CryPtoReports.com

Billy Willard says he’s on the verge of a major discovery that could change the way humans think about the natural world, not to mention their need for a creature-proof home security system.

Here in Spotsylvania County, in the forests around Lake Anna, Willard contends there have been 14 sightings in the past decade of that most fabled of cryptozoic beasts: Bigfoot.

Or Sasquatch, as the elusive, apelike brute is referred to in other circles — and on the side of Willard’s blue pickup. The decal on the truck reads “Sasquatch Watch of Virginia,’’ of which Willard is chief pooh-bah (when he’s not earning a living installing and removing underground home oil tanks).

Go ahead, call him a loon, a flake, a huckster. He’s heard it all. But Willard knows what he knows, which is that three people from this area — a woman, her husband, and their granddaughter — told him they saw a shaggy, super-sized figure on two legs gallivanting across their wooded property.

Last month, Willard led a week long expedition to the site, where he installed five motion-sensor cameras that will snap photos if and when the big galoot wanders by again.

Willard, 41, says he’d like to lead a tour of the property and introduce the witnesses, really he would. But the woman who says she saw what she believes could have been Bigfoot fears an avalanche of ridicule, which is why Willard is left to deliver his version of what happened a few miles away, in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen.

“We believe we may be close to some kind of major discovery,’’ he said. “All the things they would need are here, fresh water, shelter in the woods. The high concentration of sightings tells me they’re here.’’

He interrupts his monologue to answer his cellphone, the ringtone to which is the country tune “People Are Crazy.’’

Ever since humans began telling stories, they have spun yarns involving life forms that tower above mere mortals, whether it’s the giant of “Jack and the Beanstalk’’ fame, or Goliath, or Frankenstein.

Bigfoot has been a perennial for generations, with hundreds of purported sightings (many of them of supposed footprints), most prevalent in the Pacific Northwest but also popping up in states as disparate as Rhode Island, Illinois, and Alabama.

The myth grew in popularity in 1967, when two men in California filmed what appeared to be a huge and hairy biped walking into the woods, at one point turning its head to glance dramatically at the camera.

In Bigfoot circles, the footage is referred to as the “Patterson-Gimlin film,’’ named for its makers.

In less admiring circles, the short, fuzzy clip is cited as nothing short of poppycock.

Willard knows about the film, and most everything else Bigfoot-related, all of which he’s happy to share at any time, sometimes to the annoyance of his wife, Jeanean, who is prone to blurt out, “Okay, the conversation will have to change.’’

For all of Willard’s certainty about Bigfoot, the buzz has not exactly caught on in the rural hamlets around Lake Anna, where many residents work at the nearby nuclear power plant or in construction or commute to Richmond or Washington.

Behind the grill at Tarheel Pig Pickers barbecue, Mark Lane, 54, giggled.

“When I see Bigfoot water skiing, I’ll believe it,’’ he said. “If they catch him, we’ll put him on the rotisserie and invite everyone in the community.’’

Ron McCormick, president of a home-building company, said people have more pressing concerns, such as plummeting property values and paying bills. “On the other hand, it could bring in tourists,’’ he said as he sat at his desk, playing solitaire on his laptop.

Craig Petrie, 55, mowing grass a few miles away, volunteered that he sometimes hears voices calling his name from below as he tends the cemetery adjoining Wallers Baptist Church, where he holds the titles of head deacon and chief groundskeeper.

But Bigfoot sightings? “Never happened,’’ he said, although he’s open to the possibility, particularly with all the new subdivisions in the area ripping out trees and kicking up dirt.

“If anyone’s going to see him, it’s me, because I’m always on this mower. And if he kills me, they’ll just have to walk a few feet to bury me. It’s convenient.’’

The small but avid universe of Bigfoot enthusiasts includes self-styled investigators who pursue their quest during off hours from their day jobs.

Willard, for example, hosts an Internet radio show and maintains a website from his home in Manassas; he also monitors his Bigfoot hotline for reported sightings (a recent caller announced “I just saw Bigfoot in Reston,’’ before exploding in laughter and hanging up).

