By John Green
I am indebted to Henner Fahrenbach for the suggestion that the estimated time that a Sasquatch sighting is reported to have lasted might depend on some characteristic of the witness. He raised the possibility that Sasquatches might be attracted to human females and wondered whether observations by females would tend to last longer. A study of 899 sightings reports in my computer came up with the opposite result. For those sightings in which a time was estimated the average for males was 4 minutes, 37 seconds, while the average for females was only 2 minutes, 3 seconds. The difference was obviously enough to be significant, but significant of what? A possible answer is suggested by the fact that the reason a Sasquatch was present does not directly affect the elapsed time of the sighting, nor does it matter how long the Sasquatch was hanging around before it was seen. The clock doesn't start until the witness sees the Sasquatch, and it stops when either the creature or the witness leaves the scene. It might well be that sightings by men lasted longer because men were more likely to stand their ground and continue the observation. A check of sightings when the witness included both men and women gave a figure for elapsed time very close to that for sightings by males, an average of exactly 4 minutes. That opened up a whole new line of questioning, however, since such a sighting automatically has at least two witnesses, while most reports involve only one. Might the time also depend on the number of witnesses? That speculation proved to be a productive one. Sightings by lone males averaged 3 minutes, 18 seconds. Sightings by two men averaged 4 minutes, 12 seconds. Sightings by more than two men averaged 9 minutes, 51 seconds. Reports by more than one women were too few to be significant. Less than 30 percent of sighting reports contain time estimates in figures. Another 60 percent note only that the time was "brief" or "considerable." The trend here is not so marked, but it is the same. The percentage of sightings described as "brief" was 56% for females, and 45% for males. For single males the figure was 50%, for two male witnesses 42%, and for more than two males 32%. People who dismiss Sasquatch sighting reports as lies, mistakes or hallucinations are not noted for giving the matter much thought, but perhaps they should spend a little time on this question: If they are all imaginary what reason would there be for the time estimates to differ according to the sex of the witness or according to the number of witnesses?
John Green
P.S. In another publication Peter Byrne stated that Sasquatches do not look directly at people, and gave the Patterson movie as an example. This is just nonsense. I have 219 reports in which the witness stated that the Sasquatch was watching them, and the one in the movie turns and looks directly at Patterson, who was so intimidated by the look that he never took another step towards it.