Continuation - The PG Film - Bob Heironimus and Patty

[Resume]

In comment 3398 I wrote . . .

First, I think . . .

Here are three afterthoughts on my . . .

McClain wasn’t present . . .

PS to my comment #3424 . . .

The embankment of the creek . . .

The dog Patterson . . .

STRONGBOW!

 

[Roger Knights]

1: Is there any mention by Laverty that there was bark over the tracks when he found them?

I'm not familiar with all that has been posted about his account. Laverty hasn't said much publicly about the details of his finding and photographing of the tracks. I'll add it to my list of questions the next time I write him. (I've tried twice, with no response.)

2: All the excuses you are making to try and justify a reason for Patterson to lie about the filming date are ridiculous. Had Patterson filmed a real bigfoot - there would be no reason to lie about when it happened.

It's true that it seems ridiculous from the outside for him to have lied about the date. But, if the film couldn't have been developed at Technicolor on Saturday, and couldn't have been developed in a home lab, and if there was no record at the Arcata airport of planes flying from there to Yakima or Seattle that night (per Peter Byrne), and if the Post Office in Eureka closed before Patterson arrived (he was clocked into Willow Creek at 6:15), then fibbing about the filming date is the only explanation for what happened.

I tried hard to find a reason it could have been developed at Technicolor lab, but Frank Ishihara eliminated that possibility with his description of the hours the development team worked, etc. Although it's generally known among Bigfooters that Ishihara didn't think the film could have been developed at his lab, I think they weren't aware of the hard-to-get-around details that he told me, which I think make development there very unlikely. Bigfooters might have thought Ishihara didn’t have such solid grounds for his opinion.

Ishihara told me that only the front desk was manned on Saturdays, to hand out developed film to customers who came in to pick it up, and to take in film submitted for processing. No technical people were there then. So even if an employee had wanted to develop film for DeAtley when he arrived, it couldn't have been done.

The only way it could have been developed on a Saturday would have been for one of the front-desk employees to tell DeAtley that one of the technical employees had a home lab and would do the job for him—and gave him his contact information—and called ahead for permission first. Maybe that IS what happened, and that employee is receiving a pension that he would lose if his name were revealed. Maybe, in five or ten years, he will no longer be with us, and DeAtley can come clean about it, instead of claiming a memory gap (TMoB, pp. 253–54). That's what I hope will occur.

I tried to track down anyone in the Yakima area who might have developed the film. For instance, I found out that Yakima Junior College had a class in photography. I knew that DeAtley had connections with that college—he wangled the use of one of its offices for inclusion in the film he and Patterson made to show on the road. (TMoB, p. 261) I contacted the long-time (since before 1967) photo-class instructor there, Herb Blisard, hoping he might be the guy, or might have heard of someone with a home lab. No luck.

I also talked several times to people in the photo lab (and other departments) at KIMA TV. Again, no luck; again I was told that home-brew development was not possible, and that they'd never heard of such a thing. (I may have pursued other dead-ends. My co-Seattle-ite Matt Crowley might remember—I told him occasionally about my latest hope.) I was not seeking to debunk.

This fib about the filming date might have been something Patterson got into accidentally, which makes it more plausible. Let's say that, first, he sends off the film to DeAtley by private plane from the eight-miles-from-Bluff Creek Orleans airport. (A plane from Arcata would have picked it up and flown on—pick-ups were common. I looked at the air-delivery ads in the Yellow Pages for Humboldt County for that year.) He doesn't want to announce it until he knows it looks good, to avoid looking foolish. He wants to remain on-site to keep looking for additional evidence. He wants DeAtley's "buy-in" on backing the film and his OK to use his name when he talks to the newspaper. There's nothing ridiculous about this so far, agreed?

Three (say) days later he talks to DeAtley again (again calling collect from Orleans). DeAtley tells him he's got it developed and that it looks good enough to perhaps be real, but it's not overwhelmingly convincing. There will be doubters. So why not drive to Arcata, contacting folks along the way, and say the footage had just been shot? No harm done, and scoffers would not be able to point to possible darkroom shenanigans. Patterson, put on the spot, agrees. That's not really ridiculous either.

It's not ridiculous if you understand that this deception wasn't planned from the beginning, and wasn't thought out in detail by Patterson, but was forced on him in the spur of the moment. You’re right that “there would be no reason to lie about when it happened,” if the decision were up to him, and if there had been no delay already between the filming and the development, but that’s a too-simple understanding of how events might have unfolded. He might just as easily have contacted DeAtley and had the film developed before he went public. Mightn’t you have done so, in his position? Or at least mightn’t you have thought hard about doing so?

Here are three considerations that make me suspect the authenticity of the mailing or air-shipping from Arcata.

