Expedition to look for Bigfoot evidence

Researchers will visit the Upper Peninsula next month to search for evidence of the hairy manlike creature known as "Bigfoot" or "Sasquatch."

The expedition will center in eastern Marquette County, following the most recent Bigfoot eyewitness account, said Matthew Moneymaker of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.

"We'll be looking for evidence supporting a presence. ... We hope to meet local people who might have seen a Sasquatch or heard of someone else who had an encounter," Moneymaker told the Daily Press of Escanaba.

Most experts consider the Bigfoot legend to be a combination of folklore and hoaxes, but there are a number of authors and researchers who think the stories could be true.

Among all U.P. counties, Marquette County has logged the most reported Bigfoot sightings with four, Moneymaker said. Bigfoot encounters also have been reported in Ontonagon, Baraga, Dickinson, Luce and Schoolcraft counties.

In all but three of 30 expeditions in the United States and Canada, BFRO investigators have either glimpsed Bigfoot or gotten close enough to hear the creature, Moneymaker said.

Dr. Grover Krantz, a scientist specializing in cryptozoology, believes Bigfoot is a "gigantopithecus," a branch of primitive man believed to have existed 3 million years ago.

But mainstream scientists tend to dismiss the study as pseudoscience because of unreliable eyewitness accounts and a lack of solid physical evidence.

I don’t favor the bigfoot story one way or another...but...I do know that scientists, in general, and wildlife biologists, in particular, are pretty dogmatic and blind to evidence contrary to the dogma they’ve been taught. A couple of recent cases in my neck of the woods come to mind...

Up until a decade or so back, Minnesota DNR biologist denied the possibility of cougars roaming MN forests. Of course, locals and hunters had been reporting sightings, but the official view was: tut, tut, you ignorant yokels - let the professionals tell you what is what. Well, in the last decade, a cougar was killed by a car and one was shot in one of the river systems right in the Twin Cities metro.

Case two: Last year a man was killed and partially eaten by wild wolves. Other attacks have been documented in the last decade or so, as well. Of course, literature abounds with accounts by credible outdoor people, indians and pioneer types of just this thing, but it has been boiler plate dogma for environmentalists and wildlife biologists to dismiss such accounts as not credible (...not scientifically trained, don’cha know!). Despite reports of increase wolf predation and attacks on pets in semi-urban settings in wolf territory, nothing changed their little, well-trained, scientific minds.

Well, now that we actually have some bones to pick, the reality now bears out what was common (or pededstrian) knowlege before. The arrognace works in reverse, too. Remember Strix occidentalis? Spotted owl for the unwashed. ‘Scientists’ were telling us all that the animal couldn’t survive unless they have pristine wilderness. So, the courts gave them about 27,000 acres per mating pair (according to defective population surveys). Now we know of course that this information was bogus, but, what the heck, we only lost half a million primary and secondary forest products jobs - but the important thing is that science has done its job well!

These kinds of episodes smack of the same thing to me.

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