◆ PARALLAX

I don't post much. I'm maybe three ridges south of where Squatch is describing, farther up the road than anyone has business living. I have heard that knock-pause-knock-knock pattern in the small hours, on and off, for eleven years. I stopped mentioning it to people because of exactly this -- the attention. I am only saying it now so the man doesn't think he's alone or losing it. I have never seen a thing. I don't go looking. Make of that what you want.

I want to be careful here because there is actually something to grab onto, which is rare. Annie's envelope analysis is the only real evidence in the thread; everything else is anecdote and one washed-out Polaroid. So let us protect the one good thing: Annie, what is your false-positive rate? How many nights of recording produced clean triple-transients that turned out to be a logger, a gunshot echo, a settling tree? The knock that has a mundane source 95% of the time is still interesting in the 5%, but ONLY if you know the denominator. Same sermon as always. It is always the denominator.

Fair and good question. I have 214 logged night-hours at three sites. Clean triple-transients with that spacing: eleven events. Of those, six I later sourced (two were a neighbour splitting wood at an ungodly hour, which, fair; one was a transformer; three were almost certainly elk on a fence). Five I cannot source. So 5 of 11 unexplained, but the honest figure is 5 of 214 hours, which is rare enough to chase and common enough that I am not booking a press conference. That is the whole truth and it is less exciting than either side wants.

Credit where due -- Annie just did more real science than most "researchers" do in a career, and she did it AGAINST her own preference. The five unsourced events are genuinely a loose thread and I dislike loose threads. I still land where I land: weird audio with no animal attached is weird audio. But I will stop saying "it's just a buck" in this specific thread, because Annie earned that much. Do not get used to it.

Has nobody noticed that "Olympic_Op," an eleven-year lurker, materialises to CORROBORATE on cue, with no location anyone can check, right when the thread needs a second witness? And that the one guy warning us about a "site-salter" is steering everyone off the seep? That is how you burn a research site -- flood it with a fake faker so the real data gets thrown out with him. Somebody wants this slope discredited. Ask who.

[staff] No. Olympic_Op has eleven years of post history and a verified region on file, and Cascade_Cat warning about a known local hoaxer is the single most USEFUL post on this page. Accusing a careful tracker and a shy long-timer of being assets because they are careful and shy is exactly the move that makes this board unusable. TrustNo1, that is your second flag this week. One more in this thread and you are on a week's holiday. Everyone else: carry on, it was getting good.

I have read this thread twice before saying anything. My people have a name for what some of you are calling the B-word, and a relationship with it older than this country, and I am not going to put either on a forum. I will say two things, with respect. One: a lot of you are guests in that bush and do not know it, and you are loud in it. Two: the knocking, where I come from, is not always an invitation to come closer. Be quieter up there. Not for the data. For yourselves.

Retired warden, thirty-one years, more nights alone in black timber than anyone here, and I never once saw the animal -- which I used to offer as proof it isn't there, and stopped, because the people who DID report it to me were not the cranks. They were loggers and elk hunters who were embarrassed to be telling me. Cleaning out the old district files when I retired I kept one photo a predecessor logged in 1973, no name, just "subject declined to be identified." I have never known what to do with it. Scan below. It is probably a man in the brush. Probably.