Enlightning Bolts – January 14, 2010

I always end up with a bunch of items that I want to blog about but run out of time, so rather than just letting them fall to the wayside I’m going to start posting them all with my brief comments on a semi-regular basis.

I’m dubbing them Enlightning Bolts…Cheese-tastic!

Pat Robertson blames the Haitians for the tragic earthquake on TV, but the weird part is that the woman standing next to him doesn’t slap him for his despicable remarks. The Haitian ambassador responds perfectly. Why he should have to handle such thoughtless and hurtful remarks during such a hard time disgusts me. Shame on you, Pat Robertson.

The newest Bigfoot “evidence”: a dark figure appears in an IMAX film, nobody knows what it is, therefore Bigfoot.

Wyatt Cenac totally pwns some anti-gay marriage protesters in New Jersey: “It was just as our forefathers had envisioned. That one day, people who had been descriminated against for their religion or the colour of their skin, could come together to discriminate against people for their sexual orientation, without the slightest sense of irony.” (Canadians can watch here, sorry if you’re in the US, you’ll have to go to Comedy Central and look for the January 12th episode).

If you’re on Twitter, you should be following @lowflyingrocks, it’s fun with a tiny bit of terrifying! Yesterday, Astroid AL30 missed us by 135,000kms…that’s closer to us than the moon!

Phil Plait posted some jaw-dropping pictures of Mars (above right).

This website talks about why God is Imaginary. I like proofs 17 (Think About Leprechauns) and 48 (Compare prayer to a lucky horseshoe) best. (Thanks to misunderstoodranter for the link!) If you like that, you’ll love this. I like 50, 123, 376, bah they’re all good!

[If you have any items you’d like me to put in the next Enlightning Bolts, send them to me through the contact form or via Twitter @EnlightningLinZ]

Wham, Bigfoot Hit By Car

I love reading letters to the editor. When I get the paper I usually just flip straight to the letters. I even send one in from time to time. I have some wacky Google Alerts set up, so on occasion I get a funny letter to the editor sent to my inbox. I love the one I got today, from The Bemidji Pioneer:

No cougars in Minnesota. That’s what the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has told us for years. Then wham, “Cougar hit by car on Carr Lake Road.”

What will the DNR tell us next? No bigfoot in Minnesota? Next headline “Bigfoot hit by car on Becida Road.”

Jim Taylor

Park Rapids

What will the DNR tell us next? No fairies in Minnesota? Next headline “Fairy squashed on windshield on 15th.”

                   

Kentucky Bigfoot Photo Debunked

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a so-called Bigfoot photo that had been taken in Kentucky.

I agreed with someone’s idea that it was probably a bird that set off the motion camera, and now this video has been made showing that this is probably the case.

Another Bigfoot Photo

My bullshit detector went off as soon as I saw this story…what a pathetic bit of journalism.

It begins…

A Kentucky man said his surveillance camera captured something in his back yard last week, but no one is sure what it is.

Here’s the picture he captured:

Ok…why is this in the news? It’s a fuzzy black blob, and you can’t tell what it is. The owner of the picture says:

“It looked like it had the outline of a head, and, like, gorilla-type shoulders, and then the arms crossed is what it looks like to me,” Mahoney told WAVE-TV Monday.

Yeah it vaguely resembles that, but gorillas in Kentucky? The story goes on…

Mahoney said he doesn’t think he captured Bigfoot on film. But that doesn’t explain what the camera saw, either. Mahoney said whatever it was smashed down weeds and grass as it passed.

If he doesn’t think that it was a Bigfoot picture, where did the reporter get the idea to put the word “Bigfoot” in the headline?

Where are the pictures of the smashed down weeds and grass?

The story also links to a slideshow of images which are telling. The first image is this one:

And then they keep getting more and more zoomed in (they get more and more blurry). When you see it to scale it’s obviously not big enough to be a gorilla as it barely goes any higher than the low brush.

