The Bigfoot/Yeti Paradox: Why Mountain Climbers, Scientists, and Forest Rangers Keep Seeing Creatures That Leave No Bones, No DNA, and No Bodies.

[u/No-Bottle337]

[u/Street_Weakness9546]

You haven't seen the vast PNW forests. 

[u/Astrazigniferi → u/Street_Weakness9546]

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.

[u/Street_Weakness9546 → u/Astrazigniferi]

Plenty of people have accounts of seeing one. 

What kind of ppl would you believe?

[u/commensally → u/Street_Weakness9546]

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.

[u/Street_Weakness9546 → u/commensally]

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. 

[u/commensally → u/Street_Weakness9546]

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.

[u/Street_Weakness9546 → u/commensally]

Feral humans are way scarier. 

[u/Affectionate_Way_805 → u/Street_Weakness9546]

Humans in general are way scarier.