The Inscrutable Misidentification Argument
Theories on Bigfoot, Part 3.1
Part 3 in the Theories on Bigfoot series quickly turned unwieldy. There will probably be as many as 4 posts under Part 3, this being Part 3.1. I shouldn’t be surprised. There’s much to discuss. What’s more, Part 3 is less about a theory and more a set of propositions or arguments within a general theory on Bigfoot. I have to thank David Daegling for this insight, though I don’t agree with Daegling’s nomenclature. He refers to this general theory on Bigfoot as “explicable entirely by human agency.”1 Basically, he says Bigfoot exists only through human action.
But for many social scientists, the idea of agency grants people the ability to influence their world rather than be powerless. If you have agency, you can control how you interact with the world and create your place within it. Agency implies action and purpose. However, most arguments in Part 3 — other than a piece of the hoaxing argument — put humans into a passive role, subject to limitations in perception and memory or to cultural forces of contemporary myth. So while I appreciate Daegling’s organization of these arguments, I prefer to phrase this theory as “Bigfoot as a residual of human nature.”
I should also clarify that the arguments presented throughout Part 3 are not the exclusive domain of debunkers, though debunkers will confine themselves to these arguments. For proponents of Bigfoot and for true skeptics, these arguments are frequently drawn upon when they fit the evidence. The case of “Sarah” described below is an example where debunkers, true skeptics, and most proponents would agree on a Part 3 argument as the most plausible explanation. Sorry, Sarah. Its not your day.
Is there a science behind misidentification?
What is meant by misidentification when it comes to Bigfoot reports? We hear this quite often, not just by debunkers but also by proponents and true skeptics. The misidentification argument says that Bigfoot sightings are nothing more than common, known animals rather than Bigfoot. The black bear is often draw on as the culprit, perhaps standing on hind legs to scratch its back or whatever: The witness saw a black bear and misidentified it as a Bigfoot, they say.
Here’s the problem I have with this argument: there is no scientific research that is directly relevant to it. None. I don’t know where or how this misidentification argument first came about, but it is used so frequently at this point it’s generally accepted as a scientifically-supported argument and there is no need to substantiate it whatsoever. I guess when nearly 90% of American adults think Bigfoot don’t exist as a living species2, there is no need to justify your position beyond a personal anecdote or two.
Now, there are two lines of research that might have given birth to the misidentification argument: eyewitness testimony (primarily from the field of cognitive neuroscience) and wildlife monitoring (primarily from the field of ecology). There’s also potential influence from research into pareidolia — or the tendency to see faces and other patterns in inanimate objects — but I think this concept plays only a tertiary role in the misidentification origin story. Before I get into each of these, let’s look at a couple Bigfoot sightings to add context to what will follow.
This first sighting I pulled from Daegling’s Bigfoot Exposed book. He shared a colleague’s encounter with what she believed to be a Bigfoot. Let’s call her Sarah. Here’s Daegling’s recap.
She was driving with friends through forests somewhere in the vicinity of Crater Lake in central Oregon — a suitably remote location for spotting rare wildlife. It was night. As they drove down this highway they spotted something in the headlights. It was large, she saw two legs, it was heading across the road, and then it was gone. The encounter, as it were, probably lasted all of two or three seconds. (p 223, Bigfoot Exposed)
The second sighting comes from an interview with Jay on Sasquatch Chronicles3 . Jay was hunting on a co-worker’s remote property in Tennessee near the border with Kentucky. Jay set up a ground blind on a ridge overlooking a clear-cut area, while his co-worker hunted from another ridge some distance away. As Jay searched for deer from his blind, he spotted something through his 12x50 Bushnell binoculars in the clear-cut area below him about 150 yards away4. For the next 45 minutes Jay watched what he described as a gorilla-like man.
So after about 10-15 minutes the thing stood up. I happened to glance back over there and its huge! Probably 8-9 foot tall. 3-4 foot wide. I could see his hands, his butt crack, his skin, hairs, shoulders. On top of his head he had long hair. He had his back to me when he stood up. At first I'm freaking out. I'm like, "What the heck?" I thought a gorilla or something had escaped from the zoo or something like that. I got to watching it for a little while and just couldn't wrap my mind around what I was looking at. It was a huge, gorilla-like man.
OK. Let’s find some scientific research that could help us evaluate the accounts of Sarah and Jay.
Pareidolia
Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero offered a case of pareidolia in their book, Abominable Science! (paperback edition, 2015). The case of Sarah above and this pareidolia case are what I classify as low-hanging fruit on the Bigfoot evidence tree: cases that are easy to explain as something other than Bigfoot or to just outright dismiss for lack of data. But this is what I’ve come to expected from debunkers, it happens so often.
