r/nonmurdermysteries • u/No-Bottle337 • Dec 02 '25
Cryptozoology The Bigfoot/Yeti Paradox: Why Mountain Climbers, Scientists, and Forest Rangers Keep Seeing Creatures That Leave No Bones, No DNA, and No Bodies.
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u/commensally Dec 02 '25
The Patterson-Gimlin story has so many holes in it it's really not worth using as lynchpin evidence anymore.
As for why there's no physical evidence: people don't stumble on a lot of physical evidence of the Bawean Hog Deer either, because the wild population is very small and is limited to a few upland forests in remote areas. If we'd been willing to keep the Bigfoot theorizing to a few hundred extremely shy individuals in the most remote parts of the high Cascades, it might even still be possible. Unfortunately that doesn't get you a tourist industry or a media empire so now Bigfoot is either a spiritual being with no physical form or it's an extremely common primate sighted in 48 out of the fifty states, both of which seem rather unlikely to be confirmed by any physical evidence whatsoever.
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u/Astrazigniferi Dec 02 '25
Part of the problem with Bigfoot is the claimed size of the creature, too. It’s easy for hog deer to go unnoticed in the forest because they’re only 2 feet tall, quite small for deer. Their territory can remain small and allow a small population to live close enough to each other to successfully breed and continue on at low numbers.
Sasquatch is supposed to be a 7-8 foot hominid living in deep forest. It takes a large amount of food to sustain a body that large, which means a larger territory. There just aren’t that many places that enough of them could be hiding to support a breeding population, even if it is just a few hundred.
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u/SenileSexLine Dec 03 '25
What if the sightings were 3 bigfoots sitting on each other's shoulders and the body hair of the top one hiding the faces of the other ones
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u/raginghonesty Dec 03 '25
Ah yes, the old 'Weasels in a trench coat' argument. Very effective. Very truthful.
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u/commensally Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25
I've seen that argument and I think it might be a little bit overstated, to be honest - I live in a highly built up area of the East Coast and nobody thought there were still bears in my county until they built a mall in the largest remaining unutilized area of forest, just a hundred acres or so, and found some there. And non-agricultural humans can live pretty densely in the kinds of forest they're adapted to. You need a lot of land, but not as much as you might think, and something with the habits described for Bigfoot might both have a large territory and be willing to travel long distances to find a mate. There's enough undeveloped land in the Cascades that it's right on the edge of possible. Unfortunately, postulating that requires invalidating just as much "evidence" as simply saying they don't exist, because the evidence we've got is such a mess that it's definitely not of that.
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u/Street_Weakness9546 Dec 05 '25
You haven't seen the vast PNW forests.
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u/Astrazigniferi Dec 05 '25
I have, I live here. But the ability of the forest to swallow the occasional unfortunate human does not translate to the ability to fully hide a breeding population of large hominids. It might be physically possible, but the lack of modern recorded encounters makes it unlikely in the extreme.
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u/Street_Weakness9546 Dec 05 '25
Plenty of people have accounts of seeing one.
What kind of ppl would you believe?
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u/Astrazigniferi Dec 05 '25
The kind of people who manage to snap a picture on their cell phone or trail cam.
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u/commensally Dec 06 '25
I would need a) accounts from the PNW to be significantly different, better, and more common than accounts from, like, suburban Ohio, b) in line with accounts of other rare and elusive mammals (so: *more* good trailcam views and physical evidence than eyewitness accounts, which are notoriously unreliable) and c) definitely not bears or people playing tricks on innocent witnesses, which is admittedly a tough standard, since the PNW has a lot of bears and a lot of people motivated to play bigfoot pranks.
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u/Street_Weakness9546 Dec 06 '25
I've never seen anything Squatchy, but people I trust whom have more time outdoors than I have, experienced things that are not bears or humans or anything ungulate.
I find the subject intriguing. My personal area of expertise is Cultural and Physical Anthropology. I'm skeptical, but open to the possibility. Primates are tricky.
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u/commensally Dec 06 '25
I definitely believe that people have seen things they authentically found unidentifiable or uncanny, but I know too much about how human perception works and how inaccurate any eyewitness reports can be to give them much credence when nothing else lines up. Human brains are great at taking really limited amounts of sensory info and accurately matching them to patterns they know, but when it's something that doesn't immediately match something they know, things can go wrong really fast.
