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Indian Yeti / Barmanu

JREF does incline to be rather heavily USA-oriented; but not always and all the time. The site has some Australian posters, who tend to be disproportionately vocal vis-a-vis their small number. There's a thread on "General Skepticism and the Paranormal", titled "Yowies -- Australia's Bigfoot" (on "search", enter keyword "Yowies"), mostly conducted by a few Australian members; which I find hilariously funny -- basically because I reckon the idea of flesh-and-blood Yowies, inconceivable. For the JREF-ites, they exist only in the imaginations of... strange people... I'm open to it being a paranormal matter...
 
amyasleigh said:
The website of the James Randi Educational Foundation – http://forums.randi.org/ -- contains a lot of interesting Bigfoot-related discussion, including one very substantial thread about Native American lore on the subject. JREF, being a great “citadel of scepticism and rationalism”, is in involvement with Bigfoot matters, weighted toward the proposition that the whole business is a social construct, and that there is no such creature as Bigfoot. However, discussion there on the subject is on the whole fairly civil, and not “scorn-pouring 24/7”; some of the debunkers are wistful former / would-be Bigfoot believers, and a few genuine proponents of the creature’s existence, participate.
Further to recent discussion about JREF, and material on there about Native American lore possibly re Bigfoot (see above): it so happens that a new thread has recently popped up on JREF, giving convenient links in one place, to the two big threads in the past, about the topic.

Not wanting to risk mucking up this thread on this board with possibly abortive link-posting "tinkering" which I might not be able to delete, I feel obliged to "mark the trail" in the cumbersome way. On JREF, go to sub-forum "General Skepticism and the Paranormal", and the new thread thereon, "Fabricating the Bigfoot Pre-History". Post 2 of this thread, by Correa Neto, contains two links, one immediately after the other, to two long-past threads -- I won't make things still more unwieldy, by giving their titles here. The first one linked-to, is the "very substantial" one mentioned in the self-quote above. It contains a lot of interesting stuff; also, unfortunately, a lot of complete dross perpetrated by various troll-type idiots. The second, also long, and with intersting content about N.A. lore.

These JREF threads are of course of overall basically sceptical tone, but as I recall, not overly nastily so -- as mantioned, a couple of JREF's chief Bigfoot-debunkers are former Bigfoot proponents; they would love for the creature to be found to exist, and to have been undocumented all these past centuries -- they just consider that circumstance to be vanishingly unlikely.
 
oldrover said:
Analis I can’t agree with you about Arnold. Firstly I never made any mention of mass hysteria. Though it wasn’t meant to be, I can see that it could have seemed like it was implied. I’m not talking about anything so specific. I can’t see that there’s any successful way to argue against the flying saucer era beginning in the late 40’s, I’ve seen and read countless testimonies which do describe exactly that. The sound bite which was carried away from the case was the term ‘flying saucer’, it’s still with us today and probably will be in a thousand years. Problematic because although this is remembered as the key phrase, as you’ll know of course, it only applicable to the flight characteristics of the objects, but saucers become the shape most people are seeing. This to me is highly suggestive. And I believe it refutes your point here;

this phenomenon is well studied and its effects are known. We can observe that with various calls to witnesses on TV, or the kind of scares you mention, red under the bed scares, but also skinhead scares, terrorist scares, the 1938 Orson Welles scare etc... They have produced nothing of the sort. Despite that they were much more pregnant than the impact of a lousy press release, there is simply no comparison between them.

Sorry, as I was absent for a time, I hadn't read all. I will answer here to this point, before it veers off-topic for too long. With much lateness, I answer that what refutates your view in my opinion, is that an explanation has to be confronted to what established scientific studies already teach us (contrarily to what is sometimes believed, sociology and psychology are not so 'soft' sciences, or the realm of pure fantasy ; they've provided us a lot of secure knowledge, notably of how beliefs and sightings spread). If it doesn't fit, even if it seems highly suggestive, it has to be rejected.
I won't come back to the fact that round objects had already been reported before. But there is a point I want to adress, despite that I consider it as unconsequential : what were Arnold's real words, which are usually shrouded in much confusion. I was sometimes the victim of this, and I remember that I have on more than one occasion explained that Arnold refered to movement and not to shape. But a recent discussion reassessed that it was not the case by evidencing what he really told to the press (or at least what the press reported he had told them, which for us is exactely the same thing) :

http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2011/sep/m09-005.shtml
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2011/sep/m10-002.shtml
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2011/sep/m10-005.shtml

