Posted on 12/23/2021 1:13:45 AM PST by nickcarraway
You’ve probably seen the famous footage of Bigfoot — that grainy film from 1967 showing an apelike creature ambling through the California woods, casting a brief, leisurely glance at the camera before disappearing off screen.
What an Illinois man saw last month was rather different.
The creature he says he spotted outside the small town of Chandlerville, northwest of Springfield, was fast, athletic and massive, covering a two-lane road in two quick strides. It had incredibly long limbs and was covered in shiny black hair, the man said, and was gone almost before he could register what was happening.
“It jumped into the darkness and I was kind of freaked out about it,” said the man, a 59-year-old engineer who lives near Peoria. “I said to myself out loud, ‘(Expletive) Bigfoot!’”
In a year when UFOs have gained newfound respect, becoming the subject of a Pentagon investigative panel, the alleged Bigfoot sighting is a reminder that other paranormal phenomena are still out there, entrancing true believers and amusing skeptics.
Sasquatches are having a particularly good run. In the past 12 months they’ve been the subject of a conference in Florida, where they’re known as skunk apes, and have been featured in several documentaries and TV programs, including one that investigates whether a Bigfoot killed a trio of California pot farmers.
Nebraska man using big bucks to go after bigfootPlay Video spaceplay / pause qunload | stop ffullscreenshift + ←→slower / faster ↑↓volume mmute ←→seek . seek to previous12… 6 seek to 10%, 20% … 60% A Nebraska man armed with a million dollar budget is looking to prove the existence of the Sasquatch,
In Oklahoma, state Rep. Justin Humphrey, whose district hosts an annual Bigfoot festival, sought to pass a law that would establish a Sasquatch hunting season and announced a $3 million reward for the capture of a live one, though he all but admitted it was a stunt to attract tourists.
“We are wanting the whole world to come to Southeastern Oklahoma … and get involved in our bounty,” he said on the floor of the statehouse.
Illinois, which according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has had more than 300 reported sightings, has also been known to play the publicity game. Doug and Carrie DeVore, owners of the Shawnee Forest Cabins, mounted a 7-foot-tall concrete statue known as Sassy on their property several years ago, and it has since become a roadside attraction.
Carrie DeVore said she didn’t realize until later that the nearby Shawnee National Forest is a hotbed of sightings: People have phoned her to talk about their own supposed encounters with the creature.
“I am sure there are people who have seen something,” she said. “(I hear) the earnestness in their voices when they call me up, but I was a geologist before (having) kids and getting into the cabin rental business so the other part of me is like, ‘We’d find some evidence, wouldn’t we?’ But I guess it remains to be seen.”
The downstate engineer who says he spotted the mysterious figure last month asked not to be named after the initial report of his sighting, released without his knowledge, brought him a crush of unsought attention (“I don’t want to be known as Mr. Bigfoot,” he said).
He said he was driving home on Illinois Route 78 after visiting his mother when, just across the Sangamon River, he saw the creature bound across the road about 40 yards from his vehicle. It turned toward him just before it vanished, though he couldn’t make out its eyes or face.
The man said he is not a Bigfoot enthusiast and was sober as a judge when he made his sighting. He acknowledged, though, that when friends went back to look for tracks, they found nothing.
Even so, Matthew Moneymaker of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization graded the man’s sighting as Class A, or very reliable: The relative closeness of the encounter and lack of red flags about the man’s credibility helped to convince him, he said.
Moneymaker, who has produced or hosted several Bigfoot-related TV shows, said he started his organization in the mid-1990s after he spotted a “squatch” during an early morning outing in a patch of woods near Akron, Ohio.
Since then the group has received hundreds of sighting reports each year, he said, with many coming from the Pacific Northwest. His theory is that the creature is a primate genus known as Gigantopithecus that crossed into North America from Asia during the Ice Age and has managed to elude capture.
But Paul Garber, a University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign anthropologist who studies primates, said that is not supported by the fossil record. Gigantopithecus went extinct around 500,000 years ago, he said, and there’s no evidence it ever made it here.
He said a large primate would leave telltale signs of its presence, from droppings to bones to the remnants of “nests” in which apes sleep. Moneymaker said the lack of definitive proof could be due to Sasquatches living in extremely remote areas, but Garber said that’s also true of other big apes whose existence has been well documented.
Garber said tales of Bigfoot-like creatures exist all over the world, which he attributes to the human impulse to rationalize odd sights that defy ready explanation.