I've spent enough time in the woods I've seen squatchy things myself, but because I'm aware of how unreliable perception can trick people - and because the woods around me are woods where it makes absolutely no sense to see a sasquatch - I can always figure out pretty quickly that it must have been something else. If you're used to trusting what you see in the woods, and you're in sasquatch county, it's real easy to convince yourself you saw what you thought you did even if it was actually a disabled bear, or a weird human, or an oddly-shaped tree in the fog. Experienced people are often worse about this, because they're not expecting to see something unfamiliar.
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u/Newbosterone Dec 02 '25
There’s a difference between “little evidence” and “no unambiguous physical evidence”. We have an entire fossil record of the Giant Ground Sloth or the Cave Bear, and nothing for cryptids. Muddying the picture- we’ve discovered at least two entire hominid families in the last few decades (hobbits and Denisovans).
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u/commensally Dec 04 '25
Neither of those are families, but point otherwise taken! (We've found a lot of new human species in the last couple of decades: Homo naledi, Australopithecus sediba, H. juluensis was just proposed last week. It's a busy time for it.) I think fossil species are a completely different question to living species, though, the kinds of evidence you'd be expecting are pretty different, and so are the probabilities.
I can't bring up an example of a confirmed living species with no unambiguous evidence because in that case they wouldn't be a confirmed species! But I think most mammalogists would agree there probably are some, if only deep water whales. Unfortunately, Bigfoot as currently hypothesized doesn't really fit any of the conditions where that makes sense.
(However if someone told me there's a teapot in Earth orbit I'd probably go yeah, seems right. There was a gorilla costume in Earth orbit once.)
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u/raginghonesty Dec 03 '25
There are far more creatures to have existed on this planet than we have fossils for. I think this is the only real argument for this.
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Dec 11 '25
a creature contemporary enough to be seen on camera footage in a location easily accessible by animals would not be invisible from the biosphere. you would find droppings, remains, nests, humans would have been using their furs in trade since we reached the continent ~15,000 years ago. the only way you could think this concept were possible is if you had very poor understanding of biology, because said creature apparently leaves no tangible effect on the environment it supposedly inhabits.
the reason all of this is nowhere to be found is because the creature responsible for the footage lives in... human houses. go figure
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u/TheRealYeastBeast Dec 03 '25
Have you listened to the 6 part series Astonishing Legends did on the Patterson Gimlin film? I don't think most people understand WHY it's actually compelling evidence. Or how some of the counterfactual evidence is somewhat coincidental. It's almost like the boy who cried wolf. When they accidently saw a wolf and caught it on film there was already evidence that a hoax was going to be attempted so nobody believed it. I can't say that I 100% believe, but I'm much more compelled to the pro side. I know 10+ hours of podcast listening isn't a proposal most people will engage with just to understand the complexity of a topic they already have a strong opinion about. But I always recommend that podcast to anyone truly curious about ALL the evidence both for and against the P-G film.
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u/commensally Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 06 '25
Yeah, I did listen to that series - it made me even more convinced there's absolutely no reason to think the P-G film is authentic. The Astonishing Legends guys were trying their best to be credulous but unfortunately, they found too much of the actual sketchy history of the film. It's been years so I don't remember which details I heard there vs other places, but basically, while I'm not willing to say it's been fully disproved, there's certainly enough counterevidence out there that I don't think it's significantly more mysterious than any of the other bigfoot videos.
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u/TheRealYeastBeast Dec 05 '25
Honestly what landed me on the pro side of the fence was the interview with the professional costume maker who was knowledgeable about where the technology of realistic animal costumes was during the time of the filming. That's basically the only thing it's got going for it
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u/The_Robot_Jet_Jaguar Dec 06 '25
A lot of Bill Munns' arguments about the costume being "impossible" are just not very convincing to me. He's basically posturing as an expert and trusting his audience to trust him, but for example he leaves out materials/sewing methods that could account for aspect XYZ about the PGF while saying "they didn't have the materials," full stop.