It emerges from this review that :
1) Arnold did describe the objects as having an undulating motion, but :
2) He never used the saucer metaphor refering to the movement. This comparison emerged only two years later, in a Ray Palmer's book.
3) He didn't use either the comparison with stones bouncing over water in the following days. It seems he resorted to it, but probably, it came again only later (or if he used it just after the 24 June sigthing, it wasn't printed immediately). Although it is more logical. Making flat pebbles bouncing on water is a popular game among children, I practiced it myself. But dish plates... I doubt anybody ever used dishes to this goal...
4) He did describe the objects as disc- or saucer- or even pie-plate-like. He repeated the word saucer (as refering to the shape) in the document he submitted to the Army Air Force Intelligence. They were indeed somewhat discoid. They were round if only on the front part, the back being truncated. The closer comparison I could come with would be of a horseshoe crab without tail.
5) It was only a few weeks later that he mentionned that one of the objects was different from the others, being crescent-shaped, with a pointy tail. Which gave birth to the belief that he had seen a flight of flying wings, but he never said that (from the Martin SHOUGH's Darklore vol.5 article mentionned there, a confusion may have come from the fact that Arnold had sometimes used a half-moon comparison in the early days : The Oregon Journal on 27 June had indeed reported a fleet of crescents, but Arnold's quotes cited in the article were similar to the other ones, except for the use of the half-moon - but simultaneously with the disk metaphor).
So, Arnold's saucer and disk metaphors did refer to the shape and not to the flight characteristics. Additionally, the terms flying disc and flying saucer really caught only after another sighting above Idaho on 4 July.

(If you want a more picrocholine discussion about the implications of the use of the terms and their relations to memes, see here (don't forget your aspirin) :
http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/10 ... -gone.html )

Back to the original topic.

oldrover said:
But Similarly, Ray Wallace's hoxes were a minor cultural event. Did they call a mediatic frenzy ? Yes, but quite limited. I don't believe that people believed they saw man-beasts because they had heard of Wallace's scams

Fair point, but I’m not suggesting that it was an overnight sensation, anymore than I’m suggesting the reports instantly reached their current volume. I believe it was still a relatively minor subject and would be second fiddle to the Yeti for at least another decade. In my opinion it’s after the Patterson film that it starts to really take off, and then we have the films from the 70’s and so on.

Patterson and others did have promoted Bigfoot/Sasquatch as a north american yeti, and his movie certainly played a role in the spreading of the belief. But I was re-reading Strange creatures from time and space, and I have the feeling that between 1958 and 1966, north american BHMs were already described as they would be later. More often as a kind of "super-Paranthopus", and all the variations encountered since.

oldrover said:
Which leads us to the question of how successful Bigfoot is commercially? I doubt anyone has ever made a fortune from it, but a living I don’t know, but possibly

Possibly, but I doubt that it would be through books. More probably through conferences.
 
amyasleigh said:
It does seem to me that the majority of Native American traditions about Bigfoot do have it as “another – often very strange – kind of NA”, and / or a supernatural being; however, anything that might shed any kind of light on this perplexing issue, could be valuable.

There's very interesting stuff in FT's last issue : Blasts from the Past #34 by Ulrich Magin (pp30-31) refers a number of north american papers from the 30s mentioning Sasquatch. These articles suggest that sightings may have been more numerous than usually thought.
That being said, the descriptions refer again to "very strange hairy, often giant, amerindian" or to some kind of supernatural being. Not to bipedal apes.
 
I wonder when these stories stopped being about those "Wild Men of the Woods" and started being about Bigfoot, Yeti, and all the variations? Was it about the time the FT article states? I'm sure the idea was that these Wild Men were essentially human, sort of the hermit idea. Or am I wrong, does it depend on the location and the general myth?
 
Analis said:
amyasleigh said:
It does seem to me that the majority of Native American traditions about Bigfoot do have it as “another – often very strange – kind of NA”, and / or a supernatural being; however, anything that might shed any kind of light on this perplexing issue, could be valuable.

