Introduction:
The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry is an organization that’s mission is to promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims. (CSI) Pseudoscience’s are beliefs that claim to be science but do not meet the criteria of science. (Notes on Web unit 1 part 3) Pseudoscience in not based on scientific literature or on scientific experiments that have been peer reviewed. (Coker 2001) It is based on someone saying that they did an experiment and got a certain result and that result not being tested in order to see if it can be duplicated therefore it is not falsifiable. (Coker 2001) There are many different pseudoscience’s, astrology, palm reading, and crystal healing are some more commonly known ones. Cryptozoology is one as well all of these can be found on The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry website. (CSI) Cryptozoology is the study of the unknown animal. (Michael Dennett Science and Footprints article)
Materials and Methods:
The belief of the existence of Bigfoot is cyptozoology. When you google the word bigfoot you will get 8,400,000 hits. (google search). The trash has to be weeded out which can be done by using google scholar’s advance search options and narrow down the field in which bigfoot research and scientific peer-reviewed articles can be found. Most of the reliable links lead back to the skeptical inquirer, which is a publication from The Committee of Skeptical Inquiry. Other resources used to support this paper were found at one of two libraries located in two different counties. All of the other literature at these libraries that was on Bigfoot was found in the fiction section, so was determined to be trash. A huge red flag for trash was if they site was a .com site. There is a huge amount of .com trash on Bigfoot as indicated by my Google search. As Mr. Stewart stated .com stands for commercial sites and it is known that commercial sites
Cited: Boston, Rob. 2003, Scenes from a Bigfoot Conference [Internet]. [cited 2011 Feb 8]; 13.4 Available from: http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/scenes_from_a_bigfoot_conference Coker, Rory Dennett, Michael. 2006, Experiments Cast Doubt on Bigfoot ‘Evidence’ [Internet]. [cited 2011 Feb. 8]; 16.3 Available from: http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/exeperiments_cast_doubt_on_bigfoot_evidence Dennett, Michael. 2006, The Bigfoot Legend Lives [Internet]. [cited 2011 Feb. 8] ; 16.1 Available from: http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/the_bigfoot_legend_lives Gotera, Daniel Wylie, Kenneth. 1980, Bigfoot, New York (NY) The Viking Press; pages 150-153