“Video capture image of what a Calgary researcher claims is Bigfoot. He claims to have taken the video in the spring of 2011, three hours from his home in Calgary in the Banff/Kootenay area. Photo courtesy Todd Standing”

If nothing else, the news is bound to make big strides with the Banff tourism industry.

No longer will Alberta’s best-known mountain park depend solely on breathtaking scenery and abundant wildlife to impress visitors and lure overseas tourists.

And no more envy towards other famous vacation spots like Loch Ness and Lake Okanagan, where legendary creatures are rumoured to lurk.

Banff now has Bigfoot. Lots and lots of Bigfoots, in fact.

Yes, it’s an allegation that would have Ripley wondering whether to Believe it or Not, and P.T. Barnum reaching for his cheque book, but the mountains west of Calgary are a hotbed for the huge-footed primates.

That’s the assertion of a dedicated bigfoot research organization based near Calgary, which claims not only to have video and photo evidence of the mythical beast, but DNA proof as well.

“When I first started, I was a skeptic, but not anymore — now I’m a wholehearted believer in the species,” said Todd Standing, spokesman for the Sylvanic Bigfoot group.

Standing’s allegations of a Bigfoot colony living near the border of Banff and Kootenay national park will raise many eyebrows, but his evidence has piqued the interest of the Discovery Channel.

This week, crews from “Finding Bigfoot,” a hit show on Discovery’s Animal Planet channel, are filming in the Calgary area, and Standing says the upcoming episode will be centred upon Sylvanic’s discoveries.

“We’ve had exceptional results and we’re working with people doing DNA analysis,” said Standing.

He says preliminary results from hair samples sent in for testing suggest an unknown species of primate, while video and photographs suggest a creature larger than a gorilla, with human-like features.

Of course, it’s that latter evidence that’s bound to have the skeptics taking sasquatch-sized swipes at Standing, particularly the photographs he says are proof of Bigfoot.

Paranormal footage, as a rule, is supposed to be grainy, badly-focused and jittery, as if the camera was assembled by Fisher-Price and mounted to the bumper of a gravel truck.

Not Sylvanic: Standing boasts a collection of sharp video clips and crisp photographs of Bigfoot, showing far, far more than the usual hirsute primate dashing behind the nearest bush.

Instead of blur, we get full-face portraits of the creature, peering from behind trees.

“I’ve had multiple interactions with them, and I’ve filmed them and photographed them on many occasions,” said Standing.

“It’s a real, living breathing animal, which I got within 60 or 70 yards of.”

What the producers of Finding Bigfoot make of all this remains to be seen, as their quartet of sasquatchologists examines the Alberta evidence to see if it’s on solid footing.

The show has gone across North America investigating sightings of the creature, with the network “committed to looking for the Bigfoot until it’s found.”

Standing says he has — though he knows his belief in Bigfoot and the proof he produces from the Banff backwoods opens him to mockery, derision and the suggestion he should sober up.

But he accepts the skeptism, because he originally joined the Sylvanic team with the intent of disproving the ancient story of an ape-like creature hiding in the wilderness of North America.

“I thought it was a combination of hoaxes and mistaken identities, and I wanted to prove it wasn’t true,” said Standing.

Now, he says Bigfoot is a fact — and with weeks, he hopes to have the DNA evidence to prove it.

“We hope to have results by October,” said Standing.

If that’s the case, tourism officials in Banff will surely be thrilled. As it is, they welcome the attention of the popular television show, saying any link with Bigfoot is a bonus for visitors.

“Anything interesting that attracts people is a good thing — it seems like some harmless fun,” said Mary Morrison, spokeswoman for Banff Lake Louise Tourism.

“I mean, who wouldn’t want to see a Bigfoot?”

Source: http://www.calgarysun.com/2011/08/29/platt-bigfoot-boom-in-banff

(silver star Bigfoot photograph)

A team member on Animal Planets series Finding Bigfoot , Cliff Barackman does a video debrief of the Silver Star Photograph showcased in the “Frozen Bigfoot” Washington episode. Barackman also goes over some interesting connections between Bigfoot and cemeteries. The Finding Bigfoot Washington episode continues the crew’s search for Bigfoot and its look into some very interesting sightings and evidence. Members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) contiue their quest to prove the existance of the elusive cryptid.

The figure looked a lot like a bow hunter might appear, though none of the local hunters the brothers spoke to admitted to being in the area on the night in question. Soon a pair of local Bigfoot enthusiasts arrived on the scene, and “authenticated” the mystery. Bigfoot buff Don Sherman analyzed the photo, comparing it to the most famous image of an alleged Bigfoot, seen in a 1967 film. According to Sherman, the proportions of the figure that the Kedrowskis captured are very similar to the figure in the 1967 Bigfoot film. “I am pretty convinced,” Sherman said.

Sherman may be convinced, but others aren’t—and this Bigfoot story doesn’t survive one of the most important scientific principles, Occam’s Razor. This idea (attributed to a William of Occam, who devised his version in the 1300s) is that if you have a phenomenon to be explained and several different theories are proposed as solutions, the simplest one (or the one with the fewest assumptions) is likely to be the correct answer.

For example, if a camera snaps a photo in the woods of a bipedal form on a trail that closely resembles a human in size and shape, is it more likely that the figure is actually a person, or that it’s Bigfoot—an animal that never proven to exist? Both are possible, but which is more likely?