More dispassionate scholars are fascinated by the unflagging interest in bogeymen.

“People have a need to think about something like ourselves, something scary, using them as a cautionary tale,’’ said Robert Michael Pyle, whose book “Where Bigfoot Walks’’ explores the history of Sasquatch.

Willard spends countless hours in the woods listening for footsteps, always with a camera, ready to snap a picture.

He brings a set of knives and a hatchet. If he finds a dead Bigfoot, he intends to walk away with the ultimate trophy, DNA evidence, to send a message to those who ridicule the believers: “To give them the final ‘Aha! I told you so.’ ’’

Source: boston.com

He stands 9 feet tall with stringy brown fur all over his body and glowing red eyes, and if he truly does exist, he probably lives in a forest near you.

The ape-like beast known as Sasquatch is mere legend to skeptics, but to members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, he is a legitimate scientific conundrum. The group regularly scours areas in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and other wooded parts of the state in search of “squatches” — that’s right — plural Sasquatch.

Based on sightings reported by BFRO’s Web site, Washington state is effectively Bigfoot central, more specifically the densely covered Cascade foothills of Southwest Washington. The group believes Sasquatches live in complex communities with advanced social norms and complex forms of communication, including their own language.

“These people who live here, if you could get them to talk to you, they would tell you, ‘We hear them all the time,’” said Scott Taylor, a particularly active member of BFRO who led a group of eight people on a research trip near Mount Rainier National Park last Saturday. “We try to come out to places like this to meet the witnesses and sit and talk and let them get it off their chest, because many of them have been bottling it up for years.”

The group’s claim to fame is the “Skookum Cast,” a body impression of an ape-like figure found in the Skookum Meadow, in the southern portion of the Gifford Pinchot. It was unveiled in 2000 and studied by the late Washington State University anthropologist Grover Krantz, who dedicated much of his career to studying Bigfoot, along with the Kennewick Man — skeletal remains of a prehistoric man found on the Columbia River in 1996.

Taylor, a retired U.S. Marine and engineer by trade who lives in Spanaway, said Lewis County is one of his most common areas of investigation, and he experienced one of his five Sasquatch sightings while deer hunting south of Mossyrock in December. He said his attention peaked when he heard the characteristic Sasquatch “scream.”

“It’s high-pitched like a chimp, but with much more timbre, like a growl. You experience a primal sense of fear,” Taylor said. “I scanned the slope and saw a creature on all fours dart from one tree to another. And that’s common when they come into contact with people. They’ll get low to avoid being seen.”

Tyler Bounds, a Stanwood man also on the expedition, said he has spent time on old logging roads outside Morton, where he saw trees jammed into the ground with root structures facing upward. He said he heard a strange growl on the excursion.

“It sounded like a monster,” he said.

But in the world of Bigfoot, the believers are clearly outnumbered. A total lack of bones, plus purposeful attempts at Sasquatch hoaxing serve only to bolster the case for skeptics.

“It serves them no purpose to be seen by us. How often do we find bones of bears or cougars? They quickly decay,” Taylor said. “And it’s pretty easy to tell what’s real and what is a hoax.”

Another member of the expedition Saturday says he has never seen a Sasquatch. He said he’s a federally funded anthropologist, but declined to give his name.

“Once you start looking into the evidence and reading books and all .. the idea that it’s all hoaxing and misidentification, I don’t know, is it a collective hallucination?” he said. “It seems more reasonable to start looking at the idea that these things really exist.”

Bigfoot Hoaxer Ray Wallace Has Roots in Toledo

Perhaps the most famous Bigfoot hoaxer of all time hailed from Toledo.

Ray Wallace, apparently with the help of a Toledo friend, Rant Mullins, wanted to play a trick on Northern California miners in the 1950s when he was on a road-building project. Wallace made a wooden cast from an outline of a friend’s foot expanded by three times and left impressions in the ground near logging sites.

