I employ Sulloway’s maxim every time I encounter Bigfoot hunters and Nessie seekers. Their tales make for gripping narratives, but they do not make sound science. A century has been spent searching for these chimerical creatures. Until a body is produced, skepticism is the appropriate response.

11 Comments

1. 1. candide08 12:17 PM 8/4/08

   What's next, SciAm articles on Griffons, Satyrs and Minotaursz?

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2. 2. ckale 12:38 PM 8/4/08

   Oh, candide08, is there no room for fun in your life? IIRC, you hated the Batman article as well. This article isn't about whether Bigfoot is real, isn't about valuing scientific skepticism over anecdotes, evidence over rumor - I'd say it fits right in with SciAm.

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3. 3. mossface 01:02 PM 8/4/08

   I think it's perfectly appropriate to address this. It's easy for many people to be confused by 'true believers', and science sometimes gets characterized as stodgy and unwilling to accept new evidence. I think if someone sitting on the fence were to read this, they would have a chance of grasping the significance of an anecdote - of some limited utility in determining what merits further study. Obviously, if a bigfoot corpse turned up tomorrow, science would be delighted to accept bigfoot as a reality. In the absence of a corpse lo these many years, it would appear our hairy hominid is fiction.

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4. 4. ckale in reply to ckale 02:41 PM 8/4/08

   " isn't about valuing scientific skepticism over anecdotes,"
   Obviously a typo. I meant to say "it's about . . . "

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5. 5. TrackerMedic 08:53 PM 8/4/08

   What is your plan should a body be presented? The evidence for sasquatch has been lain at the feet of science for the last 50 years, and yet what has been presented has been ignored. When a body is presented, I for one think our "brightest minds" have a lot of explaining to do. In the search for Bigfoot, mankind has been its own worst enemy. Anyone who does see one is shunned into silence by societal pressures originating from the absolute certainty of the scientific community that they don't exist. Since I've actually seen one of these things, I can tell you to stand by for a healthy serving of Corvus brachyrhynchos .

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6. 6. BobClark 09:21 PM 8/5/08

   I agree with you, TrackerMedic. Seeing is more than just believing. Seeing is knowing that a specific cryptid exists even if it can't be proven to the scientific community. My brother and I as well as several other people in the San Francisco Bay area have had definitive sightings of a large unknown serpentine marine animal (sea serpent). Anyone who is interested in these sightings can go to our blog at http://home.access4less.net/~sfseaserpent/ where we provide a lot of information about all the sightings in the SF Bay area. We realize that without a body the skeptics and the scientific community will not acknowledge that the animal we saw actually exists. However, all the eyewitnesses know it exists in spite of all the denials of the animal's existence and claims that we must have simply misidentified a known animal or object or that we are all hoaxers.

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7. 7. howelldrake 12:49 AM 9/3/08

   "Bigfoot proponents do not not dispute the Wallace Hoax"? Ahem...2008 to 2003, do your friggin' homework that was even due in your year. Read "BIGFOOT! The True Story of Apes in America" (c) 2003, by Loren Coleman , the most respected cryptozoologist globally (as well as a sociological pundit often turned to by the media), and rephrase that tripe re: Wallace.

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8. 8. Dr. Buzzard 11:25 PM 10/6/08

   In the former Soviet territory of Georgia, U.S.S.R, you can find reliable and substantial proof that at least one relic hominid (Almas) exist (Possibly Homo heilderburgus)., Around the late 1800's a "wild woman" was captured, enslaved, domesticated and bore half human-hominid children that whose descendants still survive till this day! The captured creature was named "Zana". Dr. Stringer an anthropologist , went to Georgia in search of Zana's grave, but it is not yet located, as of this date. However, Zana's youngest son Khivit 's grave was excavated, and while Khivit and siblings led a normal human life, despite bearing a different appearance from the locals, his cranium displayed primitive features, including thick brow ridges. It's one of the world's little known secrets! For articles dealing with this subject and a photo of Khivit's skull, please, please, Google in the search bar, "Zana in Russia", read the literature on the sites and decide for yourself. As for me the evidence is so compelling, well documentated, the living descendants with physical features quite unlike their local counterparts, and most undeniable of all, the hybrid features of Khivit's skull, the creature Zana's youngest child.

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9. 9. Dr. Buzzard 11:57 PM 10/6/08

   Then there are the O rang-Pendak reports from Indonesia that correlate with fossil find Homo florensis or "hobbit" discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores a couple of years ago. Not only Negritos were recently discovered on Flores, but persistent legends of small hairy hominids still occur on Flores as well as Borneo and Sumatra. Like Gigantopithecus (Bigfoot) and Homo florensis (Orang-Pendak) if you are a skeptic still, you cannot possibly deny that these creatures exist in the fossil record. There are many relic species or "living fossils". Take alligators and coelecanths(fish re-discovered off the coast of South Africa in the 1930's alleged to be extinct for 30 million years in the fossil record) for example. Then take into consideration of recent animal discoveries such as the following four examples out of so many recent animal discoveries,, Gorilla (1849) also once a Sasquatch-like legend, Komodo Dragon (1911) and the Giant Vietnamese Muntac deer' and a bovid, also discovered in the rain forest of Vietnam, the spindlehorn ox, in the 1990's.Their are many new species discovered every year, such as believe it or not , a color changing like a chameleon, snake in Borneo, a couple of years ago. Minnesota Iceman of 1968 anyone?

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10. 10. "Old Country Editor" 11:36 PM 4/29/09

    iNTERESTING--if the facts didn't get in the way.
    I'm a disability-retired "country newspaper" editor, and I've seen all sorts of "body debris fields" (places where a large animal had died, and been left in place) ranging from where farmers had dumped winter-killed livestock, up to a site where a vet had disposed of the bodies of animals that had been euthanized.
    "Evidence" of cattle, sheep, large dogs, etc., rapidly disintegrates, and simply sinks into the forest floor. Within less than six months, all that would be left would be an occasional off-white to dark brown-gray glimpse of the large bones. After a year, one would have to dig through the forest debris to locate any "evidence.
    Plus, small animals (deer mice, chipmunks, squirrel, etc.) routinely consume bones for the minerals, so "big" bones rapidly become unrecognized shards.
    And, the annual seasonal freeze/thaw cycle helps to shatter even cattle teeth as the trapped water freezes, expands 10 percent above original volume, and breaks up the bones, teeth, etc.
    I've been to places where human remains (suicides, hunting accidents, and even homicides) had been unearthed by forensics personnel, and after a few years, even a human skeleton begins to become a scattered litter of splinters.
    Unless someone happened upon either a fairly recent (less than six months) cryptid cadaver, or a rare case in which the subject expired in a sheltered yet easily-seen location, scores of people could cross the site in complete ignorance.
    "Show Me The Body?" Sounds nice, but that simple statement profoundly demonstrates the terrific ignorance of the speaker with the natural recycling of living remains. Perhaps geting out of the office, and into the field, might be in order.
    

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11. 11. "Old Country Editor" 01:46 AM 4/30/09

    Just a quick followup, ere I rest:
    My companion is an archaeology student, and reminded me that hundreds of thousands of Native Americans had died, across the US, up until the Jacksonian "Trail of Tears" relocations, and that their remains are scant.
    Even in so-called "Mound-Builder" burial sites, skeletons are often merely more-pale smears in the clay, and even where ancient communities have been identified, human remains are still rarely discovered.
    Discovery of Native American "bones," as such, are evidently reserved for the arid regions of the country, where moisture and the byproducts of forest litter are not present to eliminate them.
    It seems that woodland soils produce bone-dissolving acids--you may recall your own grade-school experiments with chicken bones in weak vinegar solutions, and how the bones quickly became rubbery.
    Bones in woodland soils are attacked by the acetic compounds formed from leaves or "needles" and bark, in the soil (tannin, or tannic acid, is still harvested from hard- and soft-wood tree barks) and simply dissolved away, in the majority of cases.
    These causal factors greatly mitigate against the survival in situ of any cryptid skeletal remains.
    "Show Me The Body" then becomes a very moot point, as any surviving fragments of older skeletal remains would effectively be dissolved, in the vast majority of cases.
    Unless they had lain in situ long enough for fossilization to take place, with more-durable minerals infiltrating and replacing the dissolved-away calcium, they would likely resemble mere smears of lighter clays, among darker clay and loam deposits. Not much "evidence" would be available.
    Again, the premise sounds nice enough, but vanishes in the strong light of solid science. It's a nice "Catch-22" in that the debunkers are demanding evidence which "elementary science" shows them simply cannot survive the environment--they know full well that they cannot be "proven wrong" because the evidence will likely have dissolved away.
    Clever.

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