Undebunking Bigfoot: February 2020

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Washington Webcam Bigfoot Debunked - Coast to Coast AM https://www.coasttocoastam.com/article/washington-webcam-bigfoot-debunked/#.Xlc0mSQo_xk.twitter

Friday, February 21, 2020

Bigfoot sightings of Pennsylvania

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Best evidence...

Best Evidence for the Existence of Sasquatch - Forensic, Audio, Video, Photo, Statistical Data: http://undebunkingbigfoot.blogspot.com/2014/02/best-evidence-for-existence-of.html

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Pennsylvania Bigfoot reports spike largely in 2019

http://www.stangordon.info/wp/2020/01/05/2019-an-epic-year-for-ufo-and-cryptid-encounters-in-pennsylvania/

6 more mythical monsters

History Stories

UPDATED:AUG 22, 2018ORIGINAL:FEB 18, 2014

6 Mythical Monsters

From birds of prey with fearsome strength to rooster-snake hybrids capable of killing with their eyes, find out more about six legendary beasts from history.

EVAN ANDREWS

1. Kraken

Maritime lore is filled with tales of vicious sea serpents and scaly-skinned fish men, but few creatures of the deep have struck fear into sailors’ hearts like the mighty kraken. Tracing its origins back to a giant fish from Norse mythology called the hafgufa, the kraken first entered popular folklore as a titanic octopus or squid spotted by fishermen off the coasts of Norway and Greenland. One 18th century account by Bishop Erik Pontoppidan described it as a squid-like beast so large that when any part of its body stuck out of the water it resembled a floating island. The kraken supposedly used its many tentacles to ensnare ships’ masts and drag them to the icy depths, but it could also create a deadly whirlpool just by submerging itself underwater. Tales of the kraken’s wrath might be embellished, but the creature itself is not entirely fanciful. The legend may have been inspired by sightings of actual giant squid, and some paleontologists have argued that the prehistoric oceans were once home to 100-foot-long cephalopods that fed on whale-sized Ichthyosaurs.

2. Griffin

An intimidating blend of two different predators, the griffin was said to possess the body and back legs of a lion as well as the wings, beak and talons of a hawk or eagle. Tales of the flying behemoths most likely originated in the Middle East, but they later became a popular motif in ancient Greek literature. The griffin legend was later picked up in the 14th century in a largely fictional travelogue by Sir John Mandeville, who described the creatures as “more strong than eight lions” and “a hundred eagles.” Griffins were revered for their intelligence and dedication to monogamy—they supposedly mated for life—but they could also be ferocious. The beasts ripped flesh with their razor sharp talons, and they were also known to fly their victims to great heights before dropping them to their deaths. According to researcher Adrienne Mayor, legends of the griffin could be inspired by early encounters with dinosaur fossils. Scythian nomads in central Asia may have stumbled across the bones of the dinosaur protoceratops and mistook them for a bird-like creature, resulting in the myth of a terrifying flying beast.

3. Manticore

One of the most forbidding of all mythical creatures, the manticore was a bloodthirsty quadruped that supposedly sported the head of a blue-eyed man, the auburn body of a lion and the stinging tail of a scorpion. The legend of this deadly hybrid first began with Greek authors such as Ctesias, who chronicled it in a book about India. Ctesias and others described the manticore as having three rows of teeth like a shark and a tuneful bellow that sounded like a trumpet. Most terrifying of all, it had an insatiable appetite for human flesh. After using its blistering speed to chase down its prey, the beast was said to slash at them with its claws or sting them with its tail before devouring them bones and all. According to Ctesias, the manticore was even capable of paralyzing or killing its victims from a distance by firing stingers from its tail “as if from a bow.”

4. Basilisk

Credit: DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Accounts of the fearsome basilisk date back to the first century Roman writer Pliny the Elder, whose famous “Natural History” included entries on fantastical creatures and exotic races of deformed men. Pliny described the basilisk as a snake-like animal with markings on its head that resembled a crown, but by the Middle Ages it had morphed into a fiendish serpent with the head of a rooster and the wings of a dragon or bat. The basilisk was said to possess a deadly bite and venomous breath, but it could also kill a man just by looking at him. Would-be basilisk hunters countered this death stare by carrying mirrors in the hope that the creature would meet its own gaze and drop dead, but they also enlisted the help of weasels, which were believed to be immune to its poison. The basilisk supposedly originated in North Africa, but tales of European encounters with it are found throughout the Middle Ages. One particularly dubious account from 1587 in Poland describes how a man clad in a mirror-covered leather suit hunted and captured a basilisk after it killed two small girls and a nursemaid.

5. Blemmyae

Along with legends of grotesque monsters and sea creatures, ancient and medieval travelers often returned to Europe with tales of so-called “wild men” living in the unmapped regions of Asia and Africa. One of the most unusual groups was the Blemmyae, a race of hairy primitives who lacked heads but had a face situated in their upper body. The tribe first appeared in Herodotus’s “The Histories,” where they were described as a species of “headless men” from North Africa “who have their eyes in their chests.” References to the Blemmyae or creatures like them later cropped up in writings by Pliny the Elder, the reports of Sir Walter Raleigh and even in Shakespeare’s “Othello.” Their exotic appearance served as an object of both fascination and disgust for Europeans, and they became a common motif in folklore and art in the pre-Enlightenment era. Other famous “wild men” included the Sciopodes, who had a single leg with a foot so large it could double as a parasol; the cannibalistic Anthropophagi; and the Cynocephali, a race of creatures with the bodies of men and the heads of dogs.

6. Roc

A popular myth among travelers and merchants, the roc was a giant bird of prey rumored to be so strong that it could snatch an elephant from the ground. Stories of the giant fowls originated in Arabic fairytales and mythology before making their way to the West in accounts by travelers like Marco Polo, who noted that the roc’s preferred hunting method was to drop its victims from deadly heights and then “prey upon the carcass.” The Moroccan wanderer Ibn Batutta later wrote that he once confused a roc for a floating mountain because of its size, and other legends stated that its wingspan—typically described as being about 50 feet—was so huge that it could blot out the sun. Researchers have since suggested that the roc legend may be partially inspired by sightings of so-called “elephant birds,” a species of massive, flightless birds that existed in Madagascar until as recently as the 17th century.

TAGSFOLKLORE

BY EVAN ANDREWS

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Monday, February 10, 2020

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FBI investigates Bigfoot

History Stories

Bigfoot Was Investigated by the FBI. Here's What They Found

UPDATED:JAN 22, 2020ORIGINAL:JUN 6, 2019

Bigfoot Was Investigated by the FBI. Here's What They Found

BECKY LITTLE

Legends of large, ape-like beasts can be found all over the world. Since the 1950s, the United States’ version of this has been “Bigfoot.” And since 1976, the FBI has had a file on him.

That year, Director Peter Byrne of the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition in The Dalles, Oregon, sent the FBI “about 15 hairs attached to a tiny piece of skin.” Byrne wrote that his organization couldn’t identify what kind of animal it came from, and was hoping the FBI might analyze it. He also wanted to know if the FBI had analyzed suspected Bigfoot hair before; and if so, what the bureau’s conclusion was.

Hair samples sent into the FBI for testing, believed to be from Bigfoot.

Federal Bureau of Investigation

At the time, “Byrne was one of the more prominent Bigfoot researchers,” says Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. “In 2019, a lot of people think of Bigfoot as being sort of silly and a joke, or whatever else. But in the 1970s, Bigfoot was really, really popular. That was when The Six Million Dollar Man had a cameo by Bigfoot.”

This was also after Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin released their famous video footage in 1967 supposedly showing Bigfoot in Northern California. It’s worth noting that the original “evidence” that launched the Bigfoot craze—a trail of oversized footprints discovered in the same region in 1958—was revealed to be a prank by logger Ray L. Wallace in 2002. Many people believe the “Bigfoot” creature in the Patterson-Gimlin film was a costumed prankster as well. Byrne has always believed the footage is real.

Jay Cochran, Jr., assistant director of the FBI’s scientific and technical services division, wrote back to Byrne that he couldn’t find any evidence of the FBI analyzing suspected Bigfoot hair, and that the FBI usually only examined physical evidence related to criminal investigations. Still, it sometimes made exceptions “in the interest of research and scientific inquiry,” and Cochran said he’d make such an exception for Byrne.

READ MORE: People Have Been Chasing Bigfoot for 60 Years—Here's How It Began

Unsurprisingly, Cochran found that the hair didn’t belong to Bigfoot. In early 1977, he sent the hair back to Byrne along with his scientific conclusion: “the hairs are of deer family origin.” Four decades later, the bureau declassified its “Bigfoot file” about this analysis.

The FBI’s official Bigfoot testing results.

Federal Bureau of Investigation

To be clear, this is not evidence that the FBI endorsed the existence of Bigfoot, any more than the U.S. military’s decades-long investigation of unexplained aerial phenomena, popularly known as UFOs, is an endorsement of the existence of aliens.

“All it means is the FBI did a favor to a Bigfoot researcher,” Radford says. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for de facto government endorsement of the reality of Bigfoot.”

Even so, Bigfoot believers may be tempted to spin it that way. “They love the idea that there’s a smoking gun in the FBI files—‘See, look, Bigfoot must be real, otherwise the FBI wouldn’t have taken it seriously,’” he continues. “Well, the FBI didn’t send out a team of investigators to look for Bigfoot, they agreed to run an analysis of 15 hairs."

To add more layers to what is already an unusual case, 93-year-old Byrne doesn’t seem to remember receiving the FBI’s response that the “Bigfoot hair” was actually deer hair.

Because Byrne had been out of the country for several months, Cochran sent the letter to the executive vice president of the Academy of Applied Science, which was associated with Byrne’s Bigfoot organization. The executive wrote that he would give Byrne copies of the correspondence when he returned. Yet when the FBI released its Bigfoot file—which was exclusively about Byrne’s inquiry—on June 5, 2019, Byrne reacted as though he were hearing that it was deer hair for the first time.

“Obviously I can’t speak for Peter Byrne,” Radford says. But “if you’re going to make a big enough deal about this unknown specimen to give it to the FBI, then you’re not going to want to publicize the fact that it turned out to be deer.”

TAGSNEW DISCOVERY

BY BECKY LITTLE

FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

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Saturday, February 8, 2020

How the Bigfoot legend began

History Stories

How the Bigfoot Legend Began

UPDATED:JAN 22, 2020ORIGINAL:JUL 30, 2018

How the Bigfoot Legend Began

BECKY LITTLE

In 1958, journalist Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times highlighted a fun, if dubious, letter from a reader about loggers in northern California who’d discovered mysteriously large footprints. “Maybe we have a relative of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas,” Genzoli jokingly wrote in his September 21 column alongside the letter.

Later, Genzoli said that he’d simply thought the mysterious footprints “made a good Sunday morning story.” But to his surprise, it really fascinated readers. In response, Genzoli and fellow Humboldt Times journalist Betty Allen published follow-up articles about the footprints, reporting the name loggers had given to the so-called creature who left the tracks—“Big Foot.” And so a legend was born.

“There are various wild man myths from all over the world,” says Joshua Blu Buhs, author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend. In western Canada, the Sts’ailes First Nation have the “Sasq’ets,” the supposed origin of the word “Sasquatch.” However, the modern U.S. concept of bigfoot can be traced quite directly to the Humboldt Times stories in 1958.

“People later go back and dig through old newspapers and stuff and find scattered reports of a wild man here, a wild man there,” he says. “But it doesn’t coalesce into a general discussion until the ‘50s.”

Even though loggers blamed acts of vandalism on Bigfoot, Allen thought that most of them didn’t really believe in the creature. It seemed to her that they were just passing along stories with a “legendary flavor.” Still, the story spread to newspapers all over the country, and the TV show Truth or Consequences offered $1,000 to anyone who could prove the existence of Bigfoot.

A cast of a foot track, obtained in Bluff Creek, California, at the Bigfoot Institute run by Daniel Perez. (Credit: Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

“Who is making the huge 16-inch tracks in the vicinity of Bluff Creek?” Genzoli wrote in one of his columns that October. “Are the tracks a human hoax? Or, are they the actual marks of a huge but harmless wild-man, traveling through the wilderness? Can this be some legendary sized animal?”

Once Bigfoot’s story went public, it became a character in men’s adventure magazines and cheap trade paperback novels. In these stories, he—for Bigfoot was definitely a “he”—was a primal, dangerous creature out of the past who lurked in the modern wilderness. By the 1970s, pseudo-documentaries were investigating his existence and films were portraying him as a sexual predator.

In the ‘80s, Bigfoot showed his softer side. He became “associated with environmentalism, and a symbol of the wilderness that we need to preserve,” Buhs says. One big example is the 1987 movie Harry and the Hendersons, which portrayed Bigfoot as a friendly, misunderstood creature in need of protection from John Lithgow and his family.

So why has the Bigfoot legend persisted for 60 years? “It takes on its own momentum because it is a media icon,” Buh suggests.

Just as no one really needs to explain that characters who turn into wolves during a full moon are werewolves, no one needs to explain who a hairy man-ape walking out of the woods would be. “It’s just something that’s easy to refer to,” Buh says. That would be Bigfoot.

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TAGSFOLKLORE

BY BECKY LITTLE

FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you.