f13.net

I have long thought this would be a fun thread, and was finally spurred to action by the Atheist/Ghost thread. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I have grown up with Bigfoot stories all my life (it was a big deal in the 70s when I was a kid. Yes, I am old). I used to believe, and have been a big fan of all the research, sightings, TV specials, etc. Now I just WANT to believe- I think it would be way cool if it actually existed. However, my logical/cynical side has taken hold, and I am forced to admit I think it all might be BS.

Thoughts?

I have no faith and little belief. That's my explanation.

It won't let you choose none.

I would vote "none" if it was an option.

However, I do believe in a God. I do not believe that Jesus Christ was God made flesh and he died for our sins, but I do believe in a divine plan of some kind. It is cheesy and cliche, but love and children brought me to that conclusion. I will teach my kids the rudiments of Protestant Christian thinking so they have somewhere to start, but I don't go to church and don't plan on dragging them there.

I don't believe in anything in the poll list because I have zero evidence that they even might exist. Hearsay doesn't count for anything. That said, it is certainly possible that some planet in the universe has a different form of intelligent life. If here, why not somwhere else? Asserting that those lifeforms have visited us is a leap too far for me.

People on this site don't believe a good MMO can be made, let alone in anything spiritual.

I marked 3 of them because 1 I know exists from experience, two others I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to.

Add me to the "none of the above" column.

I don't know about "UFOs/Aliens," but I believe there are other living, sentient beings out there...somewhere.

To believe in something is to be limited by it.
To choose not believe in something is to be limited by disbelief of it.
I prefer not to be limbered by either regimen.  Adamant faith or antifaith strikes me as irresponsible.

To put it another way, whether or not I believe in any of the above would not be of help if I were to encounter it.

If someone could explain the chemistry or physics of their existence, I might be more open-minded.  i.e. I believe there is likely life on other planets, I just doubt its ability to get here.  Nearly everything on the list above cannot be explained by any of the data-tested studies over the past several hundred (thousand) years.

Sup guys.

OooooOOOOOooooo. Oh, and I voted.

I hope I'm drastically wrong about what I believe in, after all I'm fucked if any of it ends up being true. Yes I'm an atheist.

I voted, too, but I'm not telling what I believe in. 

It's difficult to think of a word that is more fun to say aloud than "Chupacabra."  And I have it on good authority (a Police song) that something funky lives at the bottom of Loch Ness.  I'm not sure what a cryptid is, but if they are cool like EL CHUPACABRA, sign me up for them too.

That's meaningless.  There are thousands of things you believe and don't believe in. 

Binary opposition is not your friend.

I would vote "none" but only because the aliens option is qualified with visited by.

I can't see the results when I click on the "View Results" link either.

I believe chupacabra are just pets who wandered off alien ships.

In fact, I think all chupacabra came off the exact same ship, in the exact same incident. A minor fuckup/disaster on the part of one of the aliens.

Also....I really hate that word "aliens". I shouldn't use it. They deserve better.

So that being said, there is no such thing as aliens.

It's just the manifestation of an acausal connecting principle.

I wonder how our poll would compare to say the same poll as conducted on a random sample of people.

I enjoy hokey paranormal specials on TV. A lot of these things fall more into my "I want to believe" category than "I believe". It'd be neat if there were all kinds of wacky supernatural stuff going on, but I've yet to come across things that I'd consider indicators of their presence, aside from TV specials and books written by those enjoying tinfoil chapeaus.

That is, they're fun to think about, and the mythology they present makes our world that much more rich, but in broad daylight, I can't really espouse a strong belief in their existence.

No Zombies or Vampires? Come on now!

Exact opposite for me. I dislike people making spectacles of themselves, and that sort of thing qualifies has a huge spectacle.
I feel nothing but hatred for the people who are abusing someone's love and inability to let go for their own personal gain. I'm looking at you, john edwards.

A man's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer.

Not the kind of thing I was referring to. I'm thinking more of the "ghost hunting" or "alien hunting" specials you'll sometimes see, where some New Agey tart runs around in an abandoned building being scared of the noises the building makes when it settles. Then they show a camera flickering on and off due to ancient wiring in some obscure corner of the basement and go all apeshit that something on "the other side" is trying to talk to them.

It's pretty hilarious.

Those shows bore me....But I tend to hate reality TV anyways, and that's the kind of format they usually follow.

I'm much more entertained by Erich von Daniken.

That's retarded. People watch that shit? I'd rather nail my dick to a chair.

Ghost Hunters:  The people in the show seem pretty reasonable, but whoever does the editing jacks it up by splicing it to be scary.

To be honest, I really, really enjoyed Ghostbusters.  (http://smiley.onegreatguy.net/ghost.gif)

Can I change my vote from "Chupacabra/Nessie/other Cryptids" to "New Age tarts"?

I don't believe in believing in things just for the sake of it and I saw no tangible proof for any of the above.

I think UFOs could be a possibility, even if very unlikely because you don't only have to take the enormous space in account, but the time problem involved as well. They would not only have to find our planet, but they would have to hit the small amount of time we live on it as sentient beings. Sentient life on other planets? No problem whatsoever with that thought.

Ghosts, don't see what should survive once the body dies. Even residual electricity should dissipate after a very short time.

Telepathy/Telekinesis, don't see how they should work, especially Telekinesis. To move something you have to apply force upon it, that force needs energy that has to be created. That energy needs to be channeled through a medium towards the object. And all of that without traces on the Telekinet, the object, or the space inbetween? Extremely unlikely.

Bigfoot/Yeti. Could have once upon a time something big, hairy and humanoid lived in the more wild areas of this world with only scarce contact with humanity, leading to the legend of Bigfoot and Yeti? Sure, after all a standing bear looks remarkably humanlike, as do many apes. Parallell developments or side branches of the Homo Sapiens could have been holding out for some times. Civilization should have done them in by now though, especially in North America.

Demons/Exorcism. Fuck no. The heyday of Catholic exorcism was in the days when they had to compete against the new protestant movement. Elaborate and carefully planned public spectacles to show the people that they are only safe in the one true church. A whole range of both bodily and psychological illnesses can be perceived as possession if you don't know about them or it suits your needs.

Nessie and stuff: See Bigfoot/Yeti, but less likely because of the timescale involved.

Mediums: Now that would be fun if I believed in Mediums if I don't believe in ghosts.

Gigantopithecus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigantopithecus)

Prehistoric primate from Asia who stood about 3 meters tall. A few jawbones and tooth sets have been found, but not a full skeleton.

The Fox Mulders of the world like to tie the Sasquatch/Yeti to a cross continental migration of gigantopithecines. Which, really, isn't necessarily too far fetched. There must be some reason why so many different Amerindian cultures depict gigantic apes in their art and monuments.

In my defense, bigfoot is a purely American thing. The only research I did was watching a few episodes of "Bigfoot and the Hendersons" as a child. I was bored and we only had two TV channels. :)

Bigfoot and the Hendersons? Haha. Is it called that in Austria? Here it's Harry and the Hendersons.  :-P

Btw, the guy who played him was the same guy who played the Predator.

Nah, upon checking it actually was called "Harry und die Hendersons" with translates to "Harry and the Hendersons". Sorry for that, been a long time.

As long as there's a steady paycheck, I'll believe anything you say.

I can't resist asking:

So you don't believe in them in broad daylight, what about at night?

None. Thanks for not putting that in the poll, you tard.
Really? The whole looking for EM fields, 'cold spots' and photo 'orbs' really seems like you're fucking reaching a bit hard to me. Reasonable would be "Hey, we've had two seasons and haven't found shit, let's call it decided."

Other (None).

Poll suggests a reasonable number of [moderate] new agers on here.  Interesting.

After a few beers, the ceiling lights start to look like UFOs... :)


Hilarious how far they'll stretch to find what they're looking for, isn't it? True believers come in all stripes.

I am sure they are reaching.  That's their job.  But at least they aren't the usual nutjob psychics wondering around with their hands in the air moaning "I feel an angry presence." and they don't mistake every unexplained bump as a ghost.  They look for alternate sources.

Too bad the poll didn't include some other wacky modern mythology, like MIBs and Orgone.

Them thar's some wacky shit.

I voted UFOs, with the qualification that I belive in the likely hood of intelligent life out there. It most likely has not actually done a flyby on us, but I still think its out there.

As for the ghost stuff, one of my biggest pet peeves right now is watching Myth Busters on Discovery, and ever other commercial break is for a re-enacted ghost story show on the same network. The two don't belong on the same fucking channel, damnit.

Aliens, sure.  Aliens visiting earth, not so sure.

But based on the size of the universe, there pretty much HAS to be intelligent life out there somewhere.  Roll a 200,000-sided die 900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times and it's bound to land on 1 a few times.

The problem with this kind of thing is that we have no idea how rare it is for life to form.  Even one cell of our bodies is astronomically complex, and the number of planets, excluding Earth, where we have proof of that kind of thing happening is zero.  So maybe life is super rare.  On the other hand, maybe we're defining life too narrowly (like, could life exist on a planet without liquid water), so maybe  life is more common than we'd assume.  I'm not really ready to jump to a conclusion like this until I have some statistics that are more accurate than someone's random guess.  Just saying "big numbers divided by other big numbers equals a kind of high probability, maybe!" isn't being very scientific, to my mind.

Which isn't problematic if you don't base your beliefs on science, which I don't, so I checked all the boxes.  Life's more interesting that way.  Not that I'm shelling out fifty bucks for Himalayan Salt Crystal Lamps to protect my home from "negative ions", or anything.  I just find it more productive to say "I believe in UFOs, but that guy who claims he was abducted is full of crap" than to just dismiss all UFO sightings out of hand because "UFOs don't exist!"

I read this book in college called Daemonic Reality that discussed ghosts, MIBs, UFOs, fairies, etc. The premise was that all of these things, stretching from fairies and such in medieval times to MIBS and UFOs now are the same phenomenon but that they change how they approach us to suit the mentality of the time period. So for instance, 100 years ago my ancestor might have been visited by some mysterious ghost, today I'd be visited by a MIB because I understand that better.

It was a very bizarre but kind of interesting book.

Well, mathmatically, life pretty much has to exist somewhere else in the universe. Hell, simple calculus "proves" that the chance of life approaches 1 (or 100% statistically).


I still maintain that on both sides you have a type of faith. For skeptics faith boils down to "I haven't seen it so it doesn't exist no matter what you or anyone else says."

I'm not denying the certainty that life exists in the universe.  That would be among the stupider arguments I could make.  I'm just not sure if it exists outside Earth.

If you're working on the belief that there are an infinite number of planets in the universe, that could work, but I don't think that's a universal (haha) position these days.  If you've got a closed universe, you're dealing with a finite number of planets, and the question of what the exact probability of life is becomes more important (like, if there are X number of stars, for us to assume extraterrestrial intelligence, we'd have to have some way to establish that probability for a star to have life would have to be at least 1 to X/2 (Earth + 1 other)), and I don't see reliable data to support that.

Every statistical model of extraterrestrial life I've ever seen has had MASSIVE gaps in it.  What's the chance for life to evolve on an Earthlike planet with conditions exactly like ours?  Who knows; we're limited to a sample size of one.  How is that chance affected by, say, not having a moon?  Er, I dunno, it's lowered, a bit, maybe?  Or raised?  Who knows?

Edit: spelling...

I believe that there's a real possibility of intelligent life out there somewhere, though like others have said, whether they've been here or not isn't something I feel strongly about.

Similarly, I don't have any specific beliefs in any cryptids, (ie Nessie, etc) but I think it's certainly possible that there are a few relevent undoscovered species left out there, mostly in the depths of jungles and deep deep sea. I'd tend to lump the Bigfeet and Yeti and Wampas in here as well, though I think they're much less likely to be around nowadays.

For "other", while I dont believe in a god (or gods) I do believe that Jesus and Mohammed and most other major prophets lived. I think that they would have either been either really powerful and self-convinced orators or a little bit touched in the head, or both. The stories of their amazing adventures have no doubt been embellished to no end over the years and centuries.

Demons, curses, gods, all that stuff - man explains stuff that he cant explain as best he can, and traditions and religion does the rest over the years. The sun is Ra's chariot, after all...

Mediums. Please reference Penn & Teller, Southpark. There was some kind of universal contest involved, as I believe.

I voted "Other". In 1991 I did volunteer work on an Aboriginal community northwest of Ayer's Rock/Uluru, in the Australian desert. I saw many examples of Aboriginal people's close relationship with the land. In fact, they consider themselves part of it, along with all the animals on it.

One day, a group of us (workers and an Aboriginal family) were travelling in two vehicles. A friend of mine was driving in the lead car, and I was a passenger. Our other two passengers were two Aboriginal kids, aged about five and eight. They were bored and snoozing in the back. The dirt road was going around the base of a hill, so it was curved and made a constant blind corner (couldn't see around the hill).

Suddenly both kids sat up and the eight-year-old yelled "kangaroos, go slow". We couldn't see much of the road due to the blind corner, but the driver braked. And sure enough, a little further around the bend, there were kangaroos on the road and we would have hit them if the kid had not warned us. But there was no way he could have seen them through the hill. The driver and me just looked at each other, because it was an undeniably supernatural moment. That kid had some kind of awareness of the land or the animals that we did not have.

