| For some years now, I've been reading Bigfoot sighting reports on the various websites on the internet. I, like so many others, get a great amount of satisfaction and entertainment from such reading. But a while back, it occurred to me that sighting reports could be more than just entertainment. They could be a great tool in my own search for Bigfoot.
But not necessarily for the same reasons as many researchers seem to value them for. I've never really been a "report-chaser." I've always preferred to try and to go where they are, rather than where they've been.
While on the surface reports might be an indicator of "hotspots" an analysis of report submissions will show a wide diversity between the report submission date and the date the reports are actually publicly published. And add to that, the fact that many reports are witness recollection of an event, or events which may have occurred years previously. When plotted on a map, the generalized locations of the reported sightings may appear to show "hotspots" but the reality of it is that such "hotspot" clusters may actually indicate an area of recurring sightings which might span decades. This is important, as the cluster patterns may indicate areas of repeated usage or corridors, but it does little to increase the odds of actually seeing one of the creatures, or achieving the Holy Grail of clear photographic evidence. No more than a weather report showing lightening strikes during a severe thunderstorm.
The problem, as I see it, is how to interpret the sighting reports in such a way as to best predict patterns and be able to increase the probability of actually having my own sighting.
In my line of work, we are sometimes called to determine the cause of various worker symptoms caused by "sick building syndrome" or monitoring Indoor Air Quality. One of the biggest problems facing people in such an endeavor is that there are literally thousands of compounds or materials which may contaminate a building or which may be loosed into the building air circulation system. There is no generalized test which will simply tell you what you are dealing with. Tests are compound or material-specific. You need to know what you are testing for and tests analysis can be expensive.
One company I worked for began developing a database of IAQ studies the company had performed going back to the late ‘70's. The database primarily consisted of worker symptomology and the results of those earlier IAQ studies. The company also developed a simplistic questionnaire which was distributed to workers in affected buildings and once completed, the answers from the questionnaire was entered into the database which then produced a list of possible causative compounds or materials known to have caused similar symptoms in past studies. While not sufficient to immediately pinpoint the cause of the problems, it was sufficient enough to point out which compounds or materials had the highest probability of causing the symptoms in the workers. Which eliminated numerous testing protocols and narrowed the field of possible causes considerably, saving the building owner much money in unnecessary analysis costs and consultant time.
My thought was "Why can't this be applied to Bigfoot reports?" So, as a lark, I decided to try it and see where it went.
I chose one of the bigger report databases on the internet to try my experiment with and began trying to figure out what kind of information I wanted to get out of this endeavor. So I sat down one evening and began plugging away.
First, I knew there was going to be a wide variety of reports. Too much variation to be very specific, so I kept things generalized. I initially decided to divide the reports into two simple categories. Category 1 consisted of actual sightings or encounters and Category 2 consisted of everything else (track finds, vocalizations, smells, etc.). Then reports were placed in either "Day" or "Night" events.
From there things got more complicated. As I was sitting there trying to figure this out without actually having read many reports with data input in mind, I came up with my own simplistic categories for Witness Activities and Creature Activities based solely on my impressions from previous report reading.
Witness Activities were (short-sightedly, it later turned out) subdivided into "Hiking," "Driving," "Camping," "Fishing," and "Other" categories.
Creature Activities were (over-optimistically, it later turned out) subdivided into many more categories. I was really hoping to get a detailed "behavior profile" from the anecdotal reports. So I came up with "Standing," "Eating," "Walk/Run," "Drinking," "Hiding (or attempting to)," "Watching," "Vocal," "Tracks," and "Other" categories. I arrived at these simply from my vague remembrances of what reports had said the creatures had done.
Veracity, or my opinion of the truthfulness of the report was not to be considered. The reports were to be assumed "true" and the information entered as raw data. It's true that I may have entered some false, misconstrued, or misidentification reports, but overall, I hoped that the trend would outweigh the error factor.
Once I had my categories set up, I began reviewing random reports from various different states from the report database, and immediately ran into problems.
First, there was no consistency between the reports. Some had to be read, and re-read and lines read between to determine some of the data. For instance, in some cases, it was very difficult to determine something as simple as whether it was a "Day" or "Night" sighting. The report might say something like "it was eight o'clock and my friends and I…." but it would not say whether it was 8:00 a.m. or 8:00 p.m.. So the report would have to be carefully read to pick out things like "it was too dark to see clearly…." in which case, I simply assumed that it was a night sighting rather than a day sighting.
I also discovered that there was a much wider diversity of witness activities than I had initially guessed. Oddly, I realized that I had left "hunting" from the category list, which turned out to be a pretty consistent witness activity, so I simply began including "hunting" activities in the "Hiking" category. This was only a problem when the report specifically said that the "hunting" was being done from a tree-stand, for which there was no category.