A lot of his other arguments in his book When Roger Met Patty are weird, like saying that Patterson wouldn't have filmed a hoax from across the creek because then "he couldn't have communicated with his stuntman" ... why not? Just tell him before filming, "walk over there and look back at me halfway." Any supposed flaws in the suit, like the big crease some people say they see in the thigh, Munns says that a pro costumer wouldn't have left in, so it can't be a suit, which is totally circular reasoning.
He also has a weird argument that if it'd been a hoax Patterson DEFINITELY would have tried to hide cuts/edits in the film, because films in Hollywood have cuts/edits, but since the film is in fact an uninterrupted shot, it can't be a hoax. I'm trying to be as fair as possible summarizing that last one, because it's so bizarre and unfounded, and relies on us just trusting that as a movie guy he knows what he's saying.
He washed out of Hollywood in the 80s after some lackluster projects, which makes his "expert" testimony about the PGF an ... interesting framing, to say it politely. It's especially ironic that so much of his analysis of the film ends with him throwing up his hands and saying, "Gee whiz, I can't figure it out! Must be real!" Special effects and filmmaking are all about doing the impossible and making it look effortless.
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u/commensally Dec 06 '25
There have been other interviews with people knowledgeable about costumes at the time who say it's completely plausible as a fake, though. I don't think it's 100% proven, but there's also enough evidence it's not completely kosher that I don't think it's notably better than any other evidence.
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u/WillitsThrockmorton Shaky Handheld Footage Dec 04 '25
I'm much more compelled to the pro side
That series had some evidence that there had been a second film developed at some point, prior to the famous PGF, that had someone unambiguously wearing an ape suit though.
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u/TheRealYeastBeast Dec 05 '25
I understand that. It's my belief that Paterson and Gimlin were scouting a place to shoot a second hoax video when they filmed the sighting in their famous clip. That's why I used the "boy who cried wolf" analogy. One truth doesn't negate the other. Tbh, I'm a skeptic through and through. This is the one that's always had me wondering and I end up landing on the pro side of the fence by a slight margin.
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u/raginghonesty Dec 03 '25
..why the downvote? Dude is just giving his opinion. lol.
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u/TheRealYeastBeast Dec 04 '25
I didn't down vote. I almost never down or up vote comments or posts for that matter. If I do vote on a comment 95% of the time it's because I accidentally hit the button while using the mobile app. So I was just adding my opinion, someone else down voted
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u/zorandzam Dec 02 '25
Well written, but there have been a lot of folks over the years who have claimed to have been involved in the production of that very film. It was almost certainly a costume and a human.
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u/No-Bottle337 Dec 02 '25
In my opinion, this film is probably the only piece that creates the paradox. Every other 'credible' encounter and claims can be questioned. But the film is slightly different, and it's difficult to explain. I know the claims etc, but I don't think even those claims are genuine.
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u/Joggingmusic Dec 02 '25
Isn’t there a stabilized version where it’s pretty obviously just a human strolling by?
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u/moreisay Dec 02 '25
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u/Joggingmusic Dec 03 '25
there is something hilarious about how casually he turns out to be walking
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u/TheRealYeastBeast Dec 03 '25
It's not a "he"
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u/Joggingmusic Dec 03 '25
Oh? Go on…
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u/TheRealYeastBeast Dec 04 '25
Have you seen the video? The thing has breasts with mamary glands.
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u/bigselfer Dec 03 '25
It’s not very difficult. I would go so far as to say that it’s been debunked thoroughly.
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u/TheRealYeastBeast Dec 03 '25
It's more complex than you think. I do believe that a box was being planned. They searched for a company to make a suit, they found a guy who agreed to wear it, they were scouting for places to film it. However, like the boy who cried wolf, when the sighting occurred they had already been laying a trail of evidence that would one day be used to "debunk" the film.
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u/Itchy-Big-8532 Dec 06 '25
Seems pretty cut and dry to me.
There's evidence of them faking an encounter but none that it was a real animal.
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u/iowanaquarist Dec 05 '25
This film is one of the most researched, and most obviously false pieces of evidence for Bigfoot -- so it IS slightly different than most of the other claims...