I've also driven out there on my own, on the highway. There are whirlwinds called "willy-willys" that are considered supernatural spirits by the Aboriginal people. As far as I was concerned, they were just weather effects. But I was driving along and at the side of the road ahead, there was a grey patch on the red sand. I got closer and the grey patch "got up" and "moved" onto the centre of the road. It "stood up" higher and higher, until it was a willy-willy. Then it "ran" off the road, out of the path of my car, and headed west over the land. It wasn't just like some of the red sand blown up in the start of a willy-willy, it was made of grey stuff and I saw it "get up" off the red background.

I swear I saw that, and it's very hard to explain as just some random weather effect (though possible), and any scientific explanation is dismissing 40,000 years of Aboriginal knowledge of living in the area. So I'm open to believing they're something more than weather effects.

Supernatural my ass. It was Pigpen, from Peanuts.

I'd like to mention a couple of strange experiences I had when I was younger, and want to know what your opinions are on them (I should also add the disclaimer that I used to be a regular drug user back in my teens....But during these two episodes, only marijuana was involved).

I had these two strange instances where I "attracted" wild birds to fly on me. Perhaps that sounds unremarkable, but let me explain:

The first time, I was just sitting on my porch taking a cig break, was slightly stoned, and all of the sudden I kind of "zoned out" (if you don't know what zoning out is, it's that feeling when you fall asleep for a brief instant, have your conscious and subconscious thoughts briefly merge, and for whatever reason, you get kicked back into an awakened state.....Make sense?).

Anyways, for a brief instant, this happened to me: But it was stranger than the usual kind of "zoning out". I distinctly remember this awful, pulsating, and deafening noise surrounding me as I slipped into this state. It was like being swallowed up by something.

This lasted maybe a few seconds, and instead of being "kicked" out of that state and back into consciousness, I emerged out of it much more smoothly. As I woke up, everything seemed more serene -- sights, sounds, my own attitude -- and then all of a sudden, a sparrow just came out of nowhere and landed on my hand. Not to sound corny or anything, but it was like some scene out of a fairy tale.

When that happened, reality sunk in, and I freaked out. That bird wasn't supposed to land on me. I started shaking my hand, he flew off, and then I was just left there to contemplate it. I didn't tell anyone what happened.

--

The second instance happened several weeks after that, this time in front of 3 people. We were just standing out in someone's front yard talking for awhile, and then, somewhere in the conversation, I stopped paying attention. The only thing I recall is slipping into that weird, deafening state again. When I woke, a bird came right out of the tree above us and landed on my arm. Everyone else noticed. I ended up panicing again, and shook the bird off.

They thought it was weird for a minute, and I tried to explain to them the previous instance where it happened, but all in all, it was a fairly unremarkable thing to them. They picked up where the conversation left off. And I just stood there for the rest of the night wondering what the hell was going on.


So....What was it? Coincidence? Some kind of feral telepathy maybe (am I the freaking Beastmaster or what?). Drug induced hallucination and group hallucination (Mind you, I was barely high on weed at both times. The others were barely high the second time. Weed generally doesn't cause those kind of levels of delusion or hallucination)?

[EDIT] Also, I have more strange experiences (not necessarily related to this one) if you want to hear them.

I like fun stories. Please share!

It fits into the context of my experience of Aboriginal connections with the land and everything on it (similar to Native American and other indigenous people's traditional outlook): you're not the Beastmaster, you're just reverting to your natural state of being connected with everything. You're normally disconnected with that, as western culture has lost it. But your state of mind (due to drugs or zoning out) put you back into default mode. Birds landed on your arm because your western-ness was down and they didn't sense a threat, so it was like them landing on a tree or a cow's back or whatever, because you were just a part of nature. You became a new and interesting place for a bird to land (bird logic: new and interesting = chance of food?).

The birds wanted to toke up.

Hmm, I take that back. The rest of the my experiences would just make me look like some drug addled lunatic or, in some cases, just a garden variety lunatic (if I don't seem that way already). Some have also affected my life in such a profound way that I'm not really up for criticism at the moment either.

Other than that, I have one ghost related experience (supposedly)...Which, in written form, would come out as boring as hell unless I spiced it up a bit.  :-P

I picked ghosts, cryptids and other.

Fight!

Stray, I can't blame you for not wanting to share some of those experiences here, especially since f13 is populated by a no small number of smart alecs.

My only true paranormal experience was when my parents visited me, at their own grave site. I was with a friend, and suddenly, an overwhelming feeling of love and affection surrounded me, and the 'flavor', if you will, was unmistakably that of my departed parents. My friend felt it too, and he just bolted out of there, white as a sheet. I left fairly quickly too, utterly freaked out.

I've felt like a complete ingrate since then, but I'm sure my parents, wherever they are, probably understand that we're not really prepared for supernatural visitations, even from ma and pa.

Man, that gives me the chills too.

No, it's not terribly scientific.  I'm going on gut feeling on this, as I do for most of these things.  Because as easy as it is to logically explain a number of things away (including God), these very things may be outside our current understanding of logic, or outside of logic entirely.  But I'm still pretty damn sure God, ghosts, Bigfoot, psychics, demonic possession, etc, are bullshit.

Aliens, however, I'm willing to allow because 1) they needn't have interacted with anyone on this planet, so it's not totally unbelievable that they'd exist and we wouldn't know about it 2) our universe is pretty friggin big, it almost doesn't matter how miniscule the chance is of intelligent life forming.  Almost.  My gut feeling, again, based on the sheer amount of life on this planet which really isn't that special aside from its position relative to its star and the abundance of water, is that it has to have happened somewhere else at some point, or will.  Whether we'll ever get confirmation of that I doubt.

I've heard the read the same thing in that religion I've been stalking, Buddhism, as well.

Perhaps being raised in a materialistic gimme gimme society raises one in such a way as to make it difficult to see the interconnectedness of everything.   It certainly doesn't help the way that we lose our grip on reality by believing power is to be found in ideas, which are abstract blueprints that fail to completely describe reality at best.

So, anything supernatural happen to me?  Not really, but then, isn't everyday life pretty amazing if we pay it adequate attention?

...

Add "King of Cop-Outs" to my dubious collection of grief titles.

I have two videos in my cellphone of a wild bluejay landing on my hand.  It was because I had a peanut.

I've seen all kinds of unexplained shit. Still isn't proof of ghosts or the supernatural. Senses can't be trusted, and there is an utter lack of unbiased proof.

What a gross misrepresentation of what practical skepticism is all about.  How about "I've seen no evidence to support its existence, so I'm going to go with 'no'.  If evidence surfaces that supports the position, I will reconsider."? 

Sorry to post and run, but our power went out at the office about 45 seconds after I posted the thread! I have never messed with a poll before, so blame my n00bness for its lack of perfection.

Interesting discussion so far. I would be interested in hearing any and all stories that affect your beliefs one way or the other.

That's all well and good, but the types of skeptics represented by posters so far is utterly sure of their convictions and would even ignore many types of proof as not valid. Hence, faith based skepticism.

What proof is that again?

Seconded.

When "many types of proof" amounts to "anecdotes", they're perfectly justified in ignoring them.  That's not faith, that's recognizing the unreliable nature of anecdotes.

Life is certainly easier to understand when you chalk up everything you can't explain as a sensory glitch.

So, is it an anecdote to say that I have seen a ghost face to face? (the single most scary experience of my entire life btw) That I have "felt" it for lack of a better term as well?

Is it an anecdote to say that my best friend who is an agnostic is unsure about ghosts (he doesn't 100% believe, but allows that he can't explain in any rational way what happened) based on an experience he had in Britain?

Is it an anecdote to say that a server admin for a major aeronautics coroporation and her retired air force husband have both seen, heard, and interacted with ghosts in their house, as well as having house guests, some of whom I have met and spoken to, who have also experienced unexplainable events in their house?

For you, it is an anecdote probably because you don't know me. Fair enough. But I know my friend, I know these other people, obviously I know my own experiences.

I'd be willing to bet my life though, that even if you knew these other people, and trusted them with your life (as I do my best friend) you'd find some other way to explain these things away because it doesn't fit your world view. That my friend, is faith.

Bingo!

No less difficult than when you chalk up everything you can't explain as the work of an inscrutable entity.

That's why I've heard it recommended one live in the middle, rather than either extreme.  Neither refusing to consider the possibility of everything you don't understand, nor placing blind faith in solutions you have no proof to back up.  It involves a certain acceptance of uncertainly, and there's very little security to be found there, but if you're honestly interested in getting as close to the truth as possible then that is where you sit, with your eyes open.

Of course, the people on one side of the fence will be threatening you with hot burning torment of your eternal soul for not backing up their faith, and the people on the other side of the fence will tell you you're being ignorantly closed-minded for not accepting their choice to be ignorantly close-minded.

Yes, that IS an anecdote.  I'm sure you're aware of that as well.


Obviously you know your own experiences?  There's a lot of people out there that "Know" they've been abducted by aliens, that the government is out to get them, that Elvis is alive, etc..  People are often not the best judges of what their experiences mean.



My trust in someone has nothing to do with whether they are correct about their experiences.  You seem to think that if someone is trustworthy, that means they can't be wrong about unexplained events that they remember.  That's a rather odd worldview.

How about understanding that human senses are fallible, and experiences that contradict what we know about the world are more likely to be false?  If ghosts exist, why is it that we don't get evidence of their existence from skeptical investigation?  Why do all the "haunted houses" turn out to be fakes or unreproducible events? 

One needs to be able to understand this without allowing it to dominate their thinking about everything.

My brother's car is broken.  I don't believe all cars are broken.  I'm would be willing to accept there is a possibility of a working car prior to actually seeing one.  But analogies are easy to poke holes into, so try to interpret what validity you can from this paragraph and discard the rest.

And I, as a skeptic, am willing to accept the possibility of ghosts prior to actually seeing one.   That possibility is at the same level as leprechauns, the tooth fairy and santa claus.  The fact that there are people who swear they have seen ghosts doesn't mean any more to me than those people who swear they have been abducted by aliens.

The point is, the evidence to support the existence of ghosts is severely lacking, and the evidence that people are often mistaken about their experiences and what they mean is commonplace.  Given such things, it wouldn't be very rational for me to say:

"Well, the evidence to support the existence of ghosts is pretty much entirely subjective, anecdotal, uncontrolled experiences so of course I believe."

If you're really a "skeptic", you're not willing to accept the possibility of ghosts, leprechauns, the tooth faithy, and santa claus.  A skeptic would have already have mentally filed them as, "Things it is my moral crusade to argue against because they are false."  A skeptic is as closed minded as any man of faith, but on the other side.  A skeptic is not really interested in truth so much as building mental barriers in the world that make it easier for one to deal with.

If you're really interested in getting to the truth of things, it begins with cultivating an understanding that an answer that is neither "yes or no" is acceptable.  I never said ghosts exist, I never said ghosts didn't exist.  If you read that and think, "Well, this guy believes ghosts exist", you would be wrong.  If you read that and think, "Well, this guy believes ghosts do not exist", you would also be wrong.

I believe in the Tooth Faithy.

If what I hold as a very credible source (my parents and TV) told me the tooth fairy existed, and tooth disappeared and a shiny quarter was left in its place, the tooth fairy has some very good supporting evidence.  What counterproof do I have?  :wink:

I am going to go back to my "belief in electricity 3 thousand years ago."  It'd be an irrational to believe in electricity back then even though it did exist because the rational framework to understand that lightning and static where the same thing did not exist.  Maybe 3 thousand years from now the phenomenon behind ghosts will be as understand as electricity.  Until then you just a person trying to put together a thousand piece puzzle together with just handful of pieces.  Any claim of believe there after is merely you adding extra pieces in your head to make it fit.

Now you are just redefining words to suite your argument.

That's just terribly ignorant.  Where in the world do you get that definition of skepticism?  Are you referring to philosophical skepticism instead, perhaps?

To you it is an anecdote. To me it is something I experienced firsthand that made me swing towards "you know, I don't know what ghosts are, but I am damn sure know they exist."


We're getting to the heart of what Geldon has been trying to say here. You have no objectivity. You refuse to believe anything that interferes with your worldview and become condescending rather than rationally discussing things or even acknowledging a possibility that you may be wrong. You are, as he said, just as much a fundamentalist as someone like Pat Robertson.


It means I know he wasn't lying, and if he is convinced of what he experienced I have two choices: 1) Believe he was suffering some kind of mental problem (hallucination, delusion, etc) or 2) Believe he experienced something he can't explain that when added to my own experiences I tend to think of as potentially true.

I'd argue that you are not a skeptic. A skeptic doubts something is true, but is open to being proven wrong. You have unshakeable faith that your beliefs are the only correct ones.

Oh, are we operating on everyone holding the same definition of words now? ;)

Claiming you're a "Skeptic" is a pretty slippery slope.  Under the classical definition (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dict.asp?Word=skeptic), you're saying you choose to disbelieve in something.  If you've not clearly defined what exactly it is you're disbelieving and how you go about it, you're leaving yourself pretty open to misinterpretation.  I'm not psychic... which would be yet another paranormal can of worms.

Explained above, and yes, the dictionary agrees with me in the majority of the definition of the word skeptic.

This is really the problem with any verbal/written communication - there are inherent limitations on the English language that make it difficult to convey, without a shadow of misunderstanding, what we are trying to convey.  Getting pissed off about it serves no purpose, but without cultivating a certain acceptance of uncertainty you probably will.  That's another kind of terrible ignorance, made all the more so when you recognize it in yourself.

If it happened to ME it would be an anecdote too.  I've had unexplained things happen in my life as well, but that's what they are, unexplained.  Making up my own solution to them doesn't make that solution correct, particularly if it goes against well supported evidence about how the world works.


