Bigfoot - The Patterson-Gimlin Film

[William Parcher]

Ain't no way any bloke in a monkey suit with clown feet is going to elude P&G on horseback and then climb the mountain for 3.5 miles. Hello.

 

[LTC8K6]

After all, if I could manage to prove that part of P/G's story is absolutely false, I would then cast doubt on the film for sure.

If I could show that there was heavy overcast on the days the film was supposedly shot, for example. There wasn't, though.

I can't flat out say the film is fake, because there is nothing in the film that will allow me to do that as far as I can tell.

The supporters will take all sorts of data from the film and say it proves it's not a man, but that is all faulty as far as I am concerned and not to be taken seriously.

The best I can do is say that I don't know.

If I could see the footage of the casting and track experiments, maybe I could tell about what time these experiments occurred and put a round or two through P/G's timeline. Maybe I would find that the time works out ok.

I believe the film is a hoax, though. I try not to present that belief as factual. The fact is, I do not know.

If that didn't make any sense, I'm sorry.

 

[LTC8K6]

Ain't no way any bloke in a monkey suit with clown feet is going to elude P&G on horseback and then climb the mountain for 3.5 miles. Hello.

Sure, if the 3.5 miles bit is true. What if the "sat down and watched" deal is true? Maybe P/G are lousy trackers? Maybe the trail was laid down earlier for P/G to follow while monkey man got away?

Roger called Bob back when Bob was going to follow Patty immediately, remember? If they tracked Patty, it was after she had a good head start.

Roger did not want the tracks protected, either.

 

[William Parcher]

Sure, if the 3.5 miles bit is true. What if the "sat down and watched" deal is true? Maybe P/G are lousy trackers? Maybe the trail was laid down earlier for P/G to follow while monkey man got away?

Roger called Bob back when Bob was going to follow Patty immediately, remember? If they tracked Patty, it was after she had a good head start.

Roger did not want the tracks protected, either.

Gimlin said the last time he saw Patty she was 300 yards away on the logging road (that's 3 American football fields). Then she rounded a bend in the road. If a guy in a suit did that and then also sat nearby overlooking P&G back at the sandbank... the bloke made a hell of a round-trip in big feet.

 

[William Parcher]

PGF film processing timeline smoky gun

 

[Skeptical Greg]

I did my own crunching on the film resolution issue ( for frame 352 )
and was pleasantly surprised to find I came up with 2 inches also..


I used 31.5 lines/mm ( 2 of 63 actual lines/mm needed to form a
meaningful image ) of resolution in a 16mm frame of Kodachrome 2 film, according to the
Fahrenbach article.. http://www.rfthomas.clara.net/papers/filmres.html )

( please present any information you have that doesn't agree with this film resolution information )

I used this frame ( I believe 352 ) that LTC8K6 linked to in another thread..

The actual height of the frame is 7.49 mm, and I measured the vertical size of the
image of Patty in the frame to be 1.1mm. ( whip out your ruler if you have one ( great ad hom opportunity ) )..
In real life you would be looking at this..

31.5 x 1.1 = 34.65 lines of resolution in the Patty figure.. ( isn't math grand ? )

If we estimate that the real world vertical length of the visible part of Patty in the frame
is 6 feet, this equals 1.83 meters, or 1,830mm.

Dividing 1830 by 34.65 we get 52.8 mm = 2.08 inches..

To suggest that you can resolve one centimeter in frame 352,
puts Patty at about 13 inches tall!

Of course if the ' three sharpest Cibachrome prints ' where there is 1 centimeter of resolution available, are of other frames,in which Patterson got a lot closer to the subject than we can see in the film that has been shared with the public so far, then we will have to wait for that evidence to be shared with the rest of us.

The precision of this resolving limit is dependent on an accurate measurement of the size of Patty at large ( as opposed to within a given frame ) , which we don't have.
But still, as shown below, with a height variation of 24 inches ( 5 – 7 feet ) , we get a resolution variation of .7 inches ( 17.8 mm ) for frame 352 .. Keeping in mind, the resolvable detail of frame 352 gets larger than 2 inches, as the height of Patty goes past 6 feet..


At one time it would have been pretty easy to have accurately measured one of the stumps in the background ( did Green ? ); and with that, and what we know about the resolution of the film, we could get some very accurate measurements of anything in the same frame as our stump..