One of the authors —I’m not clear whether Daniel or Donald, since the book has two authors and this chapter is written in the first person “I” — worked as a shepherd in British Columbia. His two co-shepherds confided they believed they had seen a Sasquatch while the author was away from camp. Here’s the author’s account of their conversation. This is from p 57.
“While you were gone,” they began, laughing a little nervously, “we, uh, saw a Sasquatch.” They hastened to add that they were, well, pretty [author’s emphasis] sure that it was a tall stump. After all, it stood still for a very long time…
I honestly had a difficult time getting through their chapter on Bigfoot. I could barely stomach it; their presentation of social science is mostly bullshit (in my opinion). The chapter author professes shortly after this stump story, “… the simple fact remains: people make whoppingly huge misidentification errors all the time.”(p 58). I could say in response, “People make whoppingly accurate identifications all the time.” Neither of us are citing any research to support our assertion, but I guess this is where we are now.
Even so, pareidolia is a thing, and it’s good fit for more than a few Bigfoot sightings. If you want to learn more about pareidolia, try Wikipedia for a gentle introduction or Google Scholar to get deep into the underlying neuroscience, but you’ll find nothing in either place that relates pareidolia to the misidentification of wild animals.
Eyewitness Testimony Research
Speaking of places you won’t find anything related to the misidentification of wild animals, let’s briefly explore research on eyewitness testimony. This has been an active research area since at least the 1920s. If you do a search in Google Scholar for works after 1920 and using the key phrase “eyewitness testimony”, you’ll get nearly 22,000 results. That’s a lot of information, but here’s what I think is relevant for us.
Eyewitness researchers focus on two main areas: identification accuracy or whether the witness makes a correct identification (rather than a misidentification) of the suspect, and witness reliability or whether the witness makes a consistent statement over time about what they observed. Identification accuracy is about information encoding and initial storage in memory. Witness reliability is about information retention and retrieval from memory, which I’ll cover in Part 3.2 in a couple weeks.
Studies on identification accuracy have uncovered several factors that make accurate identifications more likely. I’ll mention 3 that I find especially useful for Bigfoot sighting reports, and these factors have been plenty vetted by researchers5. First is exposure time and this speaks for itself. Second is observability or whether the witness has a clear view of the crime and the suspect. The third factor is what Bornstein and colleagues (cited a few sentences above) call “cognitive operations,” which I would describe as effortful or active processing of what’s being observed: the more the witness tries to understand what he’s focused on, the more accurate will be the identification.
These factors are instrumental in evaluating Sarah’s and Jay’s encounters. But here’s the problem I have with using this research as a basis for the misidentification argument in Bigfoot sightings. In eyewitness research the misidentification is about identifying a human suspect (or suspects) among a group of other humans. The direct translation of this research would be identifying one Bigfoot (or multiple) among a group of other Bigfoot; not about identifying a Bigfoot among other species. And last I heard, Bigfoot are not committing crimes and they’re not homo sapiens (according to most theories on Bigfoot, anyway), so any studies on the accurate identification of Bigfoot would look quite a bit different from studies in eyewitness testimony.
The field of wildlife monitoring might get us closer. Let’s take a look.
Wildlife Monitoring and Conservation Research
Let’s jump out of neuroscience over to ecology. Changing scientific fields can be like traveling to different countries. The research methods, study designs, influential people, and research problems can all be different. And the language is different. In wildlife monitoring you’ll hear terms like imperfect detection, misclassification, observer error, occupancy models, and of course, misidentification.
To inform conservation efforts for a particular species or ecosystem, researchers need to know something about the species and their population. A common method to get population size estimates is through field observation. While ideally this is performed by trained scientists, there are often too many field sites that need to be visited too frequently for scientists to cover all of them. Enter citizen scientists, the regular folk who help scientists gather the data they need.
But, its not easy gathering data on wildlife species. One of the main problems is misidentification.
What does misidentification mean in this context? In wildlife monitoring studies, a misidentification is also known as a false-positive. Let’s say you’re a commercial fisher-person and you agreed to help Lawrence Beerkircher from Southeast Fisheries Science Center and his research partners6 collect population data on white marlin (pictured above… I think). Your role as a citizen scientist is to count the number of white marlin that end up your nets before you release them. The problem is white marlin and the roundscale spearfish look almost identical. So Lawrence and his team are concerned about misidentification; that is, you could make a false-positive identification and count a roundscale spearfish as part of your white marlin tally.
Here’s what’s interesting to me about wildlife monitoring research and how it challenges the frequent use of misidentification among Bigfoot debunkers.
In this fishing example, you were looking for white marlin and misidentified a spearfish as a white marlin. By analogy, we’d say our witness Jay was looking for deer and misidentified a Bigfoot as a deer. That’s not at all what happened with Jay, but this is what a debunker is effectively claiming with a misidentification argument.