“I believe this guy saw something,” he said. “I just think the visual evidence alone is what we have. The other kind of physical evidence that would be consistent with ape behavior is what we tend not to have.”
Pressed about what he saw, the man said he thought it might have been a bear running at full tilt, but its bipedal gait and the lack of bear tracks convinced him otherwise. It resembled the classic image of Bigfoot, he said, and others who live in the area have since told him they’ve seen similar creatures.
As for the possibility of a prankster, the man said he hoped that isn’t true.
“If someone thinks of coming down to central Illinois to put a hoax on people or something, I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said. “There’s just way too many hunters. There’s too many people with guns. It would be too dangerous.”
Go pro dash cam?
Oh.... nevermind.
“There’s just way too many hunters. There’s too many people with guns. It would be too dangerous.”
Ok... stop.
Who said it would be okay to bag one.
Hypothesis, what if...
A sasquatch is shot? Science descends upon the locality, the remains are carted off, all the blood panals and other tests are conducted and sasquatch is found to be physiologicaly humanoid down to the blood.
Would it then be considered murder?
An old sci-fi story I read in a drug store pulp fiction monthly.
What would an “officially” verified endangered species hominid in the wild do to the local logging industry?
Think spotted owl...
Game cams thousands of them in the woods.
Bump
My niece lives in rural Pennsylvania. She has seen many of them, as have her neighbors. She says they emit a strong, unpleasant odor. Don’t know what kind of animal this is.
Always no camera.
No picture on game cams.
Lots of hunters in the woods.
Ask your niece what has she been smoking when she sees them.
Could be bears the smell PA has lots of them.
Alaskans believe the Nantinaq (bigfoot) is a being capable of moving across realities and leaves no evidence for that reason.
I’m in PA. I have 2 relatives that have seen one.
Yes. He always has an alibi.
Bingo she was shopping
I never get to see anything cool like this.
Kind of weird, given the researchers at Skinwalker Ranch, who were there researching because the Pentagon bought it under an assumption there is something weird like that, reported seeing something like Bigfoot coming through some sort vortex the researchers called “a portal.”
The guy at the Pentagon who studied UAPs in one interview said there was a lot they came up with he can’t talk about, but the implication was they seemed to be leaning toward this planet having some sort of high tech civilization that lives in some sort of parallel dimension, and which visits this dimension at times, and they seemed to think it has throughout history cloaked itself in weird primitive cover identities to avoid freaking us out or giving us intelligence about it (maybe so we would never focus on discovering how to get back to their dimension). SO whenever we saw it, they looked like spirits and ghosts, or angels and Demons, or gods, or weird animals, or aliens from another planet, etc. Or even giant Glowing Green Raccoons, like the creator of PCR, Kary Mullis claimed ot have been visited by, and which he later described as something doing anthropology on a level we cannot imagine.
I actually would think it to be statistically more probable, if people are seeing things which violate science and are improbable, and it is something, all of them would be a single uncharacterized phenomenon, rather than for there to be fifty different things which violate the rules.
A Bigfoot went into a shoe store.......
Huh! Didn’t know all of that bit about what the Pentagon came up with. Or the Racoon.
Occam’s Razor could be an ‘alien’ plant/misdirection to throw us off - that complex things are not possible and must require a simple explanation. CF : the original manuscripts of James Clerk Maxwell.
I’ll go with the alternate Earth civilization, except to make it plural. Their residence in some other dimension is highly improbable, as we know that the higher dimensions are rolled up and are very tiny. Alternate universe? Maybe.
But, given the enormous span of time since the Earth formed, it would not surprise me that their were many civilizations in the first billion years alone.
Where are they? They fled the earth to escape all the ELE events, and now reside elsewhere : have outposts under the sea or very large fresh water lakes, on the moon, hidden inside mountains, or large (as in multi-kilometer long) space craft capable of housing million and billions.
Appearing and disappearing could be high tech active camouflage.
Statistics is the mathematical art of using numbers to find what one wants found or to create what one wants created ; any similarity to reality is purely coincidental.
They Bigfoot in the 1967 Paterson film was not crossing the road. She
was in her own territory. The men who observed her were on horseback and she did not fear horses. Smart critters tend to cross roads quickly.
This one was likely a young male.
Killing one would be more likely to land you a prison sentence than fame and fortune. Plus the guilt of killing what could be a (very) distant cousin.
This topic was posted , thanks nickcarraway.
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