John Prindle: Have you ever seen a first generation copy of the PGF? If so, does it differ dramatically from the poorly digitized copies seen on YouTube?
Jeff Meldrum: John Green commissioned a project undertaken by Rick Noll to digitally microphotograph a first generation copy of the original PGF. Owen Caddy has presented publicly on the history of this project and his analysis of the facial details evident upon color-channel splitting of the images. MK Davis has also done extensive examinations of the digital images generated by Noll, including some very interesting stabilized gifs of several successive steps prior to the lower legs being obscured by the jumbled debris in the foreground.
JP: D.W. Grieve, an anatomist, studied the PGF in 1971. His analysis can be found in an appendix to John Napier’s Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality. His most striking statement, in my opinion, is this: My subjective impressions have oscillated between total acceptance of the Sasquatch based on the grounds that the film would be difficult to fake, to one of irrational rejection based on an emotional response to the possibility that the Sasquatch actually exists…” Do you feel that this is the case with the PGF?… one of outright rejection because it simply can’t be true?
JM: For many critics, this seems to be the case. E.g., skeptical costume artists say it is obviously a costume, and yet they are unable to point to any comparable examples and they are unable to mount a convincing effort to recreate the costume themselves. The more it (the PGF) is scrutinized, the more compelling details emerge.
