◆ PARALLAX

Greg -- that photo is the kind that ruins people, because it gives you exactly enough and not one thing more. The form has mass and the shoulder line sits wrong for a man in a coat, but the resolution is gone and "sits wrong" is precisely the feeling a faded print manufactures. I would not build a sentence on it, let alone a belief. Keep it filed. Date the scan. It is a question, not an answer, and anyone who tells you which it is, is selling something.

first real post, sorry, hands still not great typing this. car-camped the Olympics two weeks ago, first time, and at like 3am something walked the perimeter of the site slow and HEAVY and bipedal and stopped behind the cooler and just... breathed. I got my phone up and took one picture toward the noise before I zipped in and did not sleep. picture is garbage, I know it's garbage, but it's MY garbage and I need someone who isn't my roommate to look at it. please don't be mean. (it's probably a stump. tell me it's a stump.)

Cody -- breathe. Two things, both true at once. Your photo is a stump, or a snag, or fog; 176×144 at 3am cannot be anything else, and anyone who tells you they see a face in it is doing you harm. AND your written account -- slow, heavy, bipedal, the stop, the breathing, the not-sleeping -- is the actual data, and you should write every detail down, dated, tonight, before it tidies itself into a better story. The feeling is real even when the photo is a stump. Welcome. Sorry it's like this.

Outsider, different phenomenon (lights, not knocks), one transferable thing: build a knock LOG the way we built ours. Columns: timestamp to the minute, bearing, air temp, wind, moon, who else heard it, and crucially a "soft/hard" timing flag -- was the clock looked at, or remembered after? We threw out a third of our own best events when we honestly flagged them soft. The ones that survive that are the only ones worth fighting over. Squatch, your three nights are hard-timed. Most of this thread is soft. Treat them differently.

Annie -- if you want, I can lend you a parabolic dish and a decent shotgun mic that will pull that transient out of the noise floor with bearing accuracy you can actually triangulate from two stations. Two recorders, time-synced, known baseline, and you can put a POSITION on the next knock instead of a direction. That turns "NNE up the slope" into a coordinate. Coordinates are how this stops being a campfire story and starts being a data set. PM me, I'll ship it, no charge.

Squatch -- your in-situ 35mm came back and I have it. I have to give you the bad news because you asked for it specifically. It is an OVERSTEP: two prints, the rear foot landing partly in the front track, which from your Polaroid angle read as one long impression and gave you the soft medial edge and the no-clear-second-print. It is a real animal, but the measurement is wrong and the "37cm single print" goes in the bin. I am sorry. You did everything right and the ground still lied to you, which is tracking.

Bin it. Thank you, genuinely -- THIS is why I send you the casts and not the believers, who would have had me measuring a chimera. So where that leaves me, honestly: the footprint is gone, the photos are a moth and a stump and a 1973 maybe, and what is LEFT after the skeptics have done their proper work is five unsourced hard-timed audio events in 214 hours, one shy neighbour who hears the same pattern, and a dog that will not leave the truck at 2am. That is a smaller pile than I had on Tuesday. It is not zero. I will take the parabolic, Bob. We do this properly or not at all.

And that is the honest end of the substantive arc, for now. I have read prints for thirty years. I can tell you what a print is NOT -- not a bear, not a stack, not, usually, a hoax. I cannot tell you what makes that knock at 2am on a cold still slope, and I have stopped pretending the not-knowing is a failure. It is just where the edge of what I know actually is. Keep the log, Squatch. Date everything. Trust the seep less than you want to. And the rest of you who only came for the 1973 photo -- it is a question, not an answer. Page 4 is for the parabolic results. Bring numbers or bring nothing.