One commenter on the story suggested that it may be a bird coming in for a landing. I can see this as if you look at the more zoomed in picture above it looks kind of like a bird coming towards and to the right of the camera with its wings folded in front of it. The makes sense to me as the camera is meant to take wildlife photos (according to the article), and a bird is fast-moving enough that it would create a blurry image whereas land animals would be slow enough that he could get a clear picture of them.

The story concludes with this gem:

His wife took the photo to a wildlife expert on black bears, who said that whatever it was, it was fur-covered. But she told Mahoney’s wife that she couldn’t say for sure it was a bear, either.

How anyone can tell that that’s anything fur-covered from such a blurry and far-away image is beyond me. And then of course since they can’t say for sure that it’s a bear, the person writing the headlines decided to go with Bigfoot.

I wonder how many of my fudged up photos I could get published in the newspaper?

There’s even a poll attached to the story…

Come on, WLWT.com, not even an “I don’t know” option?

Bigfoot’s Footprint? Or Pereidolia?

I noticed a cute little fluff piece in my local paper the other day: a man in BC had discovered a rock with an indentation that looks like a footprint:

That’s pretty cool, but I think it might just be a coincidence, a case of pereidolia. There are hills where there should be valleys. The people who found it did the right thing and sent pictures to anthropologists and paleontologists to verify whether or not it is a real fossil.

I didn’t think anything of the story until today when I saw this article in the Calgary Herald, which speculates that it may be Bigfoot’s footprint. What the hell, Calgary Herald?!

1. It hasn’t even been confirmed that this is a real footprint.

2. The guy who found it said his foot fit perfectly in the indentation…if it is a real footprint it’s probably human.

3. Bigfoot? Seriously? Maybe if Bigfoot were found to be real and residing in BC it would be reasonable, but there’s no reason why this reporter should be speculating that this is Bigfoot’s footprint.

A pathetic bit of reporting on what is otherwise a fun story.

Bigfoot and a Critical Thinking Exercise

Martin J Clemens posted a link to his article on the evolution of Bigfoot on a forum I frequent, and I thought it woud be a fun opportunity to exercise my critical thinking skills. I had frequent nightmares about Bigfoot as a kid, so I have to say I had fun picking apart the arguments in this article…Here goes:

Since the presentation of the Patterson Video from October 20th, 1967, Bigfoot mania has swept the globe.  As a cultural phenomenon, or more accurately, an urban legend, Bigfoot’s popularity has skyrocketed, since that cold autumn day, when two business associates, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, happened to encounter what is arguably the most controversial anthropological find of modern science.

I don’t think you can call a film that’s probably a guy in a bigfoot costume anthropological evidence. And maybe it’s controversial in your circle but I doubt many (if any) anthropologists are losing sleep over it.

As possibly the most famous entry in the anthropological category of ‘Cryptid’, the Sasquatch, or more commonly, Bigfoot, has garnered more than its fair share of attention, both from believers and sceptics alike.

Among the sceptical arguments against the existence of this oft-described monster of the woods, is the pseudo-scientific claim that such a creature, if it could have evolved in the first place, could not survive for such a long period of time and remain unknown to modern science.

I don’t think any skeptic would say it’s impossible that this creature exists, I certainly wouldn’t. But people have been looking for it for a long time and no evidence has been found. It’s unlikely that a population of these creatures could have gone undetected for such a long time especially with people actively looking for it. After such a long time without any evidence it’s reasonable to be dismissive of claims that there’s a bigfoot until actual evidence is brought to light.

What I hope to show in this article is the fundamental flaw in the above reasoning, and to demonstrate, through an abstract examination of the currently known ethos of the Sasquatch, that it is not only possible for such a creature to exist and to flourish, but that it may even be likely.  In other words, I hope to debunk the debunkers.

Just because something is possible or even likely doesn’t make it true. Without evidence there’s no reason to think it’s true. The people who debunk bigfoot are simply looking at the evidence and pointing out that it’s not actually evidence for bigfoot.