Charity Event with Cliff Barackman and Bobo in Portland, OR

Meet Cliff and Bobo in person! Click image to enlarge

Save the date!!! This Wednesday, August 14th 2013 you can meet cast members of the hit show ‘Finding Bigfoot’! Cliff Barackman and James “Bobo” Fay will be on hand to sign autographs and talk Squatch!

WHAT: Sippin’ with Sasquatch featuring Cliff Barackman and James “Bobo” Fay!

WHERE: Barlow Tavern 6008 N. Greeley Ave. Portland, OR 97217

WHEN: Wednesday, August 14 2013 at 7:30pm. Doors open at 6:30pm.

COST: $10 Cover. 100% of the proceeds raised by the door charge go to benefit the Animal Shelter 

Alliance of Portland

SPONSORED BY: The Barlow Tavern, Batch 206 Distillery’s ‘Counter Gin’, Olympia Beer, Drink Think and Missing Link Toys.

RESTRICTIONS: 21 years of age and older only. ID required.

Come enjoy a fun-filled evening with the cast members of the hit show ‘Finding Bigfoot’! Cliff Barackman and James “Bobo” Faey will be on hand to sign autographs, take pictures and discuss all things sasquatch. The Barlow Tavern will have Bigfoot themed drink and food specials on hand and Lady She Buckaroo will be spinning hits on the turntables. There may even be a special guest or two! This is a great opportunity for fans of the show or Bigfoot to meet with the cast in an intimate, informal setting.

100% of the money raised through the cover charge will be donated to the Animal Shelter Alliance of 

Portland. The Animal Shelter Alliance of Portland provides low cost spay and neutering services to 

Portland residents, promotes animal welfare, responsible pet ownership and reduces the amount of 

abandoned or unwanted cats and dogs.

This event is sponsored by generous contributions from the Barlow Tavern, Batch 206 Distillery, Olympia Beer and Drink Think. 

www.batch206.com

www.olympiabigfoot.com

www.facebook.com/drinkthinkpdx

www.missinglinktoys.com

Space is limited and the event is anticipated to sell out. Tickets MAY NOT be purchased in advance. 

Guests will be admitted on a first come, first served basis and it is strongly recommended that guests 

arrive early. Ticket sales and doors open at 6:30pm. There is no early admittance. This event is not affiliated with Animal Planet, Discovery Networks or any of their subsidiaries.

For event inquiries and vendor information, contact Molly Wolfe at mollyawolfepdx@gmail.com or 

206.850.5309

Abominable Science! A Skeptical and Slightly Sympathic Approach to Cryptzoology

Abominible Science is being described as skeptical and empathetic towards cryptozoology

“Scientists are not inherently negative sourpusses who want to rain on everyone else’s parade.” --  Donald R. Prothero; Co-author of Abominable Science

The book is self-described by the publishers as:

Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero have written an entertaining, educational, and definitive text on cryptids, presenting the arguments both for and against their existence and systematically challenging the pseudoscience that perpetuates their myths. After examining the nature of science and pseudoscience and their relation to cryptozoology, Loxton and Prothero take on Bigfoot; the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, and its cross-cultural incarnations; the Loch Ness monster and its highly publicized sightings; the evolution of the Great Sea Serpent; and Mokele Mbembe, or the Congo dinosaur. They conclude with an analysis of the psychology behind the persistent belief in paranormal phenomena, identifying the major players in cryptozoology, discussing the character of its subculture, and considering the challenge it poses to clear and critical thinking in our increasingly complex world.

You can read an excerpt from a LosAngeles Magazine review below:

Both researchers approach the book from a skeptic’s point of view but they’re not quick to dismiss claims that these creatures could exist. Both have been hooked on the topic since childhood and as Prothero writes, “Scientists are not inherently negative sourpusses who want to rain on everyone else’s parade.” Though the book sometimes gets bogged down in details, the authors retain a childlike enthusiasm toward the topic. Here are the origin stories for three of the legendary beasts in the book:

Bigfoot: Most people imagine an ape-like creature that stands on two legs, but the original story of Bigfoot describes the creature quite differently. The first “sightings” of Bigfoot in North America occurred in the 1920s. A man named John W. Burns gathered reports from people of their encounters with a creature called Sasquatch, described as hairy giants who looked like giant Native Americans. They had clothes, fire, and weapons and lived in villages. And their hair? According to the stories it was not all over their bodies but worn very long.

