no credible evidence.
Like many of the other misleading stories, it completely bought into the Wallace family claims. It credited Wallace as the one who created the whole legend, and perpetuated it over the years.
In one part of the story Egan writes, "Bigfoot defenders, including at least two scientists and a clinical psychologist who says he ran into the Big Guy two years ago in southern Oregon, are undeterred. They give Mr. Wallace credit for the hoax, which led to news stories around the world and began thousands of campfire debates. But, they say other evidence is too strong ..."
The three people Egan was referring to are Dr. Jeff Meldrum, Dr. Henner Fahrehbach, and Dr. Matthew Johnson.
Dr. Johnson told Timothy Egan squarely that he didn't know one way or the other about the Wallace family claims. He didn't give Wallace credit for any hoax whatsoever, and didn't know anything about him.
Dr. Fahrenbach told Egan right up front that he knew Wallace faked tracks in the past, but Fahrenbach made no comment about the 1958 tracks -- the "hoax" Egan refers to above. Egan didn't question Fahrenbach about his stance on that episode, and Fahrenbach says he certainly "did not give Wallace credit for that one." Fahrenbach was shocked to read Egan's article, wherein he found more than one statement falsely attributed to him.
The most egregious false attribution came from Egan's interview with Dr. Meldrum. During Egan's phone interview, Meldrum similarly did not "give Mr. Wallace credit for the hoax". But, unlike the others, Meldrum did have something to say about it. He explained to Egan how he could prove that Wallace didn't have anything to do with the 1958 "Bigfoot" tracks. Egan asked Meldrum detailed questions about how he could demonstrate it. Meldrum explained himself in detail.
Regardless of whether Egan accepted Meldrum's analysis, Egan clearly got the message that Meldrum did not give Wallace "credit for the hoax". Meldrum did say he had some likely fake casts from that region which could have been made by Wallace, but those were clearly distinguished from the specific track finds Egan was asking about.
Of the two PhD's and the one clinical psychologist who were interviewed by Egan for this New York Times story, all of them say that Egan falsely attributed statements to them. Of those three people, only one had any comments about the 1958 track finds, and those comments were exactly the opposite of what Egan attributed to all three of them. Egan's cross-examination of Meldrum over the phone during their interview makes it certain that Egan knew Meldrum did not give Wallace credit for the tracks in question, yet this is what Egan wrote, for the front page of the New York Times, January 3, 2003.
If a politician, celebrity or prominent businessman had done something like this, it would have been a major scandal ... and would have been vigorously investigated by the New York Times."
http://www.bfro.net/news/wallace.asp#commentary
We're talking about a very large creature that should be pretty easy to find. Anybody with a pair of binoculars standing at the base of a mountain should be able to pick one of these things out fairly easily for that matter if given enough time. No solid evidence after years of searching equals no reason to believe that this thing exists.
Are you serious? Get the funding to stand at the base of the mountain (never mind the trees and the brush that tends to conceal anything over five feet away) and you'll have all sorts of support from investigators trying to get confirmation of these elusive, mostly nocturnal far-ranging, rare animals. Let me know how it turns out.