According to interviews with Wallace’s family, the hoax began as a way to deter people from vandalizing the sites but later developed into a lifelong hobby. The fake tracks helped coin the term “Bigfoot” in a headline of the Humboldt Times in Eureka, Calif.

Wallace died in 2002, but is survived by family still in the area. Bigfoot believers generally don’t buy the Wallace hoax because its announcement came after his death when family members found the foot pressings after sorting through his old junk. The Bigfoot faithful also take particular umbrage with what they say are fabricated quotes in a 2002 article by the New York Times calling Wallace’s passing “the death of Bigfoot.”

“He used to mess with us kids. Then he made those tracks at a camp down there in California — ‘course they got up the next morning real excited,” said Dale Wallace, Ray’s 76-year-old nephew who lives in Toledo. “Yep, he was a real character.”

The following are Bigfoot-related news snippets from The Chronicle’s archives:

April 12, 1982 — A retired Toledo logger said he helped create the legends of a Bigfoot creature around Mount St. Helens. Rant Mullens, 86, said he and his uncle were returning from a fishing trip in 1924 and decided to throw a scare into some miners in the area. They rolled rocks over the edge and hightailed away. Later the three miners from Kelso reported seeing huge, hairy, apelike creatures that hurled boulders down upon their cabin. The miners said they fought off the creatures with rifle fire.

Mullens said he built on the legend four years later, when he whittled giant feet out of green alder wood and a friend stomped around the banks of the Muddy River, leaving tracks for berry pickers to notice.

“I tell you, people will believe just about anything,” the solitary, retired logger said from his home in Toledo.

April 19, 1982 — H. Woodman, Napavine, wrote a letter to the editor saying he saw a Bigfoot creature in 1953.

“Going home one evening on the Rutledge Road in the Littlerock area, I drove around a corner and saw a single animal — I thought it was a bear standing on its hind legs in the road. It was taller than a 6-foot man and was brown in color. It ran across the road, leaped a split rail fence and was gone in four or five seconds.

“Sometime later, I read some literature and remembered this sighting. The animal had hind legs that were of human proportions. A bear’s hind legs are short compared to its body. When it ran away at great speed it did not run on four legs but ran erect as a man would. A bear would run on all fours… I know what I saw and the only proof I need is to remember that it was erect when it ran away.”

Feb. 10, 1997 — Ruth Steele, 73, was convinced that a Bigfoot creature was roaming the hills near her home in Dryad.

“No question about it, I seen it … I’m not hallucinating — I’ve got a good mind.”

She believed she had seen either a Sasquatch or some kind of alien three times in six months. She didn’t carry a camera with her those times, but she had begun to. All the sightings took place near rural Doty and Dryad on the semiforested River Road.

The 7-foot-something tall humanoid was covered with gray, white and sometimes black fur, she said. The animal’s face appeared pink skinned. The furry creature walked upright and wore no clothing. In the most recent sighting, in January, the creature heard her car, turned and looked directly at her. Its eyes shone red.

“It shocked the devil out of me when I seen it,” Steele said. “I thought what in God’s name is that? … He wasn’t no human. He’s never nothing I’d seen in the woods.”

During a recent sighting her daughter, Debra Steele, 41, also saw the creature. “It looked me right in the face — it scared the pants right off of me,” the younger Steele said.

Aug. 5, 2001 —  The public had its first chance to see the Skookum Cast, a plaster casting of what might be Bigfoot. Wildlife biologist Dr. LeRoy Fish, Oregon, said the heel had what appeared to be a callus.

The 3½ by 5 foot chunk of plaster held the reverse imprint of what Fish and Kevin Lindley of Mossyrock said was an unknown primate.

The impression had been discovered in Skookum Meadow in Skamania County in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, between Mount St. Helens and Mount Adams.

Bigfoot skeptics say Wallace could have been behind famous tracks found at the Ape Cave near Mount St. Helens.

Reported Bigfoot Sightings in Lewis County

1967

Winlock — “The Brinson Monster” — Startled by a tall standing beast, high school kids who were out for a night of beer drinking at their regular spot return with a rifle and attempt to kill Bigfoot.

