"Strange days, strange days. Seemed like a good idea at the time ..." sings Bob Saget in the opening credits of "Strange Days," a short-lived series on A&E. The show documents Saget's journey across America where he gains insight into "different and unusual" subcultures. A full year before "Finding Bigfoot" began airing on Animal Planet, Saget spent a week with the Bigfoot Field Research Organization in Washington's Olympic National Park searching for the elusive creature.
While this show doesn't serve the purpose of taking a critical look at the BFRO and their investigative techniques, it is nonetheless interesting to see what these guys get up to when they aren't producing Woo TV shows. As a person who grew up on a farm in a very rural wooded area, it seems to me that the BFRO researchers know little about the natural sounds of a forrest at night. The entire group, in fact, suffers from confirmation bias. Because they believe so strongly that bigfoot is just around the corner, every sound they hear automatically becomes a confirmation of that belief. Every noise and crackle literally is bigfoot, although the creature leaves no reliable physical evidence of its presence, even after (allegedly) woofing down bait donuts and salmon.
How does an 8ft-plus tall humanoid avoid leaving hundreds of tracks? And why do bigfoot prints never agree with one another besides displaying the stereotypical enlarged big toe and giant size? (The tracks are often anatomically bizarre and some have four toes per foot, while others have five or, occasionally, six per foot). What little evidence bigfoot hunters attribute to the creature is entirely unreliable, lacking steady reproducibility, and cannot be considered valid because of the group's overwhelming confirmation bias. No one in the "Strange Days" episode finds it bizarre that bigfoot likes to eat salmon, for example, considering that the Olympic National Park has a thriving population of black bears who feed off of massive natural salmon runs. Bears also enjoy and are attracted to sweet things, like those twinkies and chocolates BFRO "researchers" use for bait. Without considering other causes of piles of missing bait food and strange animal calls in the night, the BFRO comes off as amateurish and even silly. There are a number of large predators in that particular neck of the woods, including bob cats, mountain lions and coyotes.
The video below is another great debunking, and illustrates the point that common animals (especially bears who are capable of bipedal walking) can easily be mistaken for something mysterious, especially if you are not very experienced in the woods.
**Update** the above video is no longer on youtube. The channel, VOODOOSIXXX, an excellent source of debunking videos, was removed.
"I looked like bigfoot's TMZ paparazzi nightmare"
-Bob Saget
While this show doesn't serve the purpose of taking a critical look at the BFRO and their investigative techniques, it is nonetheless interesting to see what these guys get up to when they aren't producing Woo TV shows. As a person who grew up on a farm in a very rural wooded area, it seems to me that the BFRO researchers know little about the natural sounds of a forrest at night. The entire group, in fact, suffers from confirmation bias. Because they believe so strongly that bigfoot is just around the corner, every sound they hear automatically becomes a confirmation of that belief. Every noise and crackle literally is bigfoot, although the creature leaves no reliable physical evidence of its presence, even after (allegedly) woofing down bait donuts and salmon.
How does an 8ft-plus tall humanoid avoid leaving hundreds of tracks? And why do bigfoot prints never agree with one another besides displaying the stereotypical enlarged big toe and giant size? (The tracks are often anatomically bizarre and some have four toes per foot, while others have five or, occasionally, six per foot). What little evidence bigfoot hunters attribute to the creature is entirely unreliable, lacking steady reproducibility, and cannot be considered valid because of the group's overwhelming confirmation bias. No one in the "Strange Days" episode finds it bizarre that bigfoot likes to eat salmon, for example, considering that the Olympic National Park has a thriving population of black bears who feed off of massive natural salmon runs. Bears also enjoy and are attracted to sweet things, like those twinkies and chocolates BFRO "researchers" use for bait. Without considering other causes of piles of missing bait food and strange animal calls in the night, the BFRO comes off as amateurish and even silly. There are a number of large predators in that particular neck of the woods, including bob cats, mountain lions and coyotes.
The video below is another great debunking, and illustrates the point that common animals (especially bears who are capable of bipedal walking) can easily be mistaken for something mysterious, especially if you are not very experienced in the woods.
**Update** the above video is no longer on youtube. The channel, VOODOOSIXXX, an excellent source of debunking videos, was removed.
"I looked like bigfoot's TMZ paparazzi nightmare"
-Bob Saget
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