There's very interesting stuff in FT's last issue : Blasts from the Past #34 by Ulrich Magin (pp30-31) refers a number of north american papers from the 30s mentioning Sasquatch. These articles suggest that sightings may have been more numerous than usually thought.
That being said, the descriptions refer again to "very strange hairy, often giant, amerindian" or to some kind of supernatural being. Not to bipedal apes.
Thanks for the “heads-up” – I must seek out this latest issue of FT. Am prompted to wonder – would these 1930s items be largely from British Columbia? I have the picture that (largely set-off by the writings and findings of J.W. Burns, a schoolteacher working with Native Americans in British Columbia, who became interested in their lore re their MHB – it was Burns who coined the name “sasquatch”, adapting “his” tribes’ word, into a form more friendly to Anglophone tongues) there was in British Columbia pre-World War II, considerable writing and discourse about the phenomenon; it was somewhat later that the “respectable” media in the USA, became interested.

The same weary old frustrating thing which I’m afraid I keep coming back to: the particular huge “treasure house” of Bigfoot / Sasquatch material which was available on the Net up to a couple of years ago, but ceased to be so, concurrent with a change of domain-ownership – we’ve been hearing that its retrieval is planned, but the longer that time drags on, the less likely it feels, that that will happen. This lost material included a voluminous compilation of some hundreds of archive “cuttings” from U.S newspapers (largely local), going back to the early 19th century, about encounters in virtually all parts of the United States, with large and strange hairy bipeds – partaking in the majority, of more wild-man-like traits; but in some, of more ape-like ditto.

The chap who compiled this material is a passionate Bigfoot believer, for whom this great amount of past news material is conclusive proof that Bigfoot (am not sure how narrow or broad is his own definition of what BF is) has existed, and continues to exist, the length and breadth of North America. Most people with an interest would wish, I suspect, for more in the way of proof, than such a mass of purely anecdotal stuff (and newspapers 100+ years ago, often tended – even more so than nowadays -- to be less than scrupulous about accuracy or indeed truth). With a heap of newspaper archives not, for me, constituting proof; I never delved deeply into this collection when it was available – but it’s a pity that it’s no longer available, for whoever might have an interest in exploring it.
 
I must seek out this latest issue of FT

Yes this looks like an interesting one.

I'm sure the idea was that these Wild Men were essentially human, sort of the hermit idea. Or am I wrong, does it depend on the location and the general myth?

I don't think you are wrong. So far all I've come up with seems to point to giant human in the NA lore. That said it could be a cultural interpretation that's the cause there, after all Orangutan means man of the woods and Orang pendeck is man something or other, and there's no suggestion at least of the former being taken as a human. I don't think that's the reason but in all fairness it is a possibility. There is though a definite paranormal/mystic quality that runs through them all in North America.

Personally I cannot see the idea of the Sasquatch as a great ape or any other sort of 'natural' creature as being supported by indigenous tradition. I think that's just a modern variation of the wild thing in the woods motif, with a modern Western mindset.

Ironically I see this as being a result of a more science based view of natural history.
 
amyasleigh said:
Thanks for the “heads-up” – I must seek out this latest issue of FT. Am prompted to wonder – would these 1930s items be largely from British Columbia?

In fact... they all refer to British Columbia. The papers themselves are from the whole North America, both Canada and USA. They include : Berkeley Daily Gazette ; Rochester Evening Journal ; Saskatoon Star-Phoenix ; Lewiston Daily Sun ; Los Angeles Time ; Spartanburg, SC, Herald ; Calgary Daily Herald ; Kentucky New Era ; Montreal Gazette ; San Jose News ; Milwaukee Journal ; Newburgh News and Miami News. Interestingly an expedition to find the legendary "giant baby-snatcher of old" had been launched in 1934 by californian scientists.

The Sasquatch was described as :
-always hairy ;
-"nearly nude" (meaning that he was not, and then wearing some kind of clothe), or completely nude ;
-huge, a giant, sometimes nine feet tall ;
-living in caves, hollow trees, in the mountains, sometimes hunting using clubs and stones ;
-peering through windows ; prowling around houses ; stealing food, children ; killing warriors ; playing "diabolical tricks" ; hurling rocks into a canoe ;
-possessing hypnotic powers.