1969

White Pass — A Washington State University student sees a roadside Sasquatch who was startled by his headlights and then stepped over the guardrail on U.S. Highway 12.

1980

Packwood — Man reports a large scream from an animal running across the back side of the High Valley Country Club.

1990

Morton — Two men cutting cedar shake blocks near a creek hear a peculiar scream on an old logging road.

1994

Mineral — Two friends see a “dirty white” Sasquatch picking branches from a crab apple tree near a farm.

1996

Morton — Two people spot a Sasquatch bathing in a pond and periodically slapping the water with huge hands.

1998

Randle — Two hunters hear unusual “whoop howl” in stand of old growth forest.

2000

Morton — Mother and daughter see “large animal with long reddish brown hair” cross the road.

Morton — Woman stops her vehicle to look at what she thinks is a bear in a roadside ditch, but when it stood up, she thought it was a gorilla. She said the Sasquatch appeared to be injured and bleeding and had a “sad look” as it crossed the road in front of her car.

2001

White Pass — Family traveling from Tacoma report a Sasquatch standing in the road.

2002

Mossyrock — Riffe Lake fisherman and his son see a Sasquatch walking in a clear-cut forest near the shore.

Randle — A man and his wife are awakened by a loud scream similar to a peacock, but louder and with more timbre. The man went outside and mimicked the call and was answered six times.

Packwood — Elk hunter is spooked to find giant footprints in snow.

2003

Morton — Night watchmen for a logging company hear a strange short scream with a deep tone and two days later describe a figure “like Andre the Giant stepping over a rope.”

2004

Doty — A dozen teenagers camping at Rainbow Falls State Park hear a strange scream after putting out their camp fire.

Mossyrock — A wife and her husband hear two strange screams while out elk hunting and camping near a clear-cut forest.

2005

Salkum — A man driving down a dead-end country road sees a nondescript “gray patch” get up and move two steps into the woods.

2006

Doty — A man hunting in a wooded area comes into direct contact with a Sasquatch, which screamed at him and then “said something” he couldn’t understand.

2007

Winlock — A man lets his dogs run in his back yard when he hears a strange scream come from Olequa Creek.

2009

Salkum — Three men sitting in a drift boat on the south side of the Cowlitz River hear a sound like a “chimp screaming” from dense brush directly across the river. They said the sound carried on wailing for a minute or more.

Source: bfro.net

Chronline.com

If Bigfoot exists in North America, the mythical beast is no mere ancient representative of an ape family that migrated across the Bering land mass with mastodons and ancient man, a primatologist says.

Bigfoot — or Sasquatch or Skunk Ape or Fouke Monster or whatever name you prefer — would have to be a completely new and specific species, Esteban Sarmiento told attendees at the ninth annual Texas Bigfoot Conference on Sept. 26. “If it’s real, this animal is exceedingly human-like,” Sarmiento said. “It would be our closest relative on earth.”

Sarmiento, though, wouldn’t exactly address the question of whether Bigfoot exists or whether he believes the tales about wild, hairy beasts that have drifted out of dark, wooded river bottoms and foggy rain forests for decades. What Sarmiento did say, though, is that, based on his studies of great apes in Africa, Sumatra and Borneo, whatever Bigfoot is, he’s not an ape.

Sarmiento spoke during the conference about the so-called Patterson-Gimlin film shot in 1967. A touchstone in Bigfoot lore and the believers’ burning bush, the film purports to show a female Bigfoot with pendulous breasts, striding across a rocky area in northern California.

The film has been debated by believers, denounced and debunked by critics, shown on television and dissected and disseminated on YouTube.

Roger Patterson was a would-be filmmaker who had been trying to get funding for a movie about Bigfoot. In early 1967, he rented a quality 16mm camera and convinced Robert Gimlin to travel with him into the wilderness to look for the creature . Amazingly, they found a hairy specimen walking away from them and into heavy timber in the distance. The creature shown in the film is covered in dark hair and walks with a human gait, even turning its head to look back at the camera before it disappears.

