When seeing isn't necessarily believing

Until I worked for a roof testing company, I never gave a second thought to the roofs on buildings but you know every building has to have one. Next I worked for a trucking company, and all of a sudden everywhere I went I began noticing OTR tractors and the types of trailers they were hauling. Before then, I had a "blind spot" regarding trucks.

The same dynamic must be at work regarding BF animals. Some of us have spent most of our lives in or around the woods, but until being exposed to the possibility that such animals exist we had this "blind spot" regarding them. Even then, we must be intentionally looking and alert to perceive any physical evidence that they might be around.

Years ago when I first saw an upright standing, long-armed creature standing between the woods and the bridge at dusk, my mind immediately said "whoa, some ape escaped from a zoo" or "guy in a monkey suit" because I just didn't embrace the reality before my eyes. It wasn't until speaking about this with an investigator by phone last year that I realized what I had seen was in the right time and the right place to have been a real animal.

The old adage, "Seeing is believing" is not completely true-- instead, perception is believing. You believe what your mind perceives to be true.

There is so much truth to be learned from studies on the issue of inattentional or perceptual blindness. People cannot see what they are not prepared to perceive seeing. (Sort of reminds me of that dialog from "A Few Good Men" with Jack Nicholson, "You WANT answers?" "I want the TRUTH." "You can't HANDLE the truth.")

Consider that out of the hundreds of millions of people living in the United States only a few million people drive through the woodlands each year. And out of the hundreds of thousands of people who engage in any sort of outdoor activity, only some tens of thousands of people may actually spend at least one night soaking in the quiet of our nation's wilderness areas each year. How many of these people are intellectually receptive to perceiving evidence of the existence of BF animals?

Without being perceptive, informed and alert, so much observable physical evidence is being ignored, overlooked, misidentified, suppressed or erroneously attributed to other explanations. The vast majority of people-- even those active outdoors-- display inattentional or perceptual blindness about BF animals. They don't perceive the observations of their eyes, ears and noses because so much of the time (1) they are not alert, (2) they do not know what is significant, and (3) they are neither prepared nor equipped to perceive the reality of their observations.

I've been reading Jerome Clark's Unexplained, and found some comments he makes in the book's introduction to be insightful. Human beings abhor anything that is unexplainable the way nature abhors a vacuum. We must name it or label it or describe it as something other than being "unidentified." Our minds cannot grasp, perceive or accept "unidentified" observations. If we don't have some frame of reference for accepting it into our memory, we must ignore or block the observation. This is another way of understanding the concept of inattentional or perceptual blindness.

Therefore, we must learn to separate observations from explanations made by other people. Just because I might disagree with your explanation, it doesn't mean I should dismiss your observation. Whatever you saw or smelled or heard or tasted or felt remains an observable fact. However, your mind's explanation will be as personal as you are and is wholly limited by your knowledge, past experiences and imagination. What a person from one historical setting called a troll or an ogre, another person might label as a ghost, zombie, monster or werewolf. What a person in modern society might say looks like someone wearing a "monkey costume," others might know enough to name as being a Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Almas, Yowie, Yeti, Orang Pendek or any synonomous explanatory name.

We should be prepared for agreeing to disagree on the names that are used as explanations, but should not overlook the original fact of the observations. We do not have to accept the "explanation" as it so named by the observer to accept as being a fact (subject to verification, of course) that they made the "observation."

SOURCE: Originally posted as a discussion topic at http://www.stancourtney.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=63