Of course I'm being objective.  I'm being the most objective I CAN be.  I place ALL personal experiences in the "interesting, but doesn't really prove anything" category.  Could I be wrong?  OF COURSE I COULD.  I've never said I COULDN'T be wrong.  

All your straw man arguments to the contrary, I would certainly be willing to entertain the possibility of Ghosts, I just don't rely on anecdotal experiences to support it.  I treat those anecdotes the same way I treat anecdotes about faith healers, or psychics.


Sure, he may very well have experienced something.  I'm not saying he didn't.  I'm saying that based upon those experiences, jumping to the conclusion that "Ghosts are real!" is premature.

If it happened to you it would be an anecdote only to others. An anecdote is:

So the only way it would be an anecdote to you is if someone else told you about an experience in your own life. (A bizarre situation to say the least unless you're an amnesiac.)

As for the rest of your post, about jumping to the conclusion ghosts are real is premature, perhaps so. It is probably more accurate for me to say that I went from the skeptical viewpoint of "nah, it's all stories" to "well, I saw something, he did too, that other couple did, maybe I need to allow for the possibility there really is something we can't explain out there."

My view on scientific proof is that no proof does not equal something is not real. To use Tazelbain's analogy, we just might not have the means and understanding to measure something like "ghost energy" or whatever the hell you want to call it.

How would that not be an anecdote for me as well?  There's nothing in that description that says that it must be from someone else.  It doesn't say that I have to not remember it.  It just says an anecdote is a short tale.  Any experience I have would be a short tale.

This is all beside the point though, since I'm sure you realize what I meant by "anecdote" and this is just an unimportant divergence.


I'm very well aware there are things out there that are unexplained.  That doesn't mean they are unexplainABLE, and my own inability to come up with a mundane explanation for every unusual incident in my life (or anyone elses) says nothing about whether those experiences truly ARE less than mundane.  All it means is that I wasn't able to come up with an answer. 

That doesn't mean the proper response is to make up whatever I want to believe it is and pretend that the experience is evidence to support it. 


Of course that's possible, and I've never claimed it was impossible.  I've just said that I'm skeptical of it because, quite frankly, the experiences of those who have seen ghosts are really not that different than the experiences of those who have been abducted by aliens, seen bigfoot, witnessed a faith healing or had a psychic experience.

Speaking of explaining "unexplained" paranormal phenomena, has anyone heard about the studies done with methane pockets (http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s973492.htm) and the Bermuda Triangle?

I remember catching a show about a year back about it. Seems like the most plausible explanation (what that article doesn't get into is how methane fumes can screw with flight instruments and throw off the mix of engines' fuel and air --- which would explain various radio communications from pilots in the area who talked about weird readings and stalls, just before they went missing).

I caught something on TV about it in the past year or so as well (like I said, I can't get enough of this kind of stuff!). It sounded plausible, but I would like to see a more objective look at it (as well as some, like, scientific tests or something  8-)  )

The one I saw had a lot of scientific tests. Nothing elaborate though. Scaled ship models were used for testing submersion. All of the stuff dealing with flight instruments were dealt with by adjusting methane adjustments in a computer simulator. The engine stalls were tested by feeding methane into various type of plane engines that were known to have been lost.

Oh that sounds interesting. IIRC the one I saw showed how bubbles from the sea floor would FUBAR a ship's buoyancy, but I didn't see anything with planes being tested.

It's possible, I suppose, but I'm not really convinced.  As far as I'm aware (and my numbers are a bit old, so feel free to correct me), the statistical odds of loosing a ship in the Bermuda Triangle aren't any greater than anywhere else (It's just a very busy area).  While gas hydrates might knock out a few ships or planes, I don't see them accounting for the "hallmarks" of Bermuda Triangle cases, such as lack of wreckage or bizarre instrumentation mishaps and so on, so it's doubtful that this will be satisfactory for the believers.  And while it's a possibility, unless I'm mistaken, nobody (alive) has ever seen this happen or proven anything outside a controlled experiment, so claiming that it's sinking ships seems like an unsatisfactory explanation for skeptics, as well.

For me I basically take stances of varying disbelief on everything until it's been proven to my satisfaction. Right now I have no theory of creation that I can say I believe in. I lean towards 2 theories; the big bang, and that the universe was always here more-or-less as it is now. But I still disbelieve them, just less than the idea that God created the world in 7 days. I disbelieve in ghosts, alien abductions, and whatnot on the same principle. If it's proven to me somewhere along the line it wont make my world come crashing down either, because I don't have an oppinion one way or the other, just a lack of oppinion.

I also don't understand people's need to understand everything that happens. I just don't. I hear a sound or see something that is unusual and I forget about it the next moment because it is not relevant to me. I have this thing where I can usually tell when someone has entered my room and it's usually right. I'm not sure how it works exactly but I get the impression it's got to do with the movement of air. Very rarely I'll get that feeling that someone is there and turn around but there's nobody there. Is it some sixth sense that lets me know people are there? Is it picking up ghosts when I look back and nobody is there? Is it just me picking up on the changes in the air? Is the mistake happening when there is a different reason for the shift in air (like a small breeze or change in weather conditions)? Does it matter? Not to me. :P

I tentatively agree with your view, Cal. I'm also pretty skeptical about a lot of science like the Big Bang and especially String Theory.

As far as your second paragraphical scenario, it's a false positive. Some minute sound or air shift perked up your senses and your mind reacted instinctively. How does Dawkins put it...you can be wrong about a tree blowing in the wind being a wolf many times, but you can only be wrong about a wolf being a tree once. We're hardwired to see things that aren't there because it's safer than dismissing things that are.

That's simply not true.  My beliefs have changed many times in my life, and are open to being changed again. 

There ARE different definitions of skepticism, of course.  And I doubt you'd find the folks at, say, "Skeptic" magazine to be philosophical skeptics.  The common usage of Skeptic is certainly NOT the philosophical useage.  Sorry.

Oh, I see.  I failed to read your mind.  Sorry.

Well, considering from context it's pretty clear I am not talking about philosophical skepticism...  in any case, if it's truely just a misunderstanding, oh well, those things happen, no?

Anecdote, in this conversation, is used as defined under "anecdotal":
based on personal observation, case study reports, or random investigations rather than systematic scientific evaluation: anecdotal evidence.

Skeptic would be defined as follows:
1.   a person who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual.
2.   a person who maintains a doubting attitude, as toward values, plans, statements, or the character of others.

Yes, if something happened to me, it would still be an anecdote.  Because it's not scientific evaluation.  It's me saying "This one time...", which is meaningless as real evidence.  Wanna know how much anecdotal evidence in favor of Bigfoot I could put together?

I think it would be best if you just talked about it anyways. This thread should be for fun, and nothing but pointless anecdotes.

I can agree with that.  Just don't expect your story to convince me.

Fair?

I should use that one more.

Nothing personal, but don't piss me off. Geldon's already doing a good job at it.

-

I don't have a pressing need for you believe any of my stories. I even invited everyone to offer their own opinions and explanations at the end of my story.

Despite my indeed being in Stray's shit list right now, I have to say that I like his stories and see no need to try to disprove them.  Paranormal stuff is something you have to witness for yourself to really understand in the same way.  So, don't take it personally if you Llava is stating he isnt convinced.  I know you're not expecting him to suddenly place unconditional belief in what you said.

Let me try that again:

To answer Llava's question: Of course it's fair, man.

Sorry for snapping at you. You probably didn't deserve that. Your question just frustrated me at first. How I wish you knew me enough to not even think you need to ask a question like that.

Besides, the only reason why I said we should leave this thread to anecdotes is because there are two (two!) paranormal threads going on. And both of them were heading into unfun, un-story related territory. It had nothing to do with protecting the "poor ghost believers'" feelings. We should whip believers in the other one.

Stray, if I open this thread up again only to see no new posts, but ANOTHER EDIT, I am going beat you with the Festivus pole. Happy Holidays!

It's the Dr. Pepper...

And the Internet sucks for communicating.  :-P

I'm done though. Sorry.

You make Clippy sad.

In retrospect, I've nothing to complain about with my edit button missing seeing how I escaped a beating.

So telepathy and Aliens are the two things I believe most strongly in.

On the aliens I'm not certain we've been visited, but it's defiantly possible.  Earth has had a few "resets" what with global extinctions every few millions of years.  We also had that whole technology-reset known as the dark ages. Who knows where we'd be if such things hadn't happened. Somewhere in the universe such a place, or several places surely exist. 

Telepathy is merely the interpretation of mental energies.  We can already monitor brain waves with electronic devices, so we know they're there.  Eyesight & Hearing are just us using specialized organs to interpret other such energies known as "light" and "sound."  I find it feesable that somehow we'll develop (or perhaps colony insects HAVE developed) organs to interpret these energies as well.

Telekinesis?  Nah, too much energy required just to move something with wind, much less with mental vibrations.

Ghosts?  I've had plenty of creepy encounters, feelings and things dropping ON me from stable locations to disbelieve in them. As such, I think it's possible that certain people might have mutations that let them see or experience these ghostly energies more profoundly than others, so there's Mediums.

Bigfoot?  Too many instances of Man haughtily declaring somethings dead or impossible only to be proven wrong.  The Cecoleanth (sp) is the first that springs to mind.  There's still a LOT of wilderness in the pacific northwest.

Nessie? That one I question bigtime.  Loch Ness isn't exactly teeming with enough biomass to support a large animal, much less several.  I'd be more inclined to believe in some sort of paranormal event than a dinosaur descendant.

Demons? Depends on what you consider a demon, I suppose.  We talking Japanese Demons or Christian Demons?  I believe in that some ghosts can be maleficent forces who wish people ill. I guess that's a demon.

Other- Tuatha de Danann

That's not one you hear too often.

The full on fair folk, seelie/unseelie, tir nan og stuff?  Or just other humans who had settled on Ireland after a war with the Fomorians and were eventually wiped out?

Every single person who doesn't belong in an asylum and can function on a reasonably normal level operates on a more or less skeptical worldview.  It's how they're able to go outside and get to work, without hiding under their car to escape the invisible monsters which they can't prove do not exist.  It's just that people typically make exceptions for one or two things that tickle their fancy on an emotional level.

My world view holds the fact that our narrow range of senses keeps a lot of the world hidden beyond the pale ability of humanity.  I believe in an afterlife not born on the razored knife blade of how paramount man is next to the rest of the natural world.  Death is a journey, and perhaps is the same as the catapillar to the butterfly.  The only thing I am unsure of are UFO's and aliens.  I would like to think it is possible, but currently the one thread of thought was mentioned by an engineer from JPL.  No sentient life has yet gone past the point of self extinction.  That is my one point of cynical thought.

Interesting beleifs, especially the whole part about how narrow our senses are and how much we might miss because of it. I'm a bit curious on the "no sentient life has gone past self extinction yet" thing. Is this based on some model of probability or just a belief?

I agree we have a very narrow spectrum of inputs, but we widen that with science every year. However, it hasn't turned up any ghosts or afterlife yet. Once it does, I'll be the first in line to embrace it. Until then, it's just something someone made up within the confines of their cranium.
What does that even mean?

The engineer, scientist, whomever it was from JPL said that one of the reasons nothing has been found to indicate intelligent life out in space could be that no creature that has achieved self awareness and advancement in science has made it past the point at which it destroys itself.  Right now how many avenues have we created that can destroy not the planet, but our civilization.  Of course, if interstellar travel is possible, one can speculate that they also would have the technology to hide themselves.  Nature is a harsh mistress.

Beyond the huge distances covered, there is the fourth dimensional constraint. I think that's the most important guess. Our entire history from slime to human is only 'visible' within a finite sphere, and the sphere for our technological span is laughably small.

To flip that around, the closest galaxy is 25,000 light years away. If life began there right now, they could have colonized half of their galaxy by the time we noticed.

The distance is troublesome, but the time constraints are the real deal-killer. Not only do we have to look in the right place, we have to look in the right place at the right time.

I'm rather fond of the theory that there is extraterrestrial life, one of the few thus-far-unproven theories I cling to. I just think it's exceedingly unlikely we'll ever run into them.

edited to add: there is nothing paranormal about this particular subject

The Zoo hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis) of the Fermi paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox) handles that quite nicely. You still have to consider the constraints of the drake equasion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation) but it bypasses a lot of the other stuff. Hell, we could have been seeded. It's not an uncommon theory.

That really doesn't handle the fourth dimensional issues I raised, and is rather silly to boot.

"On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place."

It didn't nail it exactly; I do like the seeded idea; it's not uncommon in sci-fi, the idea that we are either an offshoot or were deliberately engineered, not that it comes from some god entity, but that something helped us over that hump to organics not unlike a gigantic petri dish -- that handles the 4th dimension problem, since they started it, they'd obviously be around to observe the results.

Except that it's fabricated out of whole cloth, and depends on 'them' completely avoiding our sensors purposefully. Hey, maybe it's the Goa'uld.

Noone told me we had a Scientologist on these boards!

Don't tell anyone!

Sky: Yes, it has serious caveats to it. It's not at all likely. It might explain the anal probes, though.