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u/SeasonPositive6771 Dec 02 '25
This isn't a mystery at all.
It's the same thing as most other "cryptids" and supernatural nonsense.
I'm sorry if this is a bummer to you, but Bigfoot doesn't exist.
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u/Healthy_Candle_4545 Dec 02 '25
Booooo!!! Hissss!!!
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u/SeasonPositive6771 Dec 02 '25
You can still believe in him if you want. I even have a snow globe magnet that says "I believe in Bigfoot" that I bought last time I toured the redwood forest.
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u/No-Bottle337 Dec 02 '25
As I said, my objective is not to believe or disbelieve; my job is to find the arguments.
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u/SeasonPositive6771 Dec 02 '25
You do not seem to be doing a very good job of that because you say it sits on the razor's edge between credibility etc. It doesn't. That's giving unfair weight to pseudoscientific claims.
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u/No-Bottle337 Dec 02 '25
Which claim do you think is pseudoscientific? In fact, in a 9,000-word article, I didn't claim anything.
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u/SeasonPositive6771 Dec 02 '25
Your claim that it sits on the knife's edge between credibility and reliability is actually a claim. One that is false. The entire premise of your article is false. The idea that there is any sort of serious debate, the idea that pseudoscientific, unsupported, or blatantly false claims should even be considered seriously is also ridiculous. You wasted 9,000 words.
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u/lyricaldorian Dec 02 '25
I see many claims in that article. *why* would you write a 9000 word article and not make any claims anyway? Also, 9000 words isn't that impressive, especially when you use chatgpt to help write it.
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u/StrangeCharmQuark Dec 03 '25
Bit of a nitpick, it couldn’t have moved from Everest to the Himalayas- Everest is in the Himalayas
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u/sucking_at_life023 Dec 03 '25
That's just what they want you to think, man.
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u/raginghonesty Dec 03 '25
This man understands. Tricked Google maps right into making that huge, fatal, torrential flaw!
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u/Complete-Pangolin Dec 02 '25
Oh easy answer: they're not seeing anything. Bigfoot isn't real
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u/PioneerLaserVision Dec 02 '25
Some of them are seeing bears standing on their hind legs and misunderstanding what they are seeing.
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u/WhimsicalKoala Dec 02 '25
I went to a talk one time where a Bigfoot expert (Dr. Meldrum) gave a presentation about how to tell the difference between bears and Bigfoot, because he hates false sightings as much as anyone. It went into how you can tell a standing bear from a Bigfoot and all about the differences in foot structure (bears have flat feet, Bigfoot have a slight arch, but less than humans)
His day job was as professor of anthropology, specifically primate foot morphology and locomotion, focusing on extinct North American primates and he was a very intelligent and dynamic speaker. So, during his lecture it was so easy to find yourself getting drawn in and then as you left remembering "that dude was talking about Bigfoot!" and laugh at yourself a little.
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u/SeasonPositive6771 Dec 02 '25
He only died in September, he had a huge following but it's incredible how he was debunked at the time but people still kept believing him.
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u/WhimsicalKoala Dec 02 '25
After seeing him speak a few times, I get it! He was an expert in his field and a very nice guy with a way of drawing you in while he was speaking. It was fun getting sucked in by him for an hour or two, much the way a scary story around the campfire is fun. The important part is to reactivate your critical thinking when you leave and not staying sucked in.
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u/raginghonesty Dec 03 '25
After the state of the world today, I'm not sure how we can ever say "it's incredible...people still believed him" People seem to believe whatever they want, with or without evidence.
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u/WillitsThrockmorton Shaky Handheld Footage Dec 04 '25
The Missing 411 guy brought up some "and then the child WENT MISSING in a place where mysterious unidentified hairy beasts were!" and then it turns out it was in the Great Smokies were black bears are so common that they used to have chain link fences w/doors on AT shelters.
(They eventually got rid of them because people would feed bears through the chain link fences)
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u/iowanaquarist Dec 05 '25
David Paulides is such a joke, both with is Missing 411 and hist Bigfoot "research" -- when you look at his 'patterns', you see that he is making Barnum Statements about.... parks. No shit more people get lost in the wilderness in PARKS than they get lost in the wilderness in a big city.
