How this site grades claims

Every factual claim on this site carries one of five labels. The label describes the standing of that claim, and never whether Bigfoot exists. This distinction does the most work of anything here, so it is worth being slow about.

The five labels

A DOCUMENTED label attached to a cast, a film, or an expedition is a statement about that object or event. It is not a statement about an animal, and anyone quoting this site as though it were has misread it.

The sourcing rule

Nothing is published that cannot be traced to a real, retrievable source. Not a source that sounds plausible, not a source someone else cited. If a claim cannot be run to ground, it comes out. A shorter accurate page beats a longer padded one, every time.

This is stricter than it sounds, because the Bigfoot literature is unusually contaminated by numbers and quotations that were copied wrong decades ago and have been recopied ever since. Track measurements drift. Dates slide by a year. Ordinance numbers get transposed. A quotation acquires a word. Checking these is most of the work.

Living people

People still living are described only from their published work and their published public statements. No speculation about motive, mental state, finances, or private life. Where someone has been accused of hoaxing, the accusation is stated at exactly the strength the sources support, attributed to whoever made it, with their answer where they gave one.

This applies to skeptics too. In the Rogue's Gallery everyone carries a "case against" field, including the debunkers, because a site that only prosecutes one side is not doing the thing it claims to do.

Corrections

Errors get fixed, and the fix is visible. If something material is wrong, it is corrected on the page and noted, rather than quietly edited away. If a specimen is ever produced, the rewrite goes on the front page.

Found something wrong? The about page has how to reach me. Corrections that come with a source get acted on fastest, and the person who sent it gets credit unless they would rather not have it.

Where the labels came from

The five-label scheme is adapted from the one used on a sibling site about UAP claims. It survives contact with this material well, with one addition: HOAX needed to be its own category rather than a flavor of DEBUNKED, because in this field admitted fabrication is common enough to deserve its own count. The evidence page tallies how many items fall into each.

Current state of review

This site is built in two passes. The first assembles the record from primary and secondary sources. The second is an adversarial fact-check whose instruction is to refute: to open every citation, check every number, and delete anything that cannot be confirmed, downgrading status labels wherever they are too generous.

Both passes have now run over every page and every dataset. While the second pass was outstanding, a notice sat at the top of every page saying so. It came down only when the check was genuinely complete, because announcing a standard and then not meeting it would be a worse failure than having no standard at all.

What the refutation pass actually did is the best argument for having one. A representative sample of what it caught and removed:

• A fabricated quotation. A draft had Floe Foxon concluding that "on the average, one

sighting is expected for every few hundred bears." That sentence does not exist. The paper says approximately 5,000 bears per sasquatch sighting, an order of magnitude different, and in the direction that weakens the skeptical point it was being used to support.

• An invented word inside a real quotation. John Napier was quoted calling the

Patterson-Gimlin film "a clever hoax of some kind." He wrote that the scientific evidence "taken collectively points to a hoax of some kind." The word "clever" was added, and the subject was changed from the whole body of evidence to the film alone.

• Encyclopedia prose passed off as a source's own words. A sentence about Napier was set

in quotation marks as though he had written it. He had not; it was a Wikipedia editor's summary of him.

• A sworn statement that does not exist. Albert Ostman's account was said to rest on an

affidavit before a named magistrate. The report cited as the source contains no sworn statement of any kind.

• Arithmetic invented for false precision. A continental black bear total was produced by

adding two partial surveys taken fifteen years apart, a sum no source performs.

It also cut entries outright rather than hedging them, and downgraded status labels throughout: the 1924 Ape Canyon incident moved from CONTESTED to DEBUNKED on the strength of the contemporaneous Forest Service investigation, and the Skookum cast moved the same way on the elk identification. Ten sightings, three exhibits, one researcher profile and two timeline entries were deleted for lack of a source that could be run to ground.

Every one of those errors was plausible, well written, and wrong. That is precisely the kind of thing that survives a friendly read and dies under an instruction to disprove.