Hiding in Plain Sight

How hard is it for a big animal to stay hidden in the woods?.Dale Hetzer tries to find out.

Imagine, if you will, an 8 foot giant hairy ape that weighs at least 500 pounds, has been known in ancient Native American folklore for centuries, and might possibly be the greatest cryptozoological enigma ever. It is known as Bigfoot, or Sasquatch north of the Canadian border, and it remains one of the true great mysteries of our time.

This creature roams the densest forests of the Pacific Northwest, is nocturnal, has a call that sounds like a baby crying, a woman screaming or unearthly howls unlike anything ever heard before, leaves footprints that a normal man could nearly fit two of his inside, and has been seen by virtually thousands of people. It has been filmed walking along a creek bank (and although controversial, has been authenticated by a number of research institutes as the real thing), has had hair and feces samples collected, has had voice analyzation done to it's calls only proving the sounds are coming from no known identified animal, and to top all of this off, the county of Skamania in the state of Washington, has a law on the books forbidding anyone from killing it! Yet orthodox science says that this beast cannot possibly exist because there has been no actual body to examine. However, if this was a civil trial to prove the existence of this subject before a court of law, a verdict of existence would have come forward without the jury ever leaving the room! How strange can this be?

The crux of all this is that the scientific community needs to have a dead body before it recognizes a new species of animal. This is a long held practice that goes back to the early days of scientific research, back when people, hundreds of years ago, were telling tales of all sorts of beasts, with nary a one of those ever having even a smidgen of reality connected to it. Regardless, everyone was sworn to be real and they were duly accepted as such. Gargoyles, griffins, mermaids, boogie men, all were fairy tales made up to either scare or be scared of. There were no genuine physical traces or evidence of any kind, nothing except hearsay and a will to believe. Needless to say, that is all that these creatures were then and now, hearsay. So science established age-old boundaries regarding the cataloging of animals, actual proof that could be felt and examined instead of pondered and imagined. There was only one absolutely sure way to do that, and that was with something that could be put on the dissecting table. A body. Read more