Gimlin, who’s still alive and attended the conference, swears the film is real. Patterson maintained its authenticity until his death, which happened in 1972. However, a man named Bob Heironimus has claimed he was paid $1,000 to don the suit and walk in front of the camera and out of sight.

Bigfoot and Sasquatch sightings have been common in the Pacific Northwest for decades. They’ve also been prevalent in East Texas and the surrounding big timber regions of Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma.

Believers think the common traits of a 7- to 9-foot tall, hairy, wild-eyed but super intelligent beast that normally avoids humans but often is spotted walking along roadways or standing close to remote cabins are related to the same species.

Bigfoot is rare enough, they say, that he must move around to find mates and new territory, and that’s why reports have filtered in for at least 150 years.

There have been some obscure and out-of-focus photos taken over the years, and there have been Bigfoot hoaxes and claims of capture and kills, even by respected members of the Bigfoot community. But no one ever has managed a quality photo that comes even close to Patterson’s film.

Bigfoot believers — the serious ones are called researchers to separate themselves from simple believers who seem to have devout faith as well in Atlantis, UFOs, chupacabras and aliens among us — have claimed the film shows a possible descendant of Gigantopithecus blacki, a great ape that migrated across the land bridge to live in North America. Sarmiento isn’t buying that.

“A great ape (chimp, gorilla or orangutuan) can’t do this. I guarantee there’s no great ape that can do this,” Sarmiento says, pointing to the frame in the film when the creature turns in full stride to look over its shoulder at the camera. “A gorilla couldn’t do this. It can’t turn it’s head. An ape would have to stop and turn around to look at the camera.” Apes can walk on two legs, he said, but not with the stride and gait the Patterson Bigfoot uses. That’s a human trait.

“And the breast is covered in hair. Gorillas don’t have hair on their breasts. Apes only have breasts if they’re nursing, but there’s no baby in the film,” Sarmiento said. “Females usually have a baby around, and I don’t think it would leave and not take the baby.” Sarmiento added that the bottom of the Bigfoot’s foot in the film isn’t an ape’s foot with an opposable toe and even noted that it looks somewhat like a padded house shoe.

So what is it? What does the film show? “If I can’t show it either way, why would I make the call,” Saremiento said. “If it’s real it has to be a whole new species. Is it a man in a monkey suit? I don’t know. If I said that and it turned out not to be, then I’d look stupid.”

Source: statesman

If you’ve seen any hulking hairy beasts or unexplained gigantic footprints lately, a group of sasquatch seekers wants to hear from you.

The Western Canadian Sasquatch Research Organization hopes a newspaper advertising blitz this summer will help sniff out reports from witnesses who have encountered the legendary hairy giant.

“Many reports are not brought forward because many people who have a story to tell do not want to be ridiculed,” said Roman Forczek, a Lacombe welder who specializes in conducting field research for the sasquatch group.

“We do receive a lot of stories that you just have to dismiss. That is unfortunate, because we do treat the research seriously.” The sasquatch group has already collected nearly 700 accounts dating back to the early 1800s of footprints, sasquatch sightings, strange animal vocalizations and suspicious physical damage in the woods.

Its researchers, which include a Calgary chemist and lab owner, have analyzed hair samples, shot photographs and video and travelled to secluded sasquatch hot spots in their quest to prove the legendary creature exists.

The group was founded in 1999 under the name Central Alberta Sasquatch Research. It now has 33 members and covers Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Yukon and the Northwest Territories.

“We are trying to unravel this mystery,” Forczek said.

“We don’t claim to have any concrete evidence or indisputable evidence.” But Forczek hopes that proof isn’t far off.

Already, about a dozen people have responded this summer to the group’s advertising blitz in community newspapers, mostly in towns along the front range of the Rocky Mountains. Ads have appeared in Jasper, Grande Cache, Rocky Mountain House, Edson and Coleman, and the group is organizing more ads in Alberta and B.C.