If something did jump in and give our genetics a boost, there should be some pretty clear paleontology evidence.   What that evidence does seem to indicate, though, is that it's been a pretty steady process of trial and error.  I could interpret that as either meaning that evolution did all the work or whoever was tweaking us did so on a microevolutionary (one small change at a time), trial-and-error scale.  In other words, if God exists he either isn't as perfect as we've been taught or perfection demands a lot of mistakes be made.  (Oy, the Vatican's going to bend me over the end of the popemobile and cap me gangland style if I bandied that one around too loudly.)  Of course, this leaves the alien intervention possibility on the table, but I doubt the Scientologist version of that scenario is anything more than a filtering mechanism for the gullible.  (It wouldn't surprise me if the carriers of Hubbard's legacy cap people gangland all the time.)

I've adopted the belief that the line between paranormal and normal can be bridged by paying adequate attention, and that even life after death or aliens may be nothing special in reality.   Not that this means I'd cherish a fatal response to my free-thinking.

I read this book called Angel Fire by Andrew Greely. It's an ok book, but in it, this biologist is about to win a Nobel prize because he managed to prove that evolution has what he calls punctuation points. (if memory serves.) Basically, things will evolve slowly, then make a dramatic leap in progress. From ape to caveman for instance. The whole idea behind the theory is that humanity is on the verge of another of those leaps and will become beings of energy and thought in a few centuries. (A short time evolution-wise)

Of course, people want to kill him and he is protected by a beautiful woman named Gabrielle, who literally appears out of the air and tells him he is right, and that some people don't want his knowledge getting out. She is of course an angel, who turn out to be aliens who have been watching humanity for centuries.

Actually, I was talking about the thing that we have the hardest time with -- evolution can handle everything all the way back until the first proteins assembled themselves -- but the start of life on this planet. Hence, seeded.

Apes didn't evolve into cavemen. Both have a common ancestor that was neither an ape nor a caveman. The more intelligent proto-cavemen learned to use tools and group tactics which solidified the social and intellectual traits, the dumbasses sat in trees and didn't develop the traits. Natural selection is such an amazing and beautiful thing it's kinda sad people reject it.

And bhodi, there have been some good hypothesis for the genesis of life out of the proto-soup. I'd hardly pull in an outside agent, Occam's razor and whatnot.

I think natural selection would be accepted easier if it was just explained right. Most people understand the concept of family markers, and how children carry the legacy of their parents, as well as mating and survival advantages -- so they're pretty much halfway there. If you take the top down approach though, and speak of evolution on a cosmic scale right off the bat, then you lose them.

Of course, there are some who will not accept it no matter what --- But big deal. They're like those apes sitting in the tree. It's pointless to worry about them.

Sure are. But I don't buy it until we can re-create it in a lab. Evolution fits for all the way back to square 1, and there's ample evidence of that. Unfortunately, the evidence pretty stops and then it moves into hypothesis land, so if there was going to be something 'unusual' -- perhaps I'd better say extremely unlikely -- it'd happen there.

Sky is the man.

Geldon thinks this is the 1600's and the Pope is going to beat him up for being a heretic.

Bhodi doesn't realize that "OMG aliens!" doesn't answer where life came from, just pushes the question to another planet.

Riggswolfe has read the dumbest book in history.  (Energy beings?  /vomit)

I am highly amused.

Of course I realize it. I'm saying that it would be entertaining, in a sci-fi sort of way, to be the reason for this particular planet ;)

WindupAtheist takes my popemobile gangland execution humor too seriously, but at least he's found a way to be amused regardless.

The seeding of life is an interesting consideration.  If indeed there was no external intervention involved, it's nonetheless pretty miraculous how dead matter developed the capacity to live.  Even if there were external intervention, you can follow it further back and then ask yourself, "Okay, who birthed the God/The Aliens?"

Zomg Geldon nailed it ;)

Jesus Christ on a tricycle, do you have to take everything so fucking literally? My words were a very high level summary of that small part of that book, not a god damn college thesis on evolution.

And by the way, the JC on a T reference is just a fucking expression, so don't give me a beat down about how I must obviously be a creationist or some shit since I brought that name into this post.

Oh, and WUA, you have no room to judge a book anyone reads, or frankly, anything a person does as a hobby outside of F13. Try reading a book someday before you comment on it.

*sigh* I'm sounding like whatshisdick who defended Richard Dawkins' book in that other thread.

The sane people?

:rimshot:

The concept of beings "evolving into pure energy" is nothing but an easy way for an author to say "Hello, I have no fucking clue what evolution is or how it works!"

You've heard of science fiction right? It's this entire genre out there. An the whole "beings evolving into pure energy" is actually a recurring theme in sci-fi. Hell, Star Trek TOS had the Organians in the '60s and I'm sure they weren't the first ones to come up with it.

It's one of the worst butcheries of a scientific principle to ever gain any sort of foothold in sci-fi.  It's not "evolution" at all, by any scientifically meaningful definition of the word.  Tell me, what change takes place in the genetic structure of a newly conceived organism which causes it to no longer have genes, or any other phyiscal structure at all?

Do you really want to have that conversation?

It's just like "What if I got so good at programming that my applications didn't need any code?"

An awesome one.

The same change that formed the genetic structure out of nothing in the first place, but in reverse.

Wouldn't that mean they turned into goo, not light?

Classy.

If I was aiming for class I never would get involved in these debates in the first place.

Edit: In any case, I am going to attempt to stay out of this thread from here on out. WUA is blatantly just trying to stir shit up without even an attempt at meaningful dialogue.

Hey, if Goo can do that, that's not so bad.

If you take the process of the formation of DNA and run it in reverse, you get complex chemicals turning into simpler ones.  Not magical ghosts.  And Riggs, it's okay to have read the stupidest book ever.  The problem comes when you get pissy at my calling it stupid, yet have no answer to the fact that it's screamingly ignorant about it's own subject matter.

This thread turned into a wanky personality contest.   Who'd have thought it ?

WUA, in order to remain consistent you need to immediately delete your posts from the Star Trek thread about liking any Trek at all. Trek butchers physics every single time a starship goes to warp. Don't get me started on the time Kirk ordered phasers fired while in warp. Or how much energy a transporter takes. Or how internally inconsistent it is with itself from episode to episode.

You must also immediately withdraw any liking you have for Star Wars. The Force is ESP wrapped in technobabble. Midichlorians shows such a fundamental misunderstanding of biology that it is laughable. How in the hell does a lightsaber keep a "blade" of energy that produces no heat and is produced by an object that fits in the palm of your hand?

You also need to stop watching Dr. Who if you do. Relativity shows that his escapades are truly impossible.

Dune? Right out as well. A man turning into a sandworm because of some drugs? Mental powers? I could go on and on about Dune.

Battlestar Galactica almost passes, except they too go faster than light. (implied at least.) Oh, and "downloading" a consciousness across a distance of light years? And robots that are identical to humans? And have a God? Laughable. Toss that out too.

Oh, and Heinlein, get this, that old geezer wrote about people who became effectively immortal, through selective breeding over a few generations. Crazy huh? Never read anymore Heinlein again.

Aasimov? Sentient robots? Clearly impossible with any technology known to man. A hack.

Arthur C. Clarke? Come on? Giant metal rectangles that communicate and somehow helped early man to use tools? That tried to foster a new race on Jupiter? A sentient computer that essentially goes insane?

Ray Bradbury? Have you read his stories? Life on Mars for instance? Clearly the man has no understanding at all of science.

So, be consistent, or shut the fuck up is my point.

Boy, you bit. You bit hard.

Warp drive is made up, and we all know it's made up.  Evolution is an actual concept, and if you have to hideously mutilate it in order for your story to work, then any relevance you were seeking to gain by using an actual concept is thrown out the window.  It's the difference between writing a book where Abe Lincoln is kidnapped by martians, and writing a book where Abe Lincoln is born a fillipino woman in 1976 Chicago.  One is a lame/implausibe story about Lincoln, the other makes one wonder what it has to do with Lincoln at all.

edit:  Trek loves that "evolving into energy" crap too, and it pisses me off there as well.  Star Wars at least has the sense not to even pretend it has anything to do with science.

Hmm... I'd have to say various cryptids.

Cryptogeology is interesting as well.

Space travel is an actual concept, too.  They mutilate it by bringing warp drive into it.

It's quite sad that there probably won't be anything like warpdrive.

I might be wrong, but the fastest matter being observed are gases propelled by blazar jets, producing speeds close to the speed of light. Other than that, there are observations of stars being pulled at speeds around 1,000 km a second (over 3,000,000 km an hour) by (presumably) supermassive blackholes. That's fast as all hell, enough to the point to disspate entire worlds, and that's less than 1% of the speed of light. Even if we could harness that (which would still be amazing for space travel), there's still the question of producing a hull that could take the "abuse" (for lack of a better word).

Then again, this is all along the lines of force and propulsion. Which has nothing to do with warp drives.

But anyways, it's a fun concept. As is anything speculative in Star Trek. Fun. TV Show. No reason to be pissed off.

This thread, once one of entertaining the idea of the paranormal, has apparently backlashed into one of excessive skepticism.  It's hard to anticipate exactly what science will achieve in the future, so reading the last few messages saying how various aspects of science fiction is absolutely ridiculous may be assuming too much.  I'm not saying that everything that ever dripped off a science fiction writer's quill will come true to the smallest details - the odds are pretty small.  However, one cannot yet rule out that similar effects cannot be achieved through entirely different, yet-to-be discovered techniques and phenomena. 

Some counterexamples of what I've seen here on the last few posts:

If indeed we cannot exceed the speed of light, as particle physics suggests, then perhaps we might find a way to exceed the speed of light through some method of circumvention.  Impossible, you say?  Well, there were some very learned people who thought the sound barrier was impassible just 50ish years ago.

We may actually develop robots that, if not sentient, are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from the real thing.  Can go they go insane?  What's acceptable sanity?  I'd say my computer goes insane every time it crashes - though this would be a kind of sanity that doesn't require sentience, as my existing computer has shown no evidence of self-awareness.

Given our mapping of the human genome, and our work to put together the puzzle of how we are assembled, there is introduced the possibility to make improvements.  Subtle at first, but in time, there really no limitation to the extent that what we recognize as the human organism to be modified... some would say, perverted, but that's really a matter of moral difference.  Germ line (prior to birth) genetic therapy is not the only possibility, as somatic (post-birth) gene therapy is a real life developing field that shows great potential even though they haven't quite nailed the details yet.  If we're lucky, it'll become an affordable reality before we kick the bucket, as here is your quickest potential for immortality.

Sometimes, the line between insane optimism and reality is shattered by tomorrow's discovery.

I'm not trying to reject the general idea of what you're saying, but comparing the skepticism towards exceeding the speed of light and skepticism in the past with the speed of sound is apples and oranges. The first is measured by a fair bit of provisional truths -- the latter were measured by completed shortsightedness and stupidity.

Disbelieving that one could travel faster than speed of sound didn't have any overarching laws of physics to support it (like Einstein's Theory of Relativity for Light Speed). It was just mindless skepticism. Einstein is not mindless skepticism.

Not saying that he's absolutely right either -- but he is the best we have for the time being.

That's what structural integrity fields are for.  Duh.

(http://masklinnscans.free.fr/4chan/ancient_wisdom/thread_delivers.jpg)

I now believe in leprechauns.

Turns out I work with one.

This guy is about 5'2" and let me tell you, before I was even really thinking about it, I thought he looked like a leprechaun.  He has the bushy eyebrows, the wrinkled grinning face, squinty eyes... everything about him just says leprechaun.  But today I put together more evidence.  Firstly, his last name is Kahn.  Pronounced like (lepre)chaun.  Second, he's a total lech.  Third, he's greedy and selfish.  Fourth, he likes to screw with people.  Fifth, and this is the kicker for me, he's obsessed with using the Sacagawea golden dollar instead of the paper dollar.  That's a gold coin! He's obsessed with gold coins!

I swear, I'm finding a pure iron bell and taking it to work and ringing it in front of him.  If he freaks out, I'm tackling him and getting that pot o' gold.  I'll keep you all updated.




.... This may not be funny if you don't know the guy.  Oh well, sucks to be you all.

It will be funny the moment you post the results of the iron bell ringing.  Until then it's just amusing.


As for ftl travel, buring a hole through space-time seems to be the better solution than even attempting 'real' speed.  However, not knowing much about physics beyond what the physicists on NOVA talk about, I'll let everyone else worry about how that'll happen.

Faster than light travel (http://www.dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_028.htm). Easy.

Add a "none" option and I'll vote.

Edit: at the moment, if 17% of those who reply say they believe in the mediums/ghosts option, then all you know is that 17% of the "scientifically illiterate or otherwise gullible" subset of F13's readership believe in the happy medium.

Holy 8 year old thread!

I still follow the Bigfoot phenomena. The overwhelming majority of it is pretty easily explainable as mis-identifications or overactive imaginations, but then something like this (http://media.texasbigfoot.com/OP_paper_media/OuachitaProjectMonograph_Version1.0_030315.pdf) comes along (warning- lengthy PDF). I subscribe to The Bigfoot Show (http://thebigfootshow.com/) podcast, and one of the NAWAC higher ups runs it, so I have heard most of these stories before. Seeing it all together in a report is pretty compelling, however. Either this entire group is lying or there is something real out there.

Real or not, it is a pretty interesting read. And might make you a little jumpy at night in the woods  :grin:

Almost stopped reading when I got to "North American Wood Ape Conservancy".

You nut. :awesome_for_real:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82533/cat-concern.jpg)

229 page PDF? Never have I needed a TLDR; more so than now.  :ye_gods:

I'm glad my "don't click on PDFs" policy served me well this time.

