Finding Bigfoot Wants Your Skamania and Klickitat County Bigfoot Stories!!!

Skamania County Postcard designed by Guy Edwards

The producers of Animal Planet's popular TV show Finding Bigfoot are planning a town hall in Washington State and they want YOUR stories! As you may know Skamania County is the first local government to acknowledge and sign laws to protect Sasquatch. Read the ordinances protecting Bigfoot. 

Now YOU can be a part of that continued history by contacting Finding Bigfoot with your own Skamania and Klickitat County encounter(s). Read the Press Release below and contact Finding Bigfoot!:

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Animal Planet’s hit show “Finding Bigfoot” is coming to Skamania and Klickitat counties! Skamania county is one of the ‘squatchiest’ places in the world and the “Finding Bigfoot” investigative team; Matt Moneymaker, Cliff Barakman, James “Bobo” Fey and Ranae Holland; are coming to listen to the  stories, examine the evidence and determine once and for all if Bigfoot really calls the Northwest home!

The team is looking for YOUR stories of encounters with Sasquatch in Skamania, Klickitat or surrounding areas. Sightings? Strange noises? Tracks? Wood knocks? We want to hear it all! Tell us your Bigfoot story and you may be invited to share it with the team at our Washington town hall on Wednesday, August 7 2013.

If you have a Sasquatch story and would like to attend our town hall meeting on August 7, email

findingbigfoot.northwest@gmail.com

Keep it squatchy everyone!

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Linquists Battle Over Bigfoot Language

Does Bigfoot have defined phonemes? Phonemes are distinct units of sound, like vowel sounds. 

"The vocalizations are an amateur impression of how a proto-language might sound if it evolved from non-human primates" -- Karen Stollznow of Scientific American on the Morehead/Berry tapes.

We are NOT big fans of lazy skeptics. Good skeptics on the other hand are healthy for our research. Ones that have held our feet to the fire are Sharon Hill of Doubtful News and a Huffington Post contributor and Brian Dunning of Skeptoid. Skeptics, in my opinion, are just like witches in OZ, there are good ones and bad ones.

We are not quite sure what category Scientific America's Karen Stollznow. Ms. Stollznow has  Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of New England and seems to be critical of Scott Nelson's credentials. To catch you up, Scott Nelson retired from the Navy after a 17-year career as a crypto-linguist, intercepting Russian communications and decoding them. While his son was listening to the Morehead and Berry Bigfoot audio recordings (a/k/a Sierra Sounds) he detected patterns and perhaps even language.

After Karen introduces the general public on types of Sasquatch evidence she dives right into the possibility of Bigfoot language and the Morehead/Berry Tapes:

A fascinating category of evidence involves claims of a Bigfoot language. Eyewitnesses report hearing howls, whoops, growls, screams, mumbles, whistles and other strange vocalizations in the wild, and attribute these to Bigfoot. Variant forms of Bigfoot are found across cultures, and the Sasquatch, Himalayan Yeti, Australian Yowie and other alleged creatures are similarly believed to produce vocalizations. Other Bigfoot communication includes the mimicry of wildlife and forest sounds, wood-knocking, rock-knocking and rock-throwing. Bigfoot is also thought to form patterns with sticks and rocks as a kind of writing system. In wilder claims about wild men, Bigfoot are believed to have the ability to communicate telepathically, and use their large feet to send infra-sound communication over long distances. Bigfoot are also claimed to speak and understand human languages, and to have their own Bigfoot language.

There is little evidence to support these claims, other than the anecdotal kind. The Sierra Sound recordings, also known as the Berry/Morehead tapes, are touted as the gold-standard of evidence for a Bigfoot language. During a number of expeditions to the Sierra Nevada Mountains between the years 1972-1975, Alan Berry, Ronald Morehead and their crew captured audio recordings of alleged Bigfoot encounters. They recorded a total of 90 minutes of Bigfoot language and vocalizations using a microphone dangled from a tree branch attached to a reel-to-reel recorder. Over the years they also found 18-inch footprints of Bigfoot, and experienced many sightings…just not during the recordings!

Morehead and Berry (until his death in 2012) staunchly deny that the recordings are a prank. However, for a number of reasons, it is highly probable that the recordings are a hoax, or that the crew were hoaxed. The expeditions were undertaken specifically to hunt for Bigfoot. “Bigfoot” was heard but never seen when the recordings were made. It is obvious that other animals made some of the sounds, such as bears. The wood knocks are easy to re-create, while the “language” itself is unconvincing. The vocalizations are an amateur impression of how a proto-language might sound if it evolved from non-human primates. This “Bigfoot” is likely human, and the Sierra Sounds a combination of hoax and misidentification, like all of the other evidence for Bigfoot.

Sounds like she has already reached a conclusion. What is unfortunate is we were hoping her critique would come more from a linguist perspective, but her conclusion, as you will read below,  is that looking into Bigfoot language is putting the cart before the horse. She thinks we should be looking for a body first. Not only is this a disappointment, because it would have been great to get another linguist's perspective, but it  also a flawed argument. If this was the prevailing logic we would have never tried to decipher the cuneiform text left on clay tablets by the Sumerians.

