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.
My thoughts as I'm reading through this:
P6
"Recognizing that anecdotes and anecdotally derived evidence cannot suffice to convince members of the scientific community and governmental entities that the North American wood ape (“wood ape”) exists in the absence of a type specimen, nevertheless, the authors anticipate that the NAWAC’s efforts are sufficient to provoke interest, and, hopefully, collaboration with open-minded professionals, despite not yet producing conclusive evidence necessary to generate the proper description of a relict or novel species."
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.
“Amazing. Six wood knocks in thirty-five seconds from three locations. How is this possible? The apes must harbor the ability to plan for future events by strategically carrying tools (rock or stick) for communication. It’s as if they have triangulated the area immediately around the [base camp cabin].”
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.
"These incidents were the closest that any NAWAC team members actually came to seeing wood knocks produced":
"Lawrence saw the flat reddish-brown back of the large animal. At first, Lawrence thought the animal to be a cinnamon-colored black bear, but then thought the back was too flat. A bear would normally have a humped back."
Five minutes later, the guy hears a knocking sound.
"As soon as Lawrence heard the wood knock, he knew instantly that the animal he had seen was a wood ape on all fours."
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.
"Mizejewski turned to look and observed a leaf falling from the upper canopy as if broken by a
thrown object."
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:
"Brown ran around to the northwest corner of the cabin to be closer to the tree and hoping to get a better view with his camera recording. Burrows yelled, “There is something in the tree!”
Almost before Burrows could finish, Brown said loudly, “There’s something up in the tree…”
The tree partially fell and Brown said loudly, “It just jumped out of the tree!”"
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.
"Over the next week, much of it spent alone on-site, Alton Higgins observed and documented more tree falls than any other NAWAC team member to date"
Nothing says "scientific study" like unconfirmed secondhand data from a biased source.
"12:30 – Higgins briefly returned to camp to get a seat cushion. At that time a tree fell
in the middle woods."
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:
"23:46 – The team heard another rock being thrown from the mountain over the cabin landing west of the cabin."
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.
"23:50 – The team detected another rock from the same place."
How? How are they "detecting" this? Do they have some kind of radar set up? Throwing rocks does not make a lot of noise!
"00:12 – Colyer produced “pant-hoot” vocalizations.” There was no immediate response.
00:15 – Colyer produced a “whoop” vocalization."
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
"With that said, over a four-year period NAWAC researchers heard a variety of vocalizations that were thought to have originated from the target species. Most of those sounds were not recorded"
Siiiiiiiigh.
"The first vocalization to be described and provided is the 'huff,'"
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.
"02:55 – Colyer, bunking in the kitchen on a cot below two open windows with no screens, awoke to clearly hear trotting footfalls and a very ape-like “huu huu” just before the cabin roof was slammed with a rock that impacted very loudly, bounced
around loudly, and tumbled off onto the ground. The entire team had heard it. Colyer lay there and mentally noted it all. He felt annoyance and anger."
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.
"Another vocalization documented by the NAWAC that was very kindred to vocalizations of the known great apes was a clear, loud, and intimidating “pant-hoot” in August 2011."
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.
"20:05 – Higgins heard a limb snap from behind the cabin; he believed the limb had been one inch thick or so."
"20:08 – Higgins heard yet another knock from the west cabin area. Higgins believed there were possibly two apes in the vicinity."
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.
"22:00 – Higgins got his wish: Travis Lawrence arrived at the cabin."
Awwww yeeeeeah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw6JgbfAXsc"14:40 – The men arrived at the crossing and Colyer parked his truck. At Lawrence’s suggestion, Colyer left his firearms in the truck. Colyer told Lawrence that he did not feel comfortable doing so, to which Lawrence replied, "Nobody's ever had encounters while bathing in the creek." After Colyer gave Lawrence a look of insecurity, Lawrence grabbed his pump shotgun and his sidearm. The men then proceeded to walk down the creek to the area where they were to bathe. As the men began to prepare to enter the cold creek waters, they were alarmed when they heard running footfalls and then thrashing about in the dense vegetation across the creek from them. Colyer looked at Lawrence and retorted, 'You were saying, Travis?'"
The FUCK am I reading.
P. 91
Footprints
Oh boyherewego.
"07:30 – The team awoke and quickly began the search. They never thought to look
east along the creek. If they had, they would have found blood on the rocks."
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.
"While other animals can use tools (i.e., chimps, otters, etc.), [snip...] In North America,the only described candidate capable of doing this is Homo sapiens. Since it is highly unlikely that a human would use a rock to crush open nuts instead of collecting them, returning to camp, and opening them using standard metal tools, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the stations are associated with wood apes."
