Indeed.



Well, obviously. However, that presumes two things:

1) That a conspiracy is necessary. I personally know multiple people who would fake a Bigfoot encounter if they thought they could do it convincingly, and none of them would need to be in contact with each other to act upon it. I'm sure such people exist all over the nation, let alone those who are simply mistaken about what they see/find.

2) That these footprints really have the fine details of dermal ridges and that they would have been impossible to fake. While I have no personal evidence either way, over and over again people have claimed that there was no possible way to explain supposedly paranormal events and over and over again people have found surprisingly simple ways to recreate them without the need for the paranormal explanation. (See crop circles which couldn't possibly have been formed without advanced intelligence or technology. I've also seen plenty of "scientific fact" stated in various theories, such as those trying to prove the moon landing was a hoax, that I personally could see was wrong and based on a complete misunderstanding of the science involved.) So I tend to take such claims with a very large grain of salt, and even allow for the possibility that, rather than a hoax, people are misinterpreting what they're seeing as well.



I've always been a fan of the Coelacanth. There are a few problems with using it as an example, however.

1) It lives in the ocean, and we do not. We don't share the same territory. In truth the ocean likely holds the vast majority of undiscovered species. Really, because of this, you'd have a better chance of selling me on a Kraken than on Bigfoot.

2) Once scientists were first alerted to evidence of the existence of this fish, it was a reasonably short time before they could find more and more of them to confirm it. However, with Bigfoot, a hundred years of supposed sightings in our own backyards have failed to produce any animal.

3) Again, this turned out to be a fish well known to natives in the area... It was caught regularly. It was only a "discovery" to the scientific community.



But encroachment is more than just chasing living animals away... It's digging up land and developing it. It's unearthing remains of the animals from when they weren't on the edge of extinction. Humanoid bones aren't usually ignored by people... they're reported and investigated. Nobody has found an ape species in North America.




I lived in Colorado for 8 years... I have some concept of the size of the West. Here's the thing... for as large as the outdoors are in this nation, all of the large animals on this continent were cataloged by Western explorers quite quickly... Well before nearly *any* of it was excessively developed. Again, large animals are hard to miss. We're not still discovering new bear-sized creatures in those woods.



Honestly, if people suggested they were magical in some way, then I suppose I couldn't logically rule them out. But if they're playing by the same rules as the rest of the animal kingdom then there's just no room for them to exist.