Just 'cause we haven't found anything yet....

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

I've head that a lot from believers when it comes to discussing whether bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, or any other cryptozoological creature exists. "Just 'cause we haven't found anything yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist". True. However, this doesn't mean that it does exist.

What we need to do is ask the individual who is making the claim to lay out their evidence. And we should start with the idea that their claim is false. Why? Because it is the default position. Before I made the claim, the claim didn't exist. For example, if I make a claim that there is a polar bear living in my house, you should start off with the assumption that I don't and not believe my claim. (In general conversations this form of questioning would piss people off if you did it for every claim they made. For instance, if I said that there is a cat in my house, you would probably accept it. But if an extraordinary claim was made, I reckon that's when it's OK.)

OK. Once the claim is made, let them bring forward their evidence. Now the more extraordinary the claim, the better the evidence should be. And, this is crucial, we should look at all possible explanations. Then after looking at the evidence we should say which explanation is the most likely based on what we already know.

We should have an evidence meter.

And it should start in the grey section down the bottom, meaning no evidence.

For bigfoot, the Patterson-Gimlin film is put forward as evidence.



Now we ask ourselves, is that really bigfoot, or is the most likely explanation "a guy in a suit". Well, Greg Long researched this by interviewing the people in the town where Patterson lived and found that Bob Heironimus claimed he was the guy in the suit. Other townsfolk said that they had seen the suit and that everyone in the town at the time knew it was a hoax.

OK. Let's see which claim (it is truly bigfoot, it is a guy in a suit) is the most likely. We should start with the null claim. That it's a guy in a suit. Then look for signs that rules this out emphatically. And I mean complete rules this out. First let us look at the video but this time remove the shakiness by using modern stabilisation techniques.



Looks like a man walking in a suit to me. But what about Bob's claim that it was him.



Is it possible that it was Bob in a suit? Yes. What is the most likely explanation? Guy in suit. Why? Because we know of previous occasions when people have dressed up in animal suits. Fancy dress parties, gorilla grams, etc. There is no extraordinary evidence in this footage to make us change our minds. In fact when the townsfolk first saw the film, they said that it was Bob. That's how Bob walked, they said.

But that doesn't mean that Bigfoot doesn't exist. Remember "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But this is not always true. I'll look into this next post.