Bigfoot Outline

Hannah Presley 

Bigfoot Analysis Outline

Intro: 

-Attention Getter: May 26, 1999 was a wonderful day for Lamoille County Vermont. It was the day that the residents of this county would be blessed with the birth of a beautiful baby girl named Hannah, aka me. But this wonderful point in time would not last long. Twenty years later members of the county would be struck with fear as a woman’s encounter with Bigfoot hit a bit too close to home.

-Preview: My name is Hannah Presley and I will be using the charts and practice that Vrooman has provided us to evaluate the credibility of a Class A Bigfoot report that a woman had from her front porch. I will be looking into multiple fallacies, premises, and arguments based on and establishing the structure of reality in the report and explaining how it has potential on the surface but with more investigation you can see the missing pieces and cracks in the argument that lead to its ultimate decline in credibility. 

Body: 

-Fallacies

• Accident: A sweeping generalization of a fact or a rule, presented as if it has no exception.
• Pg 1: “excellent vision- 20/15, so I was not mistaken.” 
• She has great vision, and people with great vision never see anything wrong, right? I have good vision and have mistaken things plenty of times. 
• Pg 2: She knows what bears look like because they frequently come through her yard. This wasn’t a bear because the arm/leg ratio was not right for it to be a regular bear. 
• This is a good point. However, it could have been a deformed bear or a person in an odd outfit. 
• Wishful Thinking: Something is true because I want it to be.
• Pg 2: “At that point she came to the realization that what she had seen was a Bigfoot.”
• She had no other explanation so I think she wanted it to be Bigfoot therefore it had to be Bigfoot. 
• Slippery Slope: A series of steps in a casual chain and the support/probabilities for each is omitted in an argument that A basically causes Z.
• Pg 2: The witness was on a walk and hit a hollow tree with a stick. She heard knocks being returned to her in the distance and this happened multiple times. She also saw something throwing rocks at a tree trying to knock down pine cones and she and her husband went back the next day to find the trees bare and no pine cones on the ground. 
• This sounds like kids playing to me and I wouldn’t think much of it, but in her mind all of these add up to that it was Bigfoot because she had seen the figure earlier. 

-P-OT Chart

• Presumptions, The Normal: Based on a reference group or experience.
• Pg 1: “It was not a bear. We have a bear here by the deck, so I know what bears look like standing up to the reach feeder. 
• She is familiar with bears and this didn’t match up with what she’s seen before. 
• Pg 1: “That looks like a chimp!” 
• She has to have seen a chimp before to be able to compare the humanoid figure with a chimp figure. 
• Succession, Pragmatic: Evaluation of an act through consequences.
• Pg 1: Her chihuahua refused to walk where the Bigfoot had crossed in their yard. This was the same chihuahua that had gone after a bear a couple weeks ago. 
• She’s equating a chihuahua’s moodiness with Bigfoot’s scent in the grass. I have two chihuahuas and there are some days they’re ready to go after deer in my yard and other days that they could care less. Also it’s typical behavior of chihuahuas to just stand there and not move when you set them on the ground. 
• Illustration, Import: Event calls attention to rule’s possible applications.
• Pg 2: She went to her neighbor’s house and asked if he had anyone staying with him or saw anyone out walking that morning. He hadn’t. 
• If no one was staying with him and he didn’t see anyone out walking then another thing it could be was Bigfoot. However, I think it’s interesting that this is the one time in the report that she thought that it could have been a human. Everything else was always linked back to it being Bigfoot. 
• Facts/Truths Supposed: Agreed upon reality. Probable data.
• Pg 3: “Two of those sightings have been on/near their road, one being a face to face encounter by a local hunter a few miles from their home.”
• The hunter’s report has to be credible for this one to be. The way they talk about I assume that everyone thought he was legit. This makes it a greater possibility that the figure was a Bigfoot because there was already a credible citing nearby. 

Conclusion: 

When I first read through the article it seemed like it had a lot of potential to be real. However, every time that I read through it I started seeing the evidence more through a logical lense and I began to see the flaws in the argument. On the surface it seems like this could have been real, but the more I thought about it every piece of evidence had a logical explanation that could have happened instead of it being Bigfoot. This report really had potential but luckily I had the chart to guide me and help me decipher that most of the arguments were in fact not so logical after all.  

References: 

Sheppard, J. (2019, August 9). Report # 63218 (Class A). Retrieved February 29, 

     2020, from The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization website: 

     https://www.bfro.net/GDB/show_report.asp?id=63218 

Vrooman, S., Dr. (2015, February). Some Informal Argumentative Fallacies 

     [Chart]. Retrieved from http://faculty.tlu.edu/svrooman/fallacies1.htm 

Vrooman, S. S., Dr. (2013). Perelman's Rhetoric of Argument [Chart]. Retrieved 

     from http://faculty.tlu.edu/svrooman/perelman.htm