The Yetti: Also referred to as the Abominable Snowman, the creature got its name from a team of explorers scouting a route for an attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1921. The team saw tracks that looked like a human foot. Though Lieutenant Colonel Charles Howard-Bury, the leader of the expedition, surmised that the footprints were caused by a large grey wolf, his Sherpa guides said that it was the tracks of a wild man whose kind were found in remote mountains. The first recorded sighting of a beast that fit the description of a Yetti happened more than 180 years ago when Brian Hodgson, an English explorer living in Nepal named, wrote that his shooters were alarmed by a wild man. However in the paper, which was published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, he also wrote that he doubted their accuracy.

SRC: LAMag.com

While we haven't read it, you can bet the Skeptics like it. Some Amazon.com reviewers felt, "The authors treat figures in the field of cryptozoology with perhaps more empathy and respect than they deserve, and there is generally a studied avoidance of the (understandable) temptation to intellectually skewer some of these folks."

Really? The authors were too soft on Cryptozoologist? Bill Munns left a review on Amazon.com. We were able to confirm it is, indeed, Bill Munns, the creature FX expert and author of the Munns Report chronicling his extensive research of the Patterson/Gimlin film. In his review he felt there was a clear bias and, "[Daniel Loxton] humiliates the scientific process and journalistic professionalism alike."

Read a portion of his review below:

This book entitled "Abominable Science" achieves a level of scientific and journalistic hypocrisy that warrants the publisher recalling the book. The reason is that one of the co-authors, Daniel Loxton, has written a fairly substantial portion of this book practicing the very "abominable science" the book proportedly sets out to expose. In other words, he has demonstrated a journalistic or scientific hypocrisy that is either grossly negligent, grossly incompetent, or so blatantly biased that he humiliates the scientific process and journalistic professionalism alike.

In Chapter One, Co-Author Donald Prothero describes very admirably and meticulously what is good science and what is not. Sadly, in Chapter Two, Co-Author Loxton proceeds to evaluate the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin "Bigfoot" film from page 44-50 and Mr. Loxton does nearly everything that his co-author has just explained to us that we cannot rely upon. Co-Author Loxton is discussing a topic in which there is a wealth of fine empirical data and a equally voluminous heap of poor anecdotal evidence and the author totally dismisses the fine empirical data with absolutely no justifiable explanation, and wallows in the poor anecdotal evidence instead as if it were splendidly scientific. The author also looks to material nine or more years outdated, and demonstrates virtually no awareness of new research, data, developments, or shifts of the landscape of the controversy more recently than 9 years ago, when there has been tremendous new material and analysis work worthy of his evaluation. This is intolerable and unconscionable in a work proportedly to be educating the public about good science.

While my criticism focuses on Mr. Loxton's segment of the book focused on the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin Film, we must wonder if that travesty of hypocritical fodder is an isolated moment of scientific dementia or is it the tip of a much larger iceberg of unscientific and heavily biased writing throughout his half of the book's authorship. When a write "cooks" a story with disregard for facts and academic responsibility or journalistic fairness and accuracy, that incident generally casts a profound suspicion over the entire body of the writer's work. Thus, while I focus this concern on one section, the concern may put a serious cloud over the book in general.

Read Bill Munns full review

Scientific American's Tetrapod Hosts Speculate on the Yeti

Himalayan Yeti in summer pelt, surrounded by flowering rhododendron.
Image by John Conway, from the forthcoming Cryptozoologicon.

All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals was a successful book written created by palaeozoologist Darren Naish, and palaeontological artists John
Conway and C.M. Kosemen. Mr. Naish and Mr. Conway host Scientific American's Tetrapod Zoology Podcast.

They will soon release a book in the same flavor as All Yesterdays, but with a cryptozoological theme titled Cryptozoologicon. Earlier today (08.04.2013), Scientific American's Tetrapod Zoology Blog posted presented a preview of Yeti section of Cryptozoologican.