There is something real out there. Probably several somethings lumped together by longing and expectation. No deception required. It's also not really apes. Large mammals present all over an entire, extensively explored continent (as Bigfoot is claimed to be) simply do not avoid leaving bones, fur, feces, and photographs for four hundred years of naturalist explorations. This isn't some variant buffalo which might go undetected via miscategorization of specimen age. The entire primate order has been absent from North America's fossil record (much less its primeval forests) for fifty million years. Megafauna simply do not hide in plain sight.

If we want to believe, if our goal is sufficiently vague, and if our standards of evidence are sufficiently weak then we can find anything. Our brain is especially well tuned to identifying human shapes, human faces, and human motivations... where they exist and where they do not. Giant intelligent apes meet this criteria quite well.

I would love to live in a world where all these marvelous things exist. The entire disciplines of biology, taxonomy, and paleontology would be thrilled to find a North American Ape. They still require falsifiable, testable evidence before they believe that we do. Anything we could do a DNA test on would be great.

(sorry rasix)

I like the X-Files.

There are a heap of near extinct animals that are far more interesting as things that exist than a 'Bigfoot'. Spend your energy on them.

Read the report. I know it is long, but just dismissing it without even looking at it and making snide comments is the easy way out. Or ignore it, whatever.

I didn't click it, but it says 200 pages.

Why would anyone read that?

Comeon.

I took a quick skim through, focusing in on the parts that sounded most promising (like "Blood and Hair").  Here's the tl;dr version: a very excitable group of guys went camping and saw lots of things they think are Bigfeet.  Mysteriously, all of the evidence they were able to bring back fails to corroborate their fantasies.  Due to a vast conspiracy orchestrated by the Bigfeet, no doubt.

 :awesome_for_real:

The problem with most 'natural' kinds of paranormalism, most especially cryptids (Bigfoot/Yeti, Loch Ness etc.) is that the spread of ubiquitious video across the planet should pretty much lead to concrete proof. Say, if there's a mokele-mbembe dinosaur in Lake Tele, even folks in rural Congo have cellphones now, there should be photos.

With paranormal phenomena that don't necessarily follow normal physics and/or supposedly have forms of intelligence sufficient to detect that they're being recorded and disappear/evade, there's still an out. Though, say, with UFOs, if they were slow enough to be photographed badly by old cameras but now suddenly are canny enough to avoid being captured on clear high-quality video, that strains credulity quite a bit.

The human mind is great at deceiving itself.

Just the other day I saw a guy staring at me from the back yard. I could feel his eyes peering into my house. He unabashedly remained unmoving as I stepped towards my back door to yell at him.  Just before I yanked it open to yell I hit the light and.. it was a tree that fell over on the wooded preservation site behind my house this summer.  Mother fucker.

I skimmed it immediately, like Samwise. It looks superficially like all the other Bigfoot stories I've read. I feel safe saying that if it had something valid and surprising to say then I would not have to read it here because people better informed than I in the various disciplines its truths would challenge would have already done so and them summarized it for a dozen journalists and it would be national news.

As soon as somebody gets one of these things peer reviewed, I will dive right in. Hell, I'll devour it. Like I said I would love to live in a world where there are intelligent, man-sized, bipedal apes in the woods. I'd like to see some PBS documentary compiling all the new, unimpeachable data and explaining how these mysterious beasts have avoided detection for so long.

Until then: Weird stuff happens in the woods at night, odd sights and sounds and animal visitations. It's inherently spooky, and likely appeals to the primal ancestral fears baked into the evolutionary morphology of our brain. Ghost stories around the camp fire.

I don't remember this thread.  This is a nutter thread.

Yes, it is easy. Also correct.

I used to bother explaining myself a lot more 8 years ago.

Relivant xkcd:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2673592/settled.png)

This is easily the craziest thing in this thread.

The reason I posted it is I want people to actually read it and then give me plausible explanations for what is reported. Smug ignorance is still ignorance.

modfight MODfight MODFIGHT!

I don't think they've found a new species of bird, reptile or even damn insect in North America for God knows how long so there is no damn way a six foot Mammal has evaded our detection.  At least Loch Ness is underwater so who the hell knows what goes on down there but land based?  No way.

Loch Ness is really deep and there are eels in it.  Nessie is probably just a really big old eel.

Eh, put my down for edgy techs. (Not existing now. Just...maybe one day). I'm not sure that's paranormal, though.

FTL travel, giga-scale engineering (Dyson spheres, Rings, Orbitals) or mega-engineering (Space Elevators), direct biological control via nanomachines and computing power (ie, the ability to basically alter your body on a cellular level, engineering yourself), mind uploading and digital immortality....

All highly unlikely to impossible according to the universe we know. I can sincerely hope we're wrong.

Maybe quantum immortality. I haven't decided how I feel about that one. It's certainly tempting.

We don't need to read it to dismiss it, that's the point.  The reasons for not doing so and confidently dismissing it are obvious, and many have been mentioned in recent posts.

They find new insects and fish all the time still in the US, actually. There's an active program going on in the South in particular to try and identify and preserve all the random little fish species that live in just one stream or whatever, before pollution kills them all off.

Megafauna are another matter entirely. There's just no way that it hasn't been found, not with the amount of satellite coverage we have, people carrying cameras at all times, etc.

200 pages is a lot to go through a point by point explanation on.  The part that I read the most closely (the one where they shot at Bigfoot, found what they claimed was some blood on a rock, they did some test determining it was blood, sent it off to a third party lab to find out what kind, and then the lab said "that's not even blood") I'd explain as they shot at a vague noise, imagined the part where they saw something, and found a rock with some red mud or algae or something on it and decided it was ape blood, "confirmed" it with some sloppily done test, only to get mysteriously refuted by somebody who knew what they were doing and who didn't have a lot of ego invested in corroborating their story about how the time they shot wildly at a falling branch it was because Bigfoot, guys.  

If you want to point us at another specific incident I bet half a dozen people here would be happy to Occam's Razor it to ribbons.   :awesome_for_real:

My thoughts as I'm reading through this:

P6

In other words, they have no proof of the existence of a new species.  This is their own admission.  They're just doing this to drum up interest.

P8

Gigantopithecus.  Why is it always fucking Gigantopithecus.  Gigantopithecus was an ape native to China and India something like a hundred thousand years ago.  The idea that it gives "precedent" for anecdotal descriptions of bigfoot is EXTREMELY tenuous.  We don't know what Gigantopithecus looked like, we only have a few teeth and jaw bones, saying it's totally plausible that bigfoot is real because legends of a big furred man match a fossil tooth of a large monkey found thousands of years ago on another continent is a huge stretch.  It would be like claiming that dragons are real because dinosaurs existed.

P9

Gigantopithecus may have come to NA over the Bering strait land bridge, but there's no evidence, but it's OK that there's no evidence because of climate reasons.  This is a fallacy.  Absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence, and claiming that there's a good reason that there's no proof of X still doesn't give us a reason to believe X.  Maybe this is addressed later.  Conjecture about the nature and migration of giant primates seems premature without any evidence of said primates even existing.  Until we have some kind of evidence that there is a Gigantopithecus - teeth, jaw bones, some kind of fossil trail - speculation on how it could have survived all these years without leaving any fossils seems pointless.

P11
Alton Higgins gives his backstory.  In it he describes himself as hunting bigfoots (or apes) since '95 at least.  This is not the backstory of a neutral observer.  He then relates a number of stories from witnesses with wildly conflicting details.  He led a team which encountered some "presumably large" animals (presumably?  How do you presume that, if you never saw them or had direct contact?).  He talked with some locals who saw a small chimp like animal three or four feet in height (these are both supposed to be evidence of the same animal?)  Stories about the walls of cabins being slapped or strange noises (but no sightings or evidence of any kind).  They decided to look for bigfoot in "Area X" (siiiiiiiigh).  They set up cameras and caught a bunch of photos of black bears, but no monkeys.  More talk of weird noises every night but still no recorded evidence of any kind despite walking out there with the express intention of looking for these things.

P15

Some kind of letter to his company about "Wood knocks" which he thinks are the apes communicating.  How does he know it's apes?  What are they saying?  Letter from Brad McAndrews, who "quotes" his own "text" for some "reason."  One wood knock was "explosive" another was "musical".  He thinks one of the knocks was really close by but really quiet, so he checks the area with thermal scope and sees nothing, meaning either he's wrong about the noise or the apes are invisible to thermal sensors.  Again, no indication of what the meaning of this communication is or why it has anything to do with apes (do apes communicate like this?  I've never heard of it before).  So far it sounds like apophenia to me.

P21

Ugh, okay, his hypothesis that there's an ape out there, which he's testing with three corollaries:

If the [wood ape] is corporeal, then it will leave tracks in soft substrates such as mud or wet sand.
If the [wood ape] is a great ape, then it will leave tracks resembling those of a primate.
If the [wood ape] is a great ape, then it will exhibit great ape anatomical features and demonstrate elements of great ape behavior.

Which is great, except it looks A LOT like he's working backwards from conclusion to data.  "We have big footprints, we heard what we assume is ape semaphore, what kind of argument can we build around that data to suggest the existence of giant apes."  No mention of things like "if the wood ape is a living thing, it would leave behind a corpse if it dies" or "if a stable population of these apes exist, they must have a population density of at least X" or anything provable.

P24
Finally getting to some evidence.  Playback equipment sounds, for some reason, included monkey noises as well as humans, including women "producing sexual moans", (the fuck are you guys pointing that camera) twelfth century choral chants and the expected normal animal noises.

P25
Wood Knocks
Sometimes team members knocked on trees and heard other knocking sounds nearby.  The author insists on this being ape communication, despite the ongoing lack of any evidence of apes or anything for them to communicate.  I'm sure the author knows that there are a lot of naturally occurring sources for wood tapping sounds, but he doesn't mention how this ape generated sound can be differentiated from them.  There's a lot of very sketchy "they must have heard us coming" "they were CLEARLY knocks in response to Jordan" "Burrows postulated that the sounds were all 'purposeful.'" kind of unscientific babble in all these reports.  


This seems like nonsense to me?  I have no idea how you arrive at that conclusion from those premises, and I'm not even sure what the conclusion is, or how you "triangulate an area" by knocking on some trees.
Five minutes later, the guy hears a knocking sound.
Okay.  He didn't think it was an ape until after he didn't see it do the thing apes don't do, but then HE KNEW IT MUST BE SO and that's proof of something? And this is their BEST PROOF of the apes.  Nowhere else is there anything but "I heard a spoooooooooky noise" kind of stuff.

p. 39
Metal Knocking
More of the same.  We heard a noise, don't know what it was, therefore apes.  

P. 47
Breaking branches and downed trees.
I am skeptical of Mizejewski's claim of being able to perform ballistics calculations on a leaf in mid fall.

The team hears cracking noises from a tree and:
But despite going over there for the express purpose of photographing the ape, he didn't manage to photograph it, and we don't even get a description beyond “It was fuckin’ big!”

Again, no pictures of any apes, no evidence, nobody even saw an ape, but it is ascribed to apes nonetheless.
Nothing says "scientific study" like unconfirmed secondhand data from a biased source.

APES YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES YOU'RE LOOKING FOR APES NOT WOBBLY TREES OR INTERESTING PERCUSSIVE SOLOS.  Nobody doubts the existence of trees falling in the woods (except maybe blind philosophers who take aphorisms a bit too literally) or woodpeckers, we're looking for evidence of giant primates.  Amassing a pile of unexplained spooky shit does nothing to prove or disprove anything about sasquatches.

P. 64
Rock Throwing

This so far seems mostly meaningless.  There's a long (three page) section about Coyler, Bowman, Hayes, and Helmer getting in some kind of "Rock War" (their term) with some kind of unidentified assailants, except the "war" here is Coyler chucking stones up the slope of a mountain because of the assumption that someone out there was attacking him or something.

For example:Bullshit.  You heard a rock being thrown?  By what, a trebuchet?  Only sound it makes when I chuck a stone is the impact when it hits something, and even that's hard to accurately guess without seeing it.
How?  How are they "detecting" this?  Do they have some kind of radar set up?  Throwing rocks does not make a lot of noise!
I have this mental image of the team communications coordinator sitting down to write up the minutes for this and just sighing deeply before he picks up his pen.  

To be clear, this "rock war" went from 19:45 to 02:30 the next morning, and in that seven hour period the team "detected" nine rocks being thrown at their cabin.  Supercommando Coyler spent hours chucking rocks back up the mountain but couldn't tell if he hit anything other than the ground.  They estimate they were thrown from less than 50 yards, but never saw who was throwing them or photographed them or found any physical evidence aside from the existence of rocks.

I don't want to take away from the experiences here, this does sound like freaky stuff.  Wandering around the middle of the woods and suddenly something chucks a rock at you, that's scary.  But it's not proof of any kind of ape. It doesn't tell us anything about bigfoot aside from that maybe they throw things for some reason.  Maybe bigfoot is chucking rocks at people, but there's no more evidence there than for snake people or faeries.

Pg. 79

Vocalizations
Siiiiiiiigh.
Lots of large animals make a "huff" noise.  The document claims that "Of all the vocalizations documented, team members are most certain in attributing it to the wood ape" but doesn't say why, or what differentiates this huff from that of, say, a bear.

Colyer again, somehow "feeling" annoyance and anger.  Not clear if it's referring to Coyler being annoyed and angry (if so, why would I care?) or if the paper is seriously trying to claim that he's pulling a Counselor Troi with a yeti, because there are some assumptions we should be talking about first if that's the intent.