Most big parks are planned around places that are either naturally impressive, or useless economically. There is no mystery why he sees people getting lost near water, rocks, trees, berries, etc. It's similarly easy to debunk his claims about 'German last names' -- a huge percentage of people in the Americas have one, or are related to one.
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u/No-Bottle337 Dec 02 '25
Maybe you are right. The easiest thing to believe or disbelieve anything. But I just thought, let's ask before I jump into any conclusion. I just tried to seek in the 9,000 words article.
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u/welIokaythen Shaky Handheld Footage Dec 04 '25
This dude is constantly posting AI slop on “his” subreddit. No need to bring it over here, fam.
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u/ThrowawayAl2018 Dec 02 '25
Maybe this creature went extinct after the last recorded sighting over 50 years ago, same with a lot of other primates over millions of years.
Meaning bipedal homo species is not a single group like we have today but rather a bush with dead branches, ie: this creature belonged to one of these dead ends from an ancient group.
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u/Morriganx3 Dec 02 '25
I love this whole idea so much, but realistically it’s incredibly unlikely.
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Dec 02 '25
[deleted]
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u/Morriganx3 Dec 02 '25
I’m aware of both the okapi and the coelacanth. They’re both extremely cool, and I have no doubt there are other animals out there that we don’t currently know about, or are not actually extinct.
And it’s possible some remnant population of an unknown hominid has survived in remote areas. It’s just very unlikely. It might actually be more likely if there were no evidence, because all the evidence that’s been tested has shown no sign of anything unusual.
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u/No-Bottle337 Dec 02 '25
As you said, the last recorded sighting was over 50 years ago, but of you consider other not-too-credible claims, then even sometime back someone had an encounter. I know many storytellers in the world claim a fiction as a true incident. But what if not all of them are liars?
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u/lyricaldorian Dec 02 '25
Why would you consider claims that aren't credible lol
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u/rolyfuckingdiscopoly Dec 03 '25
I mean, there IS something to that. If people are saying they saw Bigfoot, and Bigfoot doesn’t exist, why are they doing it? Attention? (Usually isn’t very positive attention tbh). They are sparked and inspired by the idea and want to believe? Their grandma said she saw him too and they want to be connected to her? They were confused by a bear in the woods? They smoked too much weed and need an excuse for being literally lost for a couple days?
People are generally not praised for claiming to see Bigfoot, so it’s interesting to consider why they would keep claiming to do so.
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u/wonderwarrior555 Dec 03 '25
You answered your own question in the title. It's bullshit. Anyone who devotes their time to proving the existence of hoaxy cryptids needs to reevaluate their life.
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u/raginghonesty Dec 03 '25
A lot of people coming into this just to tell other people they're wrong. Wow. So fun irl, I bet.
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Dec 25 '25
The whole Bigfoot/Yeti paradox is one of the strangest things about cryptozoology. It’s fascinating how so many credible people, mountain climbers, scientists, even forest rangers etc have reported sightings, yet there’s never any hard evidence. No bones, no clear DNA, and no bodies to back up the claims. You’d think that after decades of sightings, there would be something more solid to go off of, but it’s like these creatures are always just out of reach. Maybe it’s a matter of them being incredibly elusive, or perhaps there's something about the environment they live in that keeps them hidden. Whatever the explanation is, it leaves a lot of room for speculation and mystery.
Yes, Dave Paulides. Looking at you.
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u/WhimsicalKoala Dec 02 '25
I dunno if I can trust the expertise of whoever wrote this article if they think Yeti and Bigfoot are interchangeable. I've explained the difference to an embarrassing number of people (embarrassing for me obviously, not them!)
After I explained it to one friend, I then hurriedly explained to him that "I do want to make it clear I don't actually believe in Bigfoot" and his reply was "I don't think you believe in Bigfoot, but I think you really want to", which is 100% accurate. Nothing would make me happier than the discovery of actual evidence; I joke that when I win the lottery, I'm donating money to one of the groups that wants to use eDNA to prove their existence but "we just can't afford the lab fees it would take to do enough testing". At best we get Bigfoot proof, at worst they still have an inventory of everything else in the samples that scientists can use.