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Are bears to blame forBigfootsightings ? A researcher has found there ’s a link between Second Earl of Guilford America’sblack bearpopulation and hoi polloi seeing hirsute mythical creatures in the forest .
The new report , publish Jan. 13 in theJournal of Zoology , found that for every 5,000 black bears ( Ursus americanus ) , there ’s an average of one Bigfoot , or Sasquatch , sighting . And if bear numbers go up , so do the number of Bigfoot sightings .
Bigfoot sightings appear to correlate with the numbers of bears and people in a given area.
Bears have long been tied to the Bigfoot phenomenon , andprevious researchalready reported sightings of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest could be sightings of black bears . However , the fresh bailiwick has now make a correlation between bears and Bigfoot in many more country and provinces .
" Correlation does n’t signify causation but there might be so much correlation coefficient between black bears and Bigfoot sightings in most areas that the parsimonious [ round-eyed ] explanation is people misidentifying bears as sasquatches,“Michael Hickerson , a prof of biological science at the City College of New York who was not involved in the study , told Live Science in an e-mail .
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The study suggests most Bigfoot sightings are likely to be misidentified black bears.
Black bear are the most common bear in North America and can be spot in 32 U.S. state and almost every province in Canada . site like theBigfoot Mapping Project , which hosts around 8,000 diachronic and New Bigfoot sighting , show hoi polloi have reported picture Bigfoot all over the U.S. , but they ’re most heavily concentrated near the West Coast and in the eastern half of the country .
Bigfoot is a pop legend , but there ’s no hard evidence it actually exists . Reports typically name Bigfoot as a bombastic bipedal aper - like creature that ’s often around the size of a bear standing on two legs — a black-market bear can stand up to 7 feet ( 2.1 meter ) magniloquent .
Hickerson and his fellow published a " tongue in cheek " study in the Journal of Biogeography in 2009 that used a computer model to prognosticate the distribution of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest , which ended up search very similar to their predicted black bear distribution , suggesting many Bigfoot sighting were misidentified bears .
Floe Foxon , a data point science educatee at the University of Leeds in England and sole author of the Modern field , built on the previous sketch by investigating the possible correlation between Bigfoot sighting and black bear across the U.S. and Canada , factoring in human population size of it — more people to make sighting — and forest cover .
Foxon ’s poser , which is based on publically available datum from 2006 only , see that for every 1,000 additional bears in an orbit , there was a 4 % increase in Bigfoot sightings . In other words , the more black bears present , the more people see Bigfoot . The woods area correlate with the black bear population , as expected , while the correlation between sighting and human front was also high . Foxon speculated in the subject field that some Bigfoot sightings might be misidentified the great unwashed .
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Hickerson suppose the analytic thinking was " well done " but felt Foxon should have used universe densities instead of full numbers for bears and humanity , as this would have accounted for country like New Jersey and Connecticut , which have very gamy bear denseness .
Another furrow in the new bailiwick is that there were Bigfoot sightings in areas with few or no black bears . For object lesson , Florida had a relatively large human population and many Bigfoot sighting but few bears and relatively little forest cover song .
" Should n’t less forest area predict few Bigfoot sightings , not more ? " Hickerson said . " And if there are more human but very few bears , what are the mistaken identification coming from ? The author [ Foxon ] says ' other man , ' but I inquire if that explain it away . "