The articles reported legends, often insisting on native lore ; but also recent sightings. Sometimes as hearsay, although precise, but first hand accounts were present too.
He was systematically called a wild hairy man, was never compared to an ape. Things are not so clear-cut when it comes to physical apperance, hairy men, giant or not, are still reported today. But the absence of ape-like mentions is a major difference with post-war sightings. Many of his behaviours are still present until now, although the practice of living in caves or hollow trees is not any more. As a whole, most of them were typical of fairy lore.
 
Analis said:
In fact... they all refer to British Columbia. The papers themselves are from the whole North America, both Canada and USA. They include : Berkeley Daily Gazette ; Rochester Evening Journal ; Saskatoon Star-Phoenix ; Lewiston Daily Sun ; Los Angeles Time ; Spartanburg, SC, Herald ; Calgary Daily Herald ; Kentucky New Era ; Montreal Gazette ; San Jose News ; Milwaukee Journal ; Newburgh News and Miami News. Interestingly an expedition to find the legendary "giant baby-snatcher of old" had been launched in 1934 by californian scientists.
Californian scientists going to B.C. to research there, I take it?
 
Right, thanks. Just that extreme-northern California emerged as the US's first Bigfoot "hotspot", though of course didn't come to actual fame as such till the late 1950s.
 
Orang-pendek means 'short man'.
With the North American sasquatch reports from historic times, i think its only natural that the call the huge men. They are man shaped and the indians would not have known about apes and ergo had nothing to compare them to except humans.
 
Orang-pendek means 'short man'.

Thanks.

As for the Indian ape man thing that's true. That said there are a lot of things the Indians did say about them that rule out an ape and point toward something much more spirit like.

I know there's lore attached to many animals that would seem to make them sound mythic unless we knew about them for sure, with the bigfoot though that's all we've got. It's only recently another culture has come along and tried to hang their idea of the world on it.
 
I would be surprised that native americans in the early 20th Century had never heard of apes. In addition, one direct witness cited by newspapers seemed to be a white woman, and she described Sasquatch as "a big man". Mrs Cawfield spoke of the "Indians" as if they were not his people. "I guessed he was a Sasquatch so I covered my eyes with my hand, for the Indians say that if a Sasquatch catches your eye you are in his power."

I wonder too if the californian scientists who led an expedition wrote an account of their finds. It would be interesting if it could be found.
 
Have acquired a copy of the relevant FT. Concur that the reports covered, are couched in terms basically of "men", not of apes -- for sure, the widely perceived and accepted "ape-like" image, came later.

Analis said:
Many of his behaviours are still present until now, although the practice of living in caves or hollow trees is not any more. As a whole, most of them were typical of fairy lore.
The living-in-caves element: its affinity with the stuff of myth, can be seen. However – I’ve read speculation from American “Bigfooters”, in their ceaseless quest to make sense of the frustrations and paradoxes with which the whole issue is enmeshed, as to whether BF’s extreme elusiveness might be accounted for by its actually, largely living in caves. On the other hand, though – there are numerous caving enthusiasts in America, but none of them in their expeditions, ever seem to turn up any Bigfoot. IMO, the conclusion is hard to escape that “whatever it is or isn’t, it is not a plain-and-simple flesh-and-blood creature”.

I get in the 1930s newspaper quotes, a rather delightful “feel” of how back then, journalism was more naïve and less subtle. Raw sensationalism runs riot – “They are things of horror, dwelling in caves, on the borders of lakes and in mountain fast...”; “Students hunt ‘horrible, Hairy Giant Baby-snatcher’...”. Our friend J.W. Burns, originator of the word “sasquatch”, shows up in the article; he is quoted as saying in 1938, that the creatures are / were timid and harmless. One wonders how he came to that opinion, in the face of many Native Americans considering “Sassy” to be anything but... certainly, the general picture seen nowadays – with a few dissenting voices – seems to be of MHB being un-keen on hom.sap.sap., but overwhelmingly, refraining from actual physical violence against them; even in the case of huge MHB who could, with ease, take a puny human apart.

Off-topic; but, again, newspapers in a different age, and “period” atmosphere – quoted describing the 1938 “Sasquatch festival” mounted by the Native Americans: “the celebration ...will see braves, squaws and papooses living again as their ancestors did before white men came”. Such terms and tone used by the media nowadays, would set off very great outrage...
 