For those who want to fret about how Patty's height would affect
these numbers ( keeping in mind we are talking about figure size
in the context of frame 352 ) , putting her at 5 feet would give
us a resolution of 1.7 inches and 7 feet would make it 2.4 inches..

For anyone to dispute these numbers, they need to show that the 63 lines / mm
resolution for Kodachrome 2 ( or whatever film was used; the owners who have the film
squirreled away should have this info, it is on the edge of the film ) is not good information.

To suggest that any type of processing can improve this resolution is a lie, plain and simple.

Processing/enhancement can guess at, and fill in missing data; this is at best only entertaining, and
considering the target audience, highly misleading.

Any resulting prints of any process, size, resolution or enhancement will not change the two inch ( at best ) resolvable detail limit of the furry subject in frame 352 ...

 

[Skeptical Greg]

Just had a humorous vision.


As I showed in my last post, if the detail in frame 352 is as small as one centimeter, as Primateer suggested; then Patty would only be 13 inches tall.

Imagine Roger P. laying prone on the ground, filming a 13 inch Patty only a few feet away. That log in the foreground is really a small stick...

 

[William Parcher]

If I ever see a Bigfoot, I'm gonna walk right up to his face and tell him that homeopathic remedies are bunk!

 

[LTC8K6]

At the link WP posted, you will note a common refrain among the believers.

We have this film, it's genuine, and nothing else matters. We don't care when it was shot, who processed it, etc. There it is, and that's all that matters.

 

[LTC8K6]

The story is perfectly straightforward, though imprecise. … Why worry about it? The film is what counts and it contains the proof of its own validity.”

I wish John Green would have said that to me..... I would have told him how wrong he was. If I didn't die from laughing first.

 

[LTC8K6]

BF2004 at that BFF thread link:

Ok, so the film wasn't taken on October 20. So what? All that matters is the film, not the date it was taken. All we know is the film was taken sometime in October of 1967, as evidenced by the fall colors in the film. It doesn't bother me that the film wasn't taken on October 20, because the film was taken in the fall, sometime in October, and that's all that matters.

It actually matters a whole bunch if the film wasn't taken on the 20th.

It means that Patty's trackway and any claims about it are likely bogus. It means that Meldrum's midtarsal break ideas are doubly bogus. It means that Patty's "authentic" tracks are unconnected with the film and no longer "authentic". It means Bob Titmus and his Bluff creek story are unconnected with the film. It means that Laverty's photos are unconnected to the film. It means that the tracks Laverty shot and Titmus cast and followed were out in the elements for way longer than anyone thought, etc., etc,.....

It means that P/G are big fat liars....

 

[Skeptical Greg]

It means that P/G are big fat liars....

No ! No ! They are just confused..

BH And Greg Long are the liars...
I'm a liar. You're a liar...

Dfoot is a liar.. Lu is bashing him over at BFF because he dared to take Meldrum's name in vain, and seems to think she is ' outing ' him by revealing he is posting over here..

She is promising to dig up some dirt where Dfoot had a problem with Chris Walas, before he decided to check some things out for himself..

She can't seem to comprehend the concept of someone realizing they made a mistake, and admitting it..

 

[Correa Neto]

Thanks for the welcome everybody. I'm just posting things as I learn about them. It's a fun topic to investigate for a lot of reasons.

William... I can only answer that by saying that when I first heard about the FLORES discovery in 2004 I was elated. Flores had become a happy fun-time place for me full of joy and vindication. Mostly vindication. (*In your face Mr. It-cannot-exist guy!)
...snip...

Here at JREF, most of us don't actually say "it can not exist". We say "it's unlikely to exist", and if eventually reliable evidence is found, we'll say "WOW We were wrong! Cool!". Our main disagreement with some footers is regarding the quality of the evidence presented so far. But we've already spent too many letters on this.

Well, what follows is a long OT digression, but I guess it gives us something that may be interesting to discuss.

On the use of myths to back the reality of cryptos (I hope no one will ask what a crypto is). IMHO there are three main issues that I think must be taken in to account when dealing with myths. Let me tell you why, presenting you a bit of personal experience -anedoctal, mostly . Yes, I know, since its based on my personal experiences, I may be providing a biased POV.

