Nessie, Bigfoot, Biden

An article in Stuff yesterday, reprinted from the Telegraph, showcased the efforts of a scientist to bring statistics to bear on the problem of cryptids. Floe Foxen has supposedly written a couple of papers, yet to be peer reviewed, that look at the “probability” of Bigfoot and Loch Ness monster sightings being something more mundane than a hominid and plesiosaur respectively.

Sadly the article doesn't go into much detail about the methods being used, beyond giving some scenarios and numbers. Apparently for every 900 bears in a state or province, you'd expect one Bigfoot sighting. There's no explanation of how this number was calculated, why the bounding area of a state or province is important, or what timeframe this sighting per 900 bears occurs in (one per year, or one over the lifetime of the 900 bears maybe?). Foxon then concludes that many sightings are bears walking on their hind legs.

Similarly for the Loch Ness monster, Foxen has crunched the numbers and figured out that the chance of there being a 1m or longer eel in the loch is less than 1 in 50,000. His conclusion here is that, as eels are unlikely to be the real source of Nessie sightings, other explanations such as wave effects, logs and swimming mammals must be the cause. Why he doesn't seem to have used his mathemagical wizardry to calculate the probabilities for these other explanations is beyond me.

The whole thing seems like a scientist having a bit of lighthearted fun, so it's a pity the media are treating it as if it's a serious attempt to explain anything about these two popular cryptids. The article at no point even bothers to mention one of the known reasons for many sightings of both these creatures - fraud. Rick Dyer alone seems to have been responsible for several major Bigfoot news stories, although there are many more - including the famous Patterson-Gimlin footage. Here's an interesting version of the video where some IT magic has been used to stabilise the camera.

Things are no better for the Loch Ness monster, with the famous “surgeon's photograph” being a confirmed hoax. One of my favourites is the Marmaduke Wetherell incident, where the big game hunter, out looking for Nessie, found large footprints in the mud of the loch and had casts sent away for analysis. It turns out that the prints had been created by a prankster using a hippopotamus foot umbrella stand.

The article reminds me of a Chuck Klosterman question. For those who haven't heard of him or his questions, Chuck Klosterman is an American author who, in one of his books (a collection of essays titled Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto), published a set of questions that were titled “23 Questions I Ask Everybody I Meet In Order To Decide If I Can Really Love Them”. We sometimes use these questions for fun at Skeptics in the Pub meetings, or as an aid to testing audio levels when recording a podcast.

Several of the questions are related to topics that are likely to pique skeptics' interest, like magic, psychic abilities and the following question about cryptids:

Defying all expectation, a group of Scottish marine biologists capture a live Loch Ness Monster. In an almost unbelievable coincidence, a bear hunter shoots a Sasquatch in the thigh, thereby allowing zoologists to take the furry monster into captivity. These events happen on the same afternoon. That evening, the president announces he may have thyroid cancer and will undergo a biopsy later that week. You are the front-page editor of The New York Times: What do you play as the biggest story?

The idea of these questions seems to be that the interesting part is not so much the answers people give, as it is the reasoning they use to arrive at those answers. The skeptics I've seen answering questions like the one above can come to quite different conclusions, but the one thing they have in common is that there's always one or more good reasons given for the decision. I've not heard anyone just blurt out an answer without attempting to give their justifications.

I'll try not to bore you all with AI nonsense every week, but I recently asked some of Chuck's questions to ChatGPT, to see what it would make of them. I'll finish this article with the bot's bland, but perfectly reasonable, answer to the question above (interestingly it gave me some reasoning for its answer, without actually having been asked for it):

As the front-page editor of The New York Times, I would likely play the story of the president's potential thyroid cancer as the biggest story. This is because the president is a major public figure and any potential health issues would have significant ramifications for both the country and the world. Additionally, the announcement of the biopsy adds a sense of urgency to the story. While the capture of a Loch Ness Monster and the shooting of a Sasquatch would certainly be interesting and noteworthy events, they are not likely to have the same level of impact as the president's health.