Here is her non-linguistic based argument:

Self –proclaimed “Bigfoot language expert” R. Scott Nelson has taken the Bigfoot language claims one-step further. As though it is the Linear B of Bigfoot language to be deciphered, Nelson has created a transcription of the Sierra Sound Recordings. He is a retired U.S. Navy Cryptologic Technician Interpreter who speaks Russian, Spanish and Persian. He also believes he can speak “Bigfoot”.

Nelson claims he has identified not only vocalizations such as whistles, grunts, and snarls, but also individual phonemes, i.e., the sounds that combine to create words. Nelson has created a pronunciation key for these phonemes, and he uses the Latin alphabet, diacritics and various other symbols to represent these sounds. He calls this the Sasquatch Phonetic Alphabet (SPA), or the Unclassified Hominid Phonetic Alphabet (UHPA). It is unclear why he doesn’t use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language.

Bilingualism (speaking two or more languages) and working as a translator doesn’t qualify someone to identify or describe undocumented languages. This is an area of anthropological linguistics, although it appears as if many cryptozoological fans confuse “crypto-linguistics” as a field that researches the language of cryptids. The Sierra Sounds are used not only to support the claim of a Bigfoot language, but also to legitimize claims of Bigfoot’s existence. As Nelson argues, “The existence of the Sasquatch Being is hereby assumed, since any creature must exist before his language.” However, there are still prior questions. Does Bigfoot exist, and if so, could Bigfoot speak?

For arguments sake, if Bigfoot did exist, the species would likely have developed its own system of communication, like chimpanzees and Vervet monkeys. Similar to the claims of the (so far mythical) Orang-Pendek, Bigfoot would probably communicate using vocalizations. However, non-human primates don’t have the physiology to produce a wide variety of speech sounds, so it is unlikely that Bigfoot would have developed language, or would be able to speak existing human languages. At any rate, this is all starting off on the wrong (Big)foot. There is no solid physical evidence to support the existence of Bigfoot. Before we establish the existence of Bigfoot language, we would need to establish the existence of Bigfoot.

You can read her full article at the Scientific American Blog

TV Critic Questions Joe Rogan for Questioning Bigfoot

Wednesday Night (07.24.2013) Joe Rogan Debuts "Joe Rogan Questions Everything" on the SyFy Network.

"...Joe Rogan, host of a new Syfy show, “Joe Rogan Questions Everything,” hasn’t changed my opinion one bit." --Linda Stasi, TV Critic for the New York Post

Tomorrow night  (07.24.2013) Joe Rogan will debut his new series on the SyFy channel. You can read our earlier post "Joe Rogan Investigates Bigfoot on new SyFy show" to read our previous coverage. Even though the show does not air until later tonight, the first review is in. The review seems look-warm based more on whether or not Linda Stasi, the TV critic, thinks Bigfoot is real.

Here is how she starts her column:

Let me be the first to confirm: There is no such thing as Sasquatch — aka, Big Foot. And Joe Rogan, host of a new Syfy show, “Joe Rogan Questions Everything,” hasn’t changed my opinion one bit. Not that he wanted to.

This despite the DNA-filled animal poop that curious Joe brings scientists to study on the first episode of this new series. What he wants to know is why there is no photographic evidence of the elusive missing link. So do I!

He’s right to ask, but the problem is that Rogan (a funny urban myth investigator) is asking the wrong question.

The real question should be how is it possible that there isn’t photographic evidence?

Fact is, a human man — whether he be whole or half- human — cannot live without public displays of nudity, no matter how risky the behavior.

Linda Stasi compares how pervasive photos of Anthony Weiner and Geraldo Rivera are. As if photos in the wilderness of Bigfoot are comparable to politicians and celebrities proactively tweeting pics of themselves. I think Bigfoot would have better things to do with a smart phone, like decapitate squirrels, or play Candy Crush.

Ms. Stasi finishes off with questioning if Bigfoot is the proper theme for a a premier episode:

Another question worth asking is why Rogan, who questions everything, didn’t question the wisdom of devoting his premiere episode to the search for Big Foot — when in fact, just last month, the dopey hillbillies on “Mountain Monsters” also went lucklessly a-searchin’ for Sasquatch.

We know from the promos that Rogan has much more interesting questions to solve, such as if there’s is life in the universe. If I’m going to take anyone’s word on these questions, it would definitely be Rogan who has a podcast and a gig hosting UFC.


Look — I like Rogan (please don’t send me a pen). He’s got a good way about him. He’s not a slick reality-show host nor a serious PBS egghead. But I’m not sure that I would watch more. He says he’s not here to convince us of anything, which is good, but that might mean that all episodes end up where they started. Is Big Foot ready for his closeup, Mr. DeMille?

Read the New York Post article