That might be more noteworthy, but it's hard to evaluate in textual format.  The problem with a lot of these claims (hoots and moans and things) is that there are animals that make similar sounds and it's hard to distinguish them from unknown sources.  I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on this one, though.

Again, though, even if it is 100% accurate, it still doesn't prove the existence of apes, just "something I know not what" making noises.
Higgins needs to stop spouting bullshit and keep his "beliefs" to himself.  We are theoretically performing a scientific study here, not a prayer meeting, I don't care about your beliefs unless you have something to support them and if you do then I want to hear THAT.

 Premises come before conclusions.  This kind of shit is all over this report.  You can't say "I believe there are two apes nearby" in your paper which is supposed to prove that apes when nobody at any point has seen an ape of any kind.
Awwww yeeeeeah.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw6JgbfAXsc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw6JgbfAXsc)
The FUCK am I reading.

P. 91
Footprints

Oh boyherewego.
Who is taking these minutes?  God?  "Fortunately, the others never realized that Colyer was an ape double agent, since his parents had been murdered by anti-ape revolutionaries in the ook wars."

This is probably the best evidence I've seen yet in this report, but it's not super convincing.  I'm not an expert tracker so I'm not qualified to give my opinion on them, but I'm not ready to assert that they're bigfoot tracks based just on the claims of a guy who's been chasing bigfoot for 20+ years.  They look like some kind of tracks, but they're not obviously human or anything.

P. 97
Other Evidence

Nut cracking stations are decent evidence in that they're actual physical objects that they actually got photos of.  They're not great evidence for bigfoot, though.
No, it is not reasonable to hypothesize that the stations are associated with wood apes when we still have not established the existence of wood apes.  AGAIN, just because you found something weird does not mean you can fill in the blank with your pet theory.  If you want to prove that wood apes are real you need to show us evidence of a wood ape, not just point to something unexplained and go "what else could it BE" because that still doesn't give us any proof of the existence of bigfoot.

Blood and hair were found after Colyer (of course) started spraying bullets at anything that moved.  FIRST of all, opening fire with a rifle on something resembling a human is really worrying behavior, did you not have a camera?  Second of all, the tests were negative, not even confirming that the substance they were testing was blood at all.  Testing of the hair was inconclusive (they couldn't identify the source) until they sent the hair off for third party verification at some lab at which point it was lost so presumably this is all we're getting.

Odors were recorded, and this is pretty weak.  There's no consistent description of the odor (one person describes it as "musty" or "horse-like" while others describe it as "skunky" or "dead animal-like".  A few describe it as smelling like a zoo or like an ape (which presumably they smelled AT the zoo), which seems more like wishful thinking than scientific objectivity speaking unless they've got a more discerning nose than anyone I know.  And, again, weird smells do not automatically mean monkey.

Reflective eyes is another extremely weak piece of evidence.  It means the only time they were in sight of the animal was by an amazing coincidence a time when it couldn't be seen.  The margin of error is massive here.  If someone claims they see a huge ape in good light, then that's a strong claim that you might want to listen to.  If someone claims they saw some reflective eyes in the bushes at night, but nothing but bears and foxes during the day, that suggests bears and foxes.

See, you can't say shit like this when you never saw the animal.  "The eyes were about three feet off the ground" is fine.  "They moved up to about seven feet off the ground when we turned our lights on it" is also fine.  But if you never got even a vague look at what it was you can't make claims about it's posture or size.  And claims about reflective eyes in the woods aren't particularly notable or surprising if you can't even begin to rule out anything else living in the forest.

There's another section called "close approaches to the cabin" which is 100% bullshit, two guys sitting in a cabin hearing noises outside and concluding that they must be giant apes because I don't know why.

In other words, we got nothing but we're sure it's apes.

They may even OH NO LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU IT'S AN APE no wait it's just your sister.

Apes are always stealthy, except for the times when they're not.  It's a good thing both loud noise and it's absence provide equal support for our hypothesis, or else we might have to re-think it.
There's that mystery cleared up.
Higgins again.  This is pretty maddening.  There's a whole section of the report dedicated to "close encounters" where the alleged ape is RIGHT THERE but in NONE of them is it photographed or recorded or even seen clearly.  This thing is like an ape ninja.

I am genuinely surprised they didn't at some point set a bear trap with a playboy magazine dangling above it.

P. 129
Visual Contacts

OKAY FINALLY geez.  Visual contact might conceivably be evidence for an ape as opposed to just another tick for the "spooky stuff" pile.
JESUS CHRIST COLYER what the hell is wrong with you.  "Yeah, I saw a bigfoot, but all that's here now is this mysterious pile of ground beef spread out over about fifty feet.  I couldn't help myself from emptying nine rounds in to it, it was 'instinctive' for me to aim at anything with a humanoid silhouette and pull the trigger over and over until the gun dropped from my trembling hands.  What can I say, baby, it's all in the reflexes *finger guns*"  

(note that despite going all Jessie Ventura on it the bigfoot apparently escaped unharmed as there was no body nor any blood found next to the blasted remains of the tree that ate all that shot which suggests to me that Colyer misidentified a tree)

That's good!
That's bad!

And so on.  Sightings of vague shapes through dense foliage, brief glimpses from far away, that kind of thing.

There are a few decent sightings, McClurkan's probably stands out most for me.  But they didn't bring back any evidence, which makes it hard to evaluate these claims.  Eyewitness testimony is not super reliable in the best of cases, and when you go out there specifically wanting to see bigfoot it's hard to take unverified reports seriously.


That's not bad, and if it were backed up by some kind of evidence, it would make me think there was something worth investigating here.  But it's not.  None of them are.

But, shockingly, no body was found (again).

Seriously?  Like, this kind of thing is maddening when it happens once, but it hits these guys OVER AND OVER.  They see a bigfoot but there's no film in the camera.  They shoot but it's deflected by a twig.  One guy sees it but the other can't confirm before it vanishes.  Burrows and Colyer find it, but Burrows' light scares it away before anyone can do anything.  Over and over again this happens.

I'm not saying these guys are lying, because I don't think there's any deliberate attempt to deceive anyone going on here, but I also don't trust that their perceptions are 100 accurate.  When you take a picture of a "weird animal" and look at it later and it turns out to be a bear, no harm done.  Take 100 of them and 99 of them turn out to be bears, while one is lost to technical problems, it seems improbable to me to insist that the one that got lost is the one which was REALLY a bigfoot.  If that keeps happening for decades, it starts to look more and more improbable.

P. 148
Small Apes
Not content with bigfoot, they're also claiming contact with ANOTHER species of undiscovered primate, some kind of smaller chimp-like animal.  There's no evidence for this one either, they just have some sketches by one of the teammates and a few sightings of creatures that are described as "small dark animals" which don't match known local wildlife.  They feel this is another ape, but again there's nothing here which lets us evaluate those claims.

It's also worth noting that most of the stuff they attribute to bigfoot (wood knocks, reflective eyes, sounds, smells, etc.) could just as easily be this smaller animal, but that possiblilty isn't really examined.

P. 154
Camera and surveillance details

A lot of excuses in this section about why there is no proof.  Sometimes it's faulty cameras, sometimes "the cameras had negatively affected approach behavior because all close approach activity seemed to cease when the surveillance system was activated" (which is pretty dubious) but the overall problem is the same as above.  They eventually got rid of the camera system, believing it was interfering with their work, but they still have no evidence anyway.

P. 158
Specimen collection
This I really strongly agree with.  A type specimen is a physical artifact that shows distinction from currently existing animals.  So, for example, a skull that's definitely not from a bear or elk or any kind of existing animal would probably work.

Most of the rest of this section is justification for trying to kill a bigfoot, which is not really a topic I'm interested in responding to.

P. 163
Frequency of visual contact

This section seems to be devoted to the question "if you've seen bigfoot so many times why haven't you gotten any evidence" and the answer seems to be "there have been a small number of sightings spread out over a large amount of time".  Not really super convincing, but I don't think it's that critical an argument, you can't prove a LACK of bigfoots based on a lack of evidence... you just can't prove their presence, either.

P. 164
Camera traps
Possible explanations include the idea that bigfoot can see in to the infrared (and thus avoid IR sensors/cameras), the idea that bigfoot is keeping track of intruders in it's territory and avoiding cameras based on their association with humans or because of their unfamiliarity.  

The author does not mention the obvious possibility that one cannot photograph a bigfoot if they do not exist.

P. 167
Behaviors

This is a summary of the observations like odors and wood knocking and rock throwing and what they mean.  Given that we have no evidence of their existence, the basics of their physiology, diet, or anatomy,  speculating on their social structure seems premature.

P. 179
Conclusion
The conclusion of the report advocates the existance of a previously unknown species of great ape which does things like generate wood knocks and so on.

For my own part, I see no evidence supporting their conclusions.  They have not provided any physical evidence, aside from a few questionable footprints.  They have not provided any new photographs or videos of this species.  They have produced some audio clips of things like wood knocks but these claims do not support and are not supported by claims of giant apes.  At best their new evidence is an unknown phenomenon, at worst it is simply unrecognized, but in neither case is it proof of bigfoot.  A lot of animals make noises, a lot of animals bang on trees, even if the noises are inconsistent with all existing animals (and I'm not convinced that they are) then we still have no positive evidence for anything ape related. The report is filled with unsubstantiated claims and unverified data from participants who constantly report guesswork and conjecture as facts. They acknowledge the requirement to provide a type specimen, they have failed to produce said specimen, therefore their conclusion is not supported.

Holy shit.

Can we declare a general amnesty and get WUA and geldon back? These types of threads do not deliver without them.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82533/nononononono.gif)

(http://i.imgur.com/UBzLhmh.gif)

That GIF right there is more solid scientific evidence of Bigfoot than anything in that report.   :awesome_for_real:

Judging by what ezrast posted, I am thinking it is less a report and more of a fanfic based on some Twilight or Fifty Shades.  But instead of girls-who-like-rape and vampires, it is more about glistening man-flesh and Bigfoot.  And you know what they say about men with Bigfoot.

Procrastinating on the game you want to develop much?

Kail might have earned some sort of custom title.

Absolutely.  I read every word!  Unfortunately for him, he has to keep doing this now or his cred will slip.  If you have a newsletter, Kail, sign me up! 

Thanks Kail- that is (even more than) what I was hoping to hear from people here. I agree with a lot of what you said. The reason I think this particular report is interesting is the sheer volume of incidents over a period of time in the same area. Obviously they have bigfoot on the brain, and thus are almost assuredly attributing to bigfoot things for which other species or natural phenomena could be responsible. But all it takes is one single incident to be true and we have a new species. For the skeptics, a little looking around will show you that new species are discovered literally almost every day (http://e360.yale.edu/feature/finding_new_species_the_golden_age_of_discovery/2129/). I agree it is unlikely, but I also think that the sheer body of 'evidence' is worth looking into in a systematic way (like the way these guys are doing it, but with actual funding and scientific protocols). I also think that technologies like drones, cameras, and advances in DNA sequencing will make the question a lot easier to answer in the next 10 years or so.

Maybe they exist.  

If they don't, spending our time considering them is pretty much a waste.  

If they do and we have this much trouble getting easily reproducible evidence of their existence, they probably don't want us bothering them and we should respect their wishes.  

Either way, we shouldn't be spending effort looking for them at this point.

And yes, this is exactly what a member of a conspiracy to cover up the existence of these things would say.

Geldon needs help. This place is the opposite of help.

I'd almost rather have Hyu or Bruce back.  Yah, they're all annoying twats, but Geldon has the added bonus of being stupid beyond repair.

I was thinking an award for best Sir Bruce impersonation.

I liked WUA. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Because they're obviously harmless.

If they were kidnapping or killing people on a regular basis, then they'd have slipped up once or twice and we'd know about it by now.  They'd probably slip up a lot. It's the same way I'd be pleased to find out that there are aliens or fairies or whatever. The evidence we do have now - a lack of concrete evidence - tends to imply that we have nothing to fear from them. The discovery of evidence that they do exist wouldn't change the fact that they've done no obvious harm to us for all of recorded history.

It'd be sad to see a Bigfoot in a zoo in the same way it's sad to see a gorilla, an octopus, an orca or any other intelligent species in a cage. I'd also be fucking amazing.

So did I.

Me too.   :awesome_for_real:

TIL ninjas are bigfeet. Bigfoots. Bigfootii.

He was fine except for treating the Movies board like Politics. He went mental after I temp banned him for 3 days for fucking up a thread about Battleship and I perma-banned him after that.

I figure my life would not change one bit if there really were wood apes living on this continent.  Not until they became a political pawn, that is.

He was nuts, but his worst sins were about Movies for sure. And being an ass. Both of which I enjoyed from a  :popcorn: slant as he went straight down the rabbithole wearing Nerf's armor.

Well, of course I can say that because I don't see people here from a mod's perspective.  If WUA caused me work because he was being assy, I'm sure I would have hated his slimy guts and banned the hell out of him, too. 

This is a nice summary of my feeling about the supernatural. If any part of it were to become natural and provable, then it would be no more interesting than the other fascinating aspects of the natural world. Because if the proposed mental powers and cryptids and aliens and metaphysical ideas had notable, meaningful effects on our everyday lives then we'd have evidence of them by now. Certainly somebody would have accidentally come up with a working test procedure.

Try a lumber camp or Sky's backyard.