Our friend J.W. Burns, originator of the word “sasquatch”, shows up in the article; he is quoted as saying in 1938, that the creatures are / were timid and harmless.

Are there any ape references at this time or were they, specifically Burns, talking about giant men.
 
As they say, "ask me another". Our friend from the "deep-sixed" BigfootForums archive, with his voluminous collection of press cuttings, could likely shed light; but said collection is at present not to be had -- and likely, never again.
 
Adding to my last, of the 26th: all the magazine's quoted 1930s news pieces refer, directly or by implication, to giant / big / wild men -- no mention of apes (generically, or individual species). Burns, in his "mild / harmless" speculation, is quoted: "[indication of] the actual existence of some primitive race".
 
I find this really significant. If even the word Sasquatch, as I assume from your response, doesn't refer to a giant ape but a giant man then what are we left with in terms of a tradition of what the mainstream flesh and blood bigfooters rely on for support.
 
I concur. There's not actually a huge amount of material in the FT article -- it's just two pages -- but no "ape" stuff among any of what's quoted therein. Indeed, a "disconnect" with recent times' mainstream re the subject.
 
Regarding the mainstream there seems to be a lot of fuss going on at the moment about some DNA results. It sounds like a scam to me but I wonder if anyone else here has heard anything about it.
 
The DNA-results matter -- talked-about to exhaustion -- in scores of thousands of lines of text -- on the site BigfootForums, over the past year or so, and ongoingly. Strikes me as a case of Macbeth-type “sound and fury”, over little of any substance – a huge amount of wildly complicated and acrimonious infighting and personal conflicts, between numerous American Bigfooters (a category of people who seem very prone to such).

If the business is even possible to summarise: Dr. Melba Ketchum, a US citizen and resident – a veterinary surgeon who owns her own DNA testing facility – supposedly has Bigfoot bodily material from more than one source in North America; is supposedly performing DNA analysis on this, results to be published in a paper which she will submit for peer review, which thought likely to produce, ultimately, pretty breathtaking results. All this supposedly happening in great secrecy, with all parties involved bound by solemn agreements to disclose nothing. The odd small “leak” has tended to suggest that results, when finally out, will show BF as being taxonomically (if that’s the right term) a lot closer to human, than hitherto generally thought the case.

As so often in this field, frustration and disappointment have seemed to predominate. Dr. Ketchum was expected, for months “prior-to”, to be making on Oct. 1st this year, a speech at a BF conference, delivering stellar news; in fact, shortly beforehand, her speech and appearance were cancelled, for vague “professional reasons”. Seemingly, little heard from her since. Many people in the fancy are now coming round to a “we’ll believe it when we see it” attitude.

Dr. K.’s material to work on, allegedly comes from a couple of sites (details of which, shrouded in mystery) where habituation of Bigfoot is supposedly going on; and, according to some (vigorously denied by others), includes “product” from an incident in late 2010 in the mountains on the California / Nevada border, where a chap allegedly shot dead two Bigfoot – an adult female and a juvenile – but only one small scrap of “body” was retrieved.

The whole on-line voluminous and endlessly-going-on furore over all this business, is such as to incline one to sympathise with the view often expressed by hardline sceptics and debunkers – “all these Bigfooters are nuts, and pathologically addicted to squabbling even beyond the human norm.”
 
includes “product” from an incident in late 2010 in the mountains on the California / Nevada border, where a chap allegedly shot dead two Bigfoot – an adult female and a juvenile – but only one small scrap of “body” was retrieved.

That wouldn't be the 'Sierra Kills' incident would it? There is a photo supposedly showing one of the bodies somewhere, it's of a bear but someone has put a rag over it's genitals either through puritan sensibilities or to make the legs look longer.

I came across the whole thing through this article;

http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2011 ... r-21-2011/
 
"Sierra Kills / Sierra Shootings" -- that's it... the whole thing strikes me as as phony as the proverbial nine-bob note -- but in these matters, one's gut instinct is not automatically and necessarily right... the Robert Lindsay bloke, to whose blog you link, is mostly seen in US Bigfootery, as an extremely loose cannon, with his own agenda and little or no regard for what most people see as the truth. This is, however, a very strange scene -- I keep in mind the well-under-1% possibility, that the very-least-likely scenarios might perhaps be at least partially true...
 
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