But once again, the Wallace family claimed the wooden fakes were used, but it mostly has been the media that linked them to the “first” Bigfoot cast brought forth by Jerry Crew. There were other tracks, probable Wallace fakes, that look like the wooden tools left on sandbars that have more to do with the fakes.

The prize is talking about the Crew tracks that even I feel have nothing to do with the Wallace fakes.

For example, the terms of the challenge require that the replication produce deep tracks in dense earth into which “human prints barely penetrate at all;” that tracks climb and descend steep ,overgrown slopes while showing clear variation in toe positon; and that tracks allow rocks and other hard objects to stick up above the rest of the track. Furthermore, hundreds of tracks must be produced under these conditons **under cover of darkness, and undetected by persons nearby, and in places where no machine can reach.** (If I understand it correctly, these last three conditions can be satisfied individually in three separate tests.)

The problem with this is that there’s no sort of consensus that these in fact were the original conditions. Instead, the details are reconstructed, partly based on anecdotal accounts (and a hefty dollop of inference). Indeed, details like toe mobility are exactly the sorts of unproven claims that are at issue in these discussions.

I assume the Green prize is offered in good faith, but I’m not at all convinced the prize would ever be awarded in any event — there seems to be tremendous interpretive wiggle-room in the rules, all in the favour of the judges.

But it hardly matters: any outcome from the Green test, positive or negative, would be equally (and completely) irrelevant to the original claim that the tracks were made by a real live sasquatch.

——————–
(PS: The Randi Prize, on the other hand, is entirely fair, genuine, and definitive. Rather than demanding that arbitrary conditions be met, the Randi prize merely asks, A) “What can you do, according to you?” and B) “Under what conditions can you do it, according to you?” Both parties then negotiate a **mutually acceptable and mutually agreed** protocol to prevent cheating in a formal test of the claimant’s ability, and establishing a mutually acceptable framework formally defining a successful or failed demonstration. Then the claimant attempts to demonstrate his claimed ability under the conditions he himself specified, subject to the safeguards he himself agreed to. Very straightforward stuff, really: as Randi jokes, “If they say they can play the violin, then we ask them to play the violin.”)

Mark A. Hall’s treatments of the subject in Wonders, which have not been read by all the parties involved apparently, and the total output of Matt Crowley’s new work are both worthy of examining.

I will address more of this in forthcoming blogs, but I wish to say I appreciate the time taken by DB, Noll, and Green for your counter-arguments here and yesterday.

Thank you.

So, in a nutshell, your argument is this: since the Onion Mt./Blue Creek photograph resembles Wallace’s fake, without being a match, then that means Wallace once had a fake that would match it.

Going through all those posts again I am left echoing what I said in one of your threads on May 29. 2006:

While the one track from Blue Creek that Loren uses *does* look very much like Wallace’s fake, Rick Noll showed that it was not a direct match. So you can’t say that you know it was a fake, all you can say is that it looks like one and then hypothesize that Wallace at one time had a different version of his fake foot and used it at Blue Creek. Even with that you’ve got problems, because Loren’s only been able to show a similarity in one photograph (a similarity that doesn’t hold up to measurement, remember). He doesn’t make much of the fact that there were hundreds of prints found at the location made by different sized feet in several substrates. As Rick Noll pointed out on a now famous BFF thread, some of those foot impressions can’t be explained by our present understanding of Wallace’s hoaxing method. If Wallace used wooden feet, he’d have to have had dozens of them, swapping them out between steps. He’d have had to have some way of getting his wooden feet up and down embankments while maintaining a natural look. There are quite a few reasons to suppose that the footprints at Blue Creek aren’t hoaxed, and it appears the only reason to think they are is that one of them looks fake. And it *does* look fake. The preponderence of the evidence suggests that it probably isn’t.

You don’t have to take my word for what Noll said and did, though, he wrote as much himself in answer to one of your blog posts on January 10, 2007:

If you were to compare the Wallace wooden foot with the actual cast you would see that the features do not line up. They look similar but the waist is too far back towards the heel and the double ball is off in position as well. Given that these features could of moved while embedded into the soil when making a track and moving somewhat, their relationship within the track would also show this. It does not. It is obvious that the wooden foot of Wallace is not what made the cast.

