Thumbs up, captain k, for quoting me in full, paragraph-by-paragraph, and for responding to them in turn. That’s the way to make things easy to follow for readers and to avoid misrepresenting what one’s opponent has said.
captain koolaid said:
If you've got Bigfoot, for real, nothing else matters. . . . Screw DeAtley, screw everyone. "I got bigfoot on film, baby. Now where can I pick up my Corvette?"
Where indeed? Only if someone had offered a big award for the first film of a Bigfoot would “nothing else matter”—not DeAtley, for example. Only had there been an award on offer would Patterson have been able to
pick up his Corvette without further ado. But there was no such sugar daddy. Tom Slick hadn’t offered an award. And no organization had done so either, or was likely to spontaneously award one after the fact (as they didn’t).
captain koolaid said:
If you've got Bigfoot, for real, nothing else matters. . . .
IF . . . for real is the problem in a nutshell. Its reality is not compellingly obvious from what Patterson filmed. As Parcher wrote in comment #3102:
Parcher said:
Patty might suddenly become much less than outstanding if she had to bend over, squat, pick up and carry an object or person, climb, etc. How about doing those things with a camera only 25 feet away? That's what Hollywood and Disney are all about. It could in fact be that Patterson's costume was mostly useless for them for anything other than walking and looking from far away.
Possibly for such reasons, Hollywood was not convinced that “Patty was outstanding.” Here’s what Ivan Sanderson wrote in his magazine,
Pursuit, in June 1968 (available on the Bigfoot Encounters site, IIRC):
Ivan Sanderson said:
Roger Patterson and Al DeAtley . . . were invited to Hollywood at their own expense, I might add, and kept there for no less than seven weeks negotiating with all manner of high-fallootin’ outfits, all of whom were talking in six figures about making an hour and a half documentary, incorporating Roger’s “strip” of the whole Bigfoot story. They asked a year to make it, with a camera crew and director on Patterson’s expedition for which he was trying to raise money. As is usual with Hollywood, not one g-d thing happened and not one single penny was even put into escrow by way of an option.
So it wouldn’t have mattered if Patterson knew he had “filmed a real Bigfoot.” If that real Bigfoot hadn’t done anything
extraordinarily convincing to others, they wouldn’t have credited it as being real. And if they didn’t credit it as being real, he wasn’t going to get paid. He knew that. So he’d have realized that he had to “sell” others on the film’s authenticity. That selling would have involved eliminating from their minds the possibility of darkroom manipulation:
Marian Place said:
One call [from Hodgson’s] was to Patterson’s brother-in-law, Al DeAtley, at Yakima. He urged him to make certain that when the precious film being mailed that day reached Yakima to follow it through the developing process and make absolutely certain it was not tampered with in any way. This was to prevent his being accused later of perpetuating a hoax.
—On the Track of Bigfoot, 1974, p. 138
Further, in one of his interviews, Patterson said that he was uncertain how good (i.e., convincing) his footage was before he saw it. He knew it would be jerky and blurred, and shot at a distance. I think Gimlin was quoted as saying that Patterson had said that, too. Anyone who had just filmed a real Bigfoot with such film-quality drawbacks might well have had such doubts. Those doubts would have deterred the filmer from immediately cutting out DeAtley, whose help he might need in negotiating a deal or for other business assistance. Therefore, if DeAtley had suggested covering up an actual five-day delay from filming-to-projecting, a genuine filmer might have heeded what he said. This answers your objection:
captain koolaid said:
To start with, Patterson would have known what he had from the moment the camera started rolling. He doesn't seem to have been useless with the camera, so the chances are very good it would turn out ok.
But there was a chance that it wouldn’t turn out OK. So why burn his bridges with DeAtley until he’d seen the film?
captain koolaid said:
Once the roll is developed and it's not a total bust... boom... it's the bigtime for Rodeo Roger. Who cares about the development time? Roger? DeAtley? Why?
First, as I argued above, “bigtime” is not automatic after a real Bigfoot has been filmed.
Extraordinary evidence is needed to convince bigtime moneybag people to fork over big money for such an extraordinary claim. Mere adequacy is insufficient. Second, given that he was dependent on DeAtley developing the film and projecting it before he could be sure of what he had, Patterson was unlikely to have offended him by using his name in his interview with the Eureka
Times-Standard without authorization. And DeAtley might not have given that authorization unless Patterson went along with him on the timeline cover-up.
Another point. Patterson wasn’t just looking for a quick five-figure payoff and a Corvette. His medical expenses were so high that that wouldn’t have sufficed for long. (The government didn’t pay much for medical expenses back then. And the money he did get from his tour in 1968 with DeAtley was (I’ve read) gone mostly for those expenses.) He was looking for enough money to support his family after he was gone.
So he wanted a six-figure amount. But the only way he could have made the much was from getting scientific organizations to endorse his film, and/or by convincing a Hollywood producer to make a film recreation incorporating his footage. (He always had his eye on a Hollywood recreation as his money-source.) But that would have required (among other things) convincing them that no funny business had gone on in the darkroom.
What better way to do that than to pretend that the film was immediately developed and projected? For six-hours’ pretense, that important objective, which might have made the difference between getting nothing and getting a million, could be achieved. With so much at stake, why not forestall the “darkroom-funny-business” objection?
I wish I hadn’t been forced into believing (by what Frank Ishihara of told me) that the film couldn’t have been developed at Technicolor Labs in Seattle over the weekend. And I wish I hadn’t been convinced by what he and other experts told me about the impossibility of its amateur development. I’d love to hear DeAtley provide details of how one-day development was accomplished. Until then, a falsely tightened timeline is the best explanation.
(I should remind defenders of the one-day timeline of my comment 3263 on page 82 at
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=11442397#post11442397, wherein I quoted Laverty as saying that he could have missed Patty’s tracks on Thursday or Friday when he drove by the filmsite. That means the footage could have been shot before then without the tracks being seen by him and his crew.)
EDIT: PS: There is still a slight chance that the film was developed via DeAtley on Saturday. Chris Murphy wrote, in
The Bigfoot Film Controversy, p. 192:
While pure speculation on my part, it might well be that the man Patterson refers to worked for the Seattle Kodak [sic] laboratory and processed the film privately (off the record) for DeAtley as the laboratory was closed [for processing, not for pickup and submission] on Saturday, October 21, 1967. Even if the facility was open, DeAtley may still have arranged special handling for the film. On the other hand, I have been informed by professionals that the film could have been privately processed in a home laboratory. This would be especially true if the person with the home laboratory worked at a Kodak facility.
Exactly my question above (though not claiming to be the first or the hundredth to do so). It's easily 1000x. Taking into account cameras of any sort (phones etc.), their number is in the billions (worldwide) nowadays. Taking hundreds of billions of pictures. Yet still no beast besides the "one" in the PGF.