1) The contradictory stories about whether the film was sent from the post office (which anyway would have been closed by that time) or the Arcata airport.

2) The inconvenience of driving some 80 (?) miles from the Bluff Creek Road roadhead to Arcata vs. eight miles to Orleans. It seems to me that the main "advantage" of going to Arcata was to obtain witnesses in Willow Creek to his doing so on the date he claimed the filming had occurred.

3) Patterson's failure to drop in to the Eureka newspaper office (only six or so miles from Arcata) when he was in the vicinity. Patterson was a publicity hound and would have wanted his mug in the paper, along with a photo of his casts. Instead, he called the paper at 9:30 when he was back near Willow Creek, at the ranger station. I suspect the reason he didn't go to the paper was that he didn't drive to its vicinity at all. Instead, I suspect he drove a few miles in its direction and pulled off into a roadside bar, restaurant, movie theater, or pull-off and waited three hours, then turned around to go to the ranger station, claiming the film had just been sent off.

 

[LTC8K6]

Why go to the trouble? No one was going to check on his story, and in fact no one did check on the story.
Roger was in no danger of any scrutiny of his story. That's why there are so many different versions of it.

No one even went to the site to verify the story.

Laverty just happened to be in the area, and even he was not sufficiently interested to do more than take a few pics of tracks.

Titmus and company finally went 9 or 10 days later, and failed to bring a camera, but remembered to bring plaster...

 

[Roger Knights]

Why would Laverty have seen any tracks on Thursday? or even on Friday?

He would have if there hadn't been a big embankment on the far side of the creek. Ten years ago I emailed Laverty (having obtained his private e-mail) and asked if he'd seen tracks when he drove by the filmsite. His terse answer was that he hadn't. He didn't respond to my follow-up questions. I didn't realize that the creek's embankment would have blocked his view of the tracks. So I assumed that the tracks hadn't been made by Friday morning, just before Patterson's 1:30 PM filming. I published an article in Bigfoot Times claiming (incorrectly) that this debunked Heironimus's claim that the tracks were made on late Thursday afternoon or Friday morning (TMoB, p. 350).

Even if we assume Laverty could see tracks while driving by, he obviously couldn't have seen any until after they were left...and presumably after Roger and Bob were done at the site. Otherwise they run into each other. That window is pretty narrow.

I'm not following you. I'm not saying that Laverty ever saw tracks from his Jeep, so it doesn't matter if he could have seen them if there were no embankment. My theory of the case is that the film was shot before Thursday—most likely sometime between the previous Saturday the 14th and Tuesday, the 17th, inclusive. If it was filmed on the 14th, this could have been the reason Gimlin decided to stay an extra week beyond the two he’d agreed to.

Laverty and his crew didn't work weekends. And they didn't work near the filmsite—they only passed it early in the morning on their way farther upstream, to mark timber there, at which time P&G were likely snoozing, tired from driving the roads at night (when logging trucks were absent) looking for footprints in the dust. Laverty et al. passed the filmsite on their return, maybe about 4 PM.

Laverty said he never encountered P&G. But Gimlin said that most of their time previous searching had been many miles away from the filmsite, so it's not surprising that they didn't meet.

I don't think Titmus could find his butt with both hands and a helper, so the fact that he couldn't find the trackway easily doesn't say much. He did find the box seat where Patty sat and watched the Roger and Bob show, though. Which parts do we believe?

Titmus's not initially seeing the tracks when he walked along the streambed road was no big fault of his. His two accompanists didn't see them either. I only thought it was worth pointing out that fact to support Laverty's statement that he could easily have missed seeing the tracks. I think Bigfooters need to realize that. I regret that my article unintentionally misled them.

I'm dubious about his claim to have located Patty's watching post, because it conflicts with the footprints P&G found farther up the creek, leading into dense brush (possibly on the other side of the creek, for all we know).

 

[William Parcher]

Laverty said he never encountered P&G. But Gimlin said that most of their time previous searching had been many miles away from the filmsite, so it's not surprising that they didn't meet.

But Laverty doesn't even mention seeing the big truck parked at what would have been their campsite. Laverty doesn't see a truck that is supposedly parked there for weeks?

This suggests to me that they didn't really stay there for very long at all. If they did any riding around on horses it was to scout for a hoaxing site, not to look for Bigfoot or tracks. Roger, they are telling lies.

 

[Roger Knights]

Why go to the trouble? No one was going to check on his story, and in fact no one did check on the story.
Roger was in no danger of any scrutiny of his story. That's why there are so many different versions of it.