The arms and legs of the figure in the trailcam image do not show the curvature of arm or leg muscles, a synthetic jacket seems to reflects a sheen, and the figure seems to be wearing gloves. It might indeed be Bigfoot—if Bigfoot has taken to wearing warm winter clothes as it hikes the trails.

Ironically, if Sherman is correct, his comparison actually undermines the whole case for Bigfoot, since the image is almost certainly a person in a dark jacket (whether hunter or hoax). That is, this Bigfoot expert is saying that a photo of a person in a dark woodsman’s outfit looks a lot like a famous Bigfoot photo that many suspect is really a guy in a dark ape outfit. If the new (bogus) Bigfoot image closely resembles an old one, then logically the old image is suspect.

Many monster-hunters have distanced themselves from the recent photo. Loren Coleman, founder of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, said that he thought the Bigfoot looked “bogus” and may have been a prank. “All I can say is that this merely continues the media’s need to push weak Bigfoot stories on an unsuspecting public. This image seems to have no solid foundation of evidence,” Coleman said.

This case also highlights one of the pitfalls of researching mysterious subjects like Bigfoot, ghosts, and UFOs: anyone can declare himself or herself an expert on the topic. There are no governing bodies or accrediting institutions for investigators, and most casual readers can’t tell which investigators use credible scientific methods and which simply put up a Web site and deem themselves authorities. The Minnesota trailcam non-Bigfoot photo says nothing about whether Bigfoot exists, but it does reveal a great deal about how these stories begin and spread.

Source: livescience

Earlier this month, Kenny and Margaret Mahoney set up a video camera in their garden after their home-grown vegetables began to mysteriously disappear.

They were stunned to find out a creature resembling a ghostly Dementor from the Harry Potter films prowling at the bottom of their land.

“We initially suspected a deer or a racoon of stealing our green beans. However when my husband produced the pictures of the shape at the bottom of our land we must admit to being surprised,” The Sun quoted Margaret, as saying.

The couple sent the image to their local news station in Kentucky, and soon found themselves at the centre of a ‘bigfoot fever’.

“After we appeared on television we were swamped with phone calls and emails from crypto-zoologists and bigfoot hunters wanting to talk. They all think that we may have stumbled on to something important,” the paper quoted Margaret, as saying.

A team from the History Channel have now even filmed a segment for their show, Monster Quest, with the Mahoneys.

The couple, however, is now worried, and has sent the pictures to a wildlife expert friend fearing the beast was a bear.

“We worried that it might be a bear, so we sent off the picture to a good friend who is an expert in that field. She said in her opinion it looked like fur, but she could not confirm it,” Margaret said.

“Our greatest fear is that it is indeed a bear. However, bears do not live in Kentucky so we are still at a loss as to what this figure could be,” she added.

Source: londonnews

A Kentucky man said his surveillance camera captured something in his back yard last week, but no one is sure what it is.

Kenny Mahoney had the camera in his yard to capture wildlife photos. It fires when it detects motion. When he checked the camera over the weekend, he found the usual collection of rabbits, raccoons … and something else.

“It looked like it had the outline of a head, and, like, gorilla-type shoulders, and then the arms crossed is what it looks like to me,” Mahoneysaid.

Mahoney said he doesn’t think he captured Bigfoot on film. But that doesn’t explain what the camera saw, either. Mahoney said whatever it was smashed down weeds and grass as it passed.

His wife took the photo to a wildlife expert on black bears, who said that whatever it was, it was fur-covered. But she told Mahoney’s wife that she couldn’t say for sure it was a bear, either.

Source: wlwt

The Bigfoot creature may have been captured on a remote trail camera placed in the Sierra National Forest, based on photography evidence released by Sanger Paranormal Society.

Investigator Jeffrey Gonzalez said Tuesday night that multiple cameras were put in place in this remote area on Memorial Day weekend, and retreived on June 7, 2009.

Gonzalez said they did not immediately see the evidence, but upon closer inspection, noticed what appears to be the Bigfoot creature.

Gonzalez said a group returned to the site to review the exact capture spot after many theories surfaced once the original image was released in early July.

The tree stump theory was ruled out, he said, because the “dark object” is not there. Gonzalez said the bear theory does not stand up either, because the image does not have a snout on the head.

“You can see features of a human face such as the nose, mouth and chin,” Gonzalez reports.

“The arms on a bear, when standing, do not hang that far down. We also took measures on how high this thing was. According to the leaves and the branches that were covering the object’s face, the tape measure said it was between 8 and 9 feet tall. The same camera that took the picture of the object also took pictures of other objects such as black bear and deer, which does not resemble the object in any way.”

Gonzales said that Bigfoot investigator David Raygoza has been visiting this location for six years after an elderly Native American pointed it out to him.

He told David that this spot in the forest was sacred Indian land and that weird things happen here. He said David has had many individual sightings and has collected footprints, but has never captured anything with a camera until now.

Returning to the exact spot where the image was captured, Gonzalez said that the angle of the hill is 45 degrees, which would make it difficult for a bear to stand upright. He also said the the object is clearly brown in color, ruling out the black bear.

The Bigfoot creature has been reported in many different parts of the country during the 20th century, including an “outbreak” during 1973 and 1974, primarily in southwestern, Pennsylvania, and investigated by Stan Gordon. During that period, hundreds of Bigfoot sightings were reported as well as hundreds of UFO reports. No photographic evidence exists from that time, although Gordon collected many foot prints in that region.

Source: Examiner