It starts out great distinguishing that the white-furred-blue-skin yeti is more of a Hollywood conception:

The Yeti is easily one of the most famous of mystery creatures. The Yeti of the cryptozoological literature is not the shaggy-furred, white snowbeast of Hollywood movies and popular artwork. Instead, it’s a blackish, dark brown, or red-brown animal of the sub-temperate and temperate forests and mountainsides of the Himalayan Mountains and Tibetan Plateau, predominantly bipedal and 3 m or so in height (though, to be fair, white Yetis have supposedly been reported from Tibet). Eyewitness and mythological accounts believed to describe the Yeti come from such countries as Russia, China, Nepal, Tibet and India. Across this large area, a variety of different local names are believed by cryptozoologists to describe the same creature (Shackley 1983). However, there is much variation in the size, form and behaviour of the hairy ape-men described across this area by witnesses and known from lore, so one interpretation favoured by some cryptozoologists is that there are actually two kinds of yeti, or that we’re actually seeing references to a huge cast of unknown hominids that range from shaggy, orangutan-like species to surviving Dryopithecus-like species, australopithecines, Neanderthals, members of Homo erectus and others (Heuvelmans 1986, Coleman & Huyghe 1999).

Although they ultimately conclude the Yeti as, "an amalgamation of fleeting glimpses of known animals (including bears, takin and serows) with both the universal wildman archetype and with local Asian lore about humanesque, mountain-dwelling demons.." This does not stop the palaeo-power team to serious speculate on (from their perspective), "What if the Yeti were real?"

Most of the speculations we might make about the Yeti (if we assume it to be a real animal) have already been made in the extensive cryptozoological literature on it. Heuvelmans (1958) gave the Yeti the suggested scientific name Dinanthropoides nivalis and proposed that giant size evolved within a lineage of arboreal Asian apes, that the members of this lineage came down to the ground, and that specialisation for life in mountainous, snowy places encouraged them to become bipedal. He implied a close link between the Yeti and Gigantopithecus but did not think that these apes were close to orangutans. This scenario would require that Yeti bipedalism evolved independently from that seen in humans and other hominids, and it’s contradicted by evidence indicating that hominid bipedalism first evolved in an arboreal setting, later being improved by those lineages that took to increased terrestrial life (see the Orang-pendek section, pp. 13-15).

While some authors have implied or argued that the Yeti and Sasquatch are members of the human lineage, we prefer the view that these are bipedal pongines, convergently similar to hominins in some ways but different with respect to the details of anatomy, gait and behaviour. Indeed, Yeti sightings create the impression of a hominid not all that different from the paranthropines, the more robust of the extinct, African australopithecines. Dinanthropoides walks bipedally with slightly bent knees, its body leaning more forwards than is the case in our species, and its long arms reaching down to its knees. Its resting poses more recall those of orangutans and gorillas than humans, and it can even move quadrupedally when scrambling up hillside and among large rocks. Its feet are only superficially human-like, the enlarged, only semi-divergent hallux and broad heel representing strong terrestrial specialisation in a primate that started its terrestrial career with a typical hominid foot like that of orangutans.

Yetis are not reported to use tools; however, this may be due to a lack of detailed observation. We know today that orangutans, gorillas and chimps all use tools in the wild: these behaviours went unknown for decades and (in most populations) only occur rarely. A strong jaw and massive, strong teeth make Dinanthropoides an expert at breaking fruits and nuts (Tchernine 1974). As a hominid adapted for temperate, often cool, habitats, Dinanthropoides is able to deal with warm summer conditions as well as far cooler, winter ones thanks to seasonal changes in the length and thickness of its pelt, though these changes don’t happen across all Yeti populations. Our Himalayan Yetis are in their thinner, reddish summer coats (the scene depicts a time several decades in the past, when the Himalayas were more extensively covered by snow and ice than they are today).

If only more people were prepared to accept the reality of the Yeti, Sasquatch and Orang-pendek, they would realise that the supposed differences between humans and other great apes merely reflect the fact that the ‘intermediate’ taxa are extinct or scientifically unrecognised. Yet again blinkered, hidebound establishment Ivory Tower scientists, more interested in sitting behind their computers than searching the world for real animals, are holding back scientific progress!!!!!!! THEY WILL BE SHOWN WRONG IN THE END!!!

The Cryptozoologicon – by John Conway, C. M. Kosemen and Darren Naish – is due out later in 2013 and will be published by Irregular Books. Follow @IrregularBooks on twitter.

Read more from Scientific American's Tetrapod Zoology Blog