If Patterson had said that the film was shot on the 14th and developed on (say) the 18th, that would have given scoffers an excuse to suggest the film could have been manipulated in the darkroom in that time. That wouldn't have required any "checking" on scoffers' part. The fact that no one was going to check his story's film development timeline (not even skeptic Ken Wylie, 13 years later), meant that fibbing about the date the film was shot (i.e., saying it was filmed the day before it was developed) was risk-free. That's why it wasn't ridiculous for him to say so, if DeAtley thought it would make the film more salable / believable.

No one even went to the site to verify the story.

Laverty just happened to be in the area, and even he was not sufficiently interested to do more than take a few pics of tracks.

Laverty and his crew were did not just happen to be in the area. Laverty said he drove by the filmsite every day. They spent the nights at Louse Camp. On weekends they stayed in Orleans.

He and his crew were Bigfoot skeptics. He said that he and they hadn't seen any footprints or heard any howls. They weren't tracking experts. They were supposed to be working for the gov't when they were examining the tracks. About 15 minutes was the most they could have been expected to devote to their look-see.

 

[William Parcher]

I'm dubious about his claim to have located Patty's watching post, because it conflicts with the footprints P&G found farther up the creek, leading into dense brush (possibly on the other side of the creek, for all we know).

Roger, those guys didn't follow Patty tracks anywhere because the whole thing was a hoax. They are telling lies.

 

[Resume]

Someone like Roger Patterson went forth to make a film about bigfoot, and in no time at all, he films a bigfoot. In the entire natural history of North America, no one, not any of the millions upon millions upon millions have ever produced a sniff of substantive evidence for bigfoot.

Simple fact.

 

[Roger Knights]

But Laverty doesn't even mention seeing the big truck parked at what would have been their campsite. Laverty doesn't see a truck that is supposedly parked there for weeks?

This suggests to me that they didn't really stay there for very long at all. If they did any riding around on horses it was to scout for a hoaxing site, not to look for Bigfoot or tracks. Roger, they are telling lies.

You have a good point—and it’s one that’s bothered me too. They did say that they had camped at least some of the time along Bluff Creek, across from where the spur down from Bluff Creek Road ran down to the streambed road. Laverty would have seen it there.

But maybe they didn’t camp there, although they said they did. It would have made much more sense to camp most of the time atop Onion Mountain, or on some ridge, if the truck were going to be driven nightly along the roads leading from it (looking for tracks in the dust), which is what they said they spent most of their time doing. Why have to cross the creek and climb the mountain every evening, and then descend it and cross the creek every morning? It was a dangerous switchback in a loaded horse truck.

(There was comparatively little dust along the streambed road. Big logging trucks did not roar along it. It was the suction of their passing that drew pumice dust from the sides of the ridgeline roads into the roads themselves, where Bigfoots could lay tracks. That’s where the Blue Mountain tracks were found. And the low-altitude upper Bluff Creek road was already blocked inoperative by 1967, as the email I quoted from John Green establishes, so it would not have been possible to drive along it--so a camp near a spur from it would not have been advantageous.)

Now consider this: maybe it was forbidden by the Forest Service to camp along or near a forest road. That sounds like a likely rule. Patterson wasn’t the sort of person who’d obey such a rule if it were inconvenient. If there had been such a rule, it would likely have made Patterson falsely claim later, in public, that they camped elsewhere—such as along Bluff Creek—to avoid possible prosecution. Supporting the idea that the campsite was far from the campsite (e.g., atop Onion Mountain or along the road that ran along its ridge) is this:

So we decided that that Saturday [he meant Friday], Oct. 20, we'd take the little packhorse and we'd pack some gear back in and go about 10 miles beyond where we had ridden, and we knew it was gonna’ take us a few hours to get back in there.

And, if the actual date of the filming were Saturday the 14th, and they camped by Bluff Creek only that weekend, Laverty wouldn’t have come upon them.

I wouldn’t be so speculative in my patchings-up of the P&G backstory if Patterson wasn’t the sort of schemer who wouldn’t hesitate to improve a story, thus making it look fishy when closely examined, and if the PGF didn’t have so many authenticating features. (Please let’s not get into that topic—you won’t convince me, and I won’t defend my belief in it lest we get too far off-topic (Heironimus).

 

[Roger Knights]

Someone like Roger Patterson went forth to make a film about bigfoot, and in no time at all, he films a bigfoot. In the entire natural history of North America, no one, not any of the millions upon millions upon millions have ever produced a sniff of substantive evidence for bigfoot.

Simple fact.

You’re aware of the rebuttals to that claim, I presume, and it’s off-topic (Heironimus), which I hope we’ll get around to when Kitakaze returns, so I won’t reply.

 

[captain koolaid]

...This fib about the filming date might have been something Patterson got into accidentally, which makes it more plausible. Let's say that, first, he sends off the film to DeAtley by private plane from the eight-miles-from-Bluff Creek Orleans airport...