I like to think I live in a world that still has wonders to be discovered. I have been partial to Bigfootery mostly because A) I grew up in the 70s when it was a big deal, B) it seems far more likely to me than ghosts or other paranormal goodies, and C) the highest concentrations of sightings is basically a day trip in any direction from where I live.

There are so many crazy attention seekers, hoaxers, and charlatans around that 99% of anything you hear about it is likely to be false. But there is just enough plausible 'stuff' to make it interesting.

I should send that link to my mother, she was an avid Bigfoot Believer back in the day. It will mess with her head. She hears about and believes are sorts of kookie things. Last month she was warning me about not sticking half an onion back in to the fridge because it absorbed all the germs in the fridge or some such thing. Probably heard it from one of Oprah's doctors.

Also, I also like WUA. And I just wanted to post in a thread that's nine years old.

That was the joke I was expecting.

There we are 100% in agreement.

I also grew up in Bigfoot country in the 1970s and 80s. My father worked for the California water board, and he'd take us kids along for camping trips when he did sawmill inspections. I've got a picture of my whole family standing in mock terror by the Willow Creek bigfoot statue.

Can't be a real cynic until you've already been an idealist. Bring on the wonders.

I wouldn't mind that, either.  Well, as long as they knew their place and stayed in the woods where they belong and brought me shiny bananas. 

WUA was an expert on everything , but particularly tanks IIRC.  Or so he thought.  He was a pretty funny troll, as opposed to say Dusematic.

I don't think anybody would be unhappy to see WUA back. He was a benevolent troll. But that's a fine line to walk, and rules are rules. Anyway, it's fitting that his final act was to shit up a thread so hard, everyone decided that talking about the Battleship movie was preferable to whatever else was going on. That takes finesse.

I don't miss him at all.

WUA was fantastic; you could always tell when he was trolling and yet it was still entertaining.

Yep.  Put me down on the I Loved WUA list as well.

That's fantastic.  He's not a ghost/yeti/bigfoot/Jesus, so let's move the fuck on.

Has that been conclusively proven? We might be on to something, here.

Seriously, you're lumping 'Jesus' in with that shit ?

 :why_so_serious:

Didn't he link a bunch of goatse as his final act or something?  I liked him too but that crap can get innocent people he wasn't mad at fired from work.

I would like to know his thoughts on the star wars movies...

The thing about the knocking in that report is a pretty good example of how folks who are interested in this stuff only really consider the singular explanation that they're fixated on.

Suppose I was knocking on trees in the Pacific Northwest, and I heard clear answering knocks not too far away, responding precisely to my pattern. Suppose I'm also 100% certain there are no other people nearby. Suppose I'm sure that no animal could make that noise, and that the intelligence of the pattern in any event rules out animals or natural events.

So maybe I have something that's "paranormal" in the sense that there are no natural or normal explanations. But then why "wood apes"? Could be a ghost. Could be an alien. Could be a demon inside my mind making me hallucinate. Could be leprechauns. Could be time-travellers. Could be a parallel Earth where my doppleganger is knocking on trees and we're hearing each other because of some kind of dimensional resonance.

I'm not saying this just to mock--it's just that once you are absolutely certain for some reason that you cannot explain something naturally, there's a zillion kinds of paranormal or supernatural or cryptid explanations you could suggest with equal (non) plausibility.

I believe wood knocking occurs in forests around the world.  It happened in south Alabama but I figured it was just woodpeckers.  I also assumed that the thing shaking trees was a bear.  Of course, there are plenty of colorful names for things that people almost see in the forest.

Ok I've never heard of this wood knocking. It's supposed to be bigfoot knocking back?

It is a well known fact that bigfeet are a superstitious lot, and they knock on wood all the time. Duh.

Yeah, there might be (triple) trouble if they didn't.

This needs to be updated for the modern age to include options like "Soylent" and "Gluten."

I think people in this thread would really love listening to Monster Talk (http://www.skeptic.com/podcasts/monstertalk/) if you don't already. That said it's kind of died but if you haven't listened before the archives are pretty big. Lots of Big foot stuff in there including things like interviews with the producers for that Big Foot hunting 'reality' show. If you're a true believer you might get upset but the hosts, I think, try hard not to be dismissive or condescending with their views and genuinely love talking about monsters.

Personally I think examining the social and psychological reasons behind people believing these things as well as trying to chart the folklore development (and of course the actual awesome folkore) is way, way more interesting than say one of those ghost hunter shows where a bunch of nerds poke about while being filmed with NV cameras.

I once lived in a haunted house, quite disconcerting. I think I'm fairly sceptical, but the things I saw there convinced me.

It was a 300 year old gate lodge nestled in a small glade (https://www.google.ie/maps/@53.215795,-6.119535,3a,75y,132.66h,61.14t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sBvN4z53P_xMD8xAzUoIYpw!2e0!6m1!1e1). After we moved in we heard some strange stories about the place. Turned out one of the previous tenants before us went a bit nuts and smashed all the windows in the house. One of our a friends knew him and apparently he was a very normal, placid guy so to speak. We also heard, from a friends mother, that a hundred years before a Doctor performed abortions in the house.

The first thing I noticed after only a couple of days was random objects being in a different place to where I had left them. One night we were in bed and the lampshade started rocking beside our bed as if something had brushed off it. My first thought was it was a draught but there was zero draughts in this house due to the location and surrounding walls and trees. Another thing that was noticeable was the surrounding temperature of the house was deathly cold until you walked a few metres away and you would realise that it was quite a mild day.

So loads of small events, that were easily dismissed or brushed off, occurred - until one night while on my laptop I heard my wife go into the bathroom behind me. I heard the hall door close behind her, a few minutes later she was shouting and screaming. I ran to see what was up and found the hall door locked with my wife on the other side. I noticed it was locked on my side via a big old latch. So I forced the latch open by pressing on the door with my shoulder and started asking my wife what happened. It dawned on me that something external must have done this as the door was heavily warped and the only way to close this latch was to lean against the door and press down the latch like I had opened it. I then tried to pull the door from the other side forcefully to see if I could recreate the incident, but no, it was impossible. Whatever did it had to be from opposite side of the door pressing on it to force the latch down.

After that I was convinced something was in the house with us, the only time I actually saw with my own eyes was a door being slammed shut on it's own or a window open. Needless to say we moved out after a few months.

I grew up in a haunted house, however the hauntings went away after we replaced the kitchen cabinets and remodeled the bathroom.

Sounds scary, hope you weren't too scarred by the original decor.

Ancient building's doors stick and have wildly fluctuating temperatures inside vs out? I guess it was one of those 'had to be there' scenarios....

That's the thing the door was already warped from being old and fluctuating temperatures, this is what made it impossible to secure the latch without force applied to the top of the door to straighten it towards the frame.  It was a big old iron latch like this (http://conantheblacksmith.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/p1020533.jpg?w=710&h=474), I took a while to test every possible scenario there was no way my wife could have made it drop. Her version was that she heard it shut while she was in the toilet and thought I had done it to her as a prank (it was a halldoor).

The real question is why you leap from "I don't know how this happened" to "the house is haunted"?  It's ok to not know how something happened.  That doesn't mean it could only have had supernatural causes.

Entire thread summed up in one sentence.

To sound a bit like a broken record, one of the hosts of that podcast used to be a believer in the paranormal. Grew up in an Evengelical Christian household and lived in a 'haunted' house and lots of other things. He lost his religion basically around adulthood but still believed in the paranormal and had a load of stories about 'inexplicable' things that happened in his home that proved it was ghosts. Now, these weren't the only explanations but the others were all kind of unlikely and there were just so many of these events...

Except step 1 of the thought process should be 'Is this possible within the limits of the universe that we know of?' If not then you are immediately putting the probability of that cause (say for example, the psychic resonance/immortal soul/bad juju of the recently departed) in as a pretty tiny possibility. Without going into any other detail, is it more likely that several unlikely events happened or that there is not properly documented phenomena that has escaped the purview of science for the last century or more going on in this extremely localised environment.

In your particular case, a different possible interpretation (I want to stress, I'm not saying that I'm defintiely right in this interpretation. I don't think your house is haunted but maybe I am wrong and it is. What I want to know is if you think this interpretation is possible) would be:
Bad things happened in the house. Of course they did, it's an old house. How many houses are there where bad things happened and they're not haunted? Probably a shit load more.
Previous tenant had some sort of breakdown. Have you looked at mental health statistics in this country? People always seem normal and mellow until something happens, do you have any idea if this was restricted to his time in the house? It could be a perfectly normal but very unfortunate mental health issue.
Weird noises, temperature variations, etc. Now the thing is if there are temperature variations, some sort of micro-climate thing, that could actually be causing many of these other issues. Unusual or large temperature variations are not kind to building materials, especially wood and other older used ones.
The Bathroom incident. You've got an old wooden door in an old wooden (I'm guessing frame) that you are exposing to sudden heat and moisture from the shower. Is it at all possible this resulted in a change and movement that caused the old lock to fall in place and jam the door somewhat?

So at this point I feel I'm going psycho on your post, apologies. I want to be clear I'm not saying none of the things you experienced didn't happen, this is purely about the explanation for them. One of the things about haunted houses is that seemingly unlikely things (like the temperature, noises and doors locking) happening in large numbers can all stem from a common cause. Like I said, you might be right but I'd urge you to think about whether haunting is really the most likely explanation for a series of unlikely seeming events.

That all said, 'I lived in an old house with an unusual micro-climate that meant things made weird knocking noises and even cause doors to lock by themselves' is a way worse story than 'I lived in a haunted house'.

What next, a rational explanation for magnets?

It wasn't just an overnight decision, I'm pretty sceptical at best. It was a slow process of being fucked with over months.  Sure for most events there is a simple explanation, like lights switching off, windows opening, doors closing. The one event that was improbable was the latch, after that I just felt I had to accept otherwise I would be driven nuts.


Sure when I initially heard the guy who went off kilter, I said the same thing as you it's not really unlikely, but after all the shit happened I had to wonder was he getting fucked with too. On your point he was a writer who moved there to try and write a novel so yeah totally someone who would be ripe for a mental breakdown. I guess like I just said, accepting it was haunted is preferable to driving yourself nuts trying to figure out why weird shit is happening. Meltdown is the alternative.

Have some time to answer properly.


I've never lived in a 300 year old house before or after that one. Not that I think an old house would automatically make it haunted, but seeing as it was the only house I ever experienced anything resembling paranormal, I could see a link there.


I sort of answered this one already, he wanted to go into solitude to write a book. After a few months he was evicted after he smashed all the windows. Whatever bothered him, he took it out on the house. Yes it was restricted to his time in the house, he apparently went on to live a normal life. Bit like my own experience, only time I could say I experienced anything paranormal was while I lived there. We had people sit the house while we were away, they also had some strange events during a single night.


The temperature variation was an odd one, you would stand at the front door and you could see your breath, then walk literally 5 metres away from the house and it would be a summer evening. But then the location of the house in a wooded area could result in this type of micro-climate.


It was a dividing hall door and not the actual door to the bathroom, which was just a spare toilet (sorry, our nomenclature is funny here we call those bathrooms also) without a shower or bath e.g. not subject to huge temperature variance. Basically a heavy old wooden door and it was warped from age. I immediately tested it to see if it was possible for the latch to drop on it's own. My finding was that it was not physically possible without considerable force (a shoulder being pressed) on the top of door frame above the latch so the bar could drop. I also tried to pull the door extremely hard from the opposite side to see if it could drop this way, but as the door was warped it wouldn't fully close without pressure from the opposite side. Being a dividing door we never actually bothered to close it before or after.


Let me recount some scenarios to give you a feeling.

It was a single story cottage with old heavy doors which sat low nestled in a wood surrounded by a wall and trees. The fireplaces were all bricked up and the windows all had external shutters. It wasn't draughty but it was cold and poorly insulated with very poor electrics. It was small in size, about 800 square feet.

One night, after we just moved in, my wife and I were lying in the dark talking. It was a quiet summer night, no wind, no rain, all the doors were shut and all the windows closed. During a comfortable silence we were both lying still when suddenly the lampshade on my side of the bed started rocking loudly. I turned on the lamp, sure enough the shade wasn't connected properly to the lamp. But it was quite a heavy shade and it sat nice and firmly on the neck. So I tested it by tapping the skirting, but it just kind of bobbed a bit, didn't quite rock side to side. After more tinkering I realised whatever made it rock would have needed to be akin to a firm pat with the tips of your fingers or a push.

Another day soon after my wife told me not to place the toilet brush for the small toilet on the window ledge (this is where it was when we moved in) to keep it on the floor I obviously agreed. When she came home a few hours later the brush was sitting in the hallway six feet from the toilet, not where I left it.

Now the only time I saw something with my own eyes was one sunny summer afternoon, I was jamming with some friends in this famous hall (which also doubled as a front room). To the left me of me was our bedroom and in front of me was a singer. The singer stopped and asked me 'was I ok'?, I must have gone a shade of white. The bedroom door that was 75% open just closed itself. It did so in a very slow deliberate manner, it didn't speed up like the wind had closed and it didn't make a loud noise. Just looked like someone shut the door in front of my eyes. Nobody in the room, and no doors or windows open, no wind, never seen this door close itself and this was after living there over six months.

I became absolutely obsessed with buying the house and renovating it. This was an impossibility as it was a preserved building and couldn't be renovated or owned by anyone who wasn't the owner of the fifteen bedroom main house that it was the gatehouse for. Something had it's grip on me and even at the time I felt it was strange as I didn't really enjoy living there. Thinking about it now it gives me shivers down my spine.

