Never Ending Search for Sasquatch

This item is written by a a chap who is pretty fresh to the topic and he has picked off a few recent examples which are a long way from the best information available. Otherwise, what is really happening is that the show and other events is allowing the media to openly tackle the topic and simply get up in the morning and try writing up the individual stories as they come in. That is very welcome.

What the show has certainly done is to wake up everyone to the fact that there is one near you. It is not just a West Coast curiosity.

I would like to make a few general observations.

1 The Sasquatch is becoming far less shy of us generally. In cases it is coming to the point of interaction .

2 The population has increased hugely over the past century. Before then they were competing directly with humanity for game and much lower deer herds existed during the nineteenth century and also before. Now they have the equivalent of easy living.

3 This has triggered way more sightings and they are now encroaching on our living spaces.

4 It is plausible that there is a second creature that is often mistaken for a Sasquatch. It is rarer by far and any prints would be mistaken for a bear. Unfortunately it is noticed for what it is not. It is not a bear and it is also when clearly seen not a Sasquatch. So it only gets better the more data you have.

5 At this point, the number of high quality reports is in the thousands and if we add in those in which the creature was never eyeballed then we have ten thousand. High quality generally means unimpeachable observers.

5 What is better, the improving acceptance has flushed out a lot more high quality reports from folks who may never have come forward.

One of the criticism I wish to address is the apparent poor quality of most images. Most will be shot through vegetation unless the creature is totally unaware. That is very rare. We are all beginning to understand just how incredibly lucky Patterson was. As it is one mostly has just enough time to overcome one's shock and grab a camera and get a single shot of before it is over.

This will only change when a specimen decides to accept food as a gift.

'This is Finding Bigfoot': Never-Ending Search for Sasquatch

By NEAL KARLINSKY (@NealKarlinsky) , BRANDON CHASE and DAN PRZYODA

Nov. 14, 2012

http://abcnews.go.com/US/finding-bigfoot-ending-search-sasquatch/story?id=17718904#.UKQdHMVG8bA

Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Yeti. Ape-man. Man-beast. The shaggy, towering, yet elusive, creature goes by many names and there has been no shortage of tales of unexplained sightings in the woods.

People really want to believe Bigfoot is real, and for decades, dozens of Yeti hunters have tried to prove its existence. Never mind the fact that the only thing anyone knows for certain about the legendary beast is that it has been wildly successful at filling tabloids, being the subject of terrible B movies, and generally serving as an all-around punch line.

But Matt Moneymaker, Cliff Barackman, Ranae Holland and James "Bobo" Fay are a ragtag team of globetrotting researchers who are as serious about Bigfoot as the Pope is about religion.

Watch the full story on "Nightline" tonight at 11:35 p.m. ET

With every bit of cutting edge technology – night vision gear and all the sensors they can get their hands on – this group of Bigfoot hunters travels the world investigating Sasquatch sightings.

"Beliefs are things you can't see and you can't prove," Fay said. "Sasquatch is a real living entity that will be proven soon enough."

"It's more than one," Moneymaker said. "Remember it's not Bigfoot, it's Bigfoots. There's a misconception out there that we're looking around for this one thing."

Their adventures and investigations make up two, and soon to be three, seasons of the Animal Planet series, "Finding Bigfoot," which airs on Sundays at 10 p.m. ET. Interestingly, one member of the group, research biologist Ranae Holland, isn't quite sold yet.

"I'm still skeptical," she said. "We used to think the world is flat, we didn't think pandas existed. You know, in the idea of discovery, you're always testing, accepting theories... It's all about answering the question and the pursuit of that and that's what I'm behind."

Holland wants to know just what the rest of us are wondering: If Bigfoot is real, where is it?

A lot of the group's evidence falls under the umbrella of sketchy ambiguous photos and video. One famous Bigfoot video, known as the Patterson-Gimlin film, was taken in 1967, and in one episode of "Finding Bigfoot," the group studies it and tries to re-create it to determine if it was staged.

Moneymaker believes there is no way the Sasquatch in the film is a man in a monkey suit.

"When you see it in motion, you see parts of the anatomy," he said. "If you know what somebody in a costume looks like and you see that in motion, you know that doesn't really look like a person in a costume. That looks like a real animal."

They study tracks, too, evidence, they say, of an unidentified large primate-like beast with -- you guessed it -- a very big foot. They also claim to have identified a Bigfoot call.

All of them but Ranae claim to have had real life run-ins with a Sasquatch over the years, though none of them has anything to show for it but an undying passion to convince the world that it -- whatever it is -- really does exist.

"We all have different opinions on what they are," Fay said. "We're all guessing, but I think they're more like a person, a wild, kind of primitive man that can talk. I've heard them talk in the woods."

The "Finding Bigfoot" crew isn't alone in claiming Bigfoot sightings. There have been numerous reports, even just in the past year. Click the arrow to hear some recent claims from people who believe Sasquatch is real.