I find the whole "sending it off to DeAtley" to be a major WTF? to start with. No way in hell I'd do that. You'd have to kill me to get it out of my vice like fingers. But, that's me. Maybe Roger was dimmer than I give him credit for and a bit of a drunkypants, or something. But, whatever.

... He doesn't want to announce it until he knows it looks good, to avoid looking foolish. He wants to remain on-site to keep looking for additional evidence...

The only evidence worth worrying about at that point is getting more footage. You don't need to part with the roll to do that.

...He wants DeAtley's "buy-in" on backing the film and his OK to use his name when he talks to the newspaper. There's nothing ridiculous about this so far, agreed?...

Nope. Not agreed. To hell with DeAtley. If I'm Roger, there is no way that I'm giving this to some other jerk to develop and "check out". I'm gonna do that myself, scope it out, myself... and then make a move.

...Three (say) days later he talks to DeAtley again (again calling collect from Orleans). DeAtley tells him he's got it developed and that it looks good enough to perhaps be real, but it's not overwhelmingly convincing. There will be doubters. So why not drive to Arcata, contacting folks along the way, and say the footage had just been shot? No harm done, and scoffers would not be able to point to possible darkroom shenanigans. Patterson, put on the spot, agrees. That's not really ridiculous either...

Look, it's not impossible... but, it's pretty damn unlikely. I'd be jettisoning DeAtley so fast, he'd find himself in Dumpsville before the sun went down.

...It's not ridiculous if you understand that this deception wasn't planned from the beginning, and wasn't thought out in detail by Patterson, but was forced on him in the spur of the moment. You’re right that “there would be no reason to lie about when it happened,” if the decision were up to him, and if there had been no delay already between the filming and the development, but that’s a too-simple understanding of how events might have unfolded. He might just as easily have contacted DeAtley and had the film developed before he went public. Mightn’t you have done so, in his position? Or at least mightn’t you have thought hard about doing so?...

I don't see why Patterson would give a flying **** what DeAtley thought. If I'm Patterson, I'm doing it myself and I might tell him "I got it. You want in, or not?" Because if he doesn't, so what? I'm not gonna stuff around, being jerked around by DeAtley and his concerns about "scoffers". I'm cashing in and DeAtley can have some of the sweet action for being a pal about some bucks, but, I'm not gonna treat him like he's Cecil B. DeMille or anything. DeAtley can bugger off. This whole "hoax to prevent suspicion of a hoax" is weak tea.

Put yourself in Patterson's shoes. I can. I understand him. He seems a little familiar. I don't think you get him.

 

[LTC8K6]

It's really too bad that absolutely no one thought it was important to document the film site.

If Laverty or Titmus could have just been bothered enough...

Pics of the trackway, the horse tracks, Roger's tracks...they'd have been so valuable.

Titmus and company really have no excuse at all. They had plenty of prep time and they knew they were visiting the site of an important event to bigfooters.

 

[LTC8K6]

I find the whole "sending it off to DeAtley" to be a major WTF? to start with. No way in hell I'd do that. You'd have to kill me to get it out of my vice like fingers. But, that's me. Maybe Roger was dimmer than I give him credit for and a bit of a drunkypants, or something. But, whatever.





The only evidence worth worrying about at that point is getting more footage. You don't need to part with the roll to do that.






Nope. Not agreed. To hell with DeAtley. If I'm Roger, there is no way that I'm giving this to some other jerk to develop and "check out". I'm gonna do that myself, scope it out, myself... and then make a move.





Look, it's not impossible... but, it's pretty damn unlikely. I'd be jettisoning DeAtley so fast, he'd find himself in Dumpsville before the sun went down.





I don't see why Patterson would give a flying **** what DeAtley thought. If I'm Patterson, I'm doing it myself and I might tell him "I got it. You want in, or not?" Because if he doesn't, so what? I'm not gonna stuff around, being jerked around by DeAtley and his concerns about "scoffers". I'm cashing in and DeAtley can have some of the sweet action for being a pal about some bucks, but, I'm not gonna treat him like he's Cecil B. DeMille or anything. DeAtley can bugger off. This whole "hoax to prevent suspicion of a hoax" is weak tea.

Put yourself in Patterson's shoes. I can. I understand him. He seems a little familiar. I don't think you get him.

Yes, if you actually just filmed bigfoot, you would certainly not immediately release control of the undeveloped film like that.

And at that point, what do you need DeAtley for?

You have a big gold nugget.

 

[captain koolaid]

Yes, if you actually just filmed bigfoot, you would certainly not immediately release control of the undeveloped film like that.

And at that point, what do you need DeAtley for?

You have a big gold nugget.

Exactamundo, LTC.

 

[Darat]

Thread getting slow again, continuation can be found here: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=312102

Posted By: Darat