(1) While some mythical creatures may have a real background, most are probably just fantasies. Note that this real background may be something quite different from the mythical creature. For example, among the background for the cyclops myth were elephant skulls. And elephants are very different from one-eyed giants. So, where to draw the line? There are tales and myths of what could be called "small people" at a lot of cultures. Some look like miniature humans, some are hairy and monkey-like, some have wings, some have some weird anatomical features, some are good, some are bad, and so on. All these creatures have or had some real counterpart? I think that quite possibly not, and that most likely most are just fantasies. Now, with this in mind, how can we be sure that H. florensis inspired ebu gogo tales? Maybe it was just a coincidence, after all... Or maybe they actually did inspired. However, my point is: most mythical creatures are probably just that- mythical. And its very hard to draw the line in some cases. In some not, since I think most people would agree that a chimera is almost certainly just a myth, while there's something behind the kraken.

(2) What animals would impress native people enough to become a legend and for how long they will remember them? Bigfeet myth -as well as other cryptos- may be a "cultural memory" from a creature that nowdays is extinct. Back in the early and middle 90s I was in the academic world and deep in to speleology (pun intended). By this time, a paleontologist named Castor Cartelli described a species of fossil monkey named Caipora bambuirorum from remains found at a cave in Bahia (Northeastern Brazil). It was a large arboricolal monkey (think of a big howling monkey and you'll get the picture), that lived at tropicak rainforest that once covered what is now a semiarid area. The animal was named based on the supposition that it inspired the caipora myth. Caiporas, according to native brazilian lore, are supposed to be little hairy human-like creatures, with it's feet pointing backwards, that ride wild boars. Now, I spent some time discussing this with some geos, paleos and bios friends, some of whom have actually helped Cartelli at some point. Now, my point was, why fearsome creatures like Smilodons are not present in native brazilian lore? I still remmember the impression I had whe I saw for the first time a Smilodon skeleton. The thick bones were a testimony to the beast's strenght. There were plenty of remakable animals at Brazil in the Pleistocene, such as Glyptodons (giant armadillos that looked like tanks), mastodons and giant terrestrial sloths (more on this particluar one later). There are some petroglyphs showing animals from the megafauna, arrows and spearheads were found in association with Toxodon and giant sloths remains, current native Brazilian populations have no myths that can be correlated with these creatures with some certanity. So, why none of these magnific animals are recorded in current legends? The fact is that with time, not only cultures change but populations and civilizations are changed, substituted or destroyed by wars, ecological changes, etc. So, in 10Ky, a lot of things can change in a culture, and these records can be lost.

(3) Quite often myths can only be correctly interpreted within the cultural background that originated them. When one interprets the sasquatch and similar myths as an unknown primate, we may be completely changing its original context and bringing a new meaning that may not be propper. Foloow two examples:

a)The mapinguari, a creature from Amazonian lore, is interpreted by some cryptozoologists either as a bigfoot-like animal or as a surviving terrestrial sloth. The original legend talks about a stinking (OK) tall humanoid (OK) that leaves twisted branches at its trails (OK). But the mapinguari is carnivorous has a single eye, a huge mouth in the belly, alligator-like skin and a turtle-like armour at its back. These "details" were conviniently ignored. To say it is a bigfoot or a giant sloth is to twist the myth, and not to interpretate it.

b)Can't remember the name right now- the beast is supposed to live in some lakes from central Brazil. They were, according to some, a recollection from Toxodons. By then, it was supposed that these animals were aquatic, somehow like hippos. A person I know showed pictures of how Toxodons were supposed to be (the painting showed the animals in a lake or swamp) to an indian, who promptly recognized it as the mythological beast in question. However, new studies showed they were actually terrestrial grazing animals, so the link was just bunk. Shades of mokelembembe here...

 

[LTC8K6]

Meldrum's Cryptozoology page also has an Alderfoot as it's background image.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

Meldrum's Cryptozoology page also has an Alderfoot as it's background image.

Who are you trying to kid?
Everyone knows Wallace used a real bigfoot track as a model for the fake foot he carved.. Right down to the crack in the heel.

You must take us all for some kind of idiots, including the impeccably credentialed Meldrum, High Priest of Footery.
Do you think he doesn't know a real bea..., urrh, uhh, Bigfoot track when he seee's one ?

 

[LTC8K6]

Finally found a pic of casts with ridiculously long toes. Clownfoot?

 

[LTC8K6]

Who would even bother to consider the possibility that these are anything but the tracks of a hoaxer?

 

[LTC8K6]

Good shot of casts made by Patterson.

 

[LTC8K6]

I always wondered about that....

 

[LTC8K6]

Bob Titmus with casts.

I spy a pair of alderfeet....