M.K. Davis and the P/G film part 2.

Loren Coleman has a post up at Cyrptomundo with an email response from the filmmaker who worked with M.K. Davis for a while, John L. Johnsen. It's a fascinating read, and not just because of the revelations that are in it. But the revelations.. what are we going to do with those?

As I wrote on Henry May's blog:

I know you weren't the one who came up with the conspiracy angle, but does it strike you as credible that two other bigfoot researchers could have been there that day and we never hear about it until now?

And then add in the idea that they supposedly killed and dismembered several bigfoot. But then they left the bodies.

How can anyone believe that? We all believe that a bigfoot body would have significant cash value. Patterson, at least, showed that he was interested in turning the events of that day into a profit. Who believes that he would have left the bodies behind in a bloody pool?

It is preposterous and no one should give it another thought.

Mr. Johnson's email changes some of the facts, but there is still a fundamental illogic here that isn't solved.

What bigfoot researcher who had a body, no less several bodies, would leave it buried in a shallow grave when he believed that the body could be worth millions? The reason for not doing so, which isn't so much directly stated as implied, seems to be "because they thought the bigfoot looked too human and they'd be liable for murder." I don't find this to be a credible answer, and wonder if anyone else does?

I do not find it surprising that M.K. Davis supposes that the creature in the film is some kind of human. I came to that conclusion a while ago myself, without studying the P/G film. But I don't profess to know what bigfoot ultimately is. (Here is my post on "bigfoot epistemology" if you are inclined to see my take on the various beliefs about bigfoot.)

I was somewhat disappointed with several of M.K.'s bits of evidence. Having a stick in hand does not make one a digger indian, nor does it make one human. Finding a bone 4o+ years after an incident has happened has no impact on what happened there without testing. These seem to be fundamental logic problems that I would not expect a good researcher to make, and that M.K. has made them does not fill me with confidence in any of the rest of his (or Mr. Johnsen's) claims.

But you'll ultimately have to decide for yourselves how you feel about it. I will leave you with this thought though -- for more than 40 years, nothing has been able to diminish the impact of the P/G Film. But maybe this grand conspiracy theory will.

Late update: Here's another post at Cryptomundo dealing with this issue.

Even later update: I haven't been clear enough about what is bothering me about the "conspiracy theory" part of M.K. Davis' ideas -- it's not just the (apparently) ludicrous idea that bigfoot researchers would leave bodies buried in a sand bar for 40 years. There are numerous places where it appears Davis has made conclusions that do not seem warranted given the evidence he has gathered. Let me give you a couple.

At one point, Davis made the assertion that Patty having a stick in her hand lead to the conclusion that she was human. (The fact that this isn't so is shown by the article I linked with the orangutan.) That particular leap of "logic" is actually a fallacy. I spent some time on Wikipedia to make sure I had the right one, and it turns out to be a fallacy of the consequent, which is in this form: Humans use sticks as tools, Patty had a stick, therefore Patty is human. But this does not follow logically, because, as the link I just mentioned shows, many animals make use of sticks, from crows to orangutans, and they even use them as tools, but this does not make them human. This same kind of faulty logic is being used in another of Davis' assertions -- ie, Humans braid their hair, and Patty has braids in her hair, therefore, she is human. But as many a horse owner can attest, animals with long hair often get braids or braid-like clumps of hair without their being human at all.

This is but to choose two obvious examples, but I could go on. Davis' findings, at least as we have received them to date, are riddled through with this kind of fallacious reasoning. The claim that a bone found at the site 40 years after the events in question has any bearing on the facts is another kind of fallacy -- Post hoc ergo propter hoc, which is Latin for "After this, therefore because of this." Davis' bone, without any other proof that it was connected to the events from 40 years ago, is just an old bone. But he makes mention of it in support of his theories.

It is not uncommon for people to use fallacious reasoning in the day to day world. But you do not expect to find it where something like science is the expected result. The fact that Davis uses fallacious reasoning to support his theories can not give us confidence that he actually knows what he's talking about. In fact, it's quite a compelling argument for the opposite case.