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Seeing Cryptids: The Problems

jerrywayne said:
Cryptozoology, unlike zoology, depends primarily on eyewitness accounts. Some cryptozoology enthusiasts understand that eyewitness testimonies are not definitive because of the potential problems inherent in such accounts. Other advocates accept, at least provisionally, sightings, and others accept a body of eyewitness stories as surely valid.

I would like to examine various aspects of particular cryptid or unknown animal sightings to make a general argument that skeptics are rightfully doubting of eyewitness testimonies when it comes to the extraordinary claims of undocumented, unknown or out-of-place large animals.

My first example relates to the alleged lake "monster" said to live in British Columbia's Lake Okanagan and nick-named "Ogopogo."

In 1989, Ken Chaplin and his father and daughter thought they saw Ogopogo entering an inlet area on the lake. Chaplin said he was between 75ft to 100ft away from the creature. He "saw [the creature's] features very clearly" and it was "snake or lizard like" with "no fur or hair;" his sister saw a long snake-like body over 15ft long.

Sounds like Chaplin and family had a typical Ogopogo sighting. He had no question as to what he saw. Unfortunately for Ogopogo lore, Chaplin not only saw the creature, he video recorded it too--twice. What he recorded was obviously not an anomalous lake serpent/monster.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyb-hpDh-7M&feature=relmfu

Even after his recording was shown to represent a common animal, he and his sister refused to accept the mundane verdict.

Enter the local Ogopogo "expert," Arlene Gaal, to also deny that Chaplin recorded a common animal and to state he filmed a "miniature" Ogopogo.

This is a straightforward demonstration that people don't always see what they believe they are seeing, and that cryptozoological "experts" can be blind to the obvious.
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The real problem is that real animals and on rare ocassion humans can be mistaken for some mythical creature. Add in hoaxes and hallucinations and there you have most of the so called sightings.

Hiking in Alaska I was sure I saw bigfoot but the creature on further observation turned out to be a brown bear with an injured forepaw. Giant birds turn out to be miscalculations and little green turn out to be outright jokes.
 
EHocking said:
Marginally compelling, except for the fact that Pileated WP (common in the area) also have been known to produce double knocks that are indistinguishable from double knocks of Campephilus woodpeckers.
My bolding.
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Oops, sorry to have lost track of our discussion!

Under the plausibility scoring criteria for recordings that are flagged for further analysis, you will find this one:

"Is there an absence of confounding woodpeckers?"

The occasional double-knock signatures that are explained there are not a catalog of things they didn't consider, they represent a catalog of things they took pains to rule out.
 
The Shrike said:
Oops, sorry to have lost track of our discussion!

Under the plausibility scoring criteria for recordings that are flagged for further analysis, you will find this one:

"Is there an absence of confounding woodpeckers?"

The occasional double-knock signatures that are explained there are not a catalog of things they didn't consider, they represent a catalog of things they took pains to rule out.
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But my point is that their criteria is "invented".
There are no known recordings of these double-knocks, their assertion of an accurate description of the sound is just that, they even admit as much,
we aim to provide a sampling of sounds that we believe are suggestive of ivory-bill and a number of “sound-alikes” that we hope will help inform other searchers about what to listen for.
[/quote]And the page entitled Predicted Ivory-bill Inter-knock Interval Range has never been populated as far as I can tell from the Internet Wayback Machine archives.
"We are presently working on peer reviewed publication that will explain our findings in detail.​
That was 2009 (I think?). Eight years and no peer reviewed paper that I can find on their site.

If this was a crypto site, I'm sure you'd be all over their lack-lustre presentation as much as I am disappointed by them.​
 
I'm sorry that I could not isolate individual files, but on these pages you will find recordings of double-raps from other species of extant Campephilus woodpeckers. You will also find them to be both similar to each other, and similar to descriptions of double-raps made by C. principalis.

Were I looking for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers by poring over sounds collected in the field by autonomous recording units, you can bet your Aunt Betsy that I'd define some parameters of double-knocks from extant Campephilus woodpeckers and use an algorithm to help me find those signatures in the recordings. (I'd do the same if there was some distinctive call that Thylacines made for which we had recordings from extant Thylacines, too.)

What part was invented? We know that Ivorybills made double-raps and the extant Campephilus do too. So why not listen for things in the recordings that match acoustic signatures for Campephilus double-raps? If you're not doing at least that, then why take recordings at all?

This is what they did. You're hearing and seeing what they found. I see and hear in their recordings some things that sound an awful lot like the double-raps of these other Campephilus species. Because the team failed to find definitive photographic or other evidence, we pooh-pooh these recordings as so much wishful thinking. But unlike the eyewitness accounts, we don't have to rely on testimony to evaluate them. They're right there.

So was the acoustic analysis robust? I don't know. All I can tell you is that they recorded some things that sound compelling, but beyond that failed to confirm extant Campephilus principalis to the satisfaction of their peers.

Double-rap of Campephilus magellanicus.

Double-rap of C. pollens.

Double-rap of C. leucopogon.

Double-rap of C. guatemalensis.

Double-rap of C. rubricollis.

Double-rap of C. haematogaster.

Double-raps of C. robustus.
 
Cainkane1 said:
The real problem is that real animals and on rare ocassion humans can be mistaken for some mythical creature. Add in hoaxes and hallucinations and there you have most of the so called sightings.

Hiking in Alaska I was sure I saw bigfoot but the creature on further observation turned out to be a brown bear with an injured forepaw. Giant birds turn out to be miscalculations and little green turn out to be outright jokes.
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Was the bear walking on its hind legs? If not, what gave you the initial impression you were looking at Bigfoot?
 
The Guardian said:
The results, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are likely to disappoint cryptozoologists. Jonathan Downes, director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, said that while he applauded the scientific work and agreed that many samples are obviously from bears, he believes the mystery is not yet solved.

“I think there is still a possibility that there are unknown species of higher primate which are still awaiting discovery in what used to be Soviet central Asia,” he said.
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Cryptozoology has no clothes.
 
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