I would so dig a ghostly maid.  I hate cleaning the bathroom.

The line was crossed for me when we saw people moving around the house who were really not there.  Otherwise, it was mostly noises.  No objects were relocated that I can recall.

I'm glad I didn't see any apparitions, way too scary. Did you ever look into the history of the house?

My dad thinks it had something to do with a previous owner hiding something in the house.  My dad told me his name once but I can't recall... I suppose it doesn't matter.

The guy who we hired to replace the kitchen cabinets was working on them one night while we were out, and when we returned he was gone and had left all of his crap laying around.  My dad saw the cabinetmaker the next day and he said he had to leave because he was seeing things and hearing noises, so no more working after hours!  Once the cabinets were replaced, though, all was well, so my dad thinks there was something precious hidden in the cabinets at one time.

Image stabilization to the rescue!

(http://i.imgur.com/rFuelVu.gif) 

While I want to be sympathetic to the various paranormal experiences some of you encountered, I think the problem is simply that there is a simple lack of convincing evidence.  On the other hand, the world is positively filled with people who are liars, stupid, crazy, evil, naive and/or gullible.  So for the rest of us who have not had any of these first-hand experiences, it is for us far more likely that you are one of those people.  By orders of magnitude.

That's pretty much why I don't tell people about the apparitions.  The only reason even I think there is something to it is that I was part of communal viewings.  When the person next to you also saw it, that's super creepy.

Depends if the guy next to you is Tobin and he's writing a book.

Maybe it is apples to oranges, but I remember seeing one of those Cris Angel (the magician dude) specials where he took a bunch of C list celebrities and took them on a tour of a haunted hotel/motel, complete with spooky encounters, seances and all the trimmings.  He had every one of those motherfuckers (and much of the TV audience, I am sure) believing that it was 100% paranormal by the end of it, only to reveal at the end himself that it was all bullshit.  Whether he was fooling them or just the audience, we can never be sure (though I suspect he is good enough that he had them going for real), but the point is that it isn't terribly hard to fool people.  And if we take our personal opinions and experience of you as an upstanding F13 poster out of the equation, it is more likely that you are one of those people.

Cris Angel? :why_so_serious:

Better version of the Stabilized Patterson Film:

(http://i.imgur.com/YyEqJsk.gif)

Looks like a guy in a suit to me when you take away all the janikness of the original.

Didn't several people come forward and say they were involved in that video and said it was a hoax?

Hey hey it's a guy walking by in a monkey suit. I can relate.

Yeah, yeah, I know.  I should have said Random Guy.  The point is simply that it isn't actually that hard to make people believe shit, and grouping people for a shared experience probably makes it easier, because people have a tendency to want to fit in so much that they will do so subconsciously.  See all religions.  But for people on the outside looking in, we are biased to believe you are either full of shit, being duped, or simply mistaken...because there are overwhelming examples of this.

I am not saying I believe or dis-believe, just trying to make the argument for what you are up against.  Even if your claims are totally true.

He might be pranking us.  Everyone who confesses to seeing ghosts and Bigfeet might end up mocked or even blackmailed later.  Me, personally, I believe in miracles.

Where you from, you sexy thing?

Several different people have claimed it. It is as easy to claim as it is to claim that it is a real animal. No one can produce a suit, and most special effects artist of the era have stated they didn't have the tech to make something that realistic in 1967. No proof either way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUFlFD4Lvo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrUFlFD4Lvo)

The resemblance is uncanny.   :awesome_for_real:

People were probably thinking how awesome those special effects were back in the day!

The major difference being, you know, that we know suits DO exist already. This kind of false equivocation is silly.  Gee, it could be a guy in a suit, or it could be an undiscovered animal, or it could be aliens deliberately fooling us with high tech projections. No proof either way, they all have a 33% chance of being true!

I think this proves fairly conclusively that Malakili is in cahoots with the aliens.

On the Internet, nobody knows you're Bigfoot.

dont blow my cover.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/sochi/sochi-bear-crying.gif)

Oh hello David Hume On Miracles  :awesome_for_real:

Also I really love reading about monster and cryptids and there are actually cases of ethno-zooology (I think that's the hip new name) have led to new species being discovered but these have more or less been smaller animals or extinct. The example I heard of was the legends of Thunder Lizards or similar leading to discovering a preserved skin of a giant Gecko that proved there was a factual basis for the legends. On the other hand with things like Bigfoot and a lot of other cryptid stories, there's lots and lots of literature out there on sightings, etc. All the cases I've seen where people actually delve into the research looking for primary sources though seem to result in eliminating 99% of that evidence or research because it's all based on the secondary literature about the original stories.

Actually one of the more damning things for me regarding Bigfoot being real is that nearly everyone I've heard from who is disproving Bigfoot would really, really like to discover it. You haven't got something like religion arguments where one side wants to prove things and the other doesn't, pretty much both sides want to find bigfoot but the people against it being real just don't have evidence.

On the ghost/poltergeist thing, yeah, people are really good at finding explanations for things and our brains don't like explaining things by random chance without agency. We also tend to evaluate probabilities along the lines of 'well there's story 1) and story 2) and we can't really offer definitive disproofs of either so they're equally likely' :why_so_serious: Ignoring all the other factors involved

I don't exactly believe in spirits, but seeing a bunch of possessions happening on Indonesian TV Horror-dare contestants was pr. convincing.
On one hand, I'd like to rationalize that they're just following a script, on the other I don't wanna risk crazy-cancer-brain by walking into some kind 'haunted, abandoned places' at night with no cameras or TV crew to bail me out the moment I start barking, growling, clawing on the tiles of the maternity ward full of the spirit of aborted babies in Bali.

Spirits of aborted babies? Thats the second time I read it in this thread. Is that a thing among believers in the supernatural? Even outside of the Christian faith (Bali being predominantly Hindu)? I mean it makes sense in our culture with our strong belief that unborn children somehow develop souls before they develop a brain or cognition, but I think that children in Hinduism are inhabited by reincanated souls of Ancestors. According to that internal logic those spirits should just inhabit the next possible target, shouldn't they? Haunting something really doesn't bring you nearer to Nirvana, in my understanding of it.

I know when I was in Japan, concern about the spirits of aborted babies was a huge thing.  I'm fairly sure its very prevelent across all of Asia.

You learn something new every day. They even have specific prayers for the spirits of unborn children. Guess I didn't understand how reincarnation works, then.

Maybe it's the mother spirit possessing the contestant. I can't tell.  :why_so_serious:

The general idea of a ghost is that it's a spirit that can't move on because of some kind of trauma it suffered in life, right?  In this case "moving on" would be reincarnation in a new life rather than going to an afterlife.  So all those aborted baby souls, under that logic, can't (or won't) move on to their next life, maybe until some sort of justice has been exacted, like the hospital burning down.  I dunno, just spitballing what an internally consistent mythology might look like.

There's also that a lot of the eastern religions have a much more 'spiritual' side to them, and even if they aren't in a specific religion they are common in cultural beliefs.

My point is that with several different people claiming to be in the suit, we know with absolute certainty that at least some of them are lying. You cannot say the same thing about the possibility of a real creature. And if the suit exists, why hasn't anybody handed it over?

I am sure almost no one cares, but Bill Munns (http://www.themunnsreport.com/) (a special effects guy who took an interest in the slapfight over the PGF) has done some pretty extensive testing with regards to this particular footage. If you are curious it is worth a look.

Disregarding how painful this logic is, the premise is false because we do know with absolute certainty that at least some of the people who have claimed to see Bigfoot are lying.   :awesome_for_real:

I saw Bigfoot in my backyard this morning, btw, but he flew away before I could get a picture.

Thought I'd add a bit of weight - in a lot of cases the abortions would, lead to the death of the mother. During the period they were said to being performed (1940-60) it was punishable by death. This would mean it's likely the dead were buried on-site as to not raise alarm. Un-wedded mothers were treated abysmally due to the Catholic stranglehold in Ireland, see Bon Secours and the Tuam mass graves.

8 year ago me:


Old me? You're still right.

People are dumb and believe what they want to believe. Human senses can't be trusted Everything I've read and experienced since has only solidified this fact.

I miss polls.

We should find some way of figuring out if the people around here would like to see polls make a comeback.

Yes what could we do to arrange some sort of voting around polls?

I recommend telepathy.

I only have myself to blame for this bias.

Just for the record, I don't believe in ghosts per the popular description.  The notion of spirits of dead people even existing is rather ludicrous.  What I do think, however, is that there are things which cause us to perceive things which due to our programming can seem to fit into the description of a human... that is doing inhuman things.  Similar to how people saw a face on Mars in a shitty photo.  We have to rely on our senses and our interpretations of the patterns to create a working model of the world around us, and it's entirely possible that we are surrounded by lots of imperceptible things.  Or maybe even inconceivable things, meaning we aren't able to see the pattern due to the limitations in our head-meat.

Indeed, but we no longer have to depend on our senses and interpretations. We can do repeatable tests with strict standards and scientific instruments, and when we do we tend to discover that ghosts are caused by reflections, air currents, day/night temperature changes, and spooky old architectural traditions. It's only when we do depend on our sense and interpretations, letting our head-meat run wild, that explanations turn supernatural.

If they're inconceivable, imperceptible, mysteriously immune to science, and almost completely harmless... why insist they exist? Why should anybody care?

Or maybe it's because ghosts require these conditions in order to become manifest.  Hah!

I remain disappointed that telepathy or the possibility of such was below ufos and ghosts.  It's energy that travels through the air and is interpreted by a sensory organ.   It's more possible than the rest, especially considering we can use our weak brain waves to control thing here and now.

Granted I am also talking of the universal possibility. I do not believe in human telepathy as our meat currently exists.

We already have better superpowers than telepathy: Empathy and language. Why waste time on brain waves when you've got light and sound?

I don't think that's how most people view telepathy.  Energy which is interpreted by a sensory organ is how all of our known senses work, so unless there's another bullet point you want to tack on there I don't see much debate happening.  Nobody is arguing that eyesight is a myth.

Generally it's more about being able to sense specific emotions or thoughts or something, which is where the debate comes in since nobody has been able to reliably detect the existence of anything like that with any kind of instrument.  In the same way that nobody has been able to reliably detect Bigfoot or UFOs or the other items on the list.  So I'm not sure about it being more or less possible than anything else being discussed.

You wouldn't. It makes no sense in our evolutionary sphere. However, it's more a possibility than anything else on that list so it never belonged there. Caveat being that "alien visition/ UFOs" is referring to "anal probing" not "well shit, there's life out there SOMEWHERE"

Yeah it's a bit of goalpost shifting, but still bothers me.  Quirks.

The thing is, paranormal and supernatural have a lot of overlap.  But anything that exists is by definition natural, so it gets mucked up.  If you imagine actual telepathic ability explained by biology, I bet a lot of the people who believe in it would reject it as "not real telepathy" because it wouldn't have any "woo" attached to it.

It's a bit like magic.  So Penn and Teller can saw a lady in half and put her back together, only not really.  So it's not "real magic" - but ironically, it IS real magic in the sense that it is the type of magic that can actually be performed.  When people say "real magic" they mean, precisely, the kind of magic that doesn't actually exist, or "not real magic."

That's why a lot of these discussions just don't interest me too much.  Either ghosts are a thing that exist in the universe or they aren't.  If they did exist, it would be an amazing discovery for humanity.  But so far the evidence is pretty much nil.  Again this falls back into the "everyone has video cameras with them all the time now" thing for me.  If most of this stuff exists, we should be seeing it all over the place.

Ghosts I can at least imagine there would be reasons why they can't be photographed. You can't photograph dark matter (whatever it turns out to be) even if it was right in front of you, for example. There might be properties of minds that allow them to imagine they are perceiving photons-on-retinas in the presence of a ghost (e.g., seeing something) when in fact there's nothing to see, since there are other circumstances where minds can 'see' things that can't be photographed (minds can hallucinate, minds can dream and 'see').

Dark matters turns out to be matter too dark to take photos of.

Yes, you've just done a pretty good job explaining ghost sightings.  But for some reason you include some vague possible "property of a mind" that just happens to exactly replicate hallucination in the presence of ghosts.  :oh_i_see:

Eh, not arguing it for myself at all. Just saying that I could see how a true believer could reconcile "rarely photographed" with the requirements of naturalism in some of these cases. Not with Bigfoot, Loch Ness, etc. or even with UFOs if UFOs are assumed to be alien spacecraft.

They have special light-shielding which lets them be seen by the human eye, but gives cameras trouble.  Kind of like the flicker you get from trying to take video of a monitor or TV screen, but more advanced.

I bet Big Foot and Nessie have fur and scales that do that, too.  Isn't Nature amazing?

I don't know if that's usually a problem.  You can come up with unproven sci-fi justification for just about anything paranormal.  The question is "is it real" not "is it theoretically possible if we assume X Y and Z are true". 

And even if it were, photography is the least of a ghost's worries.  They can pass unaffected through solid matter sometimes, but other times they can physically impact the world.  They can walk through walls but don't sink through the floor.  The idea that they're the spirits of the dead is a whole book of problems by itself.

Perhaps tears in the time fabric can allow objects to periodically manifest in two time locations at once. So a person at different time can close a door and the event can be seen at a future or past location. The likelihood of this is increased if the object has been relatively static for a long period of time, like very old buildings.

Will just leave this here (https://youtu.be/1RR9h2mKMEk)

The artist's rendition of Fertility Rock was :awesome_for_real: