Bigfoot Does SO exist! There.

Taking off from this post, what are the categories of evidence that bigfoot really does exist? What kind of evidence do we have, and how good is it? Well, to put it in general terms, we’ve got all kinds of evidence and some of it is very good.

1. Thousands of sightings from eyewitnesses. One would be wrong to throw these out, even as a skeptic. No one case proves anything, but the sheer number of people should alert one to something unexplained going on. And the consistency of detail is astounding if one wishes to believe these are all misidentifications and hallucinations. We have a great bulk of reports, going back centuries, that correspond with each other, many with details researchers didn't appreciate well enough until recently.
2. Tracks that show anatomical details no hoaxer would have bothered to create (at least until they became a "feature" of what is considered a legit track). The number and distribution of tracks argues that there is a real creature making them, unless you subscribe to author and researcher John Green’s theory, offered in jest, that there is a worldwide organization committed to creating and sustaining the hoax. These tracks are often found in places people are very unlikely to go, suggesting (if it were all a hoax) that there are many more hoaxed tracks never found. How do skeptics explain this? The fact is, they never try to explain it. They simply wave their hands and say, “hoax”, as if that finishes the business.
3. Hair samples. There is a collection of hairs now that show internal consistencies but they also do not come from any known animal. The most interesting feature of some of the the hair samples tested is that they appear to be human in most respects, but they do not have the toxins our hairs do as a result of living in our toxin rich society.
4. Fecal samples. Some as large as coke cans. (I've seen one of these in a picture with a soda bottle next to it.) They are from no known animal, and when some of them were tested for DNA, they came back as "likely human".
5. Photographic evidence. By itself it isn't much, but it does support the other evidence.
6. The Patterson/Gimlin film. If one spends the time to analyze the film, especially if you have one of the stabilized images you can get from internet boards (available in the post below), you will notice many features that argue against the subject being a man in a suit. As a whole, in my opinion, these features simply overwhelm the contradictory evidence. When I look at the muscle in the leg shaking as the leg is planted onto the ground, I’m persuaded that I’m looking at skin and muscle over bone, not a shaggy suit.
7. Secondary evidence arising from analysis of the evidence we now have; for instance, the foot size distribution comes out as a bell curve, suggesting a real population of animals, not a hoax (since one assumes hoaxers wouldn't know each other and wouldn't make enough prints of different sizes to create the impression of a population -- unless you accept the worldwide hoaxing organization theory, which is absurd!). Here's a paper by Dr. Henner Fahrenbach exploring this kind of evidence.
   

Simply apply Occam's Razor -- what is the simplest theory that can account for the conglomeration of evidence without creating more unaccounted for features? That there is a real creature out there producing the evidence. Though not many really know about it, the case for bigfoot does not rest on a couple of guys telling stories that may be tall tales. We have thousands of reports. The fact that we have physical evidence in the abundance that we have it goes far beyond the case for other subjects that are beyond the norm in our society. For instance, the case for UFOs. I'm not saying anything about what I think about the UFO phenomena by saying that, just that it's apples and oranges comparing them to bigfoot.

There are other categories of evidence that are more controversial, but still useful to researchers in the field. These include sounds and stick signs. I’ll certainly post more about these categories in the future. I can’t say that they do much to prove that bigfoot is in the woods, but they do show that something large enough to produce the sounds, and smart enough to arrange sticks into formations is out there, and we don’t know what it is. We do know that these kinds of evidence are collected where bigfoot is reported. I suspect they really are related to bigfoot.

But that aside, we do have evidence that bigfoot exists, or at least that something real is causing people to have experiences that would remain unexplained if bigfoot didn’t exist, and it is sloppy science to wave them off without doing any further investigating. It’s always possible, for instance, that there is a common but unknown mental condition that causes people to “see” bigfoot, even when it isn’t there. But that wouldn’t explain the physical evidence collected. As René Dahinden used to say, “Something is making those damned footprints!”