We have to wonder how many bear sightings are really false-positives of a Bigfoot. If humans make “whoppingly huge misidentification errors” as Loxton & Prothero assert, then perhaps Bigfoot is frequently mistaken for a bear.
Beerkircher along with most researchers in this field acknowledge misidentification as a significant problem in population estimates. But they don’t toss out the observation data. They develop statistical models — called occupancy models — to adjust population estimates for false-positives.
While there is evidence of misidentification in wildlife monitoring studies, the evidence comes from observer errors between remarkably similar species, such as the white marlin and roundscale spearfish. Here’s a more extreme but still common example: GE Austen and colleagues7 presented experts and non-experts with pairs of images depicting bumblebees and asked whether the images were of the same species or of different species. Yes, species of bumblebees. I honestly thought “bumblebee” was the name of the species!
Bree Tillett and her Australian collaborators8 examined observer errors in a study of 5 shark species. Among the 5 species, the average misidentification rate was 20% and ranged from a low 7% to a high of 30%. Not surprising, shark species with morphological (or physical) features that are similar to other shark species generated higher rates of misidentification. Conversely, species with unique features were accurately identified more often.
That’s a short list and the field of wildlife monitoring goes far deeper than this brief summary. Still, the more I read about it, the more difficult it is to dismiss hundreds of Bigfoot encounter reports like Jay’s as cases of misidentification.
The Bottomline for Bigfoot
What have we learned through this odyssey into misidentification? Here’s my rundown:
The misidentification argument applied to Bigfoot sighting reports does not have a strong basis in any scientific field. Research on eyewitness testimony and on wildlife monitoring are as close as I could find, but these fields should only be extended to Bigfoot sightings with due caution.
Pareidolia is a third option but little if any of the scientific research investigates pareidolia as an explanation for misidentification of forest animals.
If you ever get charged with a felony and the main evidence against you is an eyewitness, then find a Bigfoot debunker to serve as your expert on eyewitness testimony. They will twist the social science to such an extent that the prosecutor’s star witness will look like a buffoon.
Eyewitness research, like most social science research, is nuanced. There is no whoppingly huge conclusion to be drawn from it. The likelihood of a misidentification depends on contextual factors such as exposure time and observability, and on individual factors such as the witness’s level of processing during the event.
Wildlife monitoring research is also nuanced. The likelihood of a misidentification is affected by morphological characteristics of the target species and its similarity to other species in the ecosystem. And Bigfoot arguably stands far apart from other woodland creatures.
Cases of Bigfoot sightings highlighted by debunkers are the low-hanging fruit of Bigfoot evidence. Tree stumps, shadows, and road crossings at night: these are cases that most actors in the social world of Bigfoot would label as misidentification or just lacking sufficient data to make a judgment.
Perhaps most important is that we can now evaluate Sarah’s and Jay’s encounters with a keener eye. Based on what we learned, observer error is a plausible explanation for Sarah’s short, night-time sighting. But for Jay… damn, Jay, what the hell did you see out there in northern Tennessee!
Next time on TSB
Its difficult to dismiss intense Bigfoot encounters as mere identification errors, but we’ve got a lot more ground to cover in Part 3. So while misidentification is a flimsy argument for Jay’s experience, debunkers have other go-to arguments they can throw at him, including an unreliable memory, hoaxing, and contemporary myth influencing his perceptions. If you got frustrated with debunkers in this post, just you wait!
Thanks for reading and don’t be a Stranger,
DC | TSB
Daegling, David. 2004. Bigfoot Exposed. p 64.
This is the latest poll I could find: https://civicscience.com/u-s-belief-in-sasquatch-has-risen-since-2020/
You can listen to Jay’s encounter here: https://sasquatchchronicles.com/sc-ep136-a-giant-ape-that-must-have-escaped-from-the-zoo/
I did the math on this. 12x50 binoculars will make an object appear 12x closer than it is. At 150 yards distance, Jay would be observing the gorilla-like man as if it were 150/12 or 12.5 yards away, or about 35-40 feet way… or less than the distance from a little league pitcher’s mound to home plate, or about the width of 4 parking spaces (in the US).
For a thorough review of this literature, see this meta-analysis study by Bornstein, Penrod, and Deffenbacher from 2012 in the Psychology, Crime and Law journal: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254264913
You can find a PDF of this article in Endangered Species Research, 2009, here: https://www.int-res.com/articles/esr2009/9/n009p081.pdf
See this article in Nature’s Scientific Reports, 2016, here: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33634
The shark study can be found in Fisheries Research, 2012, here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fishres.2012.04.007