All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Jan. 1, 2019 - Skeptoid
15:46
Skeptoid #656: And Bigfoot Said...

We compare vocalizations attributed to Bigfoot with the sounds of real animals known to be in the area. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Is Bigfoot Real 00:02:13
If you happen to know any true believers in Bigfoot and can engage them in conversation about the evidence for such a fantastical creature, one thing you might get is the fact that quite a few audio recordings purport to be of the elusive beastie's calls in the wild.
Today, we're going to listen to some of these and see if we too are forced to conclude that the reality of Bigfoot is indeed the best-fitting explanation.
That's all coming up next on Skeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief.
And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way.
And now we're even offering a little bit more.
If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid.
The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content.
These episodes are a few minutes longer.
We get rid of the ads and replace them with more Skeptoid.
The extended premium show available now.
Come to skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
And Bigfoot said, Today, we're going to head out into the deep dark woods of the Pacific Northwest, legendary home of a great hulking bipedal ape, the Sasquatch.
Known to us only by anecdotal accounts, Bigfoot, as we more commonly call it, is said to be fond of making vocalizations, whistles, screams, and grunts.
Many a Bigfoot hunter has made recordings, and today we're going to listen to some of the best regarded of these and compare them to known sounds.
The Problem with Sierra Sounds 00:04:36
Will any of them stand up to scrutiny?
Well, we'll see.
Without further ado, we'll get right to what you most want to hear.
This is one of the most classic and best-known recordings, a sort of long-drawn-out howl said to have been recorded in Ohio in 1994.
Another really famous recording is this whoop.
Many of them follow this theme of high whistling or drawn-out howls, like this one claimed to be from 1972 in Estacada, Oregon.
Sometimes it's a series of short screams that seem to sound a lot like primates, like these.
As interesting as these clips are, it turns out that the field of Bigfoot vocalizations is completely dominated by one particular set of recordings that garner the majority of the attention and monopolize the literature.
They are regarded by Bigfoot believers as top-notch evidence and dismissed by scientists as among the very least plausible.
They are called the Sierra Sounds, available for purchase on two albums.
They are claimed to have been recorded over the space of three years in the 1970s from inside a single blind in a secret location in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains by two guys named Alan Berry and Ronald Moorhead.
The recordings comprise about 90 minutes of high-quality audio, much of it like this.
The story itself is wildly implausible.
Over three years of trips to their secret blind, while that activity was happening just a few feet away, every time they visited, it never once occurred to Barry and Moorhead to pull aside the tent flap and take a photograph.
The explanation they offered is that it was hard to see out.
To believe in the authenticity of their recordings is to believe that they were simultaneously the luckiest Bigfoot hunters ever and the least competent.
Nevertheless, many Bigfoot believers embraced the tapes wholeheartedly, some even having done linguistic analysis and claiming to have deciphered a Bigfoot language from them, most notably the Navy translator and self-described Bigfoot language expert R. Scott Nelson.
Although many non-linguist Bigfoot believers speak in glowing terms of their colleagues' self-published papers discussing his Bigfoot language, actual linguists remain unpersuaded.
Dr. Karen Stolznow wrote in Scientific American in 2013: 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 cryptolinguistics as a field that researches the language of cryptids.
She concluded that these language-sounding parts of the Sierra Sounds recordings, which are often called samurai chattering, were likely human-made hoaxes, and at least one YouTuber demonstrated his own replication of them.
But the real problem is not that the samurai chattering can be so easily hoaxed, it's that they are so radically unlike any other alleged Bigfoot recordings.
Also writing in Scientific American, vertebrate paleontologist Darren Nash said, These sounds sound nothing at all like the others that have been reported and recorded, and have only been heard exclusively in one small area.
Hoaxes vs Known Animals 00:06:53
This disparity is the largest problem with the field of Bigfoot vocalizations as a whole.
The sounds are wildly diverse, much too diverse, in fact, to represent a single creature.
Real animal species produce a consistent, homogeneous range of vocalizations.
Speaking of all the alleged Bigfoot recordings as a whole, Nash continued, What's notable is that these vocalizations are phenomenally diverse.
The Ohio howls, samurai chatter, the whoops, whistles, growls, and howls attributed to this animal well exceed what we'd expect for a single animal species that communicates over long distances.
And there's nothing approaching homogeneity of the sort present across known primate species.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finish the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
It turns out there's a very good reason for the diversity of the recordings.
They are all made by different animals.
For as it turns out, very few of the alleged Bigfoot recordings are unknown to those familiar with wildlife sounds.
Just as one introductory example, think back to that whoop sound and see how it compares to a common loon, a bird active at night.
Or that famous Ohio howl.
Compare it to this pair of timber wolves.
Now it's noteworthy that the vast majority of these long howl sounds available online are of terrible quality.
One possible explanation is that the clearer the recording is, the easier it is to identify as a known non-Bigfoot species of animal.
So the ones that remain as claimed Bigfoot recordings typically sound like this.
I've found everything from owls to bobcats to foxes to marmots that can be made to sound like that given enough echo and distortion.
So there's hardly any point trying to match it up.
But here's a fox that's similar.
And for every recording of a known animal you find, you have to remember that it's just one call from one specimen.
And all animals have many different types of calls and variations.
Remember the alleged Bigfoot sound that was a bunch of short, high-pitched monkey-sounding barts?
Give a quick comparison to this compilation of fox sounds.
Foxes are one of the real champions of vocalization, able to sound like virtually anything you can think of.
Lynxes have an uncanny ability to sound like two people yelling at each other.
But if I was going to make a Bigfoot sound, I would look no farther than the wild boar.
Or the black bear.
And for that famous whistling scream so often reported as a Bigfoot, I would turn first to the barred owl.
Really, the lesson here is best summarized by the famous saying attributed to Dr. Theodore Woodward.
When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.
It's smart advice.
The probable explanation is always a better bet than the improbable one.
If you hear an unearthly howl in the woods at night, is it possible that you're not personally familiar with the entirety of the range of coyote and wolf howls?
Or are you forced to conclude that an unknown giant hairy monster must exist?
And by the same token, when you hear that strange sound, did you truly rule out all the possible vocalizations of elk, marmots, foxes, and owls?
Could there be known animals up there you're not too familiar with?
All too often, cryptid fans make the failed leap of logic, I don't know what that is, therefore I do know and it's Bigfoot.
In fact, it's no more likely to be Bigfoot than it is the psychic projection of an alien living inside the hollow earth, which is equally improbable.
That they don't go to that explanation instead reveals that their thinking is not unbiased.
If Bigfoot is out there, and so far we've no compelling reason to think he might be, he will likely be hard to miss.
Why Skepticism Matters 00:02:00
If and when we do make that determination, the evidence will likely be a little stronger than some audio tapes of unproven origin that are half a century old.
A big shout out to Skeptoid Premium supporters Bruno Van de Castile, Chip Taylor, Doug Forsyth, and Phil Lisa and Tyler Williams.
To get the full references for this and every other Skeptoid episode, always be sure to check its transcript page at skeptoid.com.
It's also easy to share the episode links with the Bigfoot audio clips from this show.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello everyone, this is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile non-profit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From P R X
Export Selection