Strange bedding That advertising caught the attention of an avid hunter and outdoorsman, who told Forczek on Monday about a shelter and strange bedding he found 20 years ago in a remote cave in the Rocky Mountain foothills.

“This fellow strongly believes this bed that he found inside of the cave was not made by bear or deer or any such creatures,” Forczek said.

“It is in an area that has had numerous sighting reports over the past 30 or 40 years.” Calgary organic chemist Brian Baillie can’t wait to set up a sasquatch search in the area sometime over the next month.

“The best chance of us getting more evidence is someone coming forward and saying, ‘Hey, I saw one,’ or ‘I saw some tracks,’ and us getting out there to see what we can verify.

“We’ve got hidden cameras that we set up in trees and all over the place. We haven’t been lucky enough yet. We’ve got lots of pictures of deer and things like that,” Baillie laughed.

There has even been sasquatch evidence around Edmonton, with reports of giant footprints along the river valley and sightings near Hobbema, Baillie said.

In 1969, numerous unrelated witnesses reported a spate of sightings near Nordegg, including five construction workers who reported seeing an enormous creature at the Big Horn Dam.

The brother of one of those workers recently contacted Baillie as a result of the sasquatch group’s ad campaign. Baillie interviewed the man and went through his brother’s sasquatch scrapbook.

“His brother, to his deathbed, swore that is exactly what he saw.” Field trips Neither Baillie nor Forczek has seen a sasquatch. However, both said they have seen evidence the creatures exist during separate field research trips to verify earlier sasquatch reports.

Forczek said he heard cracking branches, guttural grunting and high-pitched screams outside his tent in the middle of the night during a sasquatch research trip southeast of Big Horn dam in August 2005.

A search the next day failed to turn up any physical evidence.

And Baillie said he saw massive, human-like footprints from a creature with a huge stride in April 2005, when he checked out a forestry road north of Nordegg where a man had reported seeing a sasquatch two weeks earlier.

The research group is serious about weeding out hoaxes, Baillie said. There certainly have been some unbelievable reports and at least one crazy request, he added.

Quite a few years back, one woman wrote to the group “looking for love,” Baillie laughed.

“She was looking for a sasquatch because she wanted to mate. We never got back to her.”

Source: canada.com

Midnight, March 5. A young man drives toward U.S. 19 on Gulf Trace Boulevard in Holiday, Fla. He turns on his high beams where the road curves along some woods, just past the recreation center.

His lights catch a pair of yellowish eyes, then a broad-shouldered figure, 8 or 9 feet tall, covered in brown hair. The creature freezes before running to the tree line. It stops to look back at the car.

The young man pulls over 20 feet away. There are no other vehicles on the road. He can now see the creature from the shoulders up. The man doesn’t know why, but he thinks to yell, “Hi!” No answer. The creature disappears into the woods.

Believe it?

The young man sure seemed convincing when he reported the sighting to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. It dispatched investigator Cathy Betz, whose job is to separate hoaxes from actual Bigfoot sightings in Florida’s Pinellas, Pasco and Hernando counties.

She’s never seen a Bigfoot herself, but she is convinced they exist. Someday, she says, we’ll get proof.

Meanwhile, she’ll keep her day job: saving lives as a registered nurse in the intensive care unit at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa.

Betz, 45, has believed in the cryptid ever since she was a little girl growing up in Florida and her father took her to see the 1972 docudrama “The Legend of Boggy Creek.”

She read up on the subject, exploring evidence, and she became convinced that something was really out there. In 2003 she joined the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.

“I never imagined myself doing this kind of thing 10 years ago,” Betz says. “But I love it.”

She has been on four expeditions in Florida and one in North Carolina, and she is now on another in Utah. It was on the North Carolina expedition in 2008 that she had her closest encounter with Sasquatch.

At least she believes it was Sasquatch. It could have been a bear. Something walked around the tent, touching the fabric and grunting.

“I can’t say with certainty what it was,” Betz said, “but it was in a place with a lot of sightings.”