John Green’s detailed rebuttal of your position from March 10, 2006 is a powerful argument against your secondary evidence, too, so that in the end all we are left with is that superficial resemblance of the fake and the photo of a track in the ground.

It seems to me that Noll and Green have presented the stronger case, and unless you can do better than “the footprints are fake because they look like fakes” I can’t agree with your position.

After all, there is another explanation for why Wallace’s fake foot looks so much like footprints otherwise believed to be genuine — he crafted his fake to look like that very foot. This explanation also gives us a reasonable explanation for why the left and right fakes don’t look like a match — Wallace only had one cast to copy from (perhaps using, as Noll noted back on February 13 of 2006, “one of those toy machines that were popular back then that could trace a shape and duplicate it or changes its scale”). If he didn’t want his left and right foot to look identical, he’d have to fashion the second fake without a template. Perhaps he wasn’t a capable enough artist to make them look similar. (That Wallace could have copied one real track and fudged the other was suggested by Green in the aforementioned post of March 10, 2006, where he noted that there was a resemblance between one of Wallace’s fakes and “some casts of the many “15-inch” tracks that were found, photographed, and cast over a 10-year period.” He described the other fake as “not a close representation of anything. It is crudely carved to only an approximate shape, with three of the toes not even separated.”)

And now I see that the comment I’m replying to isn’t the same as the one I received in my email notice. The email seemed a little less heavy handed then the present version of your post.

This is no distraction, Loren, it is the heart of the matter. If you cannot show that Wallace’s fake made the Onion Mt. track, then you are saying, based on a superficial resemblance of ONE photograph, that the trackway was hoaxed, and then resting your case. Though you claim that all has been “asked and answered”, that is not the case, and anyone who wanted to satisfy themselves on that issue need only read through the threads you linked above.

The alignment question has been asked and answered, too. The question has been asked and addressed. It has been discussed on Bigfoot lists and forums for at least four year. Look to the link previously noted to Matt Crowley’s site for specifics, as well as the works of Mark A. Hall’s essays in Wonders. The fact is that few have read these treatments, and the words of Green, Murphy and Meldrum in support of this disputed tracks are what most people still read.

See below for more links and discussion of this entire matter:

The Ray Wallace Debate (Feb. 12, 2006)

The Ray Wallace Debate – Part II (Feb. 13, 2006)

The Ray Wallace Debate – Part III (Feb. 16, 2006)

The Ray Wallace Debate – Part IV (Mar. 3, 2006)

Media Watch: Wallace Again, Wrong Again (Apr. 30, 2006)

Remove Ray Wallace’s Fake Photos (May 27, 2006)

Wallace Fakes Revisited (Jan. 9, 2007)

The alignment question here in this comment section is merely another distraction, as it has been asked and answered.

As John Green noted earlier, there is an argument that the resemblance between the Onion Mt. tracks and a photo of Wallace’s fake foot carvings are superficial. I have seen a comparison made between one of the tracks and one of the fakes — I believe it was done by Rick Noll but it’s possible it was done by another in a thread he started on the Bigfoot Forums. A demonstration was made that the similarities indeed were superficial — that the two pictures could not be made to line up. I have never seen you address this point, or make a showing of your own that the fake and a particular track do line up, or an explanation for why they don’t line up even though the one was used to create the other. Do you have any comments about this? It would seem a direct comparison by superimposing the picture of the fake foot with a track would make short work of Mr. Green’s assertion that your analysis was superficial. If it’s not possible to make a direct comparison like that, do you have any explanation for why it won’t work?

I can see some serious scientists thinking: on the other hand, maybe the world NEEDS another Malagasy mouse lemur.

Actually, the real skull is a good analogy to this now infamous and historically significant one-of-a-kind fake wooden feet. You know and I know that if anyone ever put those fakes up on eBay, they certainly would go for more than a piece of toast with the image of Jesus on it.

Drawing a long bow with that analogy.
Fake wooden feet and real skull.
You could apply a layer of silicon on the base of both feet, peel it off and have an exact replica of the bases.
It would not damage a thing, I do it all the time with original plaster items and the resulting silicon mould/base could be poured with plaster and compared with any prints you like.
Its interesting to have a dodgy test with $ involved to test a dodgy bit of wood that has $ involved.

mike