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.
"The animal was apparently squatted down watching the men as they sat near the fire pit in camp chairs."
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.
"The animals had never been in a position where the men could visually identify them.
Besides using the cover of darkness, they always seemed to remain in a position where line-of-sight was significantly obscured by the incredibly dense vegetation. Lawrence remarked in his log that 'They were perfectly elusive.'"
In other words, we got nothing but we're sure it's apes.
"The apes are here; I’ve no doubts, and [they] may even be near as I write."
They may even OH NO LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU IT'S AN APE no wait it's just your sister.
"I heard the impact of great weight on the ground, and more than that, I could feel the impact as I lay in my cot. It must have been close. A mystery: Why aren’t the apes always stealthy?"
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.
"09:38 – Higgins was awakened by a “loud nut fall” on the roof over his head. He noted the temperature was 68° F."
There's that mystery cleared up.
“I’m extremely frustrated at missing what may have been my best chance to collect a specimen."
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.
"there is a sheet of thin trash bag plastic hanging in front of the inner door that is free to move in the breeze. (It is a breezy day.) I’m guessing this may have aroused its curiosity. Either that or it wanted a closer look at the Miss August pinup displayed on the front window."
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.
"Colyer instinctively targeted the ape with his shotgun from ninety feet away after observing it for approximately two to three seconds. He fired his shotgun until the magazine was empty (nine rounds: two 000 buckshot rounds and seven rifled slugs). Colyer saw no movement after that."
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)
"18:10 – Some 80-90 yards away, Helmer saw a black, upright figure step out and look toward him for a few seconds before it disappeared back into the foliage. Within just a few seconds, the figure re-emerged, again curiously looking toward Helmer, perhaps directly at him."
That's good!
"Helmer had been wearing a GoPro video camera at the time; however, the 8GB disk had filled prior to Helmer’s visual and the visual encounter was not recorded on video."
That's bad!
"B. Strain saw two figures, partially obscured by foliage, moving rapidly up the side of the mountain, like they were “on a cable.”"
"At 40 to 50 feet, McClurkan could make out parts of the animal as it rapidly headed toward him: the visibility was broken by foliage"
"D. Dollens spotted movement. He believed he saw the shoulder of an ape as it moved through the thick brush."
"Colyer saw two large animals through the holes in the vegetation move rapidly to the west before turning south to cross the creek."
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.
"McClurkan was stunned when he unexpectedly saw, only 15 yards or so away from him near the rock fence, a huge gray wood ape standing there facing him and staring, its eyes reflecting the flashlight in a sort of green hue. Almost immediately after McClurkan illuminated the animal, it calmly turned around and walked off into the darkness out of the illumination range of his flashlight. McClurkan had seen the upper two-thirds of the animal, the head and face, before it turned; however, his best view was of the backside of the wood ape as it strolled off into the darkness out of visual range. McClurkan saw the arms, the back, the buttocks, the upper legs, the back of its conical head, and where the head fused into the upper back. He estimated its height to be in excess of eight feet and its color was gray. The visual had lasted five or six seconds."
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.
"Viewingthrough the ATN thermal scope, Lawrence observed a huge white-hot signature of a creature as it stood up beyond Higgins’s tent in the southwest woods, revealing its body from the armpits to the top of its conical head.[snip...] Lawrence calmly put the reticle of the scope on where he believed the animal’s nose was located and sent the round (Figure 52)."
But, shockingly, no body was found (again).
"Higgins found a hanging broken tree limb, slightly smaller in diameter than a pencil, that appeared to be in the flight path of Lawrence’s bullet. McClurkan examined the limb, returning it to its original position, and revealed an obvious “cup” notched out on top of the limb where the bullet struck (Figure 53). McClurkan then found a second limb, higher than the first that had been similarly struck. It seemed clear that the bullet had been deflected upwards and away from the face of the wood ape. The results would have been very different had the bullet traveled one-quarter of an inch lower."
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
"After the five-year camera-trap project, Operation Forest Vigil, yielded no photographs orvideos of the target species, the NAWAC was not exactly eager to continue its reliance oninfrared cameras... Using the cameras as tools to augment a more active assertive approach, the teams quickly learned that cameras did not exactly perform as hoped or expected."
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
"the NAWAC shares commonality with the late anthropologist Grover Krantz:
Science requires solid evidence for the existence of a new species—footprints and sightings by local people are never enough. A “type specimen” must be obtained"
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
"At present, there simply are no concrete answers for why the NAWAC failed to get photos or
video of the target species"
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.
Poll
Author