I came to hate that "Other" category for witness activities. To my surprise, the witnesses of the published reports were actually doing a great many other things than my over-simplified "Hiking," "Driving," "Camping," "Fishing," categories fit. The "Other" category became a dumping ground for these. You'd be shocked at how many reports are filed from witnesses that never had to leave the comfort of their homes to experience a bigfoot encounter. I had not accounted for that, so into the "Other" category they'd go. Likewise with reports from people at work or who were working or riding ATVs or horses (or one that was waiting for a bus) who had encounters or incidents.
Conversely, I was dismayed by the lack of variation when it came to the "Creature Activity" portion of the spreadsheet. Of all the activities that had been in my remembrances from my past report reading, of the random reports I entered, very few of those activities were represented.
Also, I discovered that there were reports written which the activities of either the witness or the creature fit one or more of my assigned categories. For example, a report might read "We were camping at such and such and were out for a hike…." Which would it be? A "Hiking" encounter or a "Camping" encounter? Or a report would say, "It was standing there, watching us…." Which would it be? A "Standing" category entry or a "Watching" category entry?
I came to accept the premise that the activity on which the emphasis of the sentence would have been written would be the data point. If you read the sentences out loud, as if you were telling it to someone else, you can get a good feel for which word would be the emphasis of the sentence.
So onward I went, in this, or what degenerated into, very un-scientific database experiment. Some reports were discarded as they were so poorly described I could get no sense of what they were actually describing. Likewise with newspaper accounts or other media articles. Witness reports only.
Others had to be read at length and they might take pages to describe a single event which fit a category. It was extremely time consuming, and sometimes frustrating. And by the time I gave it up, I had data from three hundred twenty nine reports, from thirteen states, entered. At the time, it was nearly 20% percent of the given total reports in the database. At the time, I figured that was enough of a representation of the database as a whole. Of course, that total also included media reports and articles in various states, which I ignored. And as this was a number of years ago, that total has now greatly increased.
Now I know a mathematician or statistician could tear these results apart, but as I was doing this as a lark and was never meant for any kind of publication, I figured "what the heck." This was for my use only. And as with seemingly everything else in this field of research, the results were largely inconclusive. There were one or two numbers though, that did open my eyes a little.
One, the actual sighting category, "Category 1" outweighed the "Other" category (Category 2, tracks, vocalizations, etc.) at 60% to 40%. I did not expect actual sightings to be at a higher incident rate to the more inconclusive events of hearing strange sounds or finding strange tracks. Now it makes more sense to me. An actual sighting is more likely to be reported than an unknown sound or such.
Two, the day and night reports were almost exactly even. Daytime sightings registered 47% to nighttime sightings at 53%. I wasn't expecting this. I had always assumed that the nighttime sightings would have the largest percentage.
Perhaps not so surprisingly, the witness activities were also almost very equally divided. That damn "Other" category tied with the "Hiking/Hunting" category at 28% each. Driving was next at 22%, followed by "Camping" at 18% and "Fishing" at 4%.
Creature activities were a little more scattered. Unsurprisingly, the most often observed behavior was "Walk/Run" at 40%. Vocalizations accounted for 21% of the reports and the other damn "Other" category was 16%. Tracks (9%), Watching (7%), Standing (6%), and Hiding (1%) were the remaining results. No reports from the random selection recorded the creatures "Drinking."
What do these numbers tell us? Well, not much. But it seems fairly clear that you stand nearly as good a chance of having a sighting if you're in a vehicle as you do if you're walking a remote trail. Of course, if you live in a remote area, you stand just as good a chance standing in your laundry room, looking out a window as you do hiking a remote trail.
And if you do, the odds are that the creature is going to be walking or running away. Again, not so much a surprise, but perhaps a comfort to those who are concerned about aggression or being attacked. Which, incidentally, did not occur in any of the 329 random reports included in my experiment.
If I were to repeat this experiment, I would set it up slightly differently. "Witness Activities" would be greatly expanded and more sub-divided and I would try to make the "Creature Activities" slightly less nebulous.
Why would I finally expose my own futile attempt at profiling these reports in this unscientific manner? Well, at this time, there are several new Bigfoot research groups forming or in their infancy. It would be my hope that they would see the potential for generating a standardized report form which could be used to extrapolate usable data in order to further the documentation of these creatures as "real."
Investigating reports shouldn't only necessarily be limited to an examination of the veracity of the witness (as seem to be many investigator's focus), or a rush to the site in the hopes that evidence might still exist, or, that the creature itself may still be in the vicinity. Investigation of reports should include the report itself, or rather, with all of the reports kept in mind. Investigating individual reports, in my opinion, is rather like looking at a large picture through a paper towel tube. You only see small bits and pieces of the overall picture.
But if you discard the tube, you can see how all the smaller pieces you were looking at fit together as a whole. Which, I would think, is the real goal of the search for the documentation of these creatures.
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