Two days after the Holiday man said he saw a swamp monster, Betz met him at the scene. She compared his story to the version he submitted to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization online. It was consistent.

They searched for tracks but didn’t find any. He told her he was sure he had not seen a bear or a human.

Betz’s notes are secret, she says, in order to protect the witnesses. She says the young man did not want to be publicly identified.

She considers her role to be much like what a police investigator does.

“We don’t want to be considered like a fluff organization,” she says. “In order to be taken seriously, we feel like we should separate out the stories that don’t pan out.”

As part of her investigations, she often cross-check facts, such as if the witness says it was a full moon. And she examines the area, looking for tracks, hair and other clues. She knows all about inspecting footprints for dermal ridges and mid-tarsal breaks.

“We’re really a research- and science-based organization trying to get as much evidence as we can,” she says. “We don’t want people to think that we’re just throwing everything out there that we get.”

Henry Cabbage, a spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said Bigfoot’s existence has not been confirmed. But the agency does keep a file on the subject, which includes news clippings and letters from people requesting permits to go out and catch one.

Source: scrippsnews

Sasquatch, the mythical “Bigfoot” of western North America, makes its home deep within the fertile imaginations of gullible people. If you insist on looking for one in the real world, though, you should search in the home of the black bear – at least according to a tongue-in-cheek study of the ape-like creature’s habitat preferences.

The study has a more serious message too: it’s easy to be fooled into believing a plausible-looking habitat analysis, even when the data is totally erroneous.

Conservation biologists often need to predict where rare species are capable of living – for selecting the best site for a national park, for example, or forecasting how badly a species’ range will suffer as the climate changes in the future.

The latest technique for making these predictions is so-called ecological niche modelling, in which researchers log the locations of known species sightings, then gather environmental data for those places to define the ecological limits of the species’ range.

Jeff Lozier, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was worried that some people may have been too uncritical in applying the technique. “Whenever you have these new, shiny, easy-to-use approaches, there’s a temptation to use them even before you know what the kinks are,” he says.

So Lozier and his colleagues decided to apply ecological niche modelling to an obviously false data set – Sasquatch sightings. They gathered all reported sightings in the US states of Washington, Oregon and California and used the environmental data to predict Sasquatch distribution.

They found that the model yielded a perfectly plausible prediction about Bigfoot habitats – a warning to modellers that spurious results will not necessarily announce themselves through obvious warning signs.

“The point of the paper is really well taken,” says Dan Warren, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of California at Davis who is an expert in ecological niche models. “I think the literature is rife with people who are over-interpreting what comes out of these models.”

The researchers also compared the niche model for Sasquatch to one they developed for black bear. The two were statistically indistinguishable, they found. This suggests that many supposed Sasquatch sightings may simply be misidentified bears – a mistake that has been made on at least one occasion, Lozier notes.

Source: newscientist

FAIRFIELD — It goes by many names: Bigfoot, Sasquatch — the legendary half-human, half-ape creature that, according to legend, prowls the great northern woods of the U.S. and Canada.

Some insist, however, that the hairy beast is real. Sasquatch “sightings” have primarily been reported in the Northwest.

Until now, that is.

A woman driving on Unquowa Road about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday called police to report that she “almost hit Sasquatch,” which was standing in the middle of the road. She said it was 8 feet tall and very hairy, with a large body and “legs like tree trunks.” When she switched her headlights to highbeams, she said, the creature covered its face and ran into the woods.

The driver told police it was “human like,” but more “like an animal.”

Unlike other Sasquatch sightings, where the elusive beast melts back into the deep woods, this one was located in Fairfield.

Bigfoot turned out to be a big joke — a 16-year-old dressed in a gorillalike costume, police said. The teen told officers he was standing at the intersection of Unquowa and Sturges roads, waving at passing cars while friends watched.

A police officer escorted the sham Sasquatch back home and turned him over to his parents, who, the police report states, agreed he should have shown better judgment.

Source: connpost