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I have a bigfoot story, of sorts, twice-removed though...
There was an anthropology professor where I went to school named Tim Dunnigan. I once saw Tim give a lecture where he mentioned that the idea of a species of large hominid living unseen in remote areas of the world today wasn't actually that impossible - but what was far-fetched was that we would find no fossil evidence of this species.
As he put it, and I'm paraphrasing from memory, "For this to be true, this creature would have to be relatively intelligent and in combination with that have evolved a unique hiding skill - to remain absolutely motionless when other hominids are present and in line of sight (like Neandertal or Cro Magnon or Homo Sapiens Sapiens) and to be able to find places to hide and live in the wilderness that are free from this other-hominid traffic. If it evolved these skills and attributes over hundreds of thousands or millions of years - it could remain hidden indefinitely, right up to modern times. The problem is that
it's bones can't do this intelligent, instinctual, active hiding - and we would have found some bones by now, and carbon-dated them to near this era. We haven't done that."
He then said, "but...... If these creatures had developed a rudimentary burial mythology - or even an instinctual, non-abstract burial practice - in which the dead bodies are gathered into something like a cave, chamber or hidden crevace in each localized area they inhabit - we may never find those bones either."
He went on to describe the following account given by a CCC-employed surveyor from the 1930's:
The surveyor was walking down a loose shale slope by Black Peak in Washington state. The slope was extremely dangerous, with the face made up almost entirely of broken pieces of shale, leading all the way to a precipice. He moved very carefully and extremely slowly down the slope until he got to the cliff, which looked down on a small creek gorge - the creek came out of the mountain to his right, and the gorge formed a tight curl, where the inner part of the curl was completely unviewable from the creek bed below or the slope he was on, and there was no opposing slope that could provide a vista into the curl of the gorge.
As he got to the precipice and set up his Abney level, he noticed that the precipice itself formed a small shelf about two feet deep. It curled around the edge of the gorge - and was free of the loose shale.
He left the level in position and proceeded to walk along this precipice, to where it followed the curl. As he moved around the bend of the slope, with a vertical shale cliff on his right and a long drop to his left, the gorge opened up and he could see what was there - a level plateau in the side of the mountain, broken in half by the stream which then plunged down into the gorge below. The plateau was hidden from the top of the mountain by stands of forest, from below by the bend of the gorge and a treeline that stood in front of the plateau from a level area below. It was a completely hidden area - and he was sure no-one living had seen it before, because he knew it was unmapped, and the danger of that shale slope would have kept any casual hikers - and probably, indians, natives before them - from making such a foolish hike.
He was about 150 yards from the plateau. The plateau itself was perhaps 20 yards deep, and about 200 yards long, with grasses, a few large grey dead tree trunks and what looked like some depressions or perhaps caves in the shale wall facing the plateau... But he wasn't able to get a good description of the depressions, because as he was looking at them, one of the large grey tree trunks moved.
He realized that he had been looking right at a bear, and didn't recognize it as such. Then, as he described it: "
I knew it wasn't a bear when I saw them all start to walk."
They began to move quickly without running behind a stand of trees that intersected the plateau - there was an open area behind the trees, but he couldn't see it from where he stood. He described them as "
large, grey people, four or five. They had people faces and eyes but they were not people."
As they were walking out of his view he had turned and quickly began to make his way back - later describing a sense of panic. He looked over his shoulder several times to see if he was being pursued, but they had moved out of sight. He couldn't tell where, exactly, they had gone.
As he turned back to move to the shale slope, he immediately saw another one of the creatures about five yards in front of him, barring his exit onto the slope. He was terror stricken, and described looking in that instant for a place to jump off the precipice where he might be able to land on a tree below...
As he stood, shaking, the creature opened it's lips and mouth, and uttered a gutteral sound that sounded like the word, "Smile."
It then hit the shutter of the Pentax MZ-D it was holding at it's waist, and took his picture.
It's said that the man never recovered from that experience... and, to this day, waits for that prototype MZ-D to make it's way out of the hidden forest, in one evolved form or another... so Homo Sapiens Sapiens can use it as well.
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Last edited by jsherman999; 08-06-2013 at 11:04 PM.
Originally posted by Rupert 
Post #82 by jsherman999
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