New Gable film

I have been thinking about this all day. If you want to see the new Gable film, follow this link, but be warned, there are graphic images on the film of what may be the result of an animal attack.

Or it may be a prop for a movie.

Because I've had this thought, and I'm not saying this is what happened, but I can imagine it to have happened in this way..

Let me put it this way. Say I wanted to drive up the traffic for this blog. I've learned already that intriguing but inconclusive videos is one really fine way to do it. I've had some serious traffic spikes over some piffling video evidence, let me tell you. So let's say that I'm not the innocent and thoroughly honest blogsquatcher that you all know and love. Say I've got $$ in my eyes and I can't think straight about what's right and wrong anymore. Do you think there might be people like that out there? Hmm.. a couple of names leap to mind already, but put that aside. (I don't know any of the bloggers who have been involved in the release of the film material, so I am not characterizing them, I'm making a pointed hypothetical.)

OR, say I don't have a blog but I know all about old movie cameras and I get the idea that maybe I can sell the film to someone ala Ray Santilli and the Alien Autopsy film? Also not saying this is what happened necessarily, but would anyone really be surprised if either of these scenarios (or one I haven't thought of) turned out to be the case? I would say the list of surprised persons would be fairly short.

So is there any evidence of this being a set up? Looking at the videos that we see, I'm struck by the fact that the first video showed what appears to be the victim in the 2nd video. I have a video camera but you hardly ever see me on it unless I turn it around and film myself "Survivorman" style. Before I learned that technique, you simply never saw me on my films. But if you did, why would I choose to get, say, my wife to film me for a couple seconds while I chopped wood? That doesn't fit for me.

So why do we see the person who was supposed to be the owner of the camera in the original shots, and then again see that person as a mutilated body afterward? That's a tad convenient, and possibly evidence of a fictional technique.

Then there's the story of the uncle filmographer who mutters "bears have five toes, dogs have four toes" and loses his mind. I don't find the ring of truth here. I've seen many a fictional account of the paranormal that includes someone who is no longer present in the story driven insane by what they have witnessed, but I have never actually seen a witness driven insane. Again, this feels like a fictional technique to me.

So yes, there is textual evidence that this might be a set up. I'm not saying this has to be the case, but I suspect we are witnessing fiction here.

UPDATE: I have already begun plotting my movie..

From Icanhavecheeseburger.com

In RE: scientific certainty

I got a message from reader DC about the last post, reminding me that scientists understand that their theories are always provisional. I think functionally that isn't really true, as I wrote in an email to him:

I would say that there is a real problem about "certainty" in our culture. I think it's just the human condition at this time. We are a quite fearful race, though I suppose it's not so long ago that we shuddered in trees hiding from predators. Science, as we receive it in popular media, is presented as certain knowledge. You see how even scientists themselves can fall prey to that in the discovery that there are different kinds of DNA in different cells in our bodies. This was an idea that apparently didn't occur to anyone for years, because (I would argue) the "truth" that every person's DNA was absolutely unique went unquestioned. Now I wonder if they will discover that DNA from certain places can be very similar, or even shared among humans, and what that would do to the forensic use of DNA evidence, and criminal cases going back decades.. it boggles the mind. Hopefully it won't come to that, but you see how this idea of scientific certainty has left us vulnerable to such surprises.

I think individual scientists may well keep in mind that their theories are always provisional, but as a culture, we've been treating them as immutable laws, and it's easy to pick out areas where this feeds right back into science. The idea that mankind came to the Americas only 12,000 years ago springs to mind.. The evidence that this was in error was ignored for decades because of that "certainty". This is what I'm talking about.

Thanks to reader DC for the thought provoking email.

Science: always wrong

I'm being deliberately provocative in the title, but it is true that science has always found itself to be wrong about things as we go along in history. Here are a couple of perplexing facts that have come to light:

DNA not the same in every cell?

Species diversity not caused by natural selection?

Every year we get some of these contradictions of previously held truths.

Certainty.. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

The Michigan recording project

The Michigan recording project.

I don't know much about this, but I suspect it will be a subject of conversation over the next few weeks.

I have looked at some of the vocalizations and they do appear to have a quality about which I've become interested -- looking at the spectrograms you can't really figure where the fundamental would be. I've written about this in the past. I'll put up a link when I've found it again..

So have a look at the website and see what's up for yourselves.

UPDATE: I talked about the weirdness I was seeing in Stan Courtney's Illinois Howl and then compared my own recording in Ohio to the Sierra Sounds recordings. Those two posts make the point I'm trying to make with pictures and everything.

I have some pictures from the Michigan sounds, let me get one up here.

First vocalization Aug 30-31 2008

And here are the notes I made as I worked with the call:

First call on tape:

Floor at 82Hz -- I think this is noise from the environment/present throughout clip

bump out at 515Hz
power plateau at 687 777Hz
peak at 1121Hz
peak at 1554Hz
gradual rise to peak at 2400Hz

Looks a bit weird to me. I think if I tried to make that sound, a) I couldn't do it, and b) the peaks would arrange themselves into harmonics, which isn't happening here. This appears to conform to my idea about bigfoot calls. Since I don't think that call could be made by anything known other than a man, if it isn't a bigfoot, I guess the only thing I'd want now is to know if some people can train their voices to do this at that volume, because I really cannot do it. Raven (an audio program) says that sound got pretty loud, too, though the amplifier in the recorder might account for that.

I don't know what made the calls in that file, but I do know that it interests me.

Focusing on the psychological again

The University of Chicago Press, which published Joshua Blu Buhs' book, Bigfoot the Life and Times of a Legend, also published a book last year about wildmen in China by author Sigrid Schmalzer, called The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth Century China. The press runs a blog called The Chicago Blog. (Which I can't help noting makes the claim of "intelligent commentary" right under their masthead.. and that makes me want to say, if you have to tell your readers that your commentary is intelligent, then someone in the line of information delivery must be trucking a short load of bricks..)

Oh yeah, zing! Score one for the blogger!

Now where was I? The two authors had a conversation about the similarities between bigfoot and the yeren which helps to reveal the psychological hypothesis, though, as is common with the hypothesis, it isn't stated directly. I think one of the halmarks of the hypothesis is how it is used in just this way. The question of whether this is the correct interpretation of the way of the world is simply begged. (Actually, later Buhs says that the idea the creatures are real "starts to beggar belief," but that's another idiom..)

Allow me a quick digression to talk about that phrase, "begging the question." A lot of folks think it means "to invite a question," but it actually means to suppose something true without proving it true, when that something is rather crucial to an argument. You will note throughout the conversation that Buhs and Schmalzer will simply assume that bigfoot and the yeren are imaginary creatures without going to the trouble of making a good case that this is so. For those who have actually seen a bigfoot (or a yeren) this will no doubt make what they have to say seem a rather unintelligent commentary..

But back to business. If you read the authors' conversation, you will see that they take the psychological hypothesis as granted. They see bigfoot and the yeren as mythic ideas around which human beings are working out their feelings about civilization and wildness. There is within us, the argument goes, an ambivilence about civilization and a corresponding urge/fear about returning to the wild. Here is author Schmalzer:

I, too, am struck by how many similarities there are both in the yeren and Bigfoot stories themselves and in the stories about the people who search for them. In both cases the wildness of the monsters is crucial to their cultural significance—and this wildness is something to fear but also to embrace. The fear of the "savagery" of the wild runs through stories about wildmen who kidnap—and often rape—humans; these stories have old roots in China. But the wildness of Bigfoot and yeren also emerges in these stories as an antidote to the corruption of modern society. Some of the specifics of what that corruption is understood to be differ between the two cases (e.g., in China, it includes the inhumanity of Mao-era political campaigns), but in both places there is a strong environmentalist theme—a romantic notion that Bigfoot and yeren represent "endangered species" and that they (like Goodall's chimps or Fossey's gorillas) offer the hope of reconnecting with our primeval selves and returning to the more pure world of nature.

For Buhs and Schmalzer, bigfoot or yeren is a mythic symbol that represents the ambivalence and urge/fear I mentioned above. I grew up on the writing of Joseph Campbell so I'm familiar with this line of thought. What I don't know is whether this has ever been shown by experiment.

On the one hand, certainly people have created myths throughout time immemorial, but I won't say that I know what these myths represent or how they are constructed. I think it's possible that there are a variety of ways they are constructed. But I do think that I can make a showing of how myths can be created as a response to a fear, and I can do it without resorting to experiment. I'll have to beg certain obvious questions but you'll let me know if you think I've gone too far, I'm sure.

I think one of the primary myths human beings use on a daily basis is the myth of themselves. This is part of what Buhs and Schmalzer are talking about. If we call ourselves "bigfoot hunters," we are engaging in some myth making, taking upon ourselves all those things that have clung to the phrase "bigfoot hunter" over the years. One thinks of Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, or René Dahinden, or some other well known bigfoot hunter. Maybe we unconsciously adopt some of the mannerisms or ways of thinking of these earlier giants in the field. And perhaps we adopt, or take as a given, certain ways of thinking about things because these earlier pioneers thought that way. To become a bigfoot hunter, we make ourselves more like our heroes. Fair enough?

Now there's another personal myth I'd like to poke with a sharp stick and see if any hot air comes out. This is the myth of "I'm intelligent." Some of us probably remember the kids in school who based their entire identity on being intelligent. What I always thought I could detect was a corresponding fear of being thought unintelligent. I think it's that sort of thing which leads one to post the words "intelligent commentary" on one's blog. But allow me to get author Schmalzer to help us out here again (bolding is mine):

An earlier example of this not in your book is Karen Minns's novel, Calling Rain, published in 1991: it's a lesbian romance about a Bigfoot researcher and her graduate student inspired in part at least by Dian Fossey's work with gorillas. (Years ago when I first started the research on yeren, I had fun reading some of these North American stories, an activity I justified because they were "directly related to my dissertation.")

It seems to me that Schmalzer is here betraying her fear of being thought unintelligent. The myth of the intelligent person is a stern taskmaster.

I pointed out before that Buhs' thinks the idea that bigfoot might exist "starts to beggar belief" -- a genteel way of saying something along the lines of "that's too stupid to believe."

Certainly, it's possible that there are wildmen in both places that give rise to the stories—but this starts to beggar belief when one looks at wildmen stories from elsewhere, because then you'd have to posit—as Ivan Sanderson did—that there are several species of undiscovered apes, all over the Earth. The only other option I see is that the image is universal—or, at least, ubiquitous.

That's two theories that explain bigfoot sightings there -- the psychological theory and the flesh and blood theory. If only we had another theory..

But as I said, the myth of the intelligent self is a stern taskmaster. One cannot afford to be seen reading books that take bigfoot seriously, and one cannot possibly delve into the transdimensional or paranormal, because intelligent people don't do that.

NOTE: the conversation between Buhs and Schmalzer continues in two further blog entries which you can find if you navigate the site link I posted above.

In receipt of..

I've only started reading the book, but already I'm loving it. It's very well written if the introduction is any guide to the overall quality, and flipping through the illustrations, I'm very impressed with it from the start. I think this is going to be a classic. Kudos to Paulides and Pratt! Already in the blogsquatcher store..

Unfortunately, I couldn't get Tribal Bigfoot, which I had ordered along with this book. It seems to be indefinitely out of stock. I can order it direct from Hancock House, but you can't tell if they really have it in stock and it also costs more. Bummer. I'll get it eventually.

Now I have to go back to reading.

NOTE: Had to take the soundclick player down for a bit, but it's back!

There's no mention of bigfoot in the song, but I do use the word "monster".. As I said before, just working out my studio chops, but sometimes you like to have someone else actually hear what you did.

Expect to see this hoax video

Thanks to my good friend Reverend Strone, I can alert you to this video, which attempts to mimic a real event, though it is not:



Reverend Strone sent along this text with the alert of the video:

A few years ago at Weta Workshop (the company I work for) a pitch was created for a fiction based cryptozoology series. The show didn’t end up being made, but a pretty neat looking Yeti suit was created and has been used a couple of times since on various advertisements, including one for (from memory) AT&T. Most recently, the suit was used for a new advertisement for LandSar, a national volunteer organisation within New Zealand providing Land Search & Rescue Services to the Police and public.

Inevitably, someone involved thought it would be fun to create a couple of spoof videos which have since popped up on Youtube as well. I don’t know who posted these, but assumedly it was someone of the crew that shot the advert. Of course these should not be taken seriously. The suit itself was created to fit an actor over seven feet tall and was designed to be an obviously fictitious depiction of a yeti, hence being white, having orang-utan style cheek pouches and very pongid facial features. I thought they did a great job of creating a unique and cool looking suit while not attempting to go for complete realism or matching eye witness descriptions.

So there you are. Don't be taken in!