Hello everyone, I'm a laboriously pedantic @ss who believes in science. One of those annoying
"ahem...if I may..." types. Anyways...
No, no, and no, to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Chupacabra, respectively. You find me a corpse/skeleton of anyone of those creatures and I'll be happy to publicly apologize right here on this forum. But you never will.
As
@Paris pointed out, the sightings of UFOs in the US has gone down by about 900% due to everyone carrying a smart phone w/camera. So have all the ostensible sightings of bigfoot, Yeti, etc. Ideas about the existence of bigfoot have more to do with how the human mind works than with what is actually out there roaming around through nature. Humans are very good at seeing "agency" or "cause" in everything. This is why we believe in god (why did my crops fail?...god did it. Why did that avalanche occur?...god did it). We are programmed to see human-like intention or even human-like creatures behind every random act in nature (this is why when people "picture" god, s/he looks human and not like an octopus). Why?...because this is what you did for like the first 3 years of your life. You cried and some god-like creature (otherwise known as mom or dad) gave you a bottle. You smiled and some god-like creature (otherwise known as mom or Uncle Big Bad Jeff) took a photo of you, which made you laugh some more. You were literally brought up to see that there were larger-than-life actors in your "universe" that made things happen. And you might have carried this psychological template into your adult life in the form of organized religion, superstition, or your own spiritual beliefs. Thus it is quite natural that we
believe we see human-like creatures even though we don't, or impute human-like behaviors onto inanimate objects--like that stubborn door that won't close and thus needs to be taught a lesson!
And then, to add to the mix, there are hoaxers who like to just mess with people's minds because they are bored and they enjoy preying on the easy-believers. A modern day incarnation of bigfoot-hoaxers is InfoWars (it's exciting and makes you feel special to believe in something anti-establishment, despite facts to the contrary). There are subsets of people out there who like to create fake things such as "bigfoot footprints" or even films of "bigfoot" walking...it's been going on for decades, google "piltdown hoax".)
The creature's walk in the Patterson film (in the original post on page 1) can be easily faked by any student who has taken an intro/upper level biological anthropology class as the gait of "bigfoot" in that film is a
compliant gait, which is easy to do--you just walk like Groucho Marx, keeping your upper torso and arms immobile and rigid, and only move your legs from torso on down. The
compliant gait was used by the actor in that film because reconstructions of australopithecines (our distant human bipedal ancestors that went extinct about a million years ago) were thought to walk with a compliant gait. So the idea here is that bigfoot is a late-surviving australopithecine that has somehow managed to survive for over a million years into the present day and also--quite puzzlingly--managed to leave Africa (where australopithecines are only found in fossil form) and migrate to the northeast of the USA. The kinematics of that film were analyzed in "The Skeptical Inquirer" and it was deemed that the film is way too short and fuzzy to either prove or disprove the existence of bigfoot (see "Bigfoot's screen test" by Dave Daegling and Dan Schmitt--they did a careful analysis in response to investigations by other scientists who claimed the film "proved" the extistance of bigfoot). But to put this into perspective...if bigfoot is so elusive, then this means that density of these creatures is quite low, about 1 per 100 square miles. And you would need a population of these things, not just a single male and a single female, to sustain this "species" for a million years. There is not a single demographic model that could suggest a small number of creatures (say 50 or 100 or 150) could sustain themselves over a million years without succumbing to 1) inbreeding (because this is a small population, it is only a matter of time until brothers mate with sisters, cousins with cousins, etc.), 2) demographic stochasticity (whereby the properties of simply being a small population have recurrent negative effects on future population growth, 3) Allee effects (whereby the lack of suitable mates--because they are hard to find and at low densities--further leads to negative population growth), and 4) being 'effing seen and recorded by a population of humans in the northeast of the USA, where population densities are